BookPage April 2016 by BookPage

AMERICAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BOOK REVIEW

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

LEE SMITH The joys & sorrows of growing up Southern

HELEN SIMONSON A winning second novel from the author of Major Pettigrew

kate

DiCamillo The two-time Newbery Medalist returns to her roots with the hopeful novel she never intended to write

APRIL 2016

the fresh flavors of

Every Season

30 ICONIC SOUTHERN VEGETABLES

' '

get their due in The Southern Vegetable Book. You'll find everything you need to know about choosing, storing, and cooking the South’s finest harvest.

' '

Over 100 can’t-fail recipes using the freshest seasonal vegetables Beautiful, full-color photography Sage advice from home cooks and regional chefs A guide to selecting the best produce at the farmer’s market or the supermarket

No one knows the South better than Southern Living.

contents columns 04 04 05 06 07 09 10 11

Lifestyles Well Read Library Reads Whodunit Book Clubs Audio Romance Cooking

Cover photo by Catherine Smith Photography

book reviews 19 FICTION

Switched On by John Elder Robison I Will Find You by Joanna Connors

t o p p i c k : The Last Painting of

features 14 15 16 17 18 21 25 27

APRIL 2016 “This exciting story of 12 on the cover danger, fear, From baton-twirling failures to a big cruelty, heart, Kate DiCamillo shares delightful similarities with her new young heroine. loyalty, and enduring love,

Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

Poetry Helen Simonson Baseball Sunjeev Sahota Lynne Kutsukake Brontë books Lee Smith Birds

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan

The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth

Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

The Lady with the Borzoi by Laura Claridge

The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales

“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf

Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett

meet the author

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Glory Over Everything by Kathleen Grissom

Becoming Grandma by Lesley Stahl

29 TEEN

t o p p i c k : Exit, Pursued by a Bear

by E.K. Johnston Essential Maps for the Lost by Deb Caletti This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart

My Mrs. Brown by William Norwich

The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle

Alice & Oliver by Charles Bock

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien

t o p p i c k : Booked

The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

24 NONFICTION

t o p p i c k : Dimestore

by Lee Smith Kill ’Em and Leave by James McBride

by Kwame Alexander Twenty Yawns by Jane Smiley The Bear and the Piano by David Litchfield The Wild Robot by Peter Brown A Bandit’s Tale by Deborah Hopkinson

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W

Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cat Acree

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Allison Hammond

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

CONTRIBUTOR

ADVERTISING OPERATIONS

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Julia Steele

Lily McLemore

Roger Bishop

EDITOR

ASSISTANT EDITOR

PRODUCTION MANAGER

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Penny Childress

Lynn L. Green

MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

EDITORIAL INTERN

Trisha Ping

Sukey Howard

Leah Bruce

Sada Stipe

MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

K AT HLEEN GR IS SOM

30 CHILDREN’S

Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss

PUBLISHER

— RO B ERT M O RG A N , author of Gap Creek

Love That Boy by Ron Fournier

Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen

Lazaretto by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

brings alive some of the worst in our history, and some of the best.”

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LIFESTYLES

WELL READ

B Y S U S A N N A H F E LT S

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

The creative naturalist Adult coloring books are all the rage, but why stop there? Get inspired to sketch-it-yourself with The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (Heyday, $35, 312 pages, ISBN 9781597143158). Naturalist, educator and artist John Muir Laws is an engaging instructor, and his thorough guide is easily dipped into. Start with his introduction to the importance of close observation and “intentional curiosity,” as the act of nature

journaling can be just as fulfilling as the finished sketch. And be sure to take notes on Laws’ second chapter on focusing awareness— something most of us could benefit from. After that, you may be, ahem, drawn to individual chapters on how to draw trees, wildflowers, animals or landscapes. Later sections detail how to outfit your portable field kit with various pencils, watercolors and journals, but Laws stresses that there’s no need to spend a mint; “You probably have what you need around your home.” Both the novice and the seasoned artist will find much to enjoy here.

the right body part for the art and creating the actual tattoo using transfer paper and adhesive sheets or special pens. An inspirational gallery in the back contains QR codes for free downloads of lots of lovely, ready-made tattoo designs— from black-and-white geometric patterns to lavish, full-color floral designs and nature-inspired creations— along with info on the iconic meanings behind certain flora and fauna.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES

Now that the threat to the honeybee population is a well-publicized, global concern, many of us want to help the little guys thrive. Covering all things apiary, The Bee Book (DK, $25, 224 pages, ISBN 9781465443830) is much more than a simple howto for creating backyard hives. This informative guide traces the evolution of bees, explains different species and hive ecology and offers perspectives on population decline. Later chapters present detailed info on attracting bees with INK FOR ALL “bee hotels” and the right plants, and lay out tips for caring for Tattoos are so commonplace today that ink-free me feels less them once you’ve wooed them to your habitat. Even if you’re not up the rule than the exception. I’m not opposed; I just can’t commit. for beekeeping, the final section, Luckily, temporary tattoos have “Enjoying Bee Bounty,” contains 38 simple recipes for healing grown in popularity alongside the remedies and cosmetic products real thing. What was once child’s anyone can whip up at home with play is now an artful accessory, and Pepper Baldwin, the designer honey and beeswax. This guide behind temporary tat company is thoughtfully designed for easy consumption: captions, call-outs, Pepper Ink, is here to show you diagrams, sidebars and graphs the ropes. Baldwin’s new book, DIY Temporary Tattoos: Draw It, abound, while bold, bright illusPrint It, Ink It (St. Martin’s, $18.99, trations and photographs bring 128 pages, ISBN 9781250087706), energy to every page. The Bee guides readers through the process Book is an educational journey for of dreaming up a design, choosing the entire family.

Stevens’ ideas of order The gentleman gazing intently at us from the jacket photo of The Whole Harmonium (Simon & Schuster, $30, 496 pages, ISBN 9781451624373), Paul Mariani’s illuminating biography of Wallace Stevens, could be any successful businessman in midcentury America—a confident, well-fed mandarin. Stevens is, of course, one of our great modernist poets, but the alternative guise is no less accurate, for he spent most of his professional life as an insurance executive. That duality runs throughout the narrative of his life and helps define Stevens, who, we come to see, was as straight and narrow in his quotidian affairs as he was brilliantly fancy-free in his writing. Mariani, perhaps best known as a National Book Award finalist for William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (Williams was another modernist genius with a day job—as a doctor—and was an important contemporary, friend and influence on Stevens)—ably balances a straightforward chronicle of events from his subject’s life with an analysis of the poet’s often difficult, inventive work. While the two can seem quite separate at times, Mariani manages to make connections that give a deeper understanding of the man and the poet. Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879, and in many ways his life seems to have been a concerted effort to steer clear of his father’s wish that he return there and live a provincial life centered on family. There is an underlying irony, because while Stevens outwardly strained against that notion, and never returned permanently to Reading after graduating from Harvard, he did concede to his father’s vision by opting for a conventional career in

insurance. And he did marry a girl from his hometown, the shy Elsie Kachel, but their early romance quickly waned, and the marriage became a hollow thing, with Stevens often traveling for work and Elsie retreating into her own insular world. The best word to describe Stevens’ relationships both with Elsie and the rest of his largely estranged family might be “arid.” Stevens’ poetry, on the other hand, is anything but arid, with its dazzling wordplay and imagery. His complexity of thought has given generations of readers much to decipher and contemplate, and Mariani traces the origins of such iconic works as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Stevens came of age as a poet somewhat late—his first book was not published until he was 44—in the exciting period around World War I when modernism was born. The most compelling sections of The Whole Harmonium detail Stevens’ interactions with other poets and artists of this time, The straightas well laced executive as such was fancy-free influential in his poetry. mentors as the critic Carl Van Vechten, the patron Walter Arensberg and Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe. While there has been much critical work done on Stevens over the years, there has not been a lot of biographical inquiry, perhaps because, as the Academy of American Poets website puts it, “Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.” Though it is hard to convey a life of the mind, Mariani’s biography does justice to this cere bral, metaphysical poet and his enduring body of work.

Selected from nominations made by library staff across the country, here are the 10 books that librarians can’t wait to share with readers in April.

ELIGIBLE by Curtis Sittenfeld

Random House, $28, ISBN 9781400068326

The author of Prep and American Wife takes this delightful retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into the 21st-century world of CrossFit and reality TV.

R ead

the seRies

that inspiRed

pBs’ s

G RantchesteR

THE OBSESSION by Nora Roberts

Berkley, $28, ISBN 9780399175169 Despite a cross-country move and a new relationship, photographer Naomi Carson finds she can’t outrun her tragic past in this riveting page-turner from the bestselling author.

THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL by Laurie R. King

Bantam, $28, ISBN 9780804177900 Sherlock Holmes’ wife goes missing from the couple’s Sussex farmhouse in the latest installment of King’s popular Mary Russell series.

’TIL DEATH DO US PART by Amanda Quick

Berkley, $27, ISBN 9780399174469 This atmospheric thriller from Jayne Ann Krentz’s alter-ego winds through Victorian-era London in search of the ghoulish stalker who’s been tormenting a young businesswoman.

LILAC GIRLS by Martha Hall Kelly

Ballantine, $26, ISBN 9781101883075 Kelly’s powerful debut novel was inspired by real-life women whose fates were inextricably tied to the horrors of Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women.

“Multiple pleasures for readers of cozies and beyond.” —Booklist

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU by Joshua Hammer

Simon & Schuster, $26, ISBN 9781476777405 A journalist tells the heroic story of librarians in Mali who smuggled thousands of historic documents out of the reach of invading al-Qaida militants.

EVERY HEART A DOORWAY by Seanan McGuire

Tor, $17.99, ISBN 9780765385505 In this compelling contemporary fantasy, the troubled teens at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children share a special connection to other worlds.

BEST OF MY LOVE by Susan Mallery

HQN, $26.99, ISBN 9780373789764 In the quiet lakeside town of Fool’s Gold, Shelby and Aidan are supposed to be “just friends,” but the townspeople think there’s a romance brewing—and they might be right.

A MURDER IN TIME by Julie McElwain

Pegasus, $25.95, ISBN 9781605989747 An FBI special agent on the trail of a terrorist is transported back in time to a 19th-century English castle where a serial killer is wreaking havoc.

TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 by Molly Prentiss

Scout Press, $26, ISBN 9781501121043 This accomplished debut follows linked characters in New York City’s art scene during a tumultous year. Read our review on page 23.

“Readers definitely are in for a treat.” —Mystery Scene “A clever puzzle for armchair detectives.” —New York Times Book Review

LibraryReads is a recommendation program that highlights librarians’ favorite books published this month. For more information, visit libraryreads.org.

columns

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Tough luck for our favorite Los Angeles burglar There was a time when I thought that Lawrence Block’s character Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar Who . . .) was the definitive fictional housebreaker, but that title has been surrendered by unanimous decision (mine) to Timothy Hallinan’s cat burglar extraordinaire, Junior Bender. Contract burglaries are fraught with the possibility of unanticipated eventualities, and in his latest adventure, King Maybe (Soho Crime, $25.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9781616954321), Junior has a bad feeling from the get-go. It’s strange that he doesn’t have to steal anything; he simply has to break into the office of a despised Hollywood big shot, open a file

cabinet and read the contents of a file. But as he soon discovers, “simply” is anything but the correct adverb in this case. What starts out as a bit of Tinseltown sleuthing quickly ramps up to cold-blooded murder, and guess who’s the intended fall guy? Hallinan is an engaging writer, well versed in the history and folklore of Los Angeles,

and is insightfully wry and wickedly funny. And really, who else could insert a vignette about Japanese wasabi-flavored Kit Kat bars into

Satisfy Your Thriller Craving with

Page-Turning Suspense

a Hollywood noir mystery? You’ve got to love that.

ENJOY THE RIDE Adrenaline junkies need look no further than Matthew Quirk’s Cold Barrel Zero (Mulholland, $26, 384 pages, ISBN 9780316259217) for their next fix. The action is relentless and exceptionally inventive. One small example: A chase scene features a getaway vehicle that is, of all things, a FedEx truck. This might not seem like the vehicle of choice for eluding police, but the cops’ complacency quickly changes to dismay when said getaway truck turns into the FedEx Distribution Center at shift-change time, becoming immediately camouflaged amid the identical trucks heading out in every direction. The driver of the FedEx truck is John Hayes, onetime Army Special Forces hero, now in disgrace and sought by the government. His companion is Thomas Byrne, once an Army combat medic, now an itinerant surgeon, trying with limited success to keep his mind from drifting back to the battlefield. Once upon a time, the two served together and trusted one another implicitly; now the status of their relationship is anyone’s guess, with the possibility of deadly betrayal lurking around every corner. This is a must-read for fans of Jason Bourne or Jack Reacher.

BERNIE OFF DUTY

Available March 29.

Available April 26.

Visit www.Bookclubbish.com/Suspense to learn more.

Philip Kerr fans have followed the adventures of Berlin cop Bernie Gunther through World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Now, as The Other Side of Silence (Putnam, $27, 416 pages, ISBN 9780399177040) opens, it’s 1956, and Gunther has put his former life behind him. He no longer lives in Germany, but rather on the French Riviera. His marriage is finished, and he’s working as a concierge at a high-class resort hotel. But things take a turn for the dramatic when

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Gunther is summoned to the home of writer W. Somerset Maugham, first for bridge, then as a go-between to handle the delicate matter of blackmail payment, hush money to prevent the photos of Maugham’s gay lifestyle from becoming tabloid fodder. And there are darker forces at work as well: Maugham was a British spy (in the novel and in real life) and once had as house guests Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, both later identified as Soviet spies. If this were to come out, governments could topple. It’s always a great pleasure to watch Kerr deftly weave fact and fiction, history and mystery, in one of the finest modern suspense series.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY Bill Beverly’s Dodgers (Crown, $26, 304 pages, ISBN 9781101903735) will be one of the most talked-about debut novels of the year. Think Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising or Dennis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War—it’s that good. Fifteen-year-old East is an unassuming sort of kid for a gangbanger. He has never met his father, but he works for his father’s brother, a well-connected drug dealer. East’s job is to monitor the comings and goings at a Los Angeles crack house, a kind of early warning system to keep dealers and users safe from the authorities. But somehow the cops skirt East’s defenses, and in the ensuing gun battle, a young girl is caught in the crossfire. East knows he has to face the music for this, but he’s surprised to be chosen as part of a four-man hit squad, sent halfway across the country to eliminate a witness who can testify against one of the gang members. This takes East well out of his comfort zone, as he has never before left LA, and he’ll learn some unexpected truths about himself, his companions and the road. This unpretentious literary crime novel will upend your notions of the sort of character with whom you might empathize.

BOOK CLUBS BY JULIE HALE

A hair-raising epidemic In The Blondes (Picador, $16, 400 pages, ISBN 9781250081698), Emily Schultz’s darkly fascinating, dystopian third novel, a virus akin to rabies is making the rounds. It’s a sickness with a specific target—blonde women—and it throws each of its victims into an uncontrollable, violent frenzy. The novel’s narrator, red-headed Hazel Hayes, a Canadian Ph.D. student in New York, follows the news of the spreading virus, as infected fair-haired females unleash terror around the world (you’re correct if you detect an element of the

absurd here. Schultz is a skillful dispenser of black humor). Hazel, meanwhile, is contending with personal difficulties. Pregnant with the child of her married academic mentor, who’s back in Canada, she’s ambivalent about becoming a mother. As the threat of the virus mounts, Hazel makes a fateful decision to head back home. With impressive control, Schultz weaves the plot’s multiple threads into a story that’s at once sweeping and intimate, horrifying and deeply human. Convincing throughout, this timely book offers reading groups ample topics for discussion.

INNOCENCE LOST My Sunshine Away (Putnam, $16, 336 pages, ISBN 9780425278109), M.O. Walsh’s fiction debut, is an unforgettable tale of the urban South. Set in Baton Rouge, this haunting, atmospheric novel tells the story of Lindy Simpson—a pretty, talented 15-year-old whose life changes forever when she’s raped one night after track practice. The novel’s narrator, an anonymous 14-year-old boy, is infatuated with Lindy, and his intense feelings make him a prime

suspect in the investigation. When his sister dies unexpectedly, the narrator’s need for Lindy increases, as does his desire to find her rapist. The book moves back and forth in time, providing shifting perspectives on the tragic event that irrevocably alters the teens’ lives and affects their circle of family and friends. Walsh evokes the wistfulness of adolescence in a novel that’s at once uncompromisingly realistic and poetically tender. His insights into young adulthood, his compassionate portrayal of the narrator and his acute sense of the modern South—specifically Baton Rouge and its environs— make this an impressive debut.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS In her critically acclaimed memoir, H Is for Hawk (Grove, $16, 320 pages, ISBN 9780802124739), British writer Helen Macdonald copes with the death of her father with the aid of an unusual companion—a goshawk. Macdonald, a naturalist and seasoned falconer, takes on the training of the bird, embracing the solitary pursuit in the face of grief. That the creature is naturally irascible and perversely difficult to subdue—that it is, first and foremost, a bird of prey— makes her task an epic one, and she shares her story in prose that befits the majesty of her subject matter. Her beautifully crafted sentences make this uncommon story all the more memorable. Macdonald’s reflections on the history and tradition of falconry (largely a male endeavor) round out the narrative. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and winner of the U.K.’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, this lovely book is a rare bird, indeed.

Fresh Book Club Picks for Spring

When the Moon is Low by Nadia Hashimi

“A fascinating look at the unspoken lives of Afghani women…this is a story to transport you and make you think.” —Shilpi Somaya Gowda, New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Daughter

Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge

by Ovidia Yu

“Engaging . . . Fans of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series will find a lot to like.” —Publishers Weekly

Woman with a Secret by Sophie Hannah

“Woman With a Secret is unpredictable, unputdownable, and unlike anything you’ve read before.” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies

The Cherry Harvest

by Lucy Sanna

“A beautiful novel and a reminder that war touches every family, but never in the same way. Haunting.” —Amy Smith, author of All Roads Lead to Austen

@Morrow_PB

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William Morrow

Book Club Girl

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AUDIO BY SUKEY HOWARD

Fabulous fakes No inside-the-beltway shenanigans this time for political humorist Christopher Buckley. The Relic Master (Simon & Schuster Audio, $23.99, 11 hours, ISBN 9781442394476), his latest and one of his cleverest novels, is set in 1500s Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and replete with enough greedy, power-hungry and corruptible figures to delight any satirist. Dismas, a former mercenary, is now a purveyor of du-

bious treasures to both Frederick III of Saxony (oddly, the protector of Martin Luther) and Albrecht of Mainz, who use the relics to increase their glory and glorify their incomes. When Dismas looses his savings to a sleazy Madoff-esque banker, he dreams up a scam to pawn off a fake shroud of Jesus on Albrecht and make a small fortune. But scams can go awry, and this one lands Dismas in the dungeon, dangling from his impaled hands. His penance is to steal the “real” shroud from Chambéry for Albrecht. So begins a rollicking, suspenseful heist adventure through forests, bars, brothels and castles, with false identities galore and a proper skewering of hypocrisy, religious and otherwise.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY It all started when Harry Murphy, a 30-something New York actor leaving an off-Broadway audition, was badly in need of a bathroom. He stepped into a funky Chinese restaurant only to be told to scram by the three classic mobsters sitting there. So he used the alley, where he overheard the goombah guys planning the execution of a Colonel Villiers in London. Deciding to play the good guy—backed up with newly earned voice-over cash—and maybe have a bit of fun, Harry hops on a plane, intending

to warn Villiers and go on his merry way. But that’s not exactly what happens in David McCallum’s dark lark of a debut novel, Once a Crooked Man (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 12 hours, ISBN 9781427271709). Not surprisingly, the man from U.N.C.L.E., who narrates in his wonderfully recognizable voice, knows how to mix mob intrigue, a sexy British agent, death-defying escapes, mistaken identities and mistaken intentions into a heady cocktail of a crime caper.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO As host of public radio’s “Diane Rehm Show” for more than 30 years, Rehm has always promised lively, smart conversation and civil dialogue and kept her word. She’s interviewed newsmakers, journalists and authors, and now in her latest book, On My Own (Random House Audio, $30, 6 hours, ISBN 9780399566110), she offers a civil and often heartbreaking interview with herself about her husband’s difficult death and her commitment to the “right to die.” She reflects on their marriage, on grief that comes in waves, on winding down her long career. Rehm’s voice, as familiar as a close friend’s to so many of her dedicated listeners, has always commanded respect, gracefully demanding that her guests answer the questions posed. Here, she demands that of herself, and her extraordinary candor about enduring profound loss, both of her cherished lifelong partner and now her cherished occupation, offer hard-won wisdom that can help all of us as we age. Rehm remains a woman of strength, ideas and energy, and her words, too, will remain a source of powerful insight.

NEW and NOTABLE AUDIOBOOKS for SPRING!

AS TIME GOES BY by Mary Higgins Clark

GLORY OVER EVERYTHING

Read by Jan Maxwell

UAB CD 9781508221838/$29.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781508221852/$59.99

by Kathleen Grissom • Read by Santino Fontana with Kyle Beltran, Madeleine Maby, and Heather Alicia Simms UAB CD 9781442397712 / $39.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442397736 / $79.99

LADY MIDNIGHT by Cassandra Clare

CLAWBACK by J.A. Jance

UAB CD 9781442357105/$49.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442357129/$99.99

UAB CD 9781442397101/$29.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442397125/$59.99

ABOVE THE LINE by Shirley MacLaine

BACK FROM THE DEAD by Bill Walton

UAB CD 9781508214557/$29.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781508214571/$59.99

UAB CD 9781442368538 / $39.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442381025 / $79.99

Read by Morena Baccarin

Read by the author

Read by Karen Ziemba

Read by the author

A BRUSH OF WINGS by Karen Kingsbury THE PATH by Michael Puett and Read by Kirby Heyborne and January LaVoy Christine Gross-Loh • Read by Michael Puett UAB CD 9781442388321/$29.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442388345/$59.99 /SimonandSchusterAudio

with an introduction by Christine Gross-Loh UAB CD 9781442378087 / $24.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781442380318 / $59.99 @SimonAudio

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ROMANCE B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY

Secrets of a cowboy Mayhem finds its way to Montana in Hard Rain (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373789139), part of B.J. Daniels’ Montana Hamiltons series. After finishing grad school, Harper Hamilton returns to the family ranch, where she runs into hunky neighbor Brody McTavish— and then they run straight into trouble. The pair, who have long harbored secret feelings for each other, find a mummified corpse. To make matters worse, the body is that of Brody’s missing cousin—a

young woman who was said to be the lover of Harper’s married grandfather and had not been seen in decades. Everyone in the small Montana town assumes the newly awakened ill feelings between Harper and Brody’s families will mean the end of their relationship, but their attraction is too strong. Ignoring all obstacles, the two join together to solve the mystery, stirring up trouble for family and old acquaintances alike. Will love survive the threatening darkness? Several storylines and character viewpoints create an engrossing maze for readers who enjoy a slice of crime served with their Western romance.

OPPOSITES ATTRACT Sparks between neighbors turn to fire in the Georgian romance Because of Miss Bridgerton (Avon, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062388148) by Julia Quinn. Billie Bridgerton ran wild in the countryside with the children of the neighboring Rokesby estate, though George, the eldest Rokesby and heir to an earldom, always looked upon her with disapproval. But what does she care about that stick-in-themud? However, they’ve grown into adults, and the things that used to

rub her the wrong way about him now feel entirely different. George stoically bears the weight of his responsibilities, but he’s grown weary of life. Now, Billie is challenging him with her headstrong, reckless and oh-so-intriguing ways. They spat, they spar, they decide each is the worst possible person with whom to fall in love—but their hearts disagree. When trouble arrives, the two team up to weather the storm, and this pairing proves they have something worth pursuing and holding onto forever. Fast-paced banter and appealing characters make this love story a standout.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Emily March returns readers to her charming Eternity Springs series in Reunion Pass (St. Martin’s, $7.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9781250072979). Former sweethearts Lori Reese and Chase Timberlake find themselves once again in their Colorado hometown. Lori is a veterinarian, and adventurer Chase has come home to heal after a tragedy. Though the old chemistry between them has returned as well, Lori remains wary. Past experience is hard to forget. Not only did Chase give up on their young love, her father was absent during her growing-up years, too— cementing the message that men might not be worthy of trust. But as Chase weaves himself back into the fabric of the town, he finds his way deep into Lori’s heart. It’s up to him to convince her that he’s now ready to put down roots. Chase’s healing process and Lori’s cautious outlook are emotionally gripping and add poignancy to this small-town story of reunited lovers. March has written a warm and thoroughly satisfying read.

COOKING BY SYBIL PRATT

The flavors of Mexico Pati Jinich is a wonderfully enthusiastic champion of modern Mexican cooking as it evolves South of the border and as it spreads with the Mexican diaspora to create new regional tastes and treasures. We all know Tex-Mex, but now there’s Cal-Mex, Chicago-Mex, New York-Mex, Fusion-Mex and, perhaps, Pati-Mex. In Mexican Today (HMH/Rux Martin, $30, 320 pages, ISBN 9780544557246), Jinich, host of the popular PBS series “Pati’s Mexican Table,” invites

us into her kitchen, where she uses her knack for Mexican seasoning to add a bit of Latin flair to all kinds of foods. As a wife and working mother of three boys with packed schedules, she knows the ins and outs of getting good, interesting, family-pleasing food to the table every night. To do the same, start incorporating her recipes and her seasoning sense into your everyday repertoire—whether it’s a traditional Tortilla Soup or a new spin on Matzo Balls made with mushrooms and jalapeños, Chicken Tostadas or Tuna Tataki Tostadas with Sriracha Sauce, Pati’s Go-To Guacamole, Real Red Salsa, CalMex Fish Tacos with Creamy Slaw, versatile Med-Mex Salad or foamy Mango Mousse.

WHEN IN ROME If you’re lucky enough to be in Italy, you can sample all the pleasures of la cucina romana. For the rest of us, there’s Tasting Rome (Potter, $30, 256 pages, ISBN 9780804187183), a tribute to the unique character of Roman cooking, its time-honored dishes and its new creations rooted in traditional flavors. Working with some of the city’s renowned chefs, Katie Parla and Kristina Gill—two Americans

who fell in love with Rome, moved there and became steeped in its gastronomy and history—focus on the foods that highlight the spirit of Rome and make their selected recipes truly accessible for home cooks. Instead of going from antipasto to dolce, they start with snacks and street food, move on to classics and new riffs on the standards and, more unusually, include Roman-Jewish and Libyan-Jewish dishes. With delectable veggies, breads, pizzas, sweets and even cocktails, this is the perfect Roman holiday for every Italophile.

SERVE UP SOUTHERN CHARM FOR YOUR FAMILY National pie champion and bestselling author Francine Bryson shares recipes for Sunday suppers to serve the preacher, make-and-take casseroles, dips and other redneck whatnots, backyard barbecue favorites, and of course, her celebrated baked goods. AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE BOOKS ARE SOLD

POTTER

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Floyd Cardoz, a celebrated New York City chef, was born and trained in Mumbai, but his fabulous new cookbook, Flavorwalla (Artisan, $29.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9781579656218), is not an Indian cookbook. Cardoz has lived and cooked in New York for over 25 years, eaten his way around the world and happily admits that his food, like his life, is a fusion of different cultures and cuisines, brightened with Indian accents and a generous nod to Mexican ingredients and sensibilities. Cardoz is an advocate of bold flavors in everything he creates, flavors that excite, tempt and put real flair into your daily fare. Just consider Spice-Crusted Swordfish with Braised Romaine; Heirloom Tomato Salad with coriander, ginger and serrano chile; Pan-Roasted Broccoli with lime, honey and chile flakes; Braised Short Ribs with Peanuts and Anchovies; a zingy Masala Mary and a tart Tamarind Margarita. Flavorwalla proves that Chef Cardoz is truly a man for all seasonings.

978-1-62354-074-6 HC $18.95 Chef Einat Mazor

Discover a world of flavors—from savory to sweet.

Fresh soups and salads, tempting entrees from pizza to baba ganoush, decadent desserts, and of course hummus—all made with chickpeas! www.charlesbridge.com

KATE DICAMILLO

cover story Sharing pieces of herself in an open-hearted novel, fears and all

ate DiCamillo is a nervous Nellie. You’d think that after winning two Newbery Medals, the publication of a new children’s book would be old hat. “It’s like putting your kid on the bus for the first day of school, and you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. This time, the “kid” is Raymie Nightingale, her most autobiographical book yet. DiCamillo, who launched her acclaimed career with the publication of Because of Winn-Dixie in 2000, quickly points out that writing such a personal book wasn’t part of her plan. “I thought I was going to write something funny and lighthearted about someone Ramona Quimby-like entering a beauty pageant,” she says during a call to her home in Minneapolis. “And then bit by bit, all of these pieces of me came in there, and it became a heavier story than I had intended.” DiCamillo needn’t worry; her new novel is a gem, full of laugh-outloud situations, heartfelt moments of kindness and genuine heartache. The novel’s heroine, 10-yearold Raymie Clarke, is taking baton-twirling lessons during the summer of 1975 with the goal of becoming Little Miss Central Florida Tire. She hopes such acclaim might lure back her father, who has

RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE

By Kate DiCamillo

Candlewick, $16.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780763681173, audio, eBook available Ages 10 and up

MIDDLE GRADE

run off with a dental hygienist. There are parallels aplenty between Raymie and the author. In a note at the beginning of the novel, DiCamillo writes: “Raymie’s story is entirely made up. Raymie’s story is the absolutely true story of my heart.” At age 6, DiCamillo moved with her mother and brother from Pennsylvania to Clermont, Florida (near Orlando), to try to end DiCamillo’s frequent bouts of pneumonia. Her father, an orthodontist, was supposed to sell his practice and join them, but he never did. As soon as DiCamillo realized that her manuscript-in-progress was becoming a story about a girl whose father had left, her response was, “Uh-oh.” But that, it turns out, was actually good news. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the uh-oh shows up, I’m in business,” she says. “It means that the story is in charge and not me. So when something happens that I’m totally unprepared for, I also know that I’ve got something that matters.” When she was 7 or 8 years old, DiCamillo competed in the Little Miss Orange Blossom contest, which, alas, she didn’t win. She remembers being at the pageant and thinking, “This is not where I should be.” And even before the pageant, during baton-twirling lessons, she realized, “This is just not who I am.” Raymie’s baton lessons don’t go well either, but they introduce her to two lively, endearing characters: the tough-as-nails Beverly Tapinski, who plans to sabotage the contest, and the ever-optimistic Louisiana Elefante, who lives with her grand-

mother and claims that her parents were known as the famous Flying Elefantes. Before long, Louisiana has dubbed the unlikely trio the “Three Rancheros.” Their subsequent adventures form the heart and soul of this novel, with madcap exploits that include secret nursing home visits and a night raid Like E.B. on the Very White’s Friendly Anibest stories, mal Center in DiCamillo’s search of Louimost personal siana’s beloved cat, Archie. novel is (Animals are burnished a necessity in with love. every DiCamillo book!) But while the novel is full of action, the text has an exquisitely spare quality. Despite the outlandish predicaments they get themselves into, the Three Rancheros’ thoughts and dialogue always ring true. “Those characters,” DiCamillo says with a chuckle. “Just get out of their way because I don’t know what they’re going to do and what they’re going to say.” It’s fitting that the words that pop out of these characters’ mouths— surprising even the author—are the actual seeds from which she begins creating their personalities. “As they talk to each other, that’s how I find out who they are,” she says. “Like when Beverly says at the beginning of the book, ‘Fear is a big waste of time. I’m not afraid of anything.’ I’m like Raymie; I just idolize people like that. I can’t

INTERVIEW BY ALICE CARY

conceive of not being afraid.” That’s something DiCamillo shares with one of her literary heroes, E.B. White. “I’m super neurotic,” she says, “and I think that maybe he was, too, from what I’ve read about him. But he did things with words that very few people do, and I can’t figure out how he did it. And I think if I asked him, he wouldn’t be able to answer.” DiCamillo says she wonders whether White’s apprehensions affected his writing. “It’s just that everything is burnished with love for him, and he manages to convey that to us. So the question is, does all the worry get in the way of the love, or does the love win over the worry? Because it looks like it did, from what he wrote. “I sure would like to worry less,” she adds with a cheerful sigh. DiCamillo believes the writing process helps her overcome certain personal shortcomings by keeping her eyes and heart wide open. “It’s my connection to my better self,” she says. “You have to pay such close attention to the world and people, and it changes how you look at the world.” Storytelling keeps her gaze outward, even as it teaches her more about herself. Does this process of paying attention mean that she’s always on the lookout? “I am,” she admits. “And I think

a lot about a friend that I grew up with named Kathy Lord, who is interested in everything and everybody. She liked to sharpen her pencil as much as she could in the classroom because that gave her a chance to walk to the front of the room, and not for something to do, but to look at what everybody else was doing. Other people were so fabulously interesting to her. I think of her sometimes when I’m out in the world. Pay attention that way. Make like Kathy Lord on the way to the pencil sharpener. Every little detail of somebody is interesting. “And Kathy Lord’s mouth was always slightly hanging open as she did it, because she was just so gobstopped by people and what they were doing. And I think about that with me, and then I have to be careful sometimes to close my mouth as I’m staring at the world.” As Raymie grapples with her father’s departure, she’s surrounded by a host of helpful adults. A young DiCamillo also benefited from such reassuring presences, including three kind, widowed ladies who kept close watch over the many children who lived on her deadend street. “That’s one of the things that I was aware of consciously when the book was done,” DiCamillo says, “that this was kind of a tip of the hat to all those adults.” When she tells fans about her childhood, DiCamillo is often delighted by young readers who come up to her and ask: Do you think that if your father hadn’t left that you would be a writer? Do you think that if you weren’t so sick all the time as a kid that you would have become a writer? “I never say that explicitly,” DiCamillo says, “but that they get there is astounding.” These are her most satisfying encounters with kids, when a child walks away knowing that things that once seemed so hard and impossible actually helped shape her. As for Raymie and her struggles, DiCamillo says, “The same thing that happened with Raymie happened with me. I found what friendship can give you. And there aren’t always answers, but there’s love and friendship.”

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“LEE SMITH

IS AN AMERICAN MASTER . . . bringing her massive fictional gifts to a memoir-in-essays that reads like a novel.” —DAVID PAYNE

features

POETRY BY JULIE HALE

Celebrating 20 years of Poetry Month

his year marks an important literary milestone: the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month. Established by the Academy of American Poets, the annual event has blossomed into a worldwide celebration. We’re joining in the festivities by highlighting three terrific new collections.

“Here’s Lee Smith at her best.” —ANNIE DILLARD

“Smith’s book sheds light on her beginnings as a writer while revealing her resilience and personal transformations over the course of a remarkable lifetime.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Dimestore is a stunner.” —FRANCES MAYES

Available now wherever books and e-books are sold. ALGONQUIN BOOKS

Last year, Ohio appointed its first Poet Laureate, Amit Majmudar, who, despite his literary success, hasn’t quit his day job as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist. The son of Indian immigrants, Majmudar grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and in the innovative yet accessible poems collected in his superb new book, Dothead: Poems (Knopf, $26.95, 120 pages, ISBN 9781101947074), he explores the experience of growing up as a cultural outsider among mostly white classmates and how his heritage shapes his everyday adult life. “It happens every trip, / at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, / the customary strip / is never enough for a young brown male,” he writes in “T.S.A.” This painful prejudice rears its head again in “The Star-Spangled Turban”: “Any towel, / any shawl will . . . mark me off as / not quite level- / headed. . . .” Along with his pointed cultural critique are stark, electrifying pieces like “Ode to a Drone” and inventive, playful poems like his celebratory ode to grammar in the sly “His Love of Semicolons” (“The comma is comely, the period, peerless, / but stack them one atop / the other, and I am in love”). Majmudar finds poetry in the modern world where we least expect it.

A CAREER-CLOSING VOLUME Larry Levis was only 49 when he died of a heart attack two decades ago, but his reputation

as a rare and compassionate poet was already well established. The award-winning author of five collections of verse, Levis casts a long shadow over the poetry world, which makes the appearance of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf, $16, 96 pages, ISBN 9781555977276) a cause for celebration. Edited by poet David St. John, this never-before-pub-

lished volume features expansive works constructed from long, Whitmanesque lines and a cast of marginal characters that were a recurring thread in Levis’ verse. In “Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil,” a drug-addled boy sets his girlfriend’s house on fire and goes walking “past eaves & lawns that flowed / Beside him then as if he’d loosened them / From every mooring but brimming moonlight.” A sense of the poet as a vulnerable figure searching for meaning in a tumultuous world permeates these works, including “The Space,” in which “The Self sounds like a guy raking leaves / Off his walk. It sounds like the scrape of the rake. / The soul is just a story the scraping tells.” This collection moves between poetic modes to reveal Levis’ breadth of vision. The Darkening

Trapeze serves as a poignant final statement from a poet whose voice remains vital.

NEWLY DISCOVERED NERUDA Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda (Copper Canyon, $23, 160 pages, ISBN 9781556594946) is a true treasure: a new group of poems by Nobel Prize-winning Chilean author and statesman Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), thoughtfully translated by American poet Forrest Gander. Discovered by the Pablo Neruda Foundation, these previously unseen works were written between the 1950s and the early 1970s. The 21 pieces—image-saturated, sensuous, earthy yet elegant—highlight Neruda’s unselfconscious ease as he explores themes that loomed large in his life: home, nature, exile, art. Ardency for nature enlivens “Poem 2,” which conjures “the corollas / of giant sunflowers, defeated / by their very fullness.” “Poem 10,” with its celebratory opening lines—“Marvelous ear, / double / butterfly, / hear / your praise”—brings to mind Neruda’s famous odes to other body parts (eye, liver, skull). Of poetry itself, Neruda writes, “All my life it’s coursed through my body / like my own blood.” Indeed, these beautifully unaffected poems serve as yet another testament to the fluency of Neruda’s genius. Photographs of his handwritten drafts are included throughout, lending an archival air to this essential collection.

HELEN SIMONSON

The whole world in a small town

s the summer of 1914 draws to a close, 23-year-old Beatrice Nash is headed to East Sussex by train. The small town of Rye doesn’t know it yet, but her arrival is about to shake up the status quo—not to mention the lives of town matron Agatha Kent and her two nephews.

In her long-awaited second novel, following the 2011 word-ofmouth hit Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson returns readers to her hometown of Rye, East Sussex—although, as she admits during a phone call to her adopted hometown of Brooklyn, she’s able to view it through “somewhat rose-colored glasses. I don’t have to put up with the rain or the warm beer, so I’m left to plumb all these deep emotional wells without any of the hindrances of daily, petty annoyances!” Simonson has spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she moved with her American husband to pursue a career in advertising, and eventually raised two sons. While she loves the States, and visits England often, Simonson admits to “a deep longing for home. I’m one of those people who believes that children need to go out in the world—the farther the better—but those of us who go off to explore are left with a hole . . . it’s this kind of push-pull situation,” she says in a voice that still sounds quite English

THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR

By Helen Simonson

Random House, $28, 496 pages, ISBN 9780812993103, audio, eBook available

HISTORICAL FICTION

to this American interviewer. Simonson’s writing also has a distinctly English flavor, but her books are unlikely to be described as “cozy.” Though she uses a smalltown setting, Simonson is interested in the ways people interact. Her novels are moving but not sentimental—sly comedies of manners that have more in common with Jane Austen than Jan Karon. “I believe the whole world can be explained in a small town,” says Simonson with a laugh—and ‘Major The Summer Pettigrew’ Before the author returns War opens up a whole world with a vivid social comedy. to readers. From socialites to refugees, this rich, beautifully written social comedy encompasses a range of nationalities and classes and is told from three perspectives. It’s the first time Simonson has written from a female point of view. “There’s a long history of women wanting to go out into the world dressed as a man, and that’s essentially what I got to do writing Major Pettigrew. So it was funny to come back and write as a woman—I almost felt more exposed.” Writing historical fiction was also a new step for Simonson. Using her hometown—and her fascination with the Edwardian writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, who spent time there—as a touchstone, Simonson decided to “prove myself as a real writer by taking people on a time-travel journey.” That journey begins as Beatrice Nash arrives in Rye. Both prettier and younger than expected, the new teacher is almost immediately required to defend her position— which she desperately needs after the death of her father—against Agatha Kent’s scheming society nemesis, Lady Emily. Siding with

Agatha and her husband, John, in support of the new teacher are the couple’s two nephews, cousins Daniel and Hugh. Carefree poet Daniel is Simonson’s homage to “all the young men who went off to war writing poetry,” while practical Hugh is completing his surgical training. The two are like sons to the Kents, who never had children of their own, and their relationships with Agatha are among the most compelling in the novel. “I was really interested in how difficult it is to be an aunt who would love to be a mother,” says Simonson. She adds that she needed distance between Agatha and the two boys for other reasons as well. “As a mother of two sons, I’m just unable to write about the mother of two sons. I think my writing would come across as impossibly cheesy because I love my sons to death and would be totally incapable of writing anything nuanced about them!” There may not be a better word to describe the characters in The Summer Before the War than “nuanced.” Even background players are fully rounded and alive, thanks to Simonson’s textured writing. By the time World War I breaks out, the reader knows this community, which makes the “very, very small” approach that Simonson takes to portraying the war feel right. “When we go to war, I focus very closely on Hugh, working in the hospital. There are no epic battle scenes. By keeping things small and hopefully somewhat mundane, I try to navigate the geography of the battlefield without making any great claims to expertise in discussing war or the pain that it brings people.” Like the best historical fiction,

INTERVIEW BY TRISHA PING

The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present. Take Hugh’s observation that “spirited debate was the first casualty of any war,” or the discussion between Agatha and Beatrice about whether the best way to advance women’s rights is to work within the system, or defy it. Perhaps the most topical of these is the Belgian refugee crisis, which is largely forgotten in the U.K. today. “I had no idea until I read a Henry James essay on the subject that there were Belgian refugees in my hometown,” says Simonson. “England took in 250,000 Belgian refugees and housed them and fed them and found them work for four years, all on a charitable basis. Perhaps it’s a lesson we could learn from today.” Though there are plenty of lessons to ponder in this novel, it is also very, very funny. The crackling repartee between Agatha and Lady Emily recalls Isobel Crawley and Lady Violet on “Downton Abbey.” Hugh and Daniel, close as brothers, “spend endless hours trying to prove the other one wrong,” says Simonson, to a reader’s delight. Full of trenchant observations on human nature and featuring a lovable cast of characters, The Summer Before the War is a second novel that satisfies.

features

BASEBALL BY JOHN C. WILLIAMS

the World Series. Still, Baseball’s Power Shift is an essential primer for anyone who wants to understand the sport’s labor dynamics.

HOME RUN DEAL

The big business of our national pastime

aseball players are commodities. Many are high-priced commodities, to be sure. Stars and solid regulars are routinely traded in high-profile deals and signed to lucrative contracts. Meanwhile, bushers and journeymen toil in the minors and must seek new buyers when they are inevitably cut. This business aspect of the game—so easy to forget in the glow of Opening Day or in the heat of a pennant chase—rises to the surface in several new baseball books.

With every new season comes another tome touted as the next Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ influential story of baseball’s statistical revolution. Usually these books are just Lewis lite. Jeff Passan’s The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports (Harper, $26.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780062400369) is the real deal—a book that’s both readable as hell and that has something meaning-

spend on top wings. His quest is exhaustive. He talks with the country’s best surgeons; he visits America’s elite youth tournaments, where 13-year-olds are scouted and ranked; he travels to Japan, where youths throw hundreds of pitches a day; and he observes work at labs for the study of pitching mechanics. The next analytics revolution in baseball, Passan suggests, is focused on understanding and preventing pitching injuries.

ful to say about the way the game works. Passan’s subject is the pitcher, more specifically the pitcher’s elbow. The past few years have seen an uptick in injuries to the ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, the string that binds the upper and lower arm. The use of Tommy John surgery, the corrective procedure developed 40 years ago and named after the pitcher who pioneered it, has skyrocketed. Passan sets out to learn why this epidemic has stricken the game, how it has affected players and whether it can be stopped—an especially urgent question given the money teams

Most memorably, Passan follows Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, the first an up-and-coming starter, the second a 30-something middle reliever, as they try to bounce back from their second Tommy John. This human element lends the book its propulsive quality, but every part is fascinating. The Arm is a must-read.

THE RISE OF FREE AGENCY Krister Swanson examines the game’s broader labor market in Baseball’s Power Shift: How the Players Union, the Fans, and the Media Changed American Sports

Culture (University of Nebraska Press, $29.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9780803255234). The book is a tight study of how professional players fought against management to ensure better treatment and fair compensation. Swanson brings us all the way back to 1885, when John Montgomery Ward formed baseball’s first union, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. The union’s primary target was the reserve clause, the feature of the standard contract that blocked players from signing with other clubs and deflated their pay. The Brotherhood failed. So did other attempts at unionization, until Marvin Miller—the most important baseball figure not in the Hall of Fame—became head of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Under Miller’s tenure, the union ended the reserve clause and ensured the system of free agency and salary arbitration that’s in place today. Swanson deftly shows how the media influenced these changes. Much of the battle was fought in the papers, where writers wed to romantic (and often paternal) notions of the game argued with those who saw the MLB as the big business it is. At the same time, the explosion of television revenues made significant salaries possible for the utility man as well as for the star. One is left wishing that Swanson’s study had covered 1994, when a work stoppage cancelled

Of course, even the most famous name can be traded or sold, and in the early 20th century there was no bigger sale than the one that sent Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees. Glenn Stout covers the deal in The Selling of the Babe: The Deal That Changed Baseball and Created a Legend (Thomas Dunne, $27.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781250064318). By 1919, Ruth was a star pitcher with a spark in his bat—he had hit 49 homers with the Sox in five dead-ball seasons—but he was also ungovernable. In hindsight, the sale looks idiotic, but in the moment, Ruth was hardly a sure bet. What’s more, the deal made a lot of financial sense for Harry Frazee, the Red Sox owner, who got full ownership of Fenway Park. Stout occasionally plows through the details, but that’s the price of a brisk portrait of Babe on the brink.

AN INFLUENTIAL MANAGER The historian Maury Klein takes a more meticulous approach in Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants (Bloomsbury, $28, 400 pages, ISBN 9781632860248). The subtitle contains a bit of overselling, as these Giants don’t really appear to have changed baseball. Sure, this team stole a lot of bases—347, the most in the modern game—but so did the 1912 and 1913 squads (319 and 296, respectively). The 1911 campaign seems more a convenient framing device, as a third of the material covers previous Giants seasons. Really, this book is more about McGraw, who managed the Giants for 30 years, starting in 1902. Never one to shy from trading a player if he could find a better fit for his speed-based schemes, McGraw was perhaps the greatest manager in the history of early baseball. There’s a lot of blow-byblow here—perhaps too much— but Klein provides a robust portrait of what the sport was like during the dead-ball era.

SUNJEEV SAHOTA

A literary star in the making

ure, he gets more invitations to read his work. And he now has “a proper study” in his basement. But otherwise, Sunjeev Sahota says life hasn’t changed much since his superb second novel was named to the prestigious Man Booker Prize shortlist.

“I’m very conscious that the person sitting down to write in my basement is different from that person on the shortlist,” 35-yearold Sahota says almost shyly during a call to his home in the old steel town of Sheffield, England. “I just realize that it’s two different people; there’s the writer, and then there’s the person who has to go out and talk about the book. It doesn’t make any difference to how I write or what I write about. I don’t feel any greater sense of expectation, possibly because my expectations for myself are high enough.” But Sahota does acknowledge that the enthusiasm for The Year of the Runaways in the U.K., where it was published last year, and in the U.S., where it was just released, “definitely helps me to carry on living by my pen, which is all I’ve wanted to do for a long time now.” Sahota’s first novel, Ours Are the Streets, the fictional diary of a suicide bomber, was published in 2011. His urge to write arose shortly after he read a novel for the first time at the age of 18. The novel

THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS

By Sunjeev Sahota

Knopf, $27.95, 496 pages ISBN 9781101946107, audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, purchased while Sahota was en route to visit relatives in Punjab in northwest India. Sahota’s grandparents and parents immigrated to England more than 40 years ago. He was born in 1981, not far from where he lives today with his wife, a government accountant, and their children, ages 3 and 1. Sahota says wryly that he’s asked so often about his first tryst with fiction that it’s become “a bit of an albatross around my neck. It defines me in a way I’m not quite sure about. I don’t know how much I really understood on that first reading. But it did feel like a dam bursting. I felt quite overtaken by a sense of storytelling as a way of spending your life. And then I became a heavy, avid reader very quickly.” That reading deeply influenced his conception of The Year of the Runaways. “I knew I wanted to write a big book,” he says, “partly because I wanted to do homage to the books that made me fall in love with reading, those big, immersive novels that I first got myself lost in.” As the title suggests, the action of the novel takes place over the course of one year. It focuses on the lives of four fully imagined main characters and a host of wellwrought minor characters. Three of the main characters—Randeep, Avtar and Tochi—are young men from India who came to Sheffield with naïve plans for earning good incomes. Tochi is smuggled into the country, fleeing a terrifying family trauma. Avtar enters on a student visa. And the very immature Randeep arrives through a “visa marriage” to England-born Narinda, the pious daughter of Sikh immigrants, who is a mystery in the first part of the novel, and as time passes becomes, Sahota acknowledges, “the moral heart of the book. She’s probably the clos-

est I’ll ever get to writing a heroic character. She loses her faith, but she doesn’t lose her sense of wanting to do good.” Much of the emotional brilliance of the novel derives from its longer chapters, which illuminate—probably controversially—the circumstances that have led its characters to seek work illegally in Britain. Sahota is a stylistically and emotionally nimble writer. His After reading his first novel almost too- vivid scenes at the age of occasionally 18, Sahota provoke warm laughter, but “became a overall the heavy, avid portrayal of reader very the complexity quickly.” of these immigrants’ lives is heartrending and calls upon a reader’s empathy. “My family is from a very rural part of Punjab,” Sahota says when asked about the authenticity of these sections of the novel. “Their farm is still their livelihood. The conversation about immigration of people in this rural world who are desperate to make their way to the West is not a secret, underground thing. People discuss quite openly schemes and methods to make their way across. I speak Punjabi fluently, and I’ve spoken to dozens of people who have been to the U.K., the U.S., Australia or mainland Europe. As far as they’re concerned, there’s a world out there with lots of money, and they’d like a share.” In constructing the captivating world of The Year of the Runaways, Sahota deploys a generous dose of Punjabi in the conversation of his characters.

SIMON REVILL

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

“It’s the background orchestra of the novel,” he explains. “This is an insider’s view, so it felt natural to include Punjabi in the book to give a flavor, to show this different world that exists inside England. If a reader doesn’t understand some of it, then ironically it puts the reader in the position of someone coming to England who can’t make much sense of this new world.” Some laudatory British reviews have called The Year of the Runaways a political novel, since it explores the human side of what has become a hot-button issue. “I never started off thinking I was going to write a political novel,” Sahota says. “But I don’t have a problem with the term. It is about immigration, but I think that’s neither here nor there in terms of its politics. “Maybe it’s called political because it concerns itself with ideas of sacrifice and the question of what it means to be good in the world where the line between people who have a lot and people who are desperate is so clear and stark. As someone who grew up in England, it’s an active question in my mind. I’m able to live a comparatively privileged life because I was born here. That’s luck. Why is it fair that my cousins in India are struggling and living a very difficult, challenging life? What do I and people like Narinda owe to those who are left behind? In that sense, it is a political book.” Sahota sighs and then says with some frustration, “It’s a strange world we live in when being sympathetic is seen as a radical act.”

features

BEHIND THE BOOK

Little-known letters of postwar hope spark a poignant historical novel

rom the moment that first audacious thought crossed my mind—I will write a novel!—I knew only one thing for sure: the setting would be Japan.

I’d studied the language and I’d spent time living there. In my career as an academic librarian, I’d specialized in working with Japanese materials. I knew exactly where I wanted my novel to be set. What I didn’t yet know was when. Initially, I assumed I would write about the present. This seemed perfectly logical, as I had already written several short stories set in contemporary Japan. I thought I had lots of ideas for a novel, but each time I sat down to write, I couldn’t seem to work up momentum. I went back to working on my short story collection. Maybe I was not meant to write a novel after all. And then I read about the letters sent by the Japanese people to General MacArthur during the Occupation, and I knew I had found my time period. It was the past, not the present, that I needed to explore in the story that would become The Translation of Love.

THE TRANSLATION OF LOVE

By Lynne Kutsukake

Doubleday, $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780385540674, audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

B Y LY N N E K U T S U K A K E

The book that sparked my imagination, Dear General MacArthur by Rinjiro Sodei, is a study of the correspondence sent to MacArthur while he was in Japan. In their scope and variety, the letters were very interesting, but most astonishing of all was this: Altogether, MacArthur received a staggering 500,000 letters from the Japanese people. Half a million letters? From the people you just conquered? It seemed improbable, absurd, preposterous and . . . well, absolutely fascinating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Somewhere in this intriguing, little-known piece of history was a novel waiting to be written. I knew that the Occupation period was a time of tumult and upheaval, of great optimism and crushing despair. There was homelessness, starvation, black market profiteering, prostitution. On the other hand, many people were filled with hope for what they saw as a new direction for their country. Democracy and freedom were the hot new catchwords, and learning English was all the rage. What kind of person would write a letter to MacArthur? The question kept coming back to me. What if that person wasn’t an adult, I wondered. What if she were a young girl? And so I decided to create Fumi, a 12-year-old girl with a desperate need to write to MacArthur. I didn’t yet know what her letter would be about, but I was eager to find out. As soon as I had Fumi, I knew she needed a friend, and Aya, a 13-year-old Japanese-Canadian girl, sprang to life. Aya and her father are among the 4,000 Japanese Canadians who were repatriated to Japan after spending the war in an internment camp. As a third-gen-

eration Japanese Canadian whose own parents were interned during the war, I realized that Aya’s history was one that I absolutely needed to include. I immersed myself in the Occupation period by reading anything I could get my hands on, starting with John W. Dower’s extraordinary Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. I devoured Altogether, history books, MacArthur academic studies, memoirs, received a journalistic staggering accounts, 500,000 biographies letters from of MacArthur. Anything with the Japanese photographs people. made me especially excited. During the writing of The Translation of Love, I spent some time in Japan. I walked around the area where MacArthur had his headquarters—the original building is still standing!—and tried to look at the landscape not through my own eyes but through the eyes of my characters. Back home, I did some traveling to places I had never been before. I joined a tour of the Japanese-Canadian internment camp sites in the interior of British Columbia, and I visited a friend in California who took me to see Manzanar, one of the biggest of the Japanese-American internment sites. Each time I came back to my writing after a trip, it was with a stronger sense of the past. Most

importantly, I came to appreciate the powerful imprint that history leaves upon a particular place— and upon our understanding of ourselves. Recently, I went back to Japan and strolled in the famous Ginza district along with all the tourists. People were taking pictures of themselves in front of Wako, the most luxurious jewelry store in Japan, and I wondered how many of them knew that it had once housed the PX where only the Occupation forces could shop. Everywhere I looked, the streets were clean, the shoppers sleek and well dressed, and the store windows overflowing with abundance. It seemed as if not a single trace of the past remained, and yet I knew that if I listened hard, I might hear the sound of my two young characters—Fumi and Aya—running down a dirty alley that no longer exists. A third-generation Japanese Canadian, Lynne Kutsukake worked for many years as a librarian at the University of Toronto, specializing in Japanese materials. Her short fiction has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Ricepaper and Prairie Fire. The Translation of Love is her first novel.

reviews

FICTION

T PI OP CK

THREE-MARTINI LUNCH

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS

By Suzanne Rindell

When forgery becomes fact

HISTORICAL FICTION

REVIEW BY LAUREN BUFFERD

Australian author Dominic Smith has brought historic events and vibrant places to life in books like The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre and Bright and Distant Shores. His fourth novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, centers on a single 17th-century painting that changes the course of three lives over four centuries and across several continents. The novel has three narrative threads. In 1631, Sara de Vos became the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the Dutch Guild of St. Luke. By 1957, her only known remaining work, “At the Edge of a Wood,” hangs in the bedroom of Marty de Groot, a wealthy patent lawyer in Manhattan. In the shabbier reaches of Brooklyn, Ellie Shipley, an art history graduate student with a background in art restoration, is approached about creating a forgery. Shortly after, the de Vos is stolen, and the clues lead to Ellie’s grimy studio. By Dominic Smith Decades later, Ellie is a prominent curator in Sydney, mounting an Sarah Crichton, $26, 304 pages ISBN 9780374106683, audio, eBook available exhibition on women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Both paintings—the original and the forgery—are en route to her museum, LITERARY FICTION and Ellie is forced to confront what she did. Behind the contemporary mystery of the forged work are questions about de Vos herself and what led her to break with convention, despite the strict Guild rules governing women painters and subject matter. Though the way these elements intersect may be guessed by astute readers early on, the pleasure here is watching Smith control all three stories—the pertinent questions are answered in ways that not only convince, but also satisfy. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos does what the best books can do: sweep the reader into unfamiliar worlds filled with intriguing characters. The immense challenges faced by women in the arts, both past and present, are also skillfully rendered, and the gritty details—from behind-the-scenes museum work to the formulas of an art forger—are managed with finesse. Smith’s characters are so real and the novel plotted so thoughtfully that one finishes with a sigh of contentment. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a true pleasure to read. is much less sure. A successful attorney with no social life—her By Kemper Donovan co-workers call her La Máquina, or The Machine, for her billable Harper hours—Elizabeth wonders why $25.99, 320 pages anyone would pay her to spend ISBN 9780062391629 Audio, eBook available time with the handsome, aimless Richard. But she reluctantly agrees. DEBUT FICTION The first few meetings are awkwardness incarnate. Richard’s exuberance and Elizabeth’s bookish reserve are like oil and water. To make the time pass, they agree Richard Baumbach is technically a Hollywood producer, but at to discuss books (her choice) and 29, he has yet to actually produce movies (his) each week. As they get to know each other, the forced anything noteworthy. So when he gets a mysterious proposal via a dates become something they lawyer—spend two hours a week both look forward to, but they each for a year with a woman he’s never have reasons to be hesitant about heard of and get half a million dol- admitting any attraction. Instead, lars—Richard jumps at the chance. they team up to discover who has Elizabeth Santiago, however, set them up, with a million dollars

THE DECENT PROPOSAL

Putnam $27, 512 pages ISBN 9780399165481 eBook available

on the line. In addition to being a smart, funny rom-com, The Decent Proposal is also a love letter to one of America’s strangest and most singular cities. “To love L.A. is to love a mess,” Donovan writes. “A jumble of sand, concrete, sunsets, and strip malls; a snake’s nest of highways on top of which the full emotional spectrum, from rage to carelessness, may be witnessed inside every single hour of the day.” Donovan’s debut novel shimmers like a Los Angeles sunset. The characters are unforgettable, the dialogue crackles, and the ending is an absolute killer. The Decent Proposal is a story about taking chances and finding love in the most unlikely ways.

If you’re still mourning the end of the TV show “Mad Men,” dry those tears and turn your attention to Three-Martini Lunch. Suzanne Rindell’s cast of characters may be paying their dues in the world of 1950s book publishing rather than advertising, but it’s not all that hard to imagine them rubbing elbows with the likes of Don Draper or sharing a smoke with Peggy Olson. A literary triptych, Three-Martini Lunch is a coming-of-age tale about three dreamers trying to break into the New York literary scene. Cliff has recently dropped out of Columbia to focus on writing a novel; Eden has moved to the city from Indiana and aspires to become an editor; and Miles is a black bicycle messenger for an elite publishing house who writes as an attempt to make peace with the father he worries he never truly knew. While pursuing their respective goals, the paths of these three characters will cross, their ambitions and fates entangling in ways none of them could foresee. Each is determined to succeed, but each must decide what they are willing to sacrifice—and whom they will sabotage—in order to do so. Like Rindell’s bestselling debut, The Other Typist, Three-Martini Lunch is a rollicking period piece that builds to a magnificent crescendo. With an excellent ear for the patter and cadence of the time, Rindell expertly brings a bygone era to life, though the struggles of her trio feel anything but dated. While blackmail and backstabbing keep things suitably scandalous, Rindell also explores deeper issues of race, sexuality, class and gender in ways that feel vital and timely. The end result is a moving novel that proves provocative in more ways than one.

—AMY SCRIBNER

—STEPHENIE HARRISON

reviews THE REGIONAL OFFICE IS UNDER ATTACK! By Manuel Gonzales Riverhead $28, 416 pages ISBN 9781594632419 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

perfect backdrop to a page-turning plot. Gonzales’ tale has something for every reader: Double agents! Secret romantic trysts! Conspiracy! Fight scenes! Friendships gone awry! At its core, however, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is ultimately a tale of vengeance— one during which you’ll find yourself struggling to choose a side.

You may not be familiar with the name Manuel Gonzales, but once you’ve had the pleasure of delving into one of his out-of-the-ordinary literary creations, you won’t forget it. A graduate of Columbia University’s creative writing program, Gonzales has previously shared his unique brand of storytelling via publications such as Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer. His first collection of short stories, The Miniature Wife (2013), received much acclaim, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. In his debut novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, Gonzales conjures a futuristic world of super-powered female assassins—part of an organization called the Regional Office. Two women are at the heart of the conflict: ardently loyal Sarah and defector Rose. While Sarah (and her curious mechanical arm) looked to the Regional Office as her savior after the disappearance of her mother, Rose sees corruption and betrayal within the organization’s leadership. Filling out the cast are their fellow agents; their recruiter and mentor Henry; and, of course, the secretive individuals behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Backstory on each character and the Regional Office itself is delicately spliced between action-packed scenes, making this a wonderfully choreographed narrative. The moment you think you have a grasp on the truth about the Regional Office, Gonzales tosses in a twist that will have you questioning your understanding all over again. The amount of detail Gonzales infuses into this world makes it come alive in an engaging, quirky and delightful way, creating a

—AMANDA TRIVETT

COUNTRY OF RED AZALEAS By Domnica Radulescu

Twelve $25, 320 pages ISBN 9781455590421 Audio, eBook available WORLD FICTION

Lara and Marija have always been more like sisters than friends. Growing up in the Balkans, they spent every summer together in Sarajevo, stealing fruit from the neighbor’s gardens and quoting classic Hollywood movies. The friendship only deepened in college, where they shared everything from fiercely anti-nationalist sentiments to a pale, white boy named Milko. Life was about ideological, heady conversations in tiny cafes over shots of vodka and reckless nights spent tangled in sheets. But when the Bosnian war begins, Lara, a Serb, and Marija, a Bosnian, are forced to face the realities of their separate identities. Lara moves to Washington, D.C., with her American husband, where she throws herself into her graduate studies in political science and tries desperately to nurture an unraveling marriage. Meanwhile, Marija returns to Sarajevo to work as an undercover journalist. When contact with Marija suddenly ceases, Lara is gripped with a fear that she has lost her. Amid the chaos and mess of her personal life and driven by her desire to know the truth, Lara embarks on a journey through war-torn Serbia in an attempt to discover what really happened to her dearest friend. Country of Red Azaleas, the third novel from Romanian writer

Domnica Radulescu, is a tightly wrought, beautiful story of friendship. Whether she’s conjuring up the colorful sights and smells of the prewar Balkans or describing the “fierce clarity of the war” where you “get to see humanity all bare,” Radulescu creates images that lodge themselves firmly in your consciousness, giving you ideas to ponder long after you turn the final page. In the tradition of Elena Ferrante and Khaled Hosseini, Country of Red Azaleas prevails as a true testament to a bond that transcends the devastation of war. —J E S S I C A P E A R S O N

THE EXCELLENT LOMBARDS By Jane Hamilton

Grand Central $26, 288 pages ISBN 9781455564224 Audio, eBook available COMING-OF-AGE

Mary Frances Lombard—known as Frankie—has found her paradise. The 400 acres of the Lombard apple orchard are where she plans to be for the rest of her life. Like her father, she will quiet the wind and “outwit a storm”; she will make hay; she will grow apples; she will marry her brother William and together “carry on the business” forever. In this way, Jane Hamilton (The Book of Ruth) introduces us to the fierce child narrator of her latest work, The Excellent Lombards. Frankie’s fantasy is silly, we know that. Nevertheless, Hamilton uses exaggerated, territorial and overly emotional kid-logic to great effect to make sure the reader is on Frankie’s side, and feeling her pain, even if it is with a chuckle. We follow her over the years, as reality slowly creeps into the black-andwhite world inside the boundaries of the orchard. We see various grown-up experiences and tragedies—running a business, keeping peace in the family, even the 9/11 terrorist attacks—all through the self-centeredness of a child’s perspective, making them tender and often funny.

If, like me, you occasionally suffer from the affliction of wanting to live on a farm, then The Excellent Lombards is for you. But even if you don’t share that fantasy, this coming-of-age story is captivating and passionate, taking us back to being a child and believing in one thing wholeheartedly. Simply put, this is a book you won’t be able to put down. —CHIKA GUJARATHI

RUSH OH! By Shirley Barrett Little, Brown $25, 368 pages ISBN 9780316261548 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

“Rush oh!” was the rallying cry of the whalers in New South Wales, shouted when they spotted their target and set out to sea. It is also the title of Australian screenwriter Shirley Barrett’s fictional debut, a charming blend of history, whaling folklore and period illustrations, based on an actual whaling family in Eden, New South Wales. Rush Oh! is set during the harsh whaling season of 1908. At 19, Mary Davidson is the oldest daughter of the community’s lead whaler. Responsible for the care of her five motherless siblings, she is also the cook and laundress for her father’s crew and old enough to understand what the use of kerosene over whale oil might mean to the family finances. A mysterious new arrival—a minister turned whaler—provides some romantic distraction for Mary, but the day-to-day worries over dwindling reserves and an empty larder take precedence. Barrett’s inspiration for this novel came from a visit to the Killer Whale Museum in Eden, and it is her depiction of the symbiotic relationship between human and beast that gives this novel so much of its offbeat charm. Killer whales earned their nickname because of their method of attacking and hunting fish and sea mammals with incredible skill and dexterity. In Rush Oh!, the pod of whales

FICTION work in tandem with the fishermen, luring larger whales to the bay, and receiving their cut of the spoils when the killing is done. Rush Oh! is buoyed by Mary’s tart and unsentimental tone and wry observations of her family and neighbors. But her gentle scorn blinds her to some of the events happening right under her nose, especially when her frivolous sister Louisa makes a decision that shocks the whole family. Despite the graphic depictions of whale hunting (perhaps not for the squeamish), Rush Oh! is a lively, humorous portrayal of the domestic side of whaling at the end of its heyday, told with genuine sympathy and good will. —LAUREN BUFFERD

THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS By Karan Mahajan Viking $26, 288 pages ISBN 9780525429630 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

he’s unable to type. The novel shifts perspective throughout to encompass multiple viewpoints and demonstrate the intersection of lives affected by that initial blast, including Mansoor, who abandons his secularity after he experiences prejudice; a bomb maker named Shaukat “Shockie” Guru; and a Muslim activist who becomes more radicalized as the novel progresses. The focus wanders a bit during detailed passages about Indian politics and Mansoor’s religious conversion, but this remains a compelling story about extremism and its effects. Much of the writing is beautiful and evocative, as when the bereaved Khuranas awake to find “two parallel lines of salt” on their sheets from “shoulders soggy with tears” after the death of their sons. Some terrorist acts have relatively few casualties, but as Mahajan eloquently points out, even small acts of violence have devastating repercussions. In the world of political terrorism, there are no small bombs. —MICHAEL MAGRAS

MILLER’S VALLEY Though terrorist acts may have different motivations, they share a common factor: the suffering wrought on the victims’ families. That point is dramatized with chilling effectiveness in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, a novel in which questions of politics and religion are rarely far from the thoughts of its main characters. Mahajan, whose 2008 debut novel, Family Planning, was published in nine countries, begins his story with a 1996 marketplace bombing in India. The Khuranas, who are Hindu, have sent their two young sons to an open-air market to pick up their television from an electrician. The boys bring their Muslim friend Mansoor, the Ahmeds’ only child, along. An explosion “under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800” kills the Khurana boys, but spares Mansoor. His injury seems minor at first, but when he gets to America years later to study computer science, his wrist and neck pains become so severe that

By Anna Quindlen Random House $28, 272 pages ISBN 9780812996081 Audio, eBook available FAMILY SAGA

Mary Margaret Miller’s family has called Miller’s Valley home for hundreds of years. Everyone knows little Mimi, as she’s called, by name. She’s grown up in the shadow of older brothers Eddie and Tommy. She’s risen early to help her father with farm chores. She has observed her mother’s knowing ways; Miriam, a nurse, always seems to know what’s happening before anyone else. So when a government official arrives to tell residents that the land they call home is destined to become a reservoir, Mimi isn’t pleased. She knows the valley has its problems: After a heavy rain,

spotlight

ANNIVERSARIES BY STEPHENIE HARRISON

A Brontë bicentennial

t’s hard to name a novel more beloved than Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Billed as one of the first feminist love stories, it has inspired countless sighs from lovers of literature over the centuries.

April 21, 2016, marks the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, and two timely new releases honor Charlotte and her family’s enduring legacy. Though these two books have very different tones and approaches, their shared affection for the Brontës unites them. The setup of Catherine Lowell’s debut novel, The Madwoman Upstairs (Touchstone, $25.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9781501124211), is an English major’s fantasy come true. Heroine Samantha Whipple is an awkward bookworm who heads off to Oxford University to read literature—and just happens to be the Brontës’ last living descendent. As she butts heads with her brooding-yet-irresistible tutor, a mysterious package from her deceased father arrives. Suddenly Sam is on a scavenger hunt that promises to lead her to her inheritance: items belonging to the Brontë estate that Sam has always considered nothing but a rumor . . . until now. Crammed with myriad allusions to the entire Brontë clan’s canon, Lowell’s novel will appeal not only to Brontë megafans, but also to readers who like a healthy helping of literary criticism alongside their fiction. When Sam isn’t off solving her father’s cryptic clues, she’s arguing with her professor about how to correctly read literature in

general—and the Brontës’ works in particular. Filled with hyperlexic ripostes and an academic heroine who is the dictionary definition of quirky, this is a story that will please readers of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele (Putnam, $27, 432 pages, ISBN 9780399169496) is a very different form of tribute. Just a few pages in, Faye’s Jane utters the line, “Reader, I murdered him,” which tells you exactly the kind of book you are in for. A somewhat satirical riff on Jane Eyre, the novel reimagines Brontë’s iconic heroine with not only a will of iron but also the heart of a hot-blooded killer. This Jane embraces her “wicked” side and isn’t afraid to avenge herself against those who do her wrong. (Watch out, teachers at Lowood.) Readers worried that Jane Steele is simply a retread of Jane Eyre with more blood and gore, à la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, fear not. Just when you think you know what is coming next, Jane Steele takes things in a completely different direction. Faye is also the author of four acclaimed historical mysteries, and she juxtaposes a textured Victorian setting with more modern (and thus, more ambiguous) morality. Jane Steele is equal parts irreverent and refreshing. It’s also, remarkably, no less of a page-turner than the classic to which it pays homage.

reviews residents are often forced to dry out their homes and throw out items damaged by the rising water. But the Pennsylvania valley is home. In Miller’s Valley, bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen offers a textured portrayal of small-town life. Mimi’s desire to understand her family and the place she calls home begins in the 1960s and evolves over the decades. She’s young when talk of flooding the valley begins, but she’s also bright. With a teacher’s encouragement, Mimi takes on a science research project. As she delves into the area’s history, Mimi begins to understand the reality the valley faces. But her family remains a mystery in many ways. Every Quindlen novel seems to reveal the author’s deft storytelling skill in new ways. Miller’s Valley is a gentle story that unfolds slowly and invites the reader to savor each page. It is a tale to get lost in. —CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

GLORY OVER EVERYTHING By Kathleen Grissom

Simon & Schuster $25.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781476748443 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Kathleen Grissom’s eagerly anticipated sequel to The Kitchen House (2010), which portrayed the grim reality of life on a Virginia plantation, follows some of that novel’s characters to pre-Civil War Philadelphia. But it stands alone as its own compelling story as well. Jamie Pyke, son of a slave and the master of Tall Oakes plantation, escaped at age 13 to Philadelphia. Jamie easily passed for white, and he has become a well-established society gentleman over the last decade. But when Henry, the slave who helped Jamie get to Philadelphia years earlier, asks him for a life-changing favor, Jamie must confront his past. Glory Over Everything features an engaging cast of characters. These include Henry and his son,

Pan, who reminds Jamie of himself as a child; Robert, a longtime butler who has his own dark history; Sukey, a slave from Tall Oakes who is now part of the Underground Railroad; Caroline, Jamie’s love interest; and Caroline’s parents, a bigoted couple who threaten to reveal Jamie’s multiracial heritage. Chapters are written in the voices of these characters, delving into the interwoven stories. Grissom brings the 1830s to life, a time when slavery was still thriving, freed slaves lived in fear of recapture and abolitionists were becoming increasingly active. Like The Kitchen House, Glory Over Everything will appeal to readers who appreciate a thought-provoking historical drama, making it a good selection for book clubs as well. —DEBORAH DONOVAN

MY MRS. BROWN By William Norwich

Simon & Schuster $24, 304 pages ISBN 9781442386075 eBook available POPULAR FICTION

A reader of fashion writer and editor William Norwich’s latest novel, My Mrs. Brown, could be forgiven for thinking its titular heroine is living in the 1950s, like Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The lady described is in late middle age. Mrs. Brown is modest, fair-minded and dutiful, and lives in a quiet Rhode Island town. The highlight of her year is being asked to help with an inventory of the estate of a philanthropic widow. Only then does it becomes clear that the story takes place in the present day. Are there still people like this? Norwich’s answer is an enthusiastic “Yes!” There are ladies who wear twinsets and sensible shoes, bake morning glory muffins and still write letters in the age of Facebook and endless texting. You’ll be surprised how shocked you are when you encounter the first F-bomb in this book. No, it does not come from Mrs. Brown.

During the inventory, Mrs. Brown sorts through Mrs. Groton’s sumptuous dresses, and she finds one whose twin she simply must have. She’s a good seamstress but she could never sew such a glorious garment. No, Mrs. Meet a Brown has to delightfully go to New York old-fashioned to find such heroine in ‘My a dress, and the prospect Mrs. Brown.’ fills her with the terror and excitement of a recruit waiting to storm a beachhead. Even if you find Mrs. Brown anachronistic, with the gentle conservatism of an age long-gone, you come to like and respect her. Then, you come to love her. For along with her belief in decency and humility comes tenacity. She is determined to overcome her fear of New York—its crazy transit system and good/bad smells and confusing street signs and all the rich and sophisticated people who still manage to be kind when they meet her—because she must have that Oscar de la Renta dress, which she has painstakingly saved for. She does not want the dress to entice a man, or to flatter her figure or even because she thinks she’s as good as Mrs. Groton, although she is. The reviewer will leave it to the reader to find out the reason why. Goodness really is its own reward, says Norwich’s gentle-hearted book. Better yet, sometimes goodness is rewarded. —ARLENE McKANIC

ALICE & OLIVER By Charles Bock

Random House $28, 416 pages ISBN 9781400068388 eBook available LITERARY FICTION

Since Charles Bock’s unforgettable 2008 debut novel, Beautiful Children, seared us with its bleak portrait of teen runaways and the Vegas fringe, I’ve married, moved

across the country, lived in three homes and fathered two children. And all the while, periodically, I’ve wondered, when the heck is this guy going to write another book? Well, nearly eight years after showing up on the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, Bock gives us Alice & Oliver, at once a heart-wrenching story of a young couple’s world crumbling and an explanation, of sorts, of just where Bock has been all these years. In 2009, when their daughter was six months old, Bock’s wife, Diana, was diagnosed with cancer. She died two-and-a-half years later. Out of that time comes this book. Alice and Oliver Culvert are the parents of a newborn named Doe. It is 1993, and they live in New York City’s edgy (at the time) Meatpacking District. They are both creative people: Oliver writes code and Alice works steadily in the fashion world. We meet Alice first. She is healthy for about two inches of type. In paragraph one she coughs up blood on the street. On page six she is nearly dead. By page 12, Alice has cancer, and this powerful, riveting book becomes an exercise in keeping your lip from trembling. As Alice’s treatment begins, she and Oliver are the perfect couple, very much in love. Oliver bares his teeth at cancer, and toggles between being Alice’s protector and her jailer. But Alice deteriorates, and the duo is worn down by the labyrinthine medical system and the lacerating effects of treatment and uncertainty. They turn away from each other. Alice has a bizarre, fraught encounter with an alcoholic musician named Mervyn, who hits on her in the hospital—somehow without being totally repulsive. Oliver, meanwhile, finds himself adrift when not sitting bedside, and explores outlets that may prove poisonous to their marriage. Bock, unsurprisingly, says he cannot imagine a more difficult book to write. Nor is it, emotionally, an easy read. Yet this deep, honest and layered exploration of disease is not depressing. On the contrary, it’s a life-affirming portrait of people trying their best while enduring the worst. —IAN SCHWARTZ

FICTION eats a “king’s breakfast of peppered cow’s brain and cornbread”) more than compensate. Meda, at one By Diane McKinney- point, laments “the tragedy of a life with no history at all.” Once again, Whetstone McKinney-Whetstone has manHarper aged to bring to life a wide range $26.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780062126962 of characters whose triumphs and Audio, eBook available tribulations would never show up in a history book.

LAZARETTO

HISTORICAL FICTION

In five previous novels, Diane McKinney-Whetstone has painted a vivid portrait of 20th-century black life in Philadelphia—from the Jazz Age in her first book, Tumbling, right up to the 1990s in Blues Dancing. With her sixth novel, Lazaretto, McKinney-Whetstone turns to the 19th century. The book opens on the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, when a pregnant maid named Meda visits a midwife who “had become well known in the whispered circles of rich white men as a viable solution to the consequence of their indiscretions.” The midwife makes a fateful decision regarding Meda’s baby that will reverberate for the rest of the novel. This is just one of many deceptions in a book filled with characters who may not be what they seem. Consider orphans Linc and Bram, both named after the beloved fallen president. They tug at the heartstrings of Meda, and, when they grow older, make a fatal mistake, forcing them to flee Philadelphia. They return, however, and that’s when Lazaretto really hits its stride: The quarantine hospital that lends the book its title becomes the site of a much-anticipated wedding, bringing many of the characters together for what is supposed to be a joyous event. But events beyond the staff’s control interrupt the wedding, harshly reminding McKinney-Whetstone’s African-American characters of their place in the social hierarchy. There may be a bit too much melodrama in Lazaretto for some readers, and at times the years seem to fly by too quickly. Overall, though, McKinney-Whetstone’s sympathetic characters and historical touches (one character

—T O M D E I G N A N

THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS By Edna O’Brien

Little, Brown $27, 320 pages ISBN 9780316378239 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

Edna O’Brien, one of the jewels in the crown of Irish literature, has long given voice to her homeland’s tragic lyricism. At 85, O’Brien has lost none of her talent or fire. Indeed, her new novel, The Little Red Chairs—her first in a decade— may be the fiercest work of her estimable career. Arriving in a small, off-thebeaten-track village in the west of Ireland, Vladimir Dragan sets up shop as a holistic healer. Handsome and darkly charismatic, the aging man charms the women of the community, particularly Fidelma, once the town beauty and now the 40-ish wife of an older man. Fidelma’s great sadness is never having had a child, and Vlad comes to represent her last chance to fulfill that dream. Soon pregnant, Fidelma has her happiness shattered when the past catches up with her mysterious lover. Vlad is arrested as a war criminal—a savage master of evil responsible for thousands of violent deaths during the Bosnian war. His exposure and extradition shocks the villagers, but Fidelma’s devastation goes beyond emotional despair as she endures an unthinkable act of retribution. The Little Red Chairs takes its title from a 2012 memorial installation in Sarajevo where 11,541 red chairs represented every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425-day siege.

O’Brien comes at the story from many points of view—not only Fidelma and Vlad’s, but also those of others in the town, including an immigrant kitchen worker who is the first to recognize the war criminal—masterfully imbuing the novel with texture that complements the complexity of its collision of history and culture. —ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 By Molly Prentiss

Scout Press $26, 336 pages ISBN 9781501121043 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

For folks who were there, the New City York of 1980 was the best of times and the worst of times. The city was a cauldron of energy, creativity and wonderful freakishness. It was the city of Basquiat and Keith Haring’s hit-and-run works of art—and even a place where rents were cheap if you lived in Greenwich Village or Alphabet City. AIDS had not yet ravaged the city like a daikaiju from outer space. It was a place where a girl from Ketchum, Idaho, or an orphan from Argentina could come and dream big, make it big and yes, fail big. Molly Prentiss’ Tuesday Nights in 1980 follows several linked characters during the year in question. There’s Lucy, the innocent girl from Ketchum and her lover, Engales, the ambitious painter from Argentina, who has escaped that country’s encroaching fascism as well as a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister. James is an art critic noted for incorporating his synesthesia into his reviews. To him art, people and things are jumbles of vibrant sensations and colors. He is drawn to Lucy because she’s as fluorescent yellow as a squash blossom. Engales, who he meets after the artist suffers a disfiguring accident, fascinates him with his blueness. James’ wife, Marge, is red. Because James knows all these

people with varying degrees of intense intimacy, everything in the book will get very, very complicated. How can it not? It was 1980. The book is such an accomplished and surefooted work that it’s amazing to learn that it’s a debut. Prentiss’ descriptions of New York and its fractious art scene will make those who were there almost nostalgic, and her deep empathy for her characters, messed up as some of them are, is moving. She pulls off the difficult feat of making dialogue sound like conversations overheard in the next room. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a discerning, passionate and humane work. —ARLENE McKANIC

THE NEST By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney Ecco $26.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780062414212 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Readers who devour quirky family dramas like Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Be Frank With Me won’t want to miss this anticipated debut about a dysfunctional New York City family. In The Nest, the four adult Plumb children have been counting on their inheritance: Melody has two daughters to send to college, Jack needs some cash to keep his struggling business afloat, and Beatrice is years overdue with her second novel. But when their fresh-out-of-rehab oldest brother, Leo, loses it all, the siblings must reshape their futures. Author Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney worked as a marketing copywriter before turning to fiction. She’s at her best when describing the fluctuating sibling bonds within a large family—the uneasy alliances, the simmering resentments, the unspoken secrets and the fierce love. She also nails the ways the money can affect relationships, in ways large and small. Smart, moving and warm-hearted, The Nest is a debut to savor. —T R I S H A P I N G

reviews T PI OP CK

SWITCHED ON By John Elder Robison

DIMESTORE

Spiegel & Grau $28, 320 pages ISBN 9780812996890 Audio, eBook available

A writer’s Appalachian roots REVIEW BY ALICE CARY

Reading Dimestore: A Writer’s Life is like sitting a spell on the front porch swing with novelist Lee Smith, hearing all about the kinfolk who nurtured her in the mountain “holler” town of Grundy, Virginia. In this collection of 14 essays, Smith’s voice sings out like the mountain music she was raised on, skillfully weaving together nostalgic melodies with modern insight. Smith describes growing up in the warm embrace of her family, watching life unfold as she gazed through a one-way mirror in the office of her father’s variety store. “Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible,” she writes. “It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.” Despite a seemingly idyllic childhood, everything wasn’t completely By Lee Smith rosy. Her beloved father was what he described as “kindly nervous,” a Algonquin, $24.95, 224 pages euphemism for bipolar disorder, and her cherished mother was hospiISBN 9781616205027, audio, eBook available talized several times for depression and anxiety. However, Smith makes clear: “This is my story, then, but it is not a MEMOIR sob story.” Dimestore also contains a wealth of humor and joyful memories, such as an account of a 1966 rafting trip Smith took down the Mississippi River with 15 of her college classmates from Hollins, the inspiration for her novel The Last Girls. She writes beautifully of her epiphany upon meeting Eudora Welty and realizing that this master storyteller wrote “[p]lain stories about country people and small towns, my own ‘living world.’ ” Sadly, the hometown of Grundy so near to Smith’s heart was relocated in recent years to control flooding. Smith concludes: “The dimestore is gone. Walmart looms over the river. I’m 70, an age that has brought no wisdom. When I was young, I always thought the geezers knew some things I didn’t; the sad little secret is, we don’t. I don’t understand anything anymore, though I’m still in there, still trying like crazy.” Smith greatly underestimates her own wisdom—Dimestore is chock-full of it.

KILL ’EM AND LEAVE By James McBride Spiegel & Grau $28, 256 pages ISBN 9780812993509 Audio, eBook available MUSIC

James Brown’s impact on American popular culture reverberates so deeply through music and race relations that writers are still attempting to uncover the man behind the legend. In Kill ’Em and Leave, acclaimed writer James McBride (The Color of Water) seeks to explain why, for African Americans, Brown remains the “song of our life, the song of our entire history.” The troubled soul singer revolu-

MEDICINE JR.

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir. Robison undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) because it might increase his emotional awareness, or so researchers predict. But his reaction to the treatments far exceeds their expectations. His experiences are hallucinogenic, highly charged and deeply meaningful. They change him forever. Readers see Robison financial aid to children caught in the throes of the treatments and tionized American music—fusing jazz and funk, for example—but in the web of poverty. Brown so their dramatic aftermath—staying he didn’t appear on the cover of distrusted banks that he hid money up all night listening to music, reRolling Stone during his lifetime, everywhere and, McBride writes, considering relationships, reveling and music critics often treated him always walked around with $3,000 in his ability to finally look people worth of cashier’s checks for the as a joke. in the eye. These stories are so last 20 years of his life. McBride’s portrait of Brown is moving and unpredictable that I part cultural history, part music Brown’s insecurity filtered down found myself reading them aloud. criticism and part memoir—as to members of his band, whom he It’s been seven years since Robmistreated, paid poorly and often a child, McBride stood across ison initially underwent TMS, and spied on to see who was speakthe street from Brown’s house in the long-term implications are still ing badly of him behind his back; Queens, waiting for a glimpse of unfolding. Ultimately, though, this his hero. Drawing on interviews in short, McBride points out, he book provides an intellectual and with the singer’s family and friends, “dehumanized them.” In the end, emotional initiation into a different Brown is a product of the South—a way of perceiving the world. Like many of whom have never before spoken on the record about Brown, land of masks, in McBride’s books by Andrew Solomon and words—where no one, especially a Oliver Sacks, Switched On offers McBride paints a gloomy portrait of a man haunted by the demons of black man, can ever be himself. an opportunity to consider mental McBride’s energetic storytelling, insecurity and mistrust, a musician processes through a combination his sympathy for his subject and whose career ascended rapidly of powerful narrative and informaand descended just as quickly, and his deeply personal writing tell a tive medical context. Readers can sad tale of one of our most influen- put their hands, for a moment, on an individual who insisted that children stay in school and who tial musicians. the mystery that is the brain. left most of his fortune to provide —HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR. — K E L LY B L E W E T T

I WILL FIND YOU By Joanna Connors Atlantic Monthly $25, 272 pages ISBN 9780802122605 eBook available MEMOIR

Connors’ riveting, soul-searching book deserves a wide audience; it presents an unusual first-person perspective on critical issues of race, class and crime in America. —ALICE CARY

LAB GIRL By Hope Jahren

On July 9, 1984, reporter Joanna Connors was on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when she was raped on the stage of an empty theater at Case Western Reserve University. Her assailant, 27-yearold David Williams, was arrested and sent to prison. In I Will Find You, she offers an insightful account of this life-changing event and its harrowing aftermath. Connors describes the brutal crime, police investigation and trial with emotional honesty that’s complemented by her reporting skills. Williams’ arrest wasn’t difficult given the fact that he had his name tattooed on his arm, and that he inexplicably returned to the scene of the crime the next day. Connors remained haunted not only by the event but by Williams’ chilling threat to find her if she reported it. She raised a son and daughter, not telling them about the crime until her daughter was about to go to college. At that point, she decided, “Maybe I should find him instead.” A records search revealed that her assailant had died in prison in 2000. “My search for him was over before it started,” she writes. And yet it wasn’t. Connors diligently tracked down Williams’ friends and family, discovering that his family life was filled with poverty, abuse from his father, alcoholism, addiction and crime. Her investigation leads her to conclude that her rapist and his family were victims in their own right. She writes: “As a reporter, I have asked so many other people to open themselves up and let me tell their stories, all the while withholding my own. I owed this to them. I owed it to other women who have been raped. I owed it to my children.”

Knopf $26.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781101874936 eBook available SCIENCE

“I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science, no matter how well it feeds me,” writes Hope Jahren, a paleobiologist, winner of three Fulbright Awards, a professor at the University of Hawaii and now author of a marvelous memoir, Lab Girl. What’s it like being a female research scientist? You’ll have no better tour guide than Jahren, who is witty, thoughtful, informative and who writes exceedingly well. Jahren, whose work focuses on plant life, grew up playing beneath the chemical benches in her father’s community college lab in Minnesota, knowing that someday she would have her own lab. Today she does (her third), calling it her refuge, her asylum and “a place to go on sacred days, as is a church.” Her lab partner, Bill, is her loyal sidekick, whom she adores like a fraternal twin. Their adventures, chronicled here in high style, include overturning a van during a snowstorm, hanging off the sides of cliffs in Northern Alaska and tromping through Irish highlands in search of moss. Jahren also writes about the difficulty of being a female scientist, sometimes forced to work with “pasty middle-aged men who regarded me as they would a mangy stray that had slipped in through an open basement window.” She relates the ongoing task of securing funding—in their early days as a team, Bill lived in his car when he couldn’t afford his own place. Jahren shares her struggles with

q&a Memories of home

he author of Fair and Tender Ladies and many other beloved novels reflects on her Virginia childhood and her beginnings as a writer in Dimestore.

LEE SMITH BY ALICE CARY

NONFICTION

At what point did you decide to collect your essays as a memoir? I can tell you exactly the moment I decided to publish Dimestore: the day my childhood home—the house my parents built and lived in for over 60 years—was demolished as part of a massive flood control project. The only thing I have left is the brass doorknocker with the curly “S” on it, for Smith, which a kind neighbor salvaged and put in a homemade box frame for me to keep. My father’s dimestore had already been blown up along with about 60 other stores lining the main street of Grundy, Virginia. Do you have any memorabilia from your father’s dimestore? Or something you wish you had? I really wish I still had my own little typewriter which Daddy kept right there in his upstairs office on the long desk where I could observe the entire floor of the dimestore—all the aisles—through the one-way glass window, reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Once I saw a woman put a big old Philco radio between her legs, under her coat, and waddle right out of the store! Did you ever feel as though your parents might be watching over your shoulder as you wrote? No, I’ve never really felt that way. Since I was an only child born to them late in life—a big surprise since they’d been told they could not have children—they were unconditionally OK with whatever I did. If I’d told them, for instance, that I wanted to be an ax murderer, they would have gone out and bought me the ax. What was it like being a go-go dancer with Annie Dillard in your allgirl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs, at Hollins College in the 1960s? It was wonderful. Hollins not only had an excellent creative writing program—long before most colleges—but encouraged (or at least tolerated) all kinds of creativity. We first performed at a Hollins literary festival, then went on the road to UVA, Washington and Lee, etc. We all had go-go names—mine was Candy Love. I wore a glitter top and white boots and a cowboy hat. Is there a piece of advice you’d give your 20- or 30-year-old self? SLOW DOWN. As a young woman, I was just drunk on literature, on fire with novels and poetry and writing, I’d write all night long. Now I’d say, slow down, honey. Read. Just because you like to write doesn’t mean you’ve got something to say. Know what you’re talking about. Writing is an addiction, you say, and early in a project you feel a “dangerous, exhilarating sense that anything can happen.” What’s the most surprising thing to happen during your writing? So many surprising things have happened that I don’t know where to start. Thing is, if a character really does “come to life” on the page as you write, she’s liable to do anything. Anything! Mine are always having religious fits or running off with men. During the writing of Dimestore, the wonderful surprise has been that the more I wrote, the more I remembered—and at Visit BookPage.com to read more my age, memory is the best of our Q&A with Lee Smith. gift of all.

reviews bipolar disorder (although this isn’t the focus of the book), and the joy of finally meeting the man she would marry and becoming a mother. Along the way, she includes elegant short chapters about the natural world, artfully explaining the way in which various species’ struggle for survival mirrors her own. Lab Girl presents an edifying and entertaining look into the world of a serious research scientist. —ALICE CARY

THE MIDNIGHT ASSASSIN By Skip Hollands worth Holt $30, 336 pages ISBN 9780805097672 Audio, eBook available TRUE CRIME

spot (the request was thankfully denied)—with unexpected humor. The press sensationalized the story, but as the murders continued, one reporter, spelling his name “Frank Einstein” in the rush to print, went so far as to speculate that a real-life equivalent of Mary Shelley’s monster was roaming the streets in a murderous rage. Detectives with highly tenuous relations to the famed Pinkerton agency lived high on the city’s dollar while accomplishing next to nothing. The crimes of The Midnight Assassin were never solved, largely owing to the paucity of investigative tools available to law enforcement at the time. Hollandsworth hopes that new evidence may yet come to light and identify the killer, but even left unsolved, this is a case that will leave you freshly grateful for electric lights, fingerprinting and CSI. —HEATHER SEGGEL

In 1885, Austin, Texas, was terrorized by a series of murders so seemingly random and brutal they’re considered the work of the first American serial killer. People were reluctant to pay attention when the victims were servant girls or young women of color, ascribing the crimes to a gang of “bad blacks,” in part because Austin was prosperous and growing; murders in the news were bad publicity. In The Midnight Assassin, Texas Monthly editor Skip Hollandsworth tells the little-known story in riveting fashion, presenting this historical page-turner in spellbinding detail. The violence of the killer’s attacks is genuinely horrifying— bodies were slashed so brutally they couldn’t be properly collected for autopsy. When a similar series of crimes began in London, some speculated that Jack the Ripper had used Austin as a training ground, though there’s ample evidence to discount that theory. Hollandsworth balances the grim realities—once the citizens of Austin were sufficiently motivated to act, they asked for the right to make “citizen’s arrests,” which in this case would amount to nothing more than lynching on the

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Skip Hollandsworth.

THE LADY WITH THE BORZOI By Laura Claridge FSG $30, 416 pages ISBN 9780374114251 eBook available BIOGRAPHY

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father. Blanche’s marriage to Alfred Knopf lies at the heart of Laura Claridge’s capacious and engaging

biography. Although the Knopfs shared a passionate commitment to literature, they were not wellmatched intimately and quickly settled into a “open” marriage. Blanche mainly lived in an apartment in Manhattan, while Alfred preferred to settle in the nearby suburbs. Despite the distance between them, they had two children: their son, Pat, and the publishing company, which is still thriving today. One especially timely and tragic theme in Blanche’s life concerns her lifelong drive to be thin. Beginning in the 1920s, when fashionable women pursued a skinny flapper’s body, Blanche spent an inordinate amount of time and energy dieting. Living on a menu of cocktails and olives, supplemented by a popular diet pill that damaged her eyes, Blanche seems to have channeled the stresses of the workplace into a lifelong eating disorder. Despite her rocky personal life, Blanche’s true passion was finding and signing new authors. She was personally responsible for bringing to Knopf popular hard-boiled detective novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and her immersion in the Harlem Renaissance led her to authors Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen. In The Lady with the Borzoi, Claridge triumphantly restores Blanche Knopf’s central place in 20th-century publishing history. — CATHERINE HOLLIS

“MOST BLESSED OF THE PATRIARCHS” By Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf Liveright $27.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780871404428 eBook available HISTORY

Thomas Jefferson was arguably the central figure in the early American republic. No one contributed more to the formation of the country or had more sustained influence. But how did he think of

himself and what he was doing in the world? How did he want others to perceive him? The authoritative and eminently readable “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” is an excellent place to look for answers to these questions. Annette Gordon-Reed, who received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her groundbreaking The Hemingses of Monticello, and Peter S. Onuf, the country’s leading Jefferson scholar, delve deeply into the development and evolution of Jefferson’s thought. They give careful attention to both his public and private writing to help define his attitudes about many subjects, including the role of women. Jefferson came to view the family as a microcosm of the nation. He may have idealized home so much because, as a committed patriot and skilled politician, he was so often away from his own. Born into the top of Virginia’s social stratum, he enjoyed extraordinary advantages. At the same time, perhaps more than any of the other founders, he wrestled with the moral and practical implications of long-term relationships among Native Americans, enslaved people and white settlers. He came to accept the concept of inevitable human progress, and he believed future generations would resolve these problems. A particular highlight of the book is a discussion of the critical importance of the years during his diplomatic service in France, when his slaves, James and Sally Hemings, lived with him. When he returned home, Jefferson’s attitude toward slavery changed. He continued to see it as an evil, but not as the main degrading foundation of his country’s way of life. At the same time, Jefferson insisted publicly that patriotism began at home. The bonds that sustained family life, he thought, were the only stable and enduring foundation for republican self-government. The authors are often asked, “What is left to be known and said about Thomas Jefferson?” Their reply is “Everything.” This stimulating book is a valuable guide to our most intriguing founding father. —ROGER BISHOP

NONFICTION LOVE THAT BOY By Ron Fournier

Harmony $26, 240 pages ISBN 9780804140485 Audio, eBook available PARENTING

Clinton, and he vividly describes the former presidents’ empathy and generosity with Tyler, who didn’t make those visits easy. But Love That Boy is most affecting when we see how far Tyler has come since his diagnosis and how far his father has come as well.

BIRDS B Y LY N N L . G R E E N

Take your reading to new heights

pring has arrived, and along with it comes a flock of books about our feathered friends. Here are three new titles that bird watchers will find especially intriguing.

—SARAH MCCRAW CROW

BECOMING GRANDMA For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12. One thread of the memoir follows father and son on a series of post-diagnosis road trips. Tyler loves history and Fournier is a former White House correspondent, so they visit presidential house-museums—the White House; Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill; the Adams home in Quincy; Jefferson’s Monticello. Fournier tries to connect the dots for Tyler: Roosevelt suffered asthma and was bullied as a child but grew up to be wildly popular, he tells him. “You’re trying too hard,” Tyler says. Divided into two parts, “What We Want” and “What We Need,” the memoir is also a familiar meditation on parenting—our outsize expectations for our kids’ success, popularity and happiness. To get at these issues, Fournier interviews other parents, some who have a child with Asperger’s or depression, others who call themselves tiger moms. Fournier intersperses these with his family’s story, including the slow path to Tyler’s diagnosis and one daughter’s adolescent struggles. He’s clear-eyed about his own shortcomings—he repeatedly put work ahead of family, and his anxious expectations for his college-age daughters, Holly and Gabrielle, led him to give them wrong-headed advice (which they wisely ignored). Fournier also secured substantial visits with George W. Bush and Bill

spotlight

By Lesley Stahl

Blue Rider $27, 288 pages ISBN 9780399168154 Audio, eBook available FAMILY

How does an award-winning journalist contemplate a transformative change in her own life? With prodigious research that finds room for the blind love growing in “a whole new chamber in my heart.” Lesley Stahl, longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” has a lot to share about Becoming Grandma. Bowled over by her “thunderstruck” reaction to the birth of her first granddaughter, Stahl decides to examine grandparenthood in all its scientific, psychological, familial and cultural dimensions. She begins by looking for an explanation for her unexpected euphoria and discovers there’s a scientific reason for it: Oxytocin, the hormone that the female brain releases upon childbirth, works for grandmas, too. Stahl compares the experience to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, altering women from within and changing “what even the most career-oriented woman thinks is important.” Stahl surveys the mothers, stepgrandmas and surrogate “grans” of today’s fluid families, including great-grandmother Whoopi Goldberg, columnist Ellen Goodman and Stahl’s “60 Minutes” colleagues. Stahl calls the rewards of grandparenting the “extra bonus points” that come with aging. Now well into her 70s, she is still working— and her two beloved granddaughters are keeping her young.

Jennifer Ackerman, longtime nature writer and contributor to Scientific American, thinks it’s time to ditch the term “bird brain.” In The Genius of Birds (Penguin Press, $28, 352 pages, ISBN 9781594205217), she offers compelling evidence that birds are far smarter than we previously thought. In fact, she writes, new research has found “bird species capable of mental feats comparable to those [of] primates.” Birds can recognize human faces, use geometry to navigate, learn new skills from one another (like how to open milk bottles) and even work puzzles. The author travels from the South Pacific—home of the world’s smartest bird, the New C aledonian crow—to rural China as she explores the surprising cognitive abilities of birds. Ackerman is a pro at parsing scientific concepts in an accessible style, and her lyrical writing underscores her appreciation for the beauty and adaptability of birds.

NATURE’S CREATION While bird brains are the focus of many new studies, there’s nothing more beautiful or delicate than a brightly colored bird’s egg. In The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg (Bloomsbury, $27, 304 pages, ISBN 9781632863690), ornithologist Tim Birkhead deconstructs every part of the egg to reveal how these

small survival pods are “perfect in so many different ways.” From the shell (composed of upright crystals “packed against each other like a stack of fence posts”) to the albumen (the “absolutely remarkable, mysterious stuff” that most of us call the white part), the elements are described here in exquisite detail. Like a bird watcher who spots a rare specimen, the author shows palpable (and charming) excitement for his subject throughout, never losing his sense of wonder and admiration for nature’s “ingenious construction” of the egg.

IN THE NEST A contributing editor of Bird Watcher’s Digest, Julie Zickefoose has a particular fascination with baby birds and enjoys painting these scrawny, screeching creatures from the moment they hatch to the day they leave the nest as fledglings. Baby Birds: An Artist Looks into the Nest (HMH, $28, 352 pages, ISBN 9780544206700) offers a rare and meticulously chronicled portrait of baby birds’ day-to-day development, with the author’s lovely watercolor paintings adding a vivid visual dimension. In her introduction, Zickefoose describes Baby Birds as “an odd sort of book, like a Victorian-era curiosity.” Fans of the rediscovered 1970s bestseller The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady will happily agree.

—PRISCILLA KIPP

The only place they fit was togeTher. ◆◆◆

“A triumph of love and dignity.”

“The Southern boy in me savored every syllable and the reader in me fell in love with every page.” —JOHN COREY WHALEY, award-winning author of Where Things Come Back

“A novel that will fill the infinite space that was left in your chest after you finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” —BookRiot

◆◆◆

A hopeful and heArtbreaking coming-of-age story About three friends who are outsiders in their rural Tennessee town.

Start Reading at SerpentKingBook.com! #TheSerpentKing

—STEPHANIE PERKINS, bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss

reviews T PI OP CK

TEEN

EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR

Beyond victimhood REVIEW BY ANNIE METCALF

In the town of Palermo Heights, the cheerleading squad is the high school’s most successful team. Cheer captain Hermione Winters is determined to fill her senior year with more victories. She’s hard at work at preseason training camp when the unthinkable happens: She wakes up in a hospital to learn that she was drugged and raped, and soon finds out she was also impregnated. With her memory blank and the evidence compromised, there is little hope of finding Hermione’s attacker. While some rape narratives might focus on lurid details, the whodunit aspect and the protagonist’s downward spiral, E.K. Johnston’s latest novel works on more nuanced ground. Hermione is surrounded by a great support system, which allows her to keep cheering, stay in school and stand strong. Her best friend, Polly, is a case study in how to lend support to someone who has suffered an assault. But there are small changes to confront as well. Hermione feels a strange mix of By E.K. Johnston pride and resentment as she watches friends find their own strength Dutton, $17.99, 256 pages because of her circumstances, and she navigates fear and uncertainty ISBN 9781101994580, audio, eBook available as her memories begin to resurface. Johnston avoids unrealistic clichés Ages 14 and up by exploring Hermione’s emotions in vivid detail. FICTION It may be pointed out that Hermione is too perfect a victim, one whose narrative undermines more complicated assault scenarios. However, Johnston’s carefully crafted novel makes this simplicity work, thanks to its focus on how strongly Hermione advocates for herself after the fact. Should a young reader ever need guidance following an assault, she could do much worse than to emulate Hermione Winters.

ESSENTIAL MAPS FOR THE LOST By Deb Caletti

Simon Pulse $17.99, 336 pages ISBN 9781481415163 eBook available Ages 14 and up FICTION

“The way Mads and Billy Youngwolf Floyd met was horrible, hideous.” While starting the day with a swim in a Seattle Lake, Madison Murray bumps against the body of a woman who ended her life by jumping off a bridge. After such a horrifying moment, how could anything get better? Just hang on for the beautiful parts, beseeches the omniscient narrator in the eloquently crafted Essential Maps for the Lost. Mads shouldn’t even be at the lake. She should be hanging out

with friends back home instead of finishing up high school early, living with relatives and taking real estate courses to take over her narcissistic mother’s business. When she discovers that the body belongs to Billy’s mother, Mads has a new focus: finding out about this depressed woman and following her son. Billy, who plays his life like the video game “Night Worlds,” has his own secrets, such as carrying the map from the children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which his mother used to read to him. Together, Mads and Billy try to navigate through their losses—and, eventually, first love. But even love is hard when there isn’t a map. This seemingly quiet story becomes increasingly nuanced as Mads and Billy’s lives run parallel and intersect in shared dreams. This look at uncharted territories of the heart is a real find. —ANGELA LEEPER

finalist Beth Kephart, is a beautiful rendering of a terrifying event. If the novel’s pacing is a little awkward at times—slowing in the middle and rushing through climactic twists—Kephart’s liquid prose drives the story, fueling the reader’s own emotional turmoil and rendering Mira and her friends brave and loyal despite their fear. Kephart’s worldbuilding is meticulous and vivid, with details that make Haven feel like a place out of time. This smart, poignant novel is an absolute pleasure to read. —SARAH WEBER

THE GREAT AMERICAN WHATEVER By Tim Federle

Simon & Schuster $17.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781481404099 Audio, eBook available Ages 14 and up FICTION

Six months ago, Quinn Roberts had big plans: Inspired by the Coens and the Wachowskis, he was writing screenplays that his older sister helped to direct. But after his sister dies in a car accident, Quinn THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU and his mom are mired in grief; she eats her feelings while he sleeps By Beth Kephart through his. When Quinn’s friend Chronicle Geoff drags him to a college party $17.99, 264 pages and he meets a hot, older guy, ISBN 9781452142845 things begin to shift. The Great eBook available American Whatever finds humor Ages 14 and up in life’s darkest moments. FICTION Teenage Quinn is a delight, observant to a fault in service to his art and often hilarious. People Mira Banul has lived all her life from Quinn’s past resurface and on the six-mile long, half-mile wide are not what he remembers them island called Haven, and she’s seen to be, and his relationship with his everything. Every kind of storm, best friend contains a whopping every kind of family tragedy. And secret that nearly destroys it—yet she and her friends have weathboth things help him to work ered it all. But when a superstorm through his sadness. (The hot guy devastates Haven, leaving her doesn’t hurt, either.) mom and brother stranded on the Author Tim Federle (Better Nate mainland, her best friend missing Than Ever) has a fantastic ear for and every home destroyed, Mira the in-jokes that develop between has to dig deep inside herself to friends. His YA debut is a genuinely find the strength to move forward. great American novel, with a love This Is the Story of You, the of cinema worn on its sleeve. latest from National Book Award —HEATHER SEGGEL

—Kirkus Reviews

T PI OP CK

“[A] well-tempered piece of work.”

reviews BOOKED

Quick footwork and swift verse REVIEW BY KEVIN DELECKI

978-1-58089-638-2 HC $17.95 By Jane Sutcliffe Illustrated by John Shelley

Shakespeare’s words have endured more than 400 years. He even made “household words” household words.

Malapropism. Flummoxed. Rapprochement. Stupefy. “The average person knows about twelve thousand words. / Average president knows twice that. . . .” In Booked, the new novel-in-verse by Newbery Award winner Kwame Alexander, 12-year-old Nick knows all about words. His father is obsessed with them and makes Nick read every day from Weird and Wonderful Words, a dictionary that he wrote. Though immersed in books and language at home, Nick’s passion lies somewhere else: the soccer field. Nick is a talented soccer player and just made the A team for his travel soccer club—but his best friend, Coby, didn’t. So now Nick plays for a rival team. If that’s not bad enough, Nick is being bullied on a regular basis, and he’s finding it harder than he hoped to talk to April, the By Kwame Alexander girl of his dreams. On top of everything else, his mom is leaving Nick HMH, $16.99, 320 pages and his dad to pursue her dream of training racehorses. ISBN 9780544570986, eBook available Filled with rich, brilliant language and sharp, staccato verse that Ages 10 to 12 drives the reader forward, Booked handles difficult and painful realMIDDLE GRADE ities with the ease of a superstar on the soccer field. While eschewing the eclectic verse structures and concrete poetry in exchange for more traditional free verse (with a sprinkling of informative and very funny footnotes), Alexander recaptures the magic of Crossover and delivers a powerful story that will leave the reader breathless, right to the very end.

TWENTY YAWNS By Jane Smiley

Illustrated by Lauren Castillo

PICTURE BOOK

2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s passing.

www.charlesbridge.com

Two Lions $17.99, 32 pages ISBN 9781477826355 eBook available Ages 3 to 7

Twenty Yawns, the debut picture book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, is the story of one child’s day. Smiley is paired with Caldecott Honor artist Lauren Castillo here, and the results are spectacular. Readers meet Lucy and her family—a loving, mixed-race trio— in the early morning at the beach. The long, fun day wears out the entire family, and everyone else is asleep when Lucy gets up from the bed to retrieve her favorite toy, Molasses the bear. As she grabs her bear, many of her other stuffed animals fall to the floor. Eventually, they all end up in her bed. “They

seemed lonely,” after all. A child wandering through the house at night, when everyone else has fallen asleep, is mesmerizing subject matter for young readers; think of Jonathan Bean’s At Night (2007) or Komako Sakai’s Hannah’s Night (published in the U.S. in 2014). This endearing story is a delightful addition to the theme. The book’s title reflects the 20 yawns placed throughout, and children will have fun counting them. The “yawns” are laid out in playful, colorful typography that never intrudes upon the story. Castillo uses thick outlines for her characters, and she makes use of full-bleed spreads, as well as spot illustrations on white pages, to expertly pace the story. Her artwork is textured, and intriguing patterns dominate the family’s home, particularly in Lucy’s bedroom. Lucy’s world is one of warmth and security (even when everyone’s dozing), which makes this a winning bedtime read. —J U L I E D A N I E L S O N

THE BEAR AND THE PIANO By David Litchfield Clarion $16.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780544674547 eBook available Ages 4 to 7 PICTURE BOOK

We never seem to tire of tales about leaving home and adventuring far from our loved ones. From the bear’s first awkwardly pawed notes, The Bear and the Piano reminds us that, while we may travel, we never lose where we have been. Bear’s life would have been typically bear-like, had a piano not appeared in the forest one day. Bear’s music skills grow and grow, taking him all the way to Broadway. In New York City he is an instant celebrity, performing for enthusiastic crowds and meeting new friends. The glow of the city is all he had imagined—until he begins to dream of home. Will Bear return?

CHILDREN’S And what will he find there? Populated by kind-faced animals and people, David Litchfield’s illustrations create a welcoming and beautiful world. The soft colors and white swirls that adorn the forest make it seem as though it’s in constant musical movement. Bear is a tranquil protagonist, which lets us easily step into his shoes (or tuxedo) and imagine ourselves onstage. The text is calm and evenly paced, making it perfect for bedtime, as well as for pensive young minds that might ponder the enormity of “someday” decisions. The Bear and the Piano starts and ends on the same perfect note. —J I L L L O R E N Z I N I

THE WILD ROBOT By Peter Brown

Little, Brown $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780316381994 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12

clever denouement threatens their unusual utopia. Without being preachy, Brown hits on many timely topics—friendship, the environment, technology, cooperation and differences—in this absorbing but very readable book. This hi-lo (high interest/low reading level) novel is especially ideal for reluctant readers.

meet NIKKI McCLURE

the title of your Q: What’s new book?

would you describe Q: How the book?

—SHARON VERBETEN

A BANDIT’S TALE By Deborah Hopkinson

Knopf $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780385754996 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12

has been the biggest influence on your work? Q: Who

was your favorite subject in school? Why? Q: What

MIDDLE GRADE

Set in 1887 against the bleak backdrop of New York City tenement living, A Bandit’s Tale is the story of a plucky Italian boy and his adventures in a new world. After MIDDLE GRADE 11-year-old Rocco Zaccaro disgraces his impoverished family, his parents lease him to an unscrupulous Caldecott Honor winner Peter man and send him to America to Brown has parlayed his offbeat hu- work as a street musician. Without mor and dark, angular illustrations any knowledge of English or how to into his first chapter book. play an instrument, Rocco is forced From the moment shiny robot to earn money for his boss, the paRoz emerges from a crate that has drone. Rocco eventually gets mixed washed up on the shore of a remote up with a pickpocketing gang and island, both Roz and the island’s is arrested. After a daring prison animal inhabitants will never be the escape, Rocco meets an Irish girl same. It’s a mysterious beginning named Meddlin’ Mary and begins assisting the famous journalist and for Roz, who wonders where she is and why she’s there. Soon, she’s photographer Jacob Riis. Rocco worried about fitting in and surviv- morphs from a thief to a reformer ing among the island’s animals, who as he tries to improve the lives of vulnerable kids like him. fear this ominous metal creature and don’t try to hide their hostility. Although Deborah Hopkinson Brown’s short, well-paced chapacknowledges in an author’s note ters vary in perspective—some in that the chronology and Rocco’s inRoz’s voice, some in third-person teractions with real-life figures Riis omniscient, some addressing the and Jewish reporter Max Fischel reader directly. The prose and have been fictionalized, A Bandialogue offer an eager invitadit’s Tale is historically accurate. tion for readers to discover Roz’s Interspersed in the book are Riis’ experiences on the island: clunking photographs depicting the harsh away from angry bears, saving living conditions of immigrants. an orphaned gosling or building Rocco’s lively narrative keeps the a warm communal nest for the book from being morose, but animals. Roz eventually wins over parents may want to read along to the island creatures, securing her help kids digest the history. place in the community—until a — K I M B E R LY G I A R R A T A N O

Q: Who was your childhood hero?

books did you enjoy as a child? Q: What

one thing would you like to learn to do? Q: What

message would you like to send to young readers? Q: What

WAITING FOR HIGH TIDE Acclaimed cut-paper artist Nikki McClure takes readers to the beach with Waiting for High Tide (Abrams, $19.95, 48 pages, ISBN 9781419716560, ages 5 to 7), the story of a young boy who’s helping his family build a raft. As he anxiously and excitedly waits for the tide to come in, he explores a low-tide world filled with barnacles, crabs and hungry seabirds. McClure lives in Olympia, Washington.

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

ME, MYSELF & I

Dear Editor: Among the words I keep hearing in relation to the current presidential campaign is the word narcissism. I know it comes from a Greek myth, but when did it start being used to mean egotism? C.G. Conway, Massachusetts In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a youth so beautiful that he attracted, but spurned, many wouldbe lovers. In response to the prayer of one rejected lover, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, contrived that Narcissus should see his own reflection in a pool on Mount Helicon. Entranced by his own beauty, Narcissus could not tear himself away. He lay beside the pool until he wasted away and died. The gods metamorphosed his body into the flower now known as the narcissus. The earliest known use of narcissism in the sense of thinking too

highly of oneself appears in a letter written by English poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 1834). In 1822, Coleridge wrote, “Of course, I am glad to be able to correct my fears as far as public Balls, Concerts, and Time-murder in Narcissism.”

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Dear Editor: During colder weather, my husband says he misses the dog days of summer. It got me wondering, why do we use the term dog days for hot summer days? H.T. Boswell, Pennsylvania The Greek name for the brightest star in the sky was Seirios, a word of uncertain origin; the Latin version of this word is Sirius, which gives us our name for the star. Our alternative name, the Dog Star, is ultimately a translation of Greek Kyon, literally, “hound.” This

epithet was given to Sirius because it was considered the hound of the hunter Orion, whose constellation was nearby. Sirius was regarded by the Greeks as the bringer of scorching heat, because its early-morning rising coincided with the hottest summer days of July and August. The Greek writer Plutarch referred to these days as hemerai kynades, literally, “dog days”—the days of the Dog Star. A later Latin translation of this expression as dies caniculares is the source of the English phrase dog days.

OLD-TIME RELIGION

Dear Editor: I looked up the word pagan, and my dictionary says it comes from a Latin word for a villager. So how did it come to have its current meaning? M.S. Dayton, Ohio In ancient Rome, a person living

in a rural area or village was called paganus, a word derived from the Latin noun pagus, meaning “village” or “district.” In time, paganus came to refer to a civilian as opposed to a soldier. When Christianity became generally accepted in towns and cities of the empire, paganus was used to refer to a villager who continued to worship the old gods. Christians used the term to refer to anyone not of their faith or of the Jewish faith. The word in Old English for such a person became the modern word heathen. In the 14th century, English borrowed the Latin paganus as pagan and used it with the same meaning. In time both heathen and pagan also took on the meaning “a person having no religion.” Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Brain Games

BOOKWORM

workman.com

DIFFICULTY: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● COMPLETION: ■ TIME: ______

You have five different colors of paint. How many different ways can you paint the Halloween mask if you make the eyes, nose and mouth each a different color?

ANSWER

The trick here is looking at the way the books are lined up. The bookworm eats through only the front cover of volume 1, all of volumes 2, 3 and 4, and only the back cover of volume 5. The total distance is 19 centimeters.

ANSWER

A bookworm finds itself on page 1 of volume 1 and begins eating straight through to the last page of volume 5. If each book is 6 centimeters thick, including the front and back covers, which are half a centimeter each, what is the distance the bookworm travels?

HALLOWEEN MASK

DIFFICULTY: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● COMPLETION: ■ TIME: ______

The first step you must take to solve the problem is to find the number of combinations of three colors you can make from five colors. Plugging the values into a general formula for the number of combinations gives you: 5!/(3! x (5 – 3)!) = (5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) / (3 x 2 x 1 x (2 x 1)) = 120/12 = 10 That result tells us there are ten possible combinations of three colors out of five. But the number of combinations tells us nothing about the order in which the colors are placed on the mask. The different orders in which the three colors can be painted on the mask is 3! (3 x 2 x 1), or six for each color combination. That means there is a total of sixty possible ways the mask could be painted using three colors out of five.

BOOKWORM

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