BookPage April 2019

BookPage

®

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

+79

new books

The not-so-violent crimes of

APRIL 2019

BookPage

®

APRIL 2019

cover

features

10 The Department of Sensitive Crimes opens for business

Historical mysteries Three steadfast sleuths

12 13

Inspirational living For a fuller and richer life

13 13

Jennifer L. Eberhardt Uncovering racial biases

14 13

Poetry Collections to change your perspective

16 13

Sarah Blake A surreal imagining of life aboard Noah’s ark

17 13

Short stories A master of the form and a dazzling newcomer

21 13

Mary Laura Philpott Meet the author of I Miss You When I Blink

24 13

Samira Ahmed A chilling, all-too-plausible future

27 13

top pick: The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James

by Ashley Herring Blake

Boarding school thrillers School survival 101

29 13

columns

Children’s poetry Charming rhymes for new readers

30 13

Matthew Gray Gubler Meet the author-illustrator of Rumple Buttercup

31 13

book reviews 18 FICTION top pick: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell 23 NONFICTION top pick: Women’s Work by Megan K. Stack 28 YOUNG ADULT top pick: Dig by A.S. King 31 CHILDREN’S

4 5 5 6 7 8 9 9

The Hold List Lifestyles Romance Audio Book Clubs Whodunit Cozies Well Read

Cover image credit Ander McIntyre

PRESIDENT & FOUNDER Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Christy Lynch

CONTRIBUTOR Roger Bishop

MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Trisha Ping

ASSISTANT EDITOR Hilli Levin

PRODUCTION MANAGER Penny Childress

ASSISTANT EDITOR Savanna Walker

OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Elizabeth Grace Herbert

DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC MARKETING Stephanie Koehler

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Allison Hammond

ADVERTISING OPERATIONS Sada Stipe

DEPUTY EDITOR Cat Acree

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

B O O K P A G E · 2 1 4 3 B E L C O U R T AV E N U E · N A S H V I L L E , T N 3 7 2 1 2

EDITORIAL POLICY BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate and select for review the best books published in a variety of categories. BookPage is editorially independent; only books we highly recommend are featured.

ADVERTISING To advertise in print, online or in our e-newsletters, visit BookPage.com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 37.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Public libraries and bookstores can subscribe to BookPage in quantities for their patrons. Subscription information for libraries, bookstores and individuals is available at bookpage.com/subscriptions. BookPage is also available on Kindle or NOOK. All material © 2019 ProMotion, inc.

B O O K PA G E . C O M

3

the hold list: heists, grifts, cons and pranks Each month, the editors of BookPage share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.

This month, we wanted to do an April Fools-themed Hold List but decided it was too mean to recommend five books with happy endings when, in fact, they’re all really sad. (The dog doesn’t die, we swear.) Instead, we’ve selected a few of our favorite books about clever cons, pranks and swindles. Just be wary of using these as inspiration for your own mischief.

Six of Crows

By Leigh Bardugo This rollicking YA fantasy adventure is so much fun that only after you’ve finished will you realize how difficult it must have been to write. Bardugo had to introduce six lead characters, all with interesting backstories, while plotting out the mechanics of an increasingly complicated heist. Criminal mastermind Kaz Brekker agrees to rescue a scientist from an impenetrable castle in exchange for a fortune. He kicks things off by organizing a prison break to secure the final member of his team, and things only get more dangerous from there.

Six of Crows eschews the fairly standard blackand-white universe of Bardugo’s previous books, glorying instead in the murky morality of the criminal underworld.

—Savanna, Assistant Editor

4

The City of Lost Fortunes

The Talented Mr. Ripley

By Bryan Camp

By Patricia Highsmith

Magic winds its way through the haunted post-Katrina New Orleans of Camp’s debut.

Grifter, street magician and reluctant hero Jude Dubuisson has a little magic of his own: He’s a demigod who can find lost things. But the city that enchants our collective imagination gets even more mythical when Jude discovers that his fate is bound to a god’s murder, and he soon finds himself in uncharted territory— with ritual chalk circles that lead to doors and hidden rooms that lead to other realms. With tricky paradoxes, seedy bargains and a high-stakes poker game between gods, a vampire and an angel, the first book in Camp’s Crescent City series offers some snarky, moody entertainment.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Who among us hasn’t accidentally fallen for a handsome, courteous and charming sociopath?

Long before “Dexter,” Highsmith was making it fashionable (and alarmingly easy) to root for a cold-blooded killer with her story of young sociopath Tom Ripley.

In the chic, buttonedup world of 1950s Manhattan, Tom just wants to survive in the big city and climb the corporate ladder. His small cons have been paying off, but when Tom’s boss sends him to sunny Italy to round up his wayfaring son, Dickie Greenleaf, a much bigger scheme starts forming in Tom’s twisted, obsessive brain. And don’t worry: If you fall in hate-love with Tom, you’ll have four more novels in the series to read.

—Hilli, Assistant Editor

The Feather Thief

Fingersmith

By Kirk Wallace Johnson

By Sarah Waters

You can have your true crime shows and serial killer podcasts. I’m here for the weirdest, most improbable heists, and the true story in Johnson’s book is one of my all-time favorites.

In 2009, a 20-year-old American flutist and fly-tying enthusiast named Edwin Rist broke into the Natural History Museum in Tring, England, and stole 299 priceless and rare preserved bird specimens.

A month passed before anyone noticed the theft, and Rist wasn’t arrested until more than a year later. He never went to jail, and numerous bird specimens were never recovered. Johnson’s investigation into this bizarre crime is wholly absorbing, offering insight into museum collections as well as the young thief’s mind.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

A good con novel should have not one, not two but several twists. And few books pull the rug out from under their readers with the wicked delight of Fingersmith.

The plot begins simply enough—petty thief Sue will become lady’s maid to sheltered heiress Maud and help a con man seduce and marry her.

Then they’ll throw Maud into an insane asylum and run off with her money.

But after Sue successfully infiltrates the house, there’s a problem. She is starting to fall in love with Maud, and Maud seems to feel the same. You may think you know how this story will end, but I assure you, you do not. Read this, and then after you catch your breath, watch the superb, proudly freaky Korean film adaptation, The Handmaiden.

—Savanna, Assistant Editor

lifestyles

by susannah felts

Top Pick

by christie ridgway

romance

Top Pick

So you bought a plant or six. (I fully endorse this decision. Good job.)

Now, how to help it harmonize with your home and furnishings? Baylor Chapman knows that plant stewardship goes further than purchasing, watering and fertilizing, and in Decorating With Plants (Artisan, $24.95, 272 pages, 9781579657765), she provides copious ideas for styling your living spaces, room by room, with a wide variety of houseplants. Narrow entryway? Big flatscreen TV? Noisy neighborhood? Yes, there’s a plant for all of that, and Chapman’s design ideas will leave you ready to frame a window with cacti, geraniums and pelargoniums or to outfit a kid’s room with touch-friendly greenery. Chapman has an artist’s eye and a plant lover’s delight in the details. Her go-to plant list digs deeper than basic care info, occasionally weaving in historical background. (I love that she describes the good old Boston fern as “a mutant stowaway that has stood the test of time.”)

When a Duchess Says I Do (Forever, $7.99, 368 pages, 9781538728987) by Grace Burrowes stars a delightful and deserving pair. Having been tasked with salvaging a crumbling country estate, Duncan Wentworth is saved by a mysterious woman during a violent encounter with poachers. Curious, he manages to finagle the lovely “Maddie,” who is obviously in dire circumstances herself, into agreeing to stay and help him edit his travel journals. Widowed duchess Matilda Wakefield is on the run to protect her father and possibly herself.

Though determined and resourceful, she can’t resist the temporary respite that Duncan offers—or, finally, the man himself. Readers will root for these two wary people as they learn to trust each other with their foibles and their truths. With revealing dialogue, games of chess and subtle sensuality, this romance sings.

Gale Straub has collected travel and adventure stories from women through her website and two podcasts, and her first book, She Explores: Stories of Life-Changing Adventures on the Road and in the Wild (Chronicle, $24.95, 240 pages, 9781452167664), brings some of those short, motivational, on-the-road narratives to the printed page alongside rich color photography. We meet women who have found joy and self-knowledge in the great outdoors, but we also meet nonprofit founders, nomads, conservationists and artists. Straub includes stories from a firefighter, an indigenous archaeologist and a woman who plays the violin on mountain summits. All of their stories uplift, revealing the benefits of physical challenges, embracing fear of the unknown and shaking loose from stale routines—wherever you lay your head at night.

A paranormal wolf pack struggles to maintain its way of life in Maria Vale’s Forever Wolf (Sourcebooks Casablanca, $7.99, 352 pages, 9781492661931). The wolves of the Great North Pack can shift into human form, but must remain wolves during the full moon. Varya is an influential and powerful Shielder, a bodyguard and taskmaster for the pack. Her duty to her family’s survival is born of love, and she considers no sacrifice too great. But when she stumbles upon a strange, injured wolf, Varya’s loyalties are challenged even as danger threatens her clan. In an almost mythical voice, Vale deftly conveys the complexity of the pack’s hierarchy as well as their hopes and needs—while still including the broad strokes of a romance. Adventurous readers will appreciate Vale’s unique love story, including the unconventional but poignant happily ever after.

I felt calmer just paging through The New Rules of Pregnancy: What to Eat, Do, Think About, and Let Go of While Your Body Is Making a Baby (Artisan, $19.95, 256 pages, 9781579658571), and I’m certain the results would be the same were I currently pregnant. The anxiety brought upon by some past pregnancy books is real; sometimes, too much information really is too much.

But this sweet little book keeps most pieces of advice to a single page. Nutrition, stretch marks, sleep, birth plans, nursing—it’s all here, but it’s never more than a mom-to-be can handle. The overarching message from authors Dr. Adrienne L. Simone, Dr. Jaqueline Duckworth and Danielle Claro is to relax as much as you can, be kind to yourself and experience the magic. “Our mission was not only to inform, but to bring some of the beauty back to pregnancy,” the authors write in an afterword. Mission calmly, beautifully accomplished.

Tiffany Reisz spins an erotic romance based on Greek myth in The Rose (MIRA, $15.99, 400 pages, 9780778307921). Lia Godwick reaches the age of 21 with a broken heart and a few years’ experience at running a lucrative escort service. The world at large remains unaware of her work until her graduation party, where she meets a mysterious and handsome man. August Bowman is interested in an ancient Greek wine cup that Lia received as a gift and tells her that the artifact was used in the temple of Eros to bring sexual fantasies to life. Lia puts herself into the hands of the seductive August, who joins her in a series of erotic adventures. Lia’s delightfully humorous and sexually open parents nearly steal the show, but the growing love between the main couple and their willingness to sacrifice for each other lend depth to this uninhibited tale. Reisz masterfully balances explicit description with emotional honesty in a way that will entrance readers.

Susannah Felts is a Nashville-based writer and co-founder of The Porch, a literary arts organization. She enjoys anything paper-related and, increasingly, plant-related.

Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.

5

BLOCKBUSTER AUDIOBOOKS READ BY THE AUTHOR

“The Moment of Lift is an urgent call to courage...one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page.”

—Brene Brown, author of Daring Greatly

READ BY STEPHANIE RACINE

“The creepy feeling at the back of your neck is 100 percent real.”

—People on Sometimes I Lie

“An incredible story with a unique premise and characters...

This book is beautiful.”

—Colleen Hoover, #1 New York Times bestselling author

READ BY MARY STUART MASTERSON

A riveting new thriller full of secrets and lies from critically acclaimed suspense novelist D. J. Palmer

READ BY THE AUTHOR

“For those of us who strive to do it all and know there must be a better way, WOLFPACK’s New Rules are the answer.”

—Serena Williams

6

by anna zeitlin

audio

Top Pick A Malaysian woman of Chinese descent, Yangsze Choo is an enchanting storyteller, and she ably narrates her own novel, The Night Tiger (Macmillan Audio, 14 hours), set in the melting pot of 1930s colonial Malaya. Her narration is more than a reading; Choo has a deep empathy for her characters, and these emotions come out in her telling. The book weaves together the stories of Ren, a young houseboy on a mission to find his dead master’s severed finger and reunite it with his body in time for his soul to be at peace, and Ji Lin, a dressmaker’s apprentice and dance-hall girl who dreams of being a doctor and comes to possess the finger. Meanwhile, there seems to be a pattern to a series of tiger attacks. Are they magic or something else?

Part mystery, part love story, The Night Tiger is draped in folklore, as traditions of the past butt up against a modern world of hot rods and tango dances. It deals with themes of death, family, marriage and ambition and questions what we owe the dead.

The New Me (Penguin Audio, 4 hours) follows Millie, a 30-year-old temp who starts planning a whole new life for herself when she mistakenly believes she is being offered a fulltime position. Her best friend barely tolerates her, and she rubs her co-workers the wrong way. She has an acerbic sense of humor but can’t gauge when to rein it in. Halle Butler narrates her own novel with a wickedly cynical tone that adds to Millie’s characterization and helps explain why the world seems to have it out for her. With glimpses from more well-adjusted characters’ perspectives that reinforce Millie’s disillusionment, The New Me is a funny, tragic portrait of an ambitionless millennial woman, as well as a dark vision of capitalism and consumerism.

READ BY KATHLEEN M C INERNEY & FRED BERMAN

AV A I L A B L E F R O M

MACMILLAN AUDIO

Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (Listening Library, 4.5 hours) broke the mold in 1961 with its humor and respect for young readers’ intelligence, curiosity and playfulness. A new audiobook of the classic begins with an introduction from the now-89-yearold author, originally penned for the 50th anniversary edition. Juster shares the story behind the book, and it feels like he’s letting you in on a secret: What began as a short story inspired by a conversation with a young boy about infinity turned into the piece of literary canon we have today. The story itself—which follows a boy named Milo on an adventure through Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and over the Mountains of Ignorance to reunite the Kingdom of Wisdom—is narrated by Rainn Wilson (Dwight from “The Office”), who does a fantastic job. His original voices for each character fit perfectly, and he adroitly navigates all the wordplay to add a richness to Juster’s imagined world. This story may have been written for children, but it merits a listen at any age.

Anna Zeitlin is an art curator and hat maker who fills her hours with a steady stream of audiobooks.

book clubs

by julie hale

Top Pick Rachel Cusk concludes her acclaimed Outline Trilogy with Kudos (Picador, $17, 240 pages, 9781250207395), which finds the narrator, a British writer named Faye, in a new marriage. During a literary festival and travels in Europe, Faye encounters people in various stages of disillusionment about their lives and domestic affairs. As ever, she proves a willing listener while acquaintances pour out their stories. From the self-­ centered journalist who comes to interview Faye and hardly stops talking, to publicists, writers and others of literary ilk, Faye crosses paths with a jaded cast of characters who tell all. Meanwhile, she keeps in contact with her two sons via phone, conversations that bring tenderness to the book. Like its predecessors Outline and Transit, this novel is understated yet fierce—a beautiful and melancholy exploration of the female experience, precisely rendered by its author. Followers of the series will find this final installment deeply satisfying.

BOOK CLUB READS FOR SPRING BEYOND THE POINT

by Claire Gibson

“Claire Gibson writes a stellar trio of heroines–women I want to hug, women I want to befriend, women I want to be...

An inspiring tribute to female friendship and female courage!”

—KATE QUINN, New York Times Bestselling Author

THE NIGHT VISITORS

by Carol Goodman

“Full of half-truths and vengeful ghosts of the past, The Night Visitors will inspire readers to linger long into the night.”

—LORI RADER-DAY, Award Winning Author

AMERICAN POP Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley Picador, $17, 256 pages, 9781250310415 A smart, companionable presence on the page, Crosley cements her reputation as one of today’s leading nonfiction writers with this collection of shrewdly observed pieces that touch on topics as wide-ranging as fertility, volcanoes and life as a single woman in New York City.

Varina by Charles Frazier Ecco, $16.99, 368 pages, 9780062405999 Varina, wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, leaves her home as the Civil War ends and fends for herself and her children. Frazier chronicles her remarkable life in this richly detailed novel.

The Overstory by Richard Powers Norton, $18.95, 512 pages, 9780393356687 Powers works on a grand scale to tell a grand story about the interconnectedness of humankind and nature as nine disparate characters come together to preserve an area of virgin forest.

by Snowden Wright “Spectacular…an American saga of one man’s ambition, the woman who stoked it, and the family whose complex identity it became. What a ride!”

—ADRIANA TRIGIANI, New York Times Bestselling Author

THE LAST ROMANTICS

by Tara Conklin

“The Last Romantics is a richly observed novel, both ambitious and welcoming.”

—MEG WOLITZER, New York Times Bestselling Author

Tin Man by Sarah Winman Putnam, $14, 224 pages, 9780735218765 Winman has crafted a heartbreaking narrative about love and redemption in her powerful third novel, which explores the relationships and disparate paths of three young people.

t @Morrow_PB A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale selects the best new paperback releases for book clubs every month.

t @bookclubgirl

f William Morrow I Book Club Girl

7

whodunit

by bruce tierney

There’s a lot of history between characters Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, dating back to 1990’s Savage Season. The two have had each other’s backs through adventure after adventure, and they have solved cases and cemented their unlikely brotherhood (by East Texas standards) of a straight white guy and a gay black guy. In The Elephant of Surprise (Mulholland, $26, 256 pages, 9780316479875), Joe R. Lansdale’s dynamic duo doesn’t expend a lot of energy developing their relationship further; there simply isn’t time. There isn’t even a moment available for self-reflection or friendship evaluation from the moment they rescue a young albino Asian woman with a nearly severed tongue until the epic storm in which they pilot a prison bus of innocent survivors through deep flood waters in an attempt to escape a killer posse of bad guys. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single one of the book’s 256 pages sans bullets, blood spatter, murder and mayhem, all of which are overlaid with Hap’s dry Texas wit. The Elephant of Surprise is the read of the year thus far for adrenaline junkies, action-hero aficionados and, as is always the case with Lansdale’s novels, fans of clever and unexpected similes and metaphors. “The windshield wipers slaved back and forth like a mean librarian wagging her finger at a loud child. . . .”

I have to confess to strongly preferring first-person narration for suspense novels, perhaps because I cut my teeth on the laconic voiceovers of film noir. That said, I quite like Anne Perry’s third-person omniscient voice in her Daniel Pitt novels, the second of which is Triple Jeopardy (Ballantine, $28, 320 pages, 9780525620952). The London-set narrative is delivered in period-correct Victorian dialect and prose, which gives it the feel of having been written in another era entirely. The case centers on the alleged bad acts of a man hitherto protected by diplomatic immunity and on his defense in the English court by newly minted barrister Daniel Pitt. It is the first case of Pitt’s career in which he is lead barrister, and it is both a heady and decidedly frightening proposition for him. His client is on trial for embezzlement, but there is the very real possibility that further crimes, including assault and jewel theft, figure in as well—and perhaps even murder. Enlisting the help of his friend Miriam fforde Croft, an early practitioner of forensic sciences, Pitt divides his energies between defense and investigation, and just about the time you have your “aha!” moment, things take a sharp turn in another direction altogether.

When Anne Hillerman took over the series that made her father, Tony, famous, she gave voice to the female characters in the series, bringing them into the mainstream narrative without taking anything away from the male characters upon whom the series was built. Hillerman wisely left the best parts of her father’s beloved characters’ storylines intact while creating compelling new additions. This time, in The Tale Teller (Harper, $26.99, 320 pages, 9780062391957), three parallel tales merge with unexpected results for each of the three protagonists. Retired cop Joe Leaphorn is investigating a case that the local museum director would like to have cleared up before her imminent retirement, that of a priceless traditional Navajo dress that has gone missing. Leaphorn’s former colleague Jim Chee is involved in an investigation of jewelry thefts, largely of Native American antiques. And Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito must, somewhat reluctantly, share the stage with the FBI in the investigation of a murder on a popular running trail in the Arizona desert. As is always the case with Hillerman novels (either Tony or Anne), the supernatural is never far from the reader’s mind. Witchcraft and Native American lore permeate the narrative in a way that has appealed to readers for nigh on 50 years, with no end in sight.

Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

8

Top Pick You have to wonder why one would bother to initiate a murder investigation immediately after half the world has gone kablooey in a nuclear holocaust. But I suppose there is not a lot else that takes precedence over a murder investigation in the wake of nuclear war. Some bastion of civility remains in a small boutique hotel in the Swiss Alps, where a young girl has just been killed.

It matters not that the lead investigator in Hanna Jameson’s The Last (Atria, $27, 352 pages, 9781501198823) has no investigative experience—the list of possible suspects is quite short, and motives and opportunities are severely limited by the world events of the past 60-odd days. There are security videos, but the power has been turned off to preserve energy for the upcoming winter when it will be needed for heat. And the caretaker who controls access to the power is something of an enigmatic character, not to mention a prime suspect in the murder, so there won’t be a lot of help from that quarter. Meanwhile, all communications are down, bands of predatory looters in search of food plague the countryside, and slowly but surely the aforementioned “bastion of civility” degrades into some distinctly un­civil behavior. This genre-bending novel neatly embraces dystopian fiction and murder mystery, with the Omega Man starkness of the former and the requisite twists and turns of the latter.

cozies

by heather seggel

Top Pick S.C. Perkins taps into the current obsession with researching one’s ancestry with her terrific series debut. Murder Once Removed (Minotaur, $26.99, 336 pages, 9781250189035) finds genealogist Lucy Lancaster researching a murder that took place in the 1800s, only to have it become frighteningly relevant in the present day.

The killer could be one of two men with the same initials, and when his identity becomes a point of contention in a senate race, tempers run high. Suddenly historical research is crucial to restoring the peace.

Perkins blends a serious interest in history with giddy energy and a burgeoning romance between Lucy and a confounding but adorable special agent. The Austin, Texas, setting makes for a rich atmosphere and some rapturous descriptions of Tex-Mex food.

There’s also a sober consideration of the value, and risk, of learning about your past. Murder Once Removed kicks off this series with a bang. Here’s to many more to come.

From knitting to baking to Sudoku, cozy mysteries and niche themes are a natural pairing, but if they were all set in bookstores, would anyone complain? The Loch Ness Papers (Minotaur, $26.99, 320 pages, 9781250127815) is Paige Shelton’s latest Scottish Bookshop Mystery, and this time the genial atmosphere at the Cracked Spine bookstore is shaken up by a murder with tenuous ties to Scotland’s legendary Loch Ness monster. Bookseller and American transplant Delaney Nichols is loving life in Edinburgh, juggling wedding plans and a visit from her family, when she meets an older man obsessed with Nessie. When he’s suddenly accused of murder, she’s determined to learn the truth. The warm relationships among characters—and Delaney’s gift for finding the best quote from the right author to direct her forward—make this the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy day.

A hotel ballroom plays host to murder in Mrs. Jeffries Delivers the Goods (Berkley, $16, 288 pages, 9780451492227), Emily Brightwell’s latest in the Victorian Mystery series. When the lights are turned back on after a dramatic moment of silence at a party, one of the guests has a violent seizure and dies. A doctor determines that it was arsenic. The victim was a cad whom most people hated, but there’s still a dangerous killer on the loose. Inspector Witherspoon comes to the Wrexley Hotel to investigate, and without his knowing, the members of his household do their part to help. The unsanctioned detective work by housekeeper Mrs. Jeffries and company provides keen observations about class divisions, which Brightwell balances with humor in a story that runs like clockwork. Watching Witherspoon’s crew collect clues and sift through the suspect list, usually at meetings featuring tea and a selection of dreamy baked goods, is pure pleasure. This is Brightwell’s 37th book in the series, but newcomers will find their footing in a jiffy.

Heather Seggel is a longtime bookseller, reviewer and occasional library technician in Ukiah, California.

well read | by robert weibezahl

Love of language The Comma Queen confesses her passion for everything Greek—language, history, landscape and culture—which was born out of her love for words.

Mary Norris, whose memoir of her years as a copy editor at The New Yorker (Between You & Me) was a surprise bestseller, reveals her nearly 40-year devotion to all things Hellenic in her captivating Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (Norton, $25.95, 240 pages, 9781324001270).

Inspired by an unlikely moment—seeing Sean Connery’s cameo as Agamemnon in the movie Time Bandits—and spurred on by her boss and mentor in The New Yorker’s copy department, Norris took advantage of the magazine’s generous tuition reimbursement policy for “work-related courses” and enrolled in modern Greek at New York University. A new (well, in fact, ancient) world was unleashed for her.

Before long, she was studying ancient Greek and deciphering classical texts. She found herself performing original-language versions of Elektra and The Trojan Women as a “mature” student with the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group (and soliciting character advice from Katharine Hepburn). She immersed herself in the arcane language as best she could, fascinated by its foundational alphabet and the ways Greek survives in so much of modern English.

Most significantly, she went to Greece when she could, exploring the mainland’s many corners and its islands’ many charms. Daring to travel alone to even the most far-flung locales often proved to be an eyebrow-raising heresy in

the patriarchal, tradition-centric country, but Norris persisted. Her adventures took her to places few tourists go, to nationally divided Cyprus (birthplace of Aphrodite) and to remote Kardamyli, where the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor—whom she calls her literary father—lived and wrote.

While Norris has a keen eye, zeroing in on the peculiarities and beauties of her beloved Greece, her always witty and self-aware narrative tends less toward the descriptive than to the country’s indelible psychic charms. At every turn, the past inextricably intertwines with the present as Norris seeks the origins of ancient Greek culture, rooted in both perceptible landscape and intangible myths. Nostalgia, from the Greek neomai, to return home, “may mean a yearning for a place,” Norris ponders, “but it is also a yearning for a time when you were in that place and therefore for the you of the past.”

Norris’ inviting book thrives on the writer’s unabashed enthusiasm to learn, to immerse herself in the new and to find clues to her own past in the newly discovered. “I knew a lot of Greek, but I wouldn’t say I spoke Greek or call myself a classicist,” she admits. “I was more in love with the language than it was with me. . . . I had not mastered the language, ancient or modern, but I got glimpses of its genius, its patterns, the way it husbanded the alphabet, stretching those twenty-four letters to record everything anyone could ever want to say.”

Robert Weibezahl is a publishing industry veteran, playwright and novelist.

Each month, he takes an in-depth look at a recent book of literary significance.

9

cover story | alexander mccall smith

Lighten up! No one dies in this one!

The somber, serious Scandinavian noir craze gets a much-needed kick in the funny bone with The Department of Sensitive Crimes, another laugh-out-loud series premiere from confirmed smart alec Alexander McCall Smith.

Most likely, you’ve known Alexander McCall Smith, the effervescent, Zimbabwe-born Scotsman (known as “Sandy”) through his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, one of the seven mystery series in his 50-plus bibliography. But what you haven’t seen is the first installment of his “Scandi-blanc” parody of Scandi-noir, in which a Malmö-based detective team led by Ulf “the Wolf” Varg investigates crimes that “you won’t find in the newspaper or on the ten o’clock news . . . unless it’s a particularly slow news day.”

Case in point: The three sensitive crimes featured herein include a market vendor who is stabbed in the back of the knee, a lonely young woman whose imaginary boyfriend goes missing and a nudist resort that’s apparently being plagued by werewolf howls. Challenging cases? Not exactly. But it’s the earnestness with which Varg’s equally eccentric team— made up of paper pusher Carl Holgersson, fly-fishing fanatic Erik Nykvist and Anna Bengsdotter, a married colleague who’s caught Varg’s eye—seeks to solve the unsolvable that keeps the laughs rolling.

McCall Smith, who has visited Sweden on numerous book tours, found a worthy foil for his notorious wit by watching dead-serious Scandi-noir TV programs, including “The Killing,” “The Bridge” and “Borgen,” at his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.

“The basic idea for doing Scandi-blanc came from the general enthusiasm that people have for the Scandinavian noir,” he says by phone from Edinburgh. “I loved the idea of really deflating the body count aspect of crime fiction, where everything is so ghastly that people are chopping one another to bits, as happens in real Scandinavian noir. That’s actually the fun—there are no bodies in these, [they’re] just really ridiculous. The only person who gets damaged is a person who get stabbed in the back of the knee! I took great pleasure in that, and the nudists and then of course the lycanthropy, the idea of someone turning into a wolf. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at these stock images of Scandinavian crime.”

Scandi-blanc also offered McCall Smith the opportunity to tap into the curious cultural link between Scotland and Scandinavia.

“It’s an interesting thing,” he says, “because we are neighbors of Norway most immediately, and there is quite a lot of feeling in Scotland that Scotland is quite Scandinavian. Bits of Scotland were parts of Scandinavia in the past, and of course the Vikings came and ran quite a bit of the north of Scotland.”

Like many crime fiction fans who immerse themselves in the brutal, bloody world of Scandi-noir, McCall Smith was drawn into questions about the elements of Scandinavian culture that lead to these stories.

“There is a dark side to Sweden,” McCall Smith says. “Think about [Ingmar] Bergman films, those very intense films where everybody is looking

very intense and agonized. There is that side of the typical Scandinavian approach to things. But Sweden is a very, very conformist society; they want consensus. It’s extremely important to them to all agree.”

McCall Smith also speaks to the “vein of melancholy” present in Scandinavian culture, which he explores through a plot thread of eccentric longing in The Department of Sensitive Crimes: Ulf’s unrequited passion for Anna, and the fact that it’s not completely clear whether Anna has a crush on Ulf or on his vintage light gray Saab. “ ‘The best part of any investigation with you, Ulf,’ she said dreamily, ‘is being in your car,’ ” McCall Smith writes.

“Yes, well, those unfulfilled romantic longings, that’s [a] poignant note,” McCall Smith says. “Ulf has an unrequited passion for a colleague, and he can’t do anything about it.

That’s a good poignant. . . . There is quite a lot of brooding—brooding is the word.”

Ulf was originally created for a Twitter literary festival that invited authors “to write some stories that would be put out in tweets,” McCall Smith says. “A very weird way to read books—140-­character chapters. I created for that a character called Ulf Varg and gave him a couple of really peculiar chapters. The whole story was about 500 words.” McCall Smith then went on to write a short story starring Ulf, published by his U.K. publisher, and now this full-length book. “I rather liked this Swedish detective and his deaf dog and his peculiar colleagues,” McCall Smith says.

Despite Ulf’s beginnings, there is one line this 70-yearold storyteller still refuses to cross: admitting modern technology into his clever tales.

“In my Botswana books, and indeed in my Isabel Dalhousie books, nobody uses a cellphone. I think that cellphones and Google really make classic detective fiction very difficult because you can get the answer to most issues by going online,” McCall Smith says. “In a sense, modern success ruins surprise, ruins poignancy, ruins anguish, because it has so many solutions. It depersonalizes, and it takes out all the waiting and anticipation and uncertainty.

How could anybody be long-lost in the modern world? Modern technology is incompatible with a good solid plot; it’s just blocked. These days, lots of technology takes the mystery out of life. It collapses time and insults the dignity of time.”

Although McCall Smith cranks out up to 3,000 words daily, he retains an unquenchable thirst for new adventures. This year, even as he celebrates more than two decades of his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series (book 20, To the Land of Long Lost Friends, will publish this fall) and winds down his 44 Scotland Street series, he has not only introduced his Scandi-blanc breakthrough but also has another new release in the wings. The Second-Worst Restaurant in France, which continues the

“There are no bodies in these, [they’re] just really ridiculous.”

10

© MICHAEL LIONSTAR

Stunning

SOUTHERN Fiction...

A sweeping, profoundly emotional novel that eschews Civil War South stereotypes while sharing the timeless struggle to do the right thing amidst bitter conflict.

events of his romantic Italian countryside-set novel, My Italian Bulldozer (2016), is out this summer.

“It’s [about] a restaurant food writer by the name of Paul Stuart,” McCall Smith explains. “In My Italian Bulldozer, he goes to Italy and has difficulty with the rental car company and ends up renting a bulldozer, and has The Department of Sensitive Crimes great fun with that.” The comic Pantheon, $24.95, 240 pages sequel finds Paul on holiday in 9781524748210, eBook available France, where his story tangles with that of a local restaurant.

Cozy Mystery Fortunately for readers, if the past can predict the future, humor will always be a part of McCall Smith’s work. “That’s what I get great pleasure from,” he says. “With The Department of Sensitive Crimes, I’m able to have fun and enjoy the humor, and also to have behind it a novel of ideas. So ideas come up, and they have real human issues and desires and longings and disappointments where you can actually make quite a few points that you might want to make about the world. I do enjoy that.”

—Jay MacDonald

Delight

A moving story of loss, love, and resilience set in 1961 North Carolina when urban renewal threatens to demolish a historic Black community.

Meet “Sonny” an unforgettable young heroine and the family tested to its limits in the masterful new novel, set in 1950s North Carolina.

A dark secret is brutally exposed in this powerful and ultimately uplifting new novel set in 1970s Mississippi from the acclaimed author of The Last Suppers.

A dazzling portrait of two very different couples in the 1930s, whose friendship and fast times are no match for shattering betrayal.

ENSINGTONBOOKS.COM

Available Everywhere Books Are Sold

11

feature | historical mysteries

Murders most foul It was much easier to get away with nefarious deeds in eras past. Crime fighters didn’t have the aid of DNA testing or security cameras, and it was relatively easy for a guilty party to slip away, change their name and evade justice entirely— all of which makes the sleuths in these three historical mysteries even more impressive.

An Artless Demise (Berkley, $16, 384 pages, 9780451491367), the seventh installment of Anna Lee Huber’s Regency-era series, brings Kiera Darby back to London after scandal sent her to Scotland.

Newly married to her partner in investigation, Sebastian Gage, Kiera hopes their return will be without incident. But when the killing of a young migrant boy resembles the methods of notorious criminals Burke and Hare, who sold their victims’ bodies to medical schools, polite society can’t help but recall Lady Darby’s late first husband, who purchased corpses from body snatchers in order to further his study of the body.

Kiera tries to keep a low profile, but when a gentleman is similarly murdered in Mayfair, she and her husband are hired to investigate.

THE DEBUT NOVEL YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS! “Julie Langsdorf mines wit from the ways that people manage (or don’t) to live in close proximity. Her smart, enjoyable suburban comedy is observant and knowing about social selves and hidden selves, and the ways in which they are sometimes made to overlap.”

—MEG

WOLITZER ,

author of The Female Persuasion

AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER, EBOOK, AND AUDIO.

www.julielangsdorf.com

12

Huber highlights the simmering chemistry between the main couple, reminding readers of their physical and intellectual compatibility.

Because the plot relies on the emotional toll of Kiera’s abusive first marriage and the criminal activity of her late husband, this installment— more so than other books in the series—will be best enjoyed by readers familiar with the first book. However, a solid whodunit and the atmospheric London gloom anchor the novel well, even for a new readership.

Inspectors Ian Frey and “Nine-Nails” McGray are summoned to a remote estate in Oscar de Muriel’s Loch of the Dead (Pegasus, $25.95, 448 pages, 9781643130101). The islands of Loch Maree are rumored to harbor healing powers or evil curses, depending on who’s telling the tale. The detectives are tasked with protecting Benjamin Koloman, the illegitimate son of one of the estate’s heirs, by his mother—who believes her son is in grave danger. After the unexpected death of the father he never met, Benjamin has been invited to take his place among the wealthy Kolomans. But does the close-knit clan really want him there, or is there something darker afoot? Frey and McGray deal with murder and metaphysical mayhem as the family’s past gradually comes into the light.

McGray and Frey are constantly bemoaning the other’s shortcomings in entertaining, relatable asides, although it’s clear a mutual respect has blossomed. McGray’s sincere belief in the supernatural is a unique twist on the hardened sleuth archetype, and Frey’s funny, fussy adherence to decorum grounds the reader in the time period. The mystery itself is delightfully gruesome and unhinged right up to the heart-pounding conclusion. Readers who love bickering banter and want a historical mystery with a twist will be pleased.

The intrepid Maisie Dobbs returns in The American Agent (Harper, $27.99, 384 pages, 9780062436665), set during World War II and the terror of the London Blitz. When Catherine Saxon, an ambitious American journalist, is found murdered, Maisie is enlisted to assist. Also working the case is Mark Scott, the American agent who helped Maisie get out of Munich two years prior. Maisie must balance her determination to find the killer with the suspicion that Mark isn’t telling the whole truth. As Londoners face the fire with stiff upper lips, Maisie homes in on the truth.

Jacqueline Winspear captures the juxtaposition of the utter chaos and eerie normalcy of the Blitz with cinematic style. Maisie is much in the mold of a Golden Age sleuth, with a sharp eye and almost unrealistically good instincts. The looming question of whether she will be able to balance motherhood with her dangerous career is brilliantly relevant both to the era Winspear writes about and the current era. A straightforward yarn with excellent historical detail, The American Agent will satisfy fans and newcomers alike.

—Annie Metcalf

feature | inspirational living

A full set of tools for a fulfilling life Spring is the perfect time to freshen up your outlook—to cultivate new habits and attitudes that can lead to a more satisfying life. These four inspiring books are designed to help you thrive. Here’s to new possibilities!

Fear: We all submit to its grip every now and again.

But if the feeling is getting in the way of your goals, it’s time to take action. Carla Marie Manly shows readers how to turn this emotion into a tool for growth in her new book, Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend (Familius, $19.99, 350 pages, 9781641701211). In this warm, welcoming guide, Manly, a clinical psychologist, digs deep into the subject of fear, exploring its connections to anxiety and childhood trauma. She also offers tips on how to constructively cope with worry, self-doubt and chronic stress—the forces that so often hold us back from happiness.

Breaking out of fear-based patterns is a crucial move on the journey to joy, Manly says, and she outlines a range of strategies, including visualization exercises and breathing techniques, for doing just that. Perhaps most importantly, she helps readers be receptive to “transformational fear”—a source of productive energy that can be a motivator for positive change, whether it’s making that dreaded doctor’s appointment or discussing relationship issues with a significant other. Sure, fear can paralyze, but it can also galvanize. Pick up a copy of Manly’s book, and prepare to feel empowered.

It may be small in size, but Diana Winston’s The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness (Sounds True, $16.95, 248 pages, 9781683642176) brims with big-hearted advice on achieving inner peace. Winston is the director of mindfulness education at the UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She describes natural awareness as the mind “at rest,” a condition of “simply being—without agenda.” Once you know how to tap into it, Winston says, natural awareness can help you shut out the pressures and demands of daily activity and increase your sense of focus.

In brief chapters, Winston probes the meaning of natural awareness and leads readers through “glimpse practices” that can be performed at any point during the day or folded into a meditation routine. These simple prompts—including evocative word phrases and body-focused exercises—will help awaken natural awareness. Winston writes for both the experienced awareness-seeker and the novice, and she supplements her advice with insights into her own life and mindfulness evolution. When “you feel a sense of contentment not connected to external conditions,” Winston writes, you’re experiencing natural awareness. Her gentle instruction can result in a more open, responsive and balanced way of being.

Another take-action guide designed to bring about fundamental change is Shunmyo Masuno’s The Art of Simple Living: 100 Daily Practices From a Japanese Zen Monk for a Lifetime of Calm and Joy (Penguin, $20, 224 pages, 9780143134046). This international bestseller has helped people around the world quiet the chaos of everyday life, stress less and appreciate more. In the book, Masuno—chief priest of the 450-year-old Kenkō-ji Temple in Japan—offers forthright advice rooted in the teachings of Zen, which, he writes, is “about habits, ideas, and hints for living a happy life.”

Divided into four parts, the book provides practical steps for becoming more present, as well as suggestions for building confidence and letting go of anxiety.

Masuno’s tips are easy to execute. Simple changes— like waking up 15 minutes earlier than usual to savor the morning, or creating a pocket of quiet at work by doing a “chair zazen” (sitting up straight and breathing slowly)—will make a difference in your daily flow. Spare, evocative line drawings by artist Harriet Lee-Merrion accompany each lesson. Through this inspiring guide, Masuno shows that every step you take on the path of personal growth, no matter how small, can have a major impact.

Personal growth can be a faith-based process—one that often involves unexpected changes of heart, as bestselling author Barbara Brown Taylor demonstrates in Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (HarperOne, $25.99, 256 pages, 9780062406569).

Taylor, a professor of religion at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, is candid about the ways in which teaching has informed her faith. Over time, her own Christian views have shifted.

“I found things to envy in all of the traditions I taught,” Taylor writes. In Holy Envy, she shares stories of spiritual discovery from campus and beyond, mixing accounts of classroom life into astute considerations of the world’s differing belief systems.

She wants her students to recognize that “religion is more than a source of conflict or a calculated way to stay out of hell. Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia.” On field trips, Taylor and her students visit houses of worship in their many forms—synagogues and mosques, shrines and centers for meditation—and the excursions prove transformative. Heartfelt, thoughtful and beautifully written, Taylor’s book will give readers who are undertaking their own spiritual journeys a sense of purpose and perspective.

—Julie Hale

13

© NANA KOFI NTI

interview | jennifer l. eberhardt

black-sounding names are 50 percent less likely to get a callback than their white counterparts, and another shows that people primed with photographs of African-American men will more quickly identify disguised photographs of guns and knives.

Eberhardt’s perspective on the subject of implicit bias has been strongly influenced by her work with the Oakland, California, police department. In 2014, she was appointed to a federal oversight team to monitor Oakland’s policing after a settlement of litigation that alleged a pattern of racist misconduct within the department. Through training programs developed by Eberhardt and her team, she has helped Oakland’s officers become more conscious of the triggers, fueled by unconscious bias, that can arise during traffic stops and other encounters with African-­American residents of the city, before they lead to catastrophic violence.

But Eberhardt has also been gratified by her work outside the context of law e ­ nforcement. Two examples of her constructive consultations with well-known businesses include the neighborhood social network Nextdoor and the home-sharing service Airbnb. Both online platforms became concerned about racial bias among their users, with the former experiencing a high percentage of “crime and safety” posts with racist overtones, and the latter encountering serious evidence of discrimination in its rental process.

Eberhardt’s discussions with management, she says, enabled businesses to “actually engage with the research and solve a problem.”

Biased is also enriched by Eberhardt’s candor in drawing on her own experiences as a black woman and mother of three sons. Among the most vivid of these stories is her account of moving to a nearly all-white suburb of Cleveland at age 12, in which she highlights the difficulty she encountered when she was “confronted with a mass of white faces that I could not distinguish from one another” (a phenomOf the many issues that define the social and political landscape of enon known as the “other-race effect”), and the disturbing story of her baseless 21st-century America, none is more vexing than that of race. arrest during a traffic Though race penetrates the consciousness of many white Americans stop the day before she was scheduled only in times of crisis (like Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 or Charlottesville, to receive her Ph.D. in 1993.

Virginia, in 2017), it cuts deeply across the daily lives of African-AmeriWhile Eberhardt is a strong advocans and other people of color. Stanford University social psychologist cate of training to raise awareness Jennifer L. Eberhardt’s enlightening new book, Biased: Uncovering the and begin the process of changing Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, is a valuable behavior influenced by implicit bias, contribution to our understanding of the challenging and painful inter- she acknowledges that some of the actions that surround issues of prejudice and racial bias. enthusiasm for that proposed remeIn a call to her home in Palo Alto, California, Dr. Eberhardt eagerly ex- dy “has really taken off before people plains her desire to write about racial bias for the general reader. After have had the opportunity to evaluate winning a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2014 for her work in what works and what doesn’t work this field, she felt the weight of added responsibility. She says she wanted so well.” She cautions that those in“to share my work in a way that could be useful to people and could povolved in providing training may be tentially have an impact with a broader audience.” motivated by their own bias to report Motivated by the fact that “there weren’t a lot of books out there that fofavorable outcomes. cused on the science behind implicit bias,” Eberhardt sought to produce Even as she recognizes that it’s a work that would treat this subject in a comprehensive fashion. “I wantmore realistic to manage implicit bias ed to take this one aspect of bias and look at how we’re grappling with it than to erase it, Eberhardt concludes Biased in different spaces—in neighborhoods, in schools, in the workplace and the conversation on an optimistic Viking, $28, 352 pages 9780735224933 in the criminal justice system,” she says, “to really give people a view of note: “In addition to people taking Audio, eBook available how it shows up and how it can affect them in all these different ways.” away a good understanding of racial Asked to define implicit bias, Eberhardt offers a succinct explanation: bias—how it works and how it is studContemporary Culture “the beliefs and the attitudes that we have about social groups that can be ied—I would like them to take away triggered unconsciously, or without our awareness, and that can go on to hope. Hope that we can do better and be better. In fact, one of the key affect our decision-making and our behavior.” ingredients to addressing racial bias, as it turns out, is a belief that change Biased features an assortment of troubling studies through which is possible. In simply writing the book and talking to people in different Eberhardt shows how these attitudes—unexpressed and typically deeply environments—from schools to courtrooms, from prisons to workplacsuppressed—can be responsible for almost instantaneous, and often in- es—I found myself changed and inspired.” vidious, judgments. Results of one study reveal that job applicants with —Harvey Freedenberg

First steps in confronting our prejudices

14

Delightful & Enthralling spring reading

“ Heartbreaking, life-affirming, beautiful....

A sharply intimate portrait of what it is to be a person.”

“A memoir as rich and complex as her mushroom ragù.”

—The Wall Street Journal

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales.”

“A brilliant novel....

Moving, always enthralling.”

—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

—USA Today

“Casale makes a particular female experience vivid, centered, seen....

Universally recognizable.”

“ I tore through [it] with delight!”

—Jennifer Close, author of The Hopefuls

—Elle.com

VINTAGE

New in Paperback and eBook

READ EXCERPTS AND MORE AT READINGGROUPCENTER.COM

ANCHOR

feature | poetry

Four ecstatic collections for National Poetry Month April’s celebration of poetry offers us the chance to see the world differently. These four collections invite us to pay attention to larger social and cultural issues, explored in distinct ways.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s fifth collection, The Octopus Museum (Knopf, $25, 96 pages, 9780525655657), is an immersive tour of social and ecological calamities, as well as an elegy for the present. Told from a distant but impending point of crisis by speakers who seem both strange and familiar, the book is composed of several galleries through which Shaughnessy grants glimpses of an unrecognizable world. The reader sees a tally of America’s destructive conditions, including our blindness to the environmental and social repercussions of consumerism. In “Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence,” the speaker depicts this shortsightedness:

to the 50 employees who remained on site at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant after the devastating 2011 tsunami. Tsunami, it becomes clear, is the vast entity formed by the prism of narratives merging through each poem in this collection. From the start, the personified Tsunami is sketched as polymorphic.

Whether we see it through a contemporary, media-­saturated lens (“call her the meme ”) or as an environmental lamentation (“a rising tide

“I should pull out my earbuds, and hear the world (my first love, my favorite store).”

“Knowing how to change—not color or mind or body or action but perspective—and refusing to do it is how species vanish.”

“Stories started their premises on the stoop, broke arcs by the time they reached the uptown express, and the real was played & buried by the time it got directions.”

If “We Real Cool,” the iconic eight-line poem

by Gwendolyn Brooks, had bloomed into a fulllength collection, it might be The Crazy Bunch.

The title of Lee Ann Roripaugh’s latest collection, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed, $16, 120 pages, 9781571314857), refers

16

“sometimes I find myself hiding inside a hibernating tsunami siren, paralyzed and mute . . . trying to wake and unquiet myself free” Ilya Kaminsky’s widely anticipated second collection, Deaf Republic (Graywolf, $16, 80 pages, 9781555978310), is an intoxicating and wondrous formulation of strength in chorus through a community’s “silence / which is a soul’s noise.” After a deaf boy is gunned down by a soldier from a nameless army occupying the town of Vasenka, the townspeople begin an insurgency against their occupiers: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.”

Throughout this wondrous, flowing book, Shaughnessy’s world pleads with the reader to “stop already. Stop if you can,” while steering the reader toward another, equally important certainty:

Continuing his exploration of the sound and sense of language, Willie Perdomo’s The Crazy Bunch (Penguin, $18, 128 pages, 9780143132691) is the retelling of a single summer for a tightknit group of young men. An energetic musicality of language is on full display, electrifying every exchange. Drawing heavily from the luminous, sonic explorations of the Beats, Perdomo paints his crew with a vernacular that, like those countercultural poets, defines itself against regimented communication:

By giving the cataclysmic a voice, Roripaugh offers a path toward liberty through the chaos and confusion:

of salt tears / for the world’s fractured core”) or as Frankenstein’s creature (it “turns and faces / threatening villagers with / their flaming sticks”), Tsunami is personified and portrayed as both protagonist and antihero.

As in a Cubist painting, Tsunami seems to be no one particular thing. This book utilizes an innovative, fragmented diction that defies traditional prose as it attempts to invent a profound language to make sense of the senseless.

Refracted in these scenarios are the manifold ways in which we attempt to define Tsunami and understand such a tempestuous entity.

Kaminsky, himself a near-deaf poet, offers an eccentric yet elegant response to trauma with Deaf Republic. In “To Live,” the reader learns that resilience and hope require an active imagining because “The heart needs a little foolishness! / For our child I fold the newspaper, make a hat.” To keep sorrow at bay, characters combat the evils of the world by inventing angels. Visions crop up amid the commonplace, as in “A Bundle of Laundry,” in which “Snow pours out of the sun.”

In these sincere, striking poems, Kaminsky posits the beauty of this world as essential—to inspire those who, unlike the people of Vasenka, don’t require beauty to merely exist. “Our country is the stage,” Kaminsky announces in “Gunshot,” and he warns against an idle or uncritical engagement with the world. “Search Patrols” addresses this complicity and its unknown repercussions: “The crowd watches.

The children watch us watch.”

This collection places its most deliberate examples of optimism in its lowliest moments, affirming our ability to be stirred and incited by profoundly disheartening events. Kaminsky’s collection asks, “How do we live on earth?” He answers: We are resoundingly as complicit in the good as we are in the bad.

—Matthew Johnstone

behind the book | sarah blake

the world we left behind Debut novelist Sarah Blake offers a new heroine of biblical proportions: Naamah, wife of Noah, who finds hope amid an interminable sea.

I have been writing poetry since I was 10 years old, and I never thought I would write anything else. Poems are perfect. They’re stimulating little machines of power and grace.

They can take different forms, registers and presences. They can be read aloud or in your head, and that changes how you experience them. You can ask anything of a poem—to be short or epically long, to have one voice or multiple, to be quiet and subtle or brash and bold, to quote sources or to forget the real world, or to be a mix of it all. If someone makes you think poetry is a small wedge of the written word, they’re wrong.

After my son was born, my relationship to poetry changed. For a year, I could hardly read or write. And as I began to read again, after that year, reading felt strange. I felt removed from it. An observer. And what I observed was that every poem, whether it was lyric, narrative, language or experimental, was engaging my brain in the same way, hitting it in the same spot. I had never noticed it before, and in trying to figure it out, I started writing very long narrative poems that were attempting to develop a different kind of relationship between reader and character. I’d never written anything longer than five pages, and suddenly 60-page epics were pouring out of me while my son was in childcare at the YMCA. Soon I wasn’t writing poems anymore. I was writing screenplays. I was flooded by dialogue.

It was the only way I wanted to tell stories. My brain was working something out, and I wasn’t sure what it was. And then my friend, who’s a director, asked me to write her a screenplay for a short film, about anything I wanted. And I immediately thought of Naamah, the wife of Noah, stuck on the ark. I imagined her taking up swimming, swimming in floodwaters filled with the dead. I sent the screenplay to my friend, and we chatted about it, envisioning it set on a stage with strange props and big fans and everyone naked. I loved it in that moment, and when the moment passed, I didn’t think about it again.

But after the 2016 election, I experienced a kind of hopelessness I didn’t know how to confront. Art seemed dwarfed. I didn’t want it to feel that way, but it did. When I wrote poems, they came out didactic, and I couldn’t stand

them. And the dialogue stopped coming to me. Everything stopped. I started planning ways to volunteer in my community and ways to flee the country, all in the same few days. It felt like living a dual life: one of determination, to help stop the erosion of rights in our country, and one to prepare myself to get out.

And all of this led me back to Naamah. I thought of her stuck on that ark for over a year, with no communication with God, with everyone she knew dead, with all those animals needing her.

That was hopeless. That was miserable. It was clear that she was someone I needed to spend time with: the woman who’d faced it all and held it together.

The setting of the ark unlocked something in me. All the senses at work there. All the animals to learn about. The large family in their faith. The real and surreal already blurring at the story’s outset. There was the scale of the ark itself to try to understand. I drew pictures of it, what it might look like on the water. I returned to the book of Genesis, reading the passages over and over again. Next to my document window, I kept open a timeline of the ark, from the coming of the rains to the release of the birds. One part of me always rooted in the story as it has been told for millennia.

As I wrote Naamah’s story, I worried that I wasn’t writing a novel. I thought, Maybe I’m just figuring out more ways that narrative works. I will look up, and the story will have ended, but it will have been for me alone, not for Naamah. It was a difficult feeling to navigate: Was the story mine or Naamah’s? If it

Naamah Riverhead, $26, 304 pages 9780525536338, audio, eBook available

Literary Fiction were solely mine, it would sit happily in a drawer. If it were Naamah’s, the world might yearn to know it as I had yearned to know it.

When Naamah became entwined with an underwater village of dead children and the angel who’d created the village, I had to know what she would do, who she would choose to stay with—the angel or Noah. Every day I sat in my house and wrote about the animals, the family, the dangers and isolation, the ways to escape. Everything needed to be considered; the choices had to be made. Mine or not, the story could not continue without me returning to the page. I owed it to Naamah to continue. And the book became hers, through and through.

Sarah Blake has previously authored two poetry collections, Mr. West and Let’s Not Live on Earth. In Blake’s debut novel, Naamah provides guidance and stability to both humans and animals aboard Noah’s ark, but she also seeks solace in the mysteries underwater, where a seductive angel watches over a flooded world.

+

Visit BookPage.com to read a review of Naamah.

17

reviews | fiction

H Top Pick: The Old Drift

By Namwali Serpell Hogarth, $28, 576 pages 9781101907146, audio, eBook available

Debut Fiction Early in Namwali Serpell’s brilliant and many-layered debut novel, a turn-of-the-century British colonialist named Percy Clark wanders through the corner of what was then called Northwest Rhodesia (and is now the nation of Zambia) and complains: “I do seem plagued by the unpunishable crimes of others.” It is, in a sense, a fitting slogan for the many ruinous aftereffects of colonialism, except here it is spoken by an agent and beneficiary of the colonizer.

So begins The Old Drift, an expansive yet intricate novel that bends, inverts and at times ignores conventions of time and place. Part historical fiction, part futurism, part fantasy, Serpell’s hundred-year saga of three families and their intertwined fortunes is as unique as it is ambitious. And in just about every way, it

H Lost and Wanted

By Nell Freudenberger Knopf $26.95, 336 pages 9780385352680 Audio, eBook available

Literary Fiction If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts.

You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death.

That’s the premise with which Nell Freudenberger opens her third novel, Lost and Wanted. And what a novel it is, a work about cold, hard science that is also a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.

Charlie and Helen, who met at Harvard during freshman orientation in 1989, came from disparate backgrounds. They were,

18

succeeds.

The story begins in 1904, when an unlikely incident (Percy accidentally rips a patch of hair off another man’s head) sets off a chain of events that reverberates through the decades. From there, Serpell introduces a cast of characters that ranges from the everyday to the fantastical. The book chronicles the interwoven lives of three families, cast against the creation of Zambia itself.

There is a timeless quality to Serpell’s storytelling—or perhaps a sense that her novel moves almost independent of time. What starts as a story steeped in real colonial history eventually moves into the present and beyond—an invented near-future. In clumsier hands this

respectively, “an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena.” Helen became a physicist, wrote two popular books for laypersons about quantum cosmology and black holes, and co-published a celebrated model for “quark gluon plasma as a black hole in curved five-dimensional space-time” with a former boyfriend named Neel Jonnal.

Charlie, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and became an executive television producer.

She had a daughter after marrying a “blindingly attractive” surfer whose brother was in jail for drug possession. But life wasn’t always easy for Charlie. At Harvard, a professor’s advances persuaded her to abandon her thesis on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaisons, and give up her dreams of studying at Oxford. Later, she contracted the lupus that led to her death.

Shortly after Charlie dies, Helen’s 7-year-old son, Jack, whom she had through an anonymous donor, claims to have seen a ghost in their house. And that’s when the texts start arriving, messages containing information that only Charlie could have known.

Also arriving in Massachusetts: Charlie’s surfer husband, who plans to live with his inlaws, and Helen’s former boyfriend Neel, who accepts an MIT post to continue groundbreaking work on gravitational waves.

Refreshingly, the science in Lost and Wanted

complex, sprawling, century-­ spanning book might have easily folded in on itself, a victim of its scale and scope. Instead, The Old Drift holds together, its many strands diverging and converging in strange but undeniable rhythm.

It’s difficult not to pigeonhole the novel into a particular literary school—namely, that of the descendants of Gabriel García Márquez and the magical realists.

Less than 100 pages into the story, for example, the reader meets a girl covered head to toe in hair.

Another character cries endless tears. There are, throughout the book, myriad moments in which Serpell utilizes the improbable, the impossible, the unreal, to get at something profoundly human. And for all the ways it subverts and reinvents convention, The Old Drift is a very human book, deeply concerned with that most virulent strain of history: the unpunishable crimes of others.

—Omar El Akkad

is never window dressing, as the technical concepts that Freudenberger describes at length are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion. It is a magnificent novel.

—Michael Magras

Henry, Himself

By Stewart O’Nan Viking $27, 384 pages 9780735223042 Audio, eBook available

Family Saga In Stewart O’Nan’s latest engaging and immersive novel, he revisits the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh—a family his readers have come to know well from two earlier novels, Wish You Were Here (2002) and Emily, Alone (2011), which chronicled the early years of Emily Maxwell’s widowhood. This latest Maxwell family portrait returns to the year 1998 and focuses on 75-year-old Henry—retired and feeling somewhat purposeless—filling his

reviews | fiction days with garden chores, errands and repairing small appliances in his basement workshop.

One of O’Nan’s gifts is his ability to craft his characters with such uncanny attention to detail that the reader comes to care for them as the author does. So it is with Henry, whom we get to know more intimately as each chapter chronicles an event in his past or one aspect of his now circumscribed life.

In one, he reminisces about his dislike of piano lessons as a child until he developed a crush on his second teacher. (The annual recital will bring back memories for many readers.) Henry’s ritualized rotation of garden jobs according to the season—pruning, leaf-raking, taking down birdhouses, hanging up feeders—helps fill his days, as do the spring and summer golf outings with his three buddies.

Thanksgiving is the same each year as well.

Henry and Emily’s son and daughter and their families arrive Wednesday night, when lasagna is served, and the next day’s feast always starts with shrimp cocktail and spinach dip. Several chapters chronicle the annual vacation spent at the family cabin on Lake Chautauqua: Henry and Emily open it up a few days before the kids and grandkids arrive, and then everyone pitches in with cleaning the porch, installing screens, painting the weathered window sills, stocking the refrigerator, etc. Henry is in his glory during these days—assigning everyone a job and checking on their progress.

It isn’t necessary to have read the other novels in O’Nan’s Maxwell family saga to enjoy Henry, Himself. But readers who enjoy this poignant, everyman story will surely want to read them next. His stories of one upper-­ middle-class Pittsburgh family will resonate with many readers, especially fans of Anne Tyler’s character-­driven novels set in Baltimore.

—Deborah Donovan

H Queenie

By Candice Carty-Williams Scout $26, 328 pages 9781501196010 Audio, eBook available

Debut Fiction At the start of Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel, Queenie Jenkins has just endured a messy breakup with her longtime boyfriend.

A 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman living in London, Queenie is funny, clever and curvaceous. First to finish college in her family, she has landed a respected job with the local newspaper, where she hopes to do big things. But when her white boyfriend, Tom, unexpectedly ends their relationship, Queenie spirals through a series of self-destructive decisions until her self-worth is down in the dumps.

Helping her navigate the doldrums—as well as a series of terrible choices in men from online dating apps—are perhaps some of the best girlfriends a person could ask for. Queenie is lucky to be surrounded by caring friends, family and boss. But that doesn’t stop her from constantly questioning how her race, the color of her skin and the size of her body will ever be good enough. Queenie, in essence, is every modern black woman who has ever questioned her abilities and her place in this world.

With resonant reflections on race, relationships, sex and friendships, Queenie is a terrific debut that’s delivered with a touch of British humor and plenty of feel-good moments.

—Chika Gujarathi

H Normal People

By Sally Rooney Hogarth $26, 288 pages 9781984822178 Audio, eBook available

Coming of Age Sally Rooney became a literary sensation in her native Ireland with the release of her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, in 2017. Now, the brilliant, Booker Prize-­nominated Normal People has only enhanced her reputation.

The novel is partly set in the small Irish town of Carricklea. Sixteen-year-olds Marianne and Connell attend the same school but are worlds apart socially and financially. Marianne is plump, uncool and unliked. She comes from a well-off family, which isolates her from her blue-collar classmates. The star of the football team, Connell, is a slightly aloof, decent, sweetly unassuming guy who picks his mother up from her cleaning job.

A clandestine affair starts between the two, but at school Connell barely acknowledges Marianne. Marianne is treated badly at home, too, where she is ignored by her widowed mother

and bullied by her brother. Connell’s casual cruelty evokes all the insecurities of teen life, of fitting in and worrying about what people think. It sets a precedent: Marianne longs for Connell’s love, and he appears unable to give it.

The complex relationship between the two— their incredible closeness and dysfunction—is masterfully done.

Both Marianne and Connell receive academic scholarships to Trinity College in Dublin, and over the years, their lives bisect and cross. Marianne becomes popular, while Connell becomes introverted and distant. They become best friends, relying on each other’s counsel as they both enter into new relationships. But there is also a fractious, complicated longing that neither seems to know how to handle. Marianne’s bad choices in boyfriends—bullies and emotional abusers—only put Connell’s qualities in sharp relief. But he, too, is suffering. Depression sees him visiting a therapist and scuppers his relationship with a college girlfriend.

The quality of Rooney’s writing, particularly in the psychologically wrought sex scenes, cannot be understated as she brilliantly provides a window into her protagonists’ true selves. Ultimately, when life bashes them and there is nowhere to turn, they find they always have each other.

—Jeff Vasishta

When We Left Cuba

By Chanel Cleeton Berkley $16, 368 pages 9780451490865 Audio, eBook available

Historical Fiction On the surface, Beatriz Perez is a gorgeous 22-year-old society woman gliding through a cycle of parties, gossip and marriage proposals along with the other moneyed elite in 1960s Palm Beach, Florida.

But beneath her cool exterior burns a pure, sharp desire for revenge. In Chanel Cleeton’s When We Left Cuba, we learn that Beatriz and her family (including sister Elisa, protagonist of Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana) left Cuba after Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, Fidel Castro took power and her sugar-magnate father’s land was seized by the government.

The Perezes moved to Palm Beach in hopes of finding a sense of safety, rebuilding the family fortune and, to Beatriz’s unending frus-

19

reviews | fiction tration, marrying off the unwed daughters. She has much bigger plans—like, say, taking down Castro so she can go home to her beloved Cuba. Thanks to her still-privileged social position and her strong bond with Eduardo, a family friend and revolutionary, she’s actually got a chance at doing so. Eduardo introduces her to a CIA agent who sees her as a good bet: She’s fierce and smart, anger has made her reckless, and her social status gives her plausibility.

But there’s a complicating factor. Beatriz and Nicholas—a smart, sexy senator-to-be—meet at a fancy party, and their chemistry is immediate and electric. Alas, he’s engaged, an arrangement orchestrated by two families that want political and financial benefits from the union.

Beatriz and Nicholas understand each other on that level and so many others, from the political to the personal to the physical. But amid the aftermath of war and continued upheaval in the U.S. and Cuba, plus divergent views on how best to achieve their goals, being together often feels impossible.

An edifying, entertaining read filled with adventure, suspense, history and romance, When We Left Cuba is a thought-provoking look at the ways in which politics can be intensely personal.

—Linda M. Castellitto

ues to pair the two teens in classroom exercises. When a British director brings his troupe of young actors to the high school for an ill-fated production of Candide, Sarah is drawn into a hapless relationship with the production’s star while her bland classmate Karen pines for the group’s louche director.

Just when this hothouse atmosphere gets a bit too stifling, there is a shocking spiral of events that ricochets the action into the future and completely transforms the premise of the novel. What readers may have believed to be true about David, Sarah and Karen may not be true, but it may not be completely false either.

It is not until the final pages of the novel’s short coda that another layer of events is uncovered and the complete picture falls into place. Or does it?

Trust Exercise questions the very nature of fiction, and in a novel that depicts the fluctuating power dynamics between parents and students, students and teachers, and men and women, it suggests that the one who has the most power is the one who remains to tell the final version of the story.

We trust novels to tell us a story exactly the way it happened, but fiction, Choi suggests, has its own rules.

—Lauren Bufferd

Trust Exercise

H The Other Americans

By Susan Choi Holt $27, 272 pages 9781250309884 Audio, eBook available

Literary Fiction Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is not exactly what it seems.

Though the story explores the ways adolescent experience reverberates through adulthood, it also brilliantly topples all expectations of narrative fiction.

The novel opens in the mid-1980s at an elite high school for the performing arts, where students compete for roles in a rarefied bubble of camaraderie and pressure. Two rising sophomores, David and Sarah, have an intense sexual relationship over one summer, which ends shortly after school begins. Their bitter breakup and estrangement become the talk of their classmates, and even their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, seems obsessed as he invites Sarah to confide in him and contin-

20

By Laila Lalami Pantheon $25.95, 320 pages 9781524747145 Audio, eBook available

Literary Fiction When Driss Guerraoui, the owner of a diner near Joshua Tree National Park, leaves his restaurant one night, he’s killed in a mysterious hit-and-run while crossing the street. But this wasn’t an accident; it was murder, concludes his daughter Nora, as a variety of surprising details about her father’s life emerge.

He was, after all, feuding with Anderson Baker, the owner of the bowling alley next door.

As aspiring composer Nora returns to her hometown to help run the family diner and grieve with her mother and sister, she encounters a variety of ghosts from her childhood, including Baker’s son, A.J., who in high school wrote “raghead” on her locker, bullying her because her parents emigrated from Morocco

out of fear of political unrest.

Moroccan-born Lila Lalami was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Moor’s Account, and her much-anticipated fourth book, The Other Americans, doesn’t disappoint. The story carefully unfolds from multiple viewpoints, including that of Nora’s immigrant mother, Maryam; her jealous and seemingly highly successful sister, Salma; and even her dead father. There’s also Detective Coleman, an African-American woman investigating the case, as well as a Mexican immigrant who witnessed Driss’ death and remains haunted by his ghost but is afraid to come forward and risk deportation. Nora also reconnects with her high school friend Jeremy, now an Iraq War veteran and sheriff’s deputy.

Lalami’s crisp, straightforward prose offers the perfect counterpoint to the complexity of her plot, which artfully interweaves past and present. Reminiscent of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth in its depiction of the enduring effects of family secrets and betrayals, The Other Americans also addresses a multitude of other issues—immigration, prejudice, post-­ traumatic stress, love and murder—with what can only be described as magical finesse.

—Alice Cary

The Lost History of Dreams

By Kris Waldherr Atria $27, 320 pages 9781982101015 Audio, eBook available

Debut Fiction Following several lauded volumes of nonfiction, visual artist Kris Waldherr delivers an accomplished debut novel, The Lost History of Dreams, an atmospheric and hypnotic love story that not even death can end.

Wracked with grief over an accident that befell his wife three years previously, Robert Highstead has cut himself off from his family and turned his back on his writing, instead devoting himself to photographing the dead as one final memento for their family members. Incapacitated by sorrow, Robert remains ensconced in the past, one in which he and his wife are still madly in love with each other. But when Robert’s brother reaches out and requests that he head to the wilds of Shropshire to deliver the body of their

spotlight | short stories

Literary glimmers Spring brings two new story collections from masters of the form—one new and one well-established.

Sing to It (Scribner, $25, 160 pages, 9781982109110) is the much-anticipated new collection from Amy Hempel, her first since 2006, and Lot (Riverhead, $25, 240 pages, 9780525533672) by Bryan Washington is a stellar debut set among the diverse neighborhoods of Houston. Both collections share a generosity of spirit rooted in our common humanity and the social desire to connect.

Hempel is known for her brevity, and of the 15 stories here, 10 are less than three pages long. In some cases, an idea is succinctly stated and explored in less than

three paragraphs. But there’s nothing minimal about the contents. Hempel packs a great deal into the briefest of fictions, creating balanced and nuanced stories of longing, love and loss.

Despite her creative thrift, it’s in the longer stories that Hempel’s empathy and ready wit shine. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” inspired by the author’s real-life dedication to animal advocacy, she repeats the opening phrase of each paragraph to drive home both the passion and futility in caring for abandoned, abused dogs. Most affecting is the novella “Cloudland,” about an unnamed middle-aged woman who is haunted by memories of a daughter given up for adoption. These recollections are made more painful when she hears a horrible rumor about the

long-shuttered agency. The narrative shifts subtly in time, circling back and jumping ahead, revealing the character’s tenacity as well as her despair.

Washington’s brilliant and visceral Lot lives up to the considerable amount of buzz it has already received. Each story is named for a different Houston neighborhood, and roughly half concern a young man whose life is complicated by an adulterous father, a drug-­ hustling brother and a growing attraction to men. Though this main character is refreshingly straightforward about his sexuality, his relatives respond with shame, embarrassment and, in the case of his brother, violence.

The remainder of the stories emanate from locations across the sprawling Texan city. In “Alief,” through a first-person plural voice, neighborhood residents consider their role as they collectively witness a love affair that’s turned violent. “Peggy Park” recalls the pleasures of a pickup baseball team. In the book’s centerpiece story, “Waugh,” the two main characters are a young hustler and his pimp, and the focus is less on the hazards of their profession than on the bonds of trust and friendship that exist between them. Washington’s strong ear for dialogue and his lack of sentimentality serve these stories well.

Though their styles are different, Washington and Hempel capture both the harshness and the tenderness of the world. The stories are romantic but not corny and fiercely moral without being judgmental, capturing the complexities that make up a community.

—Lauren Bufferd

Deeply affecting stories about family: the ones you are born into, the ones you choose, and the ones that choose you.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER —a memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets.

“ Profound...

The true drama of Inheritance is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it.”

—The New York Times Book Review

FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR: a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.

and “Brilliant compassionate...

Freudenberger takes on the big questions of the universe and proves, again, that she is one of America's greatest writers.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less KNOPF

21

reviews | fiction cousin, the famed poet Hugh de Bonne, Robert finds himself powerless to refuse. Hugh’s last request was that his remains be buried beside his own wife, Ada, and that he be photographed alongside his niece and heir, Isabelle Lowell, in a dazzling glass chapel built in Ada’s memory. When Robert arrives at his cousin’s estate, however, he receives a prickly reception from Isabelle, who holds the only key to the chapel. In no uncertain terms she tells him that Hugh will never be allowed entrance to the chapel and that Robert is wasting his time.

Finally the two strike a deal: Over the course of five evenings, Isabelle will relate Ada’s story, and Robert will transcribe it. Only after the story is completed will Isabelle open the chapel, and the many ghosts tethering both her and Robert to the past can finally be laid to rest.

“Love stories are ghost stories in disguise,” Isabelle warns Robert on their first evening together. The Lost History of Dreams is a sensual, twisting gothic tale that embraces Victorian superstition much in the tradition of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; the mystery is slyly developed, while the love story is tastefully titillating.

In a novel that blurs the line between life and death, nothing can be taken for granted, and just when you think you have everything figured out, Waldherr turns the tables once again.

This means that at times the narrative becomes convoluted and certain plot points don’t come to fruition, but it’s still an absorbing read.

—Stephenie Harrison

A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

By Ann Beattie Viking $25, 288 pages 9780525557340 Audio, eBook available

Coming of Age For young Ben and his posse at Bailey Academy, most of the grown-ups in their lives are either dead, dying or dysfunctional. But despite the bleak subject matter of Ann Beattie’s latest novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ben’s adolescent angst and ensuing quarter-life crisis is riven with hope and humor.

The story begins when the bucolic bubble encompassing Ben’s posh New Hampshire

22

boarding school is burst by news of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, propelling the students further into the thrall of their Svengali-like teacher Pierre LaVerdere, whose role as their charismatic mentor and in loco parentis is solidified.

Beattie’s novel moves from the abrupt conclusion of Ben and his friends’ boarding school days straight into young adulthood, giving only a cursory mention of their college days.

Wealthy and smart, Ben and company were admitted to the likes of Cornell and Stanford, but their elite pedigrees have not prepared them for the indignities of the early aughts.

Struggling to hold a steady job and even harder to maintain a relationship, Ben pivots between his devotion to a sex-crazed narcissist and his obsession with an old boarding school crush.

When Ben escapes Manhattan and buys a house in the Hudson Valley’s idyllic Rhinebeck, he finds a kind of family in the warm embrace of his new neighbors, Steve, Ginny and their young daughter, Maude. Beattie’s belief in Ben’s inherent decency is most evident in these passages, as our brooding antihero discovers friendship, camaraderie and a sense of belonging. Alas, without spoiling the ending, LaVerdere arrives back on the scene, delivering a shocking revelation that brings Ben—and readers—into the heart of Beattie’s postmodernist Greek tragedy, where the luck of these self-­ absorbed scions of the so-called “1 percent” is not nearly as wonderful as one might think.

Beattie serves up an unflinchingly bleak— albeit sometimes laugh-out-loud humorous—serving of millennial malaise. It’s almost entirely character-driven, with plot far less important than dialogue, reflecting Beattie’s keen ear for not only what is said but also what is left unsaid, often with tragic consequences.

—Karen Cullotta Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Ann Beattie.

There’s a Word for That

By Sloane Tanen Little, Brown $28, 384 pages 9780316437165 Audio, eBook available

Family Drama It’s easy for an author to get sucked into familiar tropes when writing

about families; like venturing into a blind canyon, writers can stumble into cliches and have difficulty finding their way out. But with her latest novel, There’s a Word for That, Sloane Tanen is evidently undaunted by these common pitfalls, as she presents us with not one but two families with serious issues.

We first meet the Kesslers through Janine. A former child star on a wildly popular sitcom, she’s now in her early 40s and washed up. She’s still dependent on her beloved father, Marty, a just-as-washed-up Hollywood producer, and has no prospects. We first find her signing on for a cartoon-drawing class even though she can’t draw. Indeed, the class leads to one of her nastier humiliations in a lifetime of humiliations. Janine may have been the child star, but her late mother always preferred her beautiful sister, Amanda, now the soon-to-be-divorced mother of twins Jaycee and Hailey, who are replicating the same toxic sisterly dynamic as their mother and aunt.

Marty is a heroin addict. He doesn’t do anything as scuzzy as shoot up, but he does need his bumps once in a while, the same way he needs women. The latest is Gail, who is more of a minder than a lover and who probably isn’t as greedy as Janine thinks she is. Marty is Tanen’s great creation. Funny, big-hearted and still vigorous enough to make the reader imagine what he was like when he was firing on all thrusters, Marty is so charismatic that he can convince an attendant at the rehab center to sneak him a bottle of booze.

Speaking of rehab, the Directions Rehabilitation Center is where most of the novel takes place. With its beautiful landscapes, deluxe rooms, countless statues of the Buddha, simpering counselors and squillionaire clientele, the joint could only be in California.

One of the squillionaire clientele is Bunny Small, a bestselling British author with an oxymoronic name. The opposite of sweet and fluffy, Bunny is a lush and a harridan who’s alienated nearly everyone, including her brittle son, Henry. Only her devoted agent is left standing, and it is he who packs her off to Directions. And what d’you know, she’s there at the same time as her ex-husband, Marty Kessler. Not only that, but Henry and Janine meet and, rather too quickly, mate. (Rest assured, they’re not half-siblings.)

Like so many other books that capture the foibles of good-hearted but misguided folk, There’s a Word for That is often uproariously funny. Tanen’s skill is that you don’t laugh at the characters. Janine and Marty and Hailey and Henry and even Bunny know how messed up they are. All you, and they, can do is laugh at the straits they find themselves in and soldier on.

—Arlene McKanic

reviews | nonfiction

H Top Pick: Women’s Work

By Megan K. Stack Doubleday, $27.95, 352 pages 9780385542098, audio, eBook available

Memoir As a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Megan K. Stack lived a life defined by her career. Like so many women before her, Stack was unprepared for the jolt of trading in that work for the work of motherhood. When she left her job to give birth to her son, Max, in Beijing, Stack realized her new reality.

“I’d slaved and slashed and elbowed to maintain that job, but in the end I’d let it go like a balloon, rolling in my mouth the rare flavor of a bold gamble,” she writes in Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home.

Stack, whose previous book, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, had imagined quiet days of working on her novel while her newborn son slept, angelic and obedient, until she was ready for him to awaken. She had not imagined colic, hormones and sleep deprivation that was al-

H The Problem of Democracy

By Nancy Isenberg & Andrew Burstein Viking $35, 576 pages 9780525557500 Audio, eBook available

American History Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams disdained a two-party political system. They believed that competence, rational judgment, independence and a commitment to public service should guide our presidents rather than force of personality. Political courage, rather than consensus-building with other politicians, was a core value. That proved to be a shared, serious misstep that helped each to serve only one term as president. In the ambitious and beautifully written The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, historians Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein show us how the

most physically painful. To add insult to injury, her journalist husband, Tom, “had slipped easily back into his old life while I had been bombed back to some prehistoric version of myself. And I was angry that he had accepted this superior position, this lesser disruption, as sort of a birthright.”

Enter Xiao Li, the first in a series of nannies, cooks and cleaners who help Stack find equilibrium. But like most women who hire help, Stack felt a deep uneasiness that she couldn’t do it all herself. And while Stack paid Xiao Li a good wage, it was for work that took Xiao Li away from her own young daughter. Xiao Li later admits she would sometimes pretend Max

presidents Adams’ healthy skepticism about human nature and the fragility of government have caused them to be misunderstood and underappreciated.

This book offers an abundance of riches. It is both biography and family history of two brilliant men who were deeply concerned about the long-range prospects of their country. They were avid readers, letter writers and diarists, as well as experienced diplomats and keen observers of their own and other cultures. They could be stubborn at times, but to see their lives in tandem makes for absorbing reading.

Isenberg and Burstein push back on a number of accepted tenets of early American history. They believe Benjamin Franklin received too much credit for negotiations ending the American Revolution in 1783, while John Adams and John Jay did more; that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was overrated and did not have as much influence on the Continental Congress as many historians think; and that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern politicians whose public images “praised the little man, while acting solely in the interest of the plantation economy and the southern elites.”

The presidents Adams wrote much about political parties, demonstrating how the prejudices of the party system allowed men of wealth or with recognizable family names to be turned into idols. Accused of being elitist and anti-­

was her own baby to take away the sting of separation. It’s an uncomfortable truth that moms who work need help and that help mostly comes from lower-income women. That transaction comes at a price beyond money.

Furthermore, dads seem to navigate these issues without the noose of guilt, and Tom is no exception. He comes across as a bit of a schmuck, complaining about the quality of Xiao Li’s cooking and insisting that he can’t take even half a day off so Stack can finish a draft.

When the family moves to India for Tom’s job, Stack is in charge of setting up the household and finding help while again pregnant. In Delhi, Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection.

Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.

—Amy Scribner

democratic, the Adams “did not sell dreams, let alone democratic dreams. They fought a losing battle with historical memory, which made them virtual exiles from their own historical moment and damaged their combined legacy.”

—Roger Bishop

H A Woman of No Importance

By Sonia Purnell Viking $28, 368 pages 9780735225299 Audio, eBook available

Biography Sonia Purnell, the bestselling author of Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, captures the thrilling story of a female spy in A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, a groundbreaking biography that reads like a spy thriller.

Purnell’s subject is Virginia Hall, the daughter of a proper Maryland family, who sought to

23

reviews | nonfiction elude her mother’s social control and embrace her own desire for an adventurous life by applying with the U.S. State Department. But despite superior language skills and test results, Hall found herself stuck in low-­level clerical jobs as result of the era’s ingrained sexism.

Hall was stationed as a clerk in Turkey when a hunting accident resulted in the loss of her left leg. Despite near-fatal blood infections and the pain of walking with a prosthetic, Hall later volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army in 1939. Her bravery and passion for France made her an attractive recruit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the secretive spy organization given the nod by Winston Churchill to fight the Nazis through James Bond-style espionage. Embedded in Nazi-occupied France, Hall helped organize the French Resistance in ways so ingenious and suspenseful that her previously untold story has recently been optioned for film.

Although documentation of the French Resistance movement exists only in fragments, Purnell ably draws on a variety of sources to create a suspenseful, heartbreaking and

ultimately triumphant tale of heroism and sacrifice.

—Catherine Hollis

The Last Stone

By Mark Bowden Atlantic Monthly $27, 304 pages 9780802147301 eBook available

True Crime For 38 years, an unimaginable crime remained a complete mystery: On March 29, 1975, Katherine and Sheila Lyon, ages 10 and 12, disappeared from a shopping plaza in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The sisters were never seen again.

Fast forward to 2013, when Chris Homrock, the last remaining investigator of a cold case squad, turned his attention to a six-page transcript from April 1, 1975: the testimony of Lloyd Welch, who as a teenager claimed to have seen a man lead the Lyon girls out of the mall.

What unfolded next is the subject of Mark Bowden’s mesmerizing The Last Stone. The bestselling author of Black Hawk Down had been haunted by the girls’ disappearance ever since reporting on it as a 23-year-old for the Baltimore News American. Relying on videos and transcripts, Bowden takes readers ringside as Homrock and three other savvy investigators spend 10 long interview sessions trying to squeeze as much of the slippery truth as possible out of Welch, a compulsive liar finishing up a prison sentence in Delaware for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl. Words pour out of Welch’s mouth like a poisonous water fountain, his ever-changing statements about his involvement with the Lyon sisters always framed to make himself seem as innocent as possible.

Like any true crime book, especially one involving children, this isn’t for the faint of heart,

meet MARY LAURA PHILPOTT Describe your book in one sentence.

When you finally unwind, what is your favorite way to relax?

You are a self-described “type A” person. What do you consider to be your superpower?

If you could go back in time and meet Nora Ephron, what would you say?

What is your Achilles’ heel?

For readers who might be feeling like they miss themselves, what advice do you have?

24

Brimming with vulnerability and sparkling humor, the essays in Mary Laura Philpott’s I Miss You When I Blink (Atria, $26, 288 pages, 9781982102807) remind readers that a messy life can still be a beautiful life. Philpott is the founding editor of Musing, the online magazine of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, and is the Emmy-winning co-host of “A Word on Words.”

reviews | nonfiction but rest assured, it’s an in-depth master study of criminal psychology and interrogation. As one investigator explained, “We knew we were dealing with a monster, but we had to entertain him in a fashion. . . . We had to endure the ‘friendship’ and go through the crap to get as many of the answers as we could.”

In the tradition of the “Making a Murderer” Netflix series and the “Serial” podcast, The Last Stone will leave readers on the edge of their seats as a group of indefatigable detectives tries to unearth the carefully concealed, unspeakable truths behind a decades-old tragedy.

—Alice Cary

H Save Me the Plums

By Ruth Reichl Random House $27, 288 pages 9781400069996 Audio, eBook available

Memoir The initial phone call was a surprise. “Is this the restaurant critic of the New York Times?” a British voice asked. Ruth Reichl confirmed her identity, but the name of her caller meant nothing to her: James Truman, editorial director of magazine publishing company Condé Nast, was calling about Gourmet. The magazine had introduced an 8-year-old Reichl to the magic of food and its influence on the world. But she couldn’t imagine why Truman was calling.

That phone call ultimately led Reichl to a role she’d never dreamed of: editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. Truman’s name was the first of many things she had to learn. During Reichl’s first visit to the office, an editor gushed that she’s great at the “teeosee.” Reichl, whose background was in newspapers, didn’t realize the editor was talking about the TOC, or table of contents.

Save Me the Plums, Reichl’s memoir about her years at Gourmet, is filled with such endearing, revealing moments. Although she considered herself a writer, not a manager, Reichl reimagines the magazine that captured her youthful imagination. Alongside her talented staff, Reichl took the publication from a staid magazine that delivered the luxury readers expected (and no more) to a sometimes scintillating examination of not only food but also its impact.

Readers of her past memoirs will recognize Reichl’s lighthearted but dedicated approach

to her work, as seen in Garlic and Sapphires.

They’ll be welcomed by her big-hearted approach to the dinner table, as in Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. And new readers will be equally delighted by Reichl’s account of an influential magazine, its final days and the many moments that illustrate the ways food can bring people together.

—Carla Jean Whitley

Cities

By Monica L. Smith Viking $30, 304 pages 9780735223677 Audio, eBook available

World History There’s much to wonder about in archaeologist Monica L. Smith’s thought-­ provoking, capacious, often witty new book, Cities: The First 6,000 Years. Why is it, for example, that in the very long history of the human species, cities—beginning with Tell Brak in Mesopotamia—are only 6,000 years old?

What confluence of events helped urbanism arise at roughly the same time in many different places? And why are cities here to stay?

That is only the beginning of my questions.

An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade.

Cities, Smith posits, were our first internet.

They offered connectivity. They required dense, migratory populations where unfamiliarity became a measure of human relations. They also needed diverse economies and ritual buildings like churches. They were defined by verticality and a different scale of human experience than was available to rural populations. If that is obvious, less so are Smith’s ideas about consumption. In a chapter called “The Harmony of Consumption,” she asserts that “trash is an affirming badge of affluence” and digs among ancient trash heaps—surprising for their density of castoff human-made things—to prove it.

In other chapters, again drawing on her knowledge of ancient civilizations, she notes the vital importance of infrastructure. She observes that someone had to manage these projects:

dams, pyramids, city grids, water supplies and trash removal. She describes these projects and project managers in surprisingly, almost shockingly contemporary terms. Can it be that ancient city-dwellers were not so different from 21st-century urbanites? Cities, it seems, have always required a level of middle managers and technocrats. Then, as now, there was a population of people from different backgrounds, vitally concerned with the nuts and bolts of life.

—Alden Mudge

+

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Monica L. Smith.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

By Lori Gottlieb HMH $28, 432 pages 9781328662057 eBook available

Memoir What happens when a psychotherapist’s life falls apart? She finds her own therapist. But it turns out that beginning therapy, and then muddling through it, is just as hard for professionals as it is for the rest of us.

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Los Angeles-based therapist Lori Gottlieb details her search for a therapist she doesn’t know but might begin to trust and the way her own defenses and blind spots trip her up as she tries to get over an unexpected breakup. As Gottlieb undertakes her own therapy journey, she continues to see her usual roster of patients, and she introduces us to four of them (identities disguised), each with their own array of quirks, longings and suffering. As Gottlieb’s patients proceed (often painfully) through their sessions, so does Gottlieb with her new therapist, Wendell. And we get to listen in through this unusual combination of memoir, self-help guide and therapy primer.

Before Gottlieb trained as a therapist, she worked as a writer for TV shows like “E.R.” She’s also a columnist for The Atlantic and the author of Marry Him, and her varied background shows in her writing, which is warm, approachable and funny—a pleasure to read.

25

reviews | nonfiction “I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told,” Gottlieb writes. In showing us how patients tell themselves what turns out to be just a part of their stories, she also gives us a satisfying set of narratives. As we watch Gottlieb and her patients learn to tell the rest of their own stories and move beyond their pain, we find some surprising insights and even a bit of wisdom.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

H The Light Years

By Chris Rush FSG $27, 384 pages 9780374294410 eBook available

Memoir

hill towns to call his mother collect, to let her know he was alive and to be cautioned not to come home. Lovers and friends along the way seemed as lost as he was.

Today a celebrated Tucson artist, Rush recounts his troubled journey not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to a time when finding a place in the real world could be life-saving. For him, it was learning to bake a pie and sharing it with a friend. For his reader, this redeeming affirmation comes as both revelation and relief.

—Priscilla Kipp

Lessons from Lucy

By Dave Barry Simon & Schuster $26, 240 pages 9781501161155 eBook available

Humor There is a saying: If you remember the 1960s, you must not have been there. If you were, and went on to enjoy—or survive—their segue into the ’70s, Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, may cause some fine flashbacks.

But if you know those drug-addled days only by reputation and the sounds of their hazespawned music, Rush’s detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence will be quite an eye-opener.

The middle child of seven in a well-off New Jersey family that knew how to party, Rush was an artistic, sexually conflicted misfit. His alcoholic father loathed him, his mother protected him, and his older sister introduced him to marijuana and LSD by the time he was 12—“sacraments,” she called them, not to be confused with heroin or cocaine, which would come later. Rush remembers his acid trips with poetic clarity. Watching an American flag-clad Frisbee player at a party, he saw “stroboscopic trails” following him, “frame by frame by frame. I began to think of the awfulness of the [Vietnam] war, of dead bodies piled in the sun. Maybe the glitter-acid was coming on a little too strong.”

After his father threatened to kill him, Rush left the private school where he was peddling drugs and followed his sister out west—California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming—and into the business of storing and selling drugs. Living in “stash houses” and partaking of the inventory, Rush grew to love tripping in the wild of the mountains, adding hashish to his repertoire, spending months alone and sketching his drug-fueled fantasies. He came down into the

26

In his characteristic free-­ flowing style, Dave Barry stares down aging by taking lessons from his 10-yearold dog, Lucy, in the delightful Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog. Barry reveals seven lessons that his beloved Lucy has taught him, and he measures how well he’s succeeded in embracing those lessons. For example, he learns from Lucy how to be present, especially to “Pay Attention to the People You Love (Not Later. Right Now.).” Lucy always lives in the present moment, Barry tells us. When the garbageman comes, she “objects vociferously—she cannot believe we allow this to happen—he is taking our garbage,” but as soon as he leaves, Lucy has forgotten him and gone on to the next moment in her life. Barry tries to apply this lesson to his life with friends and family, working to be present with them rather than looking at his phone. Barry admits that it’s a constant struggle to focus on the people around him rather than on Twitter, but he thinks he’s doing better than he used to.

Another lesson he learns from Lucy is “Don’t Lie Unless You Have a Really Good Reason, Which You Probably Don’t.” When Lucy does something she’s not supposed to do, such as knocking down the Christmas tree, she greets the family with whimpering and “flattening herself on the floor in the yoga position known as Pancake Dog.” Barry points out that dogs are incapable of lying but that it’s more complicated for humans. Barry admits that he’s doing OK with this lesson.

Even as we’re laughing out loud at Lucy’s and Barry’s behavior, his witty and wise stories about aging with his dog touch our hearts.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Murder by the Book

By Claire Harman Knopf $26.95, 272 pages 9780525520399 Audio, eBook available

Literature Claire Harman, previously a biographer of literary legends like Charlotte Brontë and Robert Louis Stevenson, has now set her sights on true crime with an intriguing, entertaining and occasionally gruesome mashup of mystery, biography, history and literary intrigue. Readers who delight in the likes of Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and the dark side of 19th-century London will find a haven here.

Harman takes a storytelling approach to a crime that was the talk of 1840s London: the murder of Lord William Russell. She sets the stage with a bloody, strange murder scene; unrest between servants and employers; and a conviction and punishment that don’t completely answer all the questions swirling around the tragic events. Woven throughout is the rising tide of blame aimed at violent novels.

The wealthy became increasingly concerned that such novels were giving unsavory folk all kinds of ideas—after all, look at what happened to Lord Russell. If he wasn’t safe, who was?

Armchair detectives will enjoy following along as Harman chronicles the investigation and its suspects, as well as the ways in which authors like Charles Dickens and William Thackeray were influenced by the goings-­on (and, in Dickens’ case, later spurred to social activism). In two latter sections, Harman shares further fruits of her intensive research, offering a nice differentiation from present-day true crime books that cannot yet offer historical perspective.

A fascinating, exhaustively researched exploration into how art can influence society and vice versa, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens’s London turns an unflinching eye to the ways in which biases born of economic inequality affect the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted. It’s a true crime devotee’s delight.

—Linda M. Castellitto

interview | samira ahmed

Who gets to feel at home in America?

YA author Samira Ahmed talks about her chilling work of speculative fiction.

Love, Hate & Other Filters, was inspired by this verbal assault and follows a 17-yearold Indian-Muslim girl growing up in Batavia who confronts Islamophobia after an act of domestic terror.

Ahmed says that after “any act of terrorism, whether it occurs on U.S. soil or abroad and whether it was a Muslim or not, I hear this constant refrain in my life: ‘Go home, you terrorists.’” In Internment, Ahmed continues to explore this racism as Layla faces daily threats and violence inside Camp Mobius, where life is highly regimented and families are forced to live in cramped trailers in the desert heat of California. (Ahmed modeled her fictional trailers on those used by FEMA after Hurricane Katrina.)

In another nod to real-life American history, Ahmed places her story’s fictional detention center near the site of the Manzanar internment camp in California, one of 10 camps where more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. During her research process, Ahmed read several internment camp memoirs and talked to a number of Japanese-Americans, including one camp survivor who gave feedback on an early draft of Internment.

“Even though this book isn’t about Japanese-Americans per se, I still wanted to honor what happened to them in this country,” Ahmed says. “We live in an age of internment right now . . . and it’s not just in the United States. These things are happening globally. . . . Silence is complicity.

It’s so important for those of us who have any kind of privilege, power or platform to always speak up.

That’s the very first step to take when we see oppression in our country, when we see acts of bigotry, hatred, homophobia, xenophobia— any institutionalized prejudices.”

Despite her anger and frustration, Ahmed makes it clear that she writes from a place of hope, especially when she’s writing for young © ERIELLE BAKKUM

Speaking by phone from her home in Chicago, bestselling author Samira Ahmed says she channeled her fears and concerns about today’s political climate into her highly anticipated new novel, Internment, which she imagines as being set “15 seconds in the future.”

Internment centers on 17-year-old Layla Amin, who, according to government decree, is sent with her parents to an internment camp for Muslim-Americans. A savvy, smart young woman, Layla is a powerful narrator, noting early in her internment that, “If history had no ghosts, I wouldn’t be terrified of what might come next.”

As conditions in the camp and in the U.S. quickly deteriorate, Layla’s parents remain silently complicit, hoping things will improve. But unbeknownst to them, Layla boldly seeks to defy her captors and convey news of the injustice to the outside world in a covert mission that makes for a thrilling read. “I really like to write about this idea of a ‘Revolutionary Girl,’ ” notes Ahmed. “That’s an important theme in all of my books.”

Ahmed, who moved with her parents from India as a baby, spent countless hours as a child reading in a comfy armchair next to a Victorian fireplace in the Batavia, Illinois, public library. As the only Indian and Muslim child in her school, Ahmed saw the library as a refuge, and no doubt those reading sessions helped shape her as a writer. But another incident, one that stands in stark contrast to her cozy library retreats, also shaped her career and writing life.

One day during the Iranian hostage crisis, 7-year-old Ahmed and her parents were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown Chicago. While she was gazing out their open car window, two young men pulled up beside them in another car, and one pointed his finger at her and yelled, “Go home, you g-damn f---ing Iranian.”

Ahmed was scared (she’d never heard language like that) and confused, but she soon came to the conclusion that “racists are really bad at geography.” Her bestselling debut novel,

Internment Little, Brown, $17.99, 400 pages 9780316522694, audio, eBook available

Fiction people. “I know how brave and courageous kids are. I don’t think the future is bleak, and I think that we so often undervalue what young people are capable of. I wanted to show them in this book that they are capable of incredible things.”

Having taught high school in the Chicago area and in New York City before she began working for educational nonprofits for a number of years, Ahmed knows a thing or two about teens.

“Writing for young adults is writing into the realm of possibility,” she says. “I always say that middle-­age novels are about doors closing, and young adult novels are about doors opening.”

Ahmed goes on to explain how fortunate she feels to have been able to work with students and teachers in public schools, calling it a “privilege.”

But she speaks highly of all her past careers, whether in the classroom or out: “I love that I’ve had these different experiences. I think we bring to our writing everything that’s part of us.”

And while those two racist men from decades ago probably haven’t thought twice about how they once terrified a young Muslim girl who was riding in her parents’ car, Ahmed continues to speak out against such hatred. “I am an American. And all those kids and all those folks who are being attacked, who are having hate tweeted at them from our highest offices, they’re American, and this is our home. I think it’s so important for us to be clear about that.”

—Alice Cary

27

reviews | young adult

H Top Pick: Dig

By A.S. King Dutton, $17.99, 400 pages 9781101994917, audio, eBook available

Fiction Printz Honor-winning author A.S. King’s novels (Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Still Life With Tornado) are in another solar system entirely, so it can be hard to give readers a taste of what her stories are like without just handing them the books.

In Dig, her latest work of surrealist fiction, she follows five teenagers. A boy throws himself into snow shoveling and house painting in an attempt to save for a car that will help him find his dad. A girl works the drive-thru at an Arby’s and deals drugs from the window. The Freak—but what exactly is she?—moves be-

H Descendant of the Crane

By Joan He Albert Whitman $17.99, 416 pages 9780807515518 eBook available

Fantasy Joan He’s debut young adult novel, Descendant of the Crane, defies YA fantasy expectations.

The story unveils a world with echoes of ancient Chinese dynasties, a plot driven by mystery and intrigue, a healthy dose of fantasy and characters that are reminiscent of heroes and villains found in fairy tales. He’s ability to weave all these cultural touchstones and pieces of inspiration into a coherent and compelling story speaks volumes about her skills and future as an author.

Descendant of the Crane opens as 17-yearold Princess Hesina of Yan embarks on a mission to find the assassin who recently murdered her father. As difficult as that task alone would be, she must also convince the rest of the realm that he did not die of natural causes but was murdered. As Hesina tries to collect the evidence she needs to make her case, she must overcome even more obstacles: a mother who despises her, a kingdom on the brink of

28

tween worlds and tries to tie a family together. These are just three threads in this tangled root ball of a story. There’s also FirstClass Malcolm, who’s taking care of his terminally ill dad, and Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress.

These teens are the grandchildren of Gottfried and Marla, a couple who made their wealth developing subdivisions and are now pretty miserable. They cut off their kids and left them to their own devices, and now a traditional family gathering threatens to finally expose the extent to which their legacy of harm has eaten

away at them all.

King brings an intense surrealism to Dig’s discussion of racism and respectability politics. Plot points like the grotesque flea circus and the Freak’s magical ability to “flicker” from place to place don’t seem so exotic when placed next to scenes in which a suburban mom polishes her antebellum souvenir.

Each generation hopes the next will improve; in Dig, that hope feels more urgently needed than ever.

—Heather Seggel

war and revelations that make her question everything.

A highly recommended read for fantasy fans, Descendant of the Crane is thrilling, but not in a nonstop-action kind of way. He builds her fantastical world and characters by methodically weaving and layering details until the reader is completely enthralled by and entangled in the story.

—Jennifer Bruer Kitchel

surface?” Tiger wonders. “Is this how it will feel every day from now on?” Tiger may be strong, but she’s genuinely scared of what’s to come.

She initially channels her “Grand Canyon of grief” by wearing the same ugly dress for days on end—the same dress that Tiger and her mom argued about. During that argument, they exchanged their last words.

In these early days of grieving, Tiger feels like she is surrounded by the dark. All she feels is fear, sadness and uncertainty as she takes on the responsibilities of organizing her mother’s funeral and end-of-life documents.

She never knew her father, and she doesn’t have any extended family that she knows of, so she becomes a ward of the state of Arizona, and she’s soon shuttled from foster home to foster home.

When a previously unknown half-sister is discovered, Tiger becomes her charge, and together they reach out to their incarcerated father and try to navigate an uncertain (but hopefully forward-looking) future as a family.

Secondary characters feed the narrative and provide balance to Tiger in her journey, which she measures in minutes since her mother’s death.

Bestselling author Kathleen Glasgow’s second novel, How to Make Friends With the Dark, is an honest and extremely harrowing read. As young readers take this journey with Tiger, they will learn that grief takes all forms and that life, somehow, does go on—even amid the surrounding dark.

—Sharon Verbeten

H How to Make Friends With

the Dark

By Kathleen Glasgow Delacorte $18.99, 432 pages 9781101934753 Audio, eBook available

Fiction Sixteen-yearold Tiger Tolliver never wanted to learn how to make friends with the dark. But that’s what happens when her mom dies unexpectedly and her ensuing grief becomes overwhelming.

“If you looked at yourself in a mirror right now, could you see pieces of bone close to the

spotlight | boarding school thrillers The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe

By Ally Condie Dutton $18.99, 336 pages 9780525426455 Audio, eBook available

Dystopian Fantasy In an isolated society known simply as the Outpost, 17-year-old Poe Blythe has spent the past two years perfecting her design of weaponized armor to coat “the dredge,” a ship that mines gold from the Serpentine River. She’s been dedicated to this violent purpose ever since their last river voyage, when the boy she loved was killed by Raiders, a band of people who live outside the Outpost.

Occasionally Poe wonders why the Admiral, the Outpost’s authoritative leader, needs so much gold, prioritizing the dredge and its mining tools over all the other problems faced by the Outpost, including food shortages and poverty. But as long as he allows her to keep working on the armor that kills Raiders, she doesn’t care. Then the Admiral unexpectedly tasks Poe with leading a crew on the dredge’s next voyage. Why has she been given this responsibility? And is there a traitor among her new crew, or is her distrustful nature and inability to read people clouding her judgment? In order to save her crew and her beloved ship, Poe will have to question her long-held beliefs, re-evaluate the pain that has shaped her life and consider new ways to look at the world and herself.

In The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe, Ally Condie (author of the Matched trilogy) presents a heroine as flawed as her dystopian society, though the Outpost and its environs remain roughly sketched while the focus on Poe’s personality and growth evolves and deepens. Condie’s supporting cast mostly functions to throw Poe’s misconceptions into sharp relief, but there are also plenty of twists that constantly realign the characters and their motivations.

An immersive novel that owes as much to 20th-century sci-fi as it does to recent YA, The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe is a mature yet accessible standalone for dystopia-loving readers.

—Annie Metcalf

Cutthroat class is in session Hidden campuses, bitter rivalries, subversive relationships and a lapse of adult supervision make two new boarding school stories tantalizing reads. The curriculum? It’s all about survival.

Adriana Mather’s Killing November (Knopf, $17.99, 416 pages, 9780525579083) opens as Novem­ber Adley, an unassuming 17-year-old, wakes up at the Academy Absconditi. She was dropped off at this peculiar boarding school, which is housed in a medieval castle in an undisclosed European location, by her ex-CIA father with little explanation, other than the fact that she is there for her own safety.

But November feels anything but safe; in fact, one of the calculating and conniving students punches her in the face on her first day. And the administration? They simply encourage November to retaliate in an equally violent fashion.

This is all a bit alarming, but soon November learns that she is a member of an ancient family of powerful assassins and tacticians. Without realizing it, November has been training for this school her whole life. But when a student at the academy is murdered, the blame immediately falls on November, and she’ll need to count on her survival instincts to find the truth.

Unlike her highly suspicious classmates, November is an optimist who refutes cynicism—even in the face of life-and-death conflict. What might be most refreshing for readers is the academy’s egalitarian ideals: There are no limitations placed on any student, regardless of gender. And November proves she can handle the most challenging task with aplomb, securing her place in this school of renegades.

Suzanne Young’s Girls With Sharp Sticks (Simon Pulse, $18.99, 400 pages, 9781534426139) is also a tale of female empowerment but with a sci-fi spin. At Innovations Academy, the student body is a homogeneous group of intelligent and beautiful teenage girls who study gardening, etiquette and decorum in a repur-

posed factory. They are all graded on manners, beauty and compliance. This is the norm for Innovations student Philomena.

She doesn’t know what it’s like to have bodily autonomy or freedom, and she doesn’t question life at the academy until one of her friends goes missing. Suddenly, the academy’s all-male staff doesn’t seem like it has the girls’ best interests at heart.

But any girl who doesn’t behave and comply with the staff’s orders gets a dose of impulse control therapy, which affects their memories. Even more disturbingly, a sweet budding romance between Philomena and

a local boy is juxtaposed against the unsettling advances of the much older staff.

As Philomena and the other girls discover what they’re really being groomed for, they begin to defy orders.

Girls With Sharp Sticks is a thrilling story about a sisterhood smashing the patriarchy. Philomena and her friends resort to subversion in order to protect one another, relying on the same tribal instincts that were encouraged in their education. While this novel reads like a feminist manifesto, it’s also a reflection of modern movements to end sexual harassment.

Both Killing November and Girls With Sharp Sticks are fast-paced and gripping female-centered stories in which the class curriculum centers on survival. But be prepared—they’re both perfectly primed for sequels.

—Kimberly Giarratano

29

feature | children’s poetry

Playful poetry young readers will love We’re celebrating poetry’s impact and importance with five fabulous new collections, each filled with verses that will inspire the wordsmiths of tomorrow.

If you’ve ever wondered how to walk on Mars, distinguish a goblin from an elf or frighten a creepy monster, then you simply must get a copy of The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How-to Poems (Candlewick, $17.99, 48 pages, 9780763681685, ages 6 to 9). Instruction on the aforementioned activities can be found in this ingenious illustrated anthology, which features wonderful works from world-class poets—including Douglas Florian, Marilyn Singer, Nikki Grimes and Kwame Alexander—selected by Paul B. Janeczko (The Death of the Hat). In “How to Build a Poem,” Charles Ghigna offers fitting inspiration that sums up the collection’s aim: “Let’s build a poem made of rhyme with words like ladders we can climb” Playful illustrations by Richard Jones bring unity to the assortment of voices, forms and poetic modes that fill this playful anthology. Who knew a how-to collection could be such a hoot?

Poetry rocks! If you require proof, just check out Rhett Miller’s No More Poems!: A Book in Verse That Just Gets Worse (Little, Brown, $17.99, 48 pages, 9780316416528, ages 8 to 11).

Miller, whose day job is songwriter and frontman of the alt-country band Old 97’s, has produced a rowdy, rollicking, irresistible collection of poems, many of them written from a kid’s perspective. In pieces about too-early bedtimes, quibbling siblings and mysteriously missing homework, he brilliantly channels the mindset of a typical tween. Miller is a wordplay pro with the skills to set up extended rhyme schemes. Featuring bold mixed-media illustrations by Caldecott-winning author and illustrator Dan Santat, this inspired collection sings from start to finish.

Avery Corman’s Bark in the Park!: Poems for Dog Lovers (Orchard, $17.99, 48 pages, 9781338118391, ages 3 to 5) is a fun frolic with canines of nearly every conceivable breed. Corman is an expert at articulating what makes dogs unique, whether the pooch is a cocker spaniel (“an always on-the-run dog, / A floppy ears and fun dog”), an Afghan hound (“Although he’s noble and aloof . . . he still says ‘woof!’”) or a pug (“Is the Pug cute / Or is the Pug ugh?”). Corman’s poems are compact—many consist of a single stanza—and filled with alliteration. Artist Hyewon Yum’s renderings of the pups (and their respective people) are spot-on. A sunny, silly, buoyant book, this is a winning tribute to a kid’s best friend.

30

In Isabelle Simler’s stunning volume Sweet Dreamers (Eerdmans, $19, 80 pages, 9780802855176, ages 4 to 8), it’s nighttime in the wild, and critters are quietly snoozing. Through minimalist poems, Simler explores their sleeping habits. A delightful menagerie of animals on land and in the sea—koala bear, cat, ant, giraffe, seahorse, stingray and dolphin—populate this lovely collection. Simler employs a spare writing style, yet she perfectly captures each creature in repose.

The bat “dreams upside down,” she writes, “toes clinging to the ceiling, / kite-fingers folded like a blanket.” From the sloth, “slung like a hammock,” to the mighty humpback whale, who “nosedives / into sleep” in the ocean, “balancing on her head / or the tip of her tail,” Simler conjures up original imagery for each animal that readers of all ages will appreciate. Her dense, detailed illustrations, highlighted with vibrant touches of color, depict the glittering majesty of the natural world at night. The perfect way to wind down the day, Sweet Dreamers is the ultimate bedtime read.

Allan Wolf takes readers on an unforgettable galactic journey in The Day the Universe Exploded My Head: Poems to Take You Into Space and Back Again (Candlewick, $17.99, 56 pages, 9780763680251, ages 8 to 12). Using a variety of poetic forms, including the sonnet and the elegy, Wolf writes about eclipses, meteorites, shooting stars, astronauts, cosmonauts and famous scientists. But this isn’t just straight-laced science; Wolf’s poems brim with mischief. He depicts Jupiter, the solar system’s largest occupant, as “the planets’ bodyguard,” whose “gravity keeps space debris / from landing in the yard.” And Saturn is a diva who’s proud of her planetary bling: “My rings are often copied, but they never get it right.

The secret’s in the extra ice I add to catch the light.”

In her colorful, cosmic collages, illustrator Anna Raff imbues the planets with plenty of personality (the Sun sports Wayfarer-inspired shades; Neptune strums a guitar). From takeoff to touchdown, this space mission is a success.

—Julie Hale

reviews | children’s

H Top Pick: The Mighty

Heart of Sunny St. James

By Ashley Herring Blake Little, Brown, $16.99, 384 pages 9780316515535, audio, eBook available Ages 9 to 12

Middle Grade In The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James, author Ashley Herring Blake (Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World ) once again sensitively explores the intense emotions of adolescence.

In the aftermath of her heart transplant, 12-year-old Sunny decides to seize this second chance at life with gusto. But Sunny never could have imagined the adventures this new heart would afford her. First, there’s the reappearance of her missing biological mother, Lena, who left Sunny in the care of Lena’s

+

friend Kate eight years earlier. But Lena exhibits little of the vigilant love that pours from Kate, and many of Sunny’s big questions about Lena remain unanswered. Then there’s the heartache lingering from Sunny’s former best friend’s betrayal. But this particular problem may be assuaged by the arrival of Quinn, a bright girl who cheerfully

signs on as Sunny’s new BFF. This leads to the third big issue in Sunny’s life: kissing. Sunny is keen to have her first kiss. The problem is, she doesn’t like any of the boys she knows. When she dreams of that first kiss, Sunny dreams of kissing a girl.

Sunny is deeply reflective on the pain of parental abandonment and the taboo surrounding same-sex attraction, and she expresses her thoughts through song lyrics that she scatters about town. Her journey of self-discovery is authentic, peppered with fear and daring, mistakes and triumphs. This is a lovely novel for young readers who are exploring their own sexual orientations, as it honestly examines both the social risks and the happy potential for self-acceptance and romance.

—Diane Colson

Subscribe to our children’s and YA newsletter for more reviews, interviews and features: bookpage.com/generationread

meet MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER

How would you describe your book?

What is the weirdest thing about you, and why do you love it?

What one thing would you like to learn to do?

Who has been the biggest influence

on your work?

Who was your childhood hero?

A sweet, sewer-dwelling monster finds love and acceptance in Matthew Gray Gubler’s debut picture book, Rumple Buttercup: A Story of Bananas, Belonging, and Being Yourself (Random House, $14.99, 136 pages, 9780525648444, all ages). Gubler is a writer, director, artist and actor who stars in the TV series “Criminal Minds.” Find him on Twitter @GUBLERNATION and Instagram @gublergram.

What message would you like to send to your readers?

31