BookPage August 2015

AMERICA’S BOOK REVIEW

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

THE IN CROWD 4 debut authors on the quest to belong

FOOD & FAMILY A delicious novel from J. Ryan Stradal

LETTING GO New strategies for helicopter parents

PAU L A

McLAIN

The author of The Paris Wife returns with an evocative new historical novel exploring the life of a trailblazing female aviator

AUGUST 2015

PaperbackPicks Obsession in Death

Haunted

Lieutenant Eve Dallas walks the thin line between love and hate as an obsessed murderer stalks her in the fabulous 40th thriller from #1 New York Times bestseller J. D. Robb.

How do you make peace with the dead if the dead aren’t ready to forgive?

In New York Times bestselling author Kay Hooper’s new novel, the answer lies in the twisting shadows of a small Georgia town.

Feature

of the

Month

“SURE TO WOW FANS OF MICHAEL CRICHTON AND JAMES ROLLINS.” — Mark Greaney, bestselling author of Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect

Siren’s Call

The Golem of Hollywood

Krentz returns to her beloved Rainshadow series and the mysterious world of Harmony, a place filled with unexplored marvels and secrets.

In the latest from the two bestselling authors, a burned-out LA detective, a mysterious woman, and a grotesque monster bent on an ancient mission of retribution collide.

No Safe House

The Golden Hour

The New York Times bestselling author delivers the follow-up to No Time for Goodbye — an electrifying novel of suspense in which a family’s troubled past is about to return in more ways than one.

A remarkable thriller debut of twenty-first-century espionage, by a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.

Top Secret In this brand-new series from the bestselling author, a squeaky-clean second lieutenant is recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into the CIA.

Terminal City In the latest Alexandra Cooper novel, New York Times bestselling author Linda Fairstein delivers another breakneck thriller that captures the essence of New York City.

NEW IN HARDCOVER

The latest in James Abel’s thrilling Joe Rush series begins when authorities in Alaska receive a disturbing call from a teenage girl.

Their investigation soon leads them to discover an entire family of researchers dead, and Joe Rush is called to help examine the bodies. On the surface, it looks like a brutal murder-suicide. But the situation is nowhere near that simple—nor is it over.

contents

AUGUST 2015 B O O K PA G E . C O M

features

12

14 JEN HATMAKER

Letting go of the little things

cover story

Paula McLain, best-selling author of The Paris Wife, returns with a lush historical novel set in colonial Kenya.

16 SARA PARETSKY

Meet the author of Brush Back

Settle Into the Sun with These Hot New Romances from Avon Books!

16 JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS

Striking a healthy balance

Cover photo © Photos.com

17 PARENTING

reviews

Giving space, allowing growth

18 BACK TO SCHOOL

A better learning experience

22 FICTION

29 REBECCA STEAD

Growing up in NYC

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

also reviewed:

31 DON BROWN

The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman The Curse of Crow Hollow

by Billy Coffey Crooked by Austin Grossman

Meet the author-illustrator of Drowned City

first fiction

15 J. RYAN STRADAL Family, food, finding your way

20 JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET

26 NONFICTION

Providing a necessary voice

Boss Life by Paul Downs The Trip by Deborah Davis Avenue of Spies by Alex Kershaw

Four fresh faces in fiction

25 STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Manhattan’s young WASPs

columns

top pick:

Voracious by Cara Nicoletti

Katrina by Gary Rivlin Mess by Barry Yourgrau Born on the Bayou by Blaine Lourd

28 TEEN

30 CHILDREN’S

top pick:

top pick:

Enchanted Air

by Margarita Engle

WELL READ LIBRARY READS WHODUNIT ROMANCE AUDIO LIFESTYLES COOKING BOOK CLUBS

Racing the Rain by John L. Parker Jr. We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh How to Be a Grown-Up by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus Two Across by Jeff Bartsch

also reviewed:

21 NEW VOICES

04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

top pick:

also reviewed:

Bright Lights, Dark Nights

by Stephen Emond Court of Fives by Kate Elliott The Accident Season

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer

by Carole Boston Weatherford

also reviewed:

Out of the Woods by Rebecca Bond Appleblossom the Possum

by Holly Goldberg Sloan Chasing Secrets

by Gennifer Choldenko My Brother’s Secret by Dan Smith Terrible Typhoid Mary

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W PUBLISHER Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cat Acree

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Allison Hammond

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

CONTRIBUTOR

ADVERTISING COMMUNICATIONS

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Julia Steele

Lily McLemore

Roger Bishop

EDITOR

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Hilli Levin

Penny Childress

MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

PRODUCTION INTERN

Trisha Ping

Sukey Howard

Sadie Birchfield

Lynn L. Green

Sada Stipe

MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

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.

Only books we highly recommend are featured. Book­Page is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Public libraries and bookstores can purchase BookPage in quantity. For ­information, visit BookPage.com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 34.

Individual sub­scriptions are available for $30 per year.

Send payment to: BookPage Subscriptions 2143 Belcourt Avenue Nashville, TN 37212 Subscriptions are also available on Kindle and NOOK.

ADVERTISING To advertise in print, online or in our e-newsletters, visit BookPage .com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 19.

AvonRomance.com

All material © 2015 ProMotion, inc.

3

columns

From the critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author of

THE RETURNED

“Spellbinding.”

—People

“Lyrically written, thought-provoking and

emotionally searing.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Available now in paperback!

www.MIRABooks.com • www.JasonMottAuthor.com

Shirley Jackson, who died 50 years ago this month at the much too early age of 48, left behind a solid literary opus anchored in two indelible works: the iconic short story “The Lottery” and the classy ghost story novel, The Haunting of Hill House (turned into the equally classy movie chiller, The Haunting, starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom). On the basis of these much-loved works of fiction, we tend to remember Jackson for her dark, if wry, vision, but as a new collection of her previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays and occasional pieces reminds us, she—and her work—were so much more.

Let Me Tell You (Random House, $30, 448 pages, ISBN 9780812997668) collects 29 stories, including 21 that have never before been published, as well as many essays and humor pieces. Yes, humor. Throughout, in both fiction and nonfiction, Jackson displays a wicked, rueful wit that transcends the often disturbing plots of her stories and fuels the deceptively lighthearted angst of her domestic dispatches. The collection opens with “Paranoia,” an engrossing story that, like “The Lottery,” first appeared in The New Yorker. It follows the journey home, from midtown office to downtown apartment, of an unassuming businessman who senses that he is being followed.

Another New Yorker story, “It Isn’t the Money I Mind,” percolates with an indefinable, underlying creepiness as a man—stalker, pervert, pathological liar?—interacts with children in an urban park. Among the stories are eight early ones that offer a rare glimpse into the writer’s nascent genius.

Longtime Jackson fans may be familiar with her hilarious Life Among the Savages, a memoir of controlled domestic chaos. She also wrote about her family for

4 15_291_BookPage_TheWonder.indd 1

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Beyond ‘The Lottery’

jason mott A story of first love, faith and the sacrifices we make for those we love.

WELL READ

2015-06-18 3:26 PM

women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping and McCall’s, and Let Me Tell You features some of these previously uncollected pieces. Some are surreal—in “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again,” the cutlery and kitchen gadgets take on unspoken rivalries—while others, such as “Questions I Wish I’d Never Asked,” are just plain funny as the convoluted conversations of everyday life unfold.

Jackson’s purview is broad, and she writes here about writing, about clowns, about herbal remedies, about Dr. Seuss (“I am mortally afraid of offending Dr. Seuss,” she writes. “If I did . . . I might find myself being pursued by a Sneetch or a Vroom or a Collapsible Frink”).

Jackson strikes a chord with book reviewers everywhere (and those who cohabitate with them) New pieces when she showcase the writes of being many talents married to a of a writer critic: “That’s best known for the reviewer’s problem, her unsettling wife’s the books. fiction.

Whether she sells them or whether she sends them to the library or whether she gives them to her kid sister, they pile up in the bookcases, in packing boxes, in the corners of the living room, all incredibly pathetic in their bright shiny dust jackets.”

Two of Jackson’s children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, put together Let Me Tell You, largely from the archives of her work housed in the Library of Congress. They have even included some whimsical, stick figure-like drawings found among her papers. Whether it is your first encounter with this wholly original writer since reading “The Lottery” in middle school or you are thrilled to discover this “new” output from a writer you’ve long admired, this collection is a delight.

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

#1

BEST BOY by Eli Gottlieb

Liveright, $24.95, ISBN 9781631490477

An autistic man who has spent years in an institution dreams of returning to his childhood home in Gottlieb’s affecting fourth novel.

Summer’s Hottest

Thrillers

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST by Louise Penny

Minotaur, $27.99, ISBN 9781250022080 When a 9-year-old boy known for crying wolf disappears, the villagers of Three Pines are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true.

A WINDOW OPENS by Elisabeth Egan

Simon & Schuster, $26, ISBN 9781501105432 After a dedicated book lover takes a new job with a digital reading startup, she finds her marriage, children and friendships must take second place.

THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES by Alice Hoffman

Simon & Schuster, $27.99, ISBN 9781451693591 The latest from Hoffman is an exotic love story set on St. Thomas, where a dreamy young woman gives birth to one of the fathers of Impressionism. Read our review on page 23.

EVERYBODY RISE by Stephanie Clifford

St. Martin’s, $26.99, ISBN 9781250077172 A young woman finds herself changing in order to win clients among Manhattan’s rich and beautiful in this modern-day Bonfire of the Vanities. Read our review on page 21.

THE FALL OF PRINCES by Robert Goolrick

Algonquin, $25.95, ISBN 9781616204204 The author of A Reliable Wife switches gears to cover the excess and hedonism of 1980s Wall Street in this story of fortune and regret.

IN A DARK, DARK WOOD by Ruth Ware

Scout Press, $26, ISBN 9781501112317 In this atmospheric and suspenseful debut, a British woman reluctantly attends a hen night for a long-lost friend and discovers some secrets can’t stay buried.

BLACK-EYED SUSANS by Julia Heaberlin

Ballantine, $26, ISBN 9780804177993 Years after barely escaping a serial killer, Tessa Cartwright realizes that she may have sent the wrong person to prison in this gripping psychological thriller.

LORD OF THE WINGS by Donna Andrews

Minotaur, $25.99, ISBN 9781250049582 In her 19th Meg Langslow mystery, best-selling author Andrews serves up another dose of mystery—and laughter—as Langslow attempts to save Halloween in Caerphilly, Virginia.

Get your copies today, wherever books are sold.

BROWSINGS by Michael Dirda

Pegasus, $24.95, ISBN 9781605988443 Longtime Washington Post book reviewer Dirda has included some of his best essays on the literary life in this vibrant collection.

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

Visit BookClubbish.com to discover sneak peeks, author news and more!

5 15_249_BookPage_Thrillers_Yellow.indd 1

2015-06-29 9:34 AM

columns

WHODUNIT

BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Bright Bangkok lights and bionic men Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a Bangkok cop, a devout Buddhist, a former monk and part owner of a bar/brothel catering to the jaded tastes of the farang visitors to Asia’s sin city. He straddles a fine karmic line, usually seeking the high road (and occasionally finding it) amid Bangkok’s rampant corruption.

John Burdett’s sixth Bangkok thriller, The Bangkok Asset (Knopf, $25.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9780307272683), finds the conflicted detective investigating rumors of a CIA-funded “superman,” a sort of bionic man gifted with superhuman strength and speed. Sonchai’s boss, the deliciously crooked Inspector Vikorn, provides only the barest minimum of intelligence data. Joining Sonchai is the winsome Inspector Krom,

every bit an outsider as he is but without a doubt smoother around the edges. Together they journey to a remote jungle location in Cambodia, said to be a secret American compound for ex-soldiers who want to be—or need to be—off the grid, for reasons thus far undisclosed. The action is pretty much nonstop, and the characters continue to grow in complexity with

each passing book. This is another atmospheric and suspenseful installment in one of the finest

Fool’s Gold: Come Home to Love, Laughter, and Happily-Ever-After

contemporary mystery series.

SNOW FALLING ON BODIES Yorkshire Inspector Alan Banks is back, ably assisted by detectives Annie Cabbot and Winsome Jackman, in Peter Robinson’s gripping new thriller, In the Dark Places (Morrow, $25.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780062240545). It’s winter in England’s north country; snow is falling, and highway accidents are rising.

One crash in particular has captured the attention of the constabulary.

Although there are two victims, only one was killed in the impact; the other had been dead for some time, chopped up and bagged for disposal at a meatpacking plant. How does this relate to the theft of a pricey tractor or to the bloodstains found on the concrete floor of a nearby disused airplane hangar? Before these questions can be answered, the body count starts to multiply, and sleepy Yorkshire becomes carnage central. Banks plays a less pivotal role as center stage goes instead to Cabbot and Jackman, with strong support from the rest of the department staff. This is nicely done and guaranteed to send new fans to Robinson’s back catalog, which now numbers more than 20.

THE NEW WILD WEST

AVAILABLE IN PRINT AND EBOOK. www.HQNBooks.com

6

15_196_BookPage_HoldMe.indd 1

In the small town of Grimstad, North Dakota, 12-year-old Kyle Westergaard has long been written off as “slow”—not in any way disabled, but perhaps not the first boxcar across the bridge. He blends in as inoffensive background noise, unseen and unheard, and it’s precisely because of his unobtrusiveness that he’s able to retrieve a small bundle from an accident scene—a package that turns out to be stuffed full of banknotes and baggies of unidentified white powder. Grimstad has turned into something of a 2015-06-24 10:05 AM

boomtown, with the discovery of oil bringing with it a host of bigcity issues, the aforementioned white powder among them. Kyle is on a collision course with detective Cassie Dewell, a recent addition to the Grimstad Sheriff’s Department. Badlands (Minotaur, $26.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780312583217) marks Dewell’s second appearance following 2013’s The Highway. It’s an Old West tale for the modern era, and the woman wearing the badge may be seriously out of her depth—or maybe not. C.J. Box’s latest thriller burnishes his reputation as the dean of contemporary Western suspense.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY I made the erroneous assumption that Vietnam-born Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish (Norton, $26.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780393077803), would be set in an exotic Southeast Asian locale, and I was a tiny bit disappointed to find that the exotic locales would be Oakland, California, and Las Vegas.

But I quickly forgot my disappointment after discovering that Tran’s characters are a motley crew equal to anything ever dreamed up by Elmore Leonard or James Crumley.

Robert is a cop and an abusive ex-husband, divorced from enigmatic Suzy, a Vietnamese refugee.

Suzy has remarried, this time to an equally abusive Vietnamese-American crook named Sonny. Now Suzy has disappeared, and Sonny wants Robert to find her. Understandably, Robert is reluctant to perform this service, but Sonny can be very persuasive—and not in a good way. Robert soon discovers he might as well be chasing smoke, for Suzy’s entire existence is shrouded in mystery the likes of which he has never known as a cop, and never suspected throughout the arc of their marriage. If you like your suspense with a literary edge, as with Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, look no further than Dragonfish.

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

A fiery affair Two people discover themselves—and each other—in the vastly entertaining Taking the Heat (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373779703), the latest book in Victoria Dahl’s Girls’ Night Out series. Disappointed by big-city life, Veronica Chandler left Manhattan for her hometown of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she’s found job satisfaction as a popular advice

marry the new Earl of Thornwick, a man known for flouting society’s rules. It’s that very trait that got Harrison Thornwick into trouble.

Although dueling is illegal, he defended his honor and is now being blackmailed by the Prince into marrying Angelina. But as the two come to know each other, their attraction is palpable. Harrison is no longer a reluctant groom-to-be and works to convince Angelina to wed columnist at the local paper. him—even when her handsome, Although she feels like a fraud wounded soldier arrives on the doling out advice on sex and living scene. Angelina and Harrison are a a better life when she has her own delightful duo in this very charmtroubles and no sex life whatsoever, ing story. she puts up a confident front. Then TOP PICK IN ROMANCE librarian Gabe MacKenzie enters J.R. Ward kicks off a new conher life. Veronica can’t quite believe temporary series with The Bourthe sexy guy who loves books and bon Kings (NAL, $27.95, 432 pages, rock-climbing thinks she’s hot, ISBN 9780451475268), a rich saga but she finds herself unable to about the Bradford family, whose resist him. Gabe works hard to get beyond Veronica’s defenses, and he massive wealth comes from their bourbon business. Their magniflikes the exuberant and refreshing icent Louisville estate, Easterly, is woman he finds there. He’s falling fast, but a family emergency threat- the family home—and the center of all the family’s secrets. Lane, one ens their burgeoning relationship.

Spicy love scenes scorch the pages, of the Bradford sons, returns to Kentucky after a two-year absence and readers will root for this pair of appealing lovers who deserve to and is immediately enmeshed in domestic drama, which includes find true romance. running into Lizzie King, the BLACKMAILED BRIDE estate’s head horticulturist and the In Regency London, a young lady woman he loved and lost. Lizzie’s learns the difference between fanheart aches at the sight of him, but tasy and love in The Earl Claims a there’s no way she will get involved again with a man who is so out of Bride (St. Martin’s, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9781250042217) by Amelia her league. Their passion reignites, Grey, part of the Heirs’ Club series. however, and Lane is unwilling to let her go a second time. But busiAngelina Rule awaits her first Season dreaming about the dashing ness problems and family dynamics are heating up too, putting Lane Army officer she’s met a handful and Lizzie right in the middle of a of times—a man she expects will menacing storm. Ward has offered return from India and profess his up an engrossing read peppered love. However, before this can happen, she learns that her father with danger and glimpses into an has gambled away his fortune, and intriguing world of privilege and the family’s only hope is for her to pleasure.

Summer’s Hottest

Fiction

Get your copies today, wherever books are sold.

Visit BookClubbish.com to discover sneak peeks, author news and more!

15_251_BookPage_Fiction_Yellow.indd 1

7 2015-06-29 9:34 AM

Dive into Audiobooks! from Macmillan Audio “Orlagh Cassidy provides the perfect voices for this fascinating story.”

—AUDIOFILE ON DRIVING WITH THE TOP DOWN, WINNER OF ITS BEST VOICE AWARD

Read by Orlagh Cassidy

columns The rich are different Kevin Kwan has done it again, and it’s even more deliciously outrageous than Crazy Rich Asians, his first foray into dissecting the money-fueled madness and secretive snobbishness of the wealthy Singapore Chinese. Many of the same Rolls Royce-driving, couture-clad characters—plus the top one percent of Shanghai’s

“Nicola Barber’s narration enhances a fine historical.”

—Library Journal on The Ashford Affair

Read by Nicola Barber

“Stephanie Clifford is a 21st century Edith Wharton.”

—J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author

Read by Katherine Kellgren

Edgar Award winning author C.J. Box is back with a masterpiece of suspense

“Polly Stone’s delivery of Sarah's story is riveting.”

—AudioFile on Sarah’s Key

Read by Simon Vance & Polly Stone

8

gilded one percent—show up in the sequel, China Rich Girlfriend (Random House Audio, $50, 15 hours, ISBN 9780553551907). Narrated by Lydia Look, the soap bubbles of their operatic lives make for super summer listening. This time, Kwan’s keen social scalpel reveals the ultra-rich of mainland China: newer than nouveau riche, richer than Croesus, so over the top and power-mad that they make the jaded, older-moneyed Singporeans look downright dowdy. It makes one wonder whether this ­sybaritic-excess-on-steroids would have Chairman Mao turning in his grave or proclaiming, “Let a hundred billionaires bloom!”

MY BRILLIANT ELENA

Read by January LaVoy

AUDIO

BY SUKEY HOWARD

As critical acclaim for Elena Ferrante’s novels grows and her audience with it, so grows the intense curiosity about who this pseudonymous, determinedly elusive author really is. All we know for sure is that she’s from Naples, Italy.

For me, that’s enough. The books speak for themselves, as Ferrante wants them to do. My Brilliant Friend (Blackstone Audio, $34.95, 12.5 hours, ISBN 9781483080741), book one of her Neapolitan novels, gracefully performed by Hillary Huber, is told in the first person

by Elena Greco, now in her 60s, looking back at her childhood and adolescence in a poor, often violent Camorra-shadowed neighborhood of Naples. Elena meets Lila

Cerullo in first grade, and they become lifelong friends.

Both girls are outstandingly bright, but Lila has a fierce independence unlike anyone else. An extraordinary, unwaveringly honest portrait of a friendship unfolds, in which clashes, rivalries, jealousies and different paths taken—Elena goes on to high school, Lila gets married at 16—are all overridden by strong affection.

It is, too, Elena’s coming-of-age story, a sharply perceived interior journey that will take her beyond the neighborhood and its narrow expectations.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO At first glance (remember the adage about a book and its cover), Peter Nichols’ cleverly crafted second novel, The Rocks (Penguin Audio, $45, 15 hours, ISBN 9781611764185), may look like a sun-drenched mélange of sex, partying and expats cavorting on the picturesque Spanish island of Mallorca. But you’ll discover this story is something entirely different in its unusual opening section, when 80-something Lulu bumps into Gerald, the Brit she married and divorced long ago and has avoided for the half-century they’ve both lived in the same part of Mallorca.

Their decades-old enmity flares, and a tussle tumbles both into the sea. Moving back in time from that 2005 tragedy to the 1940s, Nichols draws us seamlessly from present to past, from Lulu and Gerald’s Aegean honeymoon disaster to its impact on the lives and loves of Luc and Aegina, their two biologically unrelated, but intricately connected, children. Steve West’s mindful reading captures the knotty texture of romance, longing and star-crossed desire.

LIFESTYLES

BY JOANNA BRICHETTO

Master your manners Do we really need another book about manners? Yes! Especially when the writing is wonderfully funny and the content is so extremely useful. Just by reading the title—The Tricky Art of Co-­ Existing: How to Behave Decently No Matter What Life Throws Your Way (The Experiment, $14.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9781615192212)—we

know we’re in the hands of an author who possesses the magic touch of turning platitudes into golden prose. Sandi Toksvig marshals her talents as a comedian, actress, mother, university chancellor and radio and television producer to help you tackle any social situation. There is a sweetly orientating introduction—please note the British usage, in keeping with the author’s national heritage—followed by 11 chapters on everything from living with roommates, breaking up, navigating the dinner table or the workplace and dealing with strangers to handling insufferable relatives, raising children and lowering coffins. Social situations used to be fraught with potential flops; not anymore, thanks to Toksvig, whom the Guardian has called “a national treasure.”

WE ALL CHEER FOR BEER Authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Bukowski sang the praises of that great miracle of human innovation—the gleaming pint of beer.

When so much famous praise has been lavished upon the juice of grain and yeast and hop, we are justified in embracing the blasphemous title of the The Beer Bible (Workman, $19.95, 656 pages, ISBN 9780761168119). Author Jeff Alworth has an impressive track record as a leading exponent of the

global craft beer movement. With his blog, Beer­vana, Alworth has established himself as the go-to expert on every question about beer’s history, production, diversity and aesthetics.

In this tour of ales, he leads readers through the origins and characteristics of hearty wheat beers, smooth lagers and fruity lambics with notes on home brewing and tips on pairing beer with food. Concluding with a guide to beer tourism, this tome will educate and leave you thirsty for a cold one.

Summer’s Hottest

Historicals

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES How does someone get knighted by the Queen of England for “services to design”? Just pick up Conran on Color (Octopus, $34.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9781840916850) to discover a spectrum of answers. Terence Conran’s book is starkly simple: After an opening chapter on the science of color (and its pragmatic applications), each subsequent chapter focuses on a single hue and its range of variants. For example, Conran explains how the intrinsic calming emotional qualities of blue can be put to best and most mindful service in our interior spaces for living and working. Each primary color is thoughtfully explored, with additional chapters on “Naturals” and “Neutrals,” and advice on how to successfully mix and match colors in each room—both with wall colors and accessories. Nothing is black and white for Conran, even when black or white. Everything demands careful consideration.

That’s how Conran got knighted by the Queen. I only wish this American edition had preserved the British spelling; it’s the only thing that’s off-colour in this lovely book.

Get your copies today, wherever books are sold.

Visit BookClubbish.com to discover sneak peeks, author news and more!

15_250_BookPage_Historicals.indd 1

9 2015-06-29 9:34 AM

IT’S A WIN-WIN “[A] beautiful book full of recipes that fit a food stamp budget.”

—@michaelpollan

Katie Workman is a culinary problem solver and a peerless kitchen strategist. Her debut, The Mom 100 Cookbook, took the fear, frenzy and frustration out of making meals the whole family could enjoy without the aid of a short-order cook. Now, she’s done it again with Dinner Solved!

(Workman, $17.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9780761181873), using her signa-

will be donated to a person or family in need.

Donated copies will be distributed through food

GRILLING À LA FRANÇAISE

—Food & Wine

YOU BUY, WE GIVE. For every copy of Good & Cheap purchased, a free copy

charities, nonprofits, and other organizations.

Created for everyone on a tight budget—the benchmark is the $4-a-day food stamp budget— Good & Cheap shows that kitchen skill and the right recipes are the keys to cooking delicious, nutritious, appealing meals.

WORKMAN is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.

COOKING

BY SYBIL PRATT

A dinnertime diva

ture “Fork in the Road” concept for modifying recipes to fit every eater’s food fancies. At some point in the prep, a dish can be divided: Silky Butternut Squash Soup can stay its lovely self or acquire an Indian accent by adding Tikka Masala Spice; skip the sesame oil and ginger in the Japanese Salmon Burgers and serve them plain; turn Vegetable Lo Mein into Chicken Lo Mein; give Honey-Glazed Carrots a soy sauce zing or not; layer a classic Potato Gratin with blue cheese and leeks to create something really special. And that’s just for starters. Workman includes lots of info on ingredients and equipment, make-ahead advice, kid-appropriate tasks within each recipe, vegan options and more.

Dinner is solved, the cook is salved and everyone gets a great meal.

“Full of delicious recipes; it will bring good, cheap meals to those who need them most.”

10

columns

There’s no downside to adding a little savoir faire and Gallic flair to your grilling repertoire, and Karen Adler and Judith Fertig’s latest, BBQ Bistro: Simple, Sophisticated French Recipes for Your Grill (Running Press, $20, 224 pages, ISBN 9780762454549), is all you’ll need to do it. Many of the casual, quickly prepared dishes that star in French bistro cooking are fabulously suited to the grill. Nothing is lost in translation and something may even be gained. Sear thin Lemon-Tarragon Vinaigrette-mar-

inated chicken paillards on a hot grill to savor a new version of a classic. Serve quick-grilled salmon fillets with a slather of Dijon Mustard-Mayonnaise or Grilled Lamb Steak with a minty Sauce Paloise and Provençal Grill-Roasted Tomatoes.

Salads, sandwiches and super sides, like Grilled Ratatouille, are delicious with a little char, as is Grilled Pêche Melba.

Heed the helpful headers, sidebars, the many tips that transcend nationality and, voilà, your grill can become a mini-bistro.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS How did a kid from New Jersey (not exactly an iconic region for BBQ) manage to create a “highly personal, untethered, mongrel style” that has become known as “Brooklyn barbecue,” making that ever-trendy part of NYC a new ’cue region? The answer can be found in Joe Carroll and Nick Fauchald’s Feeding the Fire: Recipes and Strategies for Better Barbecue and Grilling (Artisan, $29.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9781579655570), a real game-changer. Carroll, who taught himself to cook on his parents’ backyard grill by trial and error, shares his live-fire cooking philosophy in 20 straightforward lessons that offer an in-depth understanding of how smoke, fire and ingredients interact. He warns that to achieve “barbecue nirvana,” you need to use the highest quality meat, fish or vegetables—and choose the right wood. His recipes, whether for Pulled Pork Shoulder, Beer-Marinated Rump Steaks, Chicken Spiedies, Grilled Diver Scallops, Grilled Romaine Salad or his trademark Dry Rub (you’ll never need another) are truly home-cook-friendly. Go ahead— play with fire!

BOOK CLUBS

BY JULIE HALE

Then comes marriage In The Rosie Effect (Simon & Schuster, $15.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9781476767321), Graeme Simsion continues the funny, touching adventures of Don Tillman, the geneticist from Down Under introduced in the 2013 bestseller The Rosie Project. In that novel, Tillman, who has Asperger’s syndrome, sought a wife via the scientific method.

Having succeeded (and married medical student Rosie Jarman), he now braces himself for an addition to the family. Yes, Rosie is pregnant, and that changes everything for the couple, now living in New York City. Don panics and begins what he calls The Baby Project, which involves complex planning— plotting Rosie’s meals, inventing baby gear and other daddy-to-be madness. Rosie, meanwhile, finds his preparations disturbing rather than comforting. To complicate matters, Don’s best friend, Gene, arrives from Australia. Gene has left his wife, Claudia, thus creating another project for Don: reuniting the couple. Simsion offers a second winning entry in the Rosie series with a story that’s bound to have broad appeal. An intelligent, funny romantic comedy, his latest will satisfy old fans and win over new ones.

BACK HOME IN MITFORD Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good (Berkley, $16, 576 pages, ISBN 9780425276211), Jan Karon’s newest Mitford novel (her 10th, to be exact), is another heartwarming story of Father Tim and the North Carolina community millions of readers have come to love. Five years into retirement, Father Tim is discovering that life without work isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Returning to Mitford after a trip to Ireland with his wife,

Cynthia, he finds himself at loose ends and considering a return to the ministry. Meanwhile, Dooley, his adopted son, is grappling with his own life issues. He loves Lace Turner and hopes to prosper as a veterinarian. Other familiar characters make a return in this volume, including Dooley’s brother, Sammy, forever scarred thanks to an absent mother, and Hope Murphy, proprietress of the Happy Endings Bookstore, who may face tragedy with her unborn baby. With her usual skill, Karon spins multiple storylines into a compelling narrative. There’s much to savor in this feel-good story of small-town Southern life. It’s sure to make Mitford enthusiasts—and there are many—smile.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Anita Diamant, the beloved author of The Red Tent, returns with another absorbing historical novel.

In The Boston Girl (Scribner, $16, 336 pages, ISBN 9781439199367), heroine Addie Baum recounts the remarkable story of her life to her 22-year-old granddaughter. Addie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, was born in 1900 in Boston. Along with her two sisters, she grew up in a cramped tenement in the North End, a melting pot of a neighborhood that sparked her curiosity about the larger world. Over the course of her long life, she witnesses wars, experiences heartbreak and comes into her own as a woman. With wisdom to match her years, a sharp wit and a penchant for barbed humor, Addie makes a captivating narrator. Diamant’s prodigious narrative powers are on full display here. Readers will love this generation-spanning chronicle and the spirited character who stands at its center.

Sizzling

Book Club Reads for Summer Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade “Peers unflinchingly into a littleknown chapter of America’s history, an orphanage where innocent children are experimented upon in the name of science… will leave you breathless, eager to turn each page, until you reach its dramatic and utterly beautiful ending.”

—Dolen Perkins Valdez, author of Balm and Wench

Stepdog

by Nicole Galland Galland has a deft touch in illustrating the inherent difficulties in creating a blended family, especially when one of them is a dog.

Stepdog is pure genius.”

—Susan Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of The Dog Who Saved Me and One Good Dog

The Invisibles

by Cecilia Galante

“Gripping and heartrending, The Invisibles will—warning!—keep you up into the wee hours, hungry for just one more page.”

—Meg Donohue, USA Today bestselling author of All the Summer Girls and Dog Crazy

A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

“A story about the bonds of friendship and family; how they are made, broken, and come full circle. Diana Bletter writes with such lush and insightful prose.”

—Amy Sue Nathan, author of The Glass Wives

@Morrow_PB

@bookclubgirl

William Morrow

Book Club Girl

11

cover story

PAULA McLAIN

Finding a personal connection in the life of a daring pioneer

W

hen her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.

The feeling, McLain says, is “of being in a deep-sea diving bell. You go down, down, down until you hear those pings coming off the ocean floor. You’re not reachable.

You’re not conscious of time passing. Whole hours disappear and you’re completely absorbed.”

That was the opposite of what McLain was feeling a few years ago when her brother-in-law, a doctor and pilot, forced upon her a copy of West with the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham, the British-born Kenyan bush pilot who, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. At that time McLain was writing a historical novel about Marie Curie. It wasn’t working.

When she wrote The Paris Wife, McLain had felt a deep connection to Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, that allowed her “to believe absolutely, unequivocally that I understood her enough that I could follow her down a rabbit hole to Paris in 1922. But with Marie it was like being kicked out of heaven every single day of the writing.”

CIRCLING THE SUN

By Paula McLain

Ballantine, $28, 384 pages ISBN 9780345534187, audio, eBook available

HISTORICAL FICTION

12

© NINA SUBIN

BY ALDEN MUDGE

The Markham memoir sat on McLain’s bookshelf unread while she suffered. “Then one day when I was in the midst of despair, I picked it up and read one paragraph about her African childhood and thought: What have I been doing!” says McLain, who, when excited, speaks in a headlong rush.

“There was nothing subtle about it. I just knew I was going to write about her. In fact I wrote my agent that day and said, I’m ditching the Marie Curie book and writing about Beryl Markham. And she’s like, oh, please let’s not tell Random House. So for months and months I had to lie to my editor, I had to lie to my publisher. How are things going? Still working, still working. And, meanwhile, I was just lighting up the African bush in my imagination, writing really fast and having a really good time.” McLain finished a near-final draft of Circling the Sun, her novel about Markham, in five months.

In addition to being an aviation pioneer, Markham was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. Her mother moved home to England when Markham was very young, and she grew up a wild child, running with the native Kipsigis children while her father built up his farm and stable of racing horses. As a young woman she was unusually tall and strikingly attractive. She was thrice married, unhappily, beginning at age 16.

Because of her beauty, independence and adventurousness, she was a magnet for rumors about her romantic life, some of them undoubtedly true. Even today, almost 30 years after her death at age 83, Markham remains a subject of salacious gossip, as McLain discovered during a recent research trip to Kenya.

Writing a convincing, memorable novel about Markham and

the society of that era in Kenya, as she has done in Circling the Sun, presented McLain with a host of challenges.

First off was the fact the Markham had already told her own story in West with the Night.

Re-reading the memoir and comparing it to biographies of Markham, McLain began to notice that “Beryl was very, very selective in what she chose to tell.”

“I picked it McLain examup and read ined the gaps one pararaph and “thought, oh my god! This about her is a woman on African the run. This is childhood and a sphinx. This thought: What is a woman like Ernest Hemhave I been ingway in A doing!”

Moveable Feast who leaves all the pertinent stuff out. There are almost no women here. She doesn’t talk about her friendship with Karen Blixen. She uses a kind of dazzle camouflage. I wanted to figure out what created the engine of her psyche. I wondered, how does a person like Beryl get made.”

So Circling the Sun became a coming-of-age story that explored the emotional complexity of Markham’s personal and romantic life. The transatlantic flight bookends the novel as a near-death experience that permits Markham to acknowledge some difficult truths about her life. “Someone like Beryl would actually need to be at the verge of death in order to confess some of this stuff,” McLain explains.

McLain feels the reason she was able to write so vividly about Markham’s childhood is her deep

sense of connection with her heroine. Like Markham, McLain and her sisters, who grew up in Fresno, California, were abandoned by their mother at an early age, a subject she wrote about in the 2003 memoir Like Family. “I believed I knew something about the wildness she was talking about. I felt I knew what it was like to be let loose to explore that really difficult world.”

Some of the best scenes in the novel are the horseracing scenes, where Markham proves herself in a male-dominated world. Here too, McLain attributes the success of these scenes to her connectedness with Markham. “I grew up sort of the way Beryl did, meaning that from childhood I was super physical with horses. Like saddling up the pony and launching over the landscape with my sisters and not coming back until dinnertime.

I understand Beryl’s attachment to the physical animal and that sense of freedom, of flying along in an untethered, unbounded way.”

Developing the details of other sections of the novel—colonial and native life in Kenya during the early years of the 20th century, for example—McLain employed a sort of just-in-time research, gathering facts just ahead of composing the next section of her novel. Her biggest challenge, she says, was sorting through all the conflicting accounts and gossip about Markham’s life, especially her love life. “I had to let some of this stuff

YOUR SUMMER GUIDE TO GREAT READS go,” she says, laughing. “It’s provocative, it’s scintillating, but I’m not writing Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Instead, the novel concentrates on dramatizing Markham’s most important relationships: her complex lifelong friendship with a Kenyan man named Ruta, the circumstances of her three unsatisfying marriages; and her emotionally fraught affair with the love of her life, pilot and hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton, who was at the same time in a relationship with her friend Karen Blixen, author of the memoir Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen.

Movie fans will remember Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Blixen and Robert Redford’s portrayal of Finch Hatton in the film Out of Africa.

McLain admits, laughing, that it was impossible for her not to picture Redford as she wrote about this relationship.

“It’s my favorite movie. All I have to do is watch two minutes in the middle of the night, and I’m reduced to tears. But I had to dismember and complicate it to tell my story. I know that there will be readers who will be really ticked with me for doing that. But telling the true story doesn’t mean that Denys and Karen didn’t really love each other. It just means that they were really, really intricate people.”

McLain pauses and shifts subjects to say that, in her view, Markham was sustained throughout her life by a warrior spirit she developed as a child. When her life went off the rails, as it did in many of her romantic relationships, it was because “she crosses her own lines and loses herself. She loses the connection with her personal power that came from that early childhood identity.”

Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. “You know, there’s a line at the end of my book that goes, ‘This time with D ­ enys would fade, and it would last forever.’ That’s something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don’t get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That’s an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.”

“A smartly optimistic romantic comedy.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A luminous Revolutionary War novel.”

—Vogue

“A knockout debut.”

—Wall Street Journal

“Book groups will dig into this novel.”

—Booklist

“Absorbing.”

“I dare anyone to resist this wonderful novel.”

—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

—Publishers Weekly

a no vel

Th e

S t o ry “A taut, suspenseful page-turner with depth and heart.”

—Boston Globe

Hou r T h r it y Um r i g a r B E S T S E L L I N G A U T H O R O F T H E S PA C E B E T W E E N U S

@harperperennial Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com

13

interviews

JEN HATMAKER B Y K E L LY B L E W E T T

Letting ourselves off the hook

J

en Hatmaker has earned a devoted following by writing with humor and heart about mothering five children in Austin, Texas, a city she calls the home of the hipsters. In her latest book, For the Love, the popular Christian writer and star of HGTV’s “My Big Family Renovation” encourages readers to embrace imperfection.

You write that as you look at young women today, you see a generation “on the hook.” What do you mean by this?

We are tough on one another, starting with ourselves. Despite our culture of empowerment and freedom, most women feel really wobbly about how they are doing.

Consequently, the self-critical person becomes others-critical.

We “love” people the way we “love” ourselves, and if we are not good enough, then no one can be. We keep ourselves brutally on the hook, plus our husbands, our kids, our friends, our churches, our leaders, anyone “other.” I think we can do better than this.

What does radical grace look like for someone feeling the weight of impossible standards?

I think I spent too much time in my earlier days of leadership trying to “fix” us all. If we could simply focus on x, y and z, then we would discover that elusive peace. At this point in my life, and particularly in For the Love, I spend way less time

FOR THE LOVE

By Jen Hatmaker

Thomas Nelson, $22.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780718031824, audio, eBook available

CHRISTIAN LIFE

14

pushing people toward change and far more time assuring them they are already OK. Life is not waiting for better-crafted people to step into some future place of significance. We already matter and we already count, and we have these beautiful lives in front of us waiting to be lived today.

People often talk about searching for their “calling” from God, but you write that this idea is limited and misleading. What do you think is a better approach?

“Calling” is such a loaded concept.

It evokes images of world-changing purposes and complicated (but admirable) job descriptions. It diminishes what most of us will enjoy: simple, quiet lives where we work hard and love our people and do the very best with what we’ve been given. I believe every woman has access to full meaning and purpose exactly how and where she is today, because ultimately the building blocks of significance include everyday accessible treasures like love, connection, generosity and hospitality.

You care about loving others well.

What are some ways to do that?

In my faith, my primary marching orders are simple: Love God and love people. That’s basically it. So I take this super seriously because evidently it’s at least 50 percent of my whole life’s substance. I guess my basic definition of loving others involves practices that actually feel like love: affirmation, compassion, a cheese-based casserole when someone has a baby, a last-minute invite for chili and cornbread, a kind word, noticing someone.

Super basic stuff, but it requires getting out of our own heads and sometimes out of our own houses for the glorious risk of connecting.

Loneliness does not have to be a prison; we have too many keys.

Your love of food and the act of coming together with people and eating come through so clearly in For the Love. Why do you think food and friendship go together so well?

A shared table is the most common expression of hospitality in every culture on earth.

There is something timeless and universal about sharing a meal with friends and neighbors. In Spain, a perfect stranger we met in the market invited us to dinner at his house, as if it was the most natural, obvious response to a lovely conversation with visiting Americans. If we aren’t sure how to connect with folks, a burger on the grill and corn on the cob is a good starting place. I am obsessed with the goodness that begins around the table together. It is the starting place for almost every good memory I have.

You talk about the importance of listening to those whose stories are often ignored, like teenagers and those whose experiences are outside of the majority. Why is listening so powerful and necessary?

My basic approach is this: Whenever two people (or groups or cultures or tribes) combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. The dominant majority usually has no concept of their privileges, preconceived ideas, inherent bias or emotional advantages. The powerless or minority voices are typically silenced because they can be, with little to no effect on the majority experience. The path through equality, justice and empowerment has always begun when someone with power began to humbly listen to the minority perspective.

How do we listen well?

There is an enormous difference between listening to understand and listening to craft a rebuttal.

When we sit across from another human being, we let each other off the hook when our only objective is to connect and understand the other person. This is harder than it sounds because our instinct is to fix, advise, disprove or hijack the conversation, but most of us just want to be heard and loved.

Full stop. It is quite powerful to look into someone’s eyes and bear witness to their story.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

I hope readers close the last page and breathe an enormous sigh of relief. I hope they laugh out loud because they just got free. Then I hope they look with fresh, renewed eyes at all their people—the ones they married, those they birthed, the ones on their street and in church and at work and around the world—and they are released to love them as though it’s their job.

Maybe we can lay down our fear and criticism, self-directed and otherwise. We don’t have to be saviors and critics for each other; we’re probably better as loved people beside one another. We aren’t good gods, but we can be really, really good humans.

J. RYAN STRADAL

A mouthwatering Midwestern debut

N

ovelist J. Ryan Stradal spent months working on his vibrant first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, without ever knowing if anything would come of it.

“You spend a lot of time alone in a room thinking, I don’t know who’s going to read this. No one might care,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “But it’s just what I wanted to do. If someone said, Tell me your perfect day, I would say, I wake up with an idea in my head and I write it. Then I go out with friends around 7:00 for fish and chips.”

Set in Midwest kitchens in and around the Twin Cities—a region that Stradal, a native of Hastings, Minnesota, knows well—Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a masterfully woven set of stories that all connect, in some way, to the lovely and slightly mysterious Eva Thorvald. Eva’s mother abandoned her as an infant, after deciding she wasn’t ready to be a parent.

“I wasn’t cut out to be a mother,” she writes in the note she leaves behind. “The work of being a mom feels like prison to me.”

Soon after, Eva’s doting father, a chef, suffers a massive heart attack, leaving his daughter to be raised in poverty by her kindhearted but alcoholic uncle and overworked aunt.

KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST

By J. Ryan Stradal

Pamela Dorman, $25, 320 pages ISBN 9780525429142, audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

The few food experiences her father imparted in her before his death stick with Eva—or maybe cooking is just in her DNA. She grows to be a wunderkind chef, starting as a child by cultivating searing-hot peppers under grow lamps and selling them to local restaurants. The adult Eva becomes famous for hosting legendary popup restaurant meals with A legendary years-long Minnesota waiting lists, chef confronts inspired by her participation the long-lost in a Sunday mother who supper club. abandoned When her her. mother reappears years later at one of Eva’s pop-up restaurants, Eva is faced with her past—and must decide whether her mother can be part of her future.

“Eva, to me, feels like the person I want to be,” says Stradal. “Eva was decisive at points in her life where I felt a lot of us weren’t decisive.

The trauma of her childhood made her grow a thicker skin. The vicissitudes of youth, like being attracted to a douche-bag guy—that happens to everyone in their 20s!

It was all something she worked through and ultimately assembled a family of choice. You see that a lot in places like LA, where we’re far from where we came from. Eva’s sort of a personification of that.”

That’s not to say that Stradal has shallow family roots like Eva. In fact, he credits his mother, who died a decade ago, with giving him the desire to write.

“Our house was filled with books,” he says. “She was one of the few voracious readers I knew.

From a young age, I got the idea from her that the most important thing you could do was write a novel. It was the pinnacle of human achievement. The process of writing this book was like having

a conversation with her every day. It really felt good.”

While his childhood was filled with books, it was not filled with gourmet cuisine. A child of the 1970s and ’80s, he recalls frozen dinners and a local soda he calls “basically suicide in a can.”

“I definitely find myself engaged by the evolution of food consciousness in my life,” he says. “Since 1975, when I was born, it’s stark.

I remember the microwave came out and my parents said, this is great! It took such a turn in the 1970s and 1980s toward convenience at the expense of taste and safety, frankly. And now, we’re excited about exotic farmer’s market vegetables. It’s not just hipsters on the coasts who are shopping at farmer’s markets. It’s all across the country.”

Although the book is packed with scrumptious descriptions of food and a bounty of recipes for everything from French onion soup to wild rice casserole to carrot cake, Stradal does not consider himself a foodie. He has worked in publishing and television production, but never in a kitchen.

“I’m an enthusiastic end user,” he says with a laugh. “I like food quite a bit, but I’m not an accomplished chef. I sure can swipe a credit card with the best of them—I love restaurants and can spend with alacrity.”

Stradal was inspired by pop-up restaurants in and around Los Angeles, which by their very nature offer a unique dining experience.

“They’re wonderful, especially if they exist for logical reasons other than financial,” he says. “For exam-

© ANNA PASQUARELLA © ELENA SEIBERT

BY AMY SCRIBNER

ple, there was an interest in Georgian food, so some local chefs sell it out and serve Georgian food for a night. Then you can maybe hire them as caterers or fund their next pop-up if you’re a real enthusiast.”

Stradal is half-worried that pop-up restaurants, a somewhat unknown phenomenon when he started writing the book, will evolve so quickly that they will be passé soon after publication.

“I feel like by the time this book comes out, it’ll be historical fiction,” he says. “People will be charged $5,000 and there’ll be a year-long waitlist. At the time I started writing, it felt very in-thefuture, borderline satire.”

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of those fantastic, kinetic books that simultaneously entertain and make you hungry. (Think Like Water for Chocolate or Heartburn.) But it is not, Stradal insists, a book about food.

“I feel it’s a food book second,” he says. “It’s a family book first. I really wanted to write a book that was emotional and about families: one with empathy and heart, with interesting, character-driven stories. I set out to write a book with characters I don’t often see—where they live, how they behave. I didn’t think about writing a book about, like, a white guy falling in love in Brooklyn.”

15

meet SARA PARETSKY © STEVEN E. GROSS

the title of your new book?

Q: What’s

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

you could swap places with V.I. Warshawski for one day, Q: Ifwhat would you do?

the hardest part of sustaining a great mystery series Q: What’s

for more than 30 years?

us three things about the city that non-Chicagoans might Q: Tell

be surprised to learn.

hat do you think has been your greatest contribution to the Q: W mystery genre?

Q: Words to live by?

BRUSH BACK Brush Back (Putnam, $27.95, 480 pages, ISBN 9780399160578), the 17th outing in Sara Paretsky’s gritty, groundbreaking V.I. Warshawski mystery series, finds the tough Chicago P.I. reluctantly stepping into the corrupt world of the city’s political bosses.

A native of Kansas, Paretsky has made Chicago her adopted home since moving there in 1966 to work as a community organizer. She is currently president of the Mystery Writers of America.

16

JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS

A guide, not a friend

F

ormer Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims warns about the pitfalls of overparenting in How to Raise an Adult.

BY AMY SCRIBNER

© KRISTINA VETTER

q&a

How hard was it to find parents willing to talk about the competitive parenting culture?

Parents were simultaneously both eager and reluctant to talk. They’d want to tell me their experience and then they’d literally look over their shoulder to see if anyone was listening to our conversation. After observing this time and time again, I sensed that the overparenting herd is like a bully. It gave me tremendous compassion for my fellow parents and made me feel it was crucial to write this book.

How would you describe your own parenting style?

I aim for authoritative (highly responsive with high demands) and increasingly I get it right, but my tendency is to veer toward the permissive/indulgent type (highly responsive with low demands). When I catch myself heading in that direction, if, for example, I feel bad for asking them to help with something around the house—which happens particularly when I see how busy they are with school and/or activities—I remind myself that they must learn not only to help out but to take the initiative to help out, and that I’m actually building skills they’ll need in the workplace, in relationships and in life.

You write that “many of us derive real pleasure from feeling like our kid’s best friend.” Why do you think that is?

Hey, it feels good to be needed and wanted and liked and depended upon.

So many of us were raised in the “benign neglect” era of the ’70s and ’80s by parents who took a laissez-faire approach and weren’t attendant to our every experience. Maybe our inner child is responding to that by loving being the adult who demonstrably cares so much and is so present all the time. The thing is, yes, our kid needs a best friend, but it shouldn’t be us.

When we act like their best friend, we’re giving in to our need both for that closeness and to our need to be seen as demonstrating that closeness, and we’re not remembering that parents have to teach and guide, which includes having high expectations and doling out consequences and which is not commensurate with being someone’s best friend.

You echo Richard Louv’s (Last Child in the Woods) worry that overstructured childhoods are “killing dreamtime.” How do we preserve children’s dreamtime?

Two things: First, we have to stop dreaming for them. Yes, we like to picture what our sons and daughters will be and do in the world, but we mustn’t do the dreaming for them (and then the scheming required to make those dreams come true). Second, to Louv’s point, we need to protect time in our child’s life so they can be alone with their thoughts, with their own selves and with their own dreams.

How do your own teenage children feel about your writing this book?

I sense that they’re very supportive. First, I think they know I believe in this work from the inside out, and since in our house we preach “do what you love,” I think they realize they are seeing this mantra in action. Also, they’ve begun to see real-life examples of what I write and talk about— such as a friend whose parents are always worried about their whereabouts and keep them on a short leash, a friend whose parents make all the arrangements/plans or fill out forms for them. . . . They come home and they talk about what they’re seeing and how it impacts their friend.

And believe me, when I veer toward the helicopter-y in my interactions with them, they don’t hesitate to call me on it.

features

PARENTING

BY AMY SCRIBNER

Advice for parents: back off

T

he era of helicopter parenting is officially over, if this new crop of parenting books is any indication. Gone are the days of tracking your child’s every move and fighting her every battle. The focus now is on preparing children for the real world by letting them venture out and even—gasp!—make mistakes.

In How to Raise an Adult (Holt, $27, 368 pages, ISBN 9781627791779), former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims argues that we are so focused on our children that “what they eat, how they dress, what activities they pursue [and] what they achieve have become a reflection of us. Of how we see ourselves. Like their life is our accomplishment. Like their failures are our fault.”

In her years as Dean of Freshmen at Stanford, Lythcott-Haims watched as parents encroached on their children’s collegiate pursuits, showing up for social events and contacting professors. She once saw a woman in her mid-20s walking around campus, looking for the engineering building. How did Lyth­cott-Haims know? Because the mother of this Ph.D. candidate was doing all the talking. It’s a wonder parents haven’t moved into the dorms.

How to Raise an Adult is a bit of a manifesto, and I mean that in the best way. Lay off the Adderall, stop fretting that the Ivy League is the only route to success and let your children have unstructured time to dream, play and do nothing. Raising an adult, Lythcott-Haims posits, means letting go.

UN-ENTITLERS With chapters titled “They’re Not Helpless” and “Overcontrol,” parenting expert Amy McCready makes clear starting with the table of contents that she finds overparenting to be underwhelming. In The Me, Me, Me Epidemic (Tarcher, $26.95, 336 pages, ISBN

9780399169977), McCready, who founded Positive Parenting Solutions, dishes out advice in a crisply no-nonsense tone on everything from peer-pressure-proofing your kids to navigating social media.

“If we dish out empty praise and lavish rewards for the type of behavior that should be expected (such as not pitching a fit because we won’t buy them a new action figure or not making rude noises in a restaurant) we’re writing a recipe for an entitled child, one who thinks he takes ‘special to a whole new level,’ ” McCready writes.

McCready offers tools she calls “Un-Entitlers,” which are like vitamins to instill capability in children.

My favorite is Mind, Body and Soul Time, in which parents give an uninterrupted 10 or 20 minutes to their children and let the kids choose what they do together. It’s simple and surprisingly effective.

LIVE AND LEARN I have a son entering middle school this fall, so The Gift of Failure (Harper, $26.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780062299239) by Jessica Lahey was a gift to me.

With common-sense advice on how to stand back and let your children learn through their mistakes—including an entire chapter on navigating the hormone-drenched middle school years—this book is one of my new favorite parenting manuals.

Lahey is a warm, engaging writer who spent years in the trenches as a middle school Latin and English teacher. She advocates a lovingly hands-off approach that instills confidence from an early age.

“As adults we all have our own bullies to deal with: mean bosses, vicious enemies, and jealous peers,” she writes. “How your kid learns to deal with those people in their childhood, when failure means a day or two of hurt feelings or social exclusion, can mean the difference between a thin skin and a strong sense of self.”

TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS Forget gimmicky baby toys—all your child really needs is you.

Vanderbilt University child development researcher Stephen Camarata offers an antidote to all the products marketed to guilt-ridden parents in The Intuitive Parent (Current, $27.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9781591846130).

“What does a baby really need to know?” he writes. “That his parents love him, will take care of him, and will encourage him and empower him to learn. This does not require special videos, special toys, special DVDs or computer programs.”

Camarata starts with a fascinating section on the science behind child development. (How many authors can make something called brain plasticity interesting? Very few.) Then it gets even better, as Camarata lays out his case for why parents need not obsess over every developmental milestone, instead focusing on what he calls intuitive parenting, simply enjoying your child and reacting to his activities. The father of seven children, Camarata blends research and experience to create a parenting book that lets parents off the hook.

SUCCESSFUL STARTERS The co-authors of Raising Can-Do Kids (Perigee, $24.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780399168963) are perhaps an unlikely duo—Jen Prosek is a public relations executive and Richard Rende is a developmental psychologist. But the partnership works. Raising CanDo Kids is both interesting and actionable, written from the points of view of someone who understands development and someone else who understands what skills it takes to make a great entrepreneur.

Together, they identify seven traits that entrepreneurs need (curiosity and risk-taking are among them) and show parents how to cultivate these qualities in their children.

Perhaps most intriguing is their exploration of snowplow parents, who are apparently helicopter parents on steroids. As they write, snowplow parents “don’t just try to control a child’s environment and experiences but overtly eliminate perceived obstacles in a child’s path. Requesting that a specific child not be in your child’s class is one thing; demanding to review the class roster is quite another.”

Makes that Stanford mom seem almost reasonable, doesn’t it?

17

features

EDUCATION

BY ANGELA LEEPER

Making it count in the classroom

B

etween high-stakes testing and the high price of college, school can seem stressful and uninviting. But four new books show how education can inspire children, uplift communities and transform the future.

For Kristina Rizga, what started as a reporting assignment for Mother Jones turned into a four-year investigation of San Francisco’s Mission High School.

When she first entered Mission High—a school of 950 incredibly diverse students from more than 40 countries; 75 percent are poor and 38 percent are English language learners—it was one of the lowest performing schools in the country. It was also at a crossroads, forced to face its subpar test scores or prepare for serious government intervention. In Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph (Nation, $26.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9781568584959), Rizga delivers an intimate look at how an alternative, progressive approach to education works at this school.

Accessible and thoroughly researched, Rizga’s book covers a brief history of America’s education reform and the path to high-stakes testing, and weaves in profiles of Mission’s students and faculty. These profiles form the heart of the book, showing students who find community and success (even if not measurable by a multiple-choice test), teachers who provide encouragement, personalized instruction and more meaningful assessments, and a principal who refuses to “teach to the test” and gives teachers a say in developing curriculum. Through their accounts, Rizga makes a

strong case against test scores as a way to monitor individual learning and for teachers being in charge of school reform and accountability.

OPENING MINDS AND WALLETS For many families, going to college is one of the biggest expenses they will ever undertake. Understandably, they want a return on this investment. But with no definite information on the payoff, the answer is never a simple yes or no.

In Will College Pay Off? (Public­ Affairs, $25.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9781610395267), Peter Cappelli examines factors that will determine whether a college or four-year degree program is worthwhile.

Cappelli focuses on the changing relationship between college and the workplace. As companies increasingly expect certain skills in recent graduates, colleges have found themselves in the middle of a dysfunctional supply chain.

Many have responded with a massive shift toward programs that target niches in the job market and promise job skills. Cappelli asserts that the push away from the liberal arts may actually be hindering students’ chances of finding jobs after graduation.

He also dispels many myths about college education and the labor market, such as the rumor that there is a shortage of talent in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, or that students just need to pick “practical” majors with a clear

path to jobs. The best chances for a return on a college education, Cappelli contends, come through simply finishing college in a timely manner and considering a career as a marathon, not a sprint.

MAKING HERSTORY Once your daughter, granddaughter or niece has been admitted to college, The Her Campus Guide to College Life (Adams Media, $15.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781440585111) should be requisite reading. Authored by the writers and editors of HerCampus.com, this guide’s direct, conversational style covers concerns like safety—both on and off campus—healthy eating habits, getting enough sleep and homesickness while also including advice for smarter alcohol consumption and the warning signs of addiction. The Her Campus Guide also breaks down ways to manage a wide variety of relationships, from roommates (including roommate conflicts and contracts) and resident assistants to professors and even “frenemies.” The chapter on dating, hooking up and sex offers straightforward, no-nonsense advice on “dormcest,” what to expect with first-time sex and other difficult, real-world topics.

Later sections cover balancing studying with extracurriculars, Greek life and social media as well as tips on managing money and landing an internship or first professional job. A variety of checklists and wellness check-ins keep this guide interactive and make it ideal for both individual use and sharing.

IN THE FAST LANE Veteran educators may know Ron Clark from his New York Times bestseller The Essential 55, with rules about manners and success for the classroom and beyond. The former

18

Disney Teacher of the Year Award winner and co-founder of the nationally recognized Ron Clark Academy returns with Move Your Bus (Touchstone, $20, 192 pages, ISBN 9781501105036). Once again he blends Southern charm with a direct approach to inspire high performance.

Clark begins with a parable of an organization like a Flintstones-style bus powered by the passengers. He then defines five types of individuals on the bus: runners (the force behind the success), joggers (who meet basic expectations), walkers (who plod through their jobs), riders (who are dead weight) and drivers (who steer an organization). To make a bus, or organization, move, Clark declares that more runners are needed and that the desire to run is in all of us.

He continues the bus parable throughout, offering practical and encouraging tips on how to become a runner. While seemingly easy advice such as asking for help, accepting criticism and listening more than talking requires deep reflection. Clark’s personal experiences, as well as anecdotes from his teaching staff, highlight the tips in action. Although examples come from Clark’s teaching career, this guide is great for teams, committees, businesses or any organized group that wants to move forward—and enjoy the ride.

smithsonian

Don’t Just Teach Them, Show Them Created in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, Picturepedia contains 10,000 stunning photographs and illustrations to catalog the wonders of history, space, and the natural world.

Perfect for kids ages 9–12, every double-page-spread is filled with galleries, lists, facts, and timelines, making complex subjects easy to understand and creating the perfect resource for homework help or to pique kids’ curiosity.

Also Available

A WORLD OF IDEAS: SEE ALL THERE IS TO KNOW

www.dk.com

features

BEHIND THE BOOK

BY JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET

©ANDRE ELENAVIPPOLIS SEIBERT

Finding your way in a world that’s not your own

I

t’s hard for me to explain this, but Make Your Home Among Strangers came to me almost fully formed one afternoon in March of 2010. I was sitting in a meeting as part of my then-job. Like a lot of unreasonably optimistic people, I gave the brightest years of my 20s to a nonprofit—an LA-based organization called One Voice, where I served as a counselor/mentor to first-generation college kids.

The students we worked with were from low-income families, were about to be the first in their families to go to college, and were also bright as hell.

About halfway through our group meeting, one girl—one tough, brilliant young woman who is very dear to my heart because of how much our lives have in common—started crying and saying she wasn’t really smart enough to go to the ridiculously selective and awesome college that had accepted her. And then, as she went on about her fears and her sense that she was destined to fail, that she should go somewhere “more at her level” for college if she even went at all, the other kids in the circle started nodding their heads and

MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS

By Jennine Capó Crucet

St. Martin’s, $26.99, 400 pages ISBN 9781250059666, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

20

saying that they felt the exact same way.

I was immediately thrown back 10 years to myself at 18, having the exact same fears, and I lost it. All that dark horribleness, that sense of internalized oppression, rose up out of me—I had to excuse myself from the meeting, and I spent maybe 10 minutes pulling myself together in the bathroom of my boss’ house.

It was there that the narrator’s voice came to me—urgent and clear—as I sat on the closed lid of my boss’ toilet, and it was there that I literally started writing this book, in a small notebook I kept in my bag, which I’d had the foresight to drag into the bathroom with me.

Humble beginnings, yeah, but that voice—that of Lizet, the novel’s protagonist—found me every day, yelled at me when I wasn’t working hard enough, pushed me to write and to tell her story. It was a blessing and a curse, actually: to have a book’s narrator make those kinds of demands of you.

Many elements of the novel never changed from how they came to me that day in the meeting: The book is set in both Miami and New York in 1999-2000, around the time the Elian Gonzalez immigration ordeal was unfolding. Like me and like the students I worked with, ­Lizet is the first in her family to go to college—she’s the first in her family to graduate from high school, too—and she’s struggling enough on campus as it is when her first year gets abruptly politicized both at school and at home.

Along with the political drama Lizet works to navigate, I imagined the book to be this fictional road map of the first-generation college student’s experience, one that shows some of the ugly things race and class differences force on us. I didn’t know it at the time, but on the day I earned my B.A., I’d become part of a surpris“Statistically ingly small speaking, percentage of I should’ve minority stuslipped through dents from low-income the cracks families in college. admitted to I shouldn’t college in the first place to have made it do so—most to graduation of us first-gen day.” kids from that demographic drop out, so the graduation rate hovers at a little over 20 percent. Statistically speaking, I should’ve slipped through the cracks in college. I probably shouldn’t have made it to graduation day.

And I would’ve left that campus, I think, had it not been for the fact that I joined a sketch comedy group halfway through freshman year, and the friends I made there are still the best I have. (Something I told my One Voice students over

and over again: Join a club based on some interest you’ve always had but that your high school didn’t provide.)

I also constantly hung out in the office of the professor who would become my mentor via her very existence—the writer Helena Maria Viramontes, the only Latina teaching in the creative writing program at the time—and seeing her on that campus made me feel like maybe I could stick around, too. Professor Viramontes gave me books and introduced me to writers she knew I needed to read, and so it makes sense that, years later, I would write the book I’d needed to feel less alone and afraid, a book that speaks to anyone looking to navigate the unknown—a book, it turns out, that I didn’t have much choice but to write.

Miami-born author Jennine Capó Crucet won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize for her story collection, How to Leave Hialeah. Both a compelling cultural critique and a fulfilling coming-of-age story, her debut novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, follows Lizet Ramirez as she tries to make her way in a world that’s very different from the one she was born into.

Crucet currently teaches English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

NEW VOICES

Debut authors writing from the outside in

L

ooking at a world from an outsider’s point of view is a common theme in literature—with good reason. It supplies a powerful perspective and often enlightenment, as demonstrated in these four memorable first novels.

IN THE LANGUAGE OF MIRACLES

By Rajia Hassib

Viking $26.95, 288 pages ISBN 9780525428138 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

The Islamophobic phase of America’s fitful xenophobia is nothing new: The religion may change, but the fear rarely does.

Rajia Hassib’s In the Language of Miracles shows its effect on an Egyptian-American family after their eldest son kills his Christian girlfriend. The novel is topical both in its take on race relations and in its depiction of a troubled young man with ready access to firearms.

Samir and Nagla Al-Menshawy are model immigrants. Samir is a doctor building a family practice and aspiring to home ownership.

Nagla is a supportive wife, and their kids, Hossam, Khaled and Fatima, are, in Samir’s words, “well-bred.”

But something goes wrong with Hossam, even if what exactly that is isn’t clear. Is he mentally ill, or does he only suffer from the “loneliness and boredom” afflicting many newcomers? Either way, one day, in a fit of jealousy, he takes his girlfriend’s life and his own. Some reactions are predictable: threatening letters and graffiti (“Go Home”). Others are more sinister: posting photos of Samir’s house and children to Facebook. Hassib makes it clear, however, that 9/11 did change things for Muslim Americans. Khaled concludes that, as a Muslim, he is frequently seen as “a cancer that brought nothing but suffering.”

Hassib, who was born and raised in Egypt before moving to the U.S. at 23, is a capable writer, especially when dealing with the interpersonal. Her natural use of language

resembles that of Khaled Hosseini.

Both writers deal with a common theme: Sometimes melting pots have a propensity to boil over.

—KENNETH CHAMPEON

ford, expertly builds. It’s the how and not the why that this strange and unsettling novel reveals, and readers will be holding their breath by the final pages.

EVERYBODY RISE

By Stephanie Clifford

St. Martin’s $26.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781250077172 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

For centuries, New York City has been a magnet to dreamers with EILEEN fantasies of catapulting themselves MR. AND MRS. DOCTOR

By Ottessa Moshfegh into the upper echelons of society.

Penguin Press

By Julie Iromuanya Unfortunately, as Evelyn Beegan $25.95, 272 pages discovers in Stephanie Clifford’s Coffee House Press ISBN 9781594206627 debut novel, Everybody Rise, the $16.95, 288 pages eBook available higher you rise, the farther you ISBN 9781566893978 have to fall should you lose your eBook available DEBUT FICTION grip on the social ladder.

Evelyn has landed a job with an DEBUT FICTION up-and-coming social media site, which seeks to attract the crème de la crème. Therefore, Evelyn makes If Shirley Jackson and Mary Gaitskill had a literary daughter, it Fans of immigrant stories—think it her mission to land Camilla Rutherford—the queen bee of might be Ottessa Moshfegh, whose Americanah or House of Sand and Manhattan’s young, beautiful and unnerving debut is sure to garFog—will be captivated by Mr. rich—as a client. Knowing that a ner attention. Part psychological and Mrs. Doctor, the striking first thriller, part coming-of-age novel, novel from Ohio-based writer Julie blue blood like Camilla would never rub elbows with a new-money Eileen shares a week in the life of Iromuanya. nobody, Evelyn sets out to reinvent its title character: a young woman Nigerians Ifi and Job may have herself. What begins as fudging stuck in a dead-end job in a juvemarried sight unseen, but they’re the truth soon spirals until Evelyn nile detention center who crosses united by their determination to barely recognizes herself. It’s only a paths with a polished and privipresent themselves as the perfect, leged social worker. Looking back upwardly mobile immigrant couple matter of time before her carefully constructed house of cards comes on her life, Eileen narrates with a to their families back home. This tumbling down. precise, mesmerizing clarity. provides something of a challenge, With Everybody Rise, Clifford In her early 20s, Eileen is living in since Job—who has been in Amerhas crafted a sharp and witty a dilapidated house in an unnamed ica for nearly two decades—is not cautionary tale about wealth and Massachusetts town with her alcothe doctor he claimed to be during the pursuit of the American dream holic father. Eileen, who also drinks their courtship, but a college dropin the 21st century, right before the too much, loathes her body and out. As Ifi adjusts to her new home settles more deeply into her filthy (under Job’s dubious tutelage), they 2008 financial crash. Her shrewd look at upper-class dynamics in home every day. She heartily deattempt to make the most of their modern day New York society takes spises her co-workers and harbors circumstances. That is, until Job’s up the torch of Edith Wharton. And an unrequited crush on a guard, first wife, whom he married for a although her story is sobering in more out of boredom than real green card, resurfaces. its scope, Clifford keeps it afloat emotion. But when the attractive Iromuanya weaves this tale of with bursts of comedy; the end new head of education, Rebecca St. a mismatched couple with dark result is a thoughtful yet enterJohn, makes overtures of friendhumor and careful observation. ship, Eileen can’t resist her charm.

From the first scene, where Job tries taining yarn that manages to bring to mind both The Great Gatsby She soon finds herself complicit in to woo Ifi with techniques learned and The Shopaholic series. Filled Rebecca’s atypical methods. by watching American pornogwith scandal and schadenfreude, Eileen takes place over a single raphy (spoiler alert: it doesn’t go Everybody Rise will keep readers snowy week, and the locations— over well), it’s clear that no subflipping pages. from the attic bedroom and dank ject is off-limits. Her insights into assimilation—its difficulties and —STEPHENIE HARRISON bars to the narrow linoleum halls of the jail—add to the feeling of pitfalls—are astute and at times, Read a Q&A with Stephanie Clifford claustrophobia that Moshfegh, eye-opening. on page 25.

—T R I S H A P I N G currently a Stegner Fellow at Stan—LAUREN BUFFERD

21

reviews

FICTION

T PI OP CK

childhood friendship and sisterhood, as Piper and Margot work together to clear their old friend’s name. The Night Sister is a dark and compelling story that will keep you turning pages.

THE INCARNATIONS

Pursued by the past REVIEW BY LAUREN BUFFERD

Susan Barker’s daring new novel, The Incarnations, begins in 2008, just months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics. The city is grimy and polluted behind the burst of new construction. After nights spent in the dense traffic of the city’s multiple ring roads, taxi driver Wang returns home exhausted to his wife and daughter. A rare visit with his invalid father and vicious stepmother, an aging femme fatale, doesn’t add much pleasure to Wang’s already lonely existence, but things take a turn for the bizarre when an anonymous letter, tucked into the visor of his cab, assures Wang that he is the reincarnated soul mate of the sender.

Letters continue to appear, each accompanied by a story drawn from more than a thousand years of Chinese history. In each life, Wang and the sender inhabit different roles and relationships, yet every letter

By Susan Barker tells a tale similar in its depictions of betrayal, lust and obsession. With Touchstone, $26, 384 pages each communication, the sender grows closer, increasing Wang’s unISBN 9781501106781, audio, eBook available ease and memories of his unhappy childhood, his mentally ill mother and his own hospitalization for depression.

WORLD FICTION The past-life stories in The Incarnations are culled from some of the bloodiest moments in Chinese history, from the invasion of ­Genghis Khan to the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution. Barker is unsparing in her depiction of China’s political and social excesses, and the closer the stories get to the present, the harder it is to dismiss them as ancient history or folktale. The novel’s shifts from the distant past to the present are seamless, and the bittersweet twist at the book’s finale will have readers searching back through the novel for clues to the ending.

Barker has explored the world of ghosts before: Characters from both of her previous novels (Sayonara Bar and The Orientalist and the Ghost) were haunted by visitors from beyond the grave—but never were the stakes so high. Barker, who grew up in East London with a British father and Chinese Malaysian mother, spent several years in China researching The Incarnations. She skillfully combines history, the supernatural and the everyday in a novel that suggests that the past is never really past, while providing a cracking good read.

THE NIGHT SISTER

By Jennifer McMahon

Doubleday $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780385538510 Audio, eBook available HORROR

The creepy motel is a staple of the horror genre—think the Overlook or the Bates. In her chilling seventh novel, The Night Sister, Jennifer McMahon has created a worthy addition to that roster: the Tower Motel.

Located in the tiny town of Lon-

22

don, Vermont, the hotel was the pride of the region when it opened in the 1950s. But after the interstate was built, bookings trickled down to nothing and the hotel fell into disrepair. Amy Slater grew up on the grounds of the Tower Motel in the 1980s. Raised by her grandmother, Charlotte, Amy grew up hearing stories of her mother’s instability and her aunt Sylvie’s mysterious disappearance in 1961. Family lore has it that Sylvie ran off to Hollywood in hopes of becoming Hitchcock’s new favorite blonde, but Amy has doubts. In the way of preteen girls, Amy and her best friend, Piper—often trailed

by Piper’s younger sister, Margot—love to scare themselves by

imaging more sinister reasons for Sylvie’s disappearance.

Cut to the modern day: ­Piper and Amy are no longer best friends, but when Margot calls with the news that Amy has killed her son, her husband and herself, leaving only her 11-year-old daughter, Lou, alive, Piper knows she owes it to her old friend to investigate. The mystery leads her back to a discovery the girls made the summer their friendship ended—and to a dark Slater family secret.

As in her previous bestseller, The Winter People, McMahon draws from myth and legend for inspiration in crafting the tragedy that haunts the Slater family. But she has also created a powerful story of

—T R I S H A P I N G

CROOKED HEART

By Lissa Evans

Harper $24.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780062364838 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

If someone were to recommend a funny novel about the London Blitz, you might think either that the person was joking or that such a book could only be tasteless and disrespectful. In some cases you’d be right, but in the case of Crooked Heart, British author Lissa Evans’ American debut, you’d be in for a pleasant surprise. Evans has written an amusing tale about morally compromised characters that, in the midst of its comedy, asks whether morally wrong actions are justified in a time of unspeakable horror.

In the novel’s prologue, children are being evacuated from London, including from 10-year-old Noel Bostock’s area of Hampstead. Noel lives with his godmother, Mattie, a former suffragette who has been jailed five times and who resists the advice to send Noel away because, as she puts it, since when has she ever listened to the government? But when Mattie dies in the bombing, Noel is sent to live in the suburbs with Vera “Vee” Sedge, a 36-year-old widow. Cash-strapped Vee isn’t a woman with a heart of gold. She’s a con artist who spots a moneymaking opportunity when Noel, “the limping creature” with a polio-damaged leg, moves in: She borrows a collection box from a Sunday School, covers up the writing on the side, takes Noel door to door and pretends to raise funds for such charities as the Spitfire Fund and Dunkirk Widows and Orphans.

FICTION That Noel accompanies her in this scheme is one of many unexpected twists in Crooked Heart. He and Vee aren’t the only confidence tricksters in the book. Another is Donald, Vee’s son, whose heart murmur has not only rendered him unfit for service but also provided yet another way to make money.

It doesn’t spoil the story to reveal that everyone’s plans go awry. The unforeseen consequences give the book its narrative momentum. The tension flags at times, especially in sections focusing on Donald, but Crooked Heart is still an entertaining and poignant English comedy of bad manners.

—MICHAEL MAGRAS

THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES

By Alice Hoffman

Simon & Schuster $27.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781451693591 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Atmospheric, moody and evocative—these words describe Alice Hoffman’s latest achievement, The Marriage of Opposites.

And that is no accident, because they also accurately describe the 19th-century artistic movement known as Impressionism, founded

by Camille Pissarro, the third son Rachel Pomié bore to her second husband, Frédérick. (Altogether, Rachel had nine children, an accomplishment for any heroine, but Rachel is a strong character.)

Hoffman tells the story of the painter’s life through the drama of his mother’s concerns. The story takes place first on the island of St. Thomas, where Rachel is caught up in the drama of her scandalous second marriage and the troubles facing her best friend, Jestine.

Later, the family (or some of it) returns to their home country of France, a long-held dream for these French-Jewish exiles.

One would think that after 30odd books, Hoffman might have exhausted her glossary, but The Marriage of Opposites is a treasure

trove of expression, color on color and emotion on emotion. Fittingly for a book about an artist, color is never far from the spotlight. Pissarro is “greedy for all the color in the world,” and remembers November on the island, when “the dusk sifted down like black powder.”

Nature claims its fair share of the vocabulary—trees and birds and hills—and Hoffman seems always up to the task of freshly describing the latest artistic excitement.

Doing justice to the individuals in her tale is harder to accomplish—being real people, they must be unmistakably specific, sometimes in off-putting ways. Still, somehow Hoffman manages this as well, spinning a fresh tale of human error and achievement. This subject has found the right author at the right time, and no one who reads this story will forget it.

—MAUDE McDANIEL

THE CURSE OF CROW HOLLOW

bewitched by the teller, by his lyrical telling and by the tale itself, whose darkness is infernal. How is it that Coffey convinces us that the tiny population of Crow Holler, Virginia—nestled in the remote depths of the Blue Ridge—possesses so much significance, not only as a microcosm of humans as a whole, but as a prime example of the essential flaws and virtues of human nature? The tides of events and emotions running through the book pull us right under as Coffey tells the story of a small town where young girls begin suffering from mysterious symptoms.

The fate of the daughters of Crow Hollow—cursed by the witch Alvaretta one night, up at her bad place on the mountain—becomes our own fate. What happens to Sheriff Bucky, or to that preacher’s boy John David, or to the witch herself, becomes a moral obsession to us over the course of reading The Curse of Crow Hollow. Everything

is at stake in this battle between good and evil—including the identity of the narrator, revealed at last.

To Christians and non-Christians alike, this roaring tale will leave a powerful mark.

—MICHAEL ALEC ROSE

CROOKED

By Austin Grossman

Mulholland $26, 368 pages ISBN 9780316198516 eBook available ALTERNATE HISTORY

The trick to a good alternate history, particularly one that’s trying to be as impish and unpredictable as Crooked, is walking a delicious but delicate line between the weird and the plausible. You don’t want the story to veer into territory so unbe-

By Billy Coffey

Thomas Nelson $15.99, 416 pages ISBN 9780718026776 Audio, eBook available

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

CHRISTIAN FICTION

The line between mainstream and Christian fiction gets thinner and thinner. That’s because the quality of writing by identifiably Christian authors gets better and better. There has always been a strong thread of Christian theology running through mainstream fiction, from Flannery O’Connor to Marilynne Robinson. The ironic key to this successful wedding of religion and high art has always been the subtlety of the moral of the story, which must be subordinate to the storyteller’s art. The same principle elevates the novels of Virginia author Billy Coffey (The Devil Walks in Mattingly).

In the first line of the book, Coffey’s hillbilly narrator invites his accidental guest (that would be us, the readers) to “come on out of that sun” and set a spell. The spell is immediate. We are altogether

is back with a sizzling Original Heartbreakers story featuring a troubled playboy and the woman he can’t resist…

www.HQNBooks.com www.GenaShowalter.com

15_280_BookPage_Hotter.indd 1

Available now!

23 2015-06-19 9:41 AM

reviews lievable that it becomes a farce, but neither do you want to follow the straight and narrow. Austin Grossman (You) knows how to walk this line, and as a result he’s delivered a fiendishly entertaining book.

Our story begins with the premise that everything you know about Richard Nixon is wrong. He Everything is not simply a disgraced politiyou know about Nixon cian whose own susceptibility to is wrong, corruption and according to lust for power and victory Grossman’s entertaining doomed him.

He is something new novel. much more.

In Crooked, a young Nixon, years from the presidency, stumbles upon a supernatural secret behind the Cold War, something that shatters his view of how the world works. Armed with and suffering from this knowledge, Nixon embarks on a personal quest to become powerful and protect his nation, crafting in the process an alternate narrative that reimagines him as the best president the United States ever had.

The imaginative power Grossman deploys in Crooked is staggering. If you’ve ever been taken by alternate history before, or you just want a truly engrossing yarn to keep you up at night, this is the book for you—but that’s far from the only reason to read. From the beginning, Grossman understands that to buy his premise, you need to buy his version of Nixon. So he roots the story in the president’s voice, crafting a man who understands his own shortcomings, who realizes that his motives aren’t always pure, and who wants something more for himself even if it will cost him. This is a Nixon with a depth even the man himself never had in the public eye, and that depth makes the jokes land harder and the truths appear sharper.

Crooked is a wonderfully entertaining book that will please both political junkies and fantasy fans, but it also makes us see Nixon in a new light.

—MATTHEW JACKSON

24

FICTION RACING THE RAIN

By John L. Parker Jr.

Scribner $26, 368 pages ISBN 9781476769868 Audio, eBook available COMING OF AGE

It’s sometimes amazing to realize how an obsession for sports can take over a life. In John L. Parker Jr.’s amiable new work, a prequel to his 1978 bestseller Once a Runner, Quenton Cassidy, teenage native of Citrus City, Florida, is so wrapped up in his athletic pursuits that the great upheavals of his era—the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, civil rights and the arrival of the Beatles for goodness’ sake!—stick in his mind the way anything sticks to Teflon.

Torn between track and basketball, for which he’s just a bit shorter than he should be, Cassidy (as he’s called) frets over his running time, his technique, rankings, 220s, 440s and 880s. He does so even as his classmates brace themselves for the end of the world as delivered by a barrage of Russian nukes. When one of his friends is implicated in a murder, Cassidy does think of skipping a meet for a hot minute—but only for a hot minute.

Still, for all his tunnel vision, Cassidy is a lovely young man. He is popular even among his athletic rivals. He is a good and dutiful son, and would be a sweet boyfriend if he were interested in dating. He attempts to be thorough even in his non-sporting activities and calls everyone “sir.” The only reason his “ma’ams” are few and far between is because there are about four women in the book who have brief speaking roles. This is a man’s man’s man’s world.

To his credit, Parker surrounds his hero with some mighty interesting men, some of whom are not what they ought to be (see above).

The most interesting of these is the gigantic Trapper Nelson, animal lover and sometime poacher who lives rough in the swamp; he’s south Florida’s answer to Hagrid.

The boys Cassidy plays with and against are also stout fellows. The one sour note is a coach so convinced of his own rightness that he’s willing to cut the athletically brilliant Cassidy from his team for even respectfully disagreeing with him.

Racing the Rain is a cornucopia for folks who are as track-andfield crazy as Cassidy. It’s also a good-hearted, good-natured book for the rest of us.

—ARLENE McKANIC

WE NEVER ASKED FOR WINGS

By Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Ballantine $27, 320 pages ISBN 9780553392319 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

Nature tells us that a mother can’t part with her children. Like a lioness with her cubs, a mother is supposed do anything and sacrifice anything to protect her kids.

But what about a mother who feels out of her depth? A mother who believes that the only way she can protect her children is by abandoning them?

These are the themes Vanessa Diffenbaugh explored in her book club-friendly debut, The Language of Flowers, and they’re the same themes we see again in her new novel, We Never Asked for Wings.

This time, we meet Letty, a woman who became a mother as a teenager and never really grew up—in fact, she regressed—as she handed responsibility for her children to her mother, a tactic that seemed to work until her mother and father left for their childhood home in Mexico. Letty is left with two children she barely knows, let alone knows how to mother.

The clearest character for much of the novel is Alex, Letty’s teenage son. He’s abandoned with his younger sister, Luna, and seemingly doomed to repeat his mother’s mistakes. He’s grown up in poverty with a brilliant scientific mind and no way to exercise the experiments

he dreams up. He’s without a father, without resources, and when his grandfather leaves the country, he’s left without his only connection to the qualities he values in himself.

Initially, Letty’s methods for dealing with her situation and reconnecting with Alex are pretty abysmal. She leaves her children to their own devices. Her decisions don’t get better immediately, either, as she bonds with her children through bribery and bad choices. But Diffenbaugh doesn’t wait for us to process our shock at this behavior—she, and her protagonist, move on. We see everyone in this family striving to be better, and we root for them.

Diffenbaugh takes big political questions about child protective services, poverty and immigration and weaves them through the story of one multigenerational family.

The question is, can Letty and her parents undo the damage they’ve spent a lifetime building, or are some mistakes too big to come back from?

—C A R R I E R O L LWA G E N

HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP

By Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus

Atria $25, 256 pages ISBN 9781451643459 eBook available POPULAR FICTION

Best-selling authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (The Nanny Diaries) have delivered another fun and frothy read with How to Be a Grown-Up, a story in which mommy-lit meets “Sex and the City.”

Our heroine, Rory McGovern, is living in New York with her actor husband, Blake, and their two small children. She’s a part-time magazine editor; he’s an actor struggling to land the big role that will catapult his career. When Blake loses an acting job that was sure to make him famous, he decides he needs a break from fatherhood,

responsibility—and financially contributing to the family. He moves out, leaving Rory shocked and paralyzed by the potential destruction of their seemingly idyllic Manhattan life.

Driven by a dwindling bank account, Rory takes a job at JeuneBug, a “children’s lifestyle” start-up run by two 20-something business school grads who wear shoes that cost more than a week-long vacation. Rory spends much of her day trying to decipher terminology like design vertical, branding ops and backloading appendixes, and her impossibly immature bosses make her re-­ entry into the working world less than smooth.

Meanwhile, Blake seems to be slipping further away from his role as father and husband. When Rory discovers that Blake is on Tinder, she decides to play the field and finds herself juggling a group of suitors that includes her boss’ 24-year-old boyfriend.

McLaughlin and Kraus have given us late 30-somethings a little summertime indulgence. As The Nanny Diaries did for readers in their 20s, How to Be a Grown-Up hits the midlife sweet spot.

—ELISABETH ATWOOD

TWO ACROSS

By Jeff Bartsch

Grand Central $25, 304 pages ISBN 9781455554621 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

C-H-A-R-L-A-T-A-N. When that word comes up at the 1960 National Spelling Bee, Vera Baxter feels that a name has been given to her out-of-place ways.

Staying at a fancy Washington, D.C., hotel isn’t right for this girl who travels the East Coast, staying at cheap motels as her mom claws her way up the sales ladder.

I-N-C-O-R-R-I-G-I-B-L-E. As Stanley Owens steps to the microphone to spell his assigned word, Vera immediately pegs it as

his perfect description.

As the 15-year-olds watch the pool of contestants around them dwindle, they recognize each other as prime competition. As they spell through the list of approved words, only Vera and Stanley are left standing. It’s a tie.

Words bring them together.

And a love of words will tear them apart.

Stanley and The National Vera reunite at each year’s Spelling event, forming Bee unites a a bond over star-crossed their shared young couple victory and their mothers’ quirks in this and ambitious engaging goals for their debut. lives. They seem destined for success, sure to cross paths again at Harvard—until Stanley proposes a deal.

And that deal involves a proposal. The pair will marry, sell off the gifts and split the profits. Vera will be free to head to college according to plan. With a little starter money in his pocket, Stanley would chase another dream: a career creating crossword puzzles.

But there’s a hitch: Vera is secretly in love with Stanley and wishes the marriage weren’t a sham at all.

Two Across, the debut novel from Jeff Bartsch, follows the developing relationship of two young people from their school days far into adulthood. As Bartsch unravels Stanley’s charades and how they affect people around him, he weaves in enough crossword clues to keep any puzzle fans curious.

That entertaining approach flows naturally from Bartsch’s background: He is an ad copywriter who also studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin Bartsch sometimes sacrifices cleverness for plot development— there are moments in which the story seems to race ahead after previously taking carefully calculated steps. But the end result of Two Across is an examination of a relationship’s points of intersection and the clues that lead us back to ourselves.

—CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

q&a

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

BY STEPHENIE HARRISON

High society

I

n her debut novel, New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford takes readers to New York City just before the 2008 stock market crash.

ELENA SEIBERT PHOTOGRAPHY

FICTION

Everybody Rise (reviewed in our First Fiction feature on page 21) follows young striver Evelyn Beegan as she attempts to break into some of New York City’s most elite circles. We spoke to Clifford about Stephen Sondheim and the “unlikable” female protagonist.

Evelyn goes through quite the transformation over the course of the novel and, at times, behaves absolutely abhorrently. Did you ever worry about taking her past the point of redemption?

There were points when I was watching in horror as she made bad decisions, but I tried to follow where Evelyn led and to put aside worries about whether she was likable. I felt she had this underlying social anxiety that we’ve all felt at some point (well, most of us have felt). Evelyn is so desperate to belong that she’s willing to do anything for it. Once she realizes what she’s done, it was important to me that she figure out how to get back from this bad situation she creates— and to do so on her own, without being rescued by a man.

In many ways the world depicted in Everybody Rise seems not dissimilar from that of a Wharton novel; in your opinion, how has New York and its society changed in the last century?

Ooh, good question. Parts of the book were inspired by House of Mirth, and Wharton remains one of the best writers about social class. The world is a lot more diverse and a lot more meritocratic than it was in the Gilded Age. A small cadre of WASPs no longer controls, say, the business world, or colleges or social life. Growing up in Seattle, where everyone gets the same standard-issue hiking boots and fleece, I didn’t even know this echelon of people still existed. When I shipped myself off to boarding school in the East, I was startled to find not only did they exist, but they held immense social power. The question of why—of what made them so alluring despite the drastically changing times—was one of the sparks for Everybody Rise.

Let’s talk about all the Sondheim and musical theater references in the novel (including the title).

After Evelyn was deep into her bad choices, I wanted to give her something that would soften her landing just a little bit. I was listening to Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” on repeat at the time, and that offered an answer. Musicals appeal to Evelyn’s escapism and dreaminess, and remind her—even when she’s throwing herself at this world—that there’s something different out there. Also, it gave me an outlet for my voluminous and heretofore useless knowledge of musicals lyrics!

Once Evelyn starts lying, she can’t stop. Care to share a lie you would like to come clean about?

Ha! I didn’t brush the cats this morning like I said I had, and I probably won’t do it tonight, either. Evelyn’s growing lies stemmed from some of the court cases I’ve written about for the Times. As I began to attend more cases, I noticed one commonality: The defendant’s missteps always started small. Giant drug dealers who’d committed multiple murders began by packaging one bag of heroin. I wondered: How does someone get from a small lie—a place we’ve all been, where we’re futzing with the truth a little—to this life that is off the rails?

25

reviews

NONFICTION

T PI OP CK

THE TRIP

By Deborah Davis

VORACIOUS

Feeding your literary appetites

Atria $26, 336 pages ISBN 9781476703510 eBook available ART

REVIEW BY ALICE CARY

C.S. Lewis wrote that “eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably,” and Cara Nicoletti has made both her life pursuits. As she explains in Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books, her childhood playground was her grandfather’s butcher shop, where she played hide and seek among the beef carcasses, occasionally stunning her friends by pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder’s father with a dead pig slung over her shoulder. More often though, she read on a milk crate behind the cash register.

Fast-forward to the present, and Nicoletti has parlayed her passions into a literary food blog called Yummy Books, as well as this collection of 50 essays about beloved books of her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, each with a relevant recipe. Most of the dishes sound delectable (Anne of Green Gables Salted Chocolate Caramels, Moby Dick

By Cara Nicoletti Little, Brown, $28, 304 pages clam chowder) while others require courage (Lord of the Flies porchetta ISBN 9780316242998, eBook available di testa, or pig’s head, and a more palatable Crostini with Fava Bean and Chicken Liver Mousse from The Silence of the Lambs).

ESSAYS Nicoletti knows her stuff (serve that pig’s head over a bed of lentils, potatoes or stewed greens, she recommends), having worked as both a pastry chef and butcher. Her blog blossomed from her literary supper club, and Voracious is likely to affect your own reading, making fictional meals suddenly jump into prominence. She explains: “The experience of loving something—particularly a book or a book’s illustration—so much that you actually want to eat it is a sentiment near and dear to my heart. It is essentially what I’m trying to express in this book.”

Throughout Nicoletti’s life, books have remained her emotional stronghold as well as a reliable source of escape, since she’s read everything from Nancy Drew and Pippi Longstocking to In Cold Blood and Gone Girl. Like a wonderful appetizer, Nicoletti’s entries are easy to digest and full of pleasing surprises.

BOSS LIFE

By Paul Downs

Blue Rider $26.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780399172335 eBook available BUSINESS

Ever dreamed of owning your own business? Paul Downs has been living that dream for nearly three decades and has the battle scars to prove it. After sharing his experiences on the New York Times “You’re the Boss” blog, he decided to narrow his focus, documenting a year in the life of his small woodworking company in a book.

Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business may inspire you, but it will also have you asking hard

26

questions before you hang out a shingle somewhere.

When Downs started woodworking in 1986, he worked alone making furniture. Over the years, he took on employees and developed a specialty in crafting boardroom tables, but he rarely noticed how these changes affected his company. Downs extols the strong, silent temperament common to woodworkers, but it takes ages for him to realize that a shop full of rugged individualists needs cohesive leadership or the end product will suffer. A fancy table ends up being made with mismatched types of wood because every person in the chain of command assumed the previous one had signed off on what turned out to be, in essence, a typo; nobody bothered to ask.

Downs is straightforward and brutally honest about others’ shortcomings as well as his own.

On September 24, 1963, Andy Warhol left New York for a road trip to Hollywood in a black Ford Falcon station wagon. His companions were his assistant and upand-coming poet Gerard Malanga, antic underground film “superstar” Taylor Mead and Wynn Chamberlain, who owned the car. In Deborah Davis’ impressive recounting of this adventure, The Trip, Warhol’s experiences mark the turning point in his life between “Raggedy Andy” Warhola, a small-town kid from Pittsburgh, and Andy Warhol, filmmaker and pop art impresario.

Davis’ copious research into the flotsam and jetsam of 1963 establishes the mood: She shows us the billboards lining Route 66, takes us into the motels and truck stops and listens to the pop songs on the radio. These details do more than evoke the period; they also show how Warhol’s iconic “multiples”— His humility about the ways he like his Campbell’s soup cans— failed and the nail-biting number emerge from the mass culture of crunching that keeps him up at the 1960s. night should be a caution to others.

Once in Los Angeles, the ragtag From the outside, a business mak- adventurers get busy. Warhol has a ing more than a million dollars a first art show at the Ferus Gallery; year seems like a success; in truth, Dennis and Brooke Hopper throw that’s rarely the case. Downs often Andy a “real Hollywood party”; declined his own salary to ensure Warhol meets his idol Marcel that his employees took home a Duchamp; and Warhol and crew fair wage. One year his income shoot a movie called Tarzan and averaged only $3.79 per hour.

Jane Regained . . . Sort Of, with the Small business owners and those impish Mead as Tarzan and Dennis who dream of joining them need Hopper as his body double. Davis to read Boss Life. Anyone who has argues that this trip to Hollywood a boss can learn a lot here, too. It’s gives birth to the Warhol of the not always as rosy on the other side later ’60s, the artist whose silver of the counter as we may suspect, Factory and entourage of underand the view from this angle can ground divas we remember today. help an employee become an asset A good introduction to Warhol with a little extra effort. There’s ev- for pop art neophytes, The Trip will ery reason to follow a dream you’re also appeal to readers eager to learn passionate about, but do so with more about the “Mad Men”-era colyour eyes open; Boss Life can help. lision between art and advertising.

—HEATHER SEGGEL

—CATHERINE HOLLIS

NONFICTION AVENUE OF SPIES

By Alex Kershaw

Crown $28, 304 pages ISBN 9780804140034 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Dr. Sumner Jackson, a high-profile American-born surgeon, found himself in the perilous position of living a few doors down fashionable Avenue Foch from the Gestapo headquarters. At the time, Jackson was in charge of the American Hospital in Neuilly, only a brisk bicycle ride away from the home he shared with his wife, Toquette, and teenage son, Phillip.

America was not then at war with Germany, but Jackson had worked in Paris long enough to count himself among the vanquished and, thus, sympathetic to the resistance.

Alex Kershaw (The Bedford Boys) describes in stark detail how the City of Light quickly became a city of intrigue and terror. Jackson’s neighbor and nemesis was Helmut Knochen, head of the Gestapo in Paris. In addition to the spying apparatus he imported from Germany, Knochen also tapped into the local criminal underworld to recruit an army of informants and torturers. At first, Jackson’s highplaced connections insulated him and his hospital from oppressive German oversight. But his and his wife’s willingness to aid members of the resistance kept them in constant danger of being discovered.

Kershaw shows how Parisians generally and Jews specifically suffered terribly under the occupation. While German officers dined in splendor, ordinary citizens faced starvation. And there were other outrages, too. In 1943, the Germans publicly burned more than 500 works by Miro, Picasso and other artists, deeming them “degenerate.”

A few months before the Allies liberated Paris, the Germans finally imprisoned the Jacksons, including son Phillip, whose family archives and personal recollections served

as principal sources for this tense and compelling narrative.

—EDWARD MORRIS

KATRINA

By Gary Rivlin

Simon & Schuster $27, 480 pages ISBN 9781451692228 eBook available DISASTERS

August 29 marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history and the storm that delivered a near-mortal blow to the city of New Orleans. An estimated 250 billion gallons of water inundated the Big Easy when its levee system failed, damaging four out of every five homes in the city.

Those and many other sad statistics can be found in Gary Rivlin’s Katrina: After the Flood, a clear-eyed account of New Orleans’ efforts to come back from the 2005 catastrophe. In the opening chapters, Rivlin provides a recap of the incomprehensibly awful first days of the flood. He then moves forward to tell a larger tale of bureaucracy gone epically awry—a story of city rebuilding strategies hatched and abandoned, of planning committees formed and dissolved, of political rivalries old and new. Writing in an authoritative yet accessible style, he tracks the ways in which these factors slowed New Orleans’ rebirth.

A question central to the city’s future is whether damaged communities that stand a good chance of flooding again—areas like the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East—should be redeveloped or written off. Resolving that question and settling upon a general restoration strategy turn out to be agonizing tasks for government officials and citizens alike.

Rivlin weaves in powerful personal accounts from a cross-section of survivors—black and white, working class and affluent. While it’s clear that the city remains a work in progress, there is some good news.

A new flood-protection system has

been built and the city’s population has increased, thanks in part to an influx of artists and entrepreneurs.

A skillful storyteller, Rivlin delivers a fascinating report on a city transformed by tragedy.

—J U L I E H A L E

than done.

Will Yourgrau sort out a lifetime of messy relationships and get motivated to clean things up in time to host that dinner? Let’s just say the reader who roots for a tidy ending won’t be disappointed.

—KEITH HERRELL

MESS

By Barry Yourgrau Norton $25.95, 256 pages ISBN 9780393241778 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

BORN ON THE BAYOU

By Blaine Lourd

Gallery $25, 224 pages ISBN 9781476773858 eBook available MEMOIR

Thinking of cleaning out that pile of magazines in the spare room or perhaps the mountain of unused sporting equipment in the garage? You won’t find a much better incentive than reading Mess, Barry Yourgrau’s lighthearted account of his two-year quest to clean out his New York apartment.

Yourgrau, a writer and occasional actor, can afford to be lighthearted. From his description, which includes dozens of plastic supermarket bags wafting about like tumbleweeds, things are beyond messy at his pad but don’t approach reality TV territory. He can still navigate the premises, at least, and find a spot to write an entertaining chronicle of his project.

You might ask: Does it really take 256 pages to clean out an apartment? Why not call 1-800-GOTJUNK and be done with it? The answer, naturally, is complicated, and in Yourgrau’s view, it goes back to a peripatetic childhood, a difficult relationship with his father and (surprise!) an inability to let go. Throw a girlfriend short on patience into the mix, plus side trips to various therapists, support groups and clutter experts, and you have more than enough to keep things readable.

Fortunately for Yourgrau (and the reader), there’s a specific goal: All he has to do is get things presentable enough to host his girlfriend and her mother for dinner. Given all the baggage (real and psychic) involved, that’s easier said

Rambunctious and poignant, Blaine Lourd’s moseying coming-of-age memoir, Born on the ­Bayou, takes readers to the swampy, misty marshes of his youth in New Iberia, Louisiana.

While Lourd regales us with tales of his two brothers, his sister and his mother, it’s his father who stands tall at the center of the story.

Harvey “Puffer” Lourd Jr. is a salesman and a gambler, a lovable and cantankerous man living by the code of the bayou and the South, who tells his son he’s never had a bad day in his life. The younger Lourd emerges into manhood by hunting and fishing with his father, pulling the feathers off of still warm ducks just shot or cleaning a whitetail deer. “[T]his was the way of the South of my youth, boys walking in the footsteps of men who themselves did not know the way,” he writes.

Lourd does know that, like his father, he’s a Coonass, a badge he wears proudly: “A Coonass can be wealthy or poor, wise or foolish. At heart, he’s generally unpretentious and comfortable with himself, listens to his gut, has horse sense, and tends to be indulgent.”

A dazzling storyteller, Lourd so skillfully describes the hazards of growing up in the bayou with a larger-than-life father that we can’t help but read with wonder that he survived his upbringing and lived to tell these tales.

—HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR.

27

reviews T PI OP CK

TEEN

ENCHANTED AIR

Between Cuba and California REVIEW BY JILL RATZAN

Novels- and memoirs-in-verse are always welcome additions to the young adult canon, especially those that show world history through diverse voices. In Enchanted Air, poet Margarita Engle introduces readers to her “Two countries / Two families / Two sets of words” and her own “two selves.” She spends each school year in California with her Ukrainian-Jewish father’s family and summers in Cuba, her mother’s homeland. Together with her grandparents in both countries, she explores nature, admires horses and devours books that fill her mind with tales of heroes and faraway adventures.

Eleven-year-old Margarita’s days are filled with switching between her two worlds and navigating the social politics of middle school— until October 1962, when international events suddenly become personal. American spy planes have found Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, setting off what will become known as the Cuban missile crisis.

By Margarita Engle While the world nervously waits to see if nuclear war is imminent, Atheneum, $17.99, 208 pages Margarita finds her dual identities in conflict. As FBI agents question ISBN 9781481435222, eBook available her parents and her American teachers speak of Cuba as the enemy, Ages 12 and up how can she continue to honor her love of both countries?

MEMOIR-IN-VERSE The author of Newbery Honor-winning The Surrender Tree once again presents a sensitive, descriptive, free-verse work that blends Cuban history, intergenerational stories and the daily challenges and triumphs of emerging adolescence. If you’re looking for something to read after Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Visit BookPage.com for a Dreaming or Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again, Enchanted Air is the Q&A with Margarita Engle. book for you.

BRIGHT LIGHTS, DARK NIGHTS

By Stephen Emond Roaring Brook $17.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781626722064 eBook available Ages 12 and up FICTION

Set in the urban slice of fictional East Bridge, Bright Lights, Dark Nights is a charismatic tale of two teens wrapped up in the innocence of first love while reluctantly fighting racial tensions and parental overprotection.

High school senior Walter Wilcox is an average kid, growing up in the suburbs until his parents divorce and he moves with his police officer father to a part of the city known as the Basement. When his friend Jason Mills invites him over

28

for dinner, Walter meets Naomi, Jason’s awkward and adorable sister.

Walter feels a thump in his chest that he can’t easily ignore, but there are a number of problems: Walter is white and Naomi is black; they live in a city suffering from the adverse effects of gentrification; and Walter’s father is currently under public scrutiny and internal review for being accused of racially profiling a teen thief—and all these complexities are further exacerbated by the Internet.

Tackling a number of social, racial and political issues—all within the microcosm of a young, inward-facing relationship—author and artist Stephen Emond has his thumb on the pulse of contemporary young adult life, showing how the intersection of race and love has the power to challenge and change the physical and digital landscapes of American cities.

—J U S T I N B A R I S I C H

tasy Award finalist Kate Elliott has built an intriguing world inspired

by Greco-Roman Egypt, in which class dictates opportunities and everyday life is ruled by strict codes of conduct. Jes is strong-willed and savvy, unafraid to take risks but always putting her family’s safety ahead of her daredevil nature.

Her romance with the upper-class Kalliarkos is sweet but unobtrusive; Elliott has fulfilled this YA requirement with a perfectly light touch.

Though many supporting characters remain mere sketches, Jes joins Katniss among the ranks of fierce leading ladies.

—SARAH WEBER

THE ACCIDENT SEASON

By Moïra FowleyDoyle

Kathy Dawson $17.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780525429487 Audio, eBook available Ages 13 and up FICTION

For as long as Cara can remember, the month of October has meant avoiding knives and wearing extra layers of clothing, not for warmth, but for protection against trips and falls. For Cara’s family, COURT OF FIVES October is “accident season.”

Sometimes those accidents are just

By Kate Elliott burned fingers or stubbed toes; Little, Brown sometimes people die. This year’s $18, 448 pages accident season could be particuISBN 9780316364195 larly bad, and everyone is on edge: Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up Cara’s older sister, Alice, seems to be hiding something; their mom FANTASY is becoming increasingly overprotective; Cara’s relationship with her ex-stepbrother, Sam, is getting Caught between her Patron complicated; and then Cara befather and her Commoner mother, comes obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of a classmate.

Jessamy’s entire life is a balancing Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s debut is set act, yet she yearns for the freedom in Ireland, where myth and magic to become whomever she wants. often lie close to the surface of She relishes her secret sessions on the Fives court, where she trains everyday life. Readers will wonfor the intricate, dangerous athletic der—as Cara does—what is magic and what isn’t, what is logical and event that could someday bring what is unexplainable. An air of her glory. But when Jes’ family is mystery and wonder will remain endangered by cruel Lord Gargaron, she must focus on saving them with readers long after the close of from a fate worse than death. the accident season.

With this new series, World Fan—NORAH PIEHL

children’s

REBECCA STEAD INTERVIEW BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

On the streets where we live

S

ome may think of New York City’s Upper West Side as “Seinfeld” stomping grounds, but fans of Rebecca Stead know better: These apartments, shops and streets are where Stead does her own stomping— and where the characters in her critically lauded middle grade novels live.

While Stead’s first novel, 2007’s First Light, was set on the quite different island of Greenland, her three subsequent books are set in New York City past and present: 2010 Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me takes place in Stead’s childhood neighborhood; and Liar and Spy explores Brooklyn. Stead’s new book, Goodbye Stranger, which takes place 10 blocks from where the author grew up, gives readers a window into living one’s formative years in a city that’s both a world-famous object of fantasy and home to lots of regular people doing regular stuff.

“As soon as I started writing about childhood,” Stead tells BookPage during a call to her home, “it was inevitable the characters were going to end up in New York, because that’s where I’ve always been. It’s weird to live in the same neighborhood in New York City for so long. Things change so much.”

She adds, “Every once in a while I have a moment: For a second, walking on Amsterdam Avenue, it feels like my childhood. It lasts

GOODBYE STRANGER

By Rebecca Stead

Wendy Lamb, $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780385743174, audio, eBook available Ages 10 and up

MIDDLE GRADE

about six seconds, three steps—it can be something I see or hear, music, people playing dominoes— and I think about how it was . . . and then it’s gone.”

But her memories, her touchstones, do wend their way into her fiction: “Somehow, it’s all feeding me.”

Just as the city itself is both glittery and dun-colored, modern and historic—depending on the perspective—the characters in Goodbye Stranger are figuring out who they really are as well. They consider how others see them versus what they feel inside and ponder grand-scale existential questions, too.

For seventh-grader Bridget Barsamian (you can call her “Bridge”), the latter sort are front of mind.

They have been since she survived being hit by a car at age 8 and a nurse commented, “You must have been put on this earth for a reason, little girl, to have survived.”

In the intervening years, Bridge hasn’t figured out that reason. Lately it doesn’t help that she’s been getting homework assignments like, “Answer the question, ‘What is love?’ ” That’s heady stuff for anyone, let alone someone who’s negotiating the oh-so-challenging middle school years, rife with physical and emotional changes, odd behavior from longtime friends and a tentative new friendship with a boy named Sherm.

And sure, books have come before that have trod these roads— and books will come after—but Stead’s approach is a moving blend of present-day and historic, romantic love and familial love, deep questions and just-for-fun pursuits like sock buns and a hilariously intense competition between Bridge’s brother and his frenemy.

It therefore follows that Stead likes “to read books that are a little challenging or complicated, or feel

off-balance a little bit. For me, that’s a great pleasure of reading, slowly doing the reader’s work of putting the story together and building an understanding of what’s happening. It’s important to me as a reader, so I always think about that when I’m writing.”

To wit, Goodbye Stranger is told from three distinct points of view: Bridge, Sherm and an anonymous narrator whose identity is slowly, tantalizingly revealed. “I like the idea of “A lot of girls the reader synfeel fantastic thesizing the about the character over time,” says way they Stead. “Hopelook at this fully it creates age, and they a little bit of a should. It’s moment for not something the reader, because that’s kids should how people have to deny.” are—so different internally from how we present.”

That issue is also explored through the characters’ texting, sharing and judging of photos and the supposed motives therein.

Bodily autonomy figures in, via the question of whether it’s perfectly healthy for girls to be happy about how they look—or if they should feel abashed at any sense of pride.

“There are a lot of different questions around this time of life, and it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of girls feel fantastic about the way they look at this age, and they should. It’s not something kids should have to deny. It’s a complex issue.

“Also, the level of control . . . [is] lost because there are so many images online . . . but at the same time, you can really decide how you will present yourself. And

people can pull up your page and study it for an hour, forward it or link to it.”

But even as Bridge juggles her friend Emily’s texting habits, a new distance from their friend Tabitha and an unexpected affinity for the Tech Crew (which is cool because it’s a crew, not a club), ancient history looms in interesting ways, from the car accident’s continued presence in Bridge’s thoughts to Sherm questioning whether the Apollo 11 moon landing was real.

About that: Stead says, “I’m entertained by the fact people deny that it happened. The whole question of, what do we really know?”

Readers of Goodbye ­Stranger will know that, as always, the author has a keen eye for and an empathetic take on what it’s like to be a middle-schooler—and what it’s like to be a thoughtful kid like Bridge. “I think it’s an incredible time of life, and I have such enormous respect for kids that age.

They’re really deep.”

Stead adds, “My memory of that age is just full of existential questions about how the world worked.

I don’t think I was special—kids really are asking a lot of deep questions about themselves, how other people see them, who other people really are. It’s an incredible widening and explosion internally and intellectually. . . . That’s why I write for younger kids. That, for me, was a really incredibly interesting, fruitful time of life.”

29

reviews T PI OP CK

CHILDREN’S

VOICE OF FREEDOM: FANNIE LOU HAMER

A leader for us all REVIEW BY DEBORAH HOPKINSON

Fannie Lou Hamer was a tireless champion of civil rights, from the moment she attempted to register to vote in 1962 until her death in 1977. Malcolm X called her “the country’s number one freedom-fighting woman.” In 1964, Hamer came to prominence at the Democratic National Convention, where she delivered a speech that aired on national television. An older white man once expressed what many felt, telling her that she did “what he was afraid to do.”

Award-winning poet Carole Boston Weatherford and debut artist Ekua Holmes bring Hamer’s courage and legacy to life in this striking volume. The large, attractive format shares Hamer’s life story through powerful, first-person poems and colorful, detailed collage illustraBy Carole Boston Weatherford tions. The poems often incorporate Hamer’s own words, and source Illustrated by Ekua Holmes notes, a timeline and bibliography are included in the back matter.

Candlewick, $17.99, 56 pages As Weatherford tells us in her author’s note, Hamer was an unlikely ISBN 9780763665319, ages 10 and up heroine. Born in 1917 into a large sharecropping family, she married MIDDLE GRADE Perry “Pap” Hamer in 1944 and worked with him on a plantation. She first became active in voting registration efforts after realizing she didn’t even know she had the right to vote. Being arrested and beaten only solidified her resolve, and she became a leader and inspiration to others.

“All my life I’ve been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Hamer. Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer is a fitting tribute to her unforgettable spirit.

Illustration © 2015 by Ekua Holmes. Reproduced by permission of Candlewick.

OUT OF THE WOODS

By Rebecca Bond FSG $17.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780374380779 eBook available Ages 5 to 9 PICTURE BOOK

Sometimes the most incredible stories are the true ones, the stories passed through generations, eventually becoming legend. Rebecca Bond’s Out of the Woods, based on her grandfather’s childhood at Lake Gowganda in Ontario, Canada, is one of these.

Life in his mother’s hotel provided Antonio with myriad things to discover. Between days spent helping cook and stoke fires, and evenings spent listening to hotel guests make music and tell tales, Antonio’s life was happy and busy.

But more than anything, Antonio was enthralled by the elusive ani-

30

mals of the forest. When a summer forest fire threatens Antonio’s home, the hotel’s inhabitants take refuge in the lake. But they aren’t alone in the water. Readers will share Antonio’s disbelief as the forest creatures—also fleeing the blaze—join them. Predator and prey alike quietly, peacefully share the lake.

With a skillful artist’s hand and an eye for intriguing detail, Bond captures not only one remarkable event in 1914, but also an era.

Hunters and loggers, tourists and miners fill the pages, along with near-forgotten trappings of their world: kerosene lamps and tobacco pipes, wood-burning stoves and travelers’ trunks. Bond’s stylized drawings do more than just evoke the setting and the time; her lines echo tree bark, the animals’ rough fur and thick wool blankets on beds. Bond tells the story simply but illustrates with the pride that comes with telling a story you’ve not just heard, but inherited.

A beautiful story in its own right, Out of the Woods rings with an honesty that will captivate readers of all ages. By passing along her grandfather’s tale, Bond reminds us that the most fascinating stories are those that really happened.

Appleblossom and her numerous siblings learn to survive from their mother, Ma Possum. Appleblossom and her brothers Amlet and Antonio aren’t sure they’re ready to live on their own, but during their first night solo, they’re pretty good at finding food, and they know to stay away from dangerous things like dogs, cars and people. But Appleblossom is a little more curious than an opossum should be, especially about the little girl who lives nearby.

Part realism (how an opossum lives in the world) and part fantasy (opossum rooftop disco in the city), Appleblossom the Possum is a fun read, and the illustrations are a perfect accompaniment to the lighthearted story.

—J E N N I F E R B R U E R K I T C H E L

CHASING SECRETS

By Gennifer Choldenko

Wendy Lamb $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780385742535 Audio, eBook available Ages 9 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Good historical fiction is hard to find, but it’s probably even harder to write. Newbery Honor winner Gennifer Choldenko’s ability to research obscure yet intriguing topics is uncanny, and as she did — J I L L L O R E N Z I N I with the popular Al Capone trilogy, she turns a tough topic into a high-interest read with Chasing APPLEBLOSSOM THE POSSUM Secrets.

Thirteen-year-old Lizzie KenBy Holly Goldberg nedy is stuck in a snooty girls’ Sloan school in turn-of-the-century San Illustrated by Francisco, but she feels free and Gary A. Rosen competent when she accompanies Dial her physician father on house calls, $16.99, 288 pages affording her the opportunity to ISBN 9780803741331 show her knowledge and indepenAudio, eBook available dence. But soon everything she Ages 8 to 12 knows—or thinks she knows—is MIDDLE GRADE challenged: The bubonic plague Holly Goldberg Sloan knows how has led to part of the city being quarantined; many are threatening to write a story for young people, with a style that’s easily accessible to burn Chinatown to the ground; and entertaining for new readers. and her family’s beloved Chinese Her latest book, Appleblossom the cook is missing. Even worse, no one believes her fears. Her father Possum, is no exception.

CHILDREN’S and her powerful uncle, a newspaperman, deny the outbreak, and her older brother, Billy, is too distracted to help. Lizzie befriends the cook’s son, Noah, and together they hatch surreptitious, daring plans to connect the dots of the medical mystery plaguing their city and their families.

Lizzie unabashedly takes on the problems of the world, reminiscent of Sophia in Avi’s Sophia’s War. Choldenko’s research is exhaustive, weaving little-known details into the narrative, as well as into the author’s note, chronology and endnotes. Themes of friendship, race relations and deception—with diseased rats thrown in for good measure and accuracy—mesh together to create a compelling work of historical fiction.

—SHARON VERBETEN

MY BROTHER’S SECRET

the state. Karl inadvertently runs afoul of the local Gestapo, putting himself, his friends and his family in grave danger.

My Brother’s Secret weaves a heart-stopping tale that doesn’t avoid the overt brutality and subtle coercion present in Nazi Germany.

Young readers will learn a great deal from this up-close and personal story.

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

would you describe Q: How

the book?

—LORI K. JOYCE

TERRIBLE TYPHOID MARY

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

By Susan Campbell Bartoletti HMH $17.99, 240 pages ISBN 9780544313675 Audio available Ages 10 and up

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

MIDDLE GRADE

More than 100 years ago, there was little understanding of the Chicken House concept of invisible dangers like $16.99, 304 pages germs. The story of Mary Mallon, ISBN 9780545771559 better known as Typhoid Mary, was Audio, eBook available passed off as one of intentional Ages 9 to 12 harm, when in reality she didn’t believe she was a danger to anyone.

MIDDLE GRADE Mary emigrated from Ireland to New York City, was hired as household staff and found a specialty in cooking. From 1897 to 1907, 24 History remembers the various people in households where she resistance groups that cropped up during World War II, but few people worked developed typhoid fever, and one died. Later, 25 people know about the Edelweiss Pirates, developed the illness after conformed by German young adults suming her cooking. Dr. George aged 14 to 17. A factually accurate Soper, sanitary engineer for the portrayal of this group serves as United States Army Sanitary Corps, the backdrop to My Brother’s Secret, the gripping tale of 12-year- began investigating the outbreak at Mary’s last house of employment old Karl, a staunch supporter of and then Mary herself as a healthy Hitler and the Hitler youth group carrier of typhoid. Mary was held to which he belongs. against her will at Riverside HospiThe best day of Karl’s life is tal on North Brother Island in New when he’s recognized for havYork’s East River, and the story only ing the potential to make Hitler gets darker from there. proud—but this day is also his Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s worst, as his family learns that his extensive research, complete with German soldier father was killed on the Russian front. Following this photographs and illustrations from the early 1900s, brings little-known soul-shattering event, Karl begins facts to light and this fascinating to question the wisdom of blindly tale to life. Terrible Typhoid Mary following Hitler, but he finds it provides insight and understanddifficult to get any real answers in ing for a woman previously porthis untrustworthy environment trayed as a villain. where children are encouraged to —HEATHER BRUSH turn in their parents as enemies of

By Dan Smith

meet DON BROWN

Q: Who was your childhood hero?

books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: What

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

message would you like to send to young readers?

Q: What

DROWNED CITY August 29, 2015, marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Following his standout The Great American Dust Bowl (2013), award-winning author-illustrator Don Brown tells the devastating true story of one of the worst natural disasters in American history in Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans (HMH, $18.99, 96 pages, ISBN 9780544157774, ages 12 and up). Brown lives in New York with his family.

31

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

MOVED TO TEARS

Dear Editor: I’m never sure about the word maudlin. I recently heard it used to mean “depressed” or “self-pitying,” but I’ve also heard it used to mean overly emotional.

H. E. Compton, California Maudlin means “showing or expressing too much emotion especially in a foolish or annoying way” or “drunk enough to be emotionally silly.” The word in both senses comes from the name Mary Magdelene and from the depiction of her as a weeping penitent.

Mary Magdelene, who was so called because she was thought to have come from the Palestinian city of Magdala, is portrayed in the Bible as one of Jesus’ most devoted followers. The popular pronunciation of Magdalene in early Modern English is indicated by spellings such as Maudlen and Mawdlin.

By the 16th century, Mary Magdelene was traditionally portrayed as weeping in scenes of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. She became so identified with weeping that by the 17th century maudlin had come to mean “tearful.” Later the word was used to describe a tearful show of emotion and especially the overwrought display of emotion brought on by drunkenness.

BACK OF THE PACK

Dear Editor: Why is a candidate for office who isn’t expected to win called a dark horse candidate?

B. F. Cleburne, Texas Sometimes in a race, a horse whose name and ability are not widely known puts on a surprisingly good show and defeats more famous rivals. Such a horse is called a dark horse, not because of its color, but because of its obscurity.

Since the 19th century, the phrase dark horse has been extended from racehorses to obscure competitors who do unexpectedly well in contests of other kinds. Now it is perhaps most often applied, as you mention, to candidates for elected office whose chances appear poor.

HATS OFF

Dear Editor: Why is someone who makes clothes called a tailor, someone who makes hats called a milliner, and someone who makes shoes called a cobbler?

F. P. Anderson, Indiana Both tailor and cobbler go back to Middle English. The Middle English word taillour came from Old French tailleur, from tallier, meaning “to cut.” Tallier ultimately goes back to Latin talea, meaning “twig” or “cutting.” Cobbler goes back to the Middle English word

for a cobbler, cobelere, which probably also developed into the word cobble, first meaning “to mend or patch coarsely.”

The story of milliner is a bit more interesting. The Italian city of Milan was a significant source of luxury goods for 16th-century England. Milan bonnets, Milan gloves, Milan ribbons, Milan point lace, Milan jewelry—all represented the best in Renaissance finery.

The purveyors of these goods were called milaners or millaners or, in the variant that survives today, milliners. Eventually, milliner was extended to all merchants specializing in fancy accessories, the actual origin of the merchandise notwithstanding. Apparently not until the 19th century was milliner reserved exclusively for makers or retailers of women’s hats.

Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Mind Benders detAilS

puzzle Type: VIsuAl compleTIoN:

mileAge b

DIffIculTy: TIme: ___________

find where each detail appears in the big picture.

puzzle Type: Number compleTIoN:

DIffIculTy: TIme: ___________

driving to work one day you notice that the mileage indicators show the interesting pair of numbers 12345.6 and 123.4.

What is the shortest distance you can drive before the ten places in the two meters show all ten digits 0 to 9? Easier question: How far must you drive if you can reset the trip meter to 0 at any time? And if driving backward reverses the odometers, can you improve your answers to the previous questions?

HINT: You must drive forward between 700 and 1,000 miles. If you are allowed to reset the trip meter, you can drive forward less than 100 miles.

2

3

4

5

6

HINT: Detail 1 is right of middle.

ANswer:

workman.com

ANswer: After 861.1 miles the numbers 13206.7 and 984.5 appear on the mileage indicators. A mere .9 miles later it happens again with the numbers 13207.6 and 985.4 appearing. If you can reset the trip meter, then the best answer is to drive 2.2 miles, reset the trip meter, drive another 47.8 miles for a total of 50 miles, at which time the numbers 12395.6 and 047.8 will appear on the mileage indicators. You can do even better by backing up 1.4 miles, resetting, then backing up another 35.5 miles (total 36.9 miles), but the best answer is to drive forward 7.3 miles, reset, then back 12.4 miles (total 19.7 miles), giving readings of 12340.5 and 987.6.

1

Workman is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.

Available wherever books are sold.