BookPage March 2016

AMERICA’S BOOK REVIEW

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

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REVIEWS INSIDE

Calculating the cost of genius In A Doubter’s Almanac, Ethan Canin delves into the tortured legacy of a brilliant mathematician

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contents

MARCH 2016

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Lifestyles Well Read Library Reads Whodunit Audio Cooking Book Clubs Romance

Bestselling author Ethan Canin returns with an ambitious new novel that follows one highly gifted family across generations.

Ethan Canin photo by Nina Subin Cover illustration from A Doubter’s Almanac by Gérard Dubois

book reviews 19 FICTION

features 11 15 16 17 18 21 25 27 31

on the cover

I Had to Survive by Dr. Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci

t o p p i c k : All Things Cease to

Eruption by Steve Olson

Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

by Carlo Rovelli

I’m Glad About You

by Theresa Rebeck

Allison Pataki Virginia Reeves Quests St. Patrick’s Day Christian Living Historical Fiction Steve Olson Meg Medina Make-Believe

Washington’s Immortals

by Patrick K. O’Donnell

At the Edge of the Orchard

by Tracy Chevalier

The Legends Club by John Feinstein

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

The Violet Hour by Kate Roiphe

Shelter by Jung Yun Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman Version Control by Dexter Palmer

28 TEEN

t o p p i c k : Unbecoming

by Jenny Downham

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Rebel of the Sands

by Alwyn Hamilton

Under the Influence

by Joyce Maynard

The Bitter Side of Sweet

by Tara Sullivan

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

meet the author

The Girl in the Red Coat

by Kate Hamer Gone with the Mind by Mark Leyner

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Thanks for the Trouble

by Tommy Wallach

29 CHILDREN’S

t o p p i c k : Ideas Are All Around

by Philip C. Stead

Flight of Dreams by Ariel Lawhon

Have You Seen Elephant?

by David Barrow

23 NONFICTION

t o p p i c k : The Lonely City

The Night Gardener

by Terry Fan and Eric Fan

by Olivia Laing Alligator Candy by David Kushner Life Reimagined

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

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Flashback Four: The Lincoln Project by Dan Gutman

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

The Key to Extraordinary

by Natalie Lloyd

Smarter Faster Better

by Charles Duhigg

All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook by David Barrow

At the Existentialist Café

by Sarah Bakewell

Tru and Nelle by G. Neri Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar

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

ASSISTANT EDITOR

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Hilli Levin

Penny Childress

MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

EDITORIAL INTERN

Trisha Ping

Sukey Howard

Leah Bruce

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.

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LIFESTYLES

WELL READ

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

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Taking care of business

Charlotte’s passions

Upon starting her own company, entrepreneurial mentor Natalie MacNeil found that “traditional business plans induced eye rolls and tears of boredom.” She figured there was a better, and perhaps more female-centric, way to find one’s calling. Enter The Conquer Kit (TarcherPerigee, $16.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9780399175770), MacNeil’s interactive approach to navigating the business world.

The book first encourages careful self-analysis with timed activities that include space on the page for scribbling ideas and responses to

of hair it suits best (wavy, fine, curly, etc.) and whether or not you can go it alone, as many of the fancier creations require a partner for the handiwork. I did quickly achieve a decent Topsy-tail Pony on my own, and am eager to try a Messy Top Knot (“great for any girl on the go”) and some Beach Waves. The hairstyle models are all young women, which, if a little aggravating for this reader, make it easy to see this as a great gift for some tween or teen girls—a sourcebook for girly fun with the BFF.

prompts and a “Conqueror Archetype Quiz,” all designed to help the proto-entrepreneur face fears, identify strengths and gain focus.

Later chapters focus on marketing, team building and big-picture planning, but MacNeil’s third and fourth steps—“Form the Four Pillars of Success,” which includes tasks like accounting and writing an operations manual, and “Get Your Mind on Your Money,” a quick guide to finance—will strengthen readers’ savvy and confidence. The Conquer Kit also gets a boost from bonus content on MacNeil’s award-winning website.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES

Does the world need another biography of Charlotte Brontë?

The life stories of the genius behind Jane Eyre and her eccentric siblings have been told many times before, most recently in Juliet Barker’s massive The Brontës.

In the case of Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart (Knopf, $30, 480 pages, ISBN 9780307962089), which arrives in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, the answer is a resounding yes.

Harman has written a lively, compulsively readable biography that illuminates the eldest surviving Brontë sister in a new light. Humanizing Brontë by exploring her rich inner life, as well as her interactions with her family and the world, this welcome book recasts the writer not as “poor Charlotte” but as an intelligent, passionate woman.

Charlotte’s story is inseparable from her singular family’s, so it is inevitable that her father, Patrick, her brother, Branwell, and her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, share much of the narrative (her mother died when Charlotte was 5, and her two older sisters a few years after that, leaving Charlotte the sometimes unenviable role of eldest). Indeed, Harman suggests that it was the intensely close relationship between the four children, played out in near isolation, which spurred their imaginative storytelling abilities. Their father, a parson, indulged his children’s peculiarities, and none of them was particularly suited to functioning in the wider world beyond the parsonage. Charlotte would prove the most adept at making a living, although she seems to have despised every moment spent working as a teacher or a governess. This disenchantment, of course, would provide much of the narrative fuel for Jane Eyre.

HAIR TACTICS If your hair skills start with a side-part and end with a ponytail, prepare to be wowed and schooled by hairstylist and blogger Jenny Strebe’s 100 Perfect Hair Days (Chronicle, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781452143354). From a Boho Topsy-tail Side Braid for everyday wear to a Knotted Faux Hawk for special events—and anything you can imagine in between—Strebe provides step-bystep illustrations, instructions and product and tool requirements.

Each style is coded for the types

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Elizabeth Wilhide’s Scandinavian Home (Quadrille, $29.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781849497497) offers a colorfully elegant tour through the icons of midcentury modern: here a Womb Chair, there a Marimekko poppy print, everywhere the clean lines and earthy curves that defined the best of post-World War II design, now experiencing a revival in a big way. (Not that it ever really vanished—paging through, you’ll grasp the origins of many classic IKEA pieces.) The Scandinavian modern ethos values simplicity and approachability: An Egg chair, for instance, is almost irresistibly inviting. Scandinavian modern is characterized by its “contemporary ethos in design” and a “connection to nature that is innate in the human spirit,” Wilhide writes.

She goes on to profile the movement’s key designers and artists in her Design Directory, and a final section showcases gorgeous, present-day home interiors that employ this now-classic style. Browse, salivate, then head to Pinterest to plan your own midcentury modern dream home.

Not unexpectedly, Brontë’s greatest and most beloved novel, autobiographical in many ways, permeates the life story that Harman reconstructs here, and she also offers sharp insights into the real-life origins of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Anne’s Agnes Grey and Charlotte’s three other novels as well. Harman celebrates the eldest Brontë’s achievement as a writer, pointing out that she was the first novelist to use a first-person child narrator and to dramatize the injustices of childhood. Contemporary readers were bowled over by this innovation, Harman says.

Readers almost two centuries later are no less enraptured. The love story at the heart of Jane Eyre has its parallel in Charlotte’s own life.

While teaching at a girl’s school in Brussels, the 26-year-old avowed spinster fell in love with a married professor. It was unrequited, and certainly nothing on the grand scale of passion that Brontë’s would simmer beloved novel, between the fictional Jane Jane Eyre, permeates her and Rochester, but Charlotte life story. transformed this raw material into one of the most enduring, complicated love stories of all time, because that is what geniuses do.

In researching and writing Charlotte Brontë, Harman had access to letters never before available, and she has drawn on previous scholarship with a fresh eye. Harman is herself a gifted story­teller, writing with a congenial flair and eschewing the syntactical convolutions that many literary biographers employ.

The result is a sparkling biography that reads with the ease of a novel and will compel the reader to return not only to Charlotte’s masterwork, but to those singular works of genius the other Brontës left us, too.

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 March.

#1

THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR by Helen Simonson

A glorious new collection of stories

from

Random House, $28, ISBN 9780812993103

Simonson’s highly anticipated second novel, following the bestseller Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, takes readers to rural Rye, East Sussex, during the summer of 1914.

JANE STEELE by Lyndsay Faye

Putnam, $27, ISBN 9780399169496 Jane Eyre meets Sherlock Holmes in Faye’s imaginative and rousing historical murder-mystery, which finds the orphaned Jane Steele willing to do anything to claim her inheritance.

THE PASSENGER by Lisa Lutz

Simon & Schuster, $25.99, ISBN 9781451686630 Desperate and hunted, Tanya Dubois goes on the run after her husband is murdered in Lutz’s no-holds-barred, psychological thriller.

MARKED IN FLESH by Anne Bishop

Roc, $27, ISBN 9780451474476 As this fourth book in the bestselling Novels of the Others series opens, humankind and the powerful Others are on the brink of a violent conflict.

THE NEST by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Ecco, $26.99, ISBN 9780062414212 Four adult siblings from a quirky and dysfunctional New York City family squabble over the fate of their shared inheritance in this entertaining and cinematic debut novel.

FOOL ME ONCE by Harlan Coben

Dutton, $28, ISBN 9780525955092 Special ops pilot Maya is home from the war and mourning the murder of her husband—until she spots him on the nanny cam, visiting their 2-year-old daughter. Can it be real?

THE MADWOMAN UPSTAIRS by Catherine Lowell

“It brims with Maeve’s warmth and common sense.

She writes particularly well about the hopes and fears of young people on the cusp of adulthood.”

—Irish Independent

“She makes you laugh, cry, & care”

BECAUSE OF MISS BRIDGERTON by Julia Quinn

Avon, $7.99, ISBN 9780062388148 Bestselling author Quinn brings a different generation of her beloved Bridgerton family to life in a sparkling opposites-­ attract romance set in the Georgian era.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Illustration by William Low

Touchstone, $25.99, ISBN 9781501124211 In this lively academic mystery, Samantha Whipple, the last surviving Brontë heir, starts to believe that the rumored family inheritance might actually exist.

MAEVE BINCHY A Few of the Girls

DIMESTORE by Lee Smith

Algonquin, $24.95, ISBN 9781616205027 Beloved novelist Smith takes readers back to midcentury Appalachia in this collection of 15 honest and moving autobiographical essays.

ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR by Elizabeth Brundage

Knopf, $26.95, ISBN 9781101875599 A brutal murder haunts a small town in upstate New York— and two very different families—in this intricate story of loss, grief and redemption. Read our review on page 19.

KNOPF

MAEVEBINCHY . COM

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

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WHODUNIT

BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Next-level Scandinavian suspense For those who admire Scandinavian suspense novels (a group of aficionados growing in leaps and bounds), here’s one well worth your consideration: Samuel Bjørk’s riveting American debut, I’m Traveling Alone (Viking, $27, 400 pages, ISBN 9780525428961). When the body of a 6-year-old Norwegian girl is found hanging from a tree, a police task force is speedily formed to investigate.

Soon, three more children are found, each with a number lightly incised into a fingernail of her left hand. Mounting evidence suggests that there will be six more to come. For police investigator (and worrywart) Holger Munch, the case holds extra significance, as he has a

granddaughter the same age as the victims. Retired investigator Mia Krüger has agreed (begrudingly) to assist Munch and lend her considerable investigative talents to one last case. But the villain they seek appears as something of a chameleon: Perhaps it’s the cross-dressing man with an eagle tattoo, or possibly the lovely young woman

off her meds, or could it be the religious cult leader who holds acolytes underwater just a bit too long during baptism? Surprises come

The addictive new mystery series from

Julie Anne Lindsey!

Geek Girl Mia Connors is up to her tortoiseshell glasses in trouble.

right up until the final chapters, and the book begs for a sequel.

A FAMILY MATTER T. Jefferson Parker’s thriller Crazy Blood (St. Martin’s, $26.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781250064097) strays far from the whodunit genre, but it’s nonetheless a must-read for his legions of fans. Although you may know “whodunit” early on, there are still plenty of revelations in store.

Wylie Welborn has just returned to his hometown of Mammoth Lakes, California, after a stint in Afghanistan where he did things he won’t talk about.

The Sierras should be much more tranquil than the Hindu Kush, but there are some factors that militate against that. Wylie is the black sheep of the wealthy Carson family; he’s the illegitimate son of Richard Carson, a man murdered by his jealous wife, Cynthia, on the very night of Wylie’s conception.

Cynthia herself was pregnant at the time with Wylie’s half-brother, Sky. From childhood, Wylie and Sky have engaged in rivalry over everything imaginable, a drama that played out repeatedly on the ski slopes of Mammoth Mountain.

Now, after a tragic skiing accident involving third brother Robert, Wylie and Sky will duel one more time, in a winner-take-all confrontation that will either save the family or tear it apart in unimaginable ways.

VENETIAN CANALS

Available Now

Available March 7 www.CarinaPress.com

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Donna Leon’s well-loved protagonist, Venice police Commissario Guido Brunetti, falls squarely into the “likable cop” mold, not unlike Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police, or Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren. He’s urbane, well read and well liked by family and townspeople alike. And he can be a bit of a pushover, as is the case in the latest installment of the series, The Waters of Eternal Youth (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 9780802124807). When the best friend of Brunetti’s formida-

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ble mother-in-law asks him to look into a 15-year-old unsolved attempted murder, he agrees (outwardly), while wondering just what he can hope to accomplish. But Leon is a consummate storyteller, and she doesn’t leave Brunetti foundering for long. Soon he is embroiled in one of the most troubling cases of his career, the strange story of a young girl whose (deliberate?) near-drowning left her with the mental capacity of a 7-year-old. The Waters of Eternal Youth is populated with old friends (and frenemies) and is filled to the brim with insightful and often surprising observations about life in modern-day Europe.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY This past December, I was in an Internet café near Angkor Wat, Cambodia, when an email arrived from my editor with a list of suspense novels available for review for March, among them Nick Seeley’s debut novel, Cambodia Noir (Scribner, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9781501106088). Kismet? I’ll leave that for greater minds than mine to decide. It ticks all the boxes that make for a capital-T Thriller: gin-soaked protagonist, self-exiled in a backwater of the Third World— check; controversial and mysterious missing girl—check; strong supporting cast of alcoholic expats, prostitutes and corrupt members of the power elite—check; drugs, assassinations and mad motor­ cycle chases through pockmarked streets—check, check, check. Seeley gets Phnom Penh in the same way that John Burdett gets Bangkok, with descriptions so vivid that even if Seeley never mentioned the city by name, anyone who had ever spent time there would recognize it immediately. The thriller unfolds at a breakneck pace, with a backdrop of unrest and upheaval, and characters that blur (or totally obliterate) the lines between good and bad. Seeley impresses on every count.

AUDIO

BY SUKEY HOWARD

A legend looks back How does it happen? How did a skinny Jewish kid from Cleveland know before he was 10 that he wanted to be an actor, that the stage was his platform, the theater his true home? Was it nature, nurture or a magical combo? No matter how many celebrity memoirs I’ve listened to, this question rarely gets answered—maybe that’s part

of the elusive fascination of stage and screen stars. In Master of Ceremonies (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 9.5 hours, ISBN 9781427266828), Joel Grey, the face and voice of Cabaret and many other iconic productions, is so charmingly, disarmingly candid that you begin to understand how he became the man he is. Woven into the story of his long career is a more personal, more difficult story for Grey to handle. But he does, and we follow as he finally deals with his sexuality, camouflaged for decades, a source of confusion and shame; now, out of the closet at the age of 83, it’s a source of pride. Grey is his own fabulous narrator.

TRUST NO ONE On the night of his initiation into his father’s neopagan Asatru group (a modern incarnation of a pre-Christian Nordic religion), Sune Frandsen, 15 years old and eager to be part of this secret band of brothers, disappears into the forest. The rites have gone horribly wrong and, terrified, he runs for his life. That disturbing scene opens Sara Blaedel’s The Killing Forest (Hachette Audio, $39.99, 7.5 hours, ISBN 9781478960904), a new installment in her fast-paced series starring Detective Louise Rick, a member of Denmark’s elite Special Search Agency. Just back from a recuperative leave after a nasty attack, Louise takes on the case and discovers that Sune is the son

of a man she knew years ago when her boyfriend supposedly hanged himself. Dealing with the same set of suspects, her current investigation becomes intertwined with an investigation into the suicide that’s long troubled her. Hold on tight, there’s action galore, real suspense and strong character development in this chilling tale.

IN THEIR OWN

VOICE S Read by the author “Joel’s story comes straight from his heart right into yours.”

—Carol Burnett

Read by the author “Frank’s wit is as sharp as ever.”

—The Washington Post on Pity The Billionaire

TOP PICK IN AUDIO A scientific polymath of unusual stature, with insatiable curiosity and exuberant, dauntless wander­ lust, Alexander von Humboldt, born into a wealthy Prussian family in 1789, was almost as well known as Napoleon during his lifetime.

Today, even though towns, streets, a part of the moon, a great current in the Pacific Ocean, plants, animals and waterfalls are named after him, he’s all but forgotten. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (HighBridge Audio, $39.99, 14 hours, ISBN 9781622319800), Andrea Wulf’s wonderfully researched, vividly detailed portrait of the man, his ideas, his influence on the influential from Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar to Darwin, Thoreau and Muir, brings this “visionary thinker” back into focus.

He thought at warp speed, lectured and wrote prodigiously and made science accessible and popular. A brilliant observer, he was able to see global interconnections, the first to perceive “the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today,” and to understand, long ago, the catastrophic effects of human tampering with the ecosystem. In this extraordinary narrative of an extraordinary man, you’ll see his world as he saw it.

Read by the author “[Burroughs] matches fine, perceptive writing with heartfelt, note-perfect narrating, achieving an emotional power few audiobooks can match.”

––AudioFile onYou Better Not Cry audiobook, Earphones Award winner

Read by the author A uniquely heartfelt audiobook written and narrated by one legendary actor in celebration of another.

DON’T MISS THE LATEST IN

JEFFREY ARCHER’S CLIFTON CHRONICLES Read by Alex Jennings Listen to excerpts on www.UnabridgedAccess.com

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COOKING

BY SYBIL PRATT

Turn up the taste Three women navigate life’s twists and turns with the help of friendship, good food and great wine in a new novel from book club favorite, Susan Mallery.

Friends are the family you choose.

Sara Moulton, chef, cookbook author, food writer and popular TV personality, happily admits that she’s spent long years in the cooking trenches. She knows her stuff and knows how to pass on that know-how. And that’s exactly what she does in Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better (Oxmoor House, $35, 368 pages, ISBN 9780848744410), a master class in maximizing flavor for cooks of every caliber.

The recipes, more than 150, focus on everyday dinners (a Moulton spécialité), and each one subtly demonstrates a tip or method that

“[For] fans of Jodi Picoult, Debbie Macomber, and Elin Hilderbrand.”

—Bookreporter on The Girls of Mischief Bay

Read it today!

will up the taste quotient of the dish and the confidence of the cook. While you’re sharpening your sense of taste under Moulton’s tutelage, you can sample some of her super supper suggestions: a meal-in-itself soup or salad; “quick & quicker” e ­ ntrees (Salmon Baked in a Bag with Citrus, Olives and Chiles); one-pan wonders (Barley with Clam Sauce); vegetarian and vegan options; slightly more complicated dishes for special meals (Baked Arctic Char with Chermoula); a slew of savory sides and “ridiculously easy” sweets. Step-bystep photos, visits with guest chefs and “genius tips” all add shine to this sensational seminar.

SLICE ’N’ DICE

www.MIRABooks.com www.SusanMallery.com

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Butcher and vegetable are two words that usually don’t go together. But the publication of Cara Mangini’s The Vegetable Butcher: How to Select, Prep, Slice, Dice, and Masterfully Cook Vegetables from Artichokes to Zucchini (Workman, $29.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780761180524) radically changes all that. Though she comes from a long line of traditional butchers and probably has a gene for knife 2016-01-12 3:09 PM

skills, Mangini prefers to cut “steaks” from cauliflower; veggie education (vegecation?) is her true calling.

Mangini offers the must-know basics, including Butchery Essentials, Favorite Cooking Methods, cleaning, prepping, selection and storage info for more than 50 vegetables, a repertoire of more than 100 rewarding, flexible recipes, 250 step-by-step photos, plus her unique “Butcher Notes” highlighting vegetable-specific tips, tricks, substitutions and answers to prep problems.

Get ready, get set, catch Mangini’s plant-based enthusiasm! Spring is here, and summer, with its lavish abundance, green markets and CSAs, is close behind.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Francine Bryson, the downhome diva and proud redneck who shared her Southern baking secrets in her debut cookbook, is back.

Country Cooking from a Redneck Kitchen (Potter, $22, 240 pages, ISBN 9780553448450) serves up the thoroughly Southern recipes (125 in all) that she grew up with—the go-to dishes that her mother and grandmothers cooked that stay with you through a hard day’s work and more than suffice when company’s coming or you’re expecting a visit from the preacher. They’re all here, all spiced with Bryson’s sassy charm, from Redneck What­ nots (the little somethings to keep you going as you chat, like Deviled Ham Dip and Cornbread Salad), Bourbon and Coke Wings, burgers and backyard BBQ, her great-granny’s Squirrel Pot Pie, Daddy’s Church Gathering Chili, velvety Creamed Corn, Sweet Potato Biscuits, Peachy Praline Pie and Upside-Down Apple Bacon Pie.

BOOK CLUBS

BY JULIE HALE

Strangers in the night Mary Kubica delivers on the promise of her much-praised 2014 debut, The Good Girl, with the chilling suspense novel Pretty Baby (Mira, $15.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780778318743). Heidi Wood is zealous about helping other people. Her investment-banker husband, Chris, and tween daughter, Zoe, have grown accustomed to her holding forth on homelessness and poverty. Heidi, who works at a nonprofit organization in Chicago, takes her beliefs to an extreme when she invites Willow Greer, a young homeless woman

with an infant, to move in. Willow’s presence changes the family’s dynamics in ways that Heidi never anticipated. Chris is suspicious of Willow and tries to learn about her past. As her background gradually comes to light, the Wood family begins to unravel. Chris, Heidi and Willow each have a turn at narrating the novel, and the shifting points of view illuminate different facets of the plot. Kubica pulls off this kaleidoscopic storytelling style with ease. Her portrayal of a modern family torn apart by conflicting desires is riveting—and all too believable.

CALLED TO NATURE Leigh Ann Henion’s Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World (Penguin, $17, 288 pages, ISBN 9780143108030) is an inspiring nonfiction narrative about exploration and identity. After she gives birth to her son, Henion is haunted by the feeling that she may never again view the world the way her child does—as a magical place, teeming with possibility.

With the encouragement of her husband, Henion—an award-win-

ning travel writer— sets out to reawaken her sense of amazement through an itinerary that takes her from the volcanoes of Hawaii to the bioluminescent waters of Puerto Rico. While pursuing the quality of enchantment that often characterizes childhood, she crosses paths with spiritual leaders, scientists and all manner of travel guides. It’s a fascinating journey, and Henion chronicles it with the heart and eye of an artist. This delightful hybrid of a book blends memoir, history and philosophy into a modern meditation on motherhood and the quest for a fulfilled life.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS A National Book Award finalist that made many “best of 2015” lists, Angela Flournoy’s debut, The Turner House (Mariner, $14.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780544705166), is a timely, accessible family chronicle that’s sure to resonate with readers. The Turners—Francis, Viola and their 13 kids—lived in their Yarrow Street house on the East Side of Detroit for more than five decades. The year is 2008, and Francis has died. Threatened with the loss of the house, Viola and the Turner siblings must decide what to do. Cha-Cha, a former truck driver and the oldest son; his brother, Troy, a policeman; and their sister, Lelah, a gambling addict, carry the weight of the novel. Overall, it’s a wonderfully compelling exploration of family relationships and the generational changes that have shaped Detroit.

Flournoy flashes back effortlessly to earlier eras and mixes in a ghost story for good measure. This is a virtuoso performance from a gifted new writer.

Must-Reads for March

America’s First Daughter

by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

In a compelling, richly researched novel, bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph.

Fall of Poppies

edited by Heather Webb

The top voices in historical fiction deliver an unforgettable collection of short stories set in the aftermath of World War I—featuring bestselling authors such as Hazel Gaynor, Jennifer Robson, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig.

Reader, I Married Him

edited by Tracy Chevalier This collection of original stories by today’s finest women writers—including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more—takes inspiration from the opening line in Charlotte Brontë’s most beloved novel, Jane Eyre.

Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery

by Jenny Colgan

“Sheer indulgence from start to finish.”

—Sophie Kinsella, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Shopaholic to the Stars

@Morrow_PB

@bookclubgirl

William Morrow

Book Club Girl

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He’s the hottest MMA fighter in the game, but one woman is ready to try out a few steamy moves of her own.

All available now in print and ebook.

“Count on Lori Foster for sexy, edgy romance.”

—New York Times bestselling author

Jayne Ann Krentz on No Limits www.HQNBooks.com

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www.LoriFoster.com

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

Reluctant hearts Preventing scandal brings two aristocrats together in Tracy Anne Warren’s Regency romance ­Happily Bedded Bliss (Signet, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780451469236), part of the Rakes of Cavendish Square series. The impetuous Lady Esme Byron happens upon a naked man by a secluded country lake, and she stealthily sketches him while he’s sleeping. When the sensational page in her sketchbook is publicly revealed, the subject is recognized

as Gabriel, Lord Northcote, and there is only one solution in the eyes of the Byron family: They must wed. The pair reluctantly agrees. Despite the circumstances, the notorious womanizer and the animal-loving innocent forge a sizzling partnership—until a chance encounter reminds Gabriel that he was made a fool by love once before. He vows to distance himself from Esme before he becomes too attached. It’s too late for his bride, however, and Esme is perplexed by her husband’s remote behavior.

Not one to give up, she fights for what she wants: a closeness that will give Gabriel, who never had a loving family, everything he needs, too. This Regency delight is a sexy, charming and satisfying romance.

COWBOY, TAKE ME AWAY A wounded military man goes home to heal in the first book in Delores Fossen’s McCord Brothers series, Texas on My Mind (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373789610). After being injured while serving as an Air Force combat rescue officer, Riley McCord returns to Spring Hill, Texas, determined to recuperate.

He’s greeted by a bevy of beauties eager to help him during his con2016-01-14 10:24 AM

valescence, but no one captures his interest like his old friend Claire Davidson—and her interest is piqued, too. But there are reasons to resist.

Claire was once Riley’s friend’s girlfriend, and aren’t there rules about that? For her part, Claire has a young son to protect—not to mention her heart. Claire wants a man who will stay, and Riley insists that he’s not in it for the long haul.

However, the pair finds it impossible to remain apart, and Claire swears she understands that their relationship is short-term. But will Riley really be able to walk away?

This is a rollicking romance that’s both funny and poignant.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE An unexpected reunion leads to danger and ultimately love in ­Taking Fire (Pocket, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9781476739519), part of Cindy Gerard’s One-Eyed Jacks series. Six years ago in Kabul, Afghanistan, military contractor Bobby Taggart bedded Talia Levine, a woman who claimed to be a war correspondent. But she betrayed him, his mission failed, and he was left heartbroken and well aware of the fact that he’d been played. Now working as a covert government operative in Oman, Bobby once again encounters Talia, who has made hard choices for good reasons. Immediately upon reuniting, they find themselves in danger.

There’s a target on Talia’s back, and the pair must rely on each other to survive—despite Bobby’s lingering resentment. Bobby brings in his team, but the pressure doesn’t abate as they try to bring down the bad guys. Fast-paced and bristling with tension, Taking Fire is impossible to put down. Nerves will shred as readers root for Bobby and the brave Talia.

interviews

ALLISON PATAKI

The tragic life of a people’s princess

S

he was the Princess Diana of her time, a storied beauty who longed for more than the trappings of royalty. So why has Sisi been largely lost to history?

Allison Pataki’s new novel, Sisi: Empress on Her Own covers the turbulent later life of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, known to her subjects as Sisi.

While her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, struggles to maintain the power of his monarchy, Sisi seeks refuge from the stifling halls of the royal court in late 19th-century Vienna, where her every move is watched and analyzed.

Sisi travels around Europe, often accompanied by her youngest daughter, Valerie, the only one of her three children she was allowed to raise without the interference of her mother-in-law, the Archduchess Sophie. Whispers start at Sisi’s frequent trips away from the Hofburg Palace and her close relationships with other men—namely the darkly handsome Count Andrássy, a key advisor to her husband.

Pataki, whose own family roots trace to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria, became intrigued with the empress during a trip to Austria a decade ago.

“Everywhere I went, I saw images of this striking woman,” Pataki

SISI

By Allison Pataki

Dial, $28, 464 pages, ISBN 9780812989052 Audio, eBook available

HISTORICAL FICTION

says during a call to her home in Chicago, where she lives with her husband—a resident in ortho­ pedic surgery—and their newborn daughter.

“Her smile looked a little mysterious, a little sad, like there was more behind it. I thought, this is a really intriguing woman. Why don’t I know more about her?”

Pataki began researching and soon realized she had struck literary gold—enough for two books.

(The first, The Accidental Empress, was published in 2015.)

“I didn’t know how much I could rely on the historical record, but the more I looked into it, the blueprint for the story was right there in the facts,” she says. “You have the stunning settings of the Alps and palaces and courts. You have the characters of the most powerful man in Europe [Franz Joseph] and Mad King Ludwig [Sisi’s cousin, the King of Bavaria].”

And, of course, you have Sisi, a woman Pataki calls “larger than life even in her own life. She inspired mythology the way a Princess Diana or a Jackie Kennedy did.”

Pataki, the daughter of former New York Gov. George Pataki, grew up in New York and moved to Chicago for her husband’s residency.

The lifelong New Yorker is acclimating to her new home.

“What I love about New York is the layer upon layer upon layer of history,” she says. “Chicago is so wonderful because it’s so livable and friendly. You get all the wonderful aspects of New York—great restaurants, great museums—but a slower pace. I consider them both home.”

Pataki began her career in journalism, mostly working for cable news. It was not for her.

“I love history. I love writing.

I love narrative. I love getting to the bottom of people’s stories. I thought that meant I should be a journalist,” she says. “But it was get

in, get out, boil the story down to 15 seconds or less. I was told, use less big words, be more snarky.

“I was going home at the end of the day and writing fiction. It was writing therapy. It was so much fun I thought it couldn’t actually be a job. It was everything I thought I would love about journalism. I decided I would give myself a short window to see if I could make this a career.”

Pataki quickly learned that historical fiction was her niche.

“My whole “I love getting bookshelf to the bottom is historical fiction,” she of people’s says. “Historical fiction stories.” makes history accessible and entertaining.”

While Pataki does meticulous research before diving into a novel, she wants readers to understand the difference between historical fiction and biographies.

“I’m not intending to write dry, historical text,” she says. “I’m not a historian, I’m a novelist. Don’t take my version as the Bible. This is a novel.”

Still, Pataki shows deep reverence for and understanding of her subject, and draws a sympathetic portrait that shows the empress was more than her beauty. Where The Accidental Empress focused on Sisi as a young, naive woman—she was married in 1854 at only 16— Sisi portrays a woman at midlife who very much understands her place in the world, even as she resists it. Though she was disappointed in her marriage and disconnected from her older children, Sisi found happiness in travel and horse riding.

TRICIA MCCORMACK

BY AMY SCRIBNER

“Sisi was never one to derive her greatest joy from her husband and children,” Pataki says. “She was such a wandering, restless spirit.”

After spending so much time reading and writing about Sisi, Pataki struggled to write about the empress’ 1898 death in Geneva at the early age of 60, at the hands of an assassin. The Italian anarchist had another target in mind, and stabbed Sisi only after his initial plan failed.

“It was incredibly different at times to write about the tragedy of it all,” she says. “It was a split-second decision . . . just the dumb bad luck of that really struck me.”

Still, Pataki believes that, for a woman so defined by her legendary beauty, dying before she became an old woman might have been Sisi’s wish. Conscious of the public’s scrutiny, the empress maintained her legendary slender waistline through exercise, fasting and tight corset lacing, and she spent hours grooming her famously long and thick hair.

“Sisi wrote very often to family and in journals that she wanted death to take her quickly and young,” Pataki says. “In some ways, it was eerie that she almost prophesied her death.”

Sisi is a deeply moving book about a complex character.

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cover story

ETHAN CANIN

For a troubled math genius, a fractured father-son equation

O

n this winter morning, Ethan Canin seems more interested in talking bicycles than discussing his vivid, moving, finely crafted new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac.

That’s because he has discovered that the interviewer shares his love of bicycling. A couple of years ago, Canin and his wife purchased fat-tired bikes with studded tires, which means he can ride almost every day of the year in Iowa City, where he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Canin, his wife and their three daughters—ages 12, 16 and 19—“own a lot of bicycles,” including a tandem that hangs from the ceiling of his “writing shed,” a building behind his house that he converted from an old carriage house. Bicycling is one of the ways Canin offsets the anxiety and sedentary nature of writing.

But Canin’s desire to talk bikes also seems to arise from a deep reluctance to make any sort of big pronouncements about his book.

“It’s all just discovery to me. I never set out to deal with anything,” Canin says during a call to his home. “Fiction can’t be intentional like that. Because anything you set out to prove is too simplistic, and the reader will revolt against that.”

Canin goes on to quote E.L.

A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC

By Ethan Canin

Random House, $28, 576 pages ISBN 9781400068265, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

12

NINA SUBIN

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

Doctorow. “He said writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog.

You can only see as far as your headlights, but in doing so, you can go the whole way. That’s the way I write. You just don’t know what’s next. When you’re five years out, that’s scary.”

So scary, in fact, that Canin was reluctant to let his wife read the final draft of the novel. “I’ve been married to my wife for many years, and we were together for many years before that. I used to give her every paragraph and ask her to read it. I didn’t give her this book until I’d written the whole thing, and even then I almost couldn’t bear to give it to her. I thought I’d wasted five or six years.”

Readers of A Doubter’s Almanac will be astounded to learn of Canin’s fears. The novel is, start to finish, an emotionally and intellectually gripping narrative about a mathematical genius named Milo Andret. Born in the 1950s, Milo grows up a solitary child in a silent household in the woods of northern Michigan. In a lovely passage early in the novel, on one of his solo ventures into the woods, Milo finds a fallen tree, then conceives of and, over time, fashions an intricate wooden chain from the dead tree; still, his teacher thinks Milo’s claim to have made the chain is a lie. In a small way, this points to the doubts and competitive envy about Milo’s abilities that are one of the powerful currents that cascade through the novel.

Milo’s conceptual abilities— which he sometimes considers a form of idiocy—are astonishing. In his 20s he wins the Fields Medal, which is the mathematical world’s Nobel Prize. But Milo’s singularity comes with high emotional and professional costs.

The second act of Milo’s life—his intellectual banishment and physi-

cal decline—is narrated by his alienated son, Hans, who tries to balance his father Milo’s “brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his near-autistic introversion and his worldclass self-involvement” against his mother’s “modest parcels of optimism and care.”

It’s an unworkable equation. Hans also worries that he and his young children have inherited both the positive and negative sides of Milo’s unusual abilities.

Which leads one to wonder In his what traits absorbing fifth Canin thinks children inhernovel, Canin it from their explores the parents. downward Canin spiral of a laughs. “My experience both gifted math from having superstar. children and knowing other parents is that before you have kids, you wonder whether it’s nature or nurture, but once you have kids almost every parent will tell you it’s 100 percent nature. Nurture has nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s a way of avoiding blame, but I see crazy things in my kids that come from my parents or my wife’s parents. I know I have the body type and the head movements of my uncle who I hardly know. I talk like him. I move like him. It’s just bizarre. And my daughter has these crazy similarities to my mother. So with no basis in research, I think all those things are heritable.”

Still, natural abilities aren’t the whole story. Canin, the author of four previous novels and two short

story collections, is also a believer and practitioner of the daily habits of craftsmanship. “I teach wonderful students here” at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says. “I don’t have to teach anything academic.

It’s all craft-based, which I love.”

Not only that, Canin is a longtime woodworker and carpenter, experiences that inform sections of this novel in very tactile ways.

Canin says he built a standing desk in his writing shed years ago.

He is currently remodeling the small house next door in Iowa City that he and his wife bought from their elderly neighbor. And he’s rebuilding a cabin in the woods of northern Michigan where he and his family spend their summers.

“I do a lot of hammer and nails,” Canin says, then adds, laughing, “I’ve always been a woodworker since I took shop in school. It’s about the only thing I learned in high school that I remember.”

Of course, Canin also graduated from Harvard Medical School and practiced emergency medicine in San Francisco, where he spent much of his youth. He draws on his medical background in his powerful descriptions of Milo’s alcoholism and Hans’ struggle with addiction. “Anybody who has worked in an emergency room will tell you that the alcohol problem in the United States is a thousand

times bigger than the drug problem,” Canin says. “It’s the elephant in the room.”

More generally, Canin says of his career as a doctor, “there’s no place like it. If you’re interested in stories, you’d want to be a doctor. People tell you things that they tell nobody else. You see a side of the world that is crazy. It’s incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of side learning that goes into it—you have to learn anatomy and physiology and all that—but what could be better for people who are interested in literature? Other than being a priest or a cop or maybe a soldier, I can’t think of anything else that would show you the world the way being a doctor shows you the world.”

Deciding to leave medicine, Canin says, “was very hard. Would I do it today? Never in a million years because I have kids and a mortgage and college tuition to pay. But at the time, I wasn’t able to foresee any of that. It was very difficult to walk away. It’s a huge amount of education. It was a steady job. It was an interesting job for the most part. But I realized that if I didn’t need the money from finishing a book I would never finish a book. I mean, writing is one thing, finishing a book is another.

Leaving [medicine] was a motivation to finish writing a book.”

Finally, there is Canin’s lifelong interest in mathematics, which bodies forth in the novel in both playful and serious ways. “I’ve always been good at math,” he says.

“I’ve always loved it. But not like Milo’s mathematics. I understand about 25 percent of that math. I adore math, and I’m helping my kids with their math, and of course they can’t stand it. It’s very dicey how you teach adolescent kids, how you have to lie low, but I keep telling them how beautiful math is and they’re like oh, right, Dad, you’re just saying that.”

Canin laughs, then adds, “In some ways this novel really was a labor of love—in the sense that I love mathematics and I love the idea of trying something that is difficult in the world. Imagining myself into a character with Milo’s kind of devotion was one of the few pleasures of writing the book.”

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interviews

VIRGINIA REEVES

A luminous historical debut

I

nheriting land might seem like winning the lottery to many men in 1920s Alabama, but to Roscoe T. Martin, his father-in-law’s farm is a burden.

Moving to the country with his wife and son meant leaving Alabama Power, where he was able to work with the electricity that fascinates him.

Then one day Roscoe sees an opportunity: He’ll siphon off the grid to electrify the farm and save the family’s failing finances. But when a man is killed on one of Roscoe’s illegal lines, the lives of everyone on the farm are changed forever.

In her evocative debut novel, Work Like Any Other, Virginia Reeves immerses readers in the hardscrabble world of early 20th-century Alabama and a time when electricity still felt like magic.

I was surprised to learn you grew up in Montana and now live in Texas—you conjure 1920s Alabama so vividly. Do you have any ties to Alabama?

My grandparents retired to Lillian, Alabama, when I was in elementary school, and I visited nearly every year. My parents moved quite a bit, and in adulthood I have as well, but my grandmother still lives in their original house. In a way, Alabama is a constant, a place that has not changed.

What drew you to this topic?

In my second year at the Michener

WORK LIKE ANY OTHER

By Virginia Reeves

Scribner, $25, 272 pages ISBN 9781501112492, audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

Center for Writers, I took a history writing course with H.W. Brands, with the intention of digging into Alabama history. I was a novice when it came to historical research, and I remember typing “Alabama history” into a search engine at the University of Texas library. The first book I pulled off the shelves was a bound graduate thesis, published in the early 1930s, called “These Came Back.” It explored chances of breaking parole based upon specific characteristics of parolees, and it made for one of the best character sketches I’ve ever seen. I built Roscoe from those statistics.

The descriptions of electricity in this book really convey the excitement that Roscoe feels about something that we take for granted today. Can you talk a little bit about why it was so revolutionary?

Like any new technology, electricity met with its share of skeptics, embodied in the book by Roscoe’s father-in-law and Bean, the store owner. Think of light linked only to fire—oil lamps, candles—and then see it burning in a light bulb. It feels like sorcery, magic. This force can do what fire does, and it can also do what men do. It is power, fierce and raw. When that magic fed into rural communities, it took on endless potential. Roscoe sees it this way.

Some readers might find Roscoe’s wife, Marie, unsympathetic: She doesn’t hire a lawyer for Roscoe and she refuses to allow their son to communicate with him. How do you feel about Marie?

I don’t want to defend Marie’s actions, but I do understand her.

I have known people like her, people who shut down in the face of tragedy, who simply put it to the side. [Their farmhand] Wilson’s free life was something Marie and her father fought for, and she sees Roscoe as the one who took that freedom away. She simply cannot

© SUZANNE KOET

BY TRISHA PING

reconcile it, and so she removes him from her life.

Roscoe’s actions affect everyone on the farm, but arguably the biggest impact falls on Wilson, who is arrested along with him.

Because Wilson is black, he’s sent to work as forced labor in the mines rather than being incarcerated with Roscoe. But he is also the one who picks Roscoe up from prison when he is released. Why do you think Wilson is more able to forgive—or at least understand— Roscoe’s actions?

Wilson is the hero of this story. He retains his dignity and his humanity even in the face of extreme loss and degradation. He is willing to own his responsibility, “Think of light which we see linked only to early—he is a fire, and then reluctant parsee it burning ticipant in the crime, but a in a light bulb. participant all the same. WilIt feels like son won’t deny sorcery.” his involvement; he won’t underplay it, even if he should.

Unlike Marie, I don’t think Wilson would’ve been able to live with himself had he abandoned Roscoe.

He is accustomed to the racial injustices of the time, and he feels fortunate (in some ways) to have escaped the mines, to be reunited with his family, to be alive. He is able to recognize all that he hasn’t lost and to hold that alongside all that Roscoe has—his livelihood, his wife, his child.

Race is treated with a light hand in this novel. Roscoe notes injustices but, being a character of his time, they are not as egregious to him as they appear to modern readers.

How did you approach writing

about race?

It was incredibly difficult to write about race, and there are many previous iterations of this novel that reflect my sentiments, rather than Roscoe’s, or Wilson’s, for that matter. I uncovered innumerable atrocities, and I had to wade through them, selecting the ones that actually intersected this story.

The Banner Mine explosion that Wilson retells to Roscoe is a real event. It took many tries to write it in a way that felt true to my characters.

Was there anything you learned in your research that surprised you?

Convict leasing was by far the most surprising thing that I explored in my research. Convict leasing was slavery. Young, African-American men would be picked up on street corners, arrested for vagrancy and sold to private coal mines, turpentine camps, lumber yards. Alabama was the last state to abolish it—in 1928, more than 60 years after the abolition of slavery. There’s an incredible book on the subject, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, that’s been made into a PBS documentary.

What are you working on next?

I’m currently working on a novel set in Montana that explores the deinstitutionalization of the state’s developmentally disabled and mentally ill populations. Like Work Like Any Other, there is fascinating research involved.

15

spotlight

the title of your new book?

Q: What’s

© JOAN GRISWOLD

meet ROY BLOUNT JR.

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

much pie is too much pie?

Q: How

Q: Can you draw a diagram of your perfect hot dog?

Q

or False: A Georgia native once spent a night in jail for : True

serving collard greens and claiming it was kale.

would you choose as your last meal?

Q: What

Q: Words to live by?

SAVE ROOM FOR PIE Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, humorist Roy Blount Jr. is a regular panelist on NPR’s “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” and the author of 24 books. His latest is Save Room for Pie (Sarah Crichton, $26, 304 pages, ISBN 9780374175207), which includes “chewy ruminations” on all things edible. Blount and his wife, the painter Joan Griswold, divide their time between western Massachusetts, New York City and New Orleans.

16

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

Into the great unknown

W

hether you’re content with armchair travel or prefer a rugged real-life expedition of your own, these accounts of epic journeys by intrepid travelers will give you plenty of room to roam.

If you’re the type who takes a large, packed-to-the-brim suitcase on every trip, you’ll be amazed and enlightened by Clara Bensen’s account of traveling with, literally, No ­Baggage (Running Press, $25, 288 pages, ISBN 9780762457243).

Bensen considers herself a quiet introvert, so it’s a surprise when she clicks with her polar opposite, Jeff, a free spirit she meets through an online dating site. Soon after, Jeff invites her on a three-week trip to Europe, with one caveat: She must adopt his unorthodox travel style, which means no hotels, no itineraries and no luggage. Taking flight for Istanbul with only the clothes on her back (and a change of underwear in her purse), Bensen cautiously adjusts to the freedom of wandering unencumbered. “It’s a rare thing to be lost, isn’t it?” she asks Jeff, jolted by the transition from a world in which we always know exactly where we stand.

Bensen’s honest and engaging narrative offers fresh insights about why we travel and what we gain when we step outside our comfort zones.

UP THE RIVER A British veteran who served in Afghanistan, Levison Wood was inspired by 19th-century explorers who sought to locate the source of the fabled Nile River. In 2013, he set out to recreate their journey in reverse, a 4,000-mile trek chronicled in Walking the Nile (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9780802124494). This gripping travelogue is no “walk in the woods,”

however, and you won’t find amusing Bill Bryson-style asides about bad weather and annoying companions. Starting at a tiny spring in Rwanda and walking through six countries, Wood encounters armed gangs, civil war, secret police and even endures the death (from heat stroke) of a journalist who joined him. Informative and immediate, Walking the Nile is an unvarnished portrait of modern Africa.

GOING SOLO Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (as Cheryl Strayed does in Wild), was only a warmup for Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis, who had bigger challenges in mind. Starting in 2010, she traveled 10,000 miles alone, on foot, through Mongolia, including the Gobi Desert (which took three tries), China, Siberia, Laos, Thailand and finally (after hitching a ride on a cargo ship) across the Australian continent—twice. In Wild

by Nature (Thomas Dunne, $26.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9781250081971), a National Geographic Explorer of the Year in 2014 recounts her journey with the clear-eyed resolve and keen observational skills that make her a successful solo trekker.

An abscessed tooth in the wilds of Mongolia? Marquis follows a preset evacuation plan and heads to Tokyo for treatment, resuming her walk a few weeks later. Throughout her adventure, she relishes the freedom of being a woman alone in the wild.

features

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

BY JULIE HALE

Fresh stories from the Emerald Isle

M

arch is a lucky month for readers who love Ireland—a country with a rich narrative tradition, where stories and poems are considered everyday currency. Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re spotlighting three new titles that prove the country’s memorable characters and storytelling legacy live on.

Timothy Egan, meticulous historian and crackerjack story­ teller, offers a rousing biography of renegade leader Thomas Francis Meagher in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (HMH, $28, 384 pages, ISBN 9780544272880).

Meagher, a native of Waterford, Ireland, who fought for the Union in the American Civil War, has a personal history of mythical proportions. At the age of 25, he

spearheaded an unsuccessful revolt against the British and was exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania. Less than a year later, he resurfaced in New York, where he was celebrated as a hero, and he went on to command the Irish Brigade—a rag-tag crew of immigrants and outlaws— in some of the Civil War’s most cutthroat conflicts. He later served as territorial governor of Montana. Egan sheds new light on the indomitable Irishman’s final days in this fascinating and far-flung yarn.

A self-described “lapsed” Irish American, Egan—winner of the National Book Award for his 2007

chronicle of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time—writes in a spirited style that’s perfectly matched to Meagher’s remarkable life.

A NEW VOICE Already a literary sensation overseas, Sara Baume, winner of the 2015 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, delivers a remarkably accomplished debut in Spill Simmer Falter Wither (HMH, $23, 288 pages, ISBN 9780544716193), a captivating novel that features a man-redeemed-bydog plotline.

The book is narrated by an outsider named Ray, who, at the age of 57—“too old for starting over, too young for giving up”—is spurned by his neighbors after his father dies. Ray is something of a curmudgeon, and when he befriends a scruffy one-eyed terrier, he finds unexpected fulfillment in the relationship. But an unfortunate incident forces Ray to pull up roots and drift—canine by his side, of course. The novel chronicles a year in the life of the improbable pair, four seasons spent on the road that are rich with incident and gorgeously depicted through Baume’s precise, lapidary prose.

The 31-year-old author, who lives in Cork with two dogs of her

own, displays wisdom beyond her years in this compassionate tale.

IRRESISTIBLE IRISH YARNS A native of County Dublin and a longtime columnist for The Irish Times, Maeve Binchy was the author of more than 20 bestsellers,

including the classic novel Circle of Friends (1990). Binchy, who died in 2012, had a heartfelt, unaffected storytelling style that made her a favorite at home and abroad.

Her many fans will cheer the appearance of A Few of the Girls (Knopf, $26.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781101947418), a collection of 36 stories never published before in the United States. Exploring the complex nature of relationships in the melodic prose that became her trademark, Binchy charts the dynamics of romance, the politics of family and the stipulations of friendship. When it comes to capturing the caprices of the human heart, she’s unbeatable. Readers will recognize themselves in her nuanced portrayals of women and men whose goals and regrets, dreams and disappointments never feel less than true-to-life. There’s no better antidote to a raw March evening than a dose of vintage Binchy.

Welcome back home to Honey Ridge, Tennessee, with another beautiful story full of hope, haunting mystery and the power to win your heart.

“Linda Goodnight is a genuine treasure!

The Memory House is a beautiful, rich, unforgettable story filled with tenderness and heart.”

—NewYork Times bestselling author

RaeAnne Thayne Available now www.HQNBooks.com www.LindaGoodnight.com

16_004_BookPage_RainSparrow.indd 1

in print and ebook.

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2016-01-12 9:50 AM

features

CHRISTIAN LIVING

BY HOWARD SHIRLEY

Observing the seasons of faith

A

n early Easter brings the hope of spring and the promise of seasons to come as winter’s shadow slowly recedes. It’s a time of faith, a time to remember and renew, a time to reflect on the promise of Christ.

The cycle of life and the wonder of nature rest at the heart of Christie Purifoy’s Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons (Revell, $13.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9780800726669). When Purifoy and her family left Florida for Maplehurst, a 19th-century farmhouse in Pennsylvania, they dreamed of experiencing the full spectrum of changing seasons. From the August day they opened the old front door to a year later and a new August day, Purifoy found not only the beauty of the seasons, but also a growing appreciation for God’s gifts, asked for and received, looked for and unexpected—a year of faith as well as a year of nature’s bounty.

Roots and Sky is Purifoy’s memoir of striving to make a home and face the ins and outs of life as it moves from one moment to the next.

Throughout the year, she sees how God is speaking to her, touching and teaching in every event—a faith lived in the metaphors of life.

Purifoy refers to her experience as “a pilgrimage in one place,” which perfectly captures this beautifully written book. Her memoir celebrates ordinary life, but does so with the depth and power of a river, flowing ever onward.

EMBRACING POSSIBILITY Finding God in everyday life, or despite everyday life, is Logan Wolfram’s mission in Curious Faith: Rediscovering Hope in the God of Possibility (David C. Cook, $17.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780781413503).

Like Purifoy, she ponders the seasons of life, which offer opportunities for growth and understanding.

Every moment lived with God is

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a moment to discover something new, Wolfram suggests; it’s not a route to a destination, but a path of constant discovery that never ends.

In these discoveries, we can find peace from our worries, strength for our trials, celebrations of our triumphs and comfort in our tragedies. Wolfram shares her personal stories of pain and fear, including a time when she suffered several miscarriages, and reveals how she learned to embrace the discovery God has for her.

Insightful and challenging, but filled with encouragement, Curious Faith reaches into the reader’s life, calling for a renewed faith in a God who is trustworthy, faithful and good, the leader on a journey worth the risk and a life worth the search.

CLOSE TO HOME Renovate: Changing Who You Are by Loving Where You Are (Multnomah, $14.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9781601425546) is both a challenge and a call to full involvement in faith and community. For Léonce B. Crump Jr., this call came personally, as he and his wife left a ministry in Tennessee to move to a depressed, neglected neighborhood in downtown Atlanta.

Bemoaning the process of gentrification, Crump set out not to change the neighborhood, but instead to honor and uplift the community that was already there.

Passionate and uncompromis-

ing, Crump doesn’t hold back in either his criticisms or his call to action. His challenge isn’t always comfortable to read, nor may the reader agree with every point, but since when were challenges comfortable, or passion perfect?

The point is to be involved where you are, with whomever surrounds you, to be a servant of God not after a drive across town, but right next door.

A BIBLICAL JOURNEY In Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve (Pantheon, $28.95, 432 pages, ISBN 9780375424663), journalist and fiction writer Tom Bissell chronicles his journeys to the tomb sites of Christ and his Apostles. Bissell’s eye for detail shines as he recounts his explorations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. From a Greek Orthodox priest who communicates with broken English and expressive gestures to the startling contrasts of India, Bissell’s memoir is a modern-day pilgrim’s tale of Old World churches and historic sites. Throughout, Bissell presents the history and cultural traditions behind the sites and the Apostles themselves, both in Christian teaching and secular scholarship.

Although he grew up Catholic, Bissell reveals in an author’s note that he experienced a “sudden and decisive” loss of faith as a teenager.

The book is framed by that perspective, but it’s a fascinating read for believer and nonbeliever alike.

Bissell’s sense of place is evocative, vividly casting images in the reader’s mind of the catacombs, ruins and cathedrals he sees, as well as the variety of faith he encounters.

THE GOSPEL TRUTH A search through the history of Christianity is also the focus of The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Image, $23, 256 pages, ISBN 9780770435486). In the view of skeptics, the Gospels are unreliable tales, altered by numerous hands to suit a constantly changing early theology. These theories hold that the authors of the Gospels are unknown, that the works were written nearly 100 years after the events and that they are not intended to be accurate records of Jesus’ teachings and actions. With skill, logic and exceptional research, Brant Pitre, professor of sacred scripture at Notre Dame Seminary, argues that such theories are based not on scholarship, but on assumption and speculation—and a lack of understanding of 1st-century Jewish thought. To affirm the Gospels as truthful biographies, not tall tales, Pitre establishes the credibility of the claimed authorships, dates the time the Gospels were written to within 30 years of Jesus’ life and asserts that the four Gospels fundamentally agree on the divinity of Christ. Reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ famous works, The Case for Jesus brings sound historical authority to any discussion on the nature of New Testament scripture and the beliefs of early Christianity.

reviews T PI OP CK

FICTION

ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR

The aftershocks of loss REVIEW BY HALEY HERFURTH

On a bleak, harsh winter afternoon in Chosen, a small town in upstate New York, local art history professor George Clare comes home to find his 3-year-old daughter, Franny, hiding in fear and his wife, Catherine, murdered. George becomes the chief suspect, and the investigation turns up details about his personal life—secret relationships, temper issues, a disintegrating marriage—that cast his innocence in doubt for everyone but his closest family. Still, the police investigating remain unable to pin his wife’s murder on George, and the crime goes unsolved for decades.

Death seems to hang over Chosen; the town is rural, close-knit and poor, with a dark history—the Clares’ own house was the site of a suicide not long before the family moved in. The community struggles not

By Elizabeth Brundage only to understand who killed Catherine, but also how and why. Years Knopf, $26.95, 416 pages will pass—and Franny Clare will have to return to her childhood home, ISBN 9781101875599, audio, eBook available now long abandoned—before any justice is found.

In her third novel, Elizabeth Brundage, who has an MFA from the SUSPENSE Iowa Writer’s Workshop, combines a classic murder mystery with a gripping psychological thriller, exploring the complexities of grief, relationships—romantic, familial and friendly—and small-town life. All Things Cease to Appear is a smart, original take on the mystery genre, with nuanced depictions of rural New York, the people who inhabit it and the secrets they keep.

I’M GLAD ABOUT YOU

By Theresa Rebeck

Putnam $27, 384 pages ISBN 9780399172885 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

If you’re looking for a typical story in which two people meet, fall in love and live happily ever after—this is not it. Theresa Rebeck’s comedic and heartbreaking love story, I’m Glad About You, is anything but predictable. From Hollywood red carpets to Midwestern mansions, Rebeck takes us on a wild ride through the lives of two high-school sweethearts who just can’t seem to get it right.

Alison Moore and Kyle Wallace’s romance was complicated from the start. They fell in love in high school, but went their separate ways after realizing their future

ambitions didn’t quite align. Alison wanted to escape Cincinnati and become a movie star, while Kyle hoped to practice medicine. Years pass as they build their lives independently, but when fate brings them back to Cincinnati, they’re forced to face past regrets and the magnetic connection that remains despite the time and distance. Will they put their careers and families on the line to finally be together?

A seasoned playwright and producer—she was the creator of the TV drama “Smash”—Rebeck gives readers a behind-the-scenes peek into show business and the price of fame. Whether at a Hollywood movie set or a Midwestern cookout, her characters are faced with the (sometimes ugly) truth of what happens when life isn’t unfolding exactly how you thought it would.

I’m Glad About You is a refreshingly honest character study that explores how flawed people attempt to build a love that thrives in a messy, complicated world.

—MEG BOWDEN

AT THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD

By Tracy Chevalier Viking $27, 304 pages ISBN 9780525953005 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, At the Edge of the Orchard, is a heartbreaking narrative of an Ohio pioneer family’s struggles that bears no resemblance to the pastoral stories in the Little House series.

The novel begins amid the loamy misery of 19th-century rural Ohio.

James and Sadie Goodenough and their 10 children—swamp fever ends up claiming five—have traveled from Connecticut in search of a place to put down roots.

When the family’s wagon becomes stuck in the mud, their grueling, cross-country journey comes to an abrupt halt, and the Black Swamp

becomes home by default.

While readers will likely find it tough to sympathize with the hard-drinking, ill-tempered and foul-mouthed Sadie, her seemingly stolid and mild-mannered husband is no more sympathetic.

Obsessed with the welfare of his apple trees, especially his rare and delicate Golden Pippins, James makes his orchard the third party in their relationship.

But when a traveling apple tree salesman becomes a frequent visitor to the Goodenough’s Black Swamp home, Sadie becomes smitten by the charismatic man.

Known as John Appleseed, he provides an escape from her daily drudgery with a steady stream of alcohol-infused applejack.

After a random act of violence shatters the Goodenough family’s already precarious existence, the couple’s son, Robert, flees the Black Swamp, straight into the muscular arms of the California Gold Rush.

While some readers might grow a bit restless with the slow and steady pace of Chevalier’s patient narrative, her impeccable research and the abundance of fascinating historical anecdotes about everything from grafting apple trees to the circumference of the mighty redwoods adds up to a pleasureable literary experience.

—KAREN ANN CULLOTTA

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY

By Matt Ruff

Harper $26.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062292063 Audio, eBook available SUPERNATURAL

Atticus Turner, a young Army veteran from Chicago, is on a search for his father. He enlists his uncle George—the publisher of a book called, not metaphorically in 1954, The Safe Negro Travel Guide—to help find him. Along the way, the two black men encounter the powerful effects of racism in the mid-20th century, but they also meet so much more. It’s hard to say

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reviews any more than that, because Lovecraft Country is a book that’s best experienced as it’s unfolding.

Matt Ruff, a James Tiptree Jr. Award winner who has written cult classics like Bad Monkeys, brilliantly interweaves the racial tensions of the time with the supernatural, creating a world in which his characters must often literally grapple with their own second-class status.

The juxtaposition is potent. Ruff’s steady, self-assured pacing and voice make this all very matter-offact, giving more supernatural moments a tactile quality. As with so many great genre novels, Lovecraft Country provides a sense of familiarity that makes the unbelievable believable.

Fans of dense supernatural fiction will get happily lost in Lovecraft Country, as will anyone who wants a vastly entertaining novel that’s also an exploration of the nature of human prejudice.

—MATTHEW JACKSON

SHELTER

By Jung Yun

Picador $26, 336 pages ISBN 9781250075611 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Jung Yun’s debut novel, Shelter, opens with a scene all too familiar in every parent’s life: a child out of bed way too early. We meet main character Kyung Cho, a first-generation Korean American, as he, annoyed and blurry eyed, tries to gratify the demands of his 4-yearold son, Ethan. Through this mundane encounter, the reader gets a sense of Kyung’s unhappy state of mind. The young professor is broke, and things get worse when he learns that his parents have become victims of a violent crime.

With each page, Yun takes us deeper into Kyung’s troubles, caused not only by the criminal acts of strangers but also by his own ineptitude, which he blames on his sadistic and loveless childhood. Gillian, his understanding,

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supportive, non-Korean wife, and Mae, his traditional, religious and artistic Korean mother, provide a juxtaposition of female influences in Kyung’s life, while his father, the elder Mr. Cho, questions whether Kyung is to blame for his own problems.

As the crime drama unfolds in the background, Yun expertly explores what it means to be an immigrant in America, the true value of tradition, the parent-child bond, what makes a good marriage and the need for forgiveness. Yun introduces us to a man riddled with anger and self-doubt, leaving the reader to judge whether time can truly mend what’s broken. The story of Shelter is more than just about having a home; it is about finding a refuge in one’s own skin.

—CHIKA GUJARATHI

DON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO

By Boris Fishman Harper $26.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062384362 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

For both parents and child, the subject of adoption is fraught with emotional complications. That’s the point of departure for New York writer Boris Fishman’s perceptive second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. And like his debut novel, A Replacement Life, it also deals with the challenges facing immigrants from the former Soviet Union as they adapt to life in the United States.

There’s definitely something different about Max Rubin, the adopted 8-year-old son of Alex Rubin, of Belarus, and his wife, Maya, of Ukraine. The blonde-haired, greeneyed boy is fond of sleeping in a tent and has even taken to tasting some of the varieties of grass growing around his New Jersey townhouse. His decision to abandon the school bus and disappear one late spring afternoon throws his family into crisis.

Maya’s need to unravel the mys-

tery that is Max eventually leads her to propose a family odyssey to Montana, where Max was born. For the suburbanites, Montana might as well be Mars, a reality Fishman adroitly reveals in describing both its geography and its culture.

At the heart of this family drama is mercurial, deeply sympathetic Maya, who senses disaster lurking around every corner. Fishman patiently uncovers the tensions embedded in the Rubins’ relationship that intensify Maya’s restlessness.

They’ve reached the midpoint of their lives in an alien land without a clear vision of where life is taking them, and with a vague sense of unease that’s exacerbated by their sharp disagreements over how much of Max’s history they need to know.

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo— the plea of Max’s young mother as she hands over her child to his adoptive parents—is a ruminative story about the often fragile bonds of family. Even the most comfortable parents and children may someday confront a crisis as unsettling as the one that afflicts the Rubins, a truth that allows this novel to resonate with unexpected force.

tells the story of married couple Rebecca and Philip Wright. Rebecca works in customer support for a web-based dating service, while Philip is a scientist who has been toiling on what some might call a time machine (though he adamantly refers to it as a “causality violation device”) that has made him a joke in the physics community. Though the two have known heartbreak and disappointment, their life together is generally comfortable. Yet Rebecca can’t shake the feeling that the world is “wrong.” Could Philip’s device be the way to set things right? Or might it actually be the source of Rebecca’s anxiety and unease?

Expansive in scope, Version Control burrows into issues of science and technology, religion, relationships, racism and free will. It would be easy for issues to overshadow the story, but Palmer—who has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton—deftly keeps the many components in harmony.

The result is an intellectual novel that feels surprisingly intimate and accessible. Weighty yet emotionally rewarding, Version Control will appeal to all curious readers, regardless of their scientific background.

—HARVEY FREEDENBERG

—STEPHENIE HARRISON

VERSION CONTROL

By Dexter Palmer Pantheon $27.95, 512 pages ISBN 9780307907592 eBook available LITERARY FICTION

WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN

By Kaitlyn Greenidge

Algonquin $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9781616204679 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Dexter Palmer’s second novel, Version Control, is the kind of rich, multilayered book that often feels like it is raising more questions than answers. The first is the question of exactly what type of book it is: Is it a deeply personal story of a marriage and the human condition, or is it a cerebral exploration of the world of astrophysics and time travel? Is it science fiction or literary fiction?

A description does little to clear this matter up. Version Control

Charlotte’s family is starting over, and she isn’t sure what to make of it. Charlotte and her sister, Callie, have long been considered the weird ones in their Boston neighborhood. They speak in sign language as often as anything, a skill acquired from their mother, Laurel. But now that skill is setting them apart in another way: The Toneybee Institute for Ape Research has hired Laurel to teach sign language to a chimpanzee, Charlie—and the rest of the family

FICTION is expected to treat him as one of their own.

The family reacts in different ways, though. Laurel and Charlie easily bond. Callie aims to do the same, but the chimp doesn’t return her affections. He quickly becomes a point of division in Laurel and her husband Charles’ marriage.

Charlotte, meanwhile, struggles to understand why her mother is so quick to embrace Charlie.

As Charlotte studies the institute’s past, her feelings grow increasingly conflicted. Seventy years prior to the Freeman family’s arrival, researchers at the Toneybee conducted studies comparing African-American people with apes.

Charlotte is determined to reveal the link to her family and unveil the story they may now unwittingly be participating in.

In her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, Kaitlyn Greenidge addresses race with a knowing, deft hand. And there’s far more at work here, as Charlotte and Callie face their teenage years and wrestle with the line between what their parents want and what they desire for themselves. The result is a story about identity, both self-determined and dictated by outsides sources, and a family’s aim to settle into who they are.

—CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

By Joyce Maynard Morrow $25.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062257642 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

For better or worse, Joyce Maynard is best known for her memoir At Home in the World, which chronicled (among other things) a year-long love affair Maynard had with J.D Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author was 53. It should be added, however, that Maynard has slowly but surely compiled an impressive body of fiction, including 2009’s Labor Day, which was turned into

a 2013 film starring Oscar winners Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet.

Maynard’s latest is the cleverly titled Under the Influence. Helen’s marriage to Dwight, initially exciting, has fallen apart. Then one evening, a habit of drinking too much wine before bed has disastrous consequences: Helen loses custody of her beloved son, Ollie.

Having kicked booze, Helen—a photographer who must also do catering service to make extra money—meets and falls under the influence of a glamorous, wealthy “magic couple” named Ava and Swift. They seem to be everything Helen wants to be—and more importantly, they offer to help Helen win back custody of Ollie.

At times Maynard’s characters are drawn a touch heavy-handed, so that readers are likely to see the looming problems in Helen’s life long before she does. Nevertheless, Maynard deftly portrays Helen’s sense of helplessness and vulnerability as events build to a disturbing climax. Under the Influence is ultimately an absorbing portrait of complex characters confronting real problems.

—T O M D E I G N A N

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL

By Mona Awad

Penguin $16, 224 pages ISBN 9780143128489 eBook available SHORT STORIES

Lizzie March is not thin when we first meet her, but she desperately wants to be. A lonely high school girl with an obese, ill mother and an absent father, she avoids looking at her own body. Instead, she secretly envies female friends who are sexually bold or especially beautiful. Craving acceptance, she meets guys on Internet dating sites, and later, after dropping out of Catholic school, she brings home older men who don’t seem bothered by her weight. Eventually, she begins to diet, hoping that it will bring her the love she’s looking for.

spotlight

HISTORICAL FICTION

BY LAUREN BUFFERD

Women who made their mark

T

wo events with a lasting effect on American culture are celebrating a centenary in 2016: the founding of Planned Parenthood and Georgia O’Keeffe’s fateful meeting with Alfred Stieglitz.

The women at the center of these events are at the heart of two new works of historical fiction.

With the mission of Planned Parenthood being questioned almost as much today as it was at its inception, the timing is eerily apt for Terrible Virtue (Harper, $25.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780062407559), Ellen Feldman’s powerful novel about the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, whose personal life was as tumultuous as her political and social convictions, remains a controversial figure, held to current standards of ethical correctness just as she was held to impossible models of femininity during her lifetime.

Watching her own mother succumb to an early death after bearing 13 children led Sanger to advocate for family planning, despite a limited formal education.

Her desire to make a difference in the lives of poor and working-class women led her to Europe, where ideas about contraception were more progressive. After her return to the United States, she opened a clinic in Brooklyn—and was jailed for it.

Feldman lets Sanger tell her own story, but separates the chapters with sections narrated

by Sanger’s two husbands, her sister and her children. The voices of those who suffered under the singularity of Sanger’s purpose offer depth to Feldman’s vision of this complex figure—a reminder of what was gained, but also what was sacrificed.

A different kind of sacrifice

was made by Georgia O’Keeffe in Dawn Tripp’s gorgeous novel, Georgia (Random House, $28, 336 pages, ISBN 9781400069538), which focuses on the years O’Keeffe spent with photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

The love story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz is well known. Their passionate affair and his incredible photographs of her, both clothed and nude, caused a sensation at the time and are still considered seminal in the history of photography. But Tripp suggests that O’Keeffe paid a price for that notoriety. The battle that rose between her and Stieglitz was ultimately about her work as an artist, especially her early abstractions, which she believed were overshadowed by the obvious eroticism of his photographs.

O’Keeffe’s iron grip on her legacy and her need to reinvent herself in the Southwest is a key part of this exquisitely told story.

Like Terrible Virtue, Georgia relies on a first-person narrative, but in this novel, there is no other voice but O’Keeffe’s. Though the novel opens and closes in 1979 in New Mexico, it quickly plunges into the years just before World War I. The arrival of the young art teacher at Stieglitz’s gallery in New York, the expansive family home on the shores of Lake George and O’Keeffe’s first glimpses of what would become the major inspiration for the second half of her life, are all beautifully told.

Terrible Virtue and Georgia remind us that the ongoing culture wars are nothing new, but that life can be changed for the better with bravery, dedication and vision.

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reviews In 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, author Mona Awad tells Lizzie’s story through 13 chapters in her life as she transforms from a chubby teen to a sleekly fit adult. Throughout these often raw, poignant stories, Awad adeptly skewers the culture of fitness and dieting, a constant battle of self-­ denial. Awad, who received an MFA from Brown University, illustrates the way that women unconsciously size each other up by appearance or even what they choose on a restaurant menu. For example, in one story, “The Girl I Hate,” Lizzie goes to lunch with a skinny friend who joyously eats fattening food while Lizzie—dieting—nibbles on a salad.

Lizzie is a frustrating, funny and sad character. However, her story is a deeply true one. She exemplifies the fact that self-acceptance must come from inside ourselves, always separate from the ever-changing bodies we inhabit. Readers who appreciated last year’s Dietland shouldn’t miss this insightful debut.

—MARIANNE PETERS

THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT

By Kate Hamer

Melville House $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9781612195001 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

At a crowded outdoor book fair, a mother and daughter are separated. In the I-turned-around-andshe-was-gone of a parent’s nightmares, 8-year-old Carmel vanishes.

Did Carmel, whose teacher calls her “dreamy,” try to get lost? Or did the fears of her recently divorced mother, Beth, cause it to happen?

These questions tear at mother and daughter as they navigate unfamiliar, foreboding territory.

In The Girl in the Red Coat, which made the shortlist for the Costa First Novel Award after its publication in the U.K., Welsh writer Kate Hamer seamlessly alternates between the perspectives

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FICTION of mother and daughter, capturing the ongoing effects of a tragedy in stark detail. Struggling to describe her daughter’s hair to police, Beth finally settles on the exact color of a brown paper envelope, believing that if she can just be detailed and precise enough, that will bring Carmel back. Hamer pinpoints the moments that take on a painful poignancy after a loss: Beth walking past Carmel’s school; seeing the red shoes Carmel wanted in a shop window; realizing the first time she went a minute without thinking of her daughter.

Hamer also thoroughly inhabits the voice of young Carmel, who is at once both childlike and preternaturally endowed. Taken by a man with a fanatical agenda, she is a pawn in a game she doesn’t understand. The author lets the reader linger in uncertainty and frustration as Carmel’s rescue seems further and further away.

The tension builds, making the book one you want to finish, but also can’t bear to keep reading. As Beth marks the time—day 1, day 7, day 51, day 100—we hope, worry, fear, trust and doubt with her and Carmel. The Girl in the Red Coat is an engrossing, smart, well-paced read that surprises until the end.

—MELISSA BROWN

GONE WITH THE MIND

By Mark Leyner

Little, Brown $25, 256 pages ISBN 9780316323253 Audio, eBook available SATIRICAL FICTION

Mark Leyner’s electrifying and theatrical fourth novel, Gone with the Mind, opens in the food court of a shopping mall during a book signing. While the title recalls Margaret Mitchell, that is only the first of many literary touchstones for this imaginative autobiographical novel, initially narrated by Mark’s mother to an audience of two proles on work break. As her monologue proceeds for pages without a paragraph break, one is

reminded of the final chapter of Ulysses, in which Molly Bloom’s river of consciousness makes her seem more formidable with each breathless word. Mark then takes the stage, and in his casual concatenation of pop-culture references with science, philosophy and OED vocabulary, the reader enters the rarefied and rich territory charted

by David Foster Wallace.

Mark Leyner’s You never electric and know what Mark is going theatrical on about, fourth novel but you can’t is teeming stop listening. with literary It’s like Saul Bellow without allusions. the plot, a three-hourlong therapy session in which you are the therapist and Mark is the patient. Or a more frenetic Notes from Underground, with prostate cancer replacing Dostoevsky’s liver disease.

To wit: Mark is a 58-year-old struggling Jewish writer recovering from prostate surgery. He is unusually close to his mother and lacks two shekels to rub together. Mark careens from rage to despond and back again, while the two service workers in his so-called audience remain glued to their smartphones.

Mark is often hilarious, but usually in a manner calculated to shock.

Life, he says, is “pretty much like Carrie’s prom,” referring to the vengeful Stephen King character.

Leyner launched his writing career in the 1990s, alongside Jonathan Franzen and Wallace, and has worked as a screenwriter.

His novels, which are cult literary classics, have titles like My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. James Wood called this “hysterical realism,” a genre aspiring to approach in fiction the mania of contemporary life, to leave nothing out. Gone with the Mind could have been written only by someone coping with the overstimulation of today’s cyberspace. Leyner suggests that any other kind of fiction is lacking, and he may, to our detriment, be right.

A day in anyone’s life can seem ordinary. But when those moments are taken together, and especially when they intersect with the lives of others, a bigger story emerges.

That’s evident from the early pages of Flight of Dreams by Ariel Lawhon, a novel in which the author poses a theory for what could have brought down the famed German airship Hindenburg.

Even a reader without a firm grasp on history knows the ship is doomed. But what happened on board to create the fiery blast that destroyed the ship and dozens of lives in only 34 seconds? After all, as was recorded in the disaster’s investigation and newspapers, it was an uneventful flight.

Through the perspectives of passengers and crew members, Lawhon deftly draws readers into the lives of the cabin boy, the navigator and the stewardess. The latter two are romantically entangled, hiding their involvement from the rest of the crew even as the lovesick navigator and the widowed stewardess work out what’s ahead for their relationship. Then there are the passengers, including a mysterious American and a curious journalist. As each shares his or her insight into the others around them, an explanation for the ship’s ultimate demise begins to come into focus.

As with her debut novel, The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress, Lawhon uses real-life people and their stories, drawing from what is known about the ship’s passengers and crew to construct believable characters. Flight of Dreams melds historical fiction, a touch of romance and mystery to create a tale that becomes more difficult to put down as the disaster draws near.

—KENNETH CHAMPEON

—CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

FLIGHT OF DREAMS

By Ariel Lawhon

Doubleday $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780385540025 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

NONFICTION T PI OP CK

LIFE REIMAGINED

By Barbara Bradley Hagerty

THE LONELY CITY

Portrait of the lonely artist REVIEW BY CATHERINE HOLLIS

AGING

Olivia Laing’s soulful blend of biography and autobiography makes her one of the most compelling nonfiction writers around. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking made numerous “best of” lists in 2014 with its gimlet-eyed portrayal of the ravages of alcohol on the careers of otherwise distinguished writers. Laing continues to pursue her unique blend of experiential research in her new book, deepening her personal investment in the material.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone begins with a brokenhearted Laing (who’s British) adrift in a series of New York City sublets. She finds, as so many do, that loneliness has a particularly urban flavor, and that modern cities are very easy to get lost in, particularly if they are not yours. Partly to assuage her loneliness, she

By Olivia Laing starts pursuing the life stories of American visual artists who made the Picador, $26, 336 pages, experience of isolation part of their art.

ISBN 9781250039576, eBook available She begins with Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks,” with its indelible portrait of a late-night diner, and explores the bitter ART dynamics of his marriage to a fellow artist. Other subjects include Andy Warhol’s use of technology to create a safe barrier to intimacy, and— heartbreakingly—downtown artist David Wojnarowicz’s depiction of the tragic isolation of gay men in the era of AIDS. A chapter on outsider artist Henry Darger—the creator of the weird and epic Vivian Girls—argues for his deliberate transmutation of childhood trauma into art.

Laing’s own wrestling with loneliness, and her readings in psychology and philosophy, weave in and out of these portraits, creating a complex and multilayered narrative. Her experiences of “insufficient intimacy” and the social awkwardness of the lonely offer a humane and sensitive lens through which to view the life and art of her subjects. This is a stunning book on the nearly universal experience of feeling alone.

ALLIGATOR CANDY

By David Kushner Simon & Schuster $26, 256 pages ISBN 9781451682533 eBook available TRUE CRIME

Award-winning journalist and Princeton University professor David Kushner was 4 years old when he asked his 11-year-old brother to bring home his favorite candy from the convenience store, just a short bike ride away through the woods. He could not have imagined that he would never see Jon again. Neither could his family, or anyone else in 1973 Tampa, Florida, where children were free to explore the outside world and

parents fearlessly encouraged it.

Jon’s brutal murder killed such innocence. Kushner’s riveting memoir, Alligator Candy, begins by asking how any parent or family can survive such unimaginable evil and devastating grief.

Growing up in the shadow of Jon’s death, Kushner heard the rumors and imagined all kinds of things, but he resisted learning the factual details of the crime, afraid of asking questions that could resurrect his parents’ grief.

When, years later, one of the killers received a parole hearing, Kushner and his oldest brother attended.

They learned how horrifically Jon died, how the killers were caught— and what became of the candy Jon never brought home that day.

Kushner interviews those who searched for Jon and hunted down his killers. He taps the memories of those who mourned with and

Riverhead $28, 464 pages ISBN 9781594631702 Audio, eBook available

supported his family. His parents at last share their boundless sorrow, and how they survived. “Time goes by,” writes his mother, “and grief finds a niche . . . and goes along, too, included in everything. ‘I’m here,’ says Grief. ‘Never mind me, just go about your business.’ ” Finally, he knows as much as he can about the brother he was barely old enough to remember.

Now a parent himself, Kushner must balance his fear of random evil against the statistical rarity of child murder. The struggle becomes terrifyingly real when his 3-year-old daughter disappears at a carnival. Yet he goes on to share the joy of her first solo bike ride.

Parents today can understand the love, hope and fear he so eloquently describes in this account of one family’s transcendent courage in the face of crushing pain.

Those of us approaching midlife want good news about the years to come. Is dementia inevitable?

Can I continue to thrive despite an aging body? Will I become lonely and isolated as I grow older?

Barbara Bradley Hagerty has some good news for us in Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife. As she sees it, midlife can be a challenging time as we endure many transitions—empty nest, retirement, the deaths of our parents—but these later years can be a time of discovery and reinvention as well.

Hagerty was a journalist for 20 years, but Life Reimagined is not just a collection of reporting. It’s Hagerty’s personal journey as she confronts the challenges of growing older. Her writing is lively and honest, and she manages to ask serious questions without taking herself too seriously. She interviews scientists about brain structure, psychologists about friendships and 21st-century matchmakers at the headquarters of dating site eHarmony. She studies resilience, investigating ways to cope with the difficulties that midlife brings. She proves her point about reinvention when she enters the Senior Olympics after taking up a new sport—cycling.

One touching aspect of the book is Hagerty’s account of her mother, a magnificent, intelligent woman in slow decline. Her mother provides Hagerty (and readers) with a demonstration of aging gracefully and living life to the fullest for as long as we can. She also demonstrates how to let go when it’s time.

Life Reimagined gave me hope that midlife, even with its struggles, can be a time of growth and deeper joy in relationships old and new.

—PRISCILLA KIPP

—MARIANNE PETERS

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reviews EVICTED

By Matthew Desmond

Crown $28, 432 pages ISBN 9780553447439 Audio, eBook available POVERTY

Read it and weep. You’ll find it hard not to. Written by a Harvard sociologist, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has the character development and dramatic drive of a first-rate novel.

The core of Desmond’s study was conducted in Milwaukee from 2008 to 2009 and focuses on the dayto-day agonies of specific people who were frequently evicted from their homes by private landlords.

In most cases, rent took from 50 to 70 percent of the tenants’ monthly income, a situation that made late payment or non-payment inevitable—and always reason to evict.

What makes Matthew Desmond’s account so compelling is that he lived among the people whose travails he chronicles. Some of the victims—mostly black and often women with children—lived in the inner city; the others, overwhelmingly white, lived in a dilapidated trailer park on the edge of town. He also spent time with landlords to get their sides of the story.

Again and again we witness the tenants’ last-minute attempts to find rent money, negotiating with their landlords, sitting helplessly in court as judges rule against them, watching their possessions being tossed onto the sidewalk and explaining to their kids why they’re moving to yet another school. Desmond is clearly sympathetic, but he is no sentimentalist. He reveals all the blemishes of the dispossessed— their unwise ways with money, addiction to drugs and alcohol and casual attitudes toward birth control. Still, he knows that poverty seldom builds character.

Desmond argues that government-subsidized housing vouchers should be available to low-income families and that landlords should be required to accept them. “De-

24

cent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country,” he concludes. “The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

—EDWARD MORRIS

SMARTER FASTER BETTER

By Charles Duhigg Random House $28, 400 pages ISBN 9780812993394 Audio, eBook available SELF-HELP

It’s been a few weeks since our New Year’s resolutions faded into obscurity, but most of us harbor a lingering hope that we can become more productive. In Smarter Faster Better, New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg breaks productivity into eight parts that improve performance in surprising ways.

As in his bestseller The Power of Habit, Duhigg layers anecdotes, research and reporting, making potentially dry analysis compulsively readable. The tragic 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 happened because the pilots had become so dependent on the highly sophisticated flight display that they overlooked a fatal human error in their midst. By contrast, a similar plane was landed safely by a pilot who tuned out all the alarms and stripped his focus down to the parts of the plane that still worked and maximized his use of them.

Chapters on teamwork, motivation, management and more illustrate their points through stories from the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” a Marine Corps training exercise, competitive poker and the Disney musical Frozen. An appendix helpfully shows readers how to translate these concepts into daily use. The “stick man” diagrams from The Power of Habit are back, clarifying points with often humorous visuals (check out the two tiny engineers toasting one another with cans of Mountain Dew).

The Power of Habit showed readers how behavior is guided by cues and rewards; once you see

the system, making small hacks comes naturally. Smarter Faster Better looks even deeper, with tips that can help fine-tune behavior, improve relationships at work and lead to better outcomes in a variety of settings, while somehow also being an edge-of-your-seat exciting read. Duhigg has done it again.

—HEATHER SEGGEL

AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ

By Sarah Bakewell

Other Press $25, 448 pages ISBN 9781590514887 eBook available PHILOSOPHY

Existentialism is said to have begun in 1932 when three young philosophers sat in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, getting caught up on each other’s lives and drinking the house specialty, apricot cocktails. JeanPaul Sartre was inspired that day by talk of a new philosophy called phenomenology, concerned with life as it is experienced. His study of that approach changed the direction of his life and led to what came to be called existentialism.

In her sweeping and dazzlingly rich At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell introduces us to those most closely associated with existentialism by approaching “the lives through the ideas, and the ideas through the lives.” She shows how the key thinkers disagreed so much that, however you describe them as a group, you will misrepresent or exclude someone. Some of them never met, some had close or intersecting lives, and others had major public differences.

At the center of her book are Sartre and his longtime lover, Simone de Beauvoir, whose pioneering feminist work, The Second Sex, can be considered the most influential work to come out of the existentialist movement. The lives of Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Wright and

Iris Murdoch, among others, are also discussed.

Bakewell, who received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, sees her cast of characters engaged in a “big, busy café of the mind.” Their ideas remain of interest, not because they were right or wrong in their decisions, but because they dealt with real questions facing human beings.

This wonderfully readable account of one of the 20th century’s major intellectual movements offers a cornucopia of biographical detail and insights that show its relevance for our own time.

—ROGER BISHOP

I HAD TO SURVIVE

By Dr. Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci Atria $26, 304 pages ISBN 9781476765440 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

When it comes to inspirational books, it’s hard to beat Alive, Piers Paul Read’s 1974 account of the survival and eventual rescue of 16 survivors of a plane crash in the Andes. Roberto Canessa, one of two men who hiked out of the mountains and then led authorities to the survivors’ location, wisely doesn’t try to beat it in I Had to Survive, choosing instead to write (with Pablo Vierci) a complementary account of the ordeal and its effect on the subsequent four decades of his life.

It’s been quite a life, with Canessa forging a career as a pediatric cardiologist in his native Uruguay.

The book is his way of expressing how, as Vierci puts it, “his ordeal on the mountain had shaped his life.”

For the record, Canessa wastes no time addressing what, for many, was the most salient feature of Alive: how the survivors had to consume “the only nourishment that was keeping us alive, the lifeless bodies of our friends.”

But he has a larger purpose than explaining that decision. Rather

than consigning his ordeal to the past, he’s made it an indelible part of his life.

So while the first part of the book recounts the crash and its aftermath, the second part is where Canessa truly bares his soul. From his words and those of his family and the families of his patients, it’s clear that while some people might think the Andes cast a shadow over his life, his view is totally different: “It’s the light from the mountain that continues to illuminate my path, in life and in death.”

—KEITH HERRELL

ERUPTION

By Steve Olson

Norton $27.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780393242799 Audio, eBook available NATURE

I was 5 years old when Mount St. Helens blew its top in southwest Washington State in 1980.

Although I lived nearly 300 miles away, I remember my hometown of Spokane going dark in the middle of that Sunday and ash falling from the sky like eerie, gray snow.

Everyone who experienced the massive blast remembers that 57 people died that day. But what struck me after reading Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens is that, aside from the famously cantankerous octogenarian Harry Truman, who refused to leave his lodge near the mountain, we know very little about those who died.

We assume that they took unnecessary risks that cost them their lives.

In this captivating and damning book, Steve Olson examines why people were near the mountain despite warnings from geologists after a series of quakes and smaller eruptions. Government officials didn’t want to appear overzealous or hurt the already shaky timber industry by overstating the danger zone. The resulting hazard map made it appear that people could get close to the mountain on the west and northwest sides and be

safe. That misleading information would have deadly consequences.

Dozens of individuals who thought they were following the rules ventured dangerously near the volcano to camp, hike or simply take a curious peek at the awakening mountain. They were unaware that a blast would flatten the landscape for miles around, sending a cloud of searing crushed pumice zooming over the nearby ridges. One couple was camping nine miles away from the summit of the mountain. The husband, John Killian, was never found.

His wife’s left arm was recovered months later. Many of the victims burned to death or were suffocated by the blast cloud. Others were crushed by falling debris.

Olson, an award-winning science writer, brings a new perspective to the navigation of natural disasters, drawing a clear picture of how industry and politics affected who lived and died that day.

Eruption is an eye-opening and dramatic read that reminds us of nature’s power and unpredictability—and our human propensity for underestimating it.

—AMY SCRIBNER

SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS

By Carlo Rovelli

Riverhead $18, 96 pages ISBN 9780399184413 Audio, eBook available SCIENCE

Is it truly possible to explain the most compelling theories in modern physics in less than 100 pages? In language even nonscientists can understand? Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli proves that such an explanation is indeed possible—and surprisingly beautiful—in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. An international bestseller, it has outsold Fifty Shades of Grey in Italy, where Rovelli’s book was first published.

Rovelli perfectly conveys the mix of blind faith, crushing doubt and wonder that have guided

q&a

STEVE OLSON

BY AMY SCRIBNER

Volcanic disaster

S

cience writer Steve Olson captures the background and aftermath of the cataclysmic 1980 blast of Mount St. Helens in his compelling new book, Eruption.

© DANI WEISS PHOTOGRAPHY

NONFICTION

Why did you decide to write about Mount St. Helens, 35 years after the eruption?

I grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington, about 100 miles downwind from Mount St. Helens. But I moved east for college in 1974 and spent 35 years there after meeting my wife in the back of an English class. When we moved to Seattle in 2009, I wanted to write about the most dramatic thing that has ever happened in my native state—and the eruption of Mount St. Helens was the obvious choice.

How did you find people to talk with about the eruption? Was it difficult?

Almost everyone in the Pacific Northwest has a Mount St. Helens story, and almost everyone was eager to share their story with me when I asked them about the volcano. Many people in southwestern Washington told me, “If it had blown the week before, I wouldn’t be here today”—that’s how many people ventured into what would become the blast zone before the eruption.

Harry Truman became somewhat of a folk hero for refusing to leave his home near Spirit Lake. Why do you think that was?

Harry Truman captured the public’s imagination by coming across as a proud loner defying government authorities. But the situation was more complicated up close. Many people who wanted access to their properties near the volcano said, “If Harry’s up there, why can’t I go?” which made life very difficult for the sheriffs who were trying to keep people away from the mountain. He was taking an immense risk, and his friends feared for his life. And in the end, he was the only one of the 57 people killed who was breaking the law when the volcano erupted.

Mount St. Helens is still an active volcano, as is Mount Rainier southeast of Olympia. Do you think officials learned from the 1980 blast? What would be different if there were an eruption today?

Volcanologists and public safety officials learned a lot from the eruption of Mount St. Helens. They are much better now at monitoring volcanoes and predicting eruptions—plus, new technologies have made monitoring much easier. They have developed systems to warn people in surrounding communities of eruptions or dangerous mudflows, which could happen at Mount Rainier even without an eruption. Public safety officials are much more cautious in keeping people away from dangerous volcanoes. But some volcanoes still erupt without warning, as when Mount Ontake in Japan killed 57 people in 2014.

And if people don’t heed warnings, disasters can still occur.

When was the last time you visited Mount St. Helens? How would you describe it?

I drove to the mountain too many times to count while writing this book—and every time I go, I’m as astonished as the first time I visited.

It’s an incredible place. The mountain is so huge, and the destruction so vast, that you still can’t believe anyone would be crazy enough to be anywhere near it in the weeks before the eruption. If you haven’t been there, you really should go. There’s no place like it in the world.

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reviews our understanding of the world around us. The third lesson, “The Architecture of the Cosmos,” uses eight simple diagrams to graph our evolving understanding of ourselves and where exactly we are, from a lone stick man sandwiched between flat planes of Earth and sky to mere stardust that may well be a dream experienced by something in another universe.

In lessons on general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity and black holes, Rovelli beautifully merges the study of the universe with our ever-shifting understanding of our place within it. “We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little,” Rovelli writes.

“Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.”

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a science book that reads like a poem, and resonates like one, too.

It’s educational to be sure, but its biggest lesson seems to be that remaining curious is our greatest hope as individuals and a species.

—HEATHER SEGGEL

WASHINGTON’S IMMORTALS

By Patrick K. O’Donnell

Atlantic Monthly $28, 336 pages ISBN 9780802124593 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

In his new book, bestselling military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell turns his attention to a forgotten story of the American Revolution. Today, only a rusted metal sign memorializes 256 Maryland soldiers who fell during the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776. The men were part of a legendary regiment whose heroic actions in that battle—and others in the years to come—helped determine the outcome of the war.

O’Donnell became curious about the men while on a walking tour of the Brooklyn neighborhood where the undiscovered remains of the

26

NONFICTION soldiers still lie. Through his research, he uncovered the fascinating story of Major Mordecai Gist, who formed an independent company of men in Baltimore in 1774, when war clouds were gathering.

The unit would become one of only a few that fought throughout the war, disbanding in November 1783.

(Gist, who survived, named his sons Independent and States.)

O’Donnell gives a stirring account of the remarkable resilience and bravery shown by the Maryland soldiers. In the summer of 1776, British troops and warships sailed into New York’s harbors, set on invasion. Compared with the British, the American army was a ragtag affair.

General George Washington “faced a nearly impossible strategic situation,” O’Donnell notes.

Although outmatched and outmaneuvered, the Marylanders proved to be stalwart and daring soldiers, helping to cover the Americans’ retreat and causing Washington to cry, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

While O’Donnell focuses on the Marylanders, his absorbing narrative takes readers into the larger story of the Revolutionary War itself. In the process, he makes a compelling case for honoring these forgotten heroes with more than a rusted sign.

—DEBORAH HOPKINSON

THE LEGENDS CLUB

By John Feinstein Doubleday $27.95, 416 pages ISBN 9780385539418 Audio, eBook available SPORTS

Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski and N.C. State hired Jim Valvano—until Dean Smith’s retirement in 1997, the religion turned ardently passionate, ecstatic or bitter, depending on each team’s fortunes. In The Legends Club, an enthusiastic and energetic account that reads like a fan’s notes, acclaimed sportswriter John Feinstein tells the electrifying stories of the 25 years when this coaching trio ruled the triangle, regularly meeting one another in the ACC final and almost always advancing deep into the NCAA tourney.

In a season-by-season chronicle, Feinstein brings vividly to life the initial pressures Krzyzewski and Valvano felt from their alumni and their respective colleges to beat Smith at UNC. “I expect them to be good,” Krzyzewski said, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t be good, too.” Valvano took his typically humorous approach: “I’ll never outcoach Dean Smith, but maybe I can outlive him.”

In one of the saddest events in college basketball, the boisterous and big-hearted Valvano died of bone cancer in 1993, 10 years after winning a national championship.

Smith died in 2015 after suffering neurological damage following routine surgery. As Krzyzewski muses, “Where once were three . . . now there’s one. . . . [W]hat we became as individuals, but maybe even more as a group, is an amazing story.” And, while Duke, UNC and N.C. State fans might quibble about the details, as they always do, Feinstein faithfully captures a rivalry that will remain a legend in sports.

—HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR.

THE VIOLET HOUR

By Kate Roiphe

In a 20-mile triangle in North Carolina, college basketball is a religion. Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium, North Carolina’s Dean Smith Center and North Carolina State’s PNC Arena are the centers of worship, where fans engage in liturgical rituals and basketball coaches are gods.

From the early 1970s—when

Dial $28, 320 pages ISBN 9780385343596 eBook available BIOGRAPHY

Kate Roiphe’s latest offering details the deaths of five major writ-

ers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. Roiphe took the book’s title, The Violet Hour, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” because “the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden.

It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk.”

Each section of this elegiac book begins with the image of an empty room. “I very conspicuously do not belong in these rooms,” Roiphe writes, yet she recreates them in piercing detail: the hospital room in Sloan-Kettering where Sontag lay dying of cancer; the empty office where Sendak, in happier moments, drew pictures and whistled operas; Updike’s spare and efficient desk. These writers have something in common with all of humanity—they died. And in their crackling, vivid work, Roiphe finds keys that enable her to approach the mystery of death, although not to unlock it.

The chapters are organized around a moment-by-moment narrative of each writer’s final days.

We find out, for instance, that Sontag was grateful for a last haircut and that Sendak ate homemade apple crisp. And that Updike’s first wife, Mary, grabbed his feet through the sheets and held them when she saw him the final time.

So while a medical story is being laid out, there is also what Barthes calls the punctum, the evocative detail that elevates the reportage to something more like poetry. As these moments accumulate toward their final, inevitable endpoint, Roiphe takes many tangents to explore the writer’s attitude toward death as communicated through his or her work, which, for all these writers, was the central and most transcendent aspect of their lives.

“It’s all on the page,” Updike said. That may be true, and yet by combining the writer’s final moments of life with what they left on the page, Roiphe ultimately offers us something beyond the work: a glimpse of death that is startling and new, intimate and uncomfortable, and deeply, deeply human.

— K E L LY B L E W E T T

MEG MEDINA INTERVIEW BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

Seeking independence during an infamous summer

★

T

he sparkly disco ball on the cover of Meg Medina’s mesmerizing new YA novel, Burn Baby Burn, evokes the summer of 1977. But there are flames on the disco ball, too, burning with an intensity that hints at something much more dangerous than disco. In New York City, this was the summer of a relentless heat wave, ever-escalating crime and a serial killer dubbed Son of Sam. “I like the notion of disco ball as time bomb,” Medina tells BookPage in a call from her home in Richmond, Virginia. In Burn Baby Burn, the explosion comes in the form of a citywide blackout, a real-life incident that Medina remembers well. She was 13 years old and living in Queens.

Medina is the author of five previous books, including the 2014 Pura Belpré Author Award-winning Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, but this is her first novel of historial fiction. She quickly realized it wasn’t enough to draw from her own memories, and so she delved into newspapers to help re-experience that summer’s terror. “I wanted to write the story as respectfully as possible,” Medina says. “It’s part of the historical record of the city,

BURN BABY BURN

By Meg Medina

Candlewick, $17.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780763674670, audio, eBook available Ages 14 and up

HISTORICAL FICTION

eBand I didn’t want to glamorize it or make it sensational. What I wanted to capture was the sense of horror and dread that we felt.”

That instability and uncertainty permeate the pages of Burn Baby Burn and the life-changing summer of its protagonist, 17-year-old Nora Lopez. Nora has plans for her post-high school life: She’s saving money from her part-time deli job so she can move out of the apartment she shares with her mother, Mima, and brother, Hector. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the beach and disco dancing with her college-bound best friend, Kathleen, even as they alter their daily plans to ensure they aren’t vulnerable to the serial killer. That’s something Medina remembers well: Under Son of Sam’s shadow, running routine errands “felt like a really close call . . . like he could be anywhere and anybody.”

In addition to the fear that casts a pall over the city, Nora’s daily life is marked by exhausting, ultimately fruitless attempts to avoid setting off Hector’s increasingly explosive temper. It’s clear to Nora that Mima, who’s never disciplined Hector for his behavior, isn’t going to start handling things now. It’s up to Nora to save herself.

This is a daunting prospect for a teen with limited resources.

Fortunately, Nora is surrounded by a coterie of supportive and caring spirits, including Kathleen and her parents, a badass neighbor named Stiller and the funny deli owner.

“It’s important to keep young people in contact with the idea that what your situation is right

“. . . gripping.”

—School Library Journal, starred review

STEVE CASANOVA

teen

★

“. . . pure excitement.”

—Booklist, starred review

★ now isn’t what it will always be for you,” Medina says. “There are other people around from whom you can draw strength.”

Through the people who encourage Nora to think bigger (a guidance counselor urges her to apply to colleges) and broader (Kathleen’s mother and Stiller bring the girls to women’s rights rallies), Medina skillfully and movingly demonstrates that change can come in small increments, and though there may be setbacks, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

Take feminism, for example.

Nora is growing up during the movement’s second wave, filled with marches and Bella Abzug’s bullhorn. “It’s so painful to me when we see young women now disavow that and say they’re not feminists,” Medina says. “So much of what they take for granted and are allowed to do came on the backs of women who took to the street, marching and being ‘difficult.’ So I wanted to write a story about young women in the beginning of that.”

There’s much that readers will take away from Burn Baby Burn, with its dramatic and all-too-real backdrop of a city in trouble and transition, and characters who are doing their best while realizing that it’s OK to want to do better.

“I believe in the relief of naming hard experiences,” Medina says.

“There is a comfort in removing the shame around them. They happen to all kinds of people, and it’s not a character flaw in you, it’s humanity.”

“. . . told with true grit.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

978-1-58089-584-2 HC $16.95 Pamela S. Turner Illustrated by Gareth Hinds

HIS stORY IS LEGEND. www.charlesbridge.com

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reviews T PI OP CK

TEEN

UNBECOMING

Before memories slip away R E V I E W B Y E R I N A . H O LT

Painful family secrets may be at the heart of the latest novel by British author Jenny Downham, but families change and grow over time, and there is peace and healing just within reach.

Seventeen-year-old Katie first meets her grandmother, Mary, in the hospital. Mary suffers from dementia, and her husband recently died from a massive heart attack. Despite being estranged from Mary for years, Katie’s mother, Caroline, is Mary’s emergency contact. When Caroline must return to work, Katie becomes the main caregiver for Mary, and she quickly realizes that her grandmother’s memories are deteriorating before her eyes. However, the more Mary and Katie interact and take risks together, the more Mary’s memories return, resulting in long-buried family secrets coming to the surface. As Katie struggles with her identity and Mary struggles with her memories, these stories unravel, exposing revelations about all three generations of women.

By Jenny Downham Downham delivers an engrossing and emotional novel, complete Scholastic / David Fickling, $17.99, 384 pages with a thread of historical fiction that employs Mary’s flashbacks as ISBN 9780545907170, audio, eBook available the backdrop to the story. With tremendous finesse, Downham pulls Ages 14 and up readers into the mind of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s, a place FICTION where memories quickly fall out of reach. The story is fluid, perfectly paced and can be easily read in one sitting. This is a heartfelt book that sensitively and honestly reveals family issues, and it’s one that teens won’t want to miss.

REBEL OF THE SANDS

By Alwyn Hamilton Viking $18.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780451477538 eBook available Ages 12 and up FANTASY

Amani Al’Hiza is desperate to escape the tiny village of Dustwalk.

Her best chance at making the money for the journey to Miraji’s capital is her gun. Dressed as a boy to enter a shooting contest, Amani makes an unlikely alliance with a mysterious foreigner. The contest ends in chaos, and Amani barely escapes with her life, let alone the prize money. When the foreigner, Jin, reappears on the run from the Sultan’s army, Amani knows it could be dangerous to help, but she can’t shake the idea that Jin may be able to help her in return.

The nation of Miraji and its rivals

28

are rooted in geopolitical themes from our own world, adding to the sense that Amani’s journey takes place within an ancient and well-established society. Most impressive, though, is author Alwyn Hamilton’s care not to conflate the danger and poverty Amani wants to leave behind with the Miraji culture as a whole. Amani’s respect for the legends and myths of her people and her explicit pride in being “a desert girl” show the beauty of Miraji, rather than making it a wasteland to escape at all costs.

The stakes are raised significantly in the final third of the novel, which may disappoint readers who were enjoying the relative realism of Amani’s quest. However, this brilliantly executed plot twist will thrill readers anxious for true fantasy.

In Rebel of the Sands, Hamilton creates a robust mixture of gritty reality and fantasy, delivering a satisfying beginning to what promises to be an electrifying series.

—ANNIE METCALF

THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET

By Tara Sullivan

Putnam $17.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780399173073 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up FICTION

Enveloping us in the tropical forests and cacao farms of Africa, The Bitter Side of Sweet keenly inspires empathy in readers through a tale of abusive child labor and the resilience of the human spirit.

When 15-year-old Amadou and his 8-year-old brother, Seydou, left their home in Mali to harvest cacao plants in Ivory Coast, they assumed they would return after a season. But working as child slaves for the past two years has broken their bodies and their spirits. That is, until 13-year-old Khadija, the first girl they’ve ever seen on the farm, bursts into their lives with

such ferocity that Amadou nicknames her “the wildcat.”

Khadija attempts to escape on her first day, and when she’s caught, Amadou is blamed and beaten for it. But when Seydou is severely injured in the fields, Khadija keeps him alive after Amadou is dragged back to harvest. Amadou finally realizes the masters don’t care about his brother—they only care about his ability to work for them—and so he sets in motion a desperate plan for escape.

Tara Sullivan’s latest novel is heart-wrenching, with the power to leave a bitter taste of memory with every bite of chocolate.

—J U S T I N B A R I S I C H

THANKS FOR THE TROUBLE

By Tommy Wallach Simon & Schuster $17.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781481418805 Audio, eBook available Ages 14 and up FICTION

When his father died five years ago, Parker Santé lost his ability to speak. He’s not that interested in talking to anyone, anyway. Instead, he spends most days loitering in hotel lobbies, picking the occasional pocket and filling journals with stories—until one afternoon at the Palace Hotel, when he steals a wad of cash from a silver-haired girl who claims to be 246 years old.

When mysterious Zelda catches him in the act and offers to strike a deal, Parker begins to see that there might be some things in life worth paying attention to.

Tommy Wallach offers a sweet coming-of-age novel about a young man learning to overcome loss. Presented as a comically long college application essay, Parker’s narrative is brash and appropriately childish, yet attentive and at times profound.

Though the framing device is a bit far-fetched, and Zelda leans a bit too far toward Manic Pixie Dream Girl, there’s a lot to love about the poignant, lighthearted Thanks for the Trouble.

—SARAH WEBER

T PI OP CK

CHILDREN’S

IDEAS ARE ALL AROUND

Strolling and brainstorming REVIEW BY JULIE DANIELSON

The warm yellow endpapers of this picture book bring to mind the sun, a symbol of a new day filled with new inspirations. That’s the subject of Philip C. Stead’s new book, Ideas Are All Around, but it’s also so much more.

Dry on story ideas, Stead goes for a walk with his dog. The two see a shy turtle, listen to birds and visit Barbara, who owns a house the author once lived in upstairs. Stead has coffee with Barbara, and they discuss the fact that 10,000 years ago, the spot where they now sit was the bottom of a lake. I can imagine children talking back enthusiastically to this book: There are ideas for stories everywhere you look! This is, of course, the author’s point.

But there’s more. This is also a book that embraces imperfections:

By Philip C. Stead Stead tells readers he once spilled paint at Barbara’s house and left “a Roaring Brook, $18.99, 48 pages big blue blob on the sidewalk.” Barbara rejoiced in the blob and saw in ISBN 9781626721814, ages 4 to 8 it the essence of a blue horse. Stead also writes about his beloved typewriter, which he bought from a man who repairs broken things. On his PICTURE BOOK walk, Stead sees a line of people waiting for the soup kitchen to open, one with a cane and one in a wheelchair. Stead and his dog follow the railroad tracks—“You should never walk on train tracks . . . but we do it anyway”—because that can lead to adventure. In the book’s opening spread, Stead even sees a sunflower, noting it was only one of many seeds that grew. “Planting a seed is always a risk,” he writes. One for sorrow, two for joy.

The book includes Polaroid photos (be sure to remove the dustjacket) and text from the author’s typewriter. The mixed-media, collaged illustrations are spare and evocative. It’s a book that finds joy—and, yes, ideas—in this messy, beautiful world.

The year is young. I can already tell you this is one of its best books.

Illustration © 2016 by Philip C. Stead. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Children’s.

discovers that a tree outside the orphanage where he lives has been magnificently altered into an owl.

William and his neighbors are delighted with the daily additions of marvelous topiaries that grace the once-lackluster street. While the neighborhood celebrates the most outstanding piece—a dragon— William spies the Night Gardener and follows him into Grimloch Park, where the two work side-byside through the night, shaping the park’s many trees. What follows is a marvelously inspiring transformation, especially in the life of one young lad.

Terry and Eric Fan have produced an exceptional story of awakening, set during the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Readers will discover a truly magical world in these eye-catching scenes rendered in graphite, pen, ink and watercolor. Intricately designed, vintage-style spreads incorporate light and well-balanced text, and the slow transition from drab scenes to ones replete with brilliant hues breathes life into the story of an orphan boy and his serendipitous encounter with the Night Gardener.

An inimitable work, The Night Gardener has the potential to become an award-winning book and an all-time classic.

—ANITA LOCK

HAVE YOU SEEN ELEPHANT?

By David Barrow

Gecko Press $16.99, 32 pages ISBN 9781776570089 Ages 3 to 5 PICTURE BOOK

David Barrow, winner of the 2015 Sebastian Walker Award for most promising children’s illustrator, brings new life to the question of outing the “elephant in the room.”

When a large, gentle elephant asks a small boy to play hide-andseek, the boy accepts at once. Elephant kindly warns the boy that he is VERY good at this game. Despite being put on notice, the boy says he will do his best, counting to 10 while his pet dog scratches nearby.

Page after page of hilarity ensues, with Elephant doing an excellent job of hiding practically in plain view—so convincingly that the boy’s mother suggests he give up the search. But the boy and his dog soldier on, until finally, standing right in front of Elephant, he gives up. As the boy wonders about his next move, Elephant tickles him between the shoulders with his trunk. In the excitement of the moment, Turtle enters the scene and asks if they’d like to play tag—with one warning: He is VERY good.

Painted in fresh textures, warm earth tones and pops of reds and purples, Have You Seen Elephant? will engage readers young and old with its vibrant portrayal of an elephant that clearly wants in on the fun. The book is flanked front and back by a gallery of family photos.

By story’s end, Turtle and Elephant

are members of the family.

—BILLIE B. LITTLE

THE NIGHT GARDENER

By Terry Fan and Eric Fan

Simon & Schuster $17.99, 48 pages ISBN 9781481439787 eBook available Ages 4 to 8 PICTURE BOOK

The Fan Brothers make their picture-book debut with a whimsical story bursting with hope and innovation.

Everything about Grimloch Lane is unspectacular. Among its uncreative residents is a young boy named William, who one day

FLASHBACK FOUR: THE LINCOLN PROJECT

By Dan Gutman

HarperCollins $16.99, 240 pages ISBN 9780062374417 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

If you could go back in time, when and where would you go?

This is the question that inventor/ scientist/billionaire Miss Z poses to a group of four handpicked 12-year-olds in Flashback Four: The Lincoln Project. Prolific writer Dan Gutman’s new middle-grade series introduces the time-traveling Flashback Four, and in their

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reviews first adventure, they’re headed to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863.

The time-travel machine is an ingeniously modified white board, like those found in classrooms across the country. Once the children are convinced that Miss Z is the real deal, they receive their mission: They must take a picture of President Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address. Because his speech was so short, photographers didn’t have enough time to get a picture, so none exists of this historic event. While their task sounds easy enough after being coached in the manners and speech of the era, all does not go according to plan. A series of unforeseen events keeps the tension high, and the ending tantalizes.

Gutman includes helpful asides that expand on interesting historical facts.

—LORI K. JOYCE

THE KEY TO EXTRAORDINARY

By Natalie Lloyd

Scholastic $16.99, 240 pages ISBN 9780545552745 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

In Natalie Lloyd’s The Key to Extraordinary, Emma Pearl is waiting for one extraordinary thing: her Destiny Dream. Dreamt by each of her female ancestors and recorded in the Book of Days, this dream leads each woman to her lifelong destiny. Emma is desperate for her dream, so that she can begin fulfilling the promise she made to her mother before she died.

Emma’s world is filled with more than just dreams, however. Her grandmother’s café, attached to her home and situated right next to her town’s famous and historical cemetery, is under attack from a big-city developer. When Emma’s Destiny Dream, confusing as it is, points her in a direction that could save the café, she knows that she must fulfill her destiny, no matter the cost.

Filled with beautiful writing,

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CHILDREN’S compelling characters and just the slightest touch of the fantastic, The Key to Extraordinary draws readers in from the first page and carries them along straight through to the satisfying ending. Destiny Dream or no, Emma Pearl is anything but ordinary.

—KEVIN DELECKI

ALL RISE FOR THE HONORABLE PERRY T. COOK

By Leslie Connor

Katherine Tegen $16.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780062333469 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Eleven-year-old Perry Cook starts his first day of middle school with a healthy dose of trepidation, and indeed, several things go wildly wrong. But Perry’s life becomes far more difficult when he’s forced to leave the only home he’s ever known: the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility in Surprise, Nebraska, where his mom is serving time. Perry has been living in a room next to the office of his foster parent, the warden.

Unfortunately, the new district attorney, Thomas VanLeer, gets wind of Perry’s unusual living arrangement and puts a quick end to it, bringing Perry home to temporarily live with his wife and stepdaughter. VanLeer also gets rid of the warden and postpones Perry’s mom’s parole hearing. The only saving grace is that VanLeer’s stepdaughter happens to be Perry’s very best friend, Zoey.

While the plot of All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook may sound improbable, author Leslie Connor pulls these elements together beautifully and believably.

She’s a gifted storyteller who creates a memorable bunch of multi­ dimensional characters. Think of this as a G-rated “Orange Is the New Black.” There’s nothing even remotely inappropriate or hardedged here, as Connor transforms Blue River and its inmates into a kingdom filled with wise, warm

and wonderful souls—an ensemble cast at its best.

As Perry fights to spend time with his mother and to learn the important secret she’s been hiding about why she went to prison, readers gain insight into the many ways in which a prison sentence affects families in this soulful novel.

to the courthouse and words of wisdom from Nelle’s lawyer father, and hints of the pair’s later literary successes. A delightful tale on its own, Tru and Nelle will enchant younger readers with its introduction to these distinguished writers and older readers with their influential backstory.

—ANGELA LEEPER

—ALICE CARY

TRU AND NELLE

By G. Neri

HMH $16.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780544699601 Audio available Ages 9 to 12

HOUR OF THE BEES

By Lindsay Eagar

Candlewick $16.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780763679224 Audio, eBook available Ages 10 to 14 MIDDLE GRADE

MIDDLE GRADE

Truman Capote (“Tru”) and Harper Lee (“Nelle”) not only penned some of the finest American literature, but as children they spent numerous summers as next-door neighbors during the Great Depression in Monroeville, Alabama. In a departure from his gritty, urban fiction, author G. Neri brings their endearing friendship to light.

When Tru, in his fancy white suits, arrives at the home of his second cousins (thrice removed) after he’s abandoned by his scheming father and self-absorbed mother, he forms a seemingly unlikely yet fierce bond with Nelle, a scruffy tomboy whose “peculiar” mother is away “getting the treatment.” Often seen as outsiders, they share a love of big words and reading Sherlock Holmes stories, and they eventually find a sense of belonging.

Basing the book on true events, Neri captures Monroeville’s smalltown charm and lively characters.

But Tru needs big excitement, which he finds when someone breaks into the town drugstore and smashes the windows at school. As the would-be Sherlock and Watson set out to find the culprit, they also uncover more serious problems, from poverty to racism.

The harsh realities of the time are balanced with fun nods to To Kill a Mockingbird, such as trips

Twelve-year-old Carol would rather be enjoying summer vacation with her friends, not stuck on a dilapidated ranch in the parched New Mexico desert. Her family is preparing to sell the property and move her grandfather, Serge, into assisted living before his dementia advances further. But as Carol gets to know Serge, his stories open up a world that she’d never known before.

Debut author Lindsay Eagar infuses this story with rich metaphors and real magic. Carol’s Mexican-American family tends to emphasize their American side, but life on the ranch with Serge shows Carol the value of deep roots—both figuratively and literally, as their land is in a century-long drought. Eagar’s language is poetic and lovely, and the story-within-a-story is a heartbreaker. The relationships between bees and water, and life versus living, would make for a terrific book club discussion.

Hour of the Bees is as grand as the landscape it springs from, an ode to family and heritage but also to living fearlessly. Forget about the middle-grade designation; everyone who reads this will be touched, and quite possibly moved to re-­ secure their family ties. Dreamlike while also gritty and real, this is a gorgeous work of art.

—HEATHER SEGGEL

spotlight

MAKE-BELIEVE

BY JULIE HALE

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

Flights of imagination

B

ig adventures are in store for rising readers, as these three picture books celebrate the imagination and its limitless potential. These inspiring tales are all about discovery, exploration and letting your imagination take the lead. Anything is possible!

An independent little girl gets lost in an adventure of her own imagining in R.W. Alley’s Gretchen Over the Beach (Clarion, $14.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780547907086, ages 4 to 7). With her spiffy new sunhat and toys, Gretchen is ready to spend a day at the seashore with her siblings. But she’s disappointed when they race to the ocean, leaving her alone on the beach.

Gretchen plays in the sand until her hat is caught by a gust of wind. She snags it by the tail—a length of red ribbon—and is soon airborne. Flying along with her toys for company, Gretchen zips over the ocean.

A ride on the back of a seagull makes her beach day complete.

Alley uses ink, pencil and acrylics to create a swirling dreamscape of ocean and sky—the perfect backdrop for the story of Gretchen and her out-of-thisworld imagination.

FACING UP TO FEAR Danny Parker’s Parachute (Eerdmans, $16, 32 pages, ISBN 9780802854698, ages 4 to 8) is the uplifting story of a small boy who confronts a big challenge. Toby is never without his parachute.

Folded away in an orange pack, it makes him feel less uneasy about descending from his bunk bed or swinging in the park. It becomes very necessary when Toby is forced to climb up to his treehouse to retrieve Henry, his cat. Using the parachute, Toby sends Henry safely

meet HYEWON YUM

to the ground. But now Toby is stranded. How will he get down?

With the help of his imagination, of course! Artist Matt Ottley plays with perspective in ingenious pictures that deliver a sense of Toby’s vertiginous experience.

His paint, pastel and pencil illustrations are filled with brilliant details (like the stuffed rabbit that’s strapped to Toby’s pack). This is a triumphant tale about defeating fear that readers of all ages will appreciate.

would you describe Q: How

the book?

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

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

Q: Who was your childhood hero?

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT Flying bovines and a friendly dragon—there’s plenty to love about Gemma Merino’s The Cow Who Climbed a Tree (Albert Whitman, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780807512982, ages 4 to 8). Tina the cow is often teased about her inquisitive mind by her sisters, a complacent trio whose thoughts rarely stray beyond their stomachs.

In the woods one day, on a whim, Tina climbs a tree, where a surprise awaits her: a winged dragon! The two trade stories and become fast friends. At home, Tina tells her sisters about the dragon, but they don’t believe her. When she disappears the next day, they make their very first venture into the forest in hopes of finding her. The sisters soon learn that the woods are full of wonder, a place where their wildest dreams can take flight. Merino’s delightful illustrations feature simple lines and bold washes of color. Her story is sure to ignite the spirit of discovery in young readers.

books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: What

one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: What

message would you like to send to young readers?

Q: What

PUDDLE Brooklyn-based author-illustrator Hyewon Yum has won multiple awards for her picture books, including the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award for Mom, It’s My First Day of Kindergarten! In Puddle (FSG, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780374316952, ages 4 to 7), a little boy and his mom fight the rainy-day blues.

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WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

STAYING POWER Dear Editor: Can you tell me where we got the word stamina?

A. C. El Monte, California The warp in a loom is the lengthwise series of threads through which the crosswise woof or weft is woven. In Latin the word for warp was stamen. In addition, stamen developed the sense “thread,” a meaning that had a divine as well as a human aspect. In Greco-​ Roman myth, the three Fates were often pictured spinning, measuring and cutting the stamina or threads that represented mortal lives.

Stamina was borrowed from Latin in the 17th century with both the literal meaning of “warp” and the idea of the threads of fate. Stamina were the essential elements or qualities of something considered as being like the warp, the foundation on which a textile is woven. The word was also used for the innate capacities that were

once believed to determine, like the threads of the Fates, the duration of life. From this use, the word developed the modern sense “endurance, staying power.” Though stamina was originally treated as a plural, it has been reinterpreted as singular.

QUACK FACT

Dear Editor: Why is a fraud, especially a medical impostor, called a charlatan?

K. R. Hampton, Virginia There was a wide gap in medieval Italy between the handful of learned physicians who had studied medicine at the great schools of Salerno or Bologna and the average peasant who knew only simple folk remedies. This gap was filled by a large group of pretenders to medical skills, who would perform surgery on demand and traveled from one market town to another, advertising cures of dubious efficacy. For reasons now obscure, the

region of Umbria in central Italy was particularly noted as the home of itinerant medicine-peddlers, and the Italian word cerretano, which literally meant “an inhabitant of Cerreto,” a town in eastern Umbria, became an epithet for a quack physician. Cerretano was blended with the verb ciarlare, “to chatter,” alluding to the patter of the medicine seller, to form ciarlatano, in use by the end of the 15th century. Ciarlatano was borrowed into French as charlatan and hence into English, where it was in use by the early 17th century.

TAKING A BITE

Dear Editor: Given that the prefix re- means “again,” what is the repeated action that morse in the word remorse refers to?

V. G. Rye, New Hampshire Remorse is a gnawing distress that arises from a sense of guilt. In the light of its etymology, gnawing

is a description of special relevance, for remorse is borrowed from medieval Latin remorsus, a noun derivative of Latin remordere, “to bite again, vex persistently,” from re- plus mordere, “to bite.”

When a monk known as Dan Michel of Northgate, in the year 1340, finished his English translation of a French manual on sin and penitence, he called it Ayenbite of Inwyt—which we would render in Modern English as Remorse of Conscience. The word ayenbite was Dan Michel’s piece-by-piece translation of Latin remorsus, with ayen- (again in Modern English) rendering re- and bite rendering morsus. Similar translations of Latin words with ayen- for re- were quite popular in Middle English, though they have not survived.

In many cases we have simply borrowed the Latin word, as has happened with remorse.

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

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Brain Games difficulty: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● completion: ■ time: ______

AHMES’S PUZZLE

workman.com

difficulty: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● completion: ■ time: ______

twenty-four matchsticks can be arranged to create the pattern illustrated below. can you remove eight matchsticks from the configuration so that you are left with two squares that do not touch each other?

ANSWEr

16,807 measures of flour. That’s 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7. This puzzle, which comes from the ancient Egyptian “Rhind Papyrus,” was written by the scribe Ahmes in 1850 b.c. Perhaps the world’s oldest puzzle, it has inspired a great many variations over the thousands of years since its creation.

ANSWEr

Seven houses each have seven cats. each cat kills seven mice. each of the mice, if alive, would have eaten seven ears of wheat. each ear of wheat produces seven measures of flour.

How many measures of flour were saved by the cats?

MAtcH SqUArES

MATCH SQUARES

AHMES’S PUZZLE

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