BookPage September 2015 by BookPage

AMERICA’S BOOK REVIEW

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

SEPT. 2015

L OU I S E

PENNY

With her new Inspector Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, the Canadian writer expands the scope and appeal of her scintillating series

plus

THE BEST FALL FICTION

ELLY GRIFFITHS’ MAGIC MEN

WORLDWIDE MYSTERY TOUR

PaperbackPicks The Lost Key

Insatiable Appetites

The second Brit in the FBI novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter.

Stone Barrington returns in this actionpacked thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

“A fast-moving technothriller that proves the collaboration of Coulter and Ellison to be a serendipitous one.” —Booklist

“Multiple exciting story lines…readers of the series will enjoy the return of the dangerous Dolce.”—Booklist

The Eye of Heaven

Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot

The latest Fargo adventure from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Sam and Remi Fargo are. on the run through jungles, temples, and secret tombs. The solution to a thousandyear-old mystery awaits them at the end of the chase—if they manage to survive.

Only a Kiss

The Darkest Day World-class assassin Victor finds himself under fire in the new thriller from bestselling author Tom Wood.

Moondance Beach In the latest Bayberry Island romance from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetest Summer, it might take more than a magical mermaid statue to bring together a hard-headed Navy SEAL and the mysterious artist who’s loved him from afar.

of the

Month

“Page-turning and atmospheric.” —Kirkus Reviews

The new Jesse Stone novel in Robert B. Parker’s New York Times bestselling series—and this one is “a cause for celebration” (January Magazine).

The new Survivors’ Club novel from New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh. For six men and one woman, injured in the Napoleonic Wars, their friendships have been forged in steel and loyalty. But for one, her trials are not over.

Feature

Archangel’s Enigma New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh returns to her world of dark passion and immortal power— and to one of the most seductive and impenetrable heroes ever to stalk the Guild Hunter landscape.

NEW IN HARDCOVER 19th-century New York. It’s a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. Anna Savard and her cousin Sophie—both graduates of the Woman’s Medical School—treat the city’s most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they’ve strived for in jeopardy. For Sophie, an obstetrician and the orphaned daughter of free people of color, helping a young mother thrusts her and Anna into the orbit of Anthony Comstock, a dangerous man who considers himself the enemy of everything indecent and of anyone who dares to defy him.

The Gilded Hour is a captivating, emotionally gripping novel that showcases an author at the height of her powers.

contents

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

features

13 ELI GOTTLIEB

Best-selling mystery author Louise Penny returns with the 11th installment in her not-so-cozy Chief Inspector Gamache series, The Nature of the Beast.

An uncanny imagining of the inner life of an autistic man

16 ANNIE ENGLAND NOBLIN Meet the author of Sit! Stay! Speak!

Cover photo by Sigrid Estrada

16 ELLY GRIFFITHS Magic, murder and mystery

17 WILLIAM BOYD

reviews

A breathtaking historical novel 18 in words and photographs

FICTION

TOP PICK:

Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

ALSO REVIEWED:

25 MARGARET EBY Exploring the South’s literary legacy

27 JACK GANTOS (Kinda) bad to the bone

31 STEPHEN SAVAGE Meet the author-illustrator of Where’s Walrus? And Penguin?

columns 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

cover story

The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Purity by Jonathan Franzen Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

24 NONFICTION

WELL READ LIBRARY READS WHODUNIT COOKING ROMANCE BOOK CLUBS LIFESTYLES AUDIO

TOP PICK:

The Girl from the Garden by Parnaz Foroutan A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan The Gates of Evangeline by Hester Young Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig A Free State by Tom Piazza

Once in a Great City by David Maraniss

ALSO REVIEWED:

South Toward Home by Margaret Eby The Making of Home by Judith Flanders A Beginner’s Guide to Paradise by Alex Sheshunoff

The Last Season by Stuart Stevens The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Negroland by Margo Jefferson Rising Strong by Brené Brown

28 TEEN

30 CHILDREN’S

TOP PICK:

ALSO REVIEWED:

The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz

Mechanica by Betsy Cornwell The Shadow Behind the Stars by Rebecca Hahn Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy

Full Cicada Moon by Marilyn Hilton

Waiting by Kevin Henkes The Marvels by Brian Selznick Fireﬂy Hollow by Alison McGhee George by Alex Gino

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

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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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WELL READ BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Two roads diverged Most of us probably read it for the first time in middle school. In an age where few people cite poetry (and even fewer read it), its most famous lines have become ubiquitous, quoted and misquoted to the point of becoming a platitude: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. It is arguably America’s most famous and favorite poem. But do we really know what Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is about? Not so much, says David Orr. Frost’s poem was first published 100 years ago, in August 1915, and Orr’s brief, incisive new book, The Road Not Taken (Penguin Press, $25.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781594205835), revisits this canonical work with fresh eyes. Calling the poem a “literary oddity and a philosophical puzzle,” Orr says that “more than anything else it’s a way of framing the paradoxical and massively influential culture in which it both begins and ends.” In short, Orr, a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, suggests that the meaning in “The Road Not Taken” may be the very opposite of what most of us have taken away from it after a century of misuse and abuse as a source of inspirational lines about self-determination and individualism. Orr recounts the genesis of the poem, which Frost wrote for his friend and literary champion, Edward Thomas, with whom the poet spent many hours wandering the English countryside, presumably in deep conversation about life and poetry. Thomas, apparently, made a habit of regretting whatever path the two chose to take on these walks, mindful of what they might be missing along another route. Frost may have been poking fun at his friend’s indecisiveness,

which is a fairly quotidian origin story for what would become one of the most famous, beloved poems of all time. Frost, of course, could turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, which is why he is one of our greatest poets. From the beginning, this seemingly straightforward yet deceptively complex poem confused readers, including Thomas himself. Over the decades, as the poem was exploited by Madison Avenue and generations of self-help gurus, its “message” inserted into countless speeches, more exacting readers have puzzled over Frost’s true intentions. Orr explores the contradictions that can be found at every turn, and he makes a convincing case for a darker interpretation. Frost, he comes to believe, did not give us a poem about unbridled choice and our ability (and The meaning inalienable of Frost’s right) to take famous poem the unconventional path may be the and, thereby, very opposite forge our of what most own glorious destiny. Rather, of us have long believed. the poem may be saying that we are deceiving ourselves if we think that one road over another holds the key to happiness. Indeed, many look back with regret and a feeling of “what if” about the “road not taken,” and “all the difference” could easily mean that one’s choice has led to a negative outcome. The intricacies of Orr’s argument in The Road Not Taken are tied both to a deep understanding of Frost’s poetics as well as the psychological literature of “self.” Placing this most enduring of poems both in a cultural and historical context, Orr celebrates it, even as he dissects it, underscoring Frost’s genius as well as his complicated legacy as man and poet.

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 September.

THE ART OF CRASH LANDING by Melissa DeCarlo Harper, $15.99, ISBN 9780062390547

When you’re down on your luck, sometimes you have to look to the past for answers. At least, that’s the plan for Mattie Wallace, the resilient heroine of this sparkling debut.

MAKE ME by Lee Child

Delacorte, $28.99, ISBN 9780804178778 In his 20th outing, the iconic Jack Reacher uncovers a gruesome mystery while traveling through a tiny Midwestern town.

#1 LIBRARYREADS PICK “What happens when someone on the autism spectrum grows up, and they aren’t a cute little boy anymore? . . . A funny and deeply affecting work.” —ELIZABETH OLESH, Baldwin Public Library, Baldwin, NY

HOUSE OF THIEVES by Charles Belfoure

Sourcebooks Landmark, $25.99, ISBN 9781492617891 Gilded Age New York City is the evocative setting for Belfoure’s latest, which pits a desperate father against a notorious gang that has put a hit on his son.

FATES AND FURIES by Lauren Groff

Riverhead, $27.95, ISBN 9781594634475 The third novel from acclaimed writer Groff is an explosive tour de force about the intricacies of love and marriage. Read our review on page 19.

DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY by Bill Clegg

Scout Press, $26, ISBN 9781476798172 A dark exploration of the aftermath of loss in a small community, this stirring debut from literary agent Clegg is already generating buzz. Read our review on page 23.

THE GATES OF EVANGELINE by Hester Young

Putnam, $25.95, ISBN 9780399174001 In this atmospheric Southern Gothic mystery, a grieving mother attempts to solve a long-cold missing persons case in Louisiana. Read our review on page 22.

FURIOUSLY HAPPY by Jenny Lawson

Flatiron, $26.99, ISBN 9781250077004 Best-selling author and humorist Lawson tells the story of her lifelong battle with mental illness in a hilarious, no-holdsbarred memoir.

THIS IS YOUR LIFE, HARRIET CHANCE! by Jonathan Evison

Algonquin, $25.95, ISBN 9781616202613 After the death of her husband, a septuagenarian sets off on the adventure of a lifetime: an Alaskan cruise. Read our review on page 22.

GIRL WAITS WITH GUN by Amy Stewart

HMH, $27, ISBN 9780544409910 The debut novel from nonfiction writer Stewart is based on a little-known historical figure who became one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs. Read our review on page 18.

“Powerful and engaging. . . . Recommended for all readers.” —LIBRARY JOURNAL, Starred Review “Marvelous.”

—BOOKLIST, Starred Review

“[An] eloquent, sensitive rendering of a marginalized life.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS, Starred Review

“Never less than captivating.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review

THE SCRIBE by Matthew Guinn

Norton, $25.95, ISBN 9780393239294 A serial killer is haunting the streets of 1881 Atlanta, and detective Thomas Canby partners with the city’s first African-American police officer to catch him.

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

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

It’s no mystery

why readers

love

available on

KINDLE

NOOK

columns

BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Globe-trotting through mysteries

his month’s best suspense novels take readers on a trip around the world, with four tales from Austria, the Philippines, Denmark and Japan.

Brünhilde Blum, the protagonist of Austrian author Bernhard Aichner’s English-language debut, Woman of the Dead (Scribner, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 9781476775616), is

of murder-slash-dismemberments (the keyword being “slash”) of young boys in an impoverished neighborhood of Quezon City. The inept National Bureau of Inves-

a mortician. She took up the family trade with some reluctance, forced as a youngster to prepare bodies for funerals, among other unsuitable pastimes for a preteen. The experience transformed the shy child into a particularly pragmatic adult, albeit one with a sticky needle on her moral compass. Case in point: On a Mediterranean holiday, at a time when she’d had more than her fill of her parents’ bad attitudes, Blum watched them take a dive into the warm sea from the deck of their sailboat, then calmly pulled up the ladder and waited for them to stop flailing and sink beneath the waves. After a suitable amount of time, she married the very policeman who had comforted her in his arms while she “grieved” their passing. For some time, life goes, um, swimmingly for Blum, until the day her husband is killed. But this is no random hit-and-run accident; it’s a targeted hit. And now Blum is on the warpath, and heaven help the hitman who kills the loved one of a sociopathic mortician. Bonus: This is the first in a trilogy.

tigation has enlisted the aid of a pair of Jesuit priests, who double as forensic experts, to consult on the case. It’s an uneasy alliance, as the Bureau and the Jesuits have crossed proverbial swords before, and the wounds are still fresh. At irregular intervals throughout the book, the first-person voice of the killer appears in italics; this is an especially compelling plot device, and Batacan uses it to its fullest advantage. This is a thought-provoking novel on every level, one that left me itching for the sequel.

MURDER IN MANILA Smaller and Smaller Circles (Soho Crime, $26.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9781616953980), the first mystery I’ve read that’s set in the Philippines, is a killer debut for author F.H. Batacan. It revolves around the investigation of a series

WHODUNIT

DEAD IN DENMARK Best-selling Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen is back with another searing novel of Department Q, The Hanging Girl (Dutton, $28, 512 pages, ISBN 9780525954941). The girl in question isn’t hanging in the way you might expect, but rather was suspended in the branches of a tree, having been catapulted there by a hit-and-run driver. The case is 17 years cold at this point, and Department Q head Carl Mørck doesn’t appreciate being summoned by colleague Christian Habersaat to the remote Baltic Sea island of Bornholm to investigate an unsolved case that has consumed a significant portion of Habersaat’s police career. But then Mørck receives news that Habersaat has just shot himself to death in front of a group of eyewitnesses. It’s the first in a series of

unfortunate and perplexing events, including the suicide of Habersaat’s son and the one-by-one disappearances of young women from a naturist cult located on the picturesque island. All the requisite Adler-Olsen hallmarks are on display here: the easy camaraderie of the investigative team; great moments of humor; and Mørck’s crotchety disposition. It helps to read the series in order, but these books are so good that it’s no hardship to start at the beginning.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY The English-language debut of best-selling Korean author J.M. Lee, The Investigation (Pegasus, $24.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781605988467), is the first-person tale of Watanabe Yuichi, who reluctantly served as a prison guard in Japan during WWII: “The war ended on 15 August 1945. The prisoners were freed, but I’m still here.” Incarcerated by the Allies for low-level war crimes, Watanabe now has time to reflect on his wartime investigation of the murder of a fellow guard. Virtually the only clue was a handwritten poem of ineffable sadness, found in the dead guard’s pocket. Watanabe was singularly unsuited to be an investigator, and he soon realized that nobody really wanted him to solve the crime. The Investigation is a rollicking good mystery tale, with an earnest if occasionally nebbishy protagonist. It is also a volume of poetry, with heartbreaking verses of love and loss set against the backdrop of war. Wide-ranging sub-themes include the enmity between Japanese and Korean cultures, the history of pre-split Korea and the side effects of war on a civilian population. The Investigation is nearly impossible to review in a paragraph; even a whole page wouldn’t do it justice. Read it, you’ll understand.

COOKING BY SYBIL PRATT

Behind the pantry door Alice Waters is one of our national culinary treasures, so when she offers advice, we should lean in, listen up and pay attention. In her latest book, My Pantry (Pam Krauss, $24.99, 144 pages, ISBN 9780804185288), she takes us into her home kitchen and its all-important core. “[I]t’s the way I use my pantry more than any individ-

ual ingredient, recipe or technique that defines my personal cooking aesthetic,” Waters writes. She goes on to give us recipes for the many things she stocks her pantry with, such as spice mixtures (at last, a recipe for za’atar), nuts and nut milks, savory and sweet preserves, whole grains from porridge to pita, preserved meat and fish, fresh cheese and yogurt. Filling your pantry with things you’ve made encourages delicious, wholesome impromptu meals. It can also make your cooking and your kitchen greener.

INDIAN HOME COOKING “An Indian kitchen can be anywhere in the world.” Meera Sodha knows this is true; her great-grandmother’s kitchen was in Gujarat, her grandmother’s in Uganda, and her mother’s in England, where her own is now. The tastes and smells of their ancestral Gujarati cuisine have filled each one. Sodha keeps the tradition going and shares these dishes, along with her warm, charming know-how, in Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen (Flatiron, $35, 320 pages, ISBN 9781250071019). Indian home cooking is adaptable, and these recipes incorporate ingredients easily found at supermarkets and local produce stands, such as Mussels in a Coconut and Ginger Sauce. This is not the kind of complicated, intimidating cooking that needs an extended family. Most

of Sodha’s recipes are simple, fresh and quick. She’s included a section on Indian ingredients, menu ideas and wine, and she encourages you to taste as you cook. And that’s a pleasure, especially when you’re making Wild Mushroom Pilau, Royal Bengal Fish Fingers, Spicy Roasted Chickpeas, wholesome Chapatis or Mum’s Chicken Curry—Sodha’s ultimate comfort food, soon to be yours.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Heidi Swanson, a creatively curious home cook, popular blogger (101cookbooks.com) and photographer, who has successfully championed incorporating natural food into our everyday repertoire, now lets us in on what truly inspires her. Near & Far (Ten Speed, $29.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9781607745495) is a culinary ode, with fabulous photos, to “food rooted in place.” The “near” part of that place is Swanson’s home in Northern California; the “far,” Morocco, Japan, Italy, France and India, where local cuisines sing their siren calls of deliciously different ingredients, techniques and traditions. Swanson immerses herself in each place, then builds on these new ideas and flavor palettes when she returns to her own kitchen. The recipes, all vegetarian, all intriguingly introduced and carefully laid out, are simple and superb: Fennel Stew in a luxurious saffron broth and Cauliflower Pasta with green olives and crème fraîche from Northern California; Moroccan harissa-spiced Roasted Tomato Salad; a Japanese take on brussels sprouts; herb-scented Italian biscottini; gorgeous gougéres from France; nutty, piquant potatoes from Rajasthan. Swanson is simply a superb cook and companion.

“A stunningly good book for busy parents. Not only are the recipes smart and delicious, but they also include lots of ways to personalize them to make everyone in your family happy.”

—Ina Garten

On sale now, just in time for busy parent season!

No More Short-Order Cook

Dinner Solved! is the go-to cookbook of flavorful, crowd-pleasing, comforting, and family-friendly recipes with Fork in the Road variations for dishes that appeal to everyone at the table. From the author of The Mom 100 Cookbook. “What parent couldn’t use a collection of great-tasting recipes that will make everyone at the table happy—even the picky eaters? Thanks, Katie!” —Giada de Laurentiis “I am a big fan of Katie Workman, and as the mother of four, a big fan of delicious dinner recipes. So Katie writing a book about dinner? A perfect combination, and then some!” —Ree Drummond themom100.com WORKMAN is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.

L I F E C A N BE F U L L OF SU RP RI SES…

columns A thrilling ride Susan Andersen (a member of the BookPage reviewing team) writes another winner with Running Wild (HQN, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780373788460), a rollicking on-the-run romance. Mags Deluca makes the dangerous decision to travel to South America to track down her missing missionary parents after she learns that they are being held prisoner by a drug car-

“Sherryl Woods writes emotionally satisfying novels about family, friendship and home. Truly feel-great reads!” —#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

Available now for the first time in trade paperback!

www.MIRABooks.com www.SherrylWoods.com

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

tel. When she’s nearly kidnapped herself by a man from the same crime ring, Finn Kavanagh comes to the rescue. He’s in the area for a peaceful hiking trip, but that plan is quickly derailed by the beautiful Mags and his desire to keep her safe. They spend days on the move, traveling by car, by boat and by rail in hopes of rescuing her family. The two grow close during their adrenaline-fueled adventures— Mags explains why she’s usually emotionally distant, while Finn reveals that he also has a history of being commitment averse. But they find a lot to admire—and lust after—in each other. Though their hearts become just as engaged as their bodies, securing a future together will take a lot of bravery as they face down not only the bad guys, but also old habits and inner demons. This romance is sexy, fun and filled with thrills!

DARK LOVER A brooding hero and a determined heroine find love during the Victorian era in The Highwayman (St. Martin’s, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9781250076052) by Kerrigan Byrne. As a child, Farah Leigh found a champion in an older boy at the orphanage where they lived, but their innocent love ended when they were forced apart. For 17 years, Farah mourned the loss of

her friend until the enigmatic Dorian Blackwell, an infamous criminal known as the Blackheart of Ben More, comes into her life— and promptly kidnaps her. The ruthless man has a story to tell— which begins with what became of her old friend and ends with the fact that there’s a price on her head. He vows to protect her if she will become his wife. As Farah delves into Dorian’s dark past, she only wants more from him—ultimately his heart— but will the hardened man be able to offer her anything beyond heartache? With danger stalking the pair, the stakes are high all around. This is a dramatic, romantic and utterly lovely read.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Christina Dodd mixes a chilling cocktail of suspense and romance in Obsession Falls (St. Martin’s, $26.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9781250028471). While trying to save a young kidnapped boy from death, Taylor Summers finds her pleasant day in the Sawtooth Mountains turning into a prolonged feat of wilderness survival. When she re-emerges into civilization, the authorities not only think her dead, but believe that she was involved in the kidnapping. Taking on a new identity only brings danger as she witnesses even more violent wrongdoings. After being forced to go on the run again, she lands in the town of Virtue Falls and begins to rebuild her life under the name Summer Leigh. But that doesn’t keep menace at bay—or the two enigmatic men who find her so very fascinating. With enthralling characters and an intriguing and imaginative premise, this is a spooky, nerve-stretching read that is sure to please Dodd’s many fans.

BOOK CLUBS BY JULIE HALE

Trail mix The film version of Bill Bryson’s beloved memoir A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Broadway, $15.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781101905494) hits theaters this month, with Robert Redford playing the author and Nick Nolte cast as his lumbering sidekick, Stephen Katz. This new movie tie-in edition is ideal for book clubs that want to

explore and discuss Bryson’s hilarious tale of braving the Appalachian Trail before they see the film. Back in America after a 20-year absence, Bryson undertakes the hike with his old friend, the cantankerous Katz, as a way of refamiliarizing himself with his mother country. Both men are novices in the woods and underestimate the challenges that await them. During their journey, they cross paths with an assortment of characters, including a bumbling Boy Scout troop and an eccentric named Chicken John. Bryson recounts their trek with his trademark wit and self-effacing charm. Modest enough to acknowledge the absurdity of it all, he’s a gifted writer whose book succeeds as a travel narrative and as a work of spirit-lifting comedy.

BACK TO THE LIGHT The title says it all: Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free (Picador, $16, 336 pages, ISBN 9781250074850) is a true account of the victims trapped by the collapse of the San José mine in Chile in 2010. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar offers a spellbinding chronicle of the accident and its aftermath, sharing the stories of the miners, who were buried under 770,000 tons of rock

for 69 days. After the collapse, the men decide to act as a group, sharing rations and praying together in the underground room they called “The Refuge.” Meanwhile, their families set up camp near the mines, demanding information from the authorities. After their dramatic rescue, the miners agreed to share their story exclusively with Tobar, who also spoke with their relatives and other witnesses. His electrifying narrative—filled with riveting details about the miners’ existence underground—is the first official account of the ordeal and a book that’s destined to become a nonfiction classic.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests (Riverhead, $17, 592 pages, ISBN 9781594633928) is a vivid, hypnotic portrait of 1920s London. Frances Wray and her mother take in boarders to make ends meet after WWI. Their family has undergone its share of hardship: Frances’ father has died, and her two brothers were killed in the war. Frances, who is 26 years old, devotes herself to housekeeping, taking on duties once executed by servants. When new tenants Lilian and Leonard Barber arrive at the Wrays, a fresh chapter begins for Frances. The Barbers are a liberal, working-class couple. Lilian smokes and reads Russian literature, and she injects some much-needed passion into Frances’ staid life. Filled with wonderful detail and moments of unexpected humor, Waters’ latest novel solidifies her reputation as a world-class writer of historical fiction. She brings depth and sympathy to her portrayals of female relationships. And—best of all, perhaps—she knows how to spin a compelling plot.

Sizzling

Book Club Reads for Summer The Sparrow Sisters by Ellen Herrick

“If you’re looking for a read à la Elin Hilderbrand with a touch of magic, look no further than The Sparrow Sisters, Ellen Herrick’s wicked and romantic debut.” —New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Sarah Jio

Sit! Stay! Speak!

by Annie England Noblin Echoing the novels of Mary Alice Monroe, Allie Larkin, and Holly Robinson, this charming debut novel tells the unforgettable story of a rescue dog that helps a struggling young outsider make peace with the past.

White Dresses by Mary Pflum Peterson

Unflinchingly honest, insightful, and compelling, White Dresses is a beautiful, powerful story—and a reminder of the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

Hush Hush

by Laura Lippman “With an intriguing cast of characters, stinging dialogue, hilarious moments, and a superbly convoluted and suspenseful plot, Lippman has created an incisive and provocative tale about parents good and evil.” —Booklist

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William Morrow

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LIFESTYLES BY JOANNA BRICHETTO

Throwback style Retro hair is easier to emulate than ever before, thanks to the tricks in Vintage Hairstyles: Simple Steps for Retro Hair with a Modern Twist (Chronicle, $16.95, 128 pages, ISBN 9781452143088). Renowned hairstylist Sarah Wing and vintage style blogger Emma Sundh take us on an informative tour of hairstyles across history.

SIMULTANEOUS RELEASE 9/22/15

Visit us at downpour.com and blackstonelibrary.com

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Proceeding through all of the necessary tools and offering their most helpful tips, they meticulously lay out classic arrangements and combinations of curls, bangs, waves, buns and coloring. This gorgeous ensemble of information is topped off with tips on accessorizing with hats, makeup and glasses while emphasizing the exact coordination of historical style and modern effect. Most helpful are the sequential photo layouts that show the step-by-step creation of various dos, from finger waves to the beatnik ponytail.

of mindfulness is that it involves spiritual issues ordinarily addressed by religion. But instead of invoking religious concepts such as “sin” or “guilt,” Rigal embraces the flaws of our human nature as our birthright—as things that can be productively acknowledged, accepted and even celebrated. With the help of Jeanne Demmers’ sweet drawings, Rigal shows us the grace that we are already imbued with. Hundreds of nuggets of intelligent advice add up to a gold mine of practical and even life-saving help. This is a book for any suffering child of the universe, including you.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES

Each of us needs a separate place in which we can think, work, sleep and simply be, a space in which to dwell, no matter how diminutive its dimensions. Derek “Deek” Diedricksen is the current guru of micro-design, famous for hosting various HGTV series GET OUT OF YOUR WAY such as “Extreme Small Spaces” and “Tiny House Builders.” A big problem for our current generation of children is social me- Now he’s given us Microshelters dia and the endless opportunities it (Storey, $18.95, 256 pages, ISBN creates for bullies. Thank goodness 9781612123530), a photographic there is now a strong movement to survey of 59 brilliant and practicable designs for little cabins, tiny push back this awful tide. Activist houses, shed-offices, kids playEmily-Anne Rigal, whose experihouses, homes on wheels, guest ence and wisdom transcend her youth (she’s just 21), has penned huts, backyard retreats, garden the pragmatic and funny FLAWD: follies, artist studios, etc. Here, the small and simple is celebrated. The How to Stop Hating on Yourself, Others, and the Things That Make mix of glorious color photos and old-timey illustrated instructions You Who You Are (Perigee, $15.95, makes this a wishbook for DIY 208 pages, ISBN 9780399174032). Rigal’s first book is so much more dreamers, and Diedricksen’s cleareyed commentary highlights buildthan your typical self-help manuing and budgetary considerations al. The author makes it clear that that newbies might otherwise there’s no way of protecting yourself against the hateful behavior of miss. Six sets of building plans are others unless you first attack the included, along with expert advice problem of self-hatred. What’s so on tools, materials, scavenging, fascinating about Rigal’s program recycling and décor. Dream tiny!

AUDIO BY SUKEY HOWARD

The best revenge In an author’s note at the end of Villa America (Hachette Audio, $30, 14 hours, ISBN 9781611130591), Liza Klaussmann comments that writing about real people is a “tricky business.” But when done well, this kind of historical fiction can have compelling appeal, which is certainly the case with her wonderfully textured account of the lives of Sara

and Gerald Murphy. In the 1920s, the Murphys lived a golden life with their three young children, surrounded by artists and writers like Picasso, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in their fabulous villa on the Riviera. They became emblems of that time and place, of art and elegance, of unerring taste and gracious hospitality. Into this extraordinary cast of characters, Klaussmann, with a novelist’s license, introduces Owen, an American WWI pilot who stays in France after the war. Though always an outsider, he becomes part of the Murphys’ crowd and an intimate friend of Gerald’s—I’ll say no more. The Murphys were the embodiment of Gerald’s favorite proverb, “living well is the best revenge,” even though fate eventually turned “well” into hell. Jennifer Woodward’s exemplary narration adds to the poignancy of this storied tale.

ANOTHER WORLD In Julia Dahl’s second mystery starring Rebekah Roberts, the young reporter for a New York tabloid is once again drawn into the closed world of Hasidic Jews. In fact, that world has become her turf, and that’s no accident. Rebekah’s mother, Aviva, who abandoned her when she was an infant, was from a Hasidic family. They haven’t seen each other since, but Run You Down (Macmillan Audio, $29.99, 8.5 hours, ISBN 9781427260949) opens with Aviva

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reliving her life in flashbacks, so one suspects that a meeting is imminent. What you can’t suspect is how Aviva and her flight from ultra-Orthodoxy will be entwined in Rebekah’s reporting. When Rebekah is contacted by the husband of a young Hasidic woman who died mysteriously, she goes to Roseville, New York, to investigate what the local police won’t. What she finds leads her into a den of vicious anti-Semitism and hate crimes—and ever closer to her mother. Andi Arndt’s reading is to kvell over.

Macmillan Audio

Read by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff “Freedom, like... The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review on Freedom

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TOP PICK IN AUDIO Horrifying in its accuracy, mesmerizing in its sweep and immediacy, brilliantly paced and placed, The Cartel (Blackstone Audio, $44.95, 23.5 hours, ISBN 9781504610803) is Don Winslow’s second evocation of Mexico, the drug cartels, the futile American war on drugs, the men who run them both and the innocent civilians who’ve become collateral damage. Here, it’s the last decade, 2004 to 2014, a period that’s seen the cartels grow more powerful, more grotesque, more Byzantine in their ever-shifting allegiances, more al-Qaeda-like in their media-savvy terrorism. Winslow offers the big, bloody, body-strewn picture and weaves in intimate portraits of the cartel leaders (think El Chapo), their henchmen and families, a relentless DEA agent with a personal vendetta and the Mexicans—from public servants, journalists and doctors to ordinary villagers—who try desperately to keep their beloved country from being undone by the narcos and the culture of corruption they fuel. It’s all made intensely real by Ray Porter’s powerful performance.

Read by Robert Bathurst “Penny writes engagingly whether you’re reading her books or listening to them.” —The Star-Ledger

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q&a

ELI GOTTLIEB

A journey inside a curious mind

odd Aaron has been institutionalized at Payton LivingCenter since the age of 11. Despite occasional thoughts about living back home, Todd is mostly content at Payton, where he’s something of an ambassador to new residents. But when a series of events shakes up Todd’s quiet life, returning home takes on a new urgency.

In his fourth novel, Best Boy, Eli Gottlieb channels the voice of a middle-aged autistic man with uncanny authenticity and power. We asked the author a few questions about his remarkable new book and its unforgettable narrator. You have written that your first novel, told from the point of view of a teen with an autistic brother, was somewhat autobiographical. Are there autobiographical elements in Best Boy as well? Yes, the book is loosely inspired by my childhood with my brother, who has been institutionalized for autism since he was 11 years old. It’s also informed by the many years I spent visiting him in his various therapeutic communities. Todd’s narration is shaped by his autism and the limits of what he can express. This leads to some unique and even poetic imagery, as well as unexpected humor. How did you develop this voice? I initially wrote the book in the second person. The second person,

BEST BOY

By Eli Gottlieb

Liveright, $24.95, 256 pages ISBN 9781631490477, audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

with its peculiar ambiguity—is the writer addressing himself or the reader—was useful as a mapping tool to chart the perceptual universe of the narrator. I then rewrote it in the first person, while trying to retain not only the freshness of his perception but the strangeness within the individual sentences. That was the real labor—to make do without my literary reliance on simile, metaphor and the conventionally prettifying resources of “style.” There are very few commas in the book. The sentences are bluntly declarative. It was refreshing and also difficult to work against my own grain, but I hope it added to the verisimilitude of the finished product. As for the deeper wellsprings of that voice— they remain a mystery. You include so many details that show how Todd experiences the world. My favorite is his mistrust of animals, which he sees as people “who had been crushed into strange bodies.” Did details like this come from your research? Did you find any first-person accounts of adults living with autism? I read here and there on autism and the history of the malady, but no, I didn’t read any accounts to find the particularities of the narrator’s outlook. I simply drew on my memories. A fear of cats and dogs, by the way, is a characteristic of classical autism, and in the example you cite I attempted to come up with a reason why the most innocent, floppy-eared beagle should be a terrifying beast to my brother. After the book was done, I did read a powerful memoir called Boy Alone, by Karl Taro Greenfeld. His younger brother was Noah, the autistic boy who became a huge celebrity in the 1970s when his dad wrote a book about him.

BY TRISHA PING

Karl’s upbringing had uncanny similarities to my own. Even though Todd’s mother is long dead by the time the book opens, you manage to provide a truly touching portrait of their relationship. How did his mother shape Todd? Clearly, her relationship to him was one of intense, nearly interwoven closeness, as often happens between mothers and developmentally disabled children. Her love for him is a kind of inner landscape he longs to return to, or a sea whose tides he feels moving in his own chest. The idea of his childhood home is a powerful draw for Todd, even though it holds as many bad memories as good ones. Can you tell us a little about what home represents in this book? I think home in this book represents a warmth and wholeness, a time, in the words of Wordsworth, the great poet of childhood, “when meadow, grove and stream . . . did seem apparalled in celestial light.” Almost everybody misses their home-world on some level, even if, as in the case of Todd, it was a place and time where he had to endure a tremendous amount of difficulty. Because of his lack of understanding of the full emotional range of what’s going on around him, and his inability to express a lot of what he does understand, Todd is almost childlike. And just as they are for children, these qualities are both insulating and dangerous. What do you think is the difference between a child narrator

and an autistic narrator? That’s a wonderful question. I think the two narrators, child and autistic, can merge in many ways— the vulnerability coupled with an openness to experience and the freshness of perception. The autistic narrator has the added burden of an actual malady, which skews things inevitably—it can turn him deeply rageful, as when Todd gets his “volts,” which are nearly epileptoid in their fury— or when, despite his apparent innocence, he has to deal with the social shame of looking and behaving differently, a fact that filters in to his consciousness despite his seeming indifference to it. There’s a reason that older autistic men and women are often, characteristically, stooped. How and where do you write? Kafka wanted to be lowered in a bucket to the bottom of a well shaft. I’ll settle for anywhere quiet, away from the Internet and social stimulation. Much of Best Boy was written in a submarine-like garden apartment in Brooklyn, along with many solitary weeks spent at a friend’s isolated house on Shelter Island. What are you working on next? Something entirely new—a historical novel. It’s killing me.

cover story

LOUISE PENNY

Transcending the cozy village mystery

oe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy. The author erupts at the mere suggestion. “To call them cozies is to completely misread!” she protests by phone from her home in Sutton, a French-speaking village in Q uébec, east of Montreal. “I get very annoyed at anyone who calls them cozies, or even traditional. I think it’s facile for people to think that anything set in a village must, per force, be superficial and simplistic.” Far, far from either, Penny’s addictive series may be the quintessential anti-cozy, centered as it is on a village that bears more resemblance to Twin Peaks than Cabot Cove and an erudite chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec whose demons are never far behind him. Publisher Minotaur Books says more than three million copies of the Inspector Gamache books have been sold worldwide since the series debuted in 2006, with growing sales and buzz for each new release. Penny’s 11th Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, marks her largest first printing ever.

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

By Louise Penny

Minotaur, $27.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781250022080, audio, eBook available

MYSTERY

As series devotees know, the brooding, wounded Armand Gamache left the Sûreté and retired to Three Pines after tearing the lid off of internal corruption in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, only to resurface last year, “The books shaken but aren’t about not deterred, murder; in The Long Way Home. they’re about Penny focuslife and the es as much choices that on whether we make.” Gamache will overcome his demons as on whether his next demon will be his last. In The Nature of the Beast, 9-year-old Laurent Lepage goes missing after annoying the townspeople yet again with another of his signature far-fetched stories, this one about a monster and an enormous gun hidden deep in the surrounding woods. When the boy’s body is found, the search for his killer leads authorities to the unthinkable: an enormous rocket launcher, expertly concealed, provenance unknown. Who built it? How? And most importantly, why? It’s just the knotty puzzler to lure Gamache and his ever-inquisitive wife, Reine-Marie, out of early retirement. A similar unfathomable horror—the terrorist attacks of 9/11— proved to be a game-changer for Penny as well. Back in 1996, after jettisoning an 18-year on-air career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and winning a 14-year battle with alcoholism, she’d retreated with her physician husband Michael to the Eastern Townships to try her hand at historical fiction. But five years in, she was getting nowhere.

“I realized I was writing for the wrong reason; I was trying to impress my family, my former colleagues—trying to write the best book ever written. The judgment of others has played a terrible role in my life for much of my life, and I became frozen,” she recalls. Shortly after 9/11, a desultory glance at her bedside table helped dispel her ennui. “Like most people, I read catholically; I read just about anything. But among my pile of books were crime novels. I remember sitting on my bed looking at them and thinking, that’s it! I will simply write a book I would want to read,” she says. Those tenuous, post-traumatic days even inspired where she would set her mysteries. “I was feeling, like the rest of the world, fairly vulnerable and thinking that the world might be a dangerous place, and I wanted to create a place where there was a sense of belonging and community,” she recalls. “The books aren’t about murder; they’re about life and the choices that we make, and what happens to good people when such a harrowing event comes into their lives. It’s an exploration of human nature, I hope.” Re-inspired by her new direction, Penny tripped out of the gate by shooting for a perfect first draft. “The danger, at least for the first couple of books, was that I had to get it right the first time. As a result,

I N T E R V I E W B Y J AY MacD O N A L D

it paralyzed me because it didn’t allow for creativity, for flights of fancy, for inspiration,” she says. That’s when her years of journalism with the CBC crashed the party, lending offbeat spontaneity and quirky humor to the otherwise serious task at hand. “My first drafts are piles of something very soft and smelly. They’re huge, almost double the size of the final book,” she chuckles. “I throw everything in—I have to—and then I edit, because I know I’m good at editing. That’s part of the beauty of having a big, messy first draft, because then I feel like I’m in a warehouse full of ideas and words and thoughts and stories. Then I can just pick and choose.” Her unique creative process produces that rarest of wonders in fiction: verisimilitude. In Three Pines, clues to the mystery are often dropped casually over café au lait at the bistro, and so subtly that we talk ourselves to sleep wondering whether to trust them, and if they’ll ultimately form a whole. Only a writer with Penny’s instincts could wait until an author’s note at the end of The Nature of the Beast to reveal a walloping fact that’s as shocking as the book’s climax (don’t peek; it’s worth the wait!).

While it’s not a spoiler to note that a serial killer haunts this latest installment, Penny admits she’s not about the body count, and never will be. “I’ve been on a number of writer panels where people say, ‘Well, when it gets slow or boring, I just throw in another body!’ And I think, that can’t be right,” she says. “I’m not interested in body counts or serial killers; I’m really interested in the why. What would make a real-life human being do something like that? The murder is just a conceit to allow me to look at all sorts of other issues.” Which explains why the village setting not only appeals to Penny, but may well have been inevitable. “What always amazes me is, there is a tendency to dismiss crime novels set in a village or rural setting rather than in a city. As someone who lived in cities all my life, murders in Montreal are in the briefs column of the newspaper. It’s always tragic but it’s not horrific; it’s not a shock, it doesn’t set the whole community on edge,” she says. “But a murder in a tight-knit community? How big of a violation is that? Not only has a person’s life been taken, but your whole sense of security has been taken. And knowing that someone you know was murdered and someone you know did it? How horrific is that?”

Although Penny had a brief brush with cinema, serving as a consultant and executive producer on the 2013 film version of her first Gamache novel, Still Life, she’s an admittedly poor candidate to go Hollywood anytime soon. “I don’t know about films. I was involved, but I’m not anymore, by my own choice. While they did consult me, they did not take a great deal of what I said; there was no onus on them to take anything to heart, and I found that very difficult,” she recalls. Nor should readers expect any non-Gamache standalones. Penny readily admits she has found the perfect cast and setting to accomplish her primary goal as a mystery writer. “I want the reader to care, and if you don’t care, why bother? I want the books and characters to follow the reader for days or weeks after,” she says. “I want to try to bring down the fourth wall, to where they feel they’re actually sitting in the bistro listening to the conversation; they can smell the wood smoke and taste the café au lait and feel what the characters are feeling. I think if someone just reads my book with their head, they’re missing probably two-thirds of the book. You have to absorb it through your heart.”

The drama, hilarity and tears of sisterhood are at the heart of the thoroughly captivating new novel by New York Times bestselling author

“It should be on every bedside table in the country!” —Robyn Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Pick up your copy today!

“

An excerpt from The Nature of the Beast Reine-Marie turned to Armand, stricken, as though a fist had formed out of the cries. She walked into Armand’s arms and held on to him, burying her face in his body. His clothing, his shoulder, his arms almost muffled her sobs. She smelled his scent of sandalwood, mixed with a hint of rosewater. And for the first time, it didn’t comfort her. So overwhelming was the sorrow. So shattering was the wail. Henri, covered in burrs and upset by the sounds, paced the dirt road, whining and looking up at them. Reine-Marie pulled back and wiped her face with a handkerchief. Then, on seeing the gleam in Armand’s eyes, she grabbed him again. This time holding him, as he’d held her. “I need to—” he said. “Go,” she said. “I’m right behind you.” She took Henri’s leash and started to run. Armand was already halfway to the corner. Sprinting, following the grief. And then the wailing stopped.

www.HQNBooks.com www.KristanHiggins.com

AVAILABLE IN PRINT AND EBOOK.

the title of your new book? Q: What’s

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

are the best (and worst) things about small-town life? Q: What

you came into an unexpected inheritance, how would you Q: Ifspend the money?

ame three reasons why a dog can be a better companion Q: Nthan a man.

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

SIT! STAY! SPEAK! Annie England Noblin drew on her experiences working in animal rescue to craft her charming first novel, Sit! Stay! Speak! (Morrow, $14.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062379269), the story of a lonely young woman and an abandoned pit-bull puppy both looking for a new start in small-town Arkansas. Noblin lives in the Ozarks with her husband, son and four rescued bulldogs.

ELLY GRIFFITHS BY SHEILA M. TRASK

Game of illusions

riting a gripping mystery is a lot like performing a masterful magic trick—knowing when to grab the audience’s attention, when to provide distractions and how to wrap it all up with a dazzling finale.

meet ANNIE ENGLAND NOBLIN

q&a

British mystery master Elly Griffiths enters the world of illusionists with The Zig Zag Girl (HMH, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9780544527942), the first in a new series that has us looking behind the curtain in a whole new way. Tell us a little about the World War II Magic Gang that inspired this new series—including your own family connection. My granddad, Frederick Goodwin (stage name Dennis Lawes), was a music hall comedian, modestly famous between the wars. Granddad was often on the bill with a well-known magician called Jasper Maskelyne. During the Second World War, Maskelyne was a part of a group called the Magic Gang, recruited for their skills in camouflage and stage magic. The Magic Gang were based in North Africa where they created dummy tanks, ghostly platoons and a fake battleship called HMS Houdin. I’ve adapted some of these escapades for the Magic Men in The Zig Zag Girl. The Magic Men are flamboyant showmen, very different from what fans might expect from the creator of Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist. What drew you to these characters? I was passionate about acting at school and university and would have loved to pursue it as a career. But I was drawn to the world of music hall by my grandfather and—more specifically—by the playbills that he left me in his will. These bills are a treasure trove of long-forgotten acts: Lavanda’s Feats with the Feet, Lou Lenny and her Unrideable Mule, Raydini the Gay Deceiver. I knew that one day I would have to write about them. How was it different to write about 1950s Brighton than the Norfolk marshes featured in your Ruth Galloway series? I’ve lived in Brighton since I was 5, so in some ways it was a lot easier. If I needed to research a location I’d just pop out and have a look. But in other ways it was more difficult. I think there is something to be said for writing about somewhere slightly alien to you. I spent a lot of time in Norfolk as a child, but it still seems huge and slightly frightening. I almost know Brighton too well, and it’s a safe and happy place for me. However, the 1950s setting helped make it seem more mysterious. Some of the murders here are pretty gruesome, yet the book doesn’t have a dark tone. Do you consider it important to focus on the optimism of your investigators rather than the depravity of the villain? The Zig Zag Girl definitely contains my more gruesome murders to date! However, I don’t like writing—or reading—about gratuitous violence. I haven’t described any of the crimes in too much detail, and I have tried to lighten things up with a bit of humor here and there. For me, it’s important to focus on the characters and not on the mechanics of murder. Is the charismatic Max Mephisto based on a particular magician? His career is based on Jasper Maskelyne’s. However, I think Max also owes a bit to my father and grandfather—both handsome, urbane, charming men. My grandfather had three wives—all dancers—and was still Visit BookPage.com for a review a debonair man-about-town in his 80s. of The Zig Zag Girl.

interviews

WILLIAM BOYD BY ALDEN MUDGE

Photo op for the 20th century

eginning with the 1981 publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, winner of the prestigious Whitbread Award, William Boyd has been astonishingly prolific—14 novels, four story collections, four plays, countless film and television scripts, essays and reviews.

“I think it’s a very British thing,” Boyd says during an afternoon call to his home in London. He and his wife, formerly editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar and now a film writer and producer, are packing to escape overheated London for the house they have owned for 20 years in rural southwest France, where they spend roughly a quarter of the year. “You’ve got to write something every day,” Boyd says. “It needn’t be a novel. It might be a restaurant review or your diary. I think it’s because of the great Victorians—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—those tireless dynamos of writers who make us all look lazy. In the British literary tradition, it seems normal to be prolific.” Over the last decade, in addition to producing a novel every three or so years, much of Boyd’s extracurricular writing has been devoted to a newfound interest in photography. That interest bodies forth in bold, captivating and mischievous ways in his sweeping new novel, Sweet Caress. Subtitled “The Many Lives of

SWEET CARESS

By William Boyd

Bloomsbury, $28, 464 pages ISBN 9781632863324, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

Amory Clay,” the novel opens on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Scotland in 1977 with the title character, born in 1908, looking back over a tumultuous life. As a professional photographer, Amory has been a witness to many of the signature events of the 20th century: the return of emotionally damaged soldiers—including her father—from World War I; scandalous Berlin between the wars; the catastrophes of World War II and Vietnam. Amory’s romantic life has been equally turbulent. “In all my novels I tend to steer my protagonists into areas of life or history that intrigue me,” Boyd says. “Amory’s journey is pretty amazing, but it’s not extraordinary. A lot of women photographers, especially between the wars, seemed to live interesting, emotional- rollercoaster lives. Photography is a very democratic profession. There was no glass ceiling for these women. So they had a kind of independence which other professions open to women did not have.” As part of his interest in photography as an art form, Boyd says he also wanted Amory’s career to span “the many types of photography that the 20th century threw up. So she takes [action] photographs like Jacques Henri Lartigue in the beginning of her career, then she becomes a society photographer like Cecil Beaton, then a fashion photographer maybe like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, and then a war photographer and a reporter.” Boyd decided early on that merely describing Amory’s photographs wouldn’t suffice. So in a move that will surely stir comment, Sweet Caress is illustrated with photographs purportedly of and by Amory. Other novels, Boyd notes, have included photos. His own elaborate literary hoax Nat Tate (1998), a supposed biography of a tragic American painter, for exam-

ple, included images of the fictitious artist and his paintings. But, with 73 images, few previous works of fiction have used photography on the same scale as Sweet Caress. “The decision to make Amory a photographer in the 20th century made me think that maybe I should do the unprecedented thing and put a lot of her photographs in the novel,” Boyd says. “Once I had that idea, it seemed to “In a very me a really curious way intriguing kind of parallel crethat I haven’t fully analyzed ative process. I thought it yet, the would be interphotographs esting to see if I could illustrate actually her life with enhance the photos that fiction.” were purportedly taken by her but are in fact anonymous photographs and also give the anonymous people in these photographs new identities from the fiction.” And so the search for la photo juste began. Already a frequenter of junk shops and “car boot sales,” from which he had amassed a large collection of found photographs, Boyd also searched through online catalogs for photos of the right era and style. Vietnam War photos were the most difficult to come by because most of the pictures from that war are press photographs. But France, he notes with a laugh, was a gold mine. “The French seem to throw away their family albums willy nilly. Because I live in France, I go to these brocantes—antique fairs— where I’ve bought many a family album. I used them in Nat Tate and I used them in Sweet Caress.” At the outset, Boyd worried

that the photographs might be a distraction. But his creative selection of photographs, many of them snapshots, has the opposite effect. Not only do the images aptly fit how a reader might imagine a particular character or situation, but they add a surprising vitality to the narrative. As Boyd says, “In a very curious way that I haven’t fully analyzed yet, the photographs actually enhance the fiction. It’s a most strange thing that happens.” Maybe, Boyd speculates, the key lies within the nature of the snapshot. “What strikes me about photography is that it’s a stop-time device. And I think the snapshot is the quintessence of photography. Time is frozen, a moment is frozen, life stops. That moment frozen forever can be incredibly powerful.” Which leads Boyd to a kind of epiphany. “Many people have read the novel now and there’s a consensus that the photos don’t detract from the fiction. Seeing the man Amory’s in love with or the house she lives in actually makes the novel seem more real. And that fits into this bigger plan I realize I’ve been working on throughout my writing life, which is to make fiction seem so real you forget it’s fiction, to push the bounds of fiction into the real world, the world of history and journalism and reportage. I never had this plan, but I can look back at the work and see, yes, this is something I consistently tried to do: to make people’s suspension of disbelief absolute.”

reviews

FICTION

T PI OP CK

GIRL WAITS WITH GUN By Amy Stewart

FORTUNE SMILES

A Pulitzer Prize winner returns

HMH $27, 416 pages ISBN 9780544409910 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

REVIEW BY MICHAEL MAGRAS

It takes a writer of immense confidence and talent to fashion beautiful stories that chronicle ordinary people coping with devastating challenges. Adam Johnson demonstrated this talent in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He now does the same in Fortune Smiles, a collection of six powerful short stories in which characters are forced to contend with some of life’s biggest tragedies. “Nirvana” is a futuristic tale in which a computer programmer who has written an algorithm that can search for videos of dead people and “summon” them cares for his joint-smoking wife, who suffers from Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the eerie “Dark Meadow,” the police ask a pedophile who owns a computer repair business to help them track down people who view child pornography on the Web. The protagonist By Adam Johnson of “Interesting Facts,” a frustrated novelist who has undergone a douRandom House, $27, 320 pages ble mastectomy, worries about what life would be like for her husband ISBN 9780812997477, eBook available and two children if she were to die. “Hurricanes Anonymous” tells the story of a UPS driver who returns to his van after making a FEMA SHORT STORIES delivery in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana and finds there his 2-year-old son, whom his girlfriend has abandoned. In “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” a former Stasi prison warden in East Germany wonders who is leaving mysterious packages on his lawn. And in the riveting title story, two defectors from North Korea struggle to adapt to the more democratic life of the South. Sound depressing? It could be in the hands of a lesser writer. But even in the midst of emotionally trying events, Johnson finds moments of delight, such as when the UPS driver in “Hurricanes Anonymous” changes his son’s diaper and “does [the boy’s] favorite part” by holding the talcum dispenser up high and letting the powder snow down. Each page contains vivid details: A character standing on a bridge looks out at “that sandwich spread of ocean.” Johnson’s tortured characters may not always get what they want, but all of them have reason to hope.

THE FALL OF PRINCES By Robert Goolrick Algonquin $25.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781616204204 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

“The one percent” has entered the lexicon to describe those lucky and/or greedy few for whom money is literally no object, recalling Fitzgerald’s adage that they are effectively superhuman. Robert Goolrick’s electric third novel, The Fall of Princes, instead points to Hemingway’s rejoinder: The only thing separating the rich from others is that they have more money.

The novel is set in the 1980s, when greed was declared good and America was “the most heartless country on the planet.” Rooney is a Wall Street trader who buys and sells “the world before lunch” and then spends his evenings in a delirium of booze, coke and women. He consumes conspicuously and competitively, tones his body to Apollonian heights and seeks the company of the similarly wellheeled. But much like the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Rooney is empty at the core. A failed artist who thought fulfillment might come instead from wealth, he longs for something simpler: someone to love him, children to dote over. He also realizes that he is bisexual at a time when AIDS, still poorly understood, was decimating the

Constance Kopp has never quite fit in: She is tall and broad-shouldered, and she doesn’t care much for keeping house—a rarity for women in 1914. She sticks close to her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, and together they form an odd but functional trio. Norma is stoic and reserved; Constance is bold and proud; and Fleurette, the youngest, is wide-eyed and excitable. Since the death of their mother, the sisters have become closer than ever, living in the countryside after the need to keep secrets forced their move from the city more than 15 years prior. On a rare trip into town, the sisters have an altercation with a powerful silk factory owner, Henry Kaufman, who refuses to assume responsibility for the damage he caused to the family wagon. Constance seeks restitution and raises Kaufman’s ire. As Constance defends her family, she is forced to confront her past and brace for a gay community in New York. The new future. most passionate parts of the novel Author Amy Stewart is best concern this scourge and the fear known for her nonfiction (The it engendered among the liberDrunken Botanist; Wicked Plants). tines. As Rooney’s substance abuse Her first novel, Girl Waits with intensifies, he engages in ever riski- Gun, grew out of a newspaper er behavior, descending rapidly clipping about the Kopps that she down the social ladder until a trans discovered during her research streetwalker provides him with on a gin smuggler named Henry something like redemption. Kaufman. While Stewart never This is no simple clone of The learned if the smuggler Kaufman Wolf of Wall Street, despite its brawas the same man who antagozen celebration of sticking it to the nized the sisters, she was intrigued common man. But the novel is not by the little-known Constance exactly a condemnation of avaKopp, who later became one of the rice, either. Instead, it is a study in first female deputy sheriffs. how “a big hoopla of vulgarity and Through painstaking attention testosterone” conspires to eradto detail, Stewart has created an icate the better angels of a man’s elegant, moving narrative of an unnature. Rooney is a sheep who usual real-life woman who dared dons the wolf’s clothing, only to be defy the odds to ensure the safety devoured by it. of her family. —KENNETH CHAMPEON

—HALEY HERFURTH

FICTION FATES AND FURIES By Lauren Groff

Riverhead $27.95, 400 pages ISBN 9781594634475 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. In Fates and Furies, she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves. Despite the allusions to epic myth and Greek tragedy, Fates and Furies opens like a fairy tale: with a marriage between a prince and princess. Handsome, charismatic Lancelot, known as Lotto, meets the palely beautiful Mathilde in college, and after a brief courtship, they marry. “Fates”—the first half of the novel—tells the story of Lotto’s affluent upbringing in Florida, his failed acting career and years of genteel poverty with Mathilde in their Village apartment. Estranged from his mother and drinking heavily, Lotto finds unexpected success as a playwright. The second half of the novel, aptly named “Furies,” tells Matilde’s considerably grimmer side of the story. From Mathilde’s perspective, Lotto is lazy and self-absorbed, the selfish son of an indulgent yet withholding mother. For Mathilde, family life means keeping Lotto content—but at the cost of holding on to some very closely guarded secrets of her own. What begins as the story of their union unravels into something else altogether. In a novel whose title invokes the grand sweep of an epic, there shouldn’t be any surprise when the domestic tale leaps into mythic territory: bouts of hubris, betrayal and thwarted power that spring from the pages of classical tragedies.

At times, Groff’s characters, with their selfishness, lust and need for revenge, are more archetypal than living, breathing people. But Mathilde’s rage is as artful as it is destructive, and at its deepest, Fates and Furies suggests that her vengeance is a creative force as carefully wrought as any of Lotto’s dramas. Fates and Furies is an ambitious and sometimes difficult novel about two charismatic people who, thrust out of the comforting nests of their birth families, seek security and solace in one another. Groff’s writing is intelligent, knowing and deliciously sexy. When Groff’s red-hot prose ignites Mathilde’s icy rage, Fates and Furies is something very special indeed. —LAUREN BUFFERD

PURITY By Jonathan Franzen

FSG $28, 576 pages ISBN 9780374239213 Audio, eBook available

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The Year of Necessary Lies SparkPress A great-granddaughter discovers her ancestor’s secret inspirational forays into forbidden love at the turn of the last century. “The Year of Necessary Lies” is a memorable and beautifully written story about reinvention, standing up for your beliefs, and staying true to yourself, no matter what the cost.—Kristin Contino, author of The Legacy of Us

LITERARY FICTION

Jonathan Franzen is a writer who swings for the fences, an ambition that attracts terabytes of online derision. Hold the derision. Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, is quite simply his best, most textured, most plot-driven and, oddly enough, most optimistic novel to date. The book’s epigraph is a line from Goethe’s Faust, uttered by Mephistopheles, the devil to whom Faust sells his soul. One of the questions Franzen, ever the unsettling, ironic, literary provocateur, wants his readers to consider is the complicated masquerade of good and evil: how the most seemingly well-intended actions sometimes arrive at evil results, how seemingly bad actors occasionally engender good, and how sometimes we don’t know the difference. Purity also raises questions about feminism and male privilege, and—as in Franzen’s previous bestsellers, The Corrections and Freedom—about the emotionally

The Secret Language of Women Turner Publishing Available 9/29 Set in China in the late 1800’s, this first book in the Wayfarer series tells the story of star-crossed lovers driven apart by the Boxer Rebellion. “Rich with history, “The Secret Language of Women” offers a beautiful and harrowing landscape of love found, lost, and hunted for at all costs and with dire consequences. Haunting.” —Barbara Wood, New York Times bestselling author

Possession of a Highlander Diversion Publishing To save her inheritance Brianna Lindsay must trust a brooding stranger. Love can be the greatest possession in the second book from the steamy Scottish historical series. “A promising debut.”—Publisher’s Weekly on Deception of a Highlander, the first in the series.

reviews complicated nature of family life. A reader is free to avoid thinking about any of these questions, however. There are plenty of sharply drawn characters, fast-moving, seemingly coincidental events, beautifully rendered—often funny and satirical—observations, and excellent sentences to sustain unflagging interest. The narrative moves with astonishing confidence through time and geography, from contemporary Oakland, California, to East Germany before, during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to Texas and Denver and points in between. There is a murder. There is a missing nuclear warhead. There are conflicts between believers in a freewheeling, no-secrets-allowed Internet and traditional journalists bent on sourcing a story. There are fraught, intimate family dramas and heartrending betrayals. And that’s just for starters. As the novel opens, its title character, Purity Tyler, known as Pip, squats in a foreclosed house in West Oakland and works as a telemarketer trying to pay down $130,000 in college debt. Her mother, an aging hippie living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, snatched her away from her father, moved to California and changed their identities when Pip was an infant. Pip, one of those young, worldly innocents, is unbearably close to her mother, walks around with a “ready-to-combust anger” and wants nothing more than to learn who her father is. A visiting German anarchist puts Pip in touch with Andreas Wolf, media sensation and founder of an outlawed idealist organization headquartered in a remote paradisaical valley in Bolivia, trying to bring the worst government secrets to light around the world. Wolf offers her an internship to help with the loan and promises computing power to help locate her father. After a flirty email exchange with the charismatic, beguiling Wolf, Pip heads for Bolivia. The plot thickens. And Purity becomes a novel that is impossible to put down— and impossible to stop thinking about once you have put it down. —ALDEN MUDGE

FICTION UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR By Patrick deWitt Ecco $26.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062281203 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

mysteries in Undermajordomo Minor, nothing about them is frustrating. DeWitt explains exactly the right amount, in exactly the right tone, beginning to end. —BECKY OHLSEN

THIS IS YOUR LIFE, HARRIET CHANCE! By Jonathan Evison

Patrick deWitt’s novels don’t sneak up on you; they’re the kind you love instantly. His latest, Undermajordomo Minor (a follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers), is no exception. From the moment you tumble into its strange world, there is no other world. In that sense, and in its slightly mannered language, it’s like a fairy tale, although one with plenty of room inside for thoroughly modern, adult complications. The story’s hero is Lucien (Lucy) Minor, a somewhat fussy, frail, proud young lad who’s leaving his village to take a job at a nearby castle, home of the Baron von Aux. Lucy has recently acquired a pipe and enjoys the mental image of himself smoking the pipe, although he doesn’t really know how to. “He adopted the carriage of one sitting in fathomless reflection,” deWitt writes, “though there was in fact no motion in his mind whatsoever.” But Lucy isn’t empty-headed at all; he’s just very self-conscious and lacking in experience of the world. Not for long, though. Lucy’s direct supervisor at the castle is the majordomo, Mr. Olderglough, who quickly becomes fond of his new underling. Their banter is one of the many pleasures of the book; it’s sweet and brainy and feels genuinely affectionate despite being enjoyably theatrical. There’s also, of course, a love interest: Klara, the daughter of a charming thief Lucy encounters on the train to the castle—though she may be spoken for by the handsome soldier Adolphus, a hero in a confusing war being staged outside the castle grounds. And then there’s the baron himself, a mystery no one explains to Lucy until doing so becomes unavoidable. But although there are plenty of

Algonquin $25.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781616202613 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

riet is, and the layering of those events and defenses that led to her becoming that person. A book of secrets, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! reveals how one or two choices can dramatically alter not only the course of your life, but the lives of many others. —CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS By Salman Rushdie Random House $28, 304 pages ISBN 9780812998917 Audio, eBook available MAGICAL REALISM

Board the Alaska-bound Zuiderdam, a luxury cruise ship, alongside Harriet Chance. The 78-yearold widow has set sail using a pair of tickets purchased by her late husband, Bernard. Although he never mentioned the trip, Harriet is touched by his thoughtfulness and determined to take advantage of his last romantic gesture. Despite her children’s worry that Harriet is infirm, she sets sail alone, accompanied only by a letter from her best friend, Mildred. Well, that letter and repeated visits from—hallucinations of?— her late husband. It seems both Mildred and Bernard have something to say. In This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, author Jonathan Evison (The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here) alternates between a cheeky narration of Harriet’s past and present. The chapters reveal Harriet at different ages and are written with unfussy candor when examining the present and recent past. When Evison portrays Harriet’s younger days, however, he employs a more hopeful, boisterous tone that underscores the exclamation point of the novel’s title. It echoes the cinematic approach of Evison’s previous work, painting a vivid picture that’s easy for a reader to immerse him or herself in. Through carefully constructed vignettes of Harriet’s life, Evison peels away layers. What’s left is a core understanding of who Har-

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” These words can be found in an etching by Francisco Goya, reproduced at the beginning of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (or 1,001 nights, that magical number). It’s a nightmarish image of a young man asleep, slumped over a table as a horde of wide-eyed and shadowy creatures bear down upon him. But in Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, his first for adults in seven years, it’s not so tidy as monster against man. This is a fairy tale for the modern era, A Thousand and One Nights for the age of reality TV, The Odyssey in the time of Disney World. Rushdie’s jinn are mischievous, lascivious creatures, made of “smokeless fire” and generally disinterested in unfortunate human concerns about right and wrong. But the line between the human and jinn worlds is crossed when the jinnia princess Dunia presents herself at the door of the disgraced 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd. Dunia has fallen in love with his mind and so bears his many children, descendants now part human and part jinn, all with the discerning trait of lobeless ears. Leaping centuries forward to the present day, a storm strikes New York City and leaves “strangenesses” in its wake: A gardener finds himself floating a few inches above the

reviews ground. An abandoned baby marks the corrupt with boils and rotting flesh. A wormhole opens in a failed graphic novelist’s bedroom. A war of the worlds has begun. Rushdie spins this actionpacked, illusion-filled, madcap wonder of a tale with a wicked, wise fury. It’s a riot of pop culture and humor, with bursts of insight that stop readers dead, only to zip them up again like a jinn flying across the sky. To tell a story about the jinn is to tell a story about ourselves, and this is why we love myth: The contrast of the fantastical allows us to peer at ourselves from a safe distance. In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound. —CAT ACREE

THE GIRL FROM THE GARDEN By Parnaz Foroutan

When Asher contemplates taking a second wife, Rakhel’s behavior becomes more and more violent. Foroutan was born in Iran, though she currently lives in Los Angeles, and the stories explored in The Girl from the Garden were inspired by her own family. Though the reader gets a taste of what the Iranian Jewish community was like, this is really a novel about the culture of women, from the ritual baths and other religious traditions to the gardens and distinctly gendered spaces of the home. The novel mimics cinematic techniques in which one scene dissolves into another, shifting seamlessly across decades and continents. We never learn Mahboubeh’s own story, but the sense of a personality forged by the sacrifice, betrayal and restrictions of the women who came before her will remain with the reader long after the book is over. —LAUREN BUFFERD

A WINDOW OPENS

she lands a job at an edgy new start-up that is poised to revolutionize the publishing industry, Alice feels like she’s hit the jackpot. However, as the demands of her professional life intensify, her personal life begins to suffer, and difficult choices must be made. In the vein of the chick-lit classic I Don’t Know How She Does It, Egan has written a heartfelt, humorous take on the pressures faced by moms and working women, tackling her subject matter with a charming candor that makes readers feel like they are listening to the confidences of a friend. A playful and provocative meditation on what it means to “have it all,” A Window Opens is more than just a mommy manifesto—it’s also an intimate and entertaining yarn that will speak to women from all walks of life. —STEPHENIE HARRISON

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Elisabeth Egan.

By Elisabeth Egan

Ecco $26.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780062388384 Audio, eBook available

Simon & Schuster $26, 384 pages ISBN 9781501105432 Audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

Parnaz Foroutan’s debut, The Girl from the Garden, explores the fortunes of the Malacoutis, a wealthy Jewish family in Iran at the turn of the 20th century, as remembered by the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh. Now elderly and living in Los Angeles, Mahboubeh wanders her garden, awash in memories that seem more real than her California home. In Mahboubeh’s memory, her great aunt Rakhel is a bitter old woman yelling obscenities out of an open window. But she also imagines Rakhel as a very young wife. At a time when a woman’s value was measured by her fertility, Rakhel’s inability to get pregnant was cause for despair. Their infertility (blamed completely on Rakhel) proves torturous to her husband, Asher, and the situation worsens after Rakhel’s sister-inlaw gives birth to a healthy boy.

FICTION

THE GATES OF EVANGELINE

—MEG BOWDEN

ABOVE THE WATERFALL By Ron Rash

Ecco $26.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780062349316 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

By Hester Young

Putnam $25.95, 416 pages ISBN 9780399174001 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

The most common advice to aspiring authors is “Write what you know.” Clearly Elisabeth Egan took this advice to heart when penning her debut novel, A Window Opens, a literary anthem for 21st-century working mothers. Like Egan herself, her protagonist, Alice Pearse, is a mother of three who has a bookworm’s dream job: writing book reviews for a major women’s magazine. Alice finds her part-time work rewarding, but she especially loves the supportive environment and the fact that she still has the freedom to take an active role in her kids’ lives, nurture her marriage and look after herself. All of this changes when Alice’s husband drops a bombshell: He didn’t make partner and plans to open his own law firm. In the meantime, Alice offers to step up as the family breadwinner. When

Although the case was highly publicized and ruthlessly investigated, no one was ever convicted, and no body was ever found. Charlie hopes to find a new angle—and she also thinks that the psychic visions she’s been having of children in danger since Keegan’s death may help her solve the mystery. But once she is inside the gates of the Deveaus’ luxurious plantation home, Charlie realizes there is more than one skeleton in the closet. Hester Young’s debut novel, The Gates of Evangeline, is a thrilling Southern Gothic mystery. Full of family secrets, betrayals and unexpected romances, it pulls readers along on a dark, twisted ride through the Louisiana swamp.

They say that with every loss comes a gain, but in Charlie Cates’ case, that seems unimaginable. Her 5-year-old son’s sudden death from a brain aneurysm has turned her world upside down. A divorced single parent, Charlie put Keegan at the center of her world. Well-intentioned attempts from neighbors and colleagues to help Charlie get back on her feet only remind her of her dreaded new normal. When her old editor at Cold Crimes magazine calls with an unusual opportunity, Charlie—ready for a change— boldly seizes it, heading to Chicory, Louisiana, to write about a longcold missing-persons case. In 1982, 3-year-old Gabriel Deveau disappeared from his bedroom in the middle of the night.

Ron Rash may not have invented the “Appalachian Noir” genre, but he’s certainly perfected it over the past 15 years with modern classics like Serena and The World Made Straight. His new novel, Above the Waterfall, is another contemporary take on the Southern Gothic tradition, featuring a slow-burn mystery that’s light on plot but thick with atmosphere, lyrical prose and a visceral sense of place. The story alternates between a sheriff and a park ranger in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, whose lives become entwined by a series of escalating incidents involving family inheritances, land disputes and meth labs. The sheriff, Les, a hard-edged widower who craves solitude, is only three weeks away from retiring when a routine house call sets him down a path toward some of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make. Meanwhile, the park ranger, Becky, tries to lose herself in nature to escape two devastating

FICTION incidents from her past. When someone poisons the local river on property owned by an affluent fishing resort, all the evidence points to a stubborn old homesteader named Gerald Blackwater, the closest thing Becky has to a father. Les, whose feelings for Becky are clouded by his guilt over the death of his wife, is forced to either arrest Gerald or find out if more dangerous men are involved. Above the Waterfall harks back to Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden, another small-town story told from multiple perspectives, but this time there is no immediate noirish hook. Instead, Rash has crafted the finest prose of his career, whether it’s the brusque, whittled down voice of the sheriff, or the park ranger’s lush poet-speak, which allows Rash to invent words like heatsoak, streamswift, and sunspill. Don’t expect a grim, hardboiled mystery with a high body count. Above the Waterfall is another quiet, haunting ode to the natural beauty of the mountains. —ADAM MORGAN

DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY By Bill Clegg

Scout Press $26, 304 pages ISBN 9781476798172 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

what a family is and how they influence us, for better or worse. The pain in this novel is raw and visceral, though there are brilliant, subtle touches as well. In one scene, a mother and son have a talk they should have had a long time ago. Across the street, “two teenage boys scrape paint from the house,” a revealing image of painstakingly stripping away the past. Ultimately, readers of Did You Ever Have a Family will be reminded of both Faulkner (in Clegg’s dark material and kaleidoscopic storytelling) and Colum McCann (in the genuine search for meaning or redemption amid tragedy). Clegg’s novel is not for every reader. In addition to the bleak events, the flashbacks and lack of dialogue can become a bit wearisome. Nevertheless, Clegg has produced an insightful portrait of adversity. The characters, by and large, are memorable and their struggles genuine. One of Clegg’s guilt-wracked characters describes the reflection of the night sky on a lake as “both ominous and beautiful.” The same can be said of Did You Ever Have a Family. —T O M D E I G N A N

LAST BUS TO WISDOM By Ivan Doig

Riverhead $28.95, 464 pages ISBN 9781594632020 eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Memoirist and literary agent Bill Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man) has now conquered the world of literary fiction with his searing debut, Did You Ever Have a Family. As a boy “wakes to the sound of sirens,” we learn that an explosion has taken the life of a bride and groom just before their wedding day. Clegg then slowly, intricately reveals the wider ramifications of this unthinkable tragedy through the eyes of more than a dozen characters. The title (from an Alan Shapiro poem) most deeply refers to June Reid, who lost the most in the explosion that fateful day. But Clegg’s wide lens compels the reader to think deeply about

means Donny needs to go live with Gram’s somewhat estranged sister in Wisconsin. To do this he has to go Greyhound or, as they said back in the day, ride the dog bus. Having ridden the dog bus fairly frequently over the years, this reviewer braced herself for a horror story. Instead, Doig treats the reader to a panoply of folk who may or may not be down on their luck, but are still decent—most of them—for all that. Donny even runs into the not-yetfamous Jack Kerouac at one point. But that comes later. Donny’s stay with his aunt Kate and her German-born husband, Herman, is a mixed blessing. Kate, so sweet of voice and broad of girth that the boy believes for a time that she’s the singer Kate Smith, is actually a muumuu-wearing termagant. But he’s saved by Herman, or, more precisely, the two save each other. Herman is just as put upon by “the Kate” as Donny; a manchild and a child-man, they end up on the lam together, eventually arriving in Wisdom, Montana. On the way, there are hobos and powwows and rodeos, the sights and sounds of the West and all kinds of good and bad luck. Doig, the author of 16 books about the West, died earlier this year. In his final novel, he has great fun with both his characters and their slangy, inventive and often ribald ways of speech: “Holy wow!” is one of Donny’s favorite phrases. The other one can’t be repeated in a family publication. Last Bus to Wisdom is a big-hearted, joyfully meandering work by a master. —ARLENE McKANIC

The passage that hooked this reviewer came early in Ivan Doig’s delightful sprawl of a novel. It was that song about “great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,” sung on a bus by obnoxious little boys off to summer camp. Having not heard that song in years and years, it simply warmed my heart. How could this book not be a keeper? Last Bus to Wisdom is told by an orphan. He’s Donal Cameron, a Montana boy who is 11 years old in 1951. The flinty grandmother who raised him after his parents were killed needs an operation. This

A FREE STATE By Tom Piazza

Harper $25.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780062284129 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Tom Piazza’s new novel is a crisply told tale of race relations in Philadelphia a few years before the Civil War, one that brings into

sharp relief the tensions that beset Northern society even as it was about to go to war to rid the nation of slavery. When minstrel show performer and entrepreneur James Douglass encounters Henry Sims, playing his banjo for appreciative listeners on a Philadelphia street, he’s more concerned with the boost the talented young escaped slave will give his foundering show and the legal and practical obstacles to presenting him on stage than he is with the irony of inviting a black man to participate in a performance that holds those of his race up to ridicule. As Piazza portrays it, minstrel shows were among the era’s most popular entertainments, performed before audiences whose bigotry was every bit as entrenched as the most benighted Southerners. It’s only when James comes faceto-face with the vicious slave hunter Tull Burton, relentlessly tracking Henry from his escaped home in Virginia, that he understands the high stakes in the game he has naively undertaken. The narrative of this fast-paced novel goes up a notch as James finds himself struggling to conceal Henry from discovery by his fellow performers while attempting to keep him out of Burton’s hands. Piazza is never heavy-handed in dealing with the obvious moral ambiguities inherent in James’ decision to participate in minstrel shows, even as his protagonist eventually understands he and his colleagues were “complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see.” Not until James witnesses the depth of Burton’s malevolence is he impelled to action that will redeem him while giving Henry a chance at freedom. Readers familiar with Solomon Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, may discern faint echoes of that story in A Free State. But apart from a couple of graphic scenes of Burton’s brutality and glimpses of the casual cruelty of the slave owners, Piazza is more interested in telling a story that will have thoughtful readers slipping into James’ shoes and asking themselves: What would I have done? —HARVEY FREEDENBERG

MURDER, HEARTBREAK,

reviews

NONFICTION

OF HUMAN RESILIENCE IN AN AMERICAN

T PI OP CK

AND THE POWER

TOWN

On July 23, 2007, Dr. William Petit suffered an unimaginable horror: Armed strangers murdered his family. He alone survived.

“A pitch-perfect story of grace, eloquence, and renewal beyond imagination.” —BUZZ BISSINGER, author of Friday Night Lights

ONCE IN A GREAT CITY

R E V I E W B Y K E L LY B L E W E T T

David Maraniss didn’t set out to write a ghost story, but Once in a Great City, his glimmering portrait of Detroit, has a lingering, melancholy quality that will leave the reader thoroughly haunted. The story begins on November 9, 1962, a day of tragedies: The Ford Rotunda, an architectural masterpiece that was once one of the nation’s top five tourist attractions, burns to the ground. On the other side of town, the Detroit police ransack the Gotham, a landmark hotel memorialized in prose by Langston Hughes. The Gotham eventually becomes a parking lot, and the Ford Rotunda is never rebuilt. These troubling opening passages seem to portend the storms that will crash upon the city, yet Maraniss doesn’t linger in the gloom. Instead, he regards them as cracks in an otherwise gorgeous facade, for Detroit in the early 1960s was a tremendous place to be. From the inBy David Maraniss ventors of the Mustang to the producers of Motown Records, Detroit’s Simon & Schuster, $32.50, 464 pages ISBN 9781476748382, audio, eBook available movers and shakers were extraordinary. Maraniss brings them to life in vivid flashes, recounting details like the story behind Motown producer HISTORY Berry Gordy’s nickname, and the tenor of the voice of civil rights advocate Reverend C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin. Once in a Great City has it all: significant scenes, tremendously charismatic figures, even a starry soundtrack. (I challenge anyone to read this book without sneaking off to listen to old Motown favorites like “My Guy.”) Maraniss chronicles events from the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1964. Reading about the city in its heyday is like falling backward in time and running into someone whose youthful blush you’d completely forgotten. Detroit is that someone. She is bright and laughing, flickering before you like a specter from the past. I doubt I’ll forget her anytime soon.

SOUTH TOWARD HOME By Margaret Eby

Norton $25.95, 240 pages ISBN 9780393241112 eBook available LITERATURE

AVAIL ABLE EVERY WH E R E BOOKS A R E S OL D CROWN

A shining city on the brink

Wait, we need a Brooklyn-based writer to guide us through the swamps, thickets and kudzu of Southern literary haunts? Not to worry—Margaret Eby may live in the borough, but she grew up in Alabama and is on familiar turf in South Toward Home, a highly readable literary tour of the region that gave us Faulkner, O’Connor and Lee (Harper, not Robert E.). The title is a nod to Eby’s Southern roots but also an homage to North Toward Home, Willie Mor-

ris’ 1967 memoir of growing up in Mississippi and moving as an adult to New York. Eby reverses his course, with a simple conceit: Pick a writer and visit the city, town or site associated with him or her, mixing literary primer with historical background and some good old-fashioned reporting. It’s not a new formula, but it requires an expert’s touch, and Eby displays that as she makes the obligatory pilgrimages to places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Monroeville, Alabama, and the not-so-expected detours to a Memphis library or Florida backwoods. The itinerary is by no means comprehensive: Eby doesn’t go looking for Robert Penn Warren on the Tennessee-Kentucky border or Alice Walker in rural Georgia. Still, readers will feel fortunate that, while not overlooking the obvious choices, Eby includes Harry Crews—not exactly on every high school reading list.

Feel free to skip around—especially if you’re eager to get to the chapter on Harper Lee and Truman Capote, or the fascinating account of John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces) and his native New Orleans. But if you read even one of the chapters, you’ll want to make sure you take the entire tour. —KEITH HERRELL

THE MAKING OF HOME By Judith Flanders Thomas Dunne $26.99, 368 pages ISBN 9781250067357 eBook available HISTORY

No one writes about history like Judith Flanders. Reading her work (The Victorian City, Inside the

Victorian Home) is like going back in time with an expert guide at your side. In her new book, The Making of Home, Flanders ventures beyond one city or time period to explore the political, religious, economic and social factors that led to the notions of home that still influence us today. Make no mistake—this is not a history of decoration or architecture. As Flanders puts it, “It is not the style of chair that is my primary concern, but how people sat on it.” While such a broad topic might be dry in the hands of a lesser writer, Flanders boasts an astounding ability to seamlessly weave facts and ideas. In her discussion of the evolution of lighting inside and outside houses, we’re treated to Robert Louis Stevenson’s comments on gas street lamps: “The city-folk had stars of their own; biddable domesticated stars.” Like those stars, every page of this remarkable book sparkles with insights. If you’re left curious to know more about, say, the impact of technology on kitchen design and women’s lives, The Making of Home includes extensive notes and an 18-page bibliography. As Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” In The Making of Home, Flanders helps us appreciate how much there is to know about something we care about so deeply. —DEBORAH HOPKINSON

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO PARADISE

room, where he vowed to turn his life upside down if he survived. “I’d been screwing up my life, I thought, pissing away years on this failing company, this failing relationship, this . . . materialistic city and its dead-end ideas of success, this hope that enough hours at work could make me rich, my parents proud, and democracy stronger,” Sheshunoff writes. His plan, as much as he had one, was to find paradise and move there. To give this journey a little more heft, he would read 100 great books while traveling. He started where any 20-something probably would: He googled “nice Pacific island” and eventually found a message on a travel site pointing him to an island called Yap. Sheshunoff traveled to Yap, which was interesting in that the island’s residents used enormous round stones as currency and the women all went topless. But it was not quite paradise. He meandered on to other hot, tiny islands with names like Pig and Tinian, making some quirky friends along the way. It was on the island of Koror, in the Republic of Palau, that he met Sarah. They hiked, they kayaked, they swam with jellyfish, and bit by bit, they fell in love. A Beginner’s Guide to Paradise is extraordinarily entertaining, one part guidebook to two parts love story. This heartfelt account reveals what can happen when you leave everything behind—and find more than you ever hoped for. —AMY SCRIBNER

By Alex Sheshunoff NAL $25.95, 464 pages ISBN 9780451475862 eBook available TRAVEL

THE LAST SEASON By Stuart Stevens Knopf $24.95, 224 pages ISBN 9780385353021 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

Call it the male answer to Eat, Pray, Love. Alex Sheshunoff was running a not-particularly-successful Internet startup in the late 1990s when he decided to walk away from it all: his Manhattan apartment, his girlfriend, his world. A health scare had landed him in the emergency

In the South, college football is religion, and on any Saturday afternoon in the fall, the deeply faithful congregate in stadiums across the region, praying that on this day their faith will be bolstered with a

q&a

MARGARET EBY

Southern pilgrimage

argaret Eby explores the hometowns and stomping grounds of 10 Southern authors in her literary travelogue, South Toward Home.

BY KEITH HERRELL

NONFICTION

What made you decide to write this book? The idea for this book originated with a piece I wrote for the Paris Review Daily about Eudora Welty’s house. After her death, her once fabulous back garden had fallen into disrepair, but a team of Welty enthusiasts restored the place partially using passages from Welty’s fiction and letters to envision the garden as it once was. That got me thinking about the way that fictional places and real places overlap, particularly in Southern fiction. What makes the South so tempting as a literary destination? For me, it’s because many of the writers I researched are part of our fairly recent history, which means that there are still people in these small Southern towns that knew them, or at least know their relatives. If you go to Jackson and start asking about Eudora Welty, pretty soon you’ll have half a dozen people with dinner party stories about her, or an offer to introduce you to her hairdresser. The memorials aren’t these museum-ified, airless things, they’re living parts of the fabric of that town. You grew up in Alabama but now live in Brooklyn. As a former Southerner, what sort of emotions does a return arouse? It’s funny. Even though at this point, I’ve lived away from the South for about a decade, every time I go back there, it’s a relief. It’s still home to me—it’s where my parents live, and where many of my good friends are, and I’ll always carry it with me. But it’s also a place with a lot of baggage and a history of real violence. Both those things were inescapable while I was doing my research—the pleasure of the place is hard to separate from the weight of its history. Did your travels change your perspective on any of the authors? Absolutely. I think one of the most touching parts of my research was talking to Harry Crews’ cousin. Crews styled himself as this macho, hyper-masculine author, but to his cousin, he was his prankster relative who he once tricked into peeing onto an electric fence. Did you do a lot of research or just hit the road and go with your gut? It was definitely a combination. I knew which sites I wanted to go to, and I read up a lot about the writers and the places they wrote about before I set off anywhere, but some of the things I found were strokes of pure luck. Like meeting Crews’ cousin—that was thanks to a combination of Crews’ longtime friend and biographer and the kindness of a traveling furniture salesman/preacher. If you could do a sequel, which authors would you include? I’d love to write about Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter and take a look at Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville, Tennessee, before he decamped for the Southwest. I’d also love to write about Ellen Douglas, a really underrated Mississippi writer. If one of the authors could have magically appeared during one of your visits, which one would you pick? Oh, man. I think it has to be John Kennedy Toole, just because I’d want to fill him in on the success of A Confederacy of Dunces and ask him about his life. Plus, I hear he could drink a mean Sazerac.

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NONFICTION

glorious victory on the gridiron. Stuart Stevens grew up going to Ole Miss games with his father. In 1962, in the midst of tumultuous battles over civil rights on campus, Stevens and his father cheered the Rebels to a perfect season and a national championship. More than 50 years later, having just finished leading an exhausting and unsuccessful presidential campaign for Mitt Romney, Stevens “wakes up” and realizes that what he wants most in the world is one more season, “with my father and football and the Ole Miss Rebels.” In The Last Season, Stevens, a cracking good storyteller, affectionately regales us with tales of his and his 95-year-old father’s final shared season in 2012. Offering a game-by-game chronicle, Stevens reveals how he gets to know his father once again through their shared love of football and their (occasionally hilarious) travels to the team’s home and away games. Though his father is now frail, he leaps to his feet at the Ole MissLSU game to celebrate an Ole Miss interception, “and in that moment the years shed away as effortlessly as tossing aside a quilt when getting out of bed in the morning.” Though Stevens sometimes digresses from his poignant tale to offer platitudes about sports and life, he always trots back to the line of scrimmage with a winning play that has us cheering from the sidelines.

Oates herself suffers from insomnia, and has since she was a girl, using her night hours productively and well. Her new book, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, offers an exquisitely rendered glimpse of her own childhood in rural upstate New York. As in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, Oates writes tactfully, perhaps even grudgingly, avoiding the over-share, the “too much information” of the contemporary misery memoir. But the opportunity to follow her beautifully subtle stream of consciousness as it revisits the past is not to be missed. Oates sees herself as a ghost revisiting the old farmhouse of her childhood, the one-room schoolhouse she attended and the winding country roads of Sunday drives with her beloved parents. This book is as much a meditation on memory as it is a recollection of a specific time and place. Composed of separate essays, many previously published, The Lost Landscape can feel a bit repetitive, although never scattered. This makes it a perfect book for readers looking for short, contained “memoir-ish” (Oates’ term) essays. She is particularly good at capturing the post-Depression world of working-class rural life, when finishing high school was a real achievement. Had young Joyce not been bused to a Buffalo suburb for high school, she might never have gone to college or become — H E N R Y L . C A R R I G A N J R .  the eminent American author she is today. And yet, as The Lost Landscape shows, the world of THE LOST LANDSCAPE childhood is also the source of her astonishing creativity and genius. By Joyce Carol

Oates

Ecco $27.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780062408679 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

James Joyce once wished for an “ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia”; a reader of Joyce Carol Oates similarly needs an ideal insomnia to plow through the 50-plus novels of this legendarily prolific writer. As it turns out,

—CATHERINE HOLLIS

NEGROLAND By Margo Jefferson

Pantheon $25, 256 pages ISBN 9780307378453 eBook available MEMOIR

Negroland is not a geographic locale. It’s the name Margo Jeffer-

son gives to the place, time and circumstances of her upbringing in the upper echelons of black society. Her memoir, which reads with the blast force of a prose poem, looks back with love and no small amount of anger at a life spent navigating the freedoms of class while flirting with, and occasionally skirting, the imposed limits of race. Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947 to a socialite mother and a physician father who was head of pediatrics at a prestigious hospital. Their family had hired help, but Margo and sister Denise were expected to clean in advance of their arrival, to keep the habits and inflections of vernacular blackness at bay, to assert their privilege by keeping distance between themselves and those who didn’t share it. This often afforded them a rarefied perch, passing as white when it suited their needs, and allowing them to look down on poor blacks and all whites with equal distaste. When the family takes a vacation without first vetting the hotel, only to have their reservation downgraded and the red carpet withdrawn the minute they’re seen, it’s a bitter reminder that their gilded cage doesn’t always allow access to the larger world. Jefferson offers some broader historical context for her place and time, including thumbnail biographies of some “privileged free Negro(es),” then dives into personal stories, each helping to frame her highly particular circumstance and make it somewhat easier to understand. She is unsparing when describing her college years; if her life was unique, the melodrama she brought to bear on it is still a hallmark of that stage of life. “ ‘Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro,’ my mother wrote seventy years ago. It wasn’t a disavowal, it was her claim to a free space.” This line from a letter Jefferson’s mother wrote to a friend reappears throughout Negroland. It’s a stinging reminder that identity can’t always be chosen but may be tailored to one’s advantage for those who have the resources in hand.

Social work research professor Brené Brown is not your run-ofthe-mill academic. Eschewing the ivory tower, Brown puts her research—enhanced by her personal story and the stories of others—out into the world for all to see (catch her TED talk on vulnerability—millions have!). She’s ready to rumble with the tough stuff of life, including failure, imperfection, vulnerability, shame and courage. This outspoken, “lock-and-load” Texan and best-selling author categorizes her previous two books as a “call to arms,” exhorting readers in The Gifts of Imperfection to “be you” and, in Daring Greatly, to “be all in.” Her latest book, Rising Strong, completes this triumvirate with an inspiring message: “Fall. Get up. Try again.” Brown’s motivation for her research and writing is “to start a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.” This, she avows, is a step toward the authentic, wholehearted life we all yearn for. There are three phases in Brown’s rising strong theory (“the reckoning, the rumble, the revolution”), which is predicated on the power of leaning in to our hurt, of not denying our stories. These tales are what we must “reckon” with, employing self-acceptance and curiosity to see essential truths about our lives. The second phase is to “rumble” with those truths, owning them and deciding how the story will play out. The third phase is nothing short of a “revolution” that signifies a life transformed and aligned with courage. “Revolution,” says Brown, “might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.” ¡Viva la revolución!

—HEATHER SEGGEL

—ALISON HOOD

RISING STRONG By Brené Brown

Spiegel & Grau $27, 336 pages ISBN 9780812995824 Audio, eBook available SELF-HELP

teen

JACK GANTOS

The making of a Gantos

mall notebooks, black covers, Strathmore brand: For years, Jack Gantos wrote in journals with “no lines, so you could draw and write.” As he explains in a call from his Boston home, “When you finished one, you had a book. You could put a rubber band around it and put it on a shelf.”

But the author’s path to the writing life wasn’t quite as linear as a row of black journals on a bookshelf, as fans of his New York Times best-selling YA memoir, Hole in My Life, know. In it, he describes his decision, at age 20, to earn cash for college by helping to smuggle a ton of hashish (via yacht) to New York City, and the year of prison time that followed. Everything certainly turned out well: Gantos has written some 50 books, including picture books (Rotten Ralph series), fiction for young readers (Joey Pigza series), and YA and adult novels. He’s a Newbery Medalist and Scott O’Dell Award winner, as well as a National Book Award nominee. But it’s easy to wonder about what came before, to ponder how the whip-smart, self-aware, charming author could also be the guy who thought sailing a drug-laden yacht was a good idea. Of course, that’s occurred to Gantos, and to the myriad children he’s encountered on his frequent school visits.

THE TROUBLE IN ME

By Jack Gantos

FSG, $17.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780374379957, audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up

FICTION

So he wrote The Trouble in Me, his new autobiographical novel for young readers—wherein, with help from those journals, he harks back to the events that forged the 14-year-old kid who became that 20-year-old guy, and explains what was on his adolescent mind and in his unsettled heart. “A lot of middle-school kids read Hole in My Life but usually miss the deeper points, a lot of the interiors,” Gantos says. “They get the ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’ part, but don’t slow down enough to see themselves in the emotional mirror of the book, and I thought, this other story will slow them down.” In the fictionalized memoir, Gantos’ family’s frequent moves are beginning to wear on him; nearly every year he’s the new kid, always striving to adjust and fit in. Add some unhealthy family dynamics that can’t be tempered even by reading his beloved books (“my imaginative world wilted away as the printed words bruised and darkened like fruit rotting on a vine”), and young Gantos is fairly miserable fairly often. It’s not surprising, then, that the Pagoda family next door captures his interest. They’re tactless and brash, especially 17-year-old Gary, newly out of juvenile detention. His swaggering confidence and disregard for social norms proves irresistible: “All of that longing to be like him set something inside of me on fire and I had a feeling that there was no putting me out,” Gantos writes. After all, the author says, “Kids need lots of attention, and if they don’t get attention at home, they will surely accept bad attention elsewhere.” He goes on, “When I think of middle school and me at that age, I think that’s exactly where I

switched gears and decided to become somebody else. . . . I was a ticking time bomb.” That’s an apt description, not least because it’s amazing that Gantos escaped grievous injury during this time period—think explosives, fire, theft, dangerous physical feats and way too much time spent in the company of Gary, the budding (or perhaps fully bloomed) “I think this sociopath. book will It’s quite an experience have a big to read the blossoming book with inside the the knowlreader, which edge that this melancholy, is where I danger-seeking love books to 14-year-old roam.” survived and grew up to become an accomplished professor and acclaimed author—a powerful reminder that we’re not necessarily who we appear to be, and that our future isn’t determined by our past. That’s been true of Gantos’ writing career, too. After he wrote Hole in My Life, he recalls, “There came a time when I thought, oh my god, I really like children’s books. Will people accept this? . . . This is really a good story, so I’m either gonna be really honest about who I am and my entire life, or I’m gonna go ahead and burn down my children’s book career. Quite frankly, it went in the opposite direction . . . and it reaffirms for me, as a writer,

INTERVIEW BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

[that] I’m in the right field and now I can write everything. I’ve got plenty of room.” Luckily for his fans, he’ll always have room for school visits, which he views as integral to his life as an author. “One of the great dividends of writing books for young readers is you get to go into schools and work with the kids, and you feel like a good human being when you do that,” Gantos says. “No matter how exhausting it can be, you know in your heart you’re walking out of a school and there’s at least one kid who went, that just rocked my world!” The Trouble in Me will rock readers’ worlds, for sure. It is, to use a hoary phrase, the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve turned the final page, thanks to Gantos’ gift for storytelling—and the reader’s hope that he’ll write more memoirs, fictionalized or otherwise. “I’m not quite certain how people are going to look at this book,” Gantos says. “I hope people read it, read it sensibly, and I hope that kind of kid, that kind of guy, will get this book. I think this book will have a big blossoming inside the reader, which is where I love books to roam.”

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TEEN

THE HIRED GIRL

Heroine of her own life REVIEW BY JUSTIN BARISICH

In the town of Steeple Chase, Pennsylvania, there’s not much for a poor farm girl other than a life of looming drudgery. And this is why, in The Hired Girl, the farmer’s daughter wises up and escapes the farm toil, striking out on her own to push back against the societal, cultural and patriarchal confines that threaten the rest of her days. At only 14 years old, Joan Skraggs abandons her miserable life to forge a new one in the big city. She tried for years to live under her vicious father’s tyranny, but after her mother’s death, he became too uncaring and unbearable. So in the summer of 1911, yearning for adventures similar to those of her favorite literary heroines, Joan boards a train to Baltimore with the money her deceased mother once hid away for her only daughter. Assuming the “ladylike” name of Janet Lovelace and dressing to pass for 18 and old enough to find work, Joan is kindly hired by a wealthy Jewish family in high-society Baltimore. As she lives By Laura Amy Schlitz with and works for the Rosenbachs, she learns the hard way just what is Candlewick, $17.99, 400 pages required of her if she hopes to climb the social ladder. ISBN 9780763678180, eBook available Using Joan’s diary as the narrative vehicle, Newbery Medalist Laura Ages 12 and up Amy Schlitz (Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!) gives the reader a rare view HISTORICAL FICTION of how the other half lived in early 20th-century America. By providing a hard line into Joan’s (sometimes naïve) interior thoughts, Schlitz engenders a loving and comedic exploration of feminism, work ethic, cultural persecution and religious differences.

MECHANICA By Betsy Cornwell Clarion $17.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780547927718 eBook available Ages 12 and up FAIRY TALE

A wonderful, brilliant mother— who dies. An adoring, protective father, who remarries—and then dies. A beautiful but nasty stepmother, two conniving, vapid stepsisters—this is starting to sound familiar, isn’t it? However, Betsy Cornwell’s Mechanica is anything but another lifeless “Cinderella” retelling. And Nicolette, filled with her mother’s inventiveness and her father’s determination, is anything but another princess waiting to be rescued. Detested by her stepmother and called “Mechanica” by her step-

sisters to humiliate her, Nicolette has resigned herself to a lifetime of forced servitude—and to the loss of access to magic from the now-banished Fey. But at age 16, she is granted access through mysterious means to her mother’s hidden workshop, filled with wonders beyond her imagination. There, Nicolette discovers fantastic inventions and clockwork animals that almost seem to think. Most importantly, she finds hope—hope that she can get her life back, hope that she can escape, hope that she can reclaim her home from her stepmother. And with the help of new friends and the perfect timing of the technological exposition and royal ball, Nicolette sets out to do just that. With a unique mix of steampunk and the maker movement, Mechanica introduces a smart, strong, talented heroine who may be able to find her prince, but doesn’t necessarily want to. —KEVIN DELECKI

THE SHADOW BEHIND THE STARS By Rebecca Hahn Atheneum $17.99, 256 pages ISBN 9781481435710 eBook available Ages 12 and up FANTASY

Chloe was born a teenager and will always be one. Like her sisters, the middle-aged Serena and the elderly Xinot, she exists only to spin, measure and cut the threads of human lives. Chloe and her sisters are the Fates of Greek mythology, living and working on an island far from human entanglements—until a desperate teenage girl, Aglaia, seeks shelter in the Fates’ home. Aglaia’s village was destroyed, and she alone knows why. Soon Chloe and her sisters are driven to follow the refugee as she pursues a new life on the mainland. There,

the Fates are tempted to intervene in human affairs for the sake of their friend—despite prophesies that their involvement will cause the weaving to come unwound and the sun to sink into the sea. Chloe’s narrative voice is stunning, especially when she speaks of the dark power that she and her sisters channel, the mystery that fills and guides them. This is a story to savor and discuss, especially in multigenerational groups. —J I L L R A T Z A N

DUMPLIN’ By Julie Murphy

Balzer + Bray $17.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062327185 Audio, eBook available Ages 13 and up FICTION

Willowdean Dickson is fat and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. But she’s growing up in Clover City, Texas, where the church, high school football and the annual beauty pageant are all equally revered. Will’s mom is a former pageant queen who begins to tune her out as the event draws near. But with two potential boyfriends, a shaky relationship with her BFF and the usual crap from bullies, Will has nowhere to turn for advice. Author Julie Murphy draws a clear distinction between Will’s confidence, which is largely unshakeable—truly, she’s awesome—and her fears about getting closer to hot boyfriend Bo. She has a lingering sense that people will wonder how she landed him, and so she takes unusual chances, aided by her love of Dolly Parton, her late aunt and several drag queens who know a thing or two about pageantry. As these pressures bring out Will’s worst as a friend and girlfriend, they also show a clear path to her best self. Dumplin’ is inspiring while never lecturing, sexy but still classy, and may inspire you to roll down the windows and belt out “Jolene” next time you’re on the highway. —HEATHER SEGGEL

New from New York Times–bestselling author

NANCY TILLMAN ,

You’re Here for a Reason is the perfect addition to any nursery

You’re here for a reason. If you think you’re not, I would just say that perhaps you forgot— a piece of the world that is precious and dear would surely be missing if you weren’t here.

Read more in the NANCY TILLMAN COLLECTION 7 million NANCY TILLMAN books sold!

Share the love —VISIT NANCYTILLMANBOOKS.COM

FEIWEL AND FRIENDS • An imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group

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THE MARVELS By Brian Selznick

FULL CICADA MOON

One small step, one giant leap REVIEW BY DEBORAH HOPKINSON

By Marilyn Hilton

Dial, $17.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780525428756, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

An Interactive, Colorful Canine Romp for Toddlers!

Purple my sudsy bath,

A Peek Inside

Purple

the frothy foam I fling— splash, splash, splash, splash, splash!

Matthew Van Fleet Stanton Creators of the #1 New York Times bestseller DOG Photography by Brian

Half-Japanese, half-black, Mimi Yoshiko Oliver loves looking at the moon and wants to be an astronaut. In January 1969, she moves from California to the frosty Vermont town of Hillsborough, an unwelcoming place. The farmer next door is always rude, and Mimi is teased at school. Even after she forms a tentative friendship with a girl named Stacey, she’s not invited to Stacey’s home. Then there’s the matter of shop class. Mimi would rather take shop than home ec so she can use power tools to work on her science project, but girls are supposed to “learn how to cook and sew so they can be good homemakers.” Slowly, Mimi and her family discover small moments of harmony, like finding the first crocuses in the snow. When Mimi and Stacey decide to challenge the exclusion of girls from shop classes, their courage inspires the entire eighth grade to an act of civil disobedience. Told in evocative free verse, Full Cicada Moon is a lyrical portrait of a strong family at a time of immense change, perfect for that budding scientist who loves to look at the stars.

WAITING By Kevin Henkes

Greenwillow $17.99, 32 pages ISBN 9780062368430 eBook available Ages 4 to 8 PICTURE BOOK

“There were five of them. And they were waiting.” Thus opens Kevin Henkes’ latest picture book, featuring an unseen’s child five patient toys, all of whom sit in a windowsill and watch the world go by. There’s an owl, waiting for the moon; a pig with an umbrella, waiting for some rain; a bear with a kite, waiting for wind; a puppy on a sled, who longs for some snow; and a content rabbit who “wasn’t waiting for anything in particular. He just liked to look out the window and wait.” Everything about this book’s appearance is soft. Henkes uses a pastel-dominated palette, delicate pinks and blues and greens, on uncluttered spreads laid out on cream-colored paper. Curved, rounded lines are the name of the game, hinting at the security and

Scholastic $32.99, 640 pages ISBN 9780545448680 eBook available Ages 10 and up MIDDLE GRADE

Brian Selznick won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for his innovative 533-page picture book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in which much of the tale is told in full-page blackand-white drawings that weave in and out of the story told in prose. Wonderstruck (2011) followed, with a similar format—460 pages of original artwork intertwined with two independent stories set 50 years apart. The Marvels opens with 400 pages of drawings telling the story of the fictional Royal Theatre in London and five generations of a family of actors. In 1766, young comfort young children crave. Billy Marvel runs off to sea, stowing Despite this softness, there’s loss away on the Kraken, the ship on and tragedy—a new addition to the which his older brother Marcus is windowsill, a china elephant “from a sailor. The ship sinks, and Billy far away,” falls and breaks. And is the sole survivor, along with his there are scary moments, as when dog, Tar. Making his way eventually lightning cracks in the sky, and to London, Billy gets involved with observant readers see that Henkes the Royal Theater and becomes the progenitor of several generations varies the expressions on the toys’ of Marvels, great stage actors all. mostly unchanging faces: The owl squints in fear, and the pig’s eyes The story of the Marvels, related are wide and round. in black-and-white drawings, gives The world beyond the window way to a seemingly unrelated prose is their stage, and the wordless story of young Joseph Jervis, who spreads really shine. One features runs away from boarding school in frosted panes; another has fire1990 and comes to dark and snowy works; and yet another reveals a London in search of his friend rainbow. The five toys watch in Blink and his estranged uncle, wonder, “but mostly they waited.” Albert Nightingale. His uncle lives Children undoubtedly spend a lot in a magical house with smells of of time waiting, since they’re often food and fireplaces, lighted canat the whim of the adults in their dles, muffled voices, tables set with lives. But despite their dreaming dirty plates and half-empty goblets and waiting, life tends to be full of and napkins carefully placed on surprises, and it is for the toys, too. the floor. One day, a cat with patches shows Unlike Selznick’s previous up and joins the gang. The cat has volumes, there is no weaving of a secret, one that will delight young pictures and text here, but the children. stories do connect, and the mysGood things come to those teries, large and small, will absorb who wait, as they say. And this readers young and old. Inspired by child-friendly tale of wonder and a living house museum in London anticipation is a very good thing. known as Dennis Severs’ house, — J U L I E D A N I E L S O N The Marvels is an enchanting tale

of a young boy finding a home and a home finding a future. —DEAN SCHNEIDER

FIREFLY HOLLOW By Alison McGhee

Illustrated by Christopher Denise Atheneum $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9781442423367 eBook available Ages 8 to 12

MIDDLE GRADE

ever had, and loved, an imaginary friend. —SHARON VERBETEN

GEORGE

meet STEPHEN SAVAGE

the title of your Q: What’s new book?

WHERE’S WALRUS? AND PENGUIN?

JACOB B. MURPHY

CHILDREN’S

would you describe Q: How the book?

It’s the story of 2 con-artists on the run!

By Alex Gino

Scholastic $16.99, 240 pages ISBN 9780545812542 Audio, eBook available Ages 9 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

George looks and dresses like a boy, but inside, she’s not a boy. Crickets and fireflies are mere Her family doesn’t understand, but insects, right? Maybe, but don’t George knows that she’s a girl. It’s tell that to Peter, a young boy who hard pretending to be a boy, but it’s befriends one special Cricket and even harder when the class bully Firefly. And absolutely don’t call picks on her and starts fights. them his “imaginary friends” like When it’s announced that the his parents do. They prefer to be fourth-grade classes will put on called “actual.” a production of Charlotte’s Web, One summer, as Peter (the George decides to audition for “miniature giant,” as the insects Charlotte, so she can finally play call him) silently grieves the loss a girl’s role in front of her friends of a schoolmate, he keeps a close and mother, but mostly so she watch on Cricket and Firefly—two independent souls who long to see can feel like her secret self is out in the open. Her best friend helps the world outside Firefly Hollow. rehearse, and eventually George Each wants to do amazing things: Cricket wants to learn to catch like confides in her that she’s really a girl. Kelly is supportive and Yogi Berra, and Firefly wants to encouraging, but their teacher fly to the moon. Together, the trio share their dreams, their hopes and insists George can’t play a girl’s part. Fortunately, an open-minded their summer—all to the dismay principal shows readers that being of Peter’s parents (the “giants”) and Cricket and Firefly’s respective transgender is just another part of being human, and that there are nations. people who understand. Throw in the character of the Debut author Alex Gino beauwise old Vole, guardian of the river, and you’ve got an utterly charming tifully addresses the struggles of being a transgender youth. It’s and believable story of imaginary an intense conflict to be one sort friends who really can do reof person on the outside but feel markable things with each other’s like someone else on the inside, encouragement. Through sheer perseverence, this and this book recognizes and straightforwardly discusses LGBTQ quartet of friends attain actual joy issues, including family misunand reach important milestones. Author Alison McGhee has created derstandings, peer support and public acceptance. Readers going a tiny world of wonder with a genthrough a similar experience will tle, never heavy-handed, message. feel that they are no longer alone, Both full-color and black-andand cisgender (non-transgender) white illustrations from Christopher Denise add even more charm readers may gain understanding and empathy. to the reading experience. Positive messages echo throughFans of middle grade animal stories like The Incredible Journey and out George and to the reader: Be you, whoever you are. The Underneath will enjoy Firefly —HEATHER BRUSH Hollow, as will anyone who has

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

ALEXANDER CALDER (the artist who invented the mobile) I’ve always loved the sense of play in his work. What was your favorite subject Q: in school? Why?

I liked SPELLING because I was good at it!

Who was your Q: childhood hero?

My big brother KIRK. Guess what? He’s still my hero. books did you enjoy as a child? Q: What

BABAR and GO, DOG, GO!

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

Play the piano. message would you like to send to young readers? Q: What

Be COURAGEOUS! Take a risk! WHERE’S WALRUS? AND PENGUIN? Following his zany adventures in Where’s Walrus?, the mischievous Walrus has once again escaped the zoo, this time with his friend Penguin. Kids will love spotting this slippery duo in Stephen Savage’s new wordless picture book, Where’s Walrus? And Penguin? (Scholastic, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780545402958, ages 3 to 6). Savage lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

BATTLE CRY

Dear Editor: I remember from high school English class that in the poems of Sir Walter Scott, the word slogan meant a call to arms. Can you tell me more? C. M. Auburn, Maine The Scottish Gaelic word sluagh-ghairm, meaning “battle cry,” was a compound of sluagh, “army, host,” and gairm, “cry.” It was borrowed into Scots, the English of lowland Scotland, as slogorn, slughorne or, with loss of the “r,” slogan. A slogan in the Highlands and the Borders region was typically the name of a clan chief or rendezvous point, used originally as a summons to arms or a password. It was made familiar to a wider English-speaking public in Sir Walter Scott’s poems “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” (“Yet still Lord Marm-

ion’s falcon flew / With wavering flight, while fiercer grew / Around the battle yell. / The Border slogan rent the sky!”). Slogan was later taken up outside of Scotland in the extended sense “word or phrase used to express a characteristic position.”

to his own account, he asked his 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to supply a name, promising that he would indeed use the word. Milton produced googol, Kasner kept his promise, and the word was accepted in the mathematical community.

WHO’S COUNTING

NEW ANGLE

A googol is a very big number whose name was coined by a small boy. In the late 1930s American mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955) found himself working with numbers as large as one followed by a hundred zeroes. While it is possible to describe this number as 10 to the 100th power, Kasner felt that having a name for it would facilitate discussing it. According

The English word odd goes back to the early Norse language. In Old Norse, the word oddi was first used to mean “a point of land.” Then, because one corner of a triangle looks something like a point of land sticking out into the sea, oddi came to mean “triangle.” A triangle that has one long point, like a point of land, may be

Dear Editor: How did the mathematical term googol get its name? K. R. Altura, Minnesota

Dear Editor: Did the word odd first mean numbers that are odd or things that are considered strange? H. A. Ames, Iowa

thought of as having two paired angles and one angle left over. In time, the Norse came to call something that was not matched or paired up oddi. During the time when Scandinavians dominated northern and central England in the Middle Ages, oddi was presumably borrowed into English, though it is first recorded only in 14th-century Middle English as the adjective odde meaning “without a corresponding mate.” At about the same time it was used with the meaning of an odd number or it could also mean “unconforming, irregular,” though in reference to people it usually meant “outstanding, illustrious.” The modern sense of “peculiar, eccentric” did not become widely used before the 17th century. 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 Word Puzzles Definition finDeR

DIFFICULTY: COMPLETION:

TIME:___________

Using the clues below, find and circle the words concealed in the letter grid.

The start of something (noun) Showing a lack of experience or knowledge (adjective) To take or keep in custody by authority of law (verb) A place where two things join (noun) Easily broken, cracked, or snapped (adjective)

SYnonYM UnSCRAMBLe

DIFFICULTY: COMPLETION:

Unscramble the letters below to form pairs of SYNONYMS. Watch out—some words can be unscrambled more than one way!

A V-shaped indentation (noun) A clumsy person (noun) Not acceptable to talk about or do (adjective) To utter with a low, inarticulate voice (verb) A narrow steep-walled canyon (noun) To have a very strong desire for something (verb) workman.com

TIME:___________

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