November 2019 BookPage

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DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

NOV 2019

New books from Carmen Maria Machado Anthony Bourdain Jami Attenberg Kevin Wilson Bill Bryson and more!

The magic of

erin

MORGENSTERN The author of The Night Circus returns with the haunting story of a long-lost library book.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and invite you to celebrate their 20th mystery!

ENTER THE SWEEPS AND WIN...

2

A framed print by long-time No. 1 Ladies’ artist Iain McIntosh 1

The new hardcover, To the Land of Long Lost Friends

signed by Alexander McCall Smith!

IAIN MCINTOSH

+ The Full no. 1 ladies detective agency library

See official rules and enter at BookPage.com

PANTHEON

ANCHOR

the book that started it all

no.

no.

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19

BookPage

®

NOVEMBER 2019

cover story Erin Morgenstern 20 The author of The Night Circus returns with a fantastic new tale

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Three women take the case

Gift books: food

24

For your perfect dinner date

Gift books: literary

36

Writing, fighting and the will to win

New historical perspectives

38

Illuminating the past for young readers

4 –13

Oge Mora Meet the author-illustrator of Saturday

reviews 30 32 39

Fiction Nonfiction Young Adult Children’s

Holiday Gift Guide

columns 14 15 15 16 16 18 19

“Whether read as a romance, a fairy tale, a lament, or combinations of the three: The Dollmaker is a bewitching story.”

Whodunit Lifestyles Romance Well Read Audio The Hold List Book Clubs

—Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“Beautifully written and deeply strange.”

—The Times (UK) Cover image credit Allan Amato

PRODUCTION MANAGER Penny Childress

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Elizabeth Grace Herbert

MARKETING MANAGER Mary Claire Zibart

PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Trisha Ping

SUBSCRIPTIONS Katherine Klockenkemper

DEPUTY EDITOR Cat Acree ASSOCIATE EDITOR Christy Lynch ASSOCIATE EDITOR Stephanie Appell ASSISTANT EDITOR Savanna Walker

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy CHILDREN’S BOOKS Allison Hammond CONTRIBUTOR Roger Bishop EDITORIAL INTERN Prince Bush

A Novel by

“Exquisitely dark… the novel’s unusual structure and compelling characters weave a hypnotic plot.”

Books for everyone on your list

PRESIDENT & FOUNDER Michael A. Zibart

The Dollmaker Nina Allan —Booklist (starred review)

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The mother of all secrets

Sarah Deming

Emily Flake Meet the author-illustrator of That Was Awkward

37 26

For the friend who’s read more than you

Adrienne Brodeur

34

39

features British sleuths

meet the author

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

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“[Allan’s] literary sensibility fuses the fantastic and the mundane to great effect.”

—The Guardian

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Fiction A small-town lawyer locks horns with a ruthless, powerful syndicate determined to keep a wrongfully accused man behind bars in John Grisham’s electrifying new thriller.

Harper

Doubleday

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Bestselling author Mitch Albom returns to nonfiction for the first time in over a decade to celebrate Chika, a young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.

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The Guardians

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Finding Chika

602

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’Tis the season for love and laughter . . .

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Home for the holiday

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Get your jingle boots rocked this holiday season with page-turning reads that celebrate the “home” in down-home.

Kensington 9780786044023

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Mistletoe kisses and more

Fill your Christmas with stolen kisses, second chances and unexpected love from today’s most beloved romance authors.

Give someone (or yourself!) one of these sparkling stories.

Zebra

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Gallery

5

Ninth House

Great book club reads

From bestselling author Leigh Bardugo comes a mesmerizing tale of power, privilege and dark magic set among the Ivy League elite.

There’s something for every book club (and book club friend): historical romance, a genre-bending literary debut and an acclaimed classic of dystopian fiction.

Flatiron $27.99

Forever 9781538764893

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Chills for the holidays

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Murder, mayhem and Christmas cozy mysteries

Three blockbuster authors return with pulse-pounding novels that beg to be read close to the fire.

Grand Central $16.99–$30

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Kick back with something sweet and indulge in these holly jolly Christmas capers from bestselling cozy mystery authors!

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Santa brought you a gift of two Cross detectives

A brilliant killer is trying to assassinate Alex Cross. Ali Cross is searching for his missing best friend. There are plenty of signature Cross thrills and action for readers of all ages.

Little, Brown

Kensington

Warrior of the Altaii Fantasy legend Robert Jordan’s never-beforepublished first novel is exciting for fans of the #1 bestselling The Wheel of Time® series, as well as a great entry point for new readers.

Tor

$27.99 9781250247650

5

6

Nonfiction

Me In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his roller-coaster lifestyle to becoming a living legend.

Holt $30

9781250147608

Grit & Grace

Wild Game

Women

From country music legend and Billboard chart-topper Tim McGraw comes a one-of-a-kind celebrity lifestyle book that melds personal story with advice to transform your life.

This is a brilliant memoir of a daughter living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.

“Gorgeous, addictive, unflinching.”

—J. Courtney Sullivan

National Geographic opens its century-old collection of 64 million photographs to reveal and honor the lives of women from around the globe.

Harper Wave $29.99

National Geographic $50

HMH $27

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Celebrate 35 years of Transformers!

All of Which I Saw

Transformers: A Visual History, the most comprehensive compilation of Transformers artwork ever assembled, is the definitive collectible for fans of all ages.

Viz Media

“Belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to know the reality of what America did in Iraq.”

—Quil Lawrence, former Baghdad Bureau Chief, NPR

$49.99

Schiffer Military

9781974710584

$34.95

Woodstock: 50 Years of Peace and Music

Southern Women This collection of original interviews, essays and portraits from 100 groundbreaking Southern women paints a progressive portrait of the region today.

6

$32.50

In this stunning visual history book, custom maps tell the story of World War II from the rise of the Axis powers to the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Woodstock: a single weekend in August 1969 that defined a generation.

Open this book and go back to those three magical summer days.

Harper Wave 9780062859365

World War II Map by Map

9781623545314

Imagine $29.99

9781465481795

DK $40

Zoology: The Secret World of Animals

Almanac 2020

Six Ingredients With Six Sisters’ Stuff

Whether 12 years old or 112, readers with an itch to know more about the world will be addicted to this high-energy book packed with new discoveries.

Whether you’re interested in specific animal groups, such as mammals or birds, or simply have a passion for wildlife photography, this beautiful book will delight, fascinate and surprise.

The eighth cookbook from the popular familyfriendly bloggers includes easy meals and “Kid Favorite” recipes—each using just six ingredients.

National Geographic $19.99

DK

9781465482518 9781426220524

$21.99

Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: The New Frontier

The #1 New York Times bestselling guide to the most unusual, curious, bizarre and mysterious places to visit is now updated with 120 new entries and a pullout map.

Celebrated National Geographic photojournalist Joel Sartore continues his Photo Ark quest, photographing species around the world that are escaping extinction thanks 9781426220593 to human efforts.

Food Network favorite Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman, cooks up exciting new favorites from her life on the ranch.

Workman $37.50

National Geographic

9780062561374

$40

The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs

Full Circle Laugh, reminisce and discover the inspiring story of fame, resilience and the reboot of a lifetime, all chronicled in a memoir from the woman behind Kimmy Gibbler, the zany neighbor from “Full House.”

This is the riveting story of how Bill Marriott grew the family business from a root beer stand to the largest hotel chain in the world.

Shadow Mountain

For the first time, America’s Test Kitchen is bringing their baking expertise to children— with the must-have baking cookbook for every kid chef!

Citadel

$29.99

$27 9781629726007

9780806539881

CBD

Guitar

This essential book on cannabis as medicine explains how Cannabidiol (CBD) can safely treat many health conditions with remarkable results, as well as low to no psychoactivity or negative side effects.

This lushly photographed book, presented in an irresistible slipcase, features 200 instruments in stunning detail. It’s a glorious gift for every guitar lover.

9781492677697

Sourcebooks Explore $19.99

How to Raise a Reader This is an indispensable guide to welcoming children—from babies to teens—to a lifelong love of reading, written by Pamela Paul and Maria Russo, editors of the New York Times Book Review.

Workman $35

North Atlantic

William Morrow Cookbooks $29.99

9781523506484

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final

9781629725994

Shadow Mountain

$50

The Photo Ark Vanishing

7

Workman

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7

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The Umbrella Academy Library Editions

Fun Choices

The inspiration for the Netflix hit!

Each oversize book collects an entire story arc, plus previously uncollected short stories and extensive sketchbook sections with creator commentary.

Dark Horse Comics $39.99 each 9781506715483

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Pop culture picks for everyone on your list Be a gift-giving legend with these delightful and unexpected books.

Dark Horse Comics $12.99–$24.99

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White Bird

Knopf

9780593105191

9780525639336

$25

$27.50

R.J. Palacio, #1 bestselling author of Wonder, makes her graphic novel debut with an unforgettable story of the power of kindness and unrelenting courage in a time of war. $24.99

9780525590460

9781984843265

$25

$15

9780525645535

Give yourself the gift of audio

Whether you’re home for the holidays or heading out on the road, great storytelling on audio helps to make the season bright.

Random House Audio $15–$27.50

A Trick of Light Stan Lee delivers a novel packed with pulsepounding, breakneck adventure and the exuberant invention that defined his career as the mastermind behind the Marvel universe.

HMH

$28 www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com

9780358117605

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Three manga masterpieces

Dragonwatch 3: Master of the Phantom Isle 582696

1 978142

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978142

159712

6

$9.99

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From a masterpiece of horror to a macabre orphanage to a superpower-filled adventure, these three classic manga series are the perfect gifts for lovers of Japanese art.

Shonen Jump

In the third entry to the #1 New York Times bestselling Dragonwatch series, we leave the leafy woodlands of Fablehaven and enter an entirely new world: a fantastical aquatic dragon sanctuary.

Shadow Mountain

$9.99–$27.99

$18.99 9781629726045

The Secret Commonwealth

Beverly, Right Here

Dear Evan Hansen

Return to the parallel world of His Dark Materials and discover what comes next for Lyra, dubbed one of fantasy’s most indelible heroines by the New York Times Magazine.

Revisiting once again the world of Raymie Nightingale, two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo turns her focus to the tough-talking, inescapably tenderhearted Beverly.

From the creators of the hit Broadway show comes the groundbreaking, bestselling novel.

Knopf

Poppy $18.99

Candlewick

$22.99

$16.99 9780763694647

9780553510669

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Join the Explorer Academy adventure

This thrilling new series combines spellbinding storytelling with cool science and is based on the real adventures of National Geographic explorers.

“A fun, exciting and action-packed ride that kids will love.” —J.J. Abrams, filmmaker

National Geographic

$9.99–$16.99 9781426338106

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10

Kids C Jumped Over Three Pots and a Pan and Landed Smack in the Garbage Can 9780764357954

“A nifty caper showcasing teamwork, letter recognition, and word formation.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Schiffer

An Elephant & Piggie Biggie Volume 2!

Unlimited Squirrels: Who Is the Mystery Reader?

Spark early readers’ imaginations with a fivebook, bind-up series that includes I Am Going!, We Are in a Book!, I Broke My Trunk!, Listen to My Trumpet! and I’m a Frog!

Mo Willems, creator of the revolutionary, awardwinning Elephant & Piggie books, presents book two in the breakout Unlimited Squirrels series for early readers.

Hyperion 9781368045704

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Hyperion $12.99

Must-have picture books from Magination Press

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Celebrate the combined powers of psychology and literature! These books make navigating life’s challenges a little easier for children, parents and caregivers.

Magination $14.99–$17.99

$14.99

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Entertaining books for the littlest reader in your life Pack your little bookworm’s shelves with choose-your-fate graphic novels, nostalgic picture books and more.

Quirk

$9.99–$19.99

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Dr. Seuss’s Horse Museum

9781683691624 $19.99

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Outback

The Kids’ Book of Paper Love

Embark on an eyeopening adventure in the land Down Under, and see eight creatures in astounding motion in the latest from the New York Times bestselling series.

The never-beforepublished Dr. Seuss book about creating and looking at art is like a visit to a museum—with a horse as your guide!

Brimming from cover to cover with projects and paper surprises, this book begs to be folded, cut up, collaged, doodled on and shared.

Workman

Random House

$26.95

$18.99

$14.99

9781523508235

Workman

$19.95 9781523508143

9780399559129

The inspiring book-to-movie A Dog’s Purpose series by W. Bruce Cameron continues!

This season, #1 bestselling author W. Bruce Cameron has books for every dog lover in the family.

9781250163516

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$16.99

9780765388414

$7.99

Forge

$7.99–$26.99

The Night of His Birth Poetic text by Newbery Medalist Katherine Paterson reveals the intimacy of that unforgettable night long ago, when the mother of Jesus was the first to welcome him into a world he would change forever.

Flyaway

$18

9781947888128

12

Inspiration 100 Days to Brave Deluxe Edition

The Last Man at the Inn This fictional account of Jesus is seen through the eyes of a Jew who witnesses moments in Jesus’ life and wonders if he is truly the Messiah.

Dare to spend the next 100 days discovering that you are braver than you know and stronger than you thought possible.

Now in a beautiful leathersoft cover.

9780310454496

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Zondervan $19.99

9781629726038

Chicken Soup for the Soul $14.95

$16.99 9781400203 77

2

9781400213023

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9781400214

693

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Get your Christmas spirit on! Who wouldn’t love these happy, heartwarming and sometimes hilarious tales of holiday joy?

$49.99

Chicken Soup for the Soul: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

345

9781496433824

$49.99

9780310453

Knox

278 9780785229

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This is the Bible for all times, regardless of life phase or circumstance.

Study notes, Scripture application and in-depth features bring eternal truth into everyday life.

$18.99

Inspirational gifts for everyone on your list

NLT Life Application Study Bible, 3rd Edition

9781611599916

Shadow Mountain

You can check everyone off your holiday shopping list with these great new releases! With something for all age groups, these titles will lift their spirits during the season and all year long.

HarperCollins Christian $16.99–$49.99

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9780785226376

$26.99

Overcomer movie resources for the whole family

9781535949880 $12.99

9781535948920 $22.99 $22.99 9781535948920

9780785224501 9781535949859 $12.99

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From bestselling authors Alex Kendrick, Stephen Kendrick, Priscilla Shirer and Amy Parker come four books inspired by the feature film.

B&H

$25.99

9780310351726

Soul-Stirring

’Tis the season for a great read, whether it’s an unexpected romance, a historic Southern novel or a holiday gift that Narnia lovers will treasure.

Thomas Nelson $17.99–$26.99

Find holiday inspiration

Two books touch the heart! Discover the story behind the million-selling song “Redeemed” by Mike Weaver, singer for Big Daddy Weave. Pastor Robert Morris will inspire you to experience true rest and make it a priority in your life.

Gratitude, giving, togetherness and a touch of holiday magic . . .

9781496715845 $20

$12.99–$22.99

FaithWords $22 each

97815460335859

$17.99

9781546010166

9781496721907 $22.95

9781496717832 $15.95

Give heartwarming reads this Christmas season.

Kensington

$15.95–$22.95

whodunit

by bruce tierney Lethal Pursuit

If you wanted to learn about Victorian England, you can read scholarly texts that dissect every nuance of societal caste and political intrigue. Or you can do what I do and pick up a Will Thomas novel featuring private enquiry agents Caleb Barker and Thomas Llewellyn, the latest being Lethal Pursuit (Minotaur, $27.99, 9781250170408). This time out, the duo is charged with the delivery of a satchel to Calais, the French seaport closest to England. It should be a pretty straightforward task, but the previous bearer of the satchel thought that as well—moments before his murder, just steps from his planned destination. Suffice it to say that more murders will follow, as the contents of the satchel are rumored to be holy religious documents dating back to the time of St. Paul, and a host of agents (on both sides of the spectrum of holiness) will go to any lengths to get their hands on them. Think a Victorian-era Archie Goodwin narrating the exploits of a sleuth with an Indiana Jones-esque penchant for derring-do, and you will begin to get an idea of the vibe of this series. There is really nothing out there quite like it.

A Cruel Deception The armistice that ended World War I silenced the mortar fire but did little to relieve chronic shortages of food and medical supplies, nor the debilitating malaise that gripped postwar Europe. For nurse Bess Crawford, peace means an imminent change of scenery. Just shortly after the opening of Charles Todd’s latest thriller, A Cruel Deception (Morrow, $26.99, 9780062859839), Bess is summoned to her matron’s office and receives an assignment to travel to war-ravaged Paris. Her mission is to determine the whereabouts and condition of a young army lieutenant, who happens to be the son of the aforementioned matron. Early on, Bess turns up the missing soldier and finds him in pretty rough shape. Badly wounded, he has become addicted to laudanum while trying to deal with the pain. He suffers from sporadic amnesia, and Bess harbors some suspicions about both his backstory and his intentions going forward. A couple of military types offer Bess their assistance in her efforts to determine the truth, but she cannot shake the nagging doubt that one or both are rather too conveniently available in her life and may have goals that are at cross purposes to hers. As always, the mother-son writing team of Charles Todd does a magnificent job with atmosphere and dialogue, all while keeping their good-hearted heroine one step (but only one) ahead of the bad guys.

The Old Success Martha Grimes’ series featuring Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury is unusual in several respects, not least of which is that the reader would never suspect that Grimes is an American writer. In terms of verbiage, slang and speech pattern, she channels the British vernacular flawlessly. This time out, in The Old Success (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 9780802147400), Jury is summoned to a small island off Land’s End, Cornwall, to investigate a murder in which much of the trace evidence has been washed away by the relentless waves that pound England’s most westerly point. It is but the first in a trio of murders that share a common factor or two, not to mention a handful of common suspects. Figuring into all of this somehow is another dead man, perhaps the only deceased person mentioned in the book who died of natural causes, whose passing left complicated opinions in its wake.

Some people revere him as being just shy of a saint, while others hint at a much darker side, suggesting that had he lived a bit longer, he could have been the poster villain of the #MeToo movement in the U.K. Some interesting subplots (one with a race horse, one with a race car and one with an updated take on the Baker Street Irregulars) help to tie up some loose ends and keep the reader guessing as they wait for the surprising big reveal.

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H Galway Girl Ken Bruen peppers his tales of world-weary ex-Garda (Irish cop) Jack Taylor with shamrock bromides that are often thought provoking or darkly humorous as Taylor muddles his violent way through the damp and peaty Irish landscape. “In Galway / They were forecasting a shortage of CO2 (no, me neither). / Which is what puts the kick, fizz, varoom in beer, soft drinks. / Ireland, without beer, in a heat wave.”

You can almost hear the “tsk tsk” as Bruen imagines the mayhem that will ensue. Galway Girl (Mysterious Press, $26, 9780802147936) finds Taylor beleaguered by a trio of spree killers targeting the Garda, a priest whose moral compass has been severely compromised and a surly falconer with an injured but nonetheless lethal bird of prey. Taylor’s ongoing battle with the demon rum (actually Jameson Irish Whiskey, in his case) hovers in the background of every scene, like some ominous uncle, familiar yet anything but benign. Bruen’s command of language and metaphor is on full display in his trademark staccato verse, and his sense of place is superb. And to top it all off, the final scene is so artfully and powerfully rendered that I had to go back and read it again. And again. And I likely will again.

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

lifestyles

by susannah felts

H Garden to Glass Mike Wolf’s Garden to Glass (Turner, $26.99, 9781684422081), which explores the intersection of gardening, foraging and beverage design, offers instant appeal. Wolf, who worked with chef Sean Brock at Husk in Nashville, is a curious and passionate guide, taking readers into his garden and onto trails where he gathers ingredients for bitters, cordials, shrubs and more. These are featured in recipes that will enhance any bar program or make you one hell of a home mixologist. Beautiful watercolor illustrations and interviews with specialists give this study of botanical cocktails a dimension not achieved in other guides.

Pity the Reader Pity the Reader (Seven Stories, $32.95, 9781609809621), a hefty, essential new volume of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing advice and life stories, is certainly a book first and foremost for writers, with chapters on plot, character, talent and diligence. But it’s also a gold mine for any Vonnegut fan or creative seeker. Suzanne McConnell, our trusty guide through the book and a student and friend of the late author, exhaustively plumbs Vonnegut’s archives, revealing choice bits from interviews, letters, drafts and published novels. It’s fascinating to observe Vonnegut’s revisions (and rejections) and fascinating, too, to learn how the nitty-gritty of his life shaped his works. And it’s a joy to see how McConnell interacts with the ideas and words of her mentor, weaving and contrasting them with insight from her own multidecade teaching career.

A Place at the Table

romance

by christie ridgway

H Angel in a Devil’s

Arms

Scandal and passion go hand in hand in Julie Anne Long’s historical romance Angel in a Devil’s Arms (Avon, $7.99, 9780062867490). Angelique Breedlove believes she’s escaped her past and her bad luck with men. Then Lucien Durand, the bastard son of a duke, walks into her boarding house. After being presumed dead for a decade, Lucien has revenge on his mind, but the lovely Angelique just might distract him from his goal. Their attraction could lead to trouble, so the pair strive for a friendship that perhaps brings them closer than if they’d become lovers. Yet their every encounter shimmers with sensuality. Readers will sigh as Angelique and Lucien share their emotional wounds, and well-drawn supporting characters serve as an amusing counterpoint to the poignant central narrative. Filled with deep longing, this story is a stellar example of the genre.

The Devil in the Saddle A Texas princess falls for a contemporary cowboy in The Devil in the Saddle (Berkley, $7.99, 9780451492371) by Julia London. When her wedding is canceled due to her cheating fiancé, Hallie Prince finds a friendly face in her childhood friend, ex-Army Ranger Rafe Fontana.

Rafe has been in love with Hallie forever but assumed he never had a chance with the town’s golden girl. What follows is a slow-­ building friends-to-lovers romance, the tension provided by two cautious hearts. London’s characters are good people with grown-up problems, and readers will root for them to take a chance on each other. This is an emotionally mature modern-day romance with a touch of Texas sparkle.

This Earl of Mine

Now more than ever, America must celebrate the countless contributions of its foreign-born population. A Place at the Table (Prestel, $40, 9783791385181), a project from the Vilcek Foundation, which recognizes the work of immigrants in the arts, sciences and humanities, takes up this cause in stunning fashion. The editors gather profiles of 40 of the best foreign-born chefs working in cities across the U.S. today and share recipes from each. The result is a trip around the world through cuisine, from Thai Dang’s grilled salmon and snow fungus salad with Vietnamese herbs, to Erik Bruner-Yang’s takoyaki hush puppies, to Maneet Chauhan’s naanzanella. Simply scanning the ingredient lists and gazing upon the photographs of each dish feels like a journey, something of a foodie fever dream.

A book that begins with a Regency heiress seeking a bridegroom in Newgate Prison promises daring adventure, and Kate Bateman gives readers just what they’re looking for in This Earl of Mine (St. Martin’s, $7.99, 9781250305954).

Georgiana Caversteed seeks to secure her inheritance by marrying a man sentenced to death. However, Benedict Wylde, coerced by his jailers to marry the beauty, is actually an aristocratic Bow Street agent in disguise. Later, upon meeting at a London society gathering, Benedict’s identity is revealed—and sparks fly.

The fast-paced plot still finds room for sensual romance to blossom, and charismatic, roguish secondary characters abound. This Earl of Mine is pure fun.

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

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

15

well read | by robert weibezahl

audio

by anna zeitlin

H The Dutch

Trailblazing academic women This collective portrait of mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers and her circle of friends at Oxford University tells the remarkable story of women who remade the world.

Most readers today know Dorothy L. Sayers as a mystery writer—creator of the golden-age detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane— but in her lifetime she was also renowned for, among other things, her theological essays and a popular translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But as Mo Moulton tells in The Mutual Admiration Society (Basic, $30, 9781541644472), Sayers was also at the center of a circle of female friends, formed as Oxford University undergraduates, who became lifelong supporters of one another and their socially progressive work in the arts, academia and the advancement of women’s causes.

Moulton’s detailed portrait of these smart, tradition-breaking women highlights not only their lesser-­ known accomplishments but also the strength they derived from each other at a time when women were only just beginning to demand and receive their due.

When Sayers arrived at Oxford’s Somerville College in the years before World War I, women were allowed to attend the same lectures, do all the same coursework and take all the same exams as their male counterparts, but they were denied an actual degree.

(That “privilege” came a few years later, along with the right to vote and other overdue liberties.) Undeterred, Sayers and her female peers threw themselves into their academic and extracurricular pursuits with sometimes giddy abandon. A fluid contingent of six or

seven of them banded together to form a writing group they dubbed the Mutual Admiration Society with intentional irony—preempting any outside criticism from those who would invariably accuse them of being elitist or clannish. The young women were all from similar middle-­class Edwardian backgrounds, although their political leanings and worldviews varied to some degree.

After university, the women’s lives followed sometimes concurrent, sometimes divergent paths.

Most became writers or scholars, although one became a midwife, child-rearing expert and birth-control advocate. Moulton chronicles their public accomplishments and personal episodes with evenhandedness, including their romantic attachments to both women and men and the small scandals that shaped them individually and as a group.

What Moulton best accomplishes in this intimate and scholarly book is a re-creation of a world in transition. The Mutual Admiration Society came of age at a vital juncture in history, a time of new opportunity for women (although still limited by today’s standards). Steadfast, these women seized that opportunity and formed what Moulton calls “a profoundly optimistic project”: “Loving one another, they built a kind of family beyond the structures of patriarchy. . . . Offering one another space for reinvention, they helped to change what it meant to be born female in the twentieth century.”

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

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

16

House

Tom Hanks summons up a kind of nostalgic Americana in his reading of Ann Patchett’s new novel, The Dutch House (HarperAudio, 10 hours), a modern wicked-­stepmother fable that follows narrator Danny and his older sister, Maeve, throughout their lives. After Danny and Maeve’s mother abandons them, their father remarries a woman who has no interest in them. When he dies and leaves almost everything to their stepmother, including their grand house, the injustice of it guides the rest of their lives. Patchett effortlessly navigates through time, capturing the essence of her characters’ stories in a subtle portrait. Hanks truly transforms into Danny; after hearing his narration, I can’t imagine the book without it.

The Water Dancer In The Water Dancer (Random House Audio, 14 hours), Ta-Nehisi Coates’ magical debut novel, readers meet Hiram, an enslaved man with special abilities. Through Hiram’s struggles and those of the people he encounters, Coates makes the emotional costs of slavery tangible, from the families who are separated to the free mother whose children are taken from her and sold. Coates gives his characters an original way of speaking that captures the ethos of the time without being confusing to the modern ear.

He refers to the enslaved as the “Tasked” and the enslavers as the “Quality,” an intentional choice that encourages the listener to question the word slave and its denial of humanity. Hearing the words spoken in actor Joe Morton’s rich voice ties the book to the oral tradition and entrenches the story in legend. Coates brings his experience in journalism and nonfiction to ground the book in research, using history to create something new and wholly original.

Mythos With endless British wit, Stephen Fry puts his own spin on classical Greek mythology in Mythos (Hachette Audio, 15.5 hours).

The storylines stick pretty closely to the classics, while the added playfulness is all Fry. He fleshes out the gods, heroes and mortals, giving them more personality and filling in their interpersonal relationships.

Their nutty antics play out in an absurd fashion. It’s what would happen if you handed Monty Python the keys to Mount Olympus. Fry has a strong love for the English language, which his narration reinforces as beautifully strung words slip over his tongue, and his dry delivery bolsters the comedy. It’s a good listen for families with teens, but a bit risqué for young children.

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

______________ a n ______________

AU D I O B O O K

FOR EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST READ BY SUSAN ERICKSEN

READ BY ROBERT BATHURST

The newest thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author J.D. Robb

“Bathurst nails it.”

—AudioFile on Glass Houses, Earphones Award winner

READ BY THE AUTHORS

READ BY TARON EGERTON WITH ELTON JOHN

From the iconic musicians Tegan and Sara comes a memoir about high school, detailing their first loves and first songs in a compelling look back at their humble beginnings

In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life

READ BY MICHAEL STUHLBARG

READ BY LAUREN FORTGANG & MICHAEL DAVID AXTELL

“You don’t have to have read Call Me by Your Name, Aciman’s 2007 bestselling novel turned Oscar-nominated movie, to immediately fall in love with this sexy, melancholic follow-up.”

—Buzzfeed

The brilliant, fantastical adult debut from #1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo

READ BY LOUISE BREALEY

READ BY WILLIAM DUFRIS

From the author of the multi-million copy bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz comes a new novel based on an incredible true story of love and resilience

A Dog’s Promise continues the story started in the bestselling A Dog’s Purpose, now a major motion picture

Available from

Macmillan Audio

feature | the hold list

You’re invited to dinner We love many fictional characters, but when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, it takes a special person to earn a place at our families’ tables. These characters would get our plus-ones. Now, who remembers if we pass to the left or right?

Barbie Chang from Helen Loomis Barbie Chang from Dandelion

By Victoria Chang Wine For the eponymous main character in Chang’s poetry collection, being a child is about grieving and caring for an ailing mother; for me, childhood was particularly the latter. My mother gratefully calls me a hero for doing something as simple as writing her resume or taking care of her when she’s sick. My conversation with Barbie Chang would be about not only the mother-child relationship but also distance and sacrifice, “how quickly the air // around [us fills] in the space afterwards” when our mothers leave—Barbie Chang’s mother in death, mine as I matriculate into adulthood—and the sacrifices mothers make. I want to have dinner with Barbie Chang, and I also cannot wait to have dinner with my mother.

—Prince, Editorial Intern

By Ray Bradbury I consider this summery, small-town novel to be Bradbury’s masterpiece, its series of short stories offering some of the most beloved, idyllic scenes in my reading memory, from a paean to mowing the grass to the hopeful creation of a “Happiness Machine.”

Some tales crackle with the discovery of being alive, while others curl into the bittersweetness of memory and old age. In one story, we meet 95-year-old Helen Loomis, who is like a Miss Rumphius who speaks graciously, openly and ever kindly about her long and eventful life, the loneliness and freedom of her travels, her wildness and never marrying. Her story is one of love—and everyone at my family dinner would fall totally and helplessly in love with her.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Ralph S. Mouse from The Mouse and the Motorcycle

By Beverly Cleary My family likes animals.

When my dad was in college, he had a rooster named Jack who lived in his apartment. Later, he and my mom had a kinkajou named Pooh Bear who slept in the cabinets.

I’ve picked up the exotic animal baton by adopting two chinchillas (Rupert and Terrence Howard). So if I had to bring a guest of honor to dinner, my family would certainly appreciate if it were a mouse. There are, of course, many fine mice in literature, but Ralph S. Mouse is the obvious standout choice. He’s cute, he has great stories about escaping danger (essential for an ideal dinner guest), and best of all—at least in my Suzuki-driving family—he can do motorcycle tricks.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Gansey from The Raven Boys

By Maggie Stiefvater Under the right circumstances, I’d love to meet any of Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle protagonists, but Richard Campbell Gansey III is the only one who’d be at ease in any social situation, including dinner with my family. For example: “Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and . . . they liked him back, Gansey could have had any and all of the friends that he wanted.”

He’d bring flowers for my mother. He’d call my father “sir.” He’d compliment the meal and offer to help with the dishes. And after dinner, driving me home in his beat-up Camaro, he’d ask, a gleam in his eye, “How much do you know about dead Welsh kings?”

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Each month, BookPage staff share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.

18

Circe from Circe

By Madeline Miller There is probably no one with a more extensive or fascinating array of stories to tell at the Thanksgiving table than Circe. In Miller’s gorgeous reimagining of the legendary sorceress, Circe encounters Medea, Odysseus, Hermes, Athena and many more iconic figures. She is witness to some of the most well-known stories in Greek mythology, and through Miller’s cleareyed, rigorously researched perspective, figures of fable become complicated, contradictory beings of flesh and blood (or ichor) rather than cold marble.

Also, it’s important to note that many characters are either deeply dismissive of or outright hostile to poor, exiled Circe. As such, she quite frankly deserves a nice family meal where she can sit back and be the highly deserved center of love and attention.

—Savanna, Assistant Editor

book clubs

by julie hale

H The Library Book Susan Orlean offers an homage to libraries while investigating a mystery in The Library Book (Simon & Schuster, $16.99, 9781476740195).

Orlean delivers a riveting account of the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, which burned for over seven hours, was extinguished with roughly 3 million gallons of water and damaged or destroyed approximately a million books. In recounting the aftermath of the disaster, Orlean chronicles the investigations that ensued and the eventual arrest of an arson suspect—a disturbed young actor named Harry Peak. Along the way, she tracks the history of the Los Angeles Public Library and interviews librarians about their duties and the challenges they face on the job. This intriguing title is also a touching meditation on the author’s lifelong love of libraries and the invaluable services they provide to society.

BOOK CLUB READS FOR ING FORSPR FALL IF ONLY I COULD TELL YOU

by Hannah Beckerman

A September Book of the Month Club Selection

“I loved it (even though it made me cry).”

—JOJO MOYES, #1 New York Times bestselling author

THE POPPY WIFE

by Caroline Scott

“A beautiful, tender novel which explores the aftermath of the Great War, and the shattered lives left behind.”

—HAZEL GAYNOR, New York Times bestselling author

Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams Scout, $16, 9781501196027 Queenie, a young woman of Jamaican British background, tries to forget her white ex-boyfriend as she reenters the complicated world of interracial dating in this smart, briskly paced novel that explores issues of gender and relationships.

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken Ecco, $16.99, 9780062862860 Local eccentric Bertha Truitt opens a bowling alley in Salford, Massachusetts, in the early 1900s. The alley stays in her family for generations, becoming the foundation for a quirky, compelling narrative about inheritance, connection and tradition.

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer Back Bay, $16.99, 9780316524148 After learning about photography from the artist Man Ray, model Lee Miller embarks on a career in Europe, pursuing art and love to their ultimate ends. Skillfully blending fact and fiction, Scharer makes an impressive debut with this bold historical novel.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker Random House, $17, 9780812984668 For dystopian fiction full of provocative questions but light on the violence often present in the genre, try Walker’s haunting portrait of a community torn apart by a mysterious, airborne sleeping sickness.

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

MARILLA OF GREEN GABLES

by Sarah McCoy

“Prepare to meet Marilla, a captivating heroine who will transport you back to the treasured world of Anne of Green Gables.”

—SUE MONK KIDD, New York Times bestselling author

NOVEMBER ROAD

by Lou Berney

“Nothing less than an instant American classic. Haunting, thrilling—and indelible as a scar.”

—A. J. FINN, #1 New York Times bestselling author

t @Morrow_PB

t @bookclubgirl

f William Morrow I Book Club Girl

19

cover story | erin morgenstern college who finds a mysterious library book—about himself, no less— that leads him on a mind-bending adventure. The tale is divided into six books jam-packed with myths, fairy tales, lost seas, twisting tunnels, earthquakes, disappearances, mysteriously linked characters and, of course, plenty of peril, all adding up to “a book-centric fantasia.”

While The Night Circus centers on magic and illusion, The Starless Sea is a tribute to books and storytelling. “We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own,” Morgenstern writes. There’s even a character called the Story Sculptor, whose work certainly sounds autobiographical: “She created not one story but many. Stories within stories. Puzzles and wrong turns and false endings, in stone and in wax and in smoke. She crafted locks and destroyed their keys.” (Morgenstern wears an intricate handmade key around her neck, crafted by her favorite jeweler, J.L. Schnabel, whose work inspired several pieces of jewelry that appear in the novel.)

For fans who are expecting The Night Circus 2, Morgenstern says, “This one still has my sensibility, but it’s a very different book.”

And the author is different this time around, too. Morgenstern admits, “I don’t feel like the person who wrote The Night Circus. It’s been so long.

I’m in a completely different place.” Similarly, near the beginning of The Starless Sea, Zachary notes, “Every seven years each cell in your body has changed, he reminds himself. He is not that boy anymore.”

She wrote her debut while living in Salem, Massachusetts, and afterward moved to Boston, then Manhattan, and finally to the Berkshires in 2016. “It was a huge change, moving from a string of city apartments to the middle of the woods, but it’s been a really positive change,” she says, despite the fact that she discovered bats in the walls of her new home and that she couldn’t get internet or cable at her remote location for the first two years she lived there.

At that point, Morgenstern was hard at work on The Starless Sea, havThe Starless Sea ing begun writing it in earnest in 2015. As a serious painter earlier in life, Doubleday, $28.95, 9780385541213 she has a strong visual sense, and her new novel started with an archiFantasy tectural vision. “I just had this space in my head,” she says, “this subterranean library-esque space. I didn’t know what the story was, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell it.” She explains that it’s not unDown the rabbit hole with the author of The Night Circus usual for her stories to be guided by setting. “I Nothing much is happening in western Massachusetts on a sunny day have these big sprawling worlds in my head,” she says. “I don’t think in in early September, except for an occasional passing hay truck. In the plot.” In the case of The Night Circus, she was bored with her characters deserted courtyard of a cafe near her home, amid the rolling hills of the until she took them to the circus to see what would happen. (Plenty, as Berkshires, Erin Morgenstern revels in the peace and quiet. it would turn out.)

“I spend so much time by myself, I’m still practicing talking in front Morgenstern calls herself a “binge writer,” sometimes letting days of people,” Morgenstern says, laughing. “You change modes completely or weeks pass without writing, allowing passages to percolate. “I don’t going from writer mode and being by yourself, inside your head, to being write every day,” she says. “I think that advice gets so prescriptive.” She human with other people.” also doesn’t outline her stories, and for The Starless Sea, she had writFew authors have experienced more dramatic shifts than Morgenten and discarded nearly 100 pages before a helpful sentence finally stern, whose debut novel, The Night Circus, became a sensation upon its popped into her head (“There is a pirate in the basement”), which bepublication in 2011. “Everything that everyone ever told me doesn’t hapcame the book’s first line. “I didn’t really know where it was going,” she pen to debut authors happened to me,” she says. “No one can prepare recalls. Figuring out the book’s end proved equally challenging, and she you for that. So I kind of just did my best and came out the other side.” It changed it “a million times. . . . I think I probably drove my poor editor took a long time for her world to quiet down, she explains, until “all of a nuts.” sudden, it was just me and my computer again.”

Such a labyrinthine writing process is thematically perfect for ZachHer fans, champing at the bit, can’t wait to get their hands on her secary’s quest, which eventually leads him to a vast underground maze. ond release. A few, in fact, have already gotten tattoos referencing The When he asks his guide to explain his new surroundings, she replies, Starless Sea, a sprawling, delicious fantasy about 24-year-old Zachary “This is the rabbit hole,” one of numerous nods to Lewis Carroll. Noting Ezra Rawlins, a fortuneteller’s son and graduate student at a Vermont that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was originally called Alice’s Adven-

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© ALICE CARY

tures Underground, Morgenstern says, “I’m endlessly fascinated by how many mysteries there are beneath the surface of the earth, right there literally under your feet.”

The Starless Sea contains countless literary references, from Harry Potter to A Wrinkle in Time, F. Scott Fitzgerald and C.S. Lewis. It’s evidence of a life committed to books: The daughter of an elementary school librarian, Morgenstern used to pile up blankets and pillows in her closet, creating a cozy “reading cave”—which is exactly how Zachary first curls up with the mysterious book in his dorm room. As a handsome stranger named Dorian later tells Zachary, “Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.”

Morgenstern says, “That feeling of really falling into the story, like Alice in Wonderland’s deep dive, is something I look for when I read.

That’s what I wanted [The Starless Sea] to feel like. . . . So many childhood books are so rooted in that, like you can have these adventures when you’re 7 and that’s it. I don’t like that part of it.”

She first read Harry Potter for a class while studying theater and studio art at Smith College, becoming a fan of the series much later than many of her peers.

(Morgenstern says of Zachary’s unnamed fictional college, “It’s totally Smith.”)

Noting that many adults her age have lively discussions about things like Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, Morgenstern says, “I’m 41. I don’t really want to go to Hogwarts.

I don’t want to have homework. I don’t want to go to class. I want [a magical] experience that’s not school. I want places that have that sort of feel to them but still feel age-appropriate.”

As a result, the under­ground world of The Starless Sea has a dumbwaiter that leads to the kitchen, which quickly whips up any requested treat or drink. “It’s a very self-indulgent fantasy,” Morgenstern says. “I want a door in my wall where any sort of food I want will just appear.

And then I don’t have to do dishes. These are my grown-up fantasies.”

While she likes otherworldly and epic tales, her favorites are fantasies that “feel like they’re right next door.” Zachary, for instance, ends up in Manhattan at a literary masquerade ball and spends time roaming the city before finding the subterranean portal. “There’s something grounding [about the magic] that feels everyday and normal,” Morgenstern says.

Fans will be delighted to know that a third manuscript is tugging at Morgenstern’s heartstrings, even if at the moment it’s just a “handful of ideas.” So far, it seems to be a horror novel. Calling The Night Circus “a very autumnal book” and The Starless Sea a winter book, she says, “So I feel like I need to write a spring book, and then a summer book, and I’ll have a set.”

—Alice Cary

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feature | british sleuths

The lady doesn’t vanish—she investigates Three new mysteries gain extra depth from their settings in decadent Gilded Age New York, interwar London and rural World War II-era Britain.

Dowager countess Philomena Amesbury left England behind for the bright lights of turn-of-the-century Manhattan when the miserable husband she was practically sold off to finally had the good sense to die. Now Phil is determined to live life to the fullest— and it certainly helps that her bills are paid by a mysterious benefactor, Mr. X, who periodically leaves clues in her path. In Tell Me No Lies (Forge, $27.99, 9780765398741), author Shelley Noble turns Phil loose on a case with suspects to spare.

When the young heir to a fortune is found stuffed into a laundry chute after a party, investigating detectives would like nothing more than for Phil to butt out. But she received a heads-up about the case from Mr. X, and before long she’s on the intriguing trail. The clues lead her through the Plaza Hotel and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but much more is revealed at a country house where tempers grow short and the fog makes it dreadfully hard to see who’s milling about. Add in some tantalizing romantic potential (Lady Phil’s benefactor won’t show his face, but he does occasionally show up and spend the night) and a hot air balloon chase, and you’ve got suspense steeped in Gilded Age glamour, and a very good time indeed.

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The Body on the Train (Crooked Lane, $26.99, 9781643851600) pits investigator Kate Shackleton against, well, almost everyone by story’s end. Scotland Yard enlists her to help identify the titular body, which was found in a sack on a train carrying rhubarb. Kate finds credible information hard to come by among the Yorkshire residents she talks to. The train may have departed from there, but the community’s internal struggles have made them wary of outsiders. Soon Kate is investigating a second murder along with a labor dispute and a battle over land use—and trying to save her own neck in the bargain.

Author Frances Brody lets Kate wander at will, and it’s a pleasure to follow her. She stays at the home of a friend under the pretext of creating a local photography feature, and the photos she takes of people and places are described so vividly you can almost see them. The struggle to balance the rights of workers and the needs of an impoverished community makes for a tense backdrop, and Kate’s relationship with her friend is strained as she learns more about the friend’s role in both. When everyone’s motives are suspect, it’s impossible to know who to trust, and this thriller makes great use of that fact in a truly chilling climax.

Poppy Redfern is doing her bit for England’s war effort. Her family home and farm have been seized so the U.S. Air Force can use them, and Poppy serves as an air raid warden, helping with drills and checking the village for any glimpse of light through the blackout curtains. But when two young women who had been dating American servicemen are found strangled to death, suddenly wartime allies seem like potential enemies stationed too close to home. In Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders (Berkley, $16, 9781984805805) author Tessa Arlen layers suspicion on top of suspicion against a backdrop of privation and English resolve.

Local distrust of the “Yanks” runs so high that it may well divert attention away from a killer hiding in plain sight. But Poppy’s easy friendship with one of the Americans could be leading her to trust too readily. (It’s hard to be mad at someone who can get real beef in the midst of rationing.) She works out her theories of the case via a novel in progress whose protagonist always seems to have the answers she lacks. Vivid settings and high emotions keep the suspense at fever pitch, but it’s the characters that make Arlen’s series kickoff such a stunner.

—Heather Seggel

GIFTS THEY’LL OPEN AGA I N A N D AGA I N For the bookworm!

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gift books

For the friend with the best dinner reservations These books jump out of the oven and onto the page.

The holidays are galloping upon us like so many overachieving reindeer, and that means many of us are in vapor lock, wondering what to get our gastronaut (please, NOT “foodie”) friends and family. The possibilities run into the thousands, if not millions, but we’ve trekked off the road more traveled to discover some volumes that will surprise and delight.

In Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview (Melville House, $16.99, 9781612198248), the late chef, author, journalist and raconteur, never shy about expressing his opinion, states his case about food: “Well, there’s nothing more political. There’s nothing more revealing of the situation on the ground, whether a system works or not.” His words serve as a good guide through all these books, and in a person’s wider eating life.

Historically speaking, the “system,” especially as it pertains to women in restaurants, hasn’t always worked all that well. While the Irma Rombauers and Julia Childs and M.F.K. Fishers of the world were given wide berth in waxing poetic while guiding homemakers, in the pro kitchens of the world they were often overlooked or demeaned (or worse). No more. In Women on Food (Abrams, $30, 9781419736353), editor Charlotte Druckman enlists the aid of a talented brigade, including the likes of Nigella Lawson, Dorie Greenspan and Julee Rosso, to articulate the state of the food world from a female perspective. As the joke goes, “What do you call a woman chef?” “Chef.” I am in sympathy with the authors in hoping for a day, and soon, when we look back on a book like this and wonder why it was necessary.

Moving from the political to the aesthetic, Japan, perhaps more than any nation, has given life to the adage that “we eat with our eyes first.” And so it is with Bernard Radfar’s Chicken Genius: The Art of Toshi Sakamaki’s Yakitori Cuisine (Rare Bird, $40, 9781945572050). Aram Radfar’s informative, imaginative photography, alongside the book’s step-by-step recipes and techniques, is a delight to the eye as well as the appetite. It may take you a while to bring your knife skills up to pro level, but this book will aid you at every step, starting with the proper way to disassemble a whole chicken with some degree of craft, and just possibly art.

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Speaking of art, let’s turn to Wayne Thiebaud. He couldn’t have grown up anywhere other than Southern California for his canvasses to look the way they do. In Delicious Metropolis (Chronicle, $30, 9781452169934), he rolls out a dessert cart overflowing with pinwheel lollipops, pastel-frosted pastries and the promise of an endless summer, not a cloud in sight . . . unless it’s made from whipped cream.

And if every picture tells a story, it’s also true of every recipe, as Natalie Eve Garrett and her contributors prove in Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food From 31 Celebrated Writers (Black Balloon, $22, 9781936787791). From Anthony Doerr’s hilarious recipe for brownie mix (“Sit on floor. Cut open bag of brownie mix. Add water. Stir. Eat with fingers. Repeat when necessary.”) to Rosie Schaap’s moving tale of her first Passover Seder as a widow in New Mexico, Garrett has gathered not only the “what” of her talented essayists’ relationships with food, but more importantly the tragedies and triumphs behind the “why.”

If I were able to offer only one book to someone who cares to know about wine, it would be Jane Lopes’ Vignette: Stories of Life & Wine in 100 Bottles (Hardie Grant, $29.99, 9781743795323). Light and frizzante as a moscato but thoroughly researched, the book walks you through the often confusing world of viniculture with recommendations that will give you the confidence to peruse any carte du vin with authority.

At a time when many of us are moving toward a more plant-based diet, Abra Berens’ Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables (Chronicle, $35, 9781452169323) provides a veg-by-veg road map studded with tips, techniques and recipes geared toward getting the most out of the stuff we grow. Sure, you’ve grilled corn, but have you puréed it? Have you ever braised celery? Have you marinated peas? Berens not only shows you how but also explains why you should. It’s not strictly vegetarian, but it does place the plant at the center of the plate, rather than as an afterthought or mere side dish.

As Bourdain says in The Last Interview, “There are no secret recipes. There are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in a kitchen you are either told, open-source . . . or you have learned it over time, painfully.” With these books, you can sidestep some of those missteps—or just look at the pretty pictures. Either way, you’ll come away with a greater appreciation of the culinary arts, both visual and practical.

—Thane Tierney

gift books

For the friend who’s read more books than you Book lovers, bibliomaniacs, librarians at heart—call them what you will, some readers take the contents of their shelves very seriously. We’ve rounded up a quartet of titles for the literature lovers on your gift list.

The Penguin Classics Book (Penguin, $40, 9781524705879), edited by Henry Eliot, will send bibliophiles over the moon. Spotlighting 1,200 works and covering four centuries, this handsome volume provides an overview of the Penguin Classics imprint, which released its first title—a new translation of The Odyssey by E.V. Rieu—in 1946. Filled with archival gems including images of vintage covers and rare editions, all beautifully reproduced and ripe for perusal, the book gives readers a sense of the imprint’s enormous output. Eliot, a Penguin Classics editor, describes the volume as “a reader’s companion to the best books ever written.” Indeed, the diverse featured titles are drawn from every conceivable genre: poetry, drama, philosophy, fiction, history and more. The book stands as a tribute to Penguin Classics’ endeavor to publish accessible, affordable editions of essential literary works from around the world. Author biographies, précis of major literary movements and background on the development of Penguin Classics as a publishing entity make this tome a necessary addition to the library of every book lover.

of their subject matter, Great Goddesses is a provocative tribute to the power of female agency.

Any list of literature’s leading ladies would surely include the March sisters from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Part of the appeal of Alcott’s esteemed novel, which turns 150 this year, lies in her nuanced depictions of the siblings, who couldn’t be more dissimilar: Meg, mature and dutiful, is the eldest; headstrong Jo is a budding writer; delicate Beth has a kindhearted disposition; and Amy, the youngest, is a vivacious beauty. A fascinating new book pays tribute to Alcott’s heroines. In March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women (Library of America, $21.95, 9781598536287), authors Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley contribute essays on the little woman of their choice. In addition to reflecting on how the book impacted them, each contributor delves into the singular bond she feels to each sister, investigates Alcott’s inspirations and intentions and explores why the book remains relevant today. March Sisters is a must-have for steadfast fans and those new to Alcott’s novel.

Classics also serve as the foundation for Great Goddesses: Life Lessons From Myths and Monsters (Putnam, $15, 9780593085646), a new collection of poems and prose by British Indian author Nikita Gill. Mining ancient Greek Readers who live for trivia will find innumerable tidbits stories for feminist inspiration, Gill offers fresh interpretaof interest in Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers From Great Goddesses by Nikita Gill, tions of archetypal tales that feature formidable women— (St. Martin’s Griffin, $18.99, 9781250203625). Comprised courtesy of Putnam.

Artemis, Hera, Hestia, Penelope, the list goes on—each of queries posed to New York Public Library staffers, this with an indomitable spirit and distinctive destiny. In “Athena Rises,” the weird, wonderful book draws on archives dating back to the 1940s. Some goddess is at once coolly self-possessed and irrationally passionate, a figof the questions are sensible (“May a funeral be held on July 4th?”), some ure whose “heart wears wisdom skin / and wit-warmed splendor, / the are true curiosity ticklers (“How many seeds are there in a watermelon?”), echoes of a war cry holding / its four chambers together.” In “Gorgon and some appear calculated to confound (“What is the life cycle of an (A Letter to the Patriarchy),” Gill reenvisions the snake-haired Medusa: eyebrow hair?”). Questions of this kind would stretch the skills and stami“Perhaps the truth about Gorgons / is they are just women, / women na of the most long-suffering researcher. Yet library staff stepped up and who do not bend to the world or fit into the narrow mould you want supplied crisp, succinct responses to all inquiries. New Yorker illustrator them to.” Throughout, Gill includes “Mortal Interludes”—lyrical passagBarry Blitt captures the surreal, slightly mad mood of the proceedings in es of personal reflection that demonstrate the messages she gleans from his clever cartoons. This pocket-size book has enormous appeal. the myths. With hand-drawn illustrations that match the magnificence —Julie Hale

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interview | adrienne brodeur

The weight of secrets After a lifetime as her family’s secret keeper, Adrienne Brodeur faces the truth, finds compassion for her mother and breaks a generations-long pattern of dysfunction.

The best memoirs can resonate with readers who are the furthest removed from the book’s events. These stories gently tug on knotty threads and unspool to reveal a common humanity. For most readers, what happens to Adrienne Brodeur in her memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is incomprehensible. But in Brodeur’s talented hands, every reader who has ever had an unhappy mother can relate.

First, the story: One night, when Brodeur is 14 years old, her mother, Malabar, wakes her up.

Malabar was a divorced journalist and cookbook author who moved her children to Massachusetts to live with her wealthy new husband, a man who became ill not long after their marriage. On this life-altering night, Malabar gleefully shares with her daughter that a charismatic family friend, Ben—also married to someone who is not well—had kissed her.

Behind their spouses’ backs, Ben keeps kissing Malabar, and then some. A giddy Malabar updates her adolescent daughter about every twist and turn as the affair unfolds, from the beaches of Cape Cod to hotels in New York City.

Together, the three keep the affair a secret from both families. The deception seems to eat away only at Brodeur.

Still, Brodeur is pleased to be let into her enigmatic mother’s secret world. She counsels Malabar on how to hide the affair and even provides cover stories—uneasily, of course, but Brodeur had been manipulated into believing that “this affair was being conducted with everyone’s best interests at heart.” Throughout high school, college and young adulthood, her mom’s forbidden romance consumes Brodeur.

She dreads the day it might become known and hurt people she loves. (No spoilers, but what happens to both families is more complicated than the reader could ever imagine.)

The book is causing a stir in both the publishing industry and Hollywood. Fourteen publishing houses bid for Wild Game at auction, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paid a seven-figure advance. Brodeur sold the film rights to Chernin Entertainment, and filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) is helming the adaptation. Like any memoirist, Brodeur is ner-

vous about how such a personal story will be depicted on screen. But she’s read a first draft of a screenplay “that managed to capture all the emotional truth and essence and yet be very much its own thing,” she says.

Now 53, Brodeur says there wasn’t a specific moment when she knew her life story could be a memoir.

(She had a long history of shepherding other writers’ stories into existence, first as co-founder of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with director Francis Ford Coppola, and now as executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words.) A turning point came 14 years ago, she says, when she became a parent and experienced the mother-child bond from the other side.

“It dawned on me that I really needed to reckon with my past and that I didn’t want to repeat these—it’s sort of catchphrase-y—but inherited traumas, these things that had happened to me that seemed to have happened to generations of my family,” she says.

The “things” to which Brodeur refers are infidelity, violence, narcissism and alcoholism.

Additionally, Malabar suffered the death of her first child, Christopher, who choked to death at age 2, and an ensuing acrimonious divorce from Brodeur’s father, New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur. Adrienne acknowledges, “[My mother] had a much, much more difficult childhood and life than I ever did.”

But does a difficult life absolve Malabar of her mistakes? Brodeur says, “The surprising thing that took place in exploring what was a complicated part of my life was how . . . the need to forgive [my mother], on some level, took a back seat to the need to understand her.” While researching for the book, Brodeur returned to her own journals from this time, and she read through her mother’s copious notes on recipes and articles. “As I researched her life and put myself in her shoes, it

“For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

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Wild Game HMH, $27, 9781328519030

Memoir © JULIA CUMES PHOTOGRAPHY

became a path to forgiveness,” she says. “My heart expanded from going through this process. I truly believe that my mother did the best job she could, and obviously, she made enormous mistakes.”

It would be easy to dismiss Wild Game as shocking family drama. But Brodeur weaves together the story of her parentified childhood, the burdens of secret-keeping and her mother’s traumatic life such that we learn from her bottomless compassion.

“It’s a story of resilience and breaking patterns,” she says. “For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

As Brodeur faces her family’s secrets in Wild Game, she reveals the beauty in humanity’s messiness—most of all her own. And as with only the best memoirs, we the readers are better for it.

—Jessica Wakeman Visit BookPage.com to read our review of Wild Game.

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reviews | fiction

H All This Could Be Yours

By Jami Attenberg

Family Drama When we meet Victor Tuchman, the patriarch of New Orleans-based novelist Jami Attenberg’s All This Could Be Yours (HMH, $26, 9780544824256), he’s as good as dead. Which is just as well, since everyone agrees Victor is a monster. Now he languishes in comatose purgatory while the whole family is called home. Well, not home exactly, but to Victor and his wife Barbra’s condo in New Orleans, where they’ve lived for about a year. Nobody is sure why they left Connecticut, but it probably had something to do with Victor’s criminal activity.

Not that anyone knows what that activity is— except maybe Barbra.

One family member has questions. Alex, their daughter who lives in Chicago, is a tough-minded, recently divorced attorney who gave up on a relationship with her parents

H Your House Will Pay

By Steph Cha

Crime Fiction Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader. Your House Will Pay (Ecco, $26.99, 9780062868855) is based on a particularly sickening episode during a particularly sickening period in American history. In 1991 Los Angeles, Korean grocery store owner Soon Ja Du shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after accusing her of stealing. The horror was caught on video, and although Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she never went to jail.

Who was this woman who pulled the trigger? Who was the girl she shot? To answer this, Cha has fictionalized the players, with Du turned into Yvonne Park and Harlins into Ava Matthews, and has brought them to life through the eyes of their loved ones. In Yvonne’s case, this means her taciturn hus-

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years ago. But news that Victor is near death stirs in Alex a primal excitement. In a rare show of optimism, Alex has convinced herself that once her father is dead, her mother will spill the tea on the Tuchmans’ secret history.

Gary, Alex’s younger brother, has been living in New Orleans for several years and has no idea why his parents stopped honoring the decades-long unspoken agreement to stick to their own corners of the country. Gary, who is going through a marital crisis, just happens to be in Los Angeles on business when he gets the call.

He promises his mother he’ll find a flight home soon but can’t manage to force himself onto a plane.

Weaving together a riotous assortment

band, Paul, and their daughters, Miriam and Grace. After Yvonne kills Ava, the Parks escape into anonymity. They run a tiny pharmacy in a mall filled with modest Korean businesses and keep to themselves.

As for Ava, she and her brother, Shawn, were raised by their aunt Sheila after the death of their mother. Sheila’s son, Ray, is more like a brother than a cousin. The comings and goings of this African American family are far more dramatic than those of the reclusive Parks. Shawn and Ray have been in and out of gangs and, unlike Yvonne, in and out of jail. For most of the book, they’re middle-aged and determined to stay on the straight and narrow. Ray is a husband to the faithful Nisha and a father to their children, and Shawn is helping his girlfriend raise her adorable toddler. Then something terrible happens, and the Parks and the Matthewses are thumped back to square one.

The heart of the book is how alike these people are. They work, they eat, they pray, they love; their devotion to their families is painful.

They are caught up in a racial pathology that came into play long before the Parks emigrated to America and before any member of the Matthews family was born. That pathology led them to turn on each other.

What Cha wants the reader to understand through her straightforward prose is that none of what happened between these two families had to happen, and everybody’s house pays.

—Arlene McKanic

of threads—the stories of three generations of Tuchmans as well as a smattering of other characters pulled into their orbit—Attenberg tenderly mines their family history and massive dysfunction not for clues as to what created the monstrous Victor but for what a monster can create in spite of himself. Her characters—flawed, defensive, overwhelmed and frequently endearing—fizz off the page.

Their inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.

—Kathryn Justice Leache

H The Revisioners

By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Family Saga Following her award-winning debut, A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s The Revisioners (Counterpoint, $25, 9781640092587) is a passionate exploration of liberty, heritage, sisterhood and motherhood in New Orleans.

In the 1920s, Josephine takes over her husband’s land after his death. The farm is flourishing, but when a suspicious white family moves in nearby, Josephine discovers too late their affiliation to the Ku Klux Klan. In 2017, Ava, a biracial single mother descended from Josephine, has just been laid off. She takes up her white grandmother’s offer to move in together, a proposal that seems attractive at first, until her grandmother begins to have violent outbursts.

Sexton’s characters’ realistic interior thoughts drive the novel, revealing hidden emotions of apprehension and nostalgia. Ava and Josephine display an unusual ability to discern people’s

reviews | fiction motives; Ava has a unique perception of her mother, and Josephine understands her son’s struggle to break out from his father’s shadow.

Though they experience the world at different times and through different circumstances, their worlds intersect through a shared purpose: to offer support, comfort and healing.

Despite everything, Ava and Josephine hold on to hope, refusing to be bound by the constraints of their eras. The Revisioners is an uplifting novel of black women and their tenacity.

—Edith Kanyagia

On Swift Horses

By Shannon Pufahl

Historical Fiction It’s 1956, and in the American West, military servicemen are returning from Korea and Japan looking for work, the fledgling interstate system is going up, and bomb tests draw Nevada tourists to watch the explosions. This is the backdrop for Shannon Pufahl’s assured debut, On Swift Horses (Riverhead, $27, 9780525538110), set in a time and place where the new and old rub up against each other, often uncomfortably.

As the novel opens, Muriel has left her native Kansas for Southern California to join her new husband, Lee. Lee gets a factory job, and Muriel waits tables at the Heyday Lounge near the Del Mar race track. As she listens to the bar’s regulars, she picks up some insider horse-racing knowledge, which she chooses not to share with Lee. She also pines for Julius, Lee’s unruly younger brother. Julius, meanwhile, gambles and risks his life, first in California, then in Las Vegas and Tijuana, Mexico.

As different as Muriel and Julius are, they both harbor secrets—one of which Muriel shares with Julius early in the story. And they’re both trying to find a way to love more truly and openly, since neither fits into the strictures that 1950s America wants to keep them in.

On Swift Horses offers many painful reminders of the damage that repression can do, but it’s also a deep-breathing, atmospheric novel.

Pufahl renders postwar San Diego, the characters’ rural poverty and 1950s closeted gay life in careful detail, spinning plain language into beautiful images. Her prose carries hints of

other writers who combine the bleak and the hopeful, such as Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner and Kent Haruf. While the novel’s middle drags a little, Muriel’s and Julius’ journeys are compelling and surprising. Pufahl is a novelist to watch.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

Nothing to See Here

By Kevin Wilson

Family Drama Kids are unpredictable.

They suddenly love food they once thought disgusting. And sometimes they just might spontaneously combust.

In Nothing to See Here (Ecco, $26.99, 9780062913463), Kevin Wilson doesn’t dwell on the science of human combustion. Instead, he uses the phenomenon as a clever metaphor for human behavior, especially as it relates to a seemingly privileged family.

Lillian Breaker, the novel’s 28-year-old narrator, is anything but privileged. She grows up poor in Tennessee but is determined to seek a better life, so she earns a scholarship to the prestigious Iron Mountain Girls Preparatory School. She develops a fast friendship with Madison Billings, a rich girl whose family owns a chain of department stores. They’re classmates for a year, until another student rats on Madison for having cocaine in her room. The Billings family’s solution? Bribe Lillian’s mother and get Lillian to take the rap.

The young women go their separate ways until years later, when Madison is the wife of a senator who had twins with a previous spouse.

The senator is eager to assume higher political office, but the 10-year-old twins are a liability.

Whenever something upsets them, they burst into flames, damaging everything around them but leaving their own bodies unharmed.

Madison hires Lillian to live on the family estate and act as governess to the two children.

What follows is a series of revelations for all parties, as Lillian discovers untapped maternal instincts and Madison and her husband learn more about their family dynamics.

Parts of the novel go on too long, but Nothing to See Here poignantly uses its high concept to make a larger point: Embarrassing behavior often stems from a person’s emotions

and anxieties. The key is to address them before an easily resolved problem becomes a major conflagration.

—Michael Magras

H The Innocents

By Michael Crummey

Literary Fiction Award-winning poet and novelist Michael Crummey’s work draws imaginatively from the history and landscape of his native Newfoundland. The Innocents (Doubleday, $26.95, 9780385545426), his fifth novel, is the riveting story of an orphaned brother and sister whose relationship is tested by hardship and isolation in 19th-century coastal Labrador.

Ada and Evered Best live in a cove in the far northern province. Their home is a stretch of rocky coast with a simple shelter, and they survive with only the most rudimentary information passed down by their parents. The siblings support themselves by catching and salting cod, which they trade for supplies twice a year, as well as by tending a small garden and trapping the occasional animal for meat. The repetition of the changing seasons defines the pair’s existence—the breaking of the ice at the end of the long winter, the return of the cod, the annual gorging on the sweet berries that grow wild farther inland. As the years pass, their relationship changes, and when they enter puberty, their connection becomes more complicated. Though Ada and Evered once welcomed the occasional visitors who found their way to their coastline, their intimacy, developed in innocence, seems shameful in the light of even the most casual observation.

Crummey found the inspiration for the novel from an archival passage by a traveling clergyman who met an orphaned brother and sister living in a remote northern cove. When the clergyman approached them, the boy drove him away at gunpoint. Crummey has transformed this fragment into a richly fashioned story told with great sensitivity—one that is as credible as it is magical.

The Innocents reminds us of all the reasons we read—to understand, to imagine, to find compassion and to witness the making of art.

—Lauren Bufferd

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reviews | nonfiction

H In the Dream House

By Carmen Maria Machado

Memoir Queer history is both old and new. We have been gay since the dawn of time, but only recently have queer people really started to speak our own stories into the historical record. The novelty of this—as well as the precarious lives many LGBTQ people still live—raises its own questions: Which stories do we tell?

Relative to established narrative forms, where and how do they fit? What about the bad parts?

“I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this,” Carmen Maria Machado writes at the beginning of her stunning new memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf, $26, 9781644450031). “I speak into the silence.” The book describes the arc of a romantic relationship turned sour, controlling

H Fifth Sun

By Camilla Townsend

Latin American History For generations, historians have gleaned their understanding of the conquest of Mexico from Spanish accounts—whether from the conquistadors, who stressed Aztec human sacrifice, or Catholic missionaries, who were sometimes more sympathetic to the indigenous Nahua people. If you’d asked why the approach was so one-sided, the scholars would have said: Because nothing else is available.

That’s simply not true. The people Americans call Aztecs, who called themselves Mexica, had a strong tradition of historical annals that didn’t stop with the conquest. For years afterward, the descendants of Nahua nobles, both Mexica and others, continued to write Nahuatl-language chronicles.

Happily, the long neglect of those documents has now ended. Historian Camilla Townsend continues her groundbreaking work in the field

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and claustrophobic, the house of its title becoming a place where Machado locks herself in the bathroom while her girlfriend tries to break down the door.

To call it a memoir, though, is to give short shrift to the exquisite strangeness and formal innovation that Machado achieves.

The author of Her Body and Other Parties—a National Book Award-nominated collection of stories combining elements of fable, fantasy, noir, erotic thriller, science fiction and fairy tale—Machado imports her fascination with genre into In the Dream House. Each of the book’s short chapters nods to some trope or narrative tradi-

in the marvelous Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford, $29.95, 9780190673062), a dramatic and accessible narrative that tells the story as the Nahuas saw it.

Yes, the Mexica sacrificed humans and were unpopular enough that some of the regions they had conquered allied with the Spanish.

But they were also pragmatic, funny, clever, artistic and enmeshed in a civilization as sophisticated as Spain, if not as technologically advanced. Fifth Sun helps explode denigrating myths: Moctezuma was not a coward, just a realist. He did not think Hernán Cortés was a “god.” The translator known to posterity as Malinche (really Malintzin) was not a “traitor.”

Townsend, a first-rate writer, explores each era through the lives of real Nahuas who lived through or wrote about it. Among them are a captive daughter of Moctezuma, who bore one of Cortés’ many illegitimate children; a local ruler who learned to work in a Spanish-governed world and sponsored an important chronicle; and an indigenous Catholic priest, proud of both his ancestry and his Christian faith.

The Mexica were smart and effective, but they couldn’t overcome Spanish horses, steel and guns. Even so, they didn’t give up. As is often true after a conquest, the defeated generation’s children rebelled a few decades later, and the grandchildren pushed to preserve their history. Fifth Sun continues that crucial task.

—Anne Bartlett

tion that Machado is playing with—“American Gothic” or “Lesbian Pulp Novel.” This is a clever device, but it’s also a propulsive one, and occasionally leavening. One chapter is precisely one sentence long: “‘We can fuck,’ she says, ‘but we can’t fall in love.’”

Its title is “Dream House as Famous Last Words.”

If this all sounds very metatextual, know that Machado has pulled off an amazing feat: a book that comments on its own existence and the silences it endeavors to fill; a work deeply informed by a sense of identity and community; and page after page of flawless, flaying, addictive prose. In the Dream House is astonishingly good.

—Sam Worley Visit BookPage.com to read Carmen Maria Machado’s Behind the Book essay.

Medieval Bodies

By Jack Hartnell

Medieval History Perusing the pages of Jack Hartnell’s gloriously illustrated Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages (Norton, $29.95, 9781324002161), my eye caught on an elegant depiction of a tree, reproduced from a 15th-century German manuscript and surrounded by pear-shaped vials and delicate writing. Enchanted, I stopped to admire it and read the accompanying caption: “A wheel of urine sprouting from a tree.” But of course.

It’s easy to laugh at the Middle Ages, their beliefs and medical practices—easy, too, to forget that the people who lived then were people just like us. While capturing the humor inherent in looking so far back in time, Hartnell points to the common humanity between our modern selves and the men (and women!) who left behind these writings. (Some of this humor was even intentional; in forgetting that

reviews | nonfiction medieval people were simply people, we may find ourselves surprised to discover a sense of humor not far removed from our own when we encounter, for example, an illustration of a penis tree in the margins of a French manuscript.)

Their bizarre logic seems especially evident when presented alongside the technology that was available then. Indeed, the seeds of modern science can often be found amid what initially appears to be extremely outdated nonsense.

Hartnell’s book isn’t just about the peculiarities of the medical arts in the Middle Ages.

Then, as now, bodies were the vehicles through which people experienced life, and so Hartnell’s head-to-toe examination of the medieval body invokes nearly all other aspects of medieval culture and life. Food, literature, music and the prevalence of the spiritual are all present in great detail in Medieval Bodies, and it makes sense: We, on an ordinary day, do not perceive ourselves as a collection of viscera. We understand ourselves, both physically and otherwise, in relation to the things we come into contact with in the surrounding world. This was also true of our long-ago ancestors—and in making this clear, Hartnell’s book provides a most human look into a world that is neither so far away nor very separate from us at all.

—Anna Spydell

Bernhardt was so gobsmacked that she asked if Houdini could restore her missing leg.

The truth of the matter is that Houdini was a charismatic, brilliant entertainer who was obsessed with fame. This publicity genius was ruthless against critics and competitors and could not for the life of him ignore an insult. He loved making money but wore tattered clothes, preferring to spend his money on self-promotion, magic books and paraphernalia.

Even today, Houdini “lives on because people will not let him die,” Posnanski writes.

He introduces readers to a variety of Houdini’s modern disciples, such as Kristen Johnson, “Lady Houdini,” who says that after she tried her first rope escape, “she felt alive in a whole different way.” Magician David Copperfield takes Posnanski on a tour of his private museum in Las Vegas, discussing his predecessor’s influence. Australian magician Paul Cosentino admits, “I guess . . . he saved my life. Little boys like me, we need Houdini, you know? He’s a symbol of hope.” As Posnanski concludes, “Houdini is not a figure of the past. He is a living, breathing, and modern phenomenon.”

When a talented writer like Posnanski tackles a subject as endlessly fascinating as Harry Houdini, the results are, quite simply, pure magic.

—Alice Cary

H The Life and Afterlife of

For Small Creatures Such as We

Harry Houdini

By Sasha Sagan

By Joe Posnanski

Biography The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini (Avid Reader, $28, 9781501137235) is hardly a typical biography; it’s more like taking an up-close-andpersonal tour of the escape artist’s life, narrated not only by author Joe Posnanski in his wonderfully entertaining prose but also by a host of colorful experts whom the author tracks down.

Posnanski says he was drawn to the legendary escape artist because he “sparks so much wonder in the world, even today.” Modern magicians seem to concur that, technically speaking, Houdini wasn’t a particularly good magician. However, crowds were mesmerized by his escapes and were convinced he could do the impossible. The great actress Sarah

independent and deep thinker, Sagan demonstrates that rituals aren’t reserved purely for the religious.

“There is so much change in this world,” she writes. “So many entrances and exits and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don’t see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it’s still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.”

Sagan writes with stunning clarity and absolute joy. In the chapter on coming of age, Sagan connects puberty with the myth of the werewolf, before galloping through the rites of passage observed by the Amish, Mormons, Apaches, Japanese and her own family. When Sagan got her first period at age 13, her mother “took me in her arms and made me feel this was cause for celebration.” Contrast this with her mother’s experience as a Jew: Druyan’s mother slapped her across the face, as was the inexplicable custom in that time.

For Small Creatures Such as We is a marvel.

It dazzles and comforts while making us consider our own place in the vast universe. As Sagan writes, “We are, after all, someone’s distant future and someone else’s ancient past.”

—Amy Scribner

H Ordinary Girls

By Jaquira Díaz

Memoir

Memoir “My parents taught me that the universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye,” writes author Sasha Sagan in the introduction of For Small Creatures Such as We (Putnam, $26, 9780735218772), a gorgeous collection of essays that reads like a memoir.

The daughter of two of the 20th century’s most important contributors—astronomer Carl Sagan and producer Ann Druyan—Sagan began thinking deeply about the traditions and passages that shape life on earth after becoming a mother herself. Birth, anniversaries, fasting, atonement: She approaches these subjects with wonderment and a generous window into her extraordinary family history. A secular Jew who was raised by her famous parents to be an

Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls (Algonquin, $26.95, 9781616209131) reaches deep into your heart and seizes your emotions from the very first sizzling paragraph.

And as it carries you into some of Díaz’s darkest shadows and out into variegated light, it refuses to let go. In staccato sentences, Díaz walks us through her community: “We were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days, dribbling past the boys on the court. . . . We were the wild girls who loved music and dancing.

Girls who were black and brown and poor and queer. Girls who loved each other.”

In fiercely honest prose, Díaz turns back every page of her life, starting with growing up in El Caserío Padre Rivera, the government housing projects in Puerto Rico, and sharing stories from there that she “never wants to forget.” In this world, Díaz learns about danger

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reviews | nonfiction and violence and death, but she also learns about community. She yearns for a more loving family and home, but her mother and father can provide only a soundtrack of constant bickering and yelling. There’s no love lost between Díaz and her brother, who beats her and abuses her emotionally and whom she tries to kill with a steak knife.

When the family moves to Miami Beach, life looks a little sunnier because they’ve moved up financially, but only for a moment. Her mother and father split, and her mother sinks into addiction that’s exacerbated by schizophrenia. Díaz eventually escapes the violence through an early marriage, a stint in the Navy and enrollment in college and creative writing courses, though she never sheds her friendships, her family or her memories.

The stunning beauty of Díaz’s memoir grows out of its passion, its defiance, its longing, its love and its clear-eyed honesty. Díaz’s story hums with a vibrant beauty, shining a light out of the darkness that shadowed her life.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Thomas Jefferson’s Education

By Alan Taylor

American History Thomas Jefferson wanted his gravestone to acknowledge only three of his many achievements: his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and his being the “father of the University of Virginia.” Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor tells about the last of these in his engrossing and disturbing Thomas Jefferson’s Education (Norton, $29.95, 9780393652420).

Jefferson, a prominent slave owner, was involved in every aspect of planning for the university, in a society in which slavery dominated everything. How he dealt with his vision for a preeminent institution of higher learning exclusively for young white men, with structures from his complex architectural designs built by enslaved people, makes for compelling reading.

During the 1780s, Jefferson was optimistic that a new generation raised in a free republic would work toward a better society. Later, however, he believed almost all young men who had inherited their fathers’ property and become new leaders in Virginia were arrogant and lazy. Higher education, he thought, could enlighten them to become better legislators.

He dedicated the university to the “illimitable freedom of the human mind,” but he assumed that the free pursuit of truth always led to his own conclusions. He clashed with those who wanted education for people who weren’t the sons of the wealthy and vetoed offering a professorship to a distinguished scholar who differed with him on political philosophy.

meet EMILY FLAKE Describe your book in one sentence.

Any advice ahead of the season of awkward holiday hugs?

Is the self-hug awkward, assuring or sad?

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When a hug won’t do, are there any merits to the awkward high-five?

What is your most memorable hug?

Which animal do you most wish you could hug?

A hug from a recent ex, from an emotionally distant relative, from a co-worker who went a little overboard at the Christmas party punch bowl—folks, it’s awkward. How do we survive awkward hugs, and how do we laugh them off?

Before the eggnog starts flowing this holiday season, arm yourself with Emily Flake’s That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug (Viking, $16, 9781984879585). It will make you laugh, cringe and think twice before you do the handshake-or-hug hokey pokey.

reviews | nonfiction He knew emancipation was necessary, but he described black people as “inferior to the whites” and said they would, if freed, seek revenge on their oppressors. Jefferson wished to free and then deport them. In 1808, a freed person sent an anonymous appeal to Jefferson to free his slaves. The writer asked, “Is this the fruits of your education, Sir?” After his death and his estate’s financial collapse, Jefferson’s heirs sold 130 enslaved people from Monticello.

This absorbing narrative offers crucial insights into Jefferson’s thinking as he pursued his vision for what he hoped would be a better future for his state.

—Roger Bishop

H The Body

By Bill Bryson

Anatomy Bill Bryson can take any topic and spool it into the most entertaining thing you’ve ever read. He tackles diverse subjects, from hiking the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods) to, well—everything (A Short History of Nearly Everything).

In his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Doubleday, $30, 9780385539302), Bryson divides the body’s various parts and processes into 23 chapters, with subject headings such as “The Heart and Blood,” “The Guts” and “Nerves and Pain.” Each relatively short chapter is chock-full of clear, in-depth explanations of the body and its components, focusing just the right amount of facts and attention on each area to keep the reader riveted and eager to dive into the next topic.

As with his previous writings, Bryson demonstrates his gift for putting science in layman’s terms, deftly melding the most incredible statistics with wit to expose humorous and fascinating aspects of the human condition. He relates these nuggets of information to everyday life, such as when he compares a cell to a little room that is “of itself as nonliving as any other room.” Yet when combined with the busy, also nonliving things housed within its walls—such as proteins, DNA and mitochondria—life is created.

Throughout the book, Bryson highlights parts of the human physique that are mysteries

even to doctors and scientists. He creatively intertwines amazing medical advances, such as transplant surgery and antibiotics, with topics that are still very much unknown, such as the immune system and allergies. It’s rather humbling to realize that there’s so much we don’t know about the place that houses all of our thoughts, feelings and physical attributes.

As Bryson so effectively conveys in The Body, we truly are a work in progress.

—Becky Libourel Diamond

The Contender

By William J. Mann

Biography Mercurial, feline, charismatic, sullen, progressive, brutal: actor Marlon Brando was a knot of contradictions.

Passionate about social justice and civil rights, Brando could also treat the many women in his life as disposable. Hailed as a genius for his intense performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, Brando struggled to retain his interest in acting and refused to play the Hollywood game. Prizewinning Hollywood biographer William J. Mann masterfully captures Brando’s allure, his psychological complexity and the epic arc of his career in The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando (Harper, $35, 9780062427649).

Mann interweaves narrative strands from Brando’s traumatic childhood through his professional ascent to build a layered portrait of his ambivalences, rages and sexuality. Why did Brando punch a fellow actor backstage in his early years at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop? A flashback to Brando’s turbulent time in military school suggests possible answers.

Similarly, Brando’s fluid sexuality and active sex life (he called himself a “sex addict” long before the term was common currency) is interwoven against childhood scenes with his beloved but neglectful, alcoholic mother.

The portrait of 1940s New York and Brando’s time at the Dramatic Workshop is particularly fascinating. Mann punctures the myth that Brando was a Method actor (someone trained in the Strasberg method) by showing how pivotal the acting teacher (and Stanislavski disciple) Stella Adler was in Brando’s life and work.

Adler not only trained Brando in her technique but also took him into her culturally and intellectually progressive home, opening his eyes to art and politics. Adler’s milieu was the source for Brando’s lifelong political activism.

Subsequent chapters in Brando’s life and work are as carefully and fairly handled. Extensive interviews (with Ellen Adler, Rita Moreno, Elaine Stritch and many others) reveal Brando’s complex and often ambivalent relationships with women, his children and Hollywood.

From Mann, Brando receives a biography every bit as compelling and powerful as his own stage presence.

—Catherine Hollis

Running With Sherman

By Christopher McDougall

Memoir “Look, the most humane thing might be to put him down now.” That was the hoof expert’s verdict after one look at the traumatized, mistreated donkey Christopher McDougall and his family had just taken in. The donkey, which they named Sherman, had been rescued from a hoarder’s farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Since relocating from the city, McDougall and his wife, Mika, had tried their hands at keeping chickens, a stray cat and a phonebook-munching goat named Lawrence. But an ailing donkey was a whole different story. And what a story Sherman turned out to be.

McDougall, author of Born to Run, believes that “movement is big medicine.” And if movement-as-medicine works for people, why wouldn’t it work for a donkey? So McDougall concocts the idea of training Sherman to run in a world championship burro race in Colorado.

With help from family and neighbors, including a young man named Zeke who’s been struggling with depression, “Team Sherman” sets out to fulfill a quest of healing.

Running With Sherman (Knopf, $27.95, 9781524732363) includes some wonderful photos of the endearing Sherman and his clan.

And while you may not decide to take up burro racing yourself, McDougall’s inspiring story is not to be missed.

—Deborah Hopkinson

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interview | sarah deming

Fighting to succeed Debut YA novelist and boxing champion Sarah Deming on writing, fighting and the will to win

© GORDON ERIKSEN

The acknowledgments at the end of Sarah Deming’s new YA novel, Gravity, are six pages long. The author thanks boxers—women she fought on her road to becoming a New York Golden Gloves champion—as well as trainers, students, gym owners, fellow boxing journalists, editors, her agent and publisher, family, friends and her husband. It’s a lovely testament to the veritable village that underlies Deming’s experience of boxing, writing, publishing and living a life.

“I’m really grateful,” she tells BookPage in a call to her Brooklyn home.

“If you’re telling a story not just for your own ego’s sake but for a lot of people . . . people will help you along, and it’s not as lonely, not as hard.”

The value of such encouragement is an ever-present theme in Gravity, a thrilling, moving story about a Dominican Jewish girl who boxes her way to a better life. It’s the culmination of Deming’s 20-some years in the world of boxing as a competitor, reporter and coach.

Gravity Delgado began training at 12 years old at a boxing gym in a rough area of Brooklyn. By 16, she’s a Golden Gloves champion angling

What if your only choice is to trust

a dead girl? it began with

978-1-62354-106-4 HC $18.99

book II of the

D rk m tter tri lo gy On sale 10/29/2019

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“. . . Riveting . . .”

–Foreword Reviews

for a spot on the 2016 Summer Olympics team. Her desire burns brightly as she runs miles in a plastic suit, protects her little brother from their abusive, alcoholic mother and wonders if her father (who abandoned the family when she was 8) thinks about her, too.

The gym that’s long been Deming’s boxing home inspired Gravity’s gym, but the author says she doesn’t miss competing. “Oh God, no. It was so hard! It’s for young people. I’m happy to be around it, but it’s a grueling sport.”

She now channels her energy into coaching and writing. Deming says, “I’ve always had a lot of drive and been really competitive, really hard on myself. The years when I was boxing, it gave me an external focus for that. . . . I was really living in my aggression.”

Deming felt strongly about capturing how, in order to succeed, boxers must be comfortable with (enjoy, even) competition and full contact. In writing Gravity, she says, “I wanted to give kids, especially girls, permission to be hungry and driven. . . . I wanted to give a portrait that would be aspirational for young women, and I really hoped it would be accessible for people who don’t know anything about boxing.”

Gravity is indeed those things. Gravity is talented and determined, and while she must be intensely focused if she wants to make it to the Olympics, she also works to balance friendship and sport, being a sister and being a boxer.

Gravity She makes mistakes, of course, and readMake Me a World ers who’ve faced similar tensions will $17.99, 9780525581031 empathize with her lessons learned.

When it comes to the boxing elements YA Fiction of the book, Gravity is exciting and suspenseful. The road to Rio for the young boxers at Gravity’s gym is artfully described via intermittent news dispatches from a boxing journalist, compelling blow-by-blow descriptions of various bouts and vignettes that amp up the suspense, such as a will-they-make-weight-or-not scene that will leave readers chuckling and a bit grossed out. (“Spitting was my favorite way to make weight,” Deming says.)

The author says she’s experienced the same inner conflict Gravity does when fighting against her friends, or when playfully chatting with an opponent one minute and whaling on them the next. “A rival is a very powerful thing,” she says. “I wanted to show that relationship, and that [Gravity and her friends] could strive against each other. You can see things in your friends that you don’t like and want to react against that and do better than them, but at the end of the day still care about each other.”

That’s a battle fought within, something each boxer must come to terms with in their own way. “The real message,” Deming says, “is that your true competition is with yourself. As a writer, I always try to remember that. I should feel abundant, that there’s enough success in the world for everyone. I’m in competition with myself, and nobody else can write the book I want to write.”

Ultimately, she says, “Gravity is everything I had to say about boxing.

It’s my love song to boxing, warts and all.”

—Linda M. Castellitto

reviews | young adult

H Jackpot

By Nic Stone

Fiction Rico Danger has a name straight out of an explosive action movie, but her life is hurtling off a cliff in ways that are all too ordinary.

Overstretched at her job at a gas station to try and keep a roof over her family’s heads, she’s perpetually one crisis away from the edge.

The “good” school her mom insists she attend is unlikely to lead to college afterward, and friends are in short supply because she’s hard-wired to keep people at arm’s length. So when a customer at the gas station buys what might be a winning lottery ticket, it sets a whole new life in motion for Rico. But is a Jackpot (Crown, $17.99,

All the Things We Do in the Dark

By Saundra Mitchell

Thriller “I tell this story because I can,” writes Saundra Mitchell in the author’s note of her new novel, All the Things We Do in the Dark (Harper­ Teen, $17.99, 9780062852595).

Seeking to avoid “adding one more fictional rape to a world that uses it far too often for entertainment,” Mitchell retells a traumatic event from her childhood, adding elements of fabulism to create All the Things We Do in the Dark.

The first thing everyone notices about Ava is the scar on her face. When she was 9 years old, a man lured her into the dark and raped her.

But Ava’s a junior in high school now, and she knows what to do: She avoids strangers, follows her mother’s rule of never going out by herself and, most of all, keeps her emotional baggage neatly folded in mental boxes with strong, secure locks—until she finds a dead body in the woods, that is.

9781984829627) really the answer to all her problems?

Nic Stone (Dear Martin) structures Jackpot like a romance with a twist of mystery—Rico enlists rich kid Zan to help her track down the ticket holder, and their shared quest leads to mutual attraction—but it has so much more going on underneath its surface. Although Rico’s circumstances are difficult, her attitude doesn’t help; she isolates potential allies by assuming the worst about them as a defense mechanism.

Stone writes some chapters from the perspectives of inanimate objects (the winning ticket, a wood stove, some high thread count sheets, etc.), which offers a glimpse beyond Rico’s tight focus and also adds some surreal charm.

When a medical crisis sends her family into deeper debt than they could have imagined, Rico throws her already flexible morals aside and makes a risky final attempt to get the winning ticket, but fate has a twist in store. There’s a happy ending of sorts, but it’s not one readers will see coming.

Jackpot is a high school romance (senior prom receives its due) and also a kind of fairy tale (for all her complaining about thrift-store clothes, Rico still manages to end up in the perfect dress for any occasion). But Jackpot tells other stories, too, about how we judge one another based on race and class, and the ways those most in need sometimes cut themselves off from help that’s hiding in plain sight.

—Heather Seggel

Ava instantly connects with the dead teenager, whom she calls Jane. Jane haunts Ava at every turn, leading Ava to take impulsive chances as she begins to break all of her own rules. But even as Jane appears to Ava in increasingly disturbing guises, Ava’s regular life goes on. Her best friend, Syd, becomes distant, and she finds herself falling for her classmate Hailey. Soon Jane’s secret can no longer stay hidden, and Ava must make a choice. Will she claim her buried past or let it claim her?

Like the worms in the soil of Ava’s visions, All the Things We Do in the Dark will crawl into readers’ viscera and stay under their skin.

—Jill Ratzan

sessed a unique power: healing, influencing nature or interpreting dreams. Every Walker woman, that is, except Nora.

But then Nora discovers Oliver Huntsman, a boy who went missing from the nearby camp for wayward boys during the worst snowstorm in years. She finds him frozen in the woods with no memory of how he got there. Their connection triggers a series of events that prompts Nora to dig deep and activate her own abilities, magical or otherwise.

With Winterwood (Simon Pulse, $18.99, 9781534439412), bestselling author Shea Ernshaw returns with a sophomore novel as satisfyingly haunting as her debut, The Wicked Deep. Although readers will be captivated by the chemistry that grows between Nora and Oliver as they work together, the book’s most appealing element is the woods where the novel’s mysteries seem to originate. As she did in The Wicked Deep, Ernshaw has created a setting that is as critical to the story as any of the human characters. She envelopes readers in the dark and ancient magic of winter among the trees.

Readers who loved A Discovery of Witches, Practical Magic, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and other books featuring long lineages of magical women, doomed romances and quests to embrace and master supernatural powers will find much to enjoy here.

Ernshaw’s deeply atmospheric prose makes Winterwood the perfect read for a cold and gloomy day.

—Sarah Welch

Winterwood

By Shea Ernshaw

Fantasy The townspeople of Fir Haven all say the Walker family mysteriously emerged from the forest surrounding the town countless generations ago.

Every Walker woman has pos-

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feature | new historical perspectives

Illuminating the past Three new books for young readers—a work of nonfiction, a novel and a unique memoir— offer fascinating insights into World War II, an era that helped shape the world we live in today.

The seeds of World War II were planted during the aftermath of World War I. Harsh financial penalties imposed on Germany, combined with the devastating effects of the Great Depression, contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Andrew Maraniss explores the prewar period for young readers in his masterful Games of Deception (Philomel, $18.99, 9780525514633, ages 12 and up), which reveals the little-known story of the first United States Olympic basketball team. They competed in 1936, the year basketball debuted as an Olympic sport— and the year the games were held, amid controversy, in Hitler’s Berlin.

Young readers will likely be unfamiliar with much of this history, including the boycott efforts that surrounded the games, but Maraniss is an effective storyteller who skillfully paints a picture of the past by focusing on individual people and evocative details. Along with the players’ stories, Maraniss also introduces ordinary people who became eyewitnesses to history; these include a German Jewish boy named Al Miller who never forgot what it was like to watch Jesse Owens run.

The 1936 Olympics were, of course, a prelude to the horrors to come, and Maraniss follows his story through to the war’s end. Fullpage photographs, a bibliography and a timeline enhance the book. A fantastic afterword traces Maraniss’ research process, including his meeting with 95-year-old Dr. Al Miller, who managed to escape Hitler’s Germany.

Alan Gratz’s latest novel, Allies (Scholastic, $17.99, 9781338245721, ages 8 to 12), zeros in on one of the most dramatic military operations of all time: D-Day, the invasion of Normandy. Gratz has previously combined meticulous research with compelling characters and action-packed scenes in bestselling books such as Refugee, Projekt 1065 and Grenade.

Allies is no different, as Gratz once again draws readers into history.

The novel opens with Dee Carpenter riding in a Higgins boat through the rocking waves on his way to Omaha Beach. Dee is a 16-year-old from Philadelphia who has signed up for the

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U.S. Army with a fudged birth certificate. But readers find out something else at the end of the first chapter: “His real name was Dietrich Zimmermann, and he was German.”

The book also follows Samira, an Algerian girl in the French resistance who is trying to

sabotage the German occupation and find her mother, with (she hopes) the help of a fearless little dog. Supporting characters include a Jewish soldier, a Canadian paratrooper and a character based on the famed African American medic Waverly “Woody” Woodson, who was part of the all-black 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion on Omaha Beach.

Allies is timely, not merely because of this year’s 75th anniversary of D-Day but also for its contributions to discussions of how individuals, communities and nations can be allies in today’s world.

Like Waverly Woodson, Ashley Bryan was

also on Omaha Beach. Now 96 years old, Bryan has published numerous books for young readers, including the Newbery Honor book Freedom Over Me. Infinite Hope (Caitlyn Dlouhy, $21.99, 9781534404908, ages 10 and up) is the extraordinary memoir of this hugely beloved figure in children’s literature. Like many veterans, Bryan has never talked about his military service, so his story may take people by surprise.

When his draft notice arrived in 1943, Bryan was a 19-yearold art student who was already familiar with prejudice. One art school interviewer told him his portfolio was the best the school had seen, but “it would be a waste to give a scholarship to a colored person.” With his teachers’ encouragement, Bryan was accepted to Cooper Union, which judged applicants blind. Even this did not prepare Bryan for what he would experience when he joined the Army. “As a Black soldier, I found myself facing unequal treatment in a war that Blacks hoped would lead our nation closer to its professed goal of equal treatment for all.”

Infinite Hope tells the story of Bryan’s journey as a stevedore in the 502nd Port Battalion through mixed media, with large photographs interspersed with sketches, paintings and excerpts from his diary and letters. The result is both an intimate portrait of Bryan himself and a rare insight into the African American experience of World War II and the invasion of Normandy, where Bryan worked nonstop on Omaha Beach unloading cargo in the months after D-Day. Later, while guarding German prisoners of war in France after the war’s end, Bryan realized the Germans were given more respect than black American soldiers. After arriving home in early 1946, Bryan locked his WWII drawings away and rarely spoke of his experiences.

Infinite Hope makes Bryan’s incredible artwork, created in the midst of war, available for the first time. It is a must-read for young people, parents, educators and anyone interested in World War II. Most of all, it is the work of an inspiring American who truly embodies infinite grace.

—Deborah Hopkinson

H Saturday

By Oge Mora

Picture Book It’s Saturday (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316431279, ages 3 to 6), and Ava and her mother are “all smiles.” Ava’s mother works every other day of the week, so this is their “cherished” day of adventure together, as evidenced by the marked-up calendars featured on the endpapers. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned: Storytime is canceled, and Ava’s mother discovers she has left their tickets to the puppet show at home.

This bighearted ode to parent-child bonding comes from Oge Mora, who was awarded a Caldecott Honor for 2018’s Thank You, Omu! Mora uses repetition to build excitement (“Today will be special. Today will be splendid. Today is SATURDAY!”), as well as to accentuate the book’s themes of togetherness

and coping when things go awry. Both mother and daughter often pause to “let out a deep breath” when facing ruined plans. (“Whew!”)

Mother and daughter make for an indelible duo in Mora’s collage illustrations, dominated by cool turquoise, olive and teal hues offset by warm shades of pink. The two are such bodies in motion—the book’s page turns are compelled by curiosity at their next activity, and “ZOOM!” becomes a refrain as they embark on each adventure—that when they slow down for a hug, it’s all the more touching. Tenderly, Ava tells her mother the day was still splendid because it was time spent with her.

© ABIGAIL BEST

reviews | children’s

Peek beneath the dust jacket for a scrapbook-style illustration of a photo of mother and daughter, complete with a white Polaroid-esque frame and pieces of tape. It’s clear that, although their plans for the day were thwarted, they formed memories that will last a lifetime. Zoom!

—Julie Danielson

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