BookPage August 2010

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aug. 2010

america’s book review

7

best debut novels of summer

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE

New romance in the USA

r e h t Toge TRUE FRIENDS

top picks

in mystery, audiobooks & more!

Gail Caldwell honors an unbreakable bond

contents

AUGUST 2010

w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m

features

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14 gary shteyngart A funny, frightening glimpse of the future

cover story

gail caldwell

A touching story of true friendship, Let’s Take the Long Way Home is this fall’s most moving memoir.

15 lisa unger Meet the author of Fragile

Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/hkuchera

16 kate racculia Quirky characters mark a distinctive debut

18 Back to school

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Getting the most out of those school days

19 parenting

feature

debut fiction

Seven promising first-time authors take the literary stage.

Meet Rosecrans Baldwin, Ellen Bryson, Susanna Daniel, Margaret Dilloway, James King, Holly LeCraw and A.D. Scott.

Advice for every stage of childhood

28 Mary Roach America’s funniest science writer takes on the final frontier

30 cynthia lord Saving a special way of life in Touch Blue

31 kindergarten kickoff Picture books ease the transition

31

George Booth Meet the illustrator of School!

reviews 26 NonFiction

22 Fiction top pick:

Strangers at the Feast

by Jennifer Vanderbes also reviewed: Rich Boy by Sharon Pomerantz; Shift by Tim Kring and Dale Peck; I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson; The Doctor & The Diva by Adrienne McDonnell; The Typist

by Michael Knight; Bijou Roy by Ronica Dhar

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top pick: The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry also reviewed: The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo; What We Have by Amy Boesky; The Fall of the House of Walworth by Geoffrey O’Brien; The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone; Composed by Roseanne Cash; Packing for Mars by Mary Roach; The Temptress

by Paul Spicer

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departments PATCHETT’S BACK

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

MORE SEX AND THE CITY Candace Bushnell (of Sex and the City mega-fame) has signed a deal to write two new novels for Grand Central.

The first, to be published in 2012, is called The Two Mrs. Stones and concerns “a love triangle”—a lot of possibilities there!

Bushnell is best-known for her S&TC girls—Carrie, Samatha, Miranda and Charlotte—but she’s had other hits with Lipstick Jungle and, most recently, One Fifth Avenue.

Will lightning strike again in 2012?

bestseller watch Release dates for some of the guaranteed blockbusters hitting shelves in August:

3 HANGMAN

By Faye Kellerman Morrow, $25.99, ISBN 9780061702563 Murder, a missing woman and a sociopath from the past sweep Decker and Lazarus into a labyrinth of mystery in Kellerman’s latest thriller.

10 CURE

By Robin Cook Putnam, $26.95, ISBN 9780399156625 The master of the medical thriller returns with another heart-pounding story of intrigue when a CIA agent’s autopsy results are not what they seem.

24 mockingjay

By Suzanne Collins Scholastic, $17.99 ISBN 9780439023511 The hotly anticipated conclusion to the blockbuster Hunger Games trilogy.

Exciting news for Ann Patchett fans—the best-selling author (and fellow Nashvillian) has completed and sold a new novel to Harper for publication in 2011.

Described as “Conradian” and set in the Amazon jungle, the novel features two female physicians who make “hitherto unimaginable discoveries on both a personal and global scale.”

South America was also the setting of Patchett’s biggest hit, Bel PAT C H E T T Canto. Will the new novel and its similar blend of the personal and the global strike the same chord with readers? As Patchett fans, we can’t wait to find out.

MAN OF SCIENCE Bantam Dell has announced that Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Stephen Hawking will publish another book about “the ultimate mysteries of the universe.”

Hawking is something of a celebrity scientist and the author of the mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. The new book, titled The Grand Design, will be published September 7.

In The Grand Design, you can expect to learn about “a single theory that can describe and explain all the forces of nature,” which sounds very grand indeed.

REMEMBERING ROALD

Did you know that September is Roald Dahl month? (The author was born on September 13, 1916.)

To commemorate, Penguin Young Readers Group is releasing a slim volume called The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets next month.

The book is billed as “the top secret missing chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” but as we flipped through the pages of our advance copy, the most interesting parts of the book were the Dahl-related details. For example, did you know that the Oompa-Loompas were originally called WhippleScrumpets? Or that Dahl and illustrator Quentin Blake were friends in addition to collaborators?

For more Dahl tidbits, you’ll have to wait for the September 2 release.

Buzz Girl kent’s stirring prequel

Coming in November from Reagan Arthur books (a division of Little, Brown)—The Wolves of Andover, a prequel to the 2008 hit The Heretic’s Daughter.

Dallas novelist Kathleen Kent tells the story of Martha Allen and Thomas Carrier, who in her earlier novel experienced the Salem Witch Trials. Their courtship is equally daunting: Thomas, who played a significant role in the English Civil War, finds himself pursued by assassins sent to the New World from London, while Martha navigates the complicated world of a household servant.

Sounds like juicy historical fiction at its best.

The national bestselling author of The Russian Concubine takes us back to Tsarist Russia

a ‘bridget jones’ musical?

Helen Fielding’s beloved Bridget Jones character transitioned successfully from a column in the Independent, to two hugely successful novels (Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), to the screen, earning an Academy Award nomination for Renee Zellweger (and legions of female admirers for Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy).

And now, the Guardian reports that it may become a musical, with the score written by British recording artist Lily Allen.

According to the Guardian, Allen “is rumoured to be working with author Helen Fielding to bring a show to London’s West End next year.” (Although so far she’s only finished one number, “a song about poor Bridget contemplating her fridge.”)

Would you buy tickets for Bridget Jones: The Musical?

RAnKIN’s new hero Scottish novelist Ian Rankin has become one of the best-known English-language crime writers. Fans worldwide wondered what he’d be up to next after publishing his last Inspector Rebus novel, RANKIN Exit Music, in 2008.

Rankin released a stand-alone, Doors Open, in 2010, but in March 2011’s The Complaints, he will introduce a new hero that could be as compelling as Rebus himself. Do we smell a series?

NEW IN PAPERBACK Russia, 1910.

Valentina Ivanova is the darling of St. Petersburg’s elite aristocracy—until her romance with a Danish engineer creates a terrible scandal and her parents push her into a loveless engagement with a Russian count.

9780425234235 • $15

BERKLEY A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

penguin.com

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WELL READ

author enablers

column by robert Weibezahl

column by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

THROUGH A CHILD’S EYES

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Helen Grant’s inventive debut, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, takes readers into the curious mind of a young girl whose small town is beset by a series of mystifying disappearances. Like Briony in Atonement or Harper Lee’s Scout, Pia Kolvenbach is a precocious observer whose interpretation of events is clouded by her innocence.

Susceptible to the fancies of her young imagination, Pia makes a bold choice—to discover the dark truth behind the town’s mystery.

Bad Münstereifel is a classic German village, a quaint blend of medieval and post-war architecture, rife with gossip. When her Oma Kristel dies in a bizarre accident involving too much hairspray and an open flame, Pia becomes Blending notorious at her school as elements the girl whose of ghost grandmother story and exploded. intrigue with Ostracized, she is left with the classic only one friend, coming-ofStefan, another outcast. So age novel, when one of this is an her schooloriginal mates, Katharina Linden, and wellobserved tale. disappears without a trace, Pia is relieved that the town’s attention finally shifts away from her family—albeit remorseful that her social salvation has come through such a horrible occurrence.

Katharina’s vanishing, only the latest in a number of similar incidents through the years, instills a sense of alarm among the parents in Bad Münstereifel, who impose strict curfews on their children. Another girl disappears, then a third, and the townspeople adopt an angry-mob mentality, focusing their rage on Herr Düster, a taciturn old man with a suspicious demeanor.

Pia is surprised to learn that Herr Düster is the brother of Herr Schiller, a kindly neighbor who regularly regales her and Stefan with deliciously grisly folktales about strange doings in the woods on the outskirts of town. Inspired by these tales of witches and pagan rituals, Pia and Stefan vow to get to the bottom of the girls’ disappearances,

and with callow determination they plunge into solving the mystery. Of course, that proves a dangerous occupation for two ill-equipped, if bright, preadolescents.

Pia’s desire to make things right and become the heroine of Bad Münstereifel parallels her sense of helplessness at home. Her mother is English and yearns to return to Britain, especially once she begins to fear for the safety of her children.

Pia’s father, born and raised in the town, and intent on staying, cannot understand his wife’s reaction—nor, in his uninspired German way, her ironic wit. The impasse cuts to the heart of their marriage, but young Pia remains unaware until she is presented with the unimaginable certainty that her parents will divorce and she will be displaced to dreaded Middlesex.

Blending elements of ghost story and intrigue with the classic coming-of-age novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is an original and well-observed tale.

Though the mystery at the heart of the story is somewhat protracted and its solution less than surprising, Grant compensates for minor narrative imperfections by creating memorable, wholly believable characters—particularly Pia, a worthy addition to the literary gallery of likeable, resourceful children.

Grant, a native of London, moved her family to western Germany’s Bad Münstereifel in 2001, where she found her inspiration for The Vanishing of Katharina Linden after hearing local folk tales.

Grant’s imagination—coupled with predigious research and skillful writing—make her an author to watch.

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

By Helen Grant Delacorte $24, 304 pages ISBN 9780385344173

Debut fiction

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

LITERARY LINGO Dear Author Enablers, Here’s one that has my entire critique group stumped. Several editors have told me they love my manuscript but it’s “not right for our list at this time.” What do they mean? Is this a polite brush-off, or an industry secret code?

Linda Lyman Murrysville, Pennsylvania This could mean several things.

Sometimes it is indeed a polite way of saying “we’re not interested.” It can also mean that the publisher is already committed to another similar book. But most often, it’s insider terminology indicating that your book doesn’t conform to the publisher’s vision or comfort zone.

Sam works at HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins known for spiritual and self-help books.

Presented with a vampire novel, no matter how terrific, they would have to turn it down, or pass it to another HarperCollins imprint.

Why? Because they don’t know how to edit or market vampire books.

This is only one of the reasons it makes sense to find a literary agent to represent you. Agents know the lay of the land and will only pitch to publishers who are likely to think your book would be a good fit.

MAKING A MATCH Dear Author Enablers, Job fairs help people meet potential employers. Are there similar events that enable aspiring writers to make acquaintances with literary agents?

Dave Richards Hendersonville, North Carolina Many writers’ conferences provide opportunities for authors to meet literary agents and editors.

Some feature an event called “speed dating for agents,” where you get to pitch your manuscript or idea to half a dozen agents or more, in the space of an hour or so. You can ask them their sign, what movies they like . . . and who knows where it might lead? Oops—that’s another kind of speed dating.

Writers’ conferences can be expensive, but if cost is an issue, see if you can volunteer in return for

an opportunity to attend. A good resource for finding writers’ conferences is available at writersconf.org.

PLATFORM BUILDING Dear Author Enablers, My book The Randolph Women and Their Men was published in February and is still not available in the retail chain stores.

The stores say the decisions are made at the corporate level. The corporate level people don’t want books sent to them; others say they don’t want to order a book without seeing it. I am told that my readers, clamoring for the book, can order online; they in turn say they want to see the book first.

Ruth Doumlele Midlothian, Virginia

Because your book was published through a non-traditional publisher, it is unlikely that it will be distributed widely in retail bookstores unless there is great demand from readers. When you pay a publisher to print and distribute your book, the company has received its return on the time invested as soon as the book is completed. On the other hand, when a publisher pays you for the right to publish your work, it has a vested interest in getting the book into stores as quickly as possible. Also, bookstore chains are most likely to stock titles from established publishers who offer incentives for special placement and have long-term relationships with book buyers.

This is why developing a “platform” is so important for selfpublished authors. Ask yourself this question: How many people know who I am and care about reading my work? Most authors develop their platforms over time, starting locally. Build up your social networking contacts; ask friends to host book parties; and offer free lectures at community centers, churches or synagogues.

Email questions for Kathi and Sam to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

“If there were more leigh anne Tuohys, the world would be a more harmonious and more productive place.”

–saNDRa BUllOcK “sean is an all-around good guy, and the inspirational story of what he and his family did … is pretty incredible.”

–TIM McGRaw “In A Heartbeat picks up where I left off [in The Blind Side] and gives the reader a much fuller portrait of these extraordinary people.”

–MIchael lewIs

Also available on Macmillan Audio.

Henry Holt and Company www.henryholt.com

On Sale nOw Wherever books are sold

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departments

Whodunit

column by Bruce Tierney

UNSPEAKABLE HORROR IN NEW ORLEANS On my blog, Mysterious Orientations (which readers can find at BookPage.com), I recently posted a photo of myself receiving an intravenous drip of antibiotics in a Japanese hospital, and at the same time devouring Nevada Barr’s latest thriller, Burn (Minotaur, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780312614560).

I’m happy to report that I recovered fully—and I’m glad I had some good reading material! Burn features veteran park ranger Anna Pigeon, this time on location (and on indefinite leave) in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Anna’s inactive status does nothing to keep her out of harm’s way, however, and thanks to a chance encounter with a diffident and androgynous Goth youth, she finds herself dragged into one of the most harrowing

cases of her career. It seems that a number of prominent Big Easy socialites are sexually exploiting children, and the police seem to be not only looking the other way, but perhaps even actively protecting the organization of pedophiles.

And somewhere at the edge of the French Quarter, a quaint antebellum home has been recast as a den of unspeakable evil, where kids as young as toddlers are repeatedly subjected to rape and torture. Barr pulls no punches in her representation of the “game rooms,” and the denouement is certainly as violent

It’s a case no one can win.

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FRONT PAGE NEWS For a brief moment at the opening of Ridley Pearson’s In Harm’s Way (Putnam, $25.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780399156540), photographer Fiona Kenshaw harbors a secret—but that secret is about to be revealed in a front-page newspaper article about her valor when Fiona heroically rescues a small child.

Although she leaned heavily upon her friend, Sun Valley sheriff Walt Fleming, to block publication of her photo, both of their efforts were for naught, and Fiona’s past is about to catch up with her—with potentially devastating results. As she is on the verge of coming clean with Fleming, Fiona is assaulted, and her resolve falters. Meanwhile, Fleming fields a phone call from Seattle detective Lou Boldt, who is investigating a murder with possible Sun Valley implications—implications which may well involve Fiona, and reveal her in a much less flattering light than the recent newspaper article.

The plotting is tight, the requisite scarlet herrings show up in biblical multitudes and the resolution will surprise all but the most hardcore genre aficionados.

SEARCHING FOR A LOST SON

Which is exactly why he’s going to take it.

On sale now!

as it is ultimately gratifying. That said, Burn is Barr’s most tautly crafted book in quite some time; if you can stand the graphic imagery, you are in for a first-rate thriller.

www.MIRABooks.com http://JaywalkerCases.com

Mark and Claire Wallace, the unlikely protagonists of Lee Vance’s latest thriller, The Garden of Betrayal (Knopf, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9780307269775), had what most would describe as a fine life: a good marriage, well-paying jobs and a pair of smart and personable children. Then, in the space of an evening, their world crashes down around them when their 12-yearold son is abducted. Fast forward seven years; every lead has been a dead end, and the Wallaces have, to some degree or another, resigned themselves to never seeing their son again. Then, out of the blue, a new lead opens up, and Mark and Claire allow themselves a glimmer of hope; somehow, the abduction may be related to Mark’s job as consultant to a global oil concern, a syndicate perhaps on the verge of creating a stranglehold on world energy supplies. The cast of supporting characters is complex and well-drawn, and the tension

is palpable throughout. Vance’s debut thriller, Restitution, was a tourde-force, and The Garden of Betrayal will certainly cement his fast-growing reputation.

MYSTERY OF THE MONTH I thought I might run out of superlatives the first time I reviewed a Timothy Hallinan book, The Fourth Watcher. Phrases like “wickedly atmospheric” peppered the text, and the book was selected as my no-contest Mystery of the Month pick. A year later, Hallinan was in the winner’s circle once again, with a follow-up novel, Breathing Water.

His latest, The Queen of Patpong, does nothing to break the streak; it is, in fact, the most intimate and personal portrayal of gonzo travel writer Poke Rafferty and his family to date. In some ways, Rafferty takes a back seat this time to his wife Rose, a one-time bar girl in Bangkok’s infamous Patpong district, haunted by the reappearance of a man she thought long dead—a man, in fact, she thought (and hoped) she had killed. Rose’s complex history is laid bare in The Queen of Patpong, her deepest secrets revealed to her husband and daughter; from her humble beginnings as a Thai village schoolgirl to her ascendance to undisputed queen of the Patpong bar girls, Rose’s story unfolds, by turns humorous, frightening and infinitely sad, yet ultimately uplifting. Oh, and the final showdown is unlike anything I have ever run across in suspense fiction, and that’s all I’m going to say about that! The Queen of Patpong is by every measure the best of an excellent series, making Hallinan the only three-for-three Mystery of the Month winner to date.

The Queen of Patpong

By Timothy Hallinan Morrow $24.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780061672262

THRILLER

lifestyles

cooking

c o l u m n b y j o a n n a b r i c h e tt o

EMERIL GOES EMERALD

GOING BACK TO BASICS In Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World (Portfolio, $25.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9781591843320), Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make magazine, advocates the expansion of DIY into a pragmatic philosophy. After years of working with hundreds of diverse do-ityourselfers, the author realized his own life could use a little tinkering. Frustrated by the fast-paced, consumer-centric and increasingly virtual nature of his family’s lifestyle, Frauenfelder decided to devote a year to creating a richer, more meaningful life: “a life of en-

column by sybil PRATT

dessert) and agua fresca (a fruity beverage); salsas, chutneys and relishes; or butters, sauces and ketchups. Just a few of the possibilities are oven-dried tomatoes, watermelon granita, roasted garlic, martini onions, basil pesto, pear butter and Charred Chili Salsa. In addition to being easy and delicious, preserving is a natural companion to the Slow Food and Eat Local movements, and a logical extension to DIY gardening. Home “put-up” also tastes better, costs less, is easy on the Earth—and preserves venerable traditions as well as fresh produce.

There’s a green sheen on Emeril Lagasse, as there is now on most cookbook authors, restaurateurs and anyone else talking publicly about food. His new book, Farm to Fork: Cooking Local, Cooking Fresh (HarperStudio, $24.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780061742958), is this kick-it-up-a-notch celebrity chef’s nod to the current requirement to pay homage to fresh and local foods. Take Emeril at his word: He buys only the best ingredients, knows his purveyors, focuses on the super-seasonal and wants you to do the same. Freshness philosophy understood, it’s Emeril’s recipes—over 150, with their detailed instructions

COOKBOOK OF THE MONTH

TOP PICK FOR LIFESTYLES

gagement with the world.” Readers follow his progress through a fairly low-tech to-do list, including: raise chickens, build a tree house, keep bees, tutor his kids in math and science and turn the front lawn into a vegetable garden. In no rush merely to divulge results, the author details each step, however embarrassing or slow, and demonstrates that to be successful, DIYers must have “the courage to screw up.” The payoff is in the process as well as the product: Every glimmer of self-reliance earned from daring to modify one’s physical world is priceless.

PRESERVING TRADITION “Preserving is hot,” declares Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of Put ’em Up! A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook (Storey, $19.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781603425469). In this colorful, friendly book, Vinton shatters the notions that preserving foods is too complicated, or too old-fashioned, or too dangerous.

New methods, flexible batch sizes and straightforward, illustrated recipes mean anyone can do it.

With sections organized by produce item, readers can easily find which methods suit whatever they happen to have in hand: blanching; jams and jellies; vinegar pickles and fermented pickles; granita (a frozen

The Nature Connection: An Outdoor Workbook for Kids, Families, and Classrooms is, in every sense, a book that grounds the reader. With this book—and a helpful adult or two—to guide them, children of any age can practice more mindfully what already comes naturally to them: to see their world from the ground up, whether that means in a backyard or on a sidewalk, by a lake or a storm sewer, in a park or a parking lot. The author, Clare Walker Leslie (Keeping a Nature Journal), believes in “finding nature wherever you are” and that everyone can be a naturalist by simply paying attention. Her guide encourages this new way of seeing with questions, tips, exercises and creative prompts that can ground a child in the world at large, plus foster environmental literacy, responsible stewardship and a passion for nature. Of course, kids don’t really need to know these momentous goals: For them, exploration is its own reward, and success lies in every new thing noticed, recorded, pondered or named.

The Nature Connection

By Clare Walker Leslie Storey $14.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781603425315

NATURE

ti’s favorite dishes. They range from antipasti to dolci—some familiar, such as Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, and others, like Rabbit with Olives and Walnuts, engagingly unfamiliar. One caveat: Roberta’s instructions are done in Italian style and assume some kitchen know-how and ease with ingredients. And some of these ingredients—Trevisio radicchio or cuttlefish eggs, for example—might be a bit difficult to find, but are well worth the effort.

and fun, informative headers—that make this a really worthwhile new source. Check out the herb oils, Pickled Green Beans and easy, non-canned Peach Freezer Jam. And don’t miss the Cantaloupe and Pancetta Cream Sauce for Pasta (sounds like a weird combo, but it’s really good), Toasted Garlic Romano Beans, and Apricot Clafouti. Emeril, tinged with green or not, is always a good bet.

DINING WITH DONNA LEON To Commissario Guido Brunetti, the appealing Venetian detective who stars in Donna Leon’s celebrated mystery series, eating well, in a way that provides “as much physical pleasure as possible,” is fundamental to living a happy life.

Brunetti solves crimes, muses on the problems that beset Venice and savors the fabulous meals cooked by his wife, Paola. These succulent lunches and dinners have become so central to the series that fans have been clamoring for the recipes. Now nearly 100 Brunettiinspired recipes by Roberta Pianaro, Leon’s dearest Venetian friend and gastronomic guide, have been gathered in Brunetti’s Cookbook (Atlantic Monthly, $24.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9780802119476), along with six original essays by Leon herself and book excerpts highlighting Brunet-

Rick Bayless is the undisputed Big Enchilada of Mexican cooking north of the border. With his six previous cookbooks, PBS series, restaurants and product line, he has turned many gringos into avid aficionados of the real cocina Mexicana. This time around, Rick’s kicking back and having a party, and we’re all invited. To join the fun, open a copy of Fiesta at Rick’s: Fabulous Food for Great Times with Friends, pick a party, choose a few recipes and pour a few cocktails. Rick is a master at riffing on Mexican mainstays like guacamole (at least nine riffs), ceviche (six riffs) and margaritas (lost count while tasting), using his deep understanding of vibrant Mexican flavors to innovate and his cooking know-how to make his recipes totally doable in American kitchens. Want to have a Luxury Guacamole Bar Cocktail Party, with the added sparkle of Champagne Margaritas? No problema! There’s a menu, recipes and a game plan with serving strategies that tell you what to do and when.

Same goes for a Summertime Seafood Cocktail Party or a Fall Fiesta.

Buen provecho!

Fiesta at Rick’s

By Rick Bayless Norton $35, 348 pages ISBN 9780393058994

MEXICAN

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ANGLOPHILE ANGLES ON MURDER It always comes as a surprise that Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George, two best-selling perpetrators of masterful mysteries set in England and centered on detectives from New Scotland Yard, are American—their crime novels are so faultlessly British in mood and character. This season, each has a new novel: The Black Cat (Penguin Audio, $29.95, 9 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780142427965) is Ms. Grimes’ 22nd Richard Jury mystery, while This Body of Death (HarperAudio, $49.99, 26 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780061161216) is Ms. George’s 16th Inspector Lynley

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novel. Both are now excellent audiobooks and both are read by John Lee, who, for a change, is really British. Lee does a wonderful range of English accents and, more importantly, easily establishes each character’s age, gender and temperament with subtle changes in timbre and inflection. I listened to these mysteries sequentially (summer listening at its diversionary best) and was taken more by the differences in style than the similarities, given that they share recurring casts of well-drawn characters, intricately layered plots, many murders and London-based investigators.

The Black Cat is a compelling whodunit in which wildly expensive, strippy-strappy designer shoes, à la Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin, catch Chief Superintendent Richard Jury’s fancy and help him catch the killer. And it’s full of Grimes’ signature playful touches, like the very clever dog who understands English and aids in the investigation, and the arch, aristocratic foibles of Jury’s quasicomical sidekick, Melrose Plant.

In This Body of Death, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, still at loose ends and grieving for his murdered wife, is coaxed back to the Yard when a young woman from Hampshire is found gruesomely stabbed to death in a London

audio

book clubs

column by sukey howard

column by julie hale

cemetery.

The coaxer is Isabelle Ardery, the new acting superintendent, whose tough-cookie, take-no-prisoners persona seems to appeal to Lynley, but has the rest of her staff in a mutinous uproar. Internal Yard politics roil, while the killer remains elusive and the tangle of suspects, clues and motives, punctuated with the details of a savage crime committed years ago by three 12-yearold boys, intrigues, entertains and causes goosebumps even in the hot summer sun.

This month’s best new paperback releases for reading groups

AN UNINVITED GUEST An unforgettable coming-ofage story, Joyce Maynard’s Labor Day (Harper Perennial, $13.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780061843419) convincingly dramatizes the mother-son bond while spinning a story with suspense and emotional power. Henry is a 13-year-old loner who doesn’t venture far from the home he shares with his divorced mother, Adele. A fragile and introverted woman, Adele—like her son—tends to keep to herself.

AUDIO OF THE MONTH October, 1940: The Germans are advancing through the Balkans. The Greeks have just pushed Mussolini’s army back into Albania, but they know they’ll be next, that patriots will fade into the mountains to fight, as they have so valiantly before. And in Salonika, the ancient port city of Greek Macedonia, Costa Zannis, a senior police official with a tough exterior, tough moral core and tender heart, is ready to do the right thing, no matter the consequences.

Zannis, who has the appeal of a Casablanca Bogart—and a dash of Jason Bourne’s derring-do—stars in Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst’s latest. There’s a noirish tinge to Furst’s forays into WWII-era espionage that carries the same allure and fascination as a classic black and white movie, with intrigue galore, believable good guys and bad guys, atmospheric settings, accurate military details, nail-biting tension and passionate romance. As the Nazi incursion intensifies, Zannis works his wiles in Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Zagreb and in his own backyard, and Daniel Gerroll’s narration keeps perfect pace all the way.

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while Paul, his brother, must deal with his wife’s infertility.

A screw-up when it comes to finances, Phillip, the youngest sibling, is forever enmeshed in a bad business deal. Despite their differences, the time spent in mourning serves to unify the Foxman clan, as they learn surprising lessons about themselves. Narrated with humor and intelligence by Judd, this is a warmhearted yet edgy book—a delightful family portrait that will resonate with any reader whose relatives are a bit dysfunctional.

Top Pick for Book Clubs

But their lives take an unexpected turn after a bleeding man named Frank asks Henry for help in a store.

Frank—an escaped convict—holds mother and son hostage at their house over Labor Day weekend.

Aggressive yet tender, he ties Adele to a chair but makes sure she’s fed, and he coaches the hopelessly clumsy Henry in baseball. When Adele and Frank find themselves falling in love, Henry struggles with feelings of jealousy. Scared of being abandoned, he’s forced to grow up fast as Labor Day approaches.

At once beautiful and disturbing, this remarkable novel—Maynard’s sixth—is a moving read.

FAMILY AFFAIRS With This Is Where I Leave You (Plume, $15, 352 pages, ISBN 9780452296367) Jonathan Tropper delivers another hilarious pageturner, a contemporary comedy about marriage, family and emotional maturity. Judd Foxman is sent reeling by the end of his marriage and the termination of his job, both of which occur after he catches his wife in bed with his boss. Judd receives yet another shock when his father dies. Summoned home to sit shiva for seven days with his kooky family, he becomes immersed in their problems. Wendy, his sister, is locked into a dead-end marriage,

Futuristic, chilling and wonderfully original, The Year of the Flood takes readers back to the postapocalyptic world Margaret Atwood conjured in her 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. Devastating climate change and a human-engineered plague have sent the inhabitants of the earth into hiding. Among the survivors are Ren and Toby, two young women who belong to an extremist group of environmentalists called God’s Gardeners. Led by Adam One, the group is dedicated to both science and religion. Taking refuge from the plague, Ren is stuck in a sex club, while Toby is confined to a spa. Both hope for contact from the outside world and speculate as to who among their friends and loved ones may not have survived. Meanwhile, Adam One guides a small group of refugees through a desolate landscape, and his sermons on eco-religion serve to authenticate Atwood’s richly conceived universe. A strange and beautiful work, this masterful narrative proves that Atwood can do anything as a novelist.

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Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS A Kiss at Midnight

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Forced by her stepmother to attend a ball, Kate meets a prince . . . and decides he’s anything but charming. A clash of wits and wills ensues, but they both know their irresistible attraction will lead nowhere. For Gabriel is promised to another woman—a princess whose hand in marriage will fulfill his ruthless ambitions.

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Urban fantasy and vampire fans of paranormal superstars Kim Harrison, Lynsay Sands, and Christine Feehan, will devour this spellbinding tale—as the closest confidants of Frost’s popular series characters Cat and Bones must contend with love, lust, and heart-stopping danger of their own.

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No stranger to the destructiveness of twisted minds, former FBI Special Agent Sloane Burbank never expected evil to invade the lives of her family. When her mother is viciously attacked in her posh Manhattan apartment, Sloane realizes this was no ordinary robbery.

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passion with the man she’s met as her British counterpart—Owen Wakefield.

The next day she’s dismayed to discover her onenight stand has now joined A-Tac to determine what went wrong with her mission. Though she guesses that Owen suspects her as the leak in the team, they work together while trying to ignore their inconvenient attraction. More deaths come between them and the truth, and as the countdown to a nuclear explosion begins, Tyler and Owen race to save the day. A thrilling rollercoaster ride of romantic suspense.

into the ocean’s depths, where she encounters a drowning man.

Rikki manages to bring the injured stranger to the surface, and from there into her life. Hurt, and with a hampered memory, Lev Prakenskii is forced to rely on the kindness of the eccentric but beautiful woman who saved him. At first he believes he’ll only bring her danger, but then he discovers that danger already stalks Rikki. As he falls in love with her, he learns to accept her oddities as well as her strange powers. After all, Lev has some unusual talents himself that he must use to keep the woman he wants safe. Steaming with sexual tension and bubbling with danger, this imaginative tale will thrill lovers of paranormal romance.

Fiery love Dee Davis offers an actionpacked whodunit in Desperate Deeds (Grand Central, $6.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780446542029). ATac, the black-ops CIA unit with members who are experts in both academia and espionage, is back battling terrorism. Tyler Hanson, teacher of literature and the team’s go-to person for munitions, has been tasked with transferring technically advanced detonators to the British. When the operation goes awry, Tyler finds sympathy and

Nobody writes a dark hero more deliciously than Anne Stuart, and Francis, Viscount Rohan, in Ruthless is as decadent as the best dark chocolate. Francis encounters a delightful foil in Elinor Harriman, she of the unfortunate “Harriman Nose,” who will do whatever is necessary to save her destitute family. In 1795 Paris, after her mother absconds with the last of the household’s coins, Elinor’s determination takes her straight to Francis, known as the “King of Hell.” Francis finds himself charmed by Elinor and imagines it’s her innocence that fascinates him. But Elinor is more complex than Francis guesses— and her past gives her a unique resistance to his famed seductive appeal. They strike a bargain for her to spend six weeks in his house, and while Elinor wonders if her heart will survive, there are other dangers lurking as well. An irresistible, sexy story, Ruthless is another winner from Anne Stuart.

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interviews

GAIL CALDWELL Interview by katherine wyrick

© John Earle

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of Book the Day

S

Sit, stay, heal: memories of friendship

omehow it seems fitting that a conversation with Gail Caldwell would be punctuated by the jubilant barks of a dog—fitting because her exquisite new memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, is a celebration of friendship, both canine and human.

Critic and author Caldwell wrote the book as a moving tribute to her best friend, writer Caroline Knapp, who died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42.

From her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Caldwell explains that the source of said barking is her fluffy Samoyed, Tula, whom she lovingly describes as “a devil in a white suit.” Apparently, Tula protests when Gail is on the phone and at present is loudly voicing her disapproval and demanding a game of fetch. “She has me very well trained,” Caldwell (halfway) jokes.

Knapp would probably have appreciated this interruption because it was while walking their dogs that she and Caldwell forged their enduring, life-altering friendship.

Though their time together was cut short by Knapp’s death, that was not, as Caldwell tells us in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, the end of their story. She opens her book with this poignant pronouncement, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

When they met in the early ’90s, Knapp and Caldwell, both single and living in Cambridge, instantly

bonded over their shared love of books, dogs and being outdoors.

Caldwell was a book critic for the Boston Globe—her work there earned her a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2001—while Knapp was the author of the acclaimed 1996 memoir Drinking: A Love Story.

As their friendship grew, they learned that, despite differ“I remember ent upbringbeing moved ings and a nine-year age

by Caroline: difference, It was a they had much different in common, including their response past struggles from simple with alcohol. affection or Caldwell writes camaraderie.” eloquently about alcoholism and sobriety but doesn’t linger on the subject.

When she does offer insights, they are profound and spot-on, but, she says, “Once you’ve been sober 25 years, the story distills itself. . . . It was a baseline, but I didn’t need to tell that whole story.”

Instead, in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell concentrates

on the intimacies and intricacies of their extraordinary friendship.

“About halfway through our friendship, I think I realized that it was, in fact, unique,” she says.

In the book, Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” This is not to say, however, that the relationship was without its share of conflict. Both women were deeply private and self-reliant—and both were writers.

Rather than ignore problems, they faced them head on. “We loved to dissect and explain and process and wonder. Because we acknowledged the rivalry between us, Caroline and I went toward each other instead of away from each other.”

She says that welcoming their competitive spirit, a “great energy,” allowed them to challenge themselves physically and creatively.

Caldwell, for instance, helped Knapp become a stronger swimmer, while Knapp introduced Caldwell to the Zen-like pleasures of rowing on the Charles River.

They learned other things, too, like how to be vulnerable and how

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to trust in and lean on someone you love—not easy things for such fiercely independent women.

Caldwell especially appreciated Knapp’s unflinching honesty. “I’m worried you’re sick of me,” Caldwell says she once confided in Knapp, who responded matter-of-factly, “I’m not, but what if I were? Big deal.” She says, “I remember feeling like I could exhale; it was a wonderfully liberating moment.”

She also admired Knapp’s quiet intensity. “We could always match each other in terms of intensity,” she says. “She could outdo me in terms of just staying power, and I didn’t know many people who could. And I don’t just mean on the river, I mean on the phone. That was one of the things we recognized in each other from the beginning.”

She elaborates on this connection in the book. “For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch,” Caldwell writes. “Even on that first afternoon we spent together—a four-hour walk through late-summer woods—I remember being moved by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie.”

Readers will also find themselves moved by Caroline, and will almost certainly be moved to tears when she is diagnosed with lung cancer that has spread to her liver and brain. The description of her illness and death is spare but wrenching.

Caldwell, however, also laughingly recalls times when they acted more like insecure teenage girls than self-assured grown women, playfully exclaiming, “I think you’re prettier than me!” or “I like your arms better than mine.” She pauses at the memory of her friend’s strong, rower’s physique. “She had these beautiful arms,” she muses, and you sense that she can still see her with searing clarity in her mind’s eye, suntanned and laughing by the river.

When writing about the life and death of a close friend, it would be easy to lapse into sentimentality, but Caldwell avoids this pitfall, instead offering a meditation on grief that is tender but never mawkish. “I always remember her being skeptical about any story that did not tell how difficult human relationships are,” Caldwell says. “Grief itself gives you the great capacity to make everything perfect in the friendship . . . and I could hear Caroline

saying, ‘You’ve got to talk about the struggles . . . you’ve got to talk about how hard this was.’ I owe that honesty in many ways to her.”

About the process of writing the Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell reflects, “I was very scared when I started to work on this.

There was a point where I thought that I would never write about Caroline and me. And then there became a point after that when I thought I couldn’t not write about it. I really went from one extreme to the other.”

As she grappled with this dilemma, she says, “Caroline was really my compass.” For a time, Caldwell would walk in the evening with Clementine (her beloved, aged Samoyed, a major player in the book), look up at the sky and ask Caroline, “Can I do this?” The answer she received time and again proved as insistent as two-year-old Tula, who throughout this interview continues to nudge Gail with her snout in a dogged plea to play ball.

Caldwell explains that she felt compelled to share this story in part because, “One of the most important things to me is knowing that there are people out there for whom Caroline’s book [Drinking] meant a great deal . . . and now I get to give people the Caroline that I knew.”

Caldwell, who says her book is “a tribute to memory,” adds, “There were passages I wrote with tears streaming down my face . . . but there was something else about it that was restorative. There was some way it captured the love and intensity between us, encapsulated it, which I guess is what writing does.” Especially writing as luminous as this.

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13

interviews

GARY SHTEYNGART © Lacombe

interview By alden mudge

A RUSSIAN ROMP IN THE U.S.A.

G

ary Shteyngart thinks it might be time to buy a desk. Not as a reward for finally completing his super sad, super funny third novel. Not because he’s just been named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best fiction writers under the age of 40.

14

And not because he will soon move from his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to more spacious digs elsewhere in downtown Manhattan. No, it turns out that Gary Shteyngart needs a desk because he has a back problem.

“I write in bed,” Shteyngart explains during a call to his soonto-be-abandoned apartment near the Williamsburg Bridge. “Wherever I go, I always write in bed. I began this novel in New York. Then I went to the American Academy in Berlin, which is in this horrible suburb outside Berlin, and everything I wrote there had to be trashed. Then I went back to New York and worked on it some more. But it wasn’t until I got a fellowship in Umbria that I really solved all my [novel’s] problems so that in a month and a half the book was done. My posture was so bad that I was in the ER with some back problems. I think it’s time to buy a desk.”

An exaggeration? Fans of Shteyngart’s wildly exuberant novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and Absurdistan (2006), would not be surprised—or necessarily disappointed—if it were. The outsized characters (Misha of Absurdistan is the son of the 1,238thrichest man in Russia and weighs 325 pounds) and outsized events (Vladimir, the hero of Russian Debutante’s Handbook, concocts

a hilariously improbable Ponzi scheme for the Russian mafia) show Shteyngart’s unique capacity for comic exaggeration in the service of pointed satire. Why not carry that over into real life?

After all, real-life chaos in postSoviet Eastern Europe and Russia, where Shteyngart was born in 1972, shaped his first two novels. Real-life economic turbulence in the United States, where he and his parents moved in 1979, shapes his third book, Super Sad True Love Story.

“I wanted to write a novel where I took a little baby step away from the Russia theme and began working with America,” Shteyngart says.

“The U.S.S.R. fell apart in such a violent, horrible way and that was the place where I was born, but I started to notice that the place where I was living, especially under the Bush administration, was becoming very frightening in and of itself. Some of the same things I remember from the Soviet Union are happening here: the hyperpatriotism, the economic decline. . . . So I started to think about what would happen if things began to really turn bad.”

Set mostly in New York City in the not-too-distant future, Super Sad True Love Story describes a country that is far enough from our own to be very funny but plausible enough to be simultaneously terrifying. It is a country after the collapse, a

place dominated by youth culture, where our 39-year-old hero Lenny Abramov, who is both emotionally immature and physically over-thehill, sells the technology of eternal life to high net worth individuals (HNWI) for the Post-Human Services division of a major multinational corporation. It is a place where the dollar has been supplanted by the Chinese yuan as the world currency.

Where the bipartisan American Recovery Authority runs the country. Where everyone has a smartphone-like äppärät that allows each individual to instantly rate the personality and sexual appeal of everyone else. Where corporate mergers have refined business to its most simplistic expression: Credit, Media and Retail. And where, to add insult to injury, Staten Island is more fashionable than Manhattan. It is, in short, a world where Shteyngart can romp and cavort, deploying his extraordinary gifts for invention.

“The book tries to be a book for our times, and our times move so quickly that there’s almost no present anymore, we’re living in the future all the time,” Shteyngart says.

“What I’m trying to do is find a way to talk about it. “ But this is also a super sad love story. So the hapless Lenny pursues a much younger Eunice Park, the fashion-conscious daughter of Korean immigrants and a girl who expresses her every random thought through text messages and email. She is at first resistant to Lenny, then flattered, and then kinda, sorta for a while transformed by him. Throughout his depiction of Eunice, Shteyngart displays a brilliant satirist’s ear for language.

“I’m always trying to listen to the way people talk and the way they write messages and I’m trying to get that clickety-clack,” Shteyngart says “Given that this is the future where nobody can read, I think Eunice’s messages are actually quite beautiful and very introspective. . . .

Eunice is a unique character. Despite the fact that she is so modern, she’s really old-fashioned at heart and maybe that’s why she connects with Lenny.”

In fact, Lenny even gets Eunice interested in reading a book. And in that moment lurks Shteyngart’s most radical critique of the future.

Early in Super Sad True Love Story, on an airplane home, Lenny opens a book of Chekhov short stories.

The young jock sitting next to him, “a senior Credit ape at Land O’LakesGMFord,” says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Lenny, it seems, is one of the last people on Earth who is still seriously reading fiction.

“I’m not a Luddite,” Shteyngart says. “I’m speaking to you on an iPhone, I have computers lying around. But something terrible is being lost, I think. What that is is empathy for other human beings, which you can get only by entering their minds through something like a novel. As wonderful as film is, it still requires a camera lens. It does not allow you inside the mind of its creator, whereas a book still does.

That experience requires a deep train of concentration and that deep train of concentraAdventures in tion is what is a near-future being slowly America where chiseled away at by instant reading is gratificaoutmoded and tion forms of everyone gets media.”

“Reading is instant ratings now considfor personality ered nonand sex appeal. interactive as compared to, say, video games. But a good piece of fiction has enough stuff missing that it requires the reader to fill in many different emotions and feelings,” Shteyngart says. “The major difference with the new generation is that when you’re playing a video game, you are the hero or the heroine of the game. You are the avatar.

You control things. But reading fiction, you give up a little bit of your own identity, your own authority.

You meld with something else. And that is scary but exhilarating.”

And that, dear reader of fiction, is also the perfect description for Shteyngart’s new novel: scary but exhilarating.

Super Sad True Love Story

By Gary Shteyngart Random House $24.99, 352 pages ISBN 9781400066407

FICTION

meet LISA UNGER © JEEFF UNGER

Q: W hat’s the title of your new

New from New York Times bestselling author Beverly Barton

book?

There’s nowhere to run, no place to hide, & no time for tears.

Q: H ow would you describe the book?

Q: Y ou’ve been trying to write this book for 20 years. Why was it so difficult to approach this particular story?

Q: Do you think honesty is always the best policy?

Q: What has surprised you the most about being a parent?

Q: I f you could teenage self one thing, what would it be?

Q: I f you could change places with one person for a day, who would it be?

Q: W ords to live by?

The crime scenes are horrifying, and each new victim proves that the past hasn’t been forgotten...and the worst is yet to come.

FRAGILE Since leaving a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Lisa Unger has written five novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Lies and Black Out. Her latest is Fragile (Shaye Areheart, $24, 336 pages, ISBN 9780307393999), the gripping story of a girl’s disappearance and the repercussions that follow. Unger lives in Florida with her husband and daughter.

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15

interviews

KATE RACCULIA Interview by Amy Scribner

DEBUT NOVELIST FINDS HER PLACE

W

hen Kate Racculia finished her master’s in fine arts from Emerson College, her first thought was, wow, this is great, now I can be a writer and write fulltime!

“Then I realized I had to pay off my loans,” laughs Racculia.

As a result of this buzz-killing reality check, she found a 9-to-5 job in financial services marketing in Boston, and spent two and a half years’ worth of weekends writing what would become her first novel, This Must Be the Place. It’s a book bursting with ideas about grief, choices and what it means to belong, anchored by the quirky, exquisite story of Mona Jones, baker of wedding cakes and young proprietor of an upstate New York boardinghouse, and her teenage daughter Oneida, two perfectly content outsiders in their small town of Ruby Falls.

Mona has a secret she’s held tight for more than a decade, one she shares only with her estranged friend Amy. When Amy is electrocuted while working on a Hollywood movie set, her grief-stricken husband Arthur realizes he didn’t know much about his wife at all.

Determined to unravel his wife’s foggy past, Arthur travels to Ruby Falls with a pink shoebox filled with clues that only Mona understands, including an old postcard on which Amy wrote: Mona Jones, I’m sorry. I should have told you. You knew me better than anyone—I think you knew me better than me. Don’t worry, I swear I’m happier dead. Anyway, I left you the best parts of myself. You know where to look.

Throughout her remarkably selfassured debut, Racculia sprinkles allusions to her childhood inspira-

This Must be the place

By Kate Racculia Holt $25, 368 pages ISBN 9780805092301

DEBUT FICTION

16

tions, including repeated references to special effects master Ray Harryhausen. It’s only fitting for this self-described “bit of a geek.”

“I feel like people have very different definitions of a geek versus a nerd versus a dork,” Racculia says matter-of-factly. “I think a geek is someone who is really passionate and really interested in things. I love learning things, knowing things.

I love trivia. I’m a super science fiction fan. I grew up watching Star Trek and Dark Crystals.”

As an only child in a close-knit family in suburban Syracuse, she grew up writing from the time she could put her thoughts to paper—or rope someone else into doing it for her.

“I would dictate things to people who could write, my grandparents and parents, and then make little illustrations,” she says. “I think I’ve always thought of myself as a writer.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that never said, ‘Kate, you shouldn’t go to school for that.’ I always had support from my family, teachers and friends.”

Considering Racculia’s own idyllic childhood and close-knit family (the only two readings on her publicity schedule so far are Boston and Syracuse, where extended family will pack the house—accordingly, she’s selecting non-racy excerpts to read), This Must Be the Place is at times surprisingly dark, tinged with regret over choices not made, paths not taken. After growing up together, inseparable, Amy and Mona run away one summer to the Jersey shore. Without consulting Mona, Amy makes a choice there that changes both their lives forever.

Admirably, Racculia didn’t shy away from drawing out the imperfections in her characters, especially Amy. “[In] a lot of fiction, when someone dies it’s very sad and books about grief are about letting that person go. There’s this tendency to make that person truly perfect, this wonderful person who has left us. I

wanted to write about a person who made some horrible decisions,” Racculia says. “At first you see [Amy] through Arthur, you meet her and you like her, and then you find out more and like her less.”

That’s not to say This Must Be the Place is all doom and gloom. In Oneida, Racculia draws a particularly poignant, vibrant portrait of an awkward, frizzy-haired teenager just beginning to come into her own.

Oneida puts a tentative toe in the treacherous waters of the teenage dating pool when she is paired with fellow outcast Eugene on a class project. Eugene has his own issues: His father, a security guard, steals artwork from the museums he patrols and replaces the art with forgeries. His mother and sister spend all their free time rehearsing with their rock band. Eugene’s hamhanded wooing of Oneida is one of the highlights of the book, particularly when he blurts out to her, “If I don’t have real sex soon, I will die.”

“Eugene is kind of so clueless about who he really is,” says Racculia. “It was so fun to write about that family. It was the purest, completely made up part of the story. Obviously, I’ve never met an art forger.”

It’s this complete originality and fresh voice that has generated considerable buzz about Racculia’s novel. Her parents recently sent her a photo of the book’s poster in the window of a Barnes and Noble bookstore where she worked while in college.

“It’s so strange,” she said. “My high school friend posted that picture to Facebook. Friends my dad went to high school with were sending me pictures.”

It’s a time in her life that she calls “exciting and totally surreal,” an excitement that’s likely to grow as word spreads about her remarkable new book.

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How far might a woman go to get what she wants?

Married against her will while still a child, Frances Howard seeks to repay that indignity by becoming a headstrong force of nature—determined to prevail, no matter who stands in her way…even a favorite of King James I. The Murder in the Tower is the longawaited third book in Jean Plaidy’s Novels of the Stuarts series.

“Plaidy excels at blending history with romance and drama.”

—NewYork Times

features

18

By Stephanie Gerber

HELPING YOUR KID MAKE THE GRADE

A

s students gear up for school, here are four picks to help parents make the most of their child’s education, from preschool to college.

The right start The subtitle of Jenifer Wana’s preschool primer says it all: “The Ultimate Guide to Finding, Getting Into, and Preparing for Nursery School.” Type A moms everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief because How To Choose the Best Preschool for Your Child (Sourcebooks, $14.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781402242083) will save you loads of time navigating essays, interviews, applications and recommendation letters. Beginning at least a year before your child starts school, Wana offers organizational tips for researching, visiting and enrolling in preschool. This process might seem straightforward—your little tyke is only three after all—but the to-do’s are daunting.

Wana helps you determine what’s most important to you and your child in choosing the right preschool (location and cost are biggies for most families). To help you narrow down the options, she includes helpful overviews of different preschool types (Montessori, play-based, Waldorf and others) and comprehensive instructions on researching and evaluating schools.

Wana provides lots of questions that will make you look smart to the discerning admissions officer and even offers acceptably pushy tips on getting off the waiting list. Once little Susie is accepted to the perfect school, a countdown will get the whole family ready for the big day.

Kindergarten Success

threeriverspress.com

BACK TO SCHOOL

Regardless of whether they attend public or private school, most children will be given some sort of IQ test by the age of five. Author Karen Quinn has written a comprehensive guide to this secret world in Testing for Kindergarten (Fireside, $14.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9781416591078). It’s a process foreign to most parents, and these early test scores don’t even correlate well to later success.

However, the tests have enormous impact on whether a child will get into a competitive private kindergarten or a free public gifted program.

Quinn turned herself into an expert on the topic after her son Sam was faced with developmental delays caused by hearing problems.

At age three, he scored in the 37th percentile. After Quinn’s intervention, he scored in the 94th.

Testing for Kindergarten shows how every parent can improve their child’s abilities and scores. First, Quinn explains the most common IQ tests and the seven abilities they measure. Then she helps parents refocus the way they interact with their child to start sneaking learning into everyday life. Daily Life Lessons are easy ideas, like what to do while setting the table, and there are loads of games and activities.

Quinn keeps the overload factor down by focusing on the most important things you can start on day one (dialogic reading, talking to your child constantly). Don’t miss this empowering guide.

Sincere Slackers As most parents know, boys are different from girls when it comes to organization, time management and study skills. Author Ana Homayoun outlines her specially designed organizational system for preteen and teenage boys in That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week (Perigee, $15.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780399535598). This professional tutor says boys’ struggles in school are rarely due to difficulties with the class material. Instead, disorganization is the root cause.

To get boys back on track, Homayoun outlines a practical plan that focuses on building skills rather than just improving grades.

She identifies five factors that add up to chronic disorganization: trouble with multi-tasking, over-in-

volved parents, technology distractions, sleep deprivation and fear of making wrong choices. Parents play a key role in implementing change, starting by identifying their son’s dis-organizational style (the overscheduled procrastinator or the sincere slacker) and helping their sons set three academic and three personal goals.

The specific to-do’s are geared for maximum efficiency. Prepare an organized binder for each class.

Don’t do homework in the bedroom; instead try the dining room table. Turn off the music, and put away the cell phone and computer.

A five-week strategy for implementing the straightforward advice helps parents and boys see results fast.

College Bound From the author of the bestseller The Naked Roommate comes The Happiest Kid on Campus (Sourcebooks, $14.99, 640 pages, ISBN 9781402239427), a practical parents’ guide to helping your child get the most out of the emotional and tumultuous college years.

Author Harlan Cohen writes with a wise, funny point of view.

He’s young enough to understand kids these days and help parents avoid major eye-rolling on touchy subjects like sex, drugs and alcohol.

Pretty much any topic that parents are embarrassed to talk about with their kids is covered with sensitivity and common-sense advice.

Cohen also helps tech-illiterate parents navigate the muddy waters of texting, Twitter and Facebook. He says email is out of date, so if you do want to keep in touch, learn to text. But limit it to twice a week.

Cohen has plenty of advice on practical matters, including handling orientation, packing, move-in day and the basics of financial aid and, of course, dealing with difficult roommates. This handy guide will help parents survive the first few months until your child finds his place on campus.

PARENTING

by Rebecca Steinitz

BUILDING SKILLS FOR LIFE

A

t the start of the 21st century, parents are understandably worried about how to help children navigate a world characterized by economic uncertainty and academic pressure, cyberdistractions and omnipresent media. These books offer advice for every stage of the parenting journey.

In recent years, scientists and psychologists have gained dramatic new insights into the brains and behavior of babies and young children. Among other things, they have discovered that babies are aware of language, numbers and feelings at just a few months old, and that the executive functions of the brain, which help us organize our lives and behavior, are critical to achievement. Ellen Galinsky draws upon these insights in Mind in the Making (HarperStudio, $16.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780061732324), an overview of the seven “learning skills”—like “Focus and Self Control” and “Critical Thinking”—that, she argues, help children succeed in life.

Galinsky references her own experiences, brief parenting anecdotes and the research and opinions of experts as she first details the importance of each “essential life skill” and then provides suggestions for how parents can stimulate that skill. The suggestions are as specific as games to play and questions to ask, and as broad as reducing parental stress. While Mind in the Making offers much food for thought, its breadth can be overwhelming; just trying to follow the 19 suggestions for promoting focus could drive a parent to distraction.

HELPING CHILDREN LEARN Like Galinsky, Jane Healy focuses on the brain; while Galinsky addresses the basic skills that underlie success in all aspects of life, Healy— an educational psychologist, teacher and brain expert—specifically tackles learning problems, and her approach is both more focused and more comprehensive. In Different Learners (Simon & Schuster, $26, 416 pages, ISBN 9781416556411), she makes a persuasive case for attending carefully to both genetic and environmental causes of learning problems.

While learning problems often originate in the brain, Healy argues that they can be dramatically

exacerbated by a child’s “home, school, community, and culture.”

Carefully laying out the workings of the brain, along with the causes and consequences of different kinds of learning issues, she argues that paying close attention to a child’s specific needs and making changes in their environment and behavior can make medication unnecessary.

Healy is persuasive, thoughtful and, above all, sympathetic to the challenges and fears parents face, providing many useful tips and strategies for how they can help their children.

GETTING IT RIGHT FOR GIRLS In Girls on the Edge (Basic, $26, 272 pages, ISBN 9780465015610), Dr. Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, now turns his attention to the opposite sex. Sax believes that contemporary culture, with its focus on appearance and performing for others, is preventing girls from developing an “authentic sense of self.” In the first part of the book, he targets early sexualization, the Internet and environmental toxins as primary causes of this absence, and obsessions (from anorexia and alcohol abuse to perfectionism) as one of its signal manifestations.

Sax, a strong public advocate for single-sex education, believes that boys and girls are innately different and should be taught and coached in different ways. In the book’s second half, he outlines some of these differences and offers advice on how to help girls flourish.

Some of Sax’s suggestions are common sense: limiting and supervising computer time, making sure your daughter gets enough sleep, being a “Just Right” parent (“firm but not rigid, loving but not permissive”) instead of “Too Hard” or “Too Soft.” His focus on gender difference and single-sex environments may be more controversial, but will ring true for some parents.

ONE MOTHER’S TEENAGER While Sax takes a big-picture

look at today’s teenage girls, in My Teenage Werewolf (Viking, $25.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780670021697), author and mom Lauren Kessler focuses on one girl: her preteen daughter, Lizzie, with whom she increasingly finds herself “completely immersed in mutual hostility.”

Seeking to understand Lizzie, and to prevent the semi-estrangement that characterized her post-adolescent relationship with her own mother, Kessler sets out to explore the world of contemporary teenagers.

She begins with research, learning about strategies for communicating with teens, the hormonal and brain changes that make teenagers

so erratic and impulsive, and the stresses they face today. She joins Lizzie at school, camp and wrestling practice, becoming a “cultural anthropologist” of “the world of the twenty-first-century teen girl.”

In the two years she spends immersed in Lizzie’s life, Kessler discovers that her daughter is not a raging, sulking beast determined to make her mother’s life miserable, but a strong, thoughtful individual.

Acknowledging Lizzie’s autonomy, and letting go of her own need to control her daughter, Kessler finds her way to the mother-daughter relationship she seeks—a relationship that was really there all along.

HEALING WITH WORDS:

A WRITER'S CANCER JOURNEY Diana M. Raab

“Diana Raab is a woman who knows what it is to live fully in the face of mortality.

She will add value to the life of every person who reads this book.”

Sena Jeter Naslund, author of AHAB’S WIFE and ABUNDANCE: A Novel of Marie Antoinette

To order call Loving Healing Press 1-888-761-6268 or see Amazon.com, BN.com or visit your local bookseller ISBN 978-1-61599-010-8 • Paperback $19.95 206 pages

19

features

FIRST FICTION

DAZZLING DEBUT AUTHORS

W

ith more and more new writers getting published each month, it’s sometimes daunting to decide which newly minted authors to add to your reading list. From historical novels to literary fiction to mysteries that will keep you up all night, here’s a look at the best debut fiction of the season.

The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

The Swimming Pool

By Holly LeCraw Doubleday $25.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780385531931

By Ellen Bryson Holt $26, 352 pages ISBN 9780805091922

LITERARY fiction

20

—Eliza Borné

—Cory Bordonaro

YOU LOST ME THERE

By Rosecrans Baldwin Riverhead $25.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781594487637 Also available on audio

Literary fiction

Holly lecraw

In Rosecrans Baldwin’s You Lost Me There, Victor has memorialized his marriage as picture-perfect, but when he stumbles upon his wife’s private reflections on their relationship, recorded for their therapist, he begins to realize just how incompatible his own perceptions of the relationship are relative to his wife’s. As he delves deeper into Sarah’s recollections, Victor finds himself increasingly overcome with grief as he struggles to reconcile his memories of their grand romance.

With the dawning understanding that “you never know what lurks beneath people, even when they’re perfect on paper,” Victor finds he must mourn Sarah all over again.

Unrestrained yet elegant, You Lost Me There is a powerful meditation on the all-consuming nature of grief and the power of memory as both redeemer and destroyer. A novel of contradictions, it plumbs the depths of life and death, sense and sentimentality, youth and maturity—all while tackling the big quandary of how we can hold on to the past while moving forward. This is a novel for which all the romantic intellectuals of the world will rejoice, as Baldwin proves there can be such a thing as a cerebral author who writes with his heart.

—Stephenie Harrison

A Small Death in the Great Glen One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the tangling of the fibers used for sending and receiving neural messages, particularly in the regions of the brain associated with memory. As one of the leading researchers into the biological prevention of Alzheimer’s, Victor Aaron can identify all the signs of the disease with textbook precision, but it is only upon losing his wife in a car accident that he truly begins to understand the fickle and fleeting nature of memory.

By A.D. Scott Atria $15, 416 pages ISBN 9781439154939

MYSTERY

The post-WWII town featured in A.D. Scott’s enjoyable novel is not a happy place. The weather in this Scottish Highlands village is often © Susie Post Rust

© Deborah Copaken Kogan

To the modern thrill-seeker, the main event of P.T. Barnum’s Circus may be the strangely trained animals or death-defying stunts.

The original circus, however, began with a much humbler lineup, as “A Museum of Curiosities” in New York City in the mid-1800s.

In The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, readers get an inside peek at the lives behind the freak show, home to skeleton men, oversized beasts and bearded women. But the performers in Barnum’s sideshow are real people, complete with genuine struggles, emotions, ambitions and love lives. The story’s protagonist, Fortuno, or “Barthy,” is one such multifaceted character.

After meeting a new addition to the cast, Mrs. Iell Adams, Barthy’s tiny world is widened by his own curiosity. Intrigued by her alluring look, he begins to question his own “talent,” asking himself for the first time if he has chosen his life or if it has chosen him.

Trudging through his doubt, he © Marion Ettinger

The basic plot of The Swimming Pool sounds like a soap opera: A devoted wife and mother of two is murdered. Shortly after, her husband—a suspect—dies in a car accident. Seven years later, the son of the dead couple has a steamy affair. His lover? The woman who was his late father’s mistress.

Under Holly LeCraw’s spell, what could have been pure pulp is instead a passionate and suspenseful family drama and murder mystery, set during the sultry summertime of Cape Cod. LeCraw skillfully alternates between past and present, allowing the reader to observe Marcella Atkinson’s affair with Cecil McClatchey; the consequences it has on both her family and his; and her later relationship with Jed, Cecil’s son.

The aftermath of betrayal and the cost of passion loom large in the story’s background. Did Marcella and Cecil’s affair cause the death of Cecil’s wife, Betsy? Was Marcella’s temporary happiness with Cecil worth disrupting the lives of her family? Is it possible to find happiness after horrific events?

Although LeCraw’s descriptive prose is sensual and worth savoring, readers will whip through The Swimming Pool, eager to find out what really happened on the night of Betsy’s murder. At the novel’s conclusion, they’ll relish the fact that LeCraw is a debut author—how thrilling it is to anticipate what she’ll come up with next.

HISTORICAL FICTION

follows the impulses of his newfound feelings, sometimes to his own detriment, and often leaving others in the wake of his decisions.

Beginning as a troubled soul who rarely stopped to dwell on the past or realize the implications of the present, Barthy emerges transformed by the twists and turns of his true self-discovery.

Bryson’s writing invites readers directly onto the showroom floor with her apt descriptions of the culture surrounding the Museum life. She’s done her digging—and it’s clear in her detailed portrait of the complexities and conflicts of a life behind glass. This is an apropos end-of-summer pick for the historian and/or the endlessly curious.

Whether or not they’re familiar with Barnum and his enterprise, readers will find much to appreciate in this story about the life-transforming power of love.

ELLEN BRYSON

ROSECRANS BALDWIN

FIRST FICTION

—Arlene McKanic

How to Be an American Housewife

By Margaret Dilloway Putnam $24.95, 288 pages ISBN 9780399156373 Also available on audio

Women’s fiction

—Deb Donovan

A. D. SCOTT

Bill Warrington’s Last Chance

MARGARET DILLOWAY

planned, but it’s darn worth a try.

—Dee Ann Grand

By James King Viking $24.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780670021611 Also available on audio

Stiltsville

By Susanna Daniel Harper $24.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780061963070

General fiction

women’s fiction

Bill Warrington, a cantankerous old man with Alzheimer’s disease, believes he has one last shot at something. But as the story unfolds, we see that every character has one last chance to drop the baggage from their angry past. All that is a bit iffy, however, since the key to bringing about a happy ending depends on a crusty grandfather on the brink of forgetting what he was trying to achieve in the first place.

Enter Bill’s granddaughter, April, a typical teenager looking for any chance to escape her tightly wound mother. And escape she does after yet another argument at home followed by a bit of luck. As it happens, Bill is ready to hit the road for one last hurrah in his ancient Impala.

In April’s eyes, this road trip’s purpose is to fulfill her dream of making it to California to become a rock star. But Bill has a secret or two. His plans for this trip are to reunite his feuding sons and his domineering daughter, April’s mother. But as the odometer miles add up, it becomes clear to April that Bill may not be able to pull off this shenanigan with his mental stamina fading faster every day. And how is a 15-year-old, alone and far from home, supposed to handle this deteriorating geezer while helping him achieve a highly unlikely reconciliation?

Bill Warrington’s Last Chance turns out to be quite a ride for all the characters involved—and it proves that taking a chance may not turn out exactly as you had © Daniel King

© Bradford Rogne

© Therese de Villiers

Shoko was eight years old when American bombs fell on Nagasaki;

she and her family experienced the repercussions from that day throughout their lives. Her younger brother Taro grew up hating all Americans, so when Shoko decides to try to “better” herself by marrying an American GI, Taro vows he will never speak to her again.

After relocating to the States with her new husband, Shoko struggles to become an American. She is aided by a book given to her by her mother when she left Japan, How to Be an American Housewife, but still finds it difficult to fit in. Margaret Dilloway, whose own mother was Japanese, writes perceptively about the neighbors who never visit, the classmates of Shoko’s daughter, Sue, who laugh about her mother’s accent, and PTA meetings where Shoko is painfully out of place.

Years later, in San Diego, Shoko has a weak heart, and knows she may die before she has the necessary operation to repair it. She longs to visit Japan once again and reconcile with Taro—“the only one who knew me, the real Shoko.” She asks Sue (now a divorced mother of precocious 12-year-old Helena) to go to Japan in her place—to try and find her uncle Taro. Sue agrees to go, Helena in tow; their journey becomes a revelation, in a myriad of ways. Sue learns things about her mother’s culture she had never heard of, finds cousins she never knew she had and comes to realize how much her Japanese roots really mean to her—and to Helena.

In this emotionally rich debut, Dilloway delves into all familial relationships: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife and sister-brother—each one both complicated and enriched by the added ingredient of the multicultural experience. Readers will easily relate to her touching, often humorous story of the way unbreakable family ties can stretch over decades, and from one generation to another.

Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville is rooted in a community of stilt houses towering above Biscayne Bay, Florida, where the author spent much of her childhood. Daniel masterfully evokes the sticky Miami heat and refreshing ocean breezes, but there is so much more to these pages than fetching seaside images.

Daniel’s characters are emotionally complex and so believable that Stiltsville almost reads as a memoir rather than a work of fiction.

The book’s beating heart is Frances Ellerby, whom readers follow on a moving journey that hits all the milestones: marriage, parenthood, trying illness, burial of loved ones and the highs and lows in between.

Frances shares the spotlight with her attorney husband Dennis, only daughter Margo and son-in-law— with whom she chaffs—Stuart. On the periphery are Dennis’ parents and sister, characters that aid in relaying a story of unwavering familial support and friendship.

Daniel strikes a perfect balance of wit, weakness and tenderness in Stiltsville. As Frances raises a daughter, contemplates infidelity and cares for an ailing husband, her values are challenged and ultimately defined. It is not as light as other beach reads on the market, but Stiltsville emerges wonderfully buoyant.

—Lizza Connor Bowen © Mindy Stricke

dismal and the people are hidebound, which leads too often to downtrodden women, mistreated children and a reflexive distrust of strangers. Then a little boy dies. At first it’s assumed that his death was accidental, but the town is gripped by horror as it’s revealed that the child was murdered. Who could have done such a thing?

The crime is of special interest to the staff of the Highland Gazette: Joanne, the typist, married to a brute who beats both her and their children; Rob, the charming cub reporter; McAllister, the editor-inchief; and McLeod, “the subeditor and all-around fusspot know-it-all.”

As the mystery of the boy’s death grows more tangled and frustrating, it’s McAllister who finds a possible clue to solving the crime in a secret trauma he’s been nursing for years.

Scott shows us that many in the town have secrets. Some are trivial, like the secrets children keep to stay out of trouble. But some are monstrous. Scott not only captures the townsfolk’s insularity and way of speaking, but writes beautifully about the natural world that surrounds them.

Written with humor, compassion and a fine sense of tragedy, A Small Death in the Great Glen is the first in a series by this promising new author.

JAMES KING

SUSANNA DANIEL

21

reviews STRANGERS AT THE FEAST

FICTION

The familial ties that bind Review by Amy Scribner

The dread that infuses Strangers at the Feast starts quietly. The Olson family is gathering for Thanksgiving—single daughter Ginny is hosting at her slightly rundown home in Westchester County. It’s the first time her parents, Eleanor and Gavin, will meet her newly adopted daughter from India. It’s also the first time they’ve seen her brother, Douglas, since the real-estate crash left him and his wife bordering on bankruptcy.

It’s a day fraught with the same potential as most family gatherings: hurt feelings, tipsy misunderstandings, sibling squabbles over long-simmering resentments. But what ultimately happens—after Ginny’s oven fails and the hungry, overwrought clan decides to move the party to Douglas’ opulent home in Greenwich—is much more sinister.

“My children are grown and healthy adults, thought Eleanor. I have beautiful grandchildren. She would thank the Lord that everyone was at

By Jennifer Vanderbes, Scribner, $26, 352 pages peace, everything was in order. She could happily buy the groceries and ISBN 9781439166956, also available on audio weed the garden because everyone she cared about was well. But if someone were to try to threaten that? Was there a length to which a mother wouldn’t go?”

Eleanor discovers the answer to that question on Thanksgiving night: At the same time the Olsons are sitting down to eat, two teenagers are out on a mission of their own to right a terrible wrong they are sure Douglas’ company inflicted on their family.

Jennifer Vanderbes scored a Washington Post “Best Book of 2003” nod with her first novel, Easter Island. Her follow-up is every bit as compelling, a tour de force that traces the long history of two families’ decisions to their inevitable, chilling intersection. The richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling make Strangers at the Feast a must-read study of the lengths to which families will go in the face of unimaginable threats.

Rich Boy

By Sharon Pomerantz Twelve $24.99, 528 pages ISBN 9780446563185

Debut fiction

22

At 528 pages, Rich Boy is a Space Age version of a Victorian family saga, with the great difference being that the family is not upper-class English but Philadelphia Jewish.

Perhaps it is more apt to call this novel an inflated Great Gatsby, with Robert Vishniak climbing the sociocapitalist ladder all the way up and into the Bernie Madoff Manhattan era. Sharon Pomerantz is no Fitzgerald, nor is she a Dickens, but devoted readers of lengthy novels tend not to quibble.

The family expects favored son Robert to escape from their poor neighborhood and use his considerable charm and intelligence to move through prestigious New England schools into a room at the

top, where he will hold his own with other Reagan-era financial wizards.

Pomerantz takes Robert through success in Wall Street buildings to the point when “the lobby looked like the cleanest of ghost towns.”

Inherent in all such high flights out of the slums is the problem of how to shuffle off the early self.

There is always the chance one will happen to meet again the girl one left behind, the person who will reawaken the old self that did not especially want to pursue the rich and famous version of the American Dream. That’s what happens to Robert, who comes to see just how rich he was as a poor Jewish boy: “And for a moment, a strange and wonderful moment, Robert Vishniak knew where he belonged.”

Readers will enjoy this journey through the labyrinth of episodes of class conflicts, sexual escapades, financial schemes and, of course, romantic love that Pomerantz spent a decade constructing. Her publisher, Twelve, offers only 12 books each year, and they considered Rich Boy special enough to choose it as this year’s only novel. It is not to be missed.

— D a v i d Madd e n

Shift

By Tim Kring and Dale Peck Crown $26, 320 pages ISBN 9780307453457

THRILLER

recruited by a CIA operative known as The Wiz, claws his way out of a newly sanctioned 1963 Cuba and back to his “Company” progenitors, only to find that he has been quietly swept under the rug and forgotten.

Meanwhile, a Persian prostitute blackmailed by a CIA operative into giving various government targets covert doses of LSD finds that her latest mark—a career student with family ties in high places—holds the key to vast mental powers unlocked by the mind-altering properties of LSD. Add to this a freshly minted— and recently disenfranchised—FBI agent blindly seeking an answer to a question he doesn’t understand and you have the recipe for a massive, out-of-control conspiracy so unreal it almost sounds credible.

With its disparate but always converging narratives, reading Shift is like fighting a featherweight boxer. Always moving, constantly on its toes, it peppers you with small punches until, eventually, you succumb and it delivers the knockout. But oh, what a fight, and certainly one that is enjoyable and frenetic from start to finish. Written in deceptively simple language, luscious descriptions of everything from hallucinations to childhood memories to the fit of a dress on the Persian temptress spring from the page in a way that is evocative of the ’60s while also managing to stay out of the way of the sheer mania contained within the pages.

For an engaging romp through the ’60s that never were, look no further than Shift.

—T o n y K u e h n

I Curse the River of Time FBI. CIA. LSD. JFK. USSR. If an acronym associated with the 1960s comes to mind, it’s likely to make an appearance in Shift. From acidinduced mind control to covert operations in Cuba, from a missing nuclear weapon to mass hallucinations, Shift runs a gamut that your inner conspiracy theorist will find delightful and provocative. Ever wonder if Timothy Leary was more than just a drug-addled ’60s cliché?

Want to know who supplied JFK with his acid? All these, and many more, questions are considered with a wry aplomb that will keep skeptics on their toes and give the “what if” crowd enough ammunition for years to come.

Melchior, one of three “wise men”

By Per Petterson Graywolf $23, 224 pages ISBN 9781555975562

Literary fiction

“All this happened quite a few years ago.” With that unassuming, almost childlike opening sentence, Per Petterson introduces an evocative still-life portrait of the tender, difficult relationship between a mother and her adult son.

Set mainly in 1989 with flashbacks to the early 1970s, I Curse the

FICTION River of Time—Petterson’s third novel to be published in English— traces a cancer-stricken woman’s journey from Norway to her childhood home in a windswept, seaside town in Denmark’s Jutland region.

She’s followed there by her son Arvid Jensen, haunted by his impending divorce and the specter of his mother’s death. Arvid, a former Maoist who dropped out of college (over his mother’s fierce objection) to work in a printing plant as an idealistic demonstration of his solidarity with the working class, sees his youthful illusions dashed as

the Communist empire collapses in Eastern Europe.

The novel’s title, drawn from a poem by Mao Zedong, introduces the theme of time’s inevitable passage that permeates the story. “The world unfolded in all its majesty,” Arvid thinks, “back in time, forward in time, history was one long river and we were all borne along by that river.” In a few fine brushstrokes, Petterson economically captures Arvid’s regret over the way lost time has robbed him of his chances to build an enduring emotional bond with his mother.

Petterson’s unaffected prose calls to mind Hemingway’s, and is especially well suited to both the novel’s autumnal Scandinavian setting and the tense interplay between Arvid and his mother. Even the story’s mostly quotidian moments—a parent’s 50th birthday party or a conversation between mother and son over Napoleon cakes and coffee—are roiled by powerful undercurrents of feeling. Petterson seems untroubled by any need to elaborate on the novel’s sometimes enigmatic events, like the moving scenes of Arvid’s younger brother

on life support in an Oslo hospital or the relationship between Arvid’s mother and a Danish man named Hansen, but these omissions only serve to enhance its brooding tone.

With a body of work that’s attracting growing attention in this country, Per Petterson delivers novels that plumb the depths of character with tender insight. His latest, eloquent both in speech and in silence, is best read in the quiet hours of the night, when we’re most receptive to its meditative spell.

—Harvey Freedenberg

D R

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23

topshelf

this month’s top publisher picks

reviews The Doctor and the Diva

By Adrienne McDonnell Pamela Dorman/Viking $26.95, 432 pages ISBN 9780670021888

Women’s fiction

FICTION The Typist

By Michael Knight Atlantic Monthly $20, 208 pages ISBN 9780802119506

Historical fiction

Rebecca Foust

“All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song brims with amplitude and vitality. By virtue of her unsentimental warmth of spirit, Foust brings to life an immense range of experience and feeling.”—Peter Campion Many Mountains Moving Press

HC 9781592405510 $26

What We Have Amy Boesky

A riveting portrayal of how women navigate life with a knife hanging over their heads…stirs readers to look inward and examine their own closely held beliefs about fate and destiny.”—Patricia Wood, Lottery Gotham

PB 9781434376633 $12.99 www.lovingeyesarewatching.com

The Guardians: Loving Eyes Are Watching Richard Williams

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Imagine a world where special dogs lead their masters back to the path of God’s love. The Guardians is such a story; it tells of two shelties who have the ability to speak, but their unusual talent is a closely guarded secret.

AuthorHouse

—J o h n C . W i l l i a m s

Bijou Roy

By Ronica Dhar St. Martin’s $23.99, 244 pages ISBN 9780312551018

PB 9781886976245 $15.95

All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song

had delved more deeply into these characters, The Typist’s brevity—in which it refuses to draw out any one plot point—is a source of its power.

Classic storytelling and a modern sensibility don’t always come in the same package. But readers luck out with The Doctor and the Diva, a story that touches all the old novelistic pulse points while offering keen insight on the evolving roles of women.

It helps if you, like this reader, enjoy opera, but nothing really interferes with the basic story: In the first few years of the 20th century, Erika, an aspiring opera singer, finds herself still childless after years in a loving marriage. Doctors have been unable to help Erika, but her husband Peter, a successful and adventurous botanist, consents to even more treatments by young, charismatic Dr. Ravell. Finally, with Erika on the verge of going to Italy to pursue her long-delayed career goals, Dr. Ravell produces results that leave them ecstatic—for seven months, at least. And not exactly in the way you’re thinking, either.

Based on a true story from the author’s family and letters that attest to it, this novel is powerful, especially considering the period in which it is set, with medical procedures that appear to modern readers as little more than primitive.

Erika’s emotional struggle between fulfilling her musical dreams and being a loving mother are complicated by the physical and psychological limitations of the times, which can only lead to misunderstanding and bitterness.

Author Adrienne McDonnell has taught literature and fiction writing, and her talents shine in this debut.

Her portrayal of multiple settings like Boston, Trinidad and Florence convey the deep feelings of her characters as well as historical fact, connecting all the deeper parts of the reader’s mind to her story.

The Doctor and the Diva is a book to treasure and recommend, far more than just a fleeting summer’s beach read.

—Maude McDaniel

The Typist is a compelling meditation on how public events shape private lives. Packing sharp characterization and a rollercoaster plot into a brisk 200 pages, it is also a notable feat of literary economy.

Michael Knight’s protagonist is Francis “Van” Vancleave. Serving out his Army duty in post-World War II Tokyo, he is called to a meeting with General Douglas MacArthur, who has gotten the idea that Van is the fastest typist in Japan. Soon Van is not only personal secretary to MacArthur, but also weekend playmate for his son.

Even as Van adjusts happily to this odd role, trouble is on the horizon. His roommate, a member of MacArthur’s personal Honor Guard, threatens Van’s tranquility by conducting shady business deals; meanwhile, Van is befuddled by bad news from home. He quietly grapples with these problems as his Army tenure draws to a close.

The events and people Knight takes as his subjects are monumental, but The Typist does not portray them that way. Instead of a mythological General MacArthur, we see a humble homebody who reads the newspaper in his slippers. Even when there is a purportedly historic event—the “Atom Bowl” football game in Hiroshima—Van takes his leave to attend to private matters.

Van himself has a sort of blank quality—appropriate for someone whose job is to mindlessly transcribe the thoughts of others. Even though he has typed his own story, he shows little sign of grasping the importance of what goes on around him. Events are in the saddle, and— until the end, at least—Van is just there to report the ride.

Some might complain that The Typist takes liberties with history.

Yet it is no small thing to convince a reader to suspend disbelief about well-known events; Knight does so masterfully. And though readers might find themselves wishing he

GENERAL fiction

Six months after her father’s death, American-born Bijou Roy travels to India to scatter her Indian father’s ashes in the Hooghly River.

Clutching a box containing her father’s remains, she wades in to fulfill a tradition she is not familiar with and does not fully understand.

The pages of Bijou Roy chronicle Bijou’s predicament: Conflicted by her parents’ deeply felt Indian principles and those of her own modern American lifestyle, Bijou struggles to carve out an identity. The book skips back and forth in time to reveal bits of Bijou’s upbringing, her relationship with her father and her ensuing grief over his death.

In Calcutta, Bijou meets family members and friends who serve as windows into her father’s past, particularly his involvement in the controversial Communist Naxalite movement. Naveen, the son of Bijou’s father’s closest comrade, befriends Bijou and aids in her understanding with photos, stories and long-lost letters he has collected for his own academic research.

As Naveen and Bijou peel back the layers of the past during frequent walks through the vibrant city of Calcutta, a bond begins to develop.

Juggling a demanding boyfriend back home and combating serious jetlag and sensory overload, Bijou struggles. By the novel’s end, however, her time in Calcutta will afford her a much clearer picture of her heritage. Her father’s words return to her and serve as a guide for hard decisions ahead: “ ‘Better to furnish your mind [with] Truth.

Justice. Love. Friendship.’ There was no fear of overcrowding your mind with abstracts, he told Bijou. Same principle applies to the heart.”

—Lizza Connor Bowen

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

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25

reviews The Girls of Murder City

NONFICTION

CHICAGO’S RAZZLE-DAZZLE DAYS REVIEW BY Pete Croatto

With today’s relentless news cycle, it’s easy to forget the genesis of our current media fascinations. You may think that the 1990s was when the media, celebrity trials and America’s love for gawking oozed together to create the concept of the courtroom as an entertainment venue. The truth is, you have to go back a bit.

Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City provides a captivating look at the killer women who dominated headlines in Chicago and across the United States in 1924. More than a dozen women called Murderess’ Row in the Cook County Jail home, but two grabbed most of the attention: Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan. Cabaret dancer Belva’s meeting with her drunken lover ended with him fatally shot and her glamorous clothes blood-splattered.

And after shooting her lover in the apartment she shared with her husband, 23-year-old Beulah danced to her favorite record, “Hula Lou.”

By Douglas Perry,Viking, $25.95, 320 pages, Dripping with scandal, beauty and savvy, these attention-hungry ISBN 9780670021970, Also available in audio women had a glorious chance to deliver the performances of a lifetime.

They didn’t disappoint. Covering this for the Chicago Tribune was rookie reporter Maurine Watkins, who took her bitterness over the women’s manipulation of the system—Beulah changed her shooting story three times and the all-male jury still let her walk—and turned it into a hit Broadway play, Chicago.

Perry takes a sturdy foundation of murder, sex and Chicago’s scandal-happy newspapers and builds a nonfiction marvel. His bouncy, exuberant prose perfectly complements the theatricality of the proceedings, and he deftly maneuvers away from the main story without ever losing momentum. Perry uncovers illuminating background details on the Chicago newspaper wars and the female inmates who took a backseat to Belva and Beulah, and pushes Watkins back into the spotlight. He captures the pulse of a city that made New York look like a suburban block party. The Girls of Murder City not only illustrates the origins of a new media monster, but reminds us that we’ve never been that innocent.

The Murder Room

By Michael Capuzzo Gotham $26, 448 pages ISBN 9781592401420 Also available on audio

TRUE CRIME

26

Murder-mystery fans would kill for entry to the Vidocq Society, the Philadelphia-based crime-probing organization Michael Capuzzo describes in The Murder Room. Imagine the thrill of being in the same room with some of the world’s most resourceful detectives, coroners, profilers, polygraph experts and forensic artists when they’re presented details of a particularly perplexing homicide and challenged to put their formidable minds to solving it.

The society, which takes its name from pioneering French detective Eugene Francois Vidocq, was established in 1990 by former Philadelphia cop and FBI agent William Fleisher,

self-taught forensic artist Frank Bender and psychologist/profiler Richard Walter. Strictly an advisory group to law enforcement agencies, the society had consulted on more than 300 cases by 2009, Capuzzo reports, and solved 90 percent of them.

Rather than present a dry chronological narrative, Capuzzo tells his story on three interlocking and time-shifting levels—the murders at issue, the society as both a professional and a social organization and its three colorful founders. Fleisher emerges as the genial but relentless father figure who holds the society together; Bender is the intuitive (he might say psychic), bohemian artist; Walter is the chain-smoking cynic who anatomizes the criminal mind but never romanticizes it.

The murders cited are truly horrifying. Among the grisliest is the “boy in the box” murder from 1957 that united and still haunts the three principals. Capuzzo recounts several such crimes and their resolutions with panache, always seeming to be at the investigators’ elbows as they slog through to victory. But what he fails to clarify is which details he’s

actually witnessed, which he’s been told about and which he merely surmises.

As the book went to press, Bender was suffering from a terminal case of pleural mesothelioma, which, the acerbic Walter observed, might just be another of his flamboyant friend’s bids for attention. If there’s not a movie in the works about this charmed circle of cold-casers, someone is missing the boat.

— E d w a r d M o rri s

two sisters for as long as they can remember. It killed their grandmother, their aunts, their great-aunts. The hallway of their childhood home was filled with the sepia photos of dead relatives, what Boesky calls her “ill-fated, all-female family tree.” All three young women have lived with a heightened timeline, urged by doctors to finish having babies and get preventive surgery by age 35.

The beauty of Boesky’s thoroughly compelling memoir is that she deals matter-of-factly with her horrible, random family inheritance and dwells not on pity but on the life that is lived even underneath its looming shadow. A literature professor, Boesky writes elegantly, almost poetically, about the year in her life during which she had her first child, her sister lost one daughter and gave birth to another, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer (in a cruel twist, it’s not ovarian cancer).

Boesky perfectly captures the prickly, competitive, always loving way she and her sisters cope with their own genetic code and their mother’s illness. They are not above gallows humor (they call their mother’s chemotherapy drug F-U) and the occasional neurotic lapse, sure that any lump or bump is a sign of doom. As satisfying as any novel, What We Have is about coming to terms with the fact that living life means facing down time.

— Amy Scrib n e R

THE SUGAR KING OF HAVANA

By John Paul Rathbone Penguin Press $27.95, 320 pages ISBN 9781594202582 Also available on audio

HISTORY

WHAT WE HAVE

By Amy Boesky Gotham $26, 320 pages ISBN 9781592405510

MEMOIR

Women in Amy Boesky’s family die young, and they die specifically.

The threat of ovarian cancer has hung over the heads of Amy and her

In the United States, we say that someone is “as rich as Rockefeller.”

Cubans, even today, say someone is “as rich as Julio Lobo.” It’s their folk memory of a sugar-industry magnate who died in sad exile in Madrid in 1983, but endures as a symbol of his country’s pre-Castro highs and lows.

Lobo, who was worth $200 million in 1960 currency before he lost almost everything to the Revolution’s confiscation, dominated the sugar market. Che Guevara asked Lobo, known for his honesty in a corrupt

NONFICTION culture, to stay in Cuba to run the sugar industry as a top bureaucrat; Lobo, a loner and a natural risk-taker, fled the country the next day with a single suitcase rather than comply.

British journalist John Paul Rathbone is ideally suited to write The Sugar King of Havana, a colorful, even-handed account of Lobo and his Cuba. Rathbone’s mother is a Cuban exile who grew up in Lobo’s upper-class Havana circle and was a friend of his younger daughter.

His book is really a dual biography, of Lobo and of his own interesting, lively Cuban family.

Rathbone is able to see with both sympathy and detachment the two sides in the never-ending conflict between those Cubans who believe Castro’s dictatorship destroyed a paradise and those who believe the Revolution brought education, health care and independence to a country strangled by American economic imperialism. He argues that both views are distortions of real-life complexities.

On one point, Rathbone is unflinching: Today’s Havana is dismal and repressed compared to the vibrant, sophisticated city that was Lobo’s home, and that still lives in the pages of The Sugar King of Havana.

—Anne Bartlett

The Fall of the House of Walworth

By Geoffrey O’Brien Holt $30, 352 pages ISBN 9780805081152

AMERICAN HISTORY

For a time before the Civil War, Reuben Hyde Walworth was one of the most powerful men in the United States. He held the odd, nowdefunct legal position of Chancellor of New York, which, according to Geoffrey O’Brien, essentially gave him sole authority over the disposition of wills, settling of disputed contracts and adjudication of property rights. Such was Walworth’s power that litigants frequently made the journey from New York City to Saratoga Springs, where the Chancellor had constructed a courtroom in his mansion.

When his first wife died, the 62-year-old Chancellor courted and

then married 39-year-old Sarah Hardin of Kentucky, a well-connected cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Several years later, Sarah’s daughter Ellen married the Chancellor’s son Mansfield. It was a marriage made in hell. Mansfield, snotty and self-absorbed, concocted grandiose schemes and wrote lurid potboiler novels that enjoyed small success.

Ellen maintained appearances and endured. But after years of abuse and separations, she filed for divorce. Mansfield moved to New York City and penned increasingly violent threats to his ex-wife, many of which were intercepted by their oldest son, Frank. In June 1873, 19-year-old Frank took the train to NYC to confront his father and ended up shooting Mansfield to death. This patricide and Frank’s subsequent trial riveted the public.

In O’Brien’s well-researched account, the focus is less on the details of the murder and the trial than on the Walworth family saga and the family’s place in a tumultuous era of American history. Probably because the historical records are spotty in places—and because O’Brien is too scrupulous to speculate—a number of questions are left unanswered: Was the family possessed of a streak of insanity? What was the impact of family members’ conversion to Catholicism in a country that still possessed virulent strains of anti-Catholicism? Like so many questions about the past, these may simply be unanswerable.

But two things are certain. First, it is in the end a very sad family saga.

And second, Ellen somehow managed to keep the family functioning.

In later life she blossomed into an extraordinary individual. In fact, so compelling a figure does she become that she probably deserves a book all her own.

A story of mothers and daughters.

Of blame and forgiveness.

Of the choices we make and the secrets we keep.

—Alden Mudge

Composed

By Rosanne Cash Viking $26.95, 256 pages ISBN 9780670021963

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27

q&a

MARY ROACH

LOOKING AT LIFE IN THE VOID

Q

uirky science writer Mary Roach opens up about Packing for Mars, her latest book to tackle the curiosities of the human body and the bizarre world of scientific discovery.

28

Can I have your job please?

You may definitely have these parts of it: self-doubt, anxiety, unanswered email to researchers, access issues, nasty reviews.

I will wrap those right up for you with a big bright bow! The rest of it, we’ll have to work out some kind of time-share. I’m pretty fond of it.

OK, for real: What would you pack for a trip to Mars?

Extra lip balm, because things are always floating away and getting lost on spaceships (and because I’m a lip balm addict). A bottle of hot sauce. A full e-book reader. Earplugs. Patience.

What would you miss the most during an extended space mission?

My husband Ed, my stepdaughters, my friends, our home, the usual Hallmark stuff. Food: al pastor tacos from my favorite Fruitvale taco truck, Vietnamese pho soup, fresh snap peas that taste like the Earth. Privacy, sex.

Smells: jasmine and honeysuckle in bloom, meat grilling, asphalt after it rains. Sounds: the surf, thunder, the wind in trees, birds.

The comforting monotony of the known world.

What surprised you the most about space exploration and the world of zero-G research?

Having spent 10 glorious minutes in weightlessness, I was very surprised to learn that astronauts often tire of this state.

They complain that you can’t set anything down without it floating away, that their hands float up and get in their way. To me it was the most delightful, exhilarating experience I’ve ever had.

To them it’s a bother! Similarly, it surprised me to learn that one of the biggest problems of living in space long-term is boredom.

One of the Apollo astronauts commented that he “should have brought some crossword puzzles.”

I was also surprised to learn about the bed-rest facility at UT

Galveston—where NASA pays people to lie in bed 24/7 (to mimic zero gravity and study its effects on the body). When you don’t stress your bones and muscles, the body starts to dismantle them. Let it go long enough, as on a two-year Mars mission, and you’d get the sort of muscle and bone atrophy that a quadriplegic faces.

Given all the time you spend pondering the human body, do you ever gross yourself out while researching a book?

As an author, I’m usually an observer, and my sense of curiosity overrules any feelings of disgust. I can watch anything.

But if you hand the scalpel or forceps over to me, that’s when I start to lose it. The other night my husband asked me to tweeze a rogue back hair (on him, not me), and for some reason I struggled with this. David Sedaris once defined love as the ability to pop a pustule on his boyfriend Hugh’s buttock, and I have to say I agree with that definition.

I’d imagine your books attract an interesting crowd—are there any fan stories you’d like to share?

My books attract the most wonderful, smart, funny, quirky people. My readers are all people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party. I love them.

It’s rare that someone unsavory contacts me or comes to a talk.

Though I did once get an email from France, from a man who asked me about the best way to dispose of a body. I wrote back, “Pierre, have you killed someone?” He didn’t reply.

reviews and scrutiny that entails. On the other hand, you can gain a certain kind of instant cred if you enter the music business and your dad is Johnny Cash. All things considered, Rosanne Cash seems to have managed a balancing act that allowed for a legitimate singing career and also an interesting, sophisticated and full personal life.

In Composed, Cash recounts her life, which (at 55) is hardly near its end, though in pop music today she is considered something of an elder stateswoman—a respected artist who in her day carved out a comfortable niche in country crossover and continued to keep the Cash name front and center even as her dad was in decline.

As Cash makes clear, she was really a child of the Beatles, and growing up mainly in California, she was shaped by her parents’ divorce.

Later, she claimed her birthright as the writing/performing daughter of the iconic Cash, though one gets the feeling here that Rosanne was more seduced by the biz and available opportunity than driven by the inspiration of a committed artist. She wrote and sang hits, recorded good albums, got married and divorced, had children, and in later years assumed a matriarchal presence as kith and kin died off, especially her father and his wife, June Carter Cash.

Cash includes the text of her eulogies for both here, and she proves to be a sensitive and more than competent prose stylist in the general coverage of her privileged life. She also indulges a strange predilection for describing her clothing, invoking such names as Prada and Yohji Yamamoto. That kind of attention to superficial detail seems out of place for a woman who appears so intent on being taken seriously, but perhaps fashionistas will relate.

Cash doesn’t hang her hat in laid-back Nashville. Both Los Angeles and New York City have been her most comfortable stomping grounds for years, and her current life in Gotham is more textured and intellectual than Music City could probably offer her. She has had some recent physical travails (including brain surgery in 2007) but is ever rebounding, and Composed serves as testament to a thoughtful lady who traveled country roads to arrive at big-city peace of mind.

—Martin Brady

NONFICTION Packing for Mars

By Mary Roach Norton $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780393068474 Also available on audio

SCIENCE

Mary Roach has a penchant for tracking down the answers to the questions you never knew you had about the human body. People reading her books often wear the same expressions as people watching gory movies. Her sideways curiosity has led her to write about the fate of cadavers (Stiff ) and the science of sex (Bonk). With Packing for Mars, she investigates what happens to our normally earthbound selves when we’re blasted off into zero gravity. It’s an utterly fascinating account, made all the more entertaining by the author’s ever-amused tone.

Roach takes enormous delight in what she does. Not surprising, considering that what she does leads her to chat about things like “fecal popcorn” and in-helmet upchucking, and the fact that only half the human population is capable of lighting its farts. Who wouldn’t have fun asking strait-laced NASA scientists to explain how one gets a “good seal” on a space toilet? Clearly, this is not your typical sober examination of the mission to conquer space. Roach is interested in heroics and technological awesomeness, but she’s even more interested in what those things do to humble human bodies. Accordingly, she homes in on the most bizarre and surprising details in the history of space travel.

Of course, it’s not all about the gags. Roach has a larger theme underlying her frequently goofy presentation: “One of the things I love about manned space exploration,” she writes, “is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn’t acceptable.” The difficulties and indignities of space travel, she argues, are worthwhile because they teach us what is possible—they bring “a back-handed nobility” to our wilder ambitions.

They remind us that wacky, silly, fun things can also be profoundly important. Laugh and learn.

—Becky Ohlsen

NONFICTION The Temptress

By Paul Spicer St. Martin’s Press $25.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780312379704

BIOGRAPHY

“American Woman Weds Man She Shot” is an irresistible newspaper headline from 1932 about Alice de

Janzé, the Chicago heiress who married second husband Raymund de Trafford after previously shooting him in a crime of passion. A member of the decadent Happy Valley crowd in Kenya, de Janzé lived a life of privilege and bad behavior. But was she capable of murder?

Paul Spicer’s The Temptress seeks to answer this question by reopening the case of Joss Hay, Lord Erroll, whose 1941 murder in Kenya has never been solved. Readers may remember Erroll as Lady Idina Sackville’s third husband from Frances Osborne’s The Bolter, the

dramatic story of Sackville’s louche life in Happy Valley. While unhappy husbands, spurned mistresses and even Britain’s secret MI6 service are all potential candidates for Erroll’s murder, Spicer builds a case against the mentally unstable de Janzé, one of Erroll’s former lovers.

Spicer is uniquely situated to tell this story, as his mother had been a friend of de Janzé’s in Kenya in the 1920s. The book, however, works better as true-crime than it does as biography. Spicer’s case against de Janzé, while compelling, is hardly airtight: The narrative doesn’t tell us

much about the actual relationship between de Janzé and Erroll, and Spicer relies too often on speculation. The second half of The Temptress is much more exciting than the first, as Spicer dives into the court records surrounding Erroll’s murder.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to get Alice de Janzé wrong: Any woman who travels to Paris from Kenya accompanied by a lion and a baboon offers a delectable subject for biography.

Readers of The Bolter will happily snap this book up for more of the same scandalous behavior.

—Catherine Hollis

29

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WHEN WISHES COME TRUE

T

here’s a slip of paper, pulled from a fortune cookie, taped to Cynthia Lord’s computer monitor. It says, “Someday your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.”

Happily, those encouraging words turned out to be prescient ones. “I put the fortune on my computer monitor as a joke,” Lord says in an interview from her home in Maine. “But I sold my first novel, Rules, two weeks later.”

That fortune was still around when Rules was named a 2007 Newbery Honor Book, and it remains with the author today. When it’s time to discard a computer monitor, “I peel [the fortune] off and apply it to the new one!”

The seeming magic of superstition doesn’t just figure into Lord’s life; it’s a central element of her heartwarming second novel, Touch Blue. The layered story is narrated by 11-year-old Tess Brooks, a smart, earnest girl who loves her island home and is determined to keep things they way they’ve always been, whether through wishing, working or some combination thereof.

Tess’ beloved island is off the coast of Maine, a place where lobster fishing is a common occupation and kids of all ages learn together in a single schoolhouse.

Tess’ mother is in danger of losing her teaching job, and the community, its school: The state is threatening to close it down because of low enrollment. If the island doesn’t get more students, its residents will have to move to the mainland and leave behind their homes, livelihoods and special way of life.

CYNTHIA LORD

I n t e r v i e w b y L i n d a M . C a s t e lli t t o

Their solution? Take in foster children in an effort to save the school and do good at the same time. Although it might seem like a wild idea, “a little school in Maine in the 1960s did that to save their school,” Lord says. And she knows what it’s like to worry about such things, having taught at a Maine island school in her pre-author In Cynthia days. “My Lord’s new books always novel, Maine have personal experiences islanders in them,” she hatch a says, adding that her comsurprising mute from the plan to mainland “was save their very romantic . . . except community for Decemschool. ber through March.”

In Touch Blue, Tess’ new foster brother arrives on a boat (in nice weather, fortunately), and she’s very excited to meet him, not least because she’s read books about foster children, like The Great Gilly Hopkins and Bud, Not Buddy. At first, she’s disappointed by 13-year-old Aaron’s reticence, not to mention his skepticism of her neighbors’ interest in knowing everyone’s business. But over time, despite run-ins with a bully and somewhat stressful preparations for a talent show, Tess learns she can’t control everything,

and Aaron grows to like being around people who care enough to meddle.

Under Lord’s writerly hand, those realizations bring their own kind of comfort, the sort that even age-old superstitions cannot provide. “As a kid, you think you’re not in control of the things you care about. Superstitions are one way that people deal with that,” Lord says.

To that end, there are superstitious sayings at the start of every chapter in Touch Blue (finding them all, Lord said, “took a lot of research!”). The book’s title is drawn from one such saying—“Touch blue and your wish will come true”—and, in keeping with the book’s real-life feel, Lord notes that “lobster fishermen are often very superstitious.”

Like the fishermen—and the characters in Touch Blue—Lord loves the ocean. “I can even smell it from my front yard. It’s always so different. . . . Sometimes it’s blue, or gray or green. You never know what you’ll see.”

Her love for the water began in her childhood in New Hampshire, when she lived near a lake. It was part of everyday life, whether swimming or ice skating. “I was a voracious reader,” she adds. “I loved to lay down on the wharf and read all afternoon.”

Her next book will be set in New Hampshire, in “those beautiful mountains” around her childhood home. But first, she’ll be spending more time on the islands of Maine: Lord says she does some 40 school visits a year, and for Touch Blue she’ll go to schools like the one in the book.

Surely, thanks to what she learned writing Touch Blue—not to mention the fortune she has taped to her computer—Lord will keep in mind the superstition from chapter three: “Start your journey with your right foot and good luck will walk with you.”

Touch Blue

By Cynthia Lord Scholastic $16.99, 192 pages ISBN 9780545035316 Ages 9 to 12

MIDDLE GRADE

STARTING SCHOOL B y A l i c e Ca r y

meet GEORGE BOOTH

Q: W hat’s the title of your new book?

THE ADVENTURE OF KINDERGARTEN As my own brood heads off to middle school and high school this year, kindergarten seems like a very long time ago. Starting school is such a milestone, and those first few days are filled with excitement, jitters and sweetness.

DEAR DIARY Antoinette Portis’ Kindergarten Diary (HarperCollins, $12.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780061456916) is a great way to get youngsters ready for their big day. Written in diary form by a young student named Annalina, it covers her first month of school with humor and insight.

Annalina voices her fears (of school, of the teacher, of other children), but gradually discovers that she loves everything about her school, and by the end of the month, she is “Too busy to write any more!”

Even older kids who’ve already aced kindergarten will enjoy Annalina’s observations, such as what she plans to wear on her first day (bathing suit, ballet skirt, plaid shirt, cowboy boots, no socks), and what her mother makes her wear (nice blue sailor suit dress). Portis’ lively illustrations combine drawings and photographs in a style that resembles a kindergartner’s diary, right down to the wide-lined paper.

ANNIE TO THE RESCUE Another lively kindergartner is “Adventure Annie,” who made her debut in Adventure Annie Goes to Work. Toni Buzzeo brings this delightful character back to life in Adventure Annie Goes to Kindergarten (Dial, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780803733589). Dressed in a red cape and red boots, Adventure Annie is always on the lookout for great excitement, so she stuffs her backpack with her zookeeper hat, high wire slippers and walkietalkies, “just in case.” This exuberant girl is every kindergarten teacher’s nightmare as she paints the hamster cage (to make the habitat look “natural”) and sneaks out to the jungle

gym by herself. However, Annie and her walkie-talkies come to the rescue when two of her more timid classmates get lost while fetching milk cartons for lunch. This fastpaced tale will have readers chuckling, and Amy Wummer’s pencil and watercolor illustrations reveal the unfolding action and make Annie’s red cape fly.

LARGER THAN LIFE While Annie is obviously ready for kindergarten (and more!), young readers will enjoy pondering this question: Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten? (Balzer & Bray, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780061762758). As with the beloved Clifford the Big Red Dog, size is a bit of an issue for a buffalo kindergartner. However, Audrey Vernick’s witty text makes this shy student a super-sized hit as he adjusts to his new classroom. Daniel Jennewein’s simple illustrations give this buffalo big, winning eyes and lots of lovable expressions. Little ones about to spend their own first days in kindergarten will be reassured by this big guy’s successful efforts to fit in.

CLASSROOM KITTY There’s another fluffy, floppy face in Kindergarten Cat (Schwartz & Wade, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780375844751). Found outside and rescued by Mr. Bigbuttons, this lucky feline gets a new name (“Tinker Toy”) and a new home in a cheery kindergarten room, making a bed in the paintbrush drawers. In J. Patrick’s Lewis’s rhyming text, Tinker Toy proves to be a whiz, giving all the right answers with carefully enunciated “meows.” Ailie Busby’s mixed media illustrations are clever kindergarten-style creations that bring the classroom in focus.

These picture books will get prospective students in the right frame of mind for their own monumental quests. As Adventure Annie’s mother advises, “Sometimes kindergarten is its own adventure.”

Q: H ow would you describe the book?

Q: W ho has been the biggest influence on your work?

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

Q: Who was your childhood hero?

Q: W hat books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: W hat is one thing you would like to learn to do?

Q: W hat message would you like to send to children?

SCHOOL! Best known for his iconic cartoons in the New Yorker, George Booth has also illustrated many children’s books. His drawings of teachers, parents, students (and occasional dogs) are featured in School! Adventures at the Harvey N. Trouble Elementary School (Feiwel & Friends, $12.99, 160 pages, ISBN 9780312375928), written by Kate McMullan.

31

WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

JUST A DUSTING Dear Editor, I live in Montana. Some time ago, I read a news article in the Billings newspaper which said that the local area received “only a skiff of snow” during a recent storm. Is this use of the word skiff regional?

L. G. Huntley, Montana The use of skiff to mean “a small amount of snow” is actually quite old, dating back at least to the early part of the 19th century. This use of the word derives from an older Scottish verb meaning “to move lightly and quickly” and “to touch lightly in passing over, to skim.” The noun skiff that descends from this Scottish verb can refer to a slight wind or light shower of rain in addition to a small amount of snow.

It also has a figurative meaning of “a slight trace,” as in this sentence from a letter written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1884: “I have had a skiff of cold and was finally obliged to take to bed.”

Skiff was presumably brought to America by Scottish immigrants.

Our earliest evidence of the noun in this country is in a note handwritten in 1897 by one of our editors, who indicated that he had heard it in Walla Walla, Washington. It has been, and may still be, used in other scattered areas around the country, though we’ve never spotted it in the national media. Apparently it remains a dialectal term, and it appears to be most alive and well in your area—it was reported to us from Simms, Montana, in 1988 and was also spotted in Lewiston, Idaho, in 1985.

A PIECE OF WORK Dear Editor, I am interested in the origin of the word goldbrick, meaning “someone who avoids work.” What can you tell me about it?

H. A. Portland, Oregon Our evidence suggests that goldbrick hasn’t seen much use in

the past few decades. From around the turn of the century through the 1970s, though, it was in fairly frequent use, especially in the military.

In the days of the California gold rush, con men were known to paint an iron or lead brick gold and sell it as a real gold brick. One unsuspecting St. Louis man reportedly paid $3,700 for such a brick in 1887.

Goldbrick thus acquired the sense of “something that appears to be valuable but is actually worthless.”

It wasn’t long before enlisted men in the army adopted goldbrick to refer to someone who shirks work or fakes illness or injury.

Goldbrick is also a verb, similarly descended from the con man’s scheme. As early as 1902 it was being used to mean “to swindle,” and it also has a more recent meaning, “to shirk duty or responsibility.”

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS Dear Editor, There is a building near where I work with an odd inscription that I have not been able to figure out. The building has a sort of art-deco style

temple front. On the cornice are two inscriptions. On the right is “1924 A.D.” I take this as the year the building was constructed. On the left side of the cornice is another inscription which reads “A.L. 5924.” This must be the year of construction again, but according to a different calendar.

Can you tell me what A.L. means?

G. W. Lincoln, Massachusetts The A.L. on the building stands for anno lucis, which is Latin for “in the year of the light.” It is not uncommon to find A.L. inscriptions on buildings because this method of reckoning time is used by many Freemasons. It comes from the belief that God’s word creating light in Genesis 1:3 marks the beginning of creation and is dated to 4000 B.C. The A.L. date is derived by adding 4,000 to the common year, so A.D. 1924 is equivalent to A.L. 5924.

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

EVERYTHING LITERARY Reprinted from The Everything Literary Crosswords Book by Charles Timmerman, published by Adams Media, an F+W Media, Inc. Co. Copyright ©2007, F+W Media, Inc.

Stephen King ACROSS 1. Sayings of Jesus 6. Big party 10. “The ___ Zone,” novel by Stephen King 14. Maze word 15. In a dead heat 16. Ye follower 17. Novel by Stephen King, movie directed by Kubrick 19. Dapper 20. French seasoning 21. Fancy home 22. Peak 23. Coffee size crossword solution

24. Communication 26. Novel by Stephen King, movie starring Tom Hanks 31. Equestrian’s attire 32. Word from a pen pal?

33. Common article 36. Name of five Norwegian kings 37. Ad __ per aspera: Kansas motto 39. Connect 40. Cowboy Rogers 41. Heavy duty?

42. Direct 43. Car that Stephen King’s “Christine” is about 46. A cartridge 49. Coll. figure 50. Oklahoma native 51. Vehement 54. Bio stat 57. Old-time actress Naldi 58. Deprived of reason 60. Old French coins 61. Fargo’s state: Abbr.

62. Pending 63. Return mailer: Abbr.

64. It may be dominant

65. Stephen King’s home state DOWN 1. D-Day craft 2. “Top __ mornin’!”

3. Scottish Highlander 4. Treasury Dept. branch 5. Deep down 6. Kindly 7. Converse competitor 8. Pre-Easter season 9. Actress Jolie 10. Be generous 11. Chosen ones 12. “There Is Nothin’ Like ___” 13. Dissuade 18. Getaway spot 23. Cry of relief 25. Hunter’s quarry 26. Son of Odin 27. Angelic symbol 28. Bidding site 29. “Wrong!”

30. Russian space station 33. Vegan’s protein source 34. Yesterday, to Yves 35. Professor Higgins, to Eliza 37. Any unnamed object 38. It may be tidy 39. Mutt’s mate 41. Chihuahua cheer 42. Element used in electroplating 43. Request sweetener 44. Understanding

45. Old waste allowance 46. “Bag of ___,” novel by Stephen King 47. New York city 48. Yoga position 52. “Das Lied von der ___” 53. Islands off Galway 54. No pro 55. Put on 56. Allure competitor 59. “Put ___ Happy Face”