BookPage March 2011 by BookPage

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REV

2011

america’s book review

THE JOY OF TRAVEL

Embracing life at home and abroad

•

m a r c h

NEW BO

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D I N S I

JODI PICOULT

Memory Myth

TéA obreht

A fresh new literary voice delivers her stunning debut

Page-turning drama in Sing You Home

paperback picks penguin.com

ON SALE MARCH 22

Caught

Changes

Deep Shadow

The Executor

Reporter Wendy Tynes is bringing down sexual offenders on nationallytelevised sting operations. But when Dan Mercer walks into her trap, and is tied to the disappearance of a 17-yearold girl, the shocking consequences will have Wendy doubting her instincts.

Susan Rodriguez was Harry Dresden’s lover—until she was attacked and left struggling with the bloodlust of the vampiric Red Court. Harry’s enemies have found the secret she has hidden for so long, and he will have to unleash the full fury of his untapped power to stop them.

Two ex-cons are intent on diving to the bottom of a deep lake and finding the remains of a legendary plane, supposedly loaded with gold. Doc Ford’s expertise is just what they need. And if he doesn’t help, Ford and his friends are dead in the water.

Joseph Geist takes a job as a “conversationalist.” But as his friendship with his employer evolves from conversationalist to lodger to caretaker, Joseph finds himself at odds with the woman’s troubled nephew, and decides to do whatever is necessary to maintain his position.

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Flirt

Hell Gate

Living on the Edge

An Unlikely Countess

The talent Anita Blake has as a necromancer isn’t the miracle Tony Bennington thinks he needs. The creature that Anita could coerce to step out of the late Mrs. Bennington’s grave would not be the lovely Mrs. Bennington. Not really. And not for long.

Contraband cargo—young and female— from a wrecked Ukrainian freighter washes up onshore. But one victim died before she even hit the Atlantic. When New York ADA Alex Cooper discovers that the freighter victim is linked to a congressman’s sex scandal, she unearths a secret that will shatter the political landscape of New York—and expose her to the darkest revelation of her career.

With her thrilling Sentinel Wars series, Shannon K. Butcher pushed readers to the edge of their imaginations. Now, with the first in her new action romance series she takes them to the edge of their seats, following the loves and lethal lives of a group of hardened mercenaries who live on the edge— and beyond.

Prudence Youlgrave is out to marry above her station and secure a happy life. Catesby Burgoyne is out to continue his noble family’s good name. When fate pushes them together, they are married—but this unlikely marriage of convenience quickly turns into something much more.

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Share the emotional magic of Nora Roberts’s #1 New York Times bestselling Bride Quartet. All four novels in the Bride Quartet series are now available in one beautifully designed boxed set: includes Vision in White, Bed of Roses, Savor the Moment, and Happy Ever After. Follow the story of four friends and their struggles with life, love, and family as they build their wedding planning company, Vows. BERKLEY

A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

9780425239933 • $64

contents

march 2011 w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m

features

12 jodi picoult Meet the author of Sing You Home

cover story

A literary wunderkind explores the ravages of war, the bonds of family and the stories we live by in a remarkably assured debut

13 eleanor brown Three sisters tell their story of lives lived in the shadow of Shakespeare

Cover illustration © iStockphoto.com/shayes17

16 gabrielle hamilton On raising two kids, running a high-end restaurant—and writing a book, too

18 women’s history From scandalous women to she-wolves Three new books let readers explore the world from the comfort of home

27 oh, behave Quirky insights into how we work

28 franny billingsley A rich fantasy 12 years in the making

31 ben hatke Meet the author-illustrator of Zita the Spacegirl

departments 04 buzz girl 04 06 06 08 10 10 11 12

author enablers book clubs well read whodunit cooking lifestyles romance audio

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reviews 20 Fiction

top pick:

19 world travel

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TÉa obreht

West of Here by Jonathan Evison a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Paris Wife by Paula McLain; Georgia Bottoms by Mark Childress; Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult; Cleaning Nabokov’s House by Leslie Daniels; Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt; Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy; Satori by Don Winslow; Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian; When the Killing’s Done by T.C. Boyle; Wrecker by Summer Wood

24 NonFiction top pick:

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates a l s o r e v i e w e d : Townie by Andre Dubus III; Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer; Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson; Jerusalem, Jerusalem by James Carroll; The Information by James Gleick; River of Darkness by Buddy Levy; Made for You and Me by Caitlin Shetterly; The Savage City by T.J. English; Liberty’s Exiles by Maya Jasanoff

29 Children’s top pick:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai a l s o r e v i e w e d : Cloudette by Tom Lichtenheld; Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson; Strings Attached by Judy Blundell; Exposed by Kimberly Marcus; Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones

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columns

‘hunger games’ on film

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

more from patti smith Singer/songwriter Patti Smith won the National Book Award in 2010 for her memoir, Just Kids. After publishing books of poetry and collections of artwork and lyrics, it was her first book of prose. Now the Guardian reports that Smith has been working on a crime novel. A longtime fan of detective stories, she cites Mickey Spillane and Sherlock Holmes as influences. According to Smith, she has “68 percent” of the book completed. While we wait for that last 32 percent, fans can look forward to more music from Smith: She’s recording a new album and has plans to tour.

a ‘glee’-ful memoir

Fans of the hit show “Glee” know actress Jane Lynch as the cranky, conniving cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. In September, we’re going to get a peek behind the iconic tracksuit when Hyperion’s Voice imprint publishes Lynch’s memoir, Happy Accidents. According to the New York Times, “the book will recount her comedy career at the Second City improv ly n c h theater and her work in films like Best in Show and The 40-Year-Old Virgin while addressing how she learned to embrace her homosexuality and overcame alcoholism.” Lynch is one of the funniest women on television today, so we can’t wait to hear what she has to say in Happy Accidents.

author enablers

Buzz Girl Start your countdown clocks, Suzanne Collins fans: Lionsgate Studios announced that they’ll release the much-anticipated film version of The Hunger Games on March 23, 2012. Though director Gary Ross plans to begin production on the film this spring, no casting announcements have been made yet. Rumored contenders for the role of Katniss? Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Emma Roberts (Valentine’s Day) and Chloe Moretz (Let Me In). Collins, a former screenwriter, handled the adaptation of her bestselling novel herself.

Murakami update Last month we told you that the first two (of three) volumes of 1Q84, the latest novel from Japanese master Haruki Murakami, would hit U.S. bookstores this fall. But now there is more good news: Knopf has announced that they will release 1Q84 (a play on Orwell’s 1984) in a single (1,000 page!) volume. The novel, which caused a sensation when it was published in Japan, depicts an alternate reality in which two characters, a man and a woman, are searching for one another. Translated by Harvard professor Jay Rubin, 1Q84 goes on sale October 25.

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

8 love you more By Lisa Gardner

Bantam, $26, ISBN 9780553807257 In the fifth novel featuring Boston Det. D.D. Warren, the investigation of a state trooper who shot and killed her husband takes a very strange turn.

8 the money class By Suze Orman

Spiegel & Grau, $26 ISBN 9781400069736 Another blockbuster personal finance guide that encourages readers to seriously reconsider the American Dream.

29 the land of painted caves By Jean M. Auel

Crown, $30, ISBN 9780517580516 Continuing the story of Ayla and Jondalar, Auel returns with the sixth book in her wildly successful Earth’s Children series.

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

CHARACTER STUDY We recently attended one of our favorite literary events of the year: Kathy Patrick’s annual Pulpwood Queens’ Girlfriend Weekend, a wild, wacky, charming literary event in Jefferson, Texas. Also in attendance were Pat Conroy, Fannie Flagg, Mark Childress and many other fine authors. Some of the attendees were aspiring writers, and the same question came up repeatedly: How do I write a memorable character? When we got back home to San Francisco, we asked David Corbett, writing teacher and author of the compellingly characterized novel Do They Know I’m Running?, for some tips. Corbett’s advice on creating memorable characters is instructive for both writers and readers: The exact nature of the curious phenomena we refer to as “characters” remains something of a mystery, but the craft of characterization is not. Though it’s a cause for celebration—or at least relief—when a character appears in the mind’s eye fully formed, this is a rare occurrence for most writers. Certain techniques are required to make the character quicken and assume clear form. In my own work I’ve come to consider the following four qualities the crucial elements of a compelling character, i.e., a character who appears both internally consistent and yet capable of surprise. A driving need, desire or goal: The fundamental truth of characterization is that characters want something, and the stronger the want, the more compelling the drama. For example, in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois— one of the most memorable characters in American literature—has lost the family home. Desperate, she comes to New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, and asks to be taken in. Desire creates conflict, the primordial goo in which character is formed. Simply by giving the character a deep-seated need, you have automatically created conflict, for the world is not designed to answer our needs and wants. A secret: A secret is an inclination or trait (i.e., a psychological disposi-

tion to dishonesty, violence, sexual excess, etc.), or an incident from the past that, if revealed, would change forever the character’s standing in her world. Secrets tell us what the character has to lose, and why. We are our own best source for understanding secrets. We know our own, and if we’re insightful, we understand how they affect our behavior. Blanche’s secret is that through drink and illicit sexual liaisons she became so emotionally and physically dissipated she could not hold on to the family home. A contradiction: We all know people who are both shy and rude, cruel but funny, bigoted but protective. This complexity makes a person unpredictable. Contradictions automatically pique the reader’s interest. Our senses are tuned to focus on irregularities—the thing that doesn’t quite fit, doesn’t make sense or is simply changing. This is an evolutionarily adaptive trait; it helps in analyzing the environment for threats. But it also attunes us to whatever is unusual in what we perceive; contradictions reveal what we couldn’t predict, the enigma, the surprise. Blanche is desperate and weak, hopelessly vain, with an alcoholic’s capacity for denial—but she is also fiercely proud and resourceful with a surprising steeliness. A vulnerability: Nothing draws us into a character more than vulnerability. When people appear wounded or in need of our help, we are instantly drawn to them—it’s a basic human response. Vulnerability may be the result of the character’s secret—she is afraid of being found out. Or it may come from the intensity of her need or want—desire renders us naked in a fundamental way. Blanche’s desperation and need to find a safe place makes her vulnerable, as does the tawdry nature of her secrets, which threaten to shame her if revealed. Our big thanks to David Corbett! Find him at www.davidcorbett.com. Email questions for Kathi and Sam to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

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columns This month’s best paperback releases for reading groups

MITCHELL’S JAPANESE EPIC In his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, $15, 512 pages, ISBN 9780812976366), David Mitchell focuses his prodigious narrative powers on Japan in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A small Dutch trading settlement on an island in Nagasaki Harbor is where readers first meet Jacob, a representative of the Dutch East Indies Company. Jacob hopes to make his fortune and impress his

book clubs

WELL READ

by julie hale

by robert Weibezahl

serving as live-in nurse. Glynis makes for a terrible patient, but Shep endures her demands with the support of his best friend, Jackson, whose teenage daughter is also terminally ill. The two patients strike up an odd friendship as the men in their lives struggle to maintain some sort of status quo. Shep’s retirement fund dwindles quickly as he pays for chemotherapy and hospital stays, and Jackson is basically broke. Shriver depicts their plight in lively prose that’s meticulously crafted. She writes with delicacy and a unique understanding of the ways in which illness can transform lives and relationships. This is a funny, angry, compassionate novel that’s sure to resonate with readers.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS fiancée back home, but instead he falls in love with Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife. Theirs is a tenuous relationship, as Jacob isn’t allowed to visit the mainland where Orito lives. The pair encounter greater obstacles when Jacob is treated unjustly at work, and Orito’s conniving stepmother sends her away to a sinister nunnery. Their stories provide the foundation for Mitchell’s most ambitious work to date. He populates his tale with a cast of memorable characters that includes Uzaemon, an old flame of Orito’s, and various seamen, slaves and government officials. Author of the critically acclaimed Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, Mitchell, as always, pushes boundaries to create an epic and richly rewarding reading experience.

IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH

Taking a swing at America’s health-care system, Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, So Much for That (Harper Perennial, $14.99, 480 pages, ISBN 9780061458590), is a humorous and insightful examination of the patient-caregiver relationship. After selling his business for a million dollars, Shep Knacker plans to retire and travel the world with his wife, Glynis. But when she’s diagnosed with a malignant form of cancer, Shep finds himself

In this vivid mix of science and biography, Rebecca Skloot tells the incredible true story of Henrietta Lacks, a victim of cervical cancer whose cells made possible some of medicine’s biggest discoveries. Lacks, a mother of five, came from a poor African-American family. When she died in 1951, doctors took samples of her tissues without having secured her consent. Her cells endured in the lab, allowing researchers to formulate a vaccine for polio and treatments for AIDS. Henrietta’s husband and children had no knowledge of her invaluable contribution until many years later. Skloot becomes involved with various surviving family members, who had passed the intervening years in poverty and bad health, helping them discover the truth about Henrietta. This poignant story about the invasiveness of medicine is also a deeply intimate look at one family’s efforts to claim its legacy.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot Broadway $16, 400 pages ISBN 9781400052189

HISTORY

A twisted Russian satire Vladimir Sorokin’s darkly comic novel, Day of the Oprichnik, is set in Moscow in 2028, and offers a warped futuristic vision of a Russian society where advanced technology and medieval brutality seamlessly merge. A major Russian literary voice, born in 1955, Sorokin began his career as part of the underground scene during the last days of the Soviet era. He has since gained respectability—including a Russian Booker Prize nomination—and his work has been published in some 20 languages. But his writing still riles many in his homeland, and Sorokin reading Day of is both the Oprichnik it is easy to see lamenting why. and lamAs the title pooning his suggests, the homeland’s first-person narrative recounts fate, its ever- 24 hours in the tumultuous life of an oprichnik—a member history, of an elite force bound of governmentequally in sanctioned strongmen faith and (read: thugs) apostasy. who carry out the wishes of the restored Russian monarchy. It begins when Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is awakened by a cell phone call—his ring tone is a scream, a moan and a death rattle—summoning him with the first order of the day. Racing in his red Mercedov, upon which the freshly severed head of a new dog is mounted each morning, Komiaga joins his fellow oprichniks at the estate of a hereditary nobleman to kill, rape and pillage. All before breakfast. As the day progresses, Komiaga will be sent on short plane trips to outposts of the nation, visit a clairvoyant, have tiny fish with hallucinogenic powers injected into his bloodstream, go to church, have an audience with the half-Jewish tsarina and engage in ritualistic copulation with the oprichnik brotherhood. Komiaga’s behavior, a blend of gleeful debauchery and ardent patriotism, is consistently disturbing, even as he cracks jokes or waxes poetic about the fatherland. At once charming and menacing, Komiaga is someone for his fellow

Russians to both fear and envy. It is easy to see that Sorokin is commenting on the mess and corruption of contemporary Russia while projecting the story into a not-sodistant future when the country has isolated itself from the West behind a fortified wall and lives in economic thrall to the Chinese. During a visit to the Kremlin Concert Hall, Komiaga listens to a song about the time of Ivan III: “A grim, fateful time in Russian history. A serious struggle for the integrity of the Russian state is under way—a fledgling state, not yet strong, only beginning to stand on its own.” These words clearly describe not only the Russia of this novel, but the Russia of the novelist as well. Sorokin is both lamenting and lampooning his homeland’s fate, its ever-tumultuous history, bound equally in faith and apostasy (the last, perhaps ironic words of the novel are “And thank God”), in warm-hearted fellowship and abject greed. The translation by Jamey Gambrell is fresh and contemporary, retaining just enough Russian words and phrases to remind us that the story could take place nowhere else. The humor is dark and intentionally tasteless, certainly not for every reader. But, like any great satirist, Vladimir Sorokin is a provocateur. One can’t paint a dystopian nightmare with a subtle palette, and Day of the Oprichnik is undeniably vivid in the telling. Readers who crave more of Sorokin’s caustic fiction can seek out his seminal Ice Trilogy, newly published in a one volume edition by NYRB Classics.

Day of the Oprichnik By Vladimir Sorokin Translated by Jamey Gambrell FSG $23, 208 pages ISBN 9780374134754 eBook available

Translation

The Creed men have always been wild at heartâ&#x20AC;Ś.

What will it take to tame them?

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Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss this incredible trilogy from the First Lady of the West, New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author

Visit www.TakeACowboyHome.com to learn more! Available now!

Coming in June Coming in July

columns

Whodunit by Bruce Tierney

HOT ON THE TRAIL OF A COLD CASE Vanessa Munroe, the protagonist of Taylor Stevens’ debut thriller The Informationist (Crown, $23, 320 pages, ISBN 9780307717092), has a job that will make Whodunit fans drool: She is an information broker, dealing in the sort of intelligence that typically slips under even the best radar. Against her better judgment she accepts an assignment from a Texas oil billionaire, to find news of his daughter who has gone missing in Africa. Since the disappearance took place four years ago, the trail has grown quite cold, not to mention well trampled by Vanessa’s predecessors, none of whom could turn up a wisp of a clue. It’s not her normal sort of endeavor, but she nonetheless finds herself sucked in by the mystery—and perhaps by the

promised seven-figure paycheck. And it won’t take long for her to begin wondering if she is being grossly underpaid. The Informationist pushes every one of my buttons: exotic locale, sassy and competent protagonist, crisp dialogue and nonstop action. A fine debut—can’t wait for the sequel!

Lost in translation Gerard O’Donovan’s The Priest (Scribner, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9781451610604) is a fine debut as well, introducing Dublin cop Mike Mulcahy, back in Ireland after a

long stint in Madrid with Europol, the European Union’s criminal intelligence organization. He finds himself dragged into a case simply because of his facility with the Spanish language. A young exchange student from Spain has been raped and mutilated, her body branded by a fiery crucifix, and Mulcahy is called upon to serve as interpreter for the first interview of the victim. Perhaps as a result of his compassion for the girl, the Spanish authorities request Mulcahy’s ongoing participation in the case, as liaison between the Dublin police and the Spanish government. A quick arrest allays the concerns of the public and the politicos involved, but Mulcahy is less than convinced by the evidence. And rightly so, for in a matter of days there is another attack—and then another, this time resulting in the death of the victim. So, unbeknownst to his bosses, Mulcahy embarks on a secondary investigation, aided by aggressive tabloid correspondent Siobhan Fallon, with whom he shares what one might call a “complicated” relationship. It will grow ever more complicated with each day the killer remains on the loose. The verdict: This is a book you want to read right now, so you can later lay claim to bragging rights of having been “one of O’Donovan’s earliest fans.”

The next McBain Homicide Detective Taylor Jackson knows instantly mira qtr ad that The Pretender is back…and he’s got helpers. The brilliant psychopath who both adores and despises her is drawing close. Close enough to touch…

On sale now!

Author Lou Manfredo is one book ahead of the aforementioned Stevens and O’Donovan; his Rizzo’s Fire (Minotaur, $24.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780312538064) is the sophomore effort from a writer hailed as the heir apparent to Ed McBain. Protagonist cop Joe Rizzo is near the end of his run as a detective. He’d be there already, were it not for the crippling tuition fees of his college-age daughters (that, and a bit of unfinished under-the-table business from the first novel, Rizzo’s War). This time out, he’s teamed with a new partner, an AfricanAmerican lesbian named Priscilla Jackson. Together they will investigate the murder of an unknown writer whose finest work may have been plagiarized by Pulitzer Prizewinning Broadway playwright Avery Mallard, coincidentally (?) recently killed as well. Manfredo’s books intersperse the mundane details of daily life amid the main storyline, much like real life or an ongoing television series, as opposed to the

relentless onpoint pacing of a twohour movie. McBain did that as well, and it is a style that will appeal to many readers, yours truly included.

Mystery of the month The Mystery of the Month winner for March is well past his freshman and/or sophomore efforts. Indeed, were this academia, Ian Rankin would be working on his third or fourth Ph.D. by now. His latest, The Complaints, centers on the internal affairs department of the Edinburgh police force. Everybody hates them, everybody fears them. And Malcolm Fox is one of them, a complex and serious fellow, struggling to keep up the payments on his father’s nursing home care, and dealing not at all well with the abusive relationship his sister seems locked into. Fox gets saddled with the unpleasant investigation of Detective Sergeant Jamie Breck, suspected of being involved in a child pornography ring. The investigation holds the distinct possibility of destroying lives, including one closer to home than Fox ever could have imagined. Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between Malcolm Fox and his predecessor, the iconic John Rebus. They are as different as chalk and cheese, but a master storyteller of Rankin’s caliber can draw in his audience, making them sympathize (and identify) in equal parts with the hard-charging Rebus and the taciturn Fox, all the while not missing a beat in the plotting, the setting, the characters and the ever-present battle between good and evil. The Complaints is superb on every level, and begging for a follow-up!

The Complaints By Ian Rankin Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur $24.99, 448 pages ISBN 9780316039741 Audio, eBook available

Mystery

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With this many twists and turns, only one name fits. Vicious Cycle is the latest thriller in the bestselling Intervention series by Terri Blackstock. Available February 22, 2011. Visit terriblackstock.com for more info.

columns

cooking

lifestyles

by sybil PRATT

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

fresh from your backyard Though it feels like a leap of faith in the snowy Northeast, I know that spring will come, and with it all the joys of fresh, tender veggies. For many of us, the best part of the growing season is the seasonal cooking it engenders. The Kitchen Garden Cookbook (DK, $22.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780756671884) offers more than 200 recipes in celebration of these seasonal splendors, plus a host of techniques for preserving the harvest, from packing

a taste of the sweet life

Strawberry Ice Cream. Ripe, juicy tomatoes are front and center in Tomato Herb Soup, Red Tomato Relish or Oven-Smoked Tomatoes with Savory Grit Cakes. Pears shine in a crunchy pecan-and-blue-cheesetopped salad or a smooth Sorbet, while fresh and home-dried herbs make a rub for Beef Tenderloin or scent Savory Rosemary Butternut Squash. Smith includes a short how-to guide for setting up a small garden and selecting the plants that are just right for you.

The release of Maple Sugar: From Sap to Syrup: The History, Lore, and How-to Behind this Sweet Treat (Storey, $12.95, 144 pages, ISBN 9781603427357) coincides this month with a maple tree’s release of sap: the “sole ingredient of one of the world’s most appealing natural delicacies.” Author Tim Herd, a naturalist and award-winning environmental educator, explains how maple sap starts its inexorable rise between February and April, signal-

Top pick for lifestyles

Cookbook of the Month vegetables in oil to drying, freezing, pickling and making conserves, jellies, jams and chutneys. Savor Asparagus Quiche, fresh Pea Soup with Mint Gremolata and Rhubarb and Ginger Meringue Cake in spring. Baked Ricotta with Roasted Tomatoes, Zucchini with Chive Marinade and Blackberry Brioche with Mascarpone are the essence of summer. Pumpkin and Orange Spiced Jam heralds fall, as does an earthy Beet Risotto and Grape and Cinnamon Cake. Then we’re back in that winter wonderland, keeping the cold at bay with Spicy Spaghetti with Broccoli, warming Tuscan Ribollita and Wasabi Beef with Bok Choy. Innovative and tempting, these easy-to-follow recipes star prime-time produce all year long.

A year in the garden

For gardening authority P. Allen Smith, it’s natural to incorporate home-grown and local fruits, herbs and vegetables in everyday cooking. His debut cookbook, P. Allen Smith’s Seasonal Recipes from the Garden (Clarkson Potter, $32.50, 256 pages, ISBN 9780307351081), is his enthusiastic invitation to reconnect with the “culture of the earth.” The book’s 120 recipes, all tested in his own kitchen and introduced in his warm, informative, Southern style, take us through the year, with 30 dishes for each of the four seasons. When those first sweet strawberries appear, use them in Strawberry Lemonade and Speckled

Madhur Jaffrey introduced classic Indian cooking to our shores more than 30 years ago and through her many award-winning cookbooks has made its marvels accessible to American home cooks . Like all of us, Jaffrey is always looking for ways to simplify her cooking, to save time but still get the same great Indian flavors. She does just that in her latest, At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, and in so doing, she removes the “fear of spicing” that keeps many of us from preparing aromatic curries, kormas, chutneys and chaats, not to mention dals, raitas and pickles, in our own kitchens. Jaffrey is at your side throughout the cooking process, with detailed explanations, super-clear instructions and great header notes. She reduces the spice palette somewhat, offers serving suggestions and even encourages you to mix and match with Western accompaniments—wrap Lamb Curry with Whole Spices in a tortilla or jazz up popcorn with a marvelous mélange of spices. Jaffrey’s innate elegance, practicality and love of Indian cooking informs each and every one of these recipes.

At Home with Madhur Jaffrey By Madhur Jaffrey Knopf $35, 320 pages ISBN 9780307268242

INDIAN

taining. The book advises on color, scent, lighting and water features, and makes a particular effort to help clarify the reader’s style and space. Part two spotlights plants and planting, dividing materials into three formal categories: “star plants” (like jasmine and moonflower), “supporting cast” (like clematis montana) and “backstage beauties” (including smokebush and redbud trees).

ing the start of sugaring season. So begins a delicious look at the history, mystery, science and “application” (i.e., the eating) of sap. He includes an “illustrated family tree” of maples, concentrating on how to identify the 13 native varieties most tapped by hobbyists, plus a friendly DIY chapter on how to make syrup from trees at home and a chapter of maple-y recipes both sweet and savory. Photographs, illustrations, vintage ads and a nifty woodcutthemed layout help make Maple Sugar a Grade A treat.

Some enchanted evenings In The Twilight Garden: Creating a Garden that Entrances by Day and Comes Alive at Night (Ball, $26.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9781569765296), Lia Leendertz, gardening columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian, argues that “the best time to enjoy a garden may come after sunset.” Most of us are too busy during daylight hours to tend our borders and beds, much less to sit and enjoy them. But the appeal of a nocturnal garden grows beyond considerations of leisure; night scents and night blooms are unique and magical in their own right. The Twilight Garden is a comprehensive guide to making this magic possible on any scale, whether it be a climbing, scented white rose at the front door, containers on the balcony, a family garden, a contemplative nook or a stellar “outdoor room” for enter-

Urban farming has been around since cities began. Only lately, however, with the convergence of locavore (local eating) movements, a crummy economy, increased awareness of food safety and other environmental concerns has the idea started to flourish at the grassroots level. Your Farm in the City: An Urban-Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals, by Lisa Taylor and the gardeners of Seattle Tilth, makes a convincing case for any effort to grow our own food, whether we dream of a few cherry tomatoes on the stairwell or goats in the backyard. To grow plants, lack of experience or square footage need not be an obstacle: The only real requirement is a bit of sun, even if it is through a window or in a vacant lot. Container, raised bed and vertical gardening methods are covered (with an emphasis on sustainable methods), as are cityfriendly varieties of fruit, vegetables and herbs, soil care, composting, watering systems and pest control. If raising chickens, bees or even livestock is a goal, look here for suggested breeds, basic care and special considerations. Your Farm in the City backs up its ambitious title with all we need to succeed.

Your Farm in the city By Lisa Taylor Black Dog & Leventhal $18.95, 336 pages ISBN 9781579128623

Gardening

romance c o l u m n b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way

One night to forever In Deadly Lies (Grand Central/ Forever, $7.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780446559256) by Cynthia Eden, 24-year-old heroine Samantha Kennedy is a genius FBI agent and member of an elite unit formed to apprehend serial murderers. While appearing in control on the outside, Samantha still suffers the after-effects of her last case—during which she was abducted by a killer and nearly died. To find some hours of relief from that harrowing experi-

women turn up murdered. Is what she’s always assumed to be a fable actually the truth? Will she survive to solve the puzzle? Danger and desire fill the pages of this entertaining paranormal romance, and it’s a pleasure to see cynical Kris learn to believe in what can’t be proven. This is a delightful and imaginative story set in a place rife with beauty and magic.

Romance of the Month

ence, she picks up wealthy and sexy Max Ridgeway. But Max won’t settle for the one night stand Samantha intended. That’s not in the cards anyway, as Samantha and Max are quickly thrown into the middle of a series of lethal kidnappings. When it appears Max’s stepbrother is part of the pattern, Samantha poses as Max’s love interest and hides her status as a special agent in order to have access to the family without tipping off the criminals. As the grisly case progresses, Max and Samantha must learn to trust each other to stop further murders. Their sexual chemistry is fiery, their conflict strong and the plot turns twisted. Readers will race through the final pages to see if the characters—and love—can survive.

Myth and mystery Legend and love come together in Lori Handeland’s Moon Cursed (St. Martin’s, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780312389352). Kristin Daniels, host of a hoax-busting TV program, travels to Scotland to debunk the myth of Nessie, the monster of Loch Ness. But most everyone she meets professes to be a believer, and her investigation is complicated by the friendly but evasive townspeople— and one beautiful man in particular, Liam Grant. He’s mysterious and sexy and Kris can’t resist him. While he claims to be a protector of the loch, what exactly does that mean? Her life only gets stranger when she’s almost killed and other young

Happiness seems achingly distant for two deserving characters in Veronica Wolff’s Scottish historical, Devil’s Own. After being abducted and sold into slavery at age 10, Aidan MacAlpin escaped from servitude and is back home with his family, his heart and mind filled with a single goal: to find and kill his abductor—a mysterious man with a black pearl earring. While he has some papers that might lead him to the villain, his years of forced labor left him uneducated. He turns to his bookish neighbor, Elspeth Farquharson, for reading lessons, and in turn he helps on her impoverished family farm. As they work together, these lonely people find what they need in each other. Aidan is gentled by Elspeth’s fortitude and grace, and he is the hero of spinster Elspeth’s imagination come to life. Yet a union between them looks impossible; Aidan must find vengeance before he can feel worthy of love. Will he complete his quest before he loses Elspeth to another . . . or before he loses his life to the criminal he’s after? This is a sigh-worthy story of lovers who dare to hope that dreams can come true.

Devil’s Own By Veronica Wolff Berkley $7.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780425240182 eBook available

Historical

Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com The Bone Thief by Jefferson Bass It seems a routine case for Dr. Bill Brockton, the exhumation of a body to obtain a bone sample for a DNA paternity test. But a shocking discovery awaits Brockton and his colleagues when the coffin is opened: the corpse inside has been horribly violated. The grisly find embroils the Body Farm’s founder in a dangerous investigation into a flourishing black market in body parts, as Brockton is recruited for an FBI sting to bring down a postmortem chop shop—using corpses from the Body Farm as bait. 9780061284779 $7.99

Executive Intent by Dale Brown The U.S. has unleashed Thor’s Hammer, a missile-launching satellite that can strike anywhere on the planet in seconds. But when President Joseph Gardner elects to employ the still-untested weapon against terrorists firing missiles at Indian cities, the Hammer misses its mark, killing thousands of Pakistani civilians. In retaliation, Pakistan and its neighbors grant China a strategic naval advantage over America through access to Middle Eastern ports. 9780061560903, $9.99

This Side of the Grave by Jeaniene Frost Half-vampire Cat Crawfield and her vampire husband Bones have fought for their lives, as well as for their relationship. But just when they’ve triumphed over the latest battle, Cat’s new and unexpected abilities threaten to upset a long-standing balance. Now Cat and Bones are forced to seek help from a dangerous “ally”—the ghoul queen of New Orleans herself. But the price of her assistance may prove more treacherous than even the threat of a supernatural war … to say nothing of the repercussions Cat never imagined. 9780061783180, $7.99

Wildcase

by Neil Russell In a bedroom community populated by good cops and bad cops, a retired police officer and his wife have been brutally tortured and slain. A “wildcase” with no apparent rhyme or reason, it has caught the attention of the FBI . . . and Hollywood billionaire, ex-Delta Force operative Rail Black, who called the slaughtered pair his friends. And the precious blood already spilled is nothing compared to the deluge to come—with Rail’s own added to the mix if he gets too close. 9780061721731, $7.99

All available as eBooks Visit LibraryLoveFest.com for more great reading

columns

audio by sukey howard

Finding what is lost If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a super-ambitious 30-something with a high-powered job, an equally high-powered husband and three kids under seven, wonder no more. We don’t just get to know Sarah Nickerson, the narrator of Lisa Genova’s second novel, Left Neglected (Simon & Schuster Audio, $39.99, 9 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781442335394), convincingly read by Sarah Paulson; we get to live in her mind, to see and experience life as she does. Sarah’s sure she can

mommy.” But no one knows who Haley’s daddy is. The glamorous, charming Marissa, who arrived in town when Haley was a baby, never said a word about the missing progenitor, and Haley calls every man she knows “Daddy.” The detectives, including retired FBI profiler Vince Leone, have a lot of suspects but little conclusive evidence. Hoag’s been in the thrillerdiller-killer business for a long time and proves, yet again, that she knows how to ratchet up the suspense and keep you guessing.

Audio of the Month drive, talk on the phone and strategize all at once. Then her car flips over on a rain-drenched highway and all that came before comes to a sudden stop. When Sarah regains consciousness, her traumatic brain injury has delivered her into a world with no left side; she has an uncommon, terribly debilitating condition called Left Neglect Syndrome. Using her background in neuroscience (she has a Harvard Ph.D.) and her skill as a writer, Genova makes this illness and the recovery from it into a metaphor for the wildly demanding, over-scheduled life we’ve come to accept as the norm and her portrait of Sarah, before and after, into a poignant reminder to live life, not work, to its fullest.

Hunting for “Bad Daddy”

Marissa Fordham’s throat was slashed with such ferocity that she was almost decapitated—and huddled against her mutilated body was her four-year-old daughter Haley, her small neck horribly bruised from an attempted strangling. That’s just for openers in Secrets to the Grave (Random House Audio, $40, 14 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780739365830), Tami Hoag’s sequel to Deeper than the Dead. It’s set in Oak Knoll, a seemingly idyllic, upscale college town near Santa Barbara, and performed with good pacing and strong character definition by Kirsten Potter. Little Haley had somehow managed to call 911 and whisper, “My daddy hurt my

Fascinating, almost mesmerizing, equally disturbing and encouraging, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies is the biography of cancer, a disease that killed more than seven million people worldwide last year and that may be the “defining plague of our generation.” Mukherjee, a cancer researcher and physician, is also a gifted writer who makes the complexities of the science surrounding cancer understandable. Following the labyrinthine history of cancer research in the last 100 years, he profiles the researchers who have dedicated so much of their lives to the fight to treat and beat this malicious malady. Mukherjee puts everything in its very human context, from the moving personal stories of his own patients to the infighting among cancer professionals, the misconceptions, the setbacks, the slow triumphs that have emerged and the glimpses of what the future may hold. Though there is much scientific and medical detail, Stephen Hoye’s straightforward reading adds clarity as it carries you through this magisterial narrative.

The Emperor of All Maladies By Siddhartha Mukherjee Tantor Media $49.99, 21 hours unabridged ISBN 9781400119172

science

meet Jodi Picoult

the title of your new Q: What’s book?

would you describe Q: How the book?

You Q: Sing wrote the lyrics to a CD of songs that accompanies You Home. Can you pick a favorite lyric to share?

Q: M ost of your novels, including this one, deal with hot-button social issues. Have you ever been tempted to tackle an easier topic—like vampires or werewolves?

Q: T ell us one thing your readers would be surprised to learn about you.

three things would you want with you on a desert island? Q: What

Q: W ords to live by?

SING YOU HOME

Since the publication of her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, in 1992, Jodi Picoult has specialized in weaving contemporary themes into engaging and believable fiction. Her 19th novel, Sing You Home (Atria, $28, 480 pages, ISBN 9781439102725), is reviewed in the fiction section of this issue. Picoult and her family live in Hanover, New Hampshire.

interviews

eleanor brown

A SHAKESPEAREAN FAMILY REUNION

lthough she has been writing for years, The Weird Sisters is Eleanor Brown’s first novel, and her joy at being published is almost palpable.

In a birth announcement of sorts, Brown posted a photo of an early copy of the book on her blog and gushed adorably about its beauty. “The paper is beautiful and doesn’t reproduce quite right in photos— it’s a beautiful pearlescent white that glitters in light,” she wrote. It’s true—the cover is gorgeous. That’s nothing, though, compared to what’s inside this delicious, wholly original novel. Brown laughs when teased about her blog post. “There’s something about seeing the hardcover that just made it all feel very real and very close, and kind of brought home that I’d done something worth celebrating,” she says. Indeed, The Weird Sisters is a book worth celebrating. Because their father is a renowned Shakespearean scholar, the Andreas family communicates largely through the words of the Bard. It is not unusual for them to drop Shakespearean quotes into a conversation about, say, wedding rings or what to eat for breakfast. The three Andreas sisters—Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, each named for great Shakespearean characters—come home to the tiny college town where they grew up when their mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Rosalind (or Rose) doesn’t have far to go, since she lives and teaches nearby in Columbus. Bianca (or Bean) comes home from her glitzy life in Manhattan after being disgraced at

THE WEIRD SISTERS

By Eleanor Brown, Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9780399157226, Audio, eBook available

work. And the baby sister, Cordelia (Cordy), wanders home from her latest aimless road trip around America, broke, tired and pregnant. The novel wonderfully captures how it feels to go home again—and all the bittersweet, mixed emotions that can come along with it. Who hasn’t visited the parents and immediately reverted to acting like a sullen teenager, or been home for the holidays and run into an ex at the grocery store? “The reason I was interested in the story of the Andreas sisters comes very much from my family in broad strokes,” says Brown, who has two sisters. “When we get back together, we tend to slip back into those roles.” It’s a meaningful choice of theme for someone like Brown, who has lived all over the world and admits she longs to find a place where she wants to stay. Brown just moved from Florida to Colorado with her partner, writer J.C. Hutchins. She has also lived in England, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Philadelphia. And yet, she admits that someone had to point out to her the dichotomy between her own peripatetic life and the focus on home in her book. “I did have a psychology undergrad degree,” Brown laughs. “You’d think I would’ve picked up on that!” Brown came late to Shakespeare, never really a fan until she studied at Oxford and got to see productions at the Globe and Stratford-upon-Avon. “That’s when I really fell in love with the language and stories,” she says. Telling someone she’s written a book about a family that speaks in Shakespearean quotes causes people “to kind of get that look in their eye, like ‘I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz,’ ” she says. “But really this is about a family that is crippled by the fact that they’re not talking honestly and openly with each other using their own words. Every family has patterns that hold them back.” In the Andreas’ case, that pattern includes a dad who wanders around the house muttering things like, “Marry, sir, ’tis an ill cook that

Interview by Amy Scribner

cannot lick his own fingers: therefore he that cannot lick his fingers goes not with me.” Huh? “Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: It’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about,” the sisters say, in the book’s terrific first-person-plural voice. Capturing that voice—in which the sisters collectively tell the story—was no easy feat. “It was tricky,” Brown says. “I had to kind of devise the rules; for example, how many sisters have to be in the scene to use that voice? Technically, it was really difficult, but I thought it was important because when people talk about their families, they always slip into ‘we.’ ” So different in personality and life choices, Rose, Bean and Cordy find it complicated to be under one roof again. Bean owes thousands of dollars to her former employer. Rose is engaged to a fellow professor who wants to live in England, while she prefers to stick closer to home. Cordy has no job, no money, no college degree, no health insurance and a rapidly growing belly. How they reconnect—with themselves, each other and their parents—is the heart of this funny, warm story. It also bears mentioning that The Weird Sisters is a book nerd’s nirvana: The whole family carries books with them wherever they go, and they read at any opportunity. Brown herself knocks off about 300 books in a good year, everything from romance to nonfiction. “Basically, I don’t go anywhere without a book in my hand,” she says. None of this is surprising: The Weird Sisters is clearly written by a booklover. It’s irresistible and the ending, although satisfying, comes all too soon.

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Sister Evangeline is plunged into a secret history stretching back a millennium—an ancient conflict that might now shape the fate of the world.

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interviews

téa obreht

the truth that lies behind family stories

ometime in the not-too-distant future Téa Obreht plans to move to New York City. “That’s where the action is, I guess,” she says, sounding in the same instant both eager and skeptical.

But for now, Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has remained since finishing her MFA at Cornell two years ago. In Ithaca’s relative calm she has ridden out the hoopla of being named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best writers under 40—and at 25, she is the youngest writer on that list. “Ithaca is a nice environment to write in, and I have a community of writers here, so I have stayed,” says Obreht, who is remarkably composed for a young writer cast suddenly into the limelight. “Besides, changing environments in a situation where the book was in final edits wasn’t something I wanted to do.” The book in question is Obreht’s stirringly accomplished first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans after prolonged civil war, the story is narrated by a young doctor named Natalia as she travels into the borderlands, where emotions about the war are still raw, to deliver medicine to an orphanage. Early in her journey Natalia learns that her grandfather, also a doctor, has died in a remote village while on his own mission of mercy. Her grandmother asks Natalia to retrieve a packet of his belongings. As Natalia travels deeper into the fraught landscape, she unravels the meaning of the two central stories that ran “like secret rivers through all the other

The Tiger’s Wife

By Téa Obreht, Random House, $25, 352 pages, ISBN 9780385343831, Audio, eBook available

stories of [her grandfather’s] life”— the story of his repeated meetings with the deathless man and the story of his childhood experience with the tiger’s wife. Like her narrator, Obreht was very close to her grandfather. She was born in Belgrade in 1985 and lived there with her grandparents and her mother until 1992, “when things got pretty heated.” As fighting intensified in the former Yugoslavia, her family fled. At the age of “My grandfather was an 25, literary engineer and rising star he had conTéa Obreht nections in different places, taps her so we ended up family’s in Cyprus for a experience year. Then we lived in Cairo in the for three and Balkans for a half years a memorable until we were journey into lucky enough to come to the past. the United States. A lot of our family lived in a far suburb of Atlanta, so we lived there for two or three years. And then my mother met my stepfather and we moved to Palo Alto.” The summer before she left for Cornell her grandfather died. “He was always very supportive of my decision and desire to write,” she says. On his deathbed he asked her to write under his family name—Obreht—“and now I do.” Obreht has been writing since the age of eight. As an undergraduate she “went to the University of Southern California to study creative writing, with the full support of my mother. But she also wanted me to have an additional major so I could get an actual job. So I chose art history!” she says, laughing. At USC, Obreht wrote prolifically at first and then stopped for a year. “In any artistic endeavor when you’re just learning something, there comes a moment in your progress when you hit a wall and the wall is

simply there. And the only way for that wall or curtain or whatever it is to dissolve is to wait it out.” Obreht’s wait lasted until her senior year, when she took a workshop with T.C. Boyle. “I suddenly understood there was this whole thing to be done with structure, how it works and looks and what it feels like to read a good short story and understand what makes it good,” she says. “After that, writing for me was the absolute top priority once again and it has remained so.” The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, began as “a terrible short story that took all kinds of beatings in workshops. It failed, but there was something I was really attached to and I wasn’t willing to give up on— the tiger. I’ll say without embarrassment that writing the tiger sections was my favorite part of the process. I write out of chronological order. I skip around a lot. But I wanted to stay with his character and go on this journey with him. So those were the parts that got written first.” As the story grew, Obreht drew first on things she knew from her own life and from stories her relatives told her. Then in the summer of 2009 she went to Serbia and Croatia “to hunt for vampires for Harper’s” (her nonfiction piece appeared in the November 2010 issue of the magazine). “We ended up bumming around a lot of villages in a car with a tape recorder, getting out and asking, ‘Does this village have any vampire stories?’ It ended up being a much-needed lesson in village life, the way village society functions, the way myths operate in a village setting.” The result of that research is one of the most powerful aspects of The Tiger’s Wife—the novel’s strong sense of place: not merely place as vividly described locale, but place as the location of layers of often conflicting emotion. In the villages Natalia visits, for example, the re-

Interview by Alden Mudge

cent civil war is never discussed, but the sorrow and distrust it has left behind seem to seep out of the earth itself. Likewise, Obreht’s exploration of folktales and myths adds powerful resonance—and compassion—to her narrative. “I think when people suffer great tragedy, they turn to myths,” Obreht says. “I was interested in the question of at what point a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or legend. Sometimes the fact that the story exists at all is moving in itself. I think there’s a lot of that where I come from, and a lot of that generally in the world.” The final thread in the development of The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, was her experience of her grandfather’s death. “I had tried for a long time not to deal with it and not to think about it and say to myself, ‘I’m doing fine. I’m great.’ Then this story started to come together with this narrator who had a grandfather who had died. . . . Maybe this isn’t the right thing to say because we’re talking about writing. But personally in the process of writing this novel I ended up making peace with the fact that my grandfather was dead. I’m not pleased with this [in the sense of] ‘oh, this is an accomplishment,’ but somehow . . . it became a fact that I could process in a way that I hadn’t thought I could do before. The writing of the book got me there, and I’m happy with that.”

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interviews

GABRIELLE HAMILTON

A chef’s well-seasoned life

rune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book. “I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business. But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a

stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13year-old Hamilton and her brother

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Dawn of the Shining Darkness An edge-of-your-seat Spiritual thriller that spans two thousand years of Christian history and weaves today’s headlines with the true prophecies you don’t know and the urgent warning you should never forget. (Perfect for Christian book clubs. A top 10 pick for 2010: Catholic Answers Forums.) $16.95; 420 pages; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9828279-0-1

Transformed by Trouble From Misfortune to Miracles

In 2004, two hurricanes destroyed the Werkowski home while they were away for the summer, spreading the Gospel. This is their uplifting story of triumph over tragedy and the prayers, messages and Miracles that sustained them as they kept their eyes on Jesus Christ, not on the storms in their lives.

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Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a restaurant in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes. The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.” The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.” Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge. But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.”

Blood, Bones & Butter

By Gabrielle Hamilton, Random House, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9781400068722, Audio, eBook available

•

At last, the Kingkiller Chronicle continues

•

From New York Times bestselling author

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In The Name of the Wind, readers were introduced to Kvothe, a young man who grows to be one of the most notorious magicians his world has ever seen. Now, Kvothe takes his first steps on the path of the hero and learns how difficult life can be when a man becomes a legend in his own time.

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features

women’s history By Deanna Larson

Strong women who paved the way

he theme of Women’s History Month 2011 is “Our History is Our Strength.” Three new—and very different—books profile women with intellect, tenacity, courage and creativity.

Women who ruled Elizabeth I ruled England with history-making style. But Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Margaret of Anjou and Matilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, were equally powerful, ambitious women who thrived in a cutthroat world well before her reign. Award-winning British historian Helen Castor (Blood and Roses) tells their extraordinary stories in She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (Harper, $27.99, 496 pages, 9780061430763). “Man was the head of woman, and the king was the head of all,” Castor writes. “How, then, could royal

power lie in female hands?” Castor answers that suspenseful question in dense, historically rich accounts that set out every detail of the complex social mores, political machinations, familial manipulations and feuds that formed their paths to power and influence. Women who claimed their earned power—even their birthright—outright during the 12th-15th centuries were seen as fanged, bloodthirsty “she-wolves.” “Freedom to act,” Castor writes, “did not mean freedom from censure and condemnation.” Their stories—like young French bride Isabella’s fight for her royal rights in England at the age of 12—

featured subtle negotiations, covert confrontations, manipulations and sharp analysis worthy of any male ruler during such tumultuous, war-ravaged times, and SheWolves makes for exceptional, even inspirational reading.

An enduring legacy

The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, was a controversial and groundbreaking book that turned the myth of the “content and fulfilled” housewife and mother on its head. The best-selling and radical book by Betty Friedan—often read undercover—inspired a generation of women to buck societal pressures and the prevailing belief that “women’s independence was bad for husbands, children, and the community at large” and seek change in their lives. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic, $25.95, 222 pages, ISBN 9780465002009), award-winning social historian Stephanie Coontz conducts interviews with nearly 200 women (and men) who were affected by Friedan’s book and traces its societal impact, including its influence on issues of gender equality today. Coontz examines the eras of relative freedom for women that predated the book, from getting the vote and the bobs and short dresses of the 1920s to hard-working Rosie the Riveters of the 1940s, and the erosion of those SIGN UP FOR OUR E-NEWSLETTERS NOW! Scan this QR code with your freedoms in postwar America. Friedan, mobile device and select desired e-newsletters. Don’t have a QR reader? “just another unhapSearch QR reader apps and download for free. py housewife” and writer for women’s

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magazines, conceived her book in the “Mad Men” era, when men had total legal control over the lives of their families and women couldn’t get credit in their own names. While other books of the time tackled similar problems, Friedan—a former activist—made readers feel passionate and validated in their frustration with their gilded cages. Packed with fascinating statistics and research on 20th-century American social history, including the effect of “liberation” on middleclass, working-class and AfricanAmerican women, Coontz shines new light on a landmark work.

Women behaving badly Actress and blogger Elizabeth Kerri Mahon puts readers smack in the middle of some incredible female lives with her blog, Scandalous Women. Her mini-biographies are now compiled in Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women (Perigee, $15, 320 pages, ISBN 9780399536458). Mahon, a selfproclaimed “history geek,” reclaims history “one woman at a time” in short, lighthearted accounts of the lives of rich and famous—and ordinary—women who caused wars, created drama, “defied the rules and brought men to their knees.” Each chapter features five women who created whole genres of scandal, from Warrior Queens (Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine), Wayward Wives (Jane Digby, Zelda Fitzgerald), Scintillating Seductresses (Emma Hamilton, Mata Hari), Crusading Ladies (Ida B. Wells, Anne Hutchinson), Wild Women of the West (Calamity Jane, Unsinkable Molly Brown), Amorous Artists (Camille Claudel, Billie Holiday) and Amazing Adventuresses (Anna Leonowens, Amelia Earhart). While many of the facts surrounding these lives are familiar, Mahon weaves page-turner narratives from her passion and affection for these spectacular but often misrepresented women.

world travel By Eliza Borné

RENEWAL and adventure ABROAD

hether you’re planning a trip, imagining a radical move across the globe or simply hoping to explore from the couch, travelogues provide entertainment and inspiration.

BON APPÉTIT The premise of Lonely Planet’s latest anthology is one upon which we can all agree: “Wherever we go, we need to eat.” In A Moveable Feast (Lonely Planet, $14.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9781742202297), edited by veteran travel writer Don George, eating is something to relish on trips— sometimes it’s even the point of the trip. Thirty-eight essays will take you from a hospitable yurt in Mongolia, where Stanley Stewart happily samples sheep intestines and fermented mare’s milk, to barbeque capital Kansas City, where Doug Mack and his father have some long-anticipated bonding time over a plate of heavenly ribs. The essays are short and easily digestible—A Moveable Feast would be perfect for stop-and-go reading while you’re in transit to your next destination (or for anytime you want to fantasize about being somewhere more exotic). In one of my favorite essays of the collection, Alexander Lobrano writes of getting “almost teary” as he muses on a “magical meal” in Portugal—pork and clams

in tomato sauce, juicy chicken, fried potatoes and rice. You may find yourself salivating as you read about these fabulous food experiences and charming international characters, and the stories will inspire you to remember your own magical meals while traveling.

GOT THE BEIJING BLUES There’s a lot to love about Alan Paul’s Big in China (Harper, $25.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780061993152), a story about plunging into life in

TRAVEL TO EUROPE him to pursue creative opportunities he never could have imagined prior to moving around the world. He wrote an award-winning column for WSJ.com titled “The Expat Life” and fronted a blues and jam band called Woodie Alan with three Chinese men and another American. The group rose to prominence in Beijing, and Paul writes poignantly about performing in a multicultural band that became like a second family. Besides telling a good story, Paul honestly addresses the complexity of uprooting kids, making career sacrifices for a spouse and living in a foreign land. He writes, “One of the lessons I had taken from expat life was that no one was destined to live by any single reality.” In Big in China, Paul learns that “home” is where the people you love happen to be.

smaller versions of the best-selling Rough Guides are full-color and cityfocused—the 10 destinations include Barcelona, Prague and Rome.

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THE HAPPIEST COUNTRY

Lisa Napoli’s Radio ShangriLa (Crown, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9780307453020) will undoubtedly be compared to Eat, Pray, Love—in both, women in the midst of midlife crises find peace on adventures far away from the U.S. But Napoli’s destination of Bhutan is no Bali. Americans rarely visit this small nation in South Asia because of a steep tourist tax and limited plane access, and the a foreign culture—and rocking out country is remarkably sheltered from with a Chinese blues band. Paul and outside influences: Bhutan’s capital, his wife moved their three young Thimphu, is the only one in the world kids to Beijing after she got a postwithout a traffic light, and the king ing as China bureau chief of the Wall legalized television in the country Street Journal. A journalist with a just 12 years ago. Napoli was workflexible schedule, Paul became one ing for NPR’s Marketplace when a of the few male “trailing spouses” in chance encounter led to an invitation their neighborhood in Beijing, an to advise Kuzoo FM, Bhutan’s youth identity he embraced as it allowed radio station. Sick of producing 90-second segments, Napoli “felt New Guides for the world traveler hungry for knowledge, deeper Several travel publishers are introducing new series and destinations in meaning, time to synthesize the 2011—here are some of the most notable additions. world.” So she went to Bhutan in a time of great transition for the • DK Eyewitness Guides: This popular series is getting an overhaul in country: new king, new consti2011, with pull-out maps and a cleaner look. New destinations added tution, impending democracy. this year include Back Roads Germany, Chile & Easter Island and Radio Shangri-La is as much Cambodia & Laos. about the personalities at Kuzoo FM and the culture of Bhutan • Fodor’s Guides: Celebrating their 75th anniversary this year, America’s as it is about Napoli’s personal oldest travel guide company is adding Honduras & the Bay Islands, transformation. Readers will Prague & the Czech Republic, Venice & the Best of Northern Italy and enjoy learning about a part of the Essential India to their roster of more than 600 destinations. world far different from our own, • Lonely Planet Discover Guides: This successful new series of focused, a place where success is meafull-color, portable guides has added hotspots like London and Paris as sured not by GDP, but by Gross well as less-traveled destinations like Peru and China. National Happiness.

• Pocket Rough Guides: Billed as “slim, stylish and pocketable,” these

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reviews west of here

FICTION

Westward, ho! Review by Tony Kuehn

Set in fictional Port Bonita, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, West of Here is no less than epic. The narrative covers a timeline that is split between the late 1800s and the early 2000s, two periods that are united by the sublime power of the wilderness that surrounds the novel’s characters. The early settlers of Port Bonita are presented with a vast expanse of harsh land on the cusp of statehood, but blessed with what appears to be nearly limitless possibility—if only they can survive long enough to grasp it. Fighting to maintain a hardscrabble existence on the very edge of the American frontier, bounded on one side by unconquerable mountains that threaten to push civilization into an inhospitable sea, the early frontiersmen and women of West of Here are truly on the very edge of a newly explored country. In contrast to their ancestors, the contempoBy Jonathan Evison, Algonquin, $24.95, 496 pages, rary denizens of Port Bonita are watching their small corner of the world ISBN 9781565129528, Audio, eBook available slowly erode as they attempt to undo the ambitions of their predecessors, chiefly a massive dam that, though it once brought power and progress, now chokes valuable fish runs and threatens to capsize the civilization it engendered. The twists of the plots in West of Here are manifold and far too extensive to cover in any one review. Regardless, the journey down the paths author Jonathan Evison has created is so delightful that anyone who has taken it is loath to spoil it for another. This book is a living, breathing testament to Evison’s singular talent for creating portraits of people who may be fictional, but nevertheless are so vital that one is certain their names must be in a historic register somewhere. Like the people in his book, Evison’s grand ambition seems to have been snatched out of thin air and made real in a way that is simply undeniable.

THE PARIS WIFE By Paula McLain Ballantine $25, 336 pages ISBN 9780345521309 Audio, eBook available

historical fiction

Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a broke, ambitious writer in Europe in the 1920s. Or, more specifically, a broke, ambitious writer’s wife. Hadley meets Ernest at a friend’s house in Chicago. She’s in her late 20s, nearly a decade older than he is, and on the verge of permanent spinsterhood. He deflowers her, they marry and flee to Paris, where they can live cheaply and meet all manner of big shots, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They have a baby, nicknamed Bumby. There’s some drinking, though

Hadley doesn’t hit the sauce nearly as much as Ernest. In McLain’s hands, he’s nicer than one would think, and the word that comes to mind for Hadley is “earnest” as she struggles to make homes for them in dinky little rooms while Hem tries to make a living. In clear and unfussy prose, McLain makes the reader long for their Lost Generational squalor. Indeed, McLain’s talent is such that the fact that few of the characters are likable doesn’t mar her story. Characters need only be interesting, and well-drawn creeps are the most interesting of them all. Exceptions to the overall badness are the Murphys, the rich, cosmopolitan and compassionate couple who adopt both the Hemingways and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds like some folks adopt ugly pound puppies, and of course Bumby, still a child when his parents’ marriage detonates. Even Hadley repels with her love of bullfighting—a woman who gets her kicks from watching an animal tortured to death is simply not someone one can like. When the appalling Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, crawls into bed with

them one drowsy Mediterranean afternoon one doesn’t know whether to cheer or gag. Hadley, like so many of her revered matadors, ends up pretty badly gored, but survives, and lives well into her 80s. Restrained, perceptive and a bit sad, The Paris Wife is a look at a time and a marriage that weren’t as glamorous and carefree as we’d like to believe. — Arl e n e M c K a n i c

GEORGIA BOTTOMS By Mark Childress Little, Brown $24.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780316033046 eBook available

The vivacious Georgia grew up in the tiny town and, like everybody else there, she stayed put. Her best friend, Krystal, is the city’s mayor, her brother, “Brother,” is the municipal misfit, and her momma, plagued with dementia, is losing her mind. The good Southern Baptist that she is, Georgia has occupied the same pew at church for as long as she can remember. Trouble is, lately she’s not coming to find forgiveness. Rather, Georgia Bottoms opens with Georgia feigning a fainting spell to keep the preacher from confessing from the pulpit. You see, he’s been spending his Saturday nights apart from his family and in Georgia’s arms. And he’s not the only guilty one singing hymns on Sunday mornings. But Georgia can’t risk letting his pious conscience get the best of him—she has too much at stake. The Bottoms family fortune is long gone, and Georgia has a long-kept secret for which she needs the cash flow. And it’s not just for her manicures or her Belk shopping sprees, either. Childress, an Alabama native, brings the same humor and flair for drama to Georgia Bottoms that made his novel Crazy in Alabama such a hit. He is a master of penning dialect, especially when it’s uttered south of the Mason-Dixon line. Georgia’s Southern accent floats off the page, making Georgia Bottoms a quick, entertaining novel for Childress fans and new readers alike. If you’ve got Southern roots, this is a must-read, y’all. —Lizza Connor Bowen

SING YOU HOME By Jodi Picoult Atria $28, 480 pages ISBN 9781439102725 eBook available

fiction

Fiction

Georgia Bottoms is the blond, beautiful Southern belle next door. As the central character in Mark Childress’ new novel, aptly titled for the aforementioned Georgia, she is the center of attention in Six Points, Alabama.

The seemingly unstoppable Jodi Picoult delivers another heartwrenching page-turner in Sing You Home, a stirring exploration of same-sex couples’ reproductive rights. Fast-paced and three-dimensional, the novel does justice to this pivotal civil rights issue, and Picoult again proves herself the queen of

FICTION heartfelt social statement. Forty-year-old music therapist Zoe Baxter and her husband, Max, have tried to have a child for nine years. When their fifth in-vitro fertilization attempt ends in a stillbirth, Max files for divorce, unwilling to try fathering a child again. Backsliding into alcoholism, Max moves in with his brother, Reid, and sister-in-law, Liddy, who are also struggling with infertility. Confidence at rock bottom, Max comes under the influence of the charismatic, ultraconservative Pastor Clive at Reid’s evangelical church. Meanwhile, Zoe develops a close friendship with high school guidance counselor Vanessa Shaw and, to her own surprise, falls in love with her. Zoe and Vanessa marry, and when they discuss the possibility of parenting, Zoe remembers that three frozen embryos remain from her last round of IVF with Max. When Zoe asks Max for consent to obtain them, a heated court battle erupts in which Max tries to prevent

the “pre-born children” from being brought into Zoe and Vanessa’s “sinful” household. Coached by Pastor Clive and a media-drunk attorney, Max wants Reid and Liddy to be awarded the embryos instead. Told from the perspectives of Zoe, Max and Vanessa, the story takes beautiful shape as Zoe’s loving but troubled relationship with Max falls apart and her tender one with Vanessa begins. Included with the book, a CD of songs performed by “Zoe” (with lyrics by Picoult) adds further dimension to the novel. The born-again Max sometimes verges on cartoonish, but his complicated relationship with his sister-in-law and his memories of marriage to Zoe pull his character back from the brink. At the same time, Picoult’s deft weaving of past and present gives Zoe and Vanessa engrossing depth from start to finish, and readers will be hard-pressed to put the book down before that finish comes. Thoroughly satisfying, Sing You Home truly sings. —Sheri Bodoh

CLEANING NABOKOV’S HOUSE By Leslie Daniels Touchstone $24, 336 pages ISBN 9781439195024 Audio, eBook available

Women’s fiction

Cleaning Nabokov’s House is a laugh-out-loud pleasure of a read. Our main character, Barbara Barrett, is a divorced mother deemed emotionally unstable by the court. Her children, Sam and Darcy, will live with their father (referred to by Barb as “the experson”) until Barb can prove she has it together—a stable income, a happy and clean home, friends and hobbies. Barb’s journey to reinvent herself—to find a different way of living than the silly, stuffy way of the experson—is a totally original delight. The novel is partially of inter-

est because Barb is an outsider. She’s an outsider in her northern New York town of Onkwedo, where everyone knows the experson and automatically sides with him during the divorce. She’s an outsider professionally, working a dead-end job answering letters for a local dairy (she gets to decide if the person who complained deserves a free ice cream cone). And, most significantly, she’s an outsider from her former family. Barb’s remarkable resilience comes from her ability to pursue happiness on her own terms. While initially hostile to Onkwedo and to the experson, she uncannily puts her finger on just what Onkwedo needs and opens up her own business with smashing results. Along the way, Barb moves into a house formerly inhabited by the genius writer Vladimir Nabokov. When she finds a manuscript tucked behind a false wall in a cabinet, Barb believes she’s found a lost masterpiece. Her attempts to get it published lead readers to the wonderful cast of secondary char-

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TWICE D O N ’ T LO O K AUTHOR OF

“Reckless is a sexy-as-hell thriller and Andrew Gross’s best.” —James Patterson

“This book is fantastic. An automatic must-read.” —Lee Child “Quick, intense, pulse-pounding.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

www.andrewgrossbooks.com © Jan Cobb

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reviews acters—no-nonsense agent Margie (pronounced with a hard G), a slick entertainment lawyer and maybe even a new boyfriend. As writer Dorothy Allison says in her endorsement of Cleaning Nabokov’s House, “Go ahead, take a risk. You are going to love this woman—and this book.” — K e l ly B l e w e t t

MR. CHARTWELL By Rebecca Hunt Dial $24, 256 pages ISBN 9781400069408 Audio, eBook available

debut fiction

During his lifetime, Sir Winston Churchill struggled with depression and was quite candid about his battle with the dark disease. Churchill

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

A Back-To-Back Delight Avon 1/8

Both available as eBooks

The Heiress—the second book in the very sexy, very funny Regency romance series she began with The Countess—is further proof of Sands’s historical romance mastery.

AvonBooks.com

FICTION often referred to his bleak moods as the Black Dog, and his metaphor has now been transformed and brought to life by novelist Rebecca Hunt in Mr. Chartwell. As one might expect, Hunt’s debut novel features her inspiration, Churchill, but the true star of the novel is Hunt’s own creation: a young librarian named Esther Hammerhans who has a terrible burden of her own weighing her down. When Esther decides to sublet a room in her house, she never imagines who—or what—will walk through her door. Much to her surprise, the only response she receives to her advert comes from Mr. Chartwell, a hulking, vaguely sinister brute of a dog. Despite her repulsion, Esther cannot help but feel oddly comforted by and drawn to Mr. Chartwell, and hesitantly opens up her home to him. Unfortunately for Esther, Mr. Chartwell may not be content with simply claiming Esther’s home as his own, but may instead have his sights set on Esther herself. As Esther struggles to resist Mr. Chartwell’s advances, she finds an unlikely ally in Churchill when she is sent by her library to help him type up a speech regarding his impending retirement. Though the two have little in common, Churchill understands all too well the nefarious adversary Esther faces. Spanning the course of just six days, Mr. Chartwell is a tightly coiled novel that covers a lot of ground in a short time frame. Hunt deftly explores the intricacies of depression with the empathy and sensitivity that the topic deserves, but avoids veering into maudlin territory. Readers who can accept a novel that features a talking dog will find much to admire in Hunt’s inspired look at the inner lives of her characters and the disease that haunts them. Punctuated with moments of quintessentially English humor, Hunt’s novel has an impressive lightness in its handling of depression, yet the book is pervaded with a calm, contemplative sadness that quietly demands a deeper emotional response from the reader. It is tempting to race through its pages to discover the ultimate fates of Esther and Churchill, but this is a novel that is best appreciated with slow and careful reading. —Stephenie Harrison

MINDING FRANKIE By Maeve Binchy Knopf $26.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780307273567 Audio, eBook available

fiction

one, will consider Minding Frankie one of Binchy’s best novels yet. —Maude McDaniel

SATORI By Don Winslow Grand Central $25.99, 512 pages ISBN 9780446561921 Audio, eBook available

thriller

Maeve Binchy has done it again. In Minding Frankie, she assembles a large cast of characters (many of them familiar faces from the close-knit Dublin neighborhood last depicted in Heart and Soul) and deploys them with her characteristic playfulness, effortlessly forming yet another warm tale of individual growth and human community. Binchy writes about a baby girl born to a dying mother, who names the exact right person among her acquaintances to raise little Frances before she dies. That would be Noel Lynch, a victim of advanced apathy concerning just about everything in his life, which is further complicated by alcoholism. He could indeed be Frankie’s father, but it takes all of dying Stella’s determination to start things in the right direction, and before the story is done, the whole neighborhood bands together to see things done right by Frankie. Binchy mourns the loss of community in the town, but a desire to work together seems alive and well as the neighbors gather ’round to care for Frankie—and to foil Moira, the rather nasty social worker who threatens to upset the carefully planned arrangements. Even minor characters feel the jab of Binchy’s wit, like Miss Gorman, a secretary “who had a disapproval rating about almost everything,” and the Italian restaurant owner, who speaks in “carefully maintained broken English.” Ireland may not be what it used to be, but Binchy viably populates a modern version that is almost as heartwarming. Binchy specializes in exploring human foibles without spelling them out in tiresome detail. Here she adds a 19th novel to a string of successes that take light-hearted looks at real life and always find it worth the effort. There’s a good chance that many readers, like this

The 1979 international thriller Shibumi, by the author Trevanian, quickly became a classic of the genre. The hero of Shibumi was Nicholai Hel, the son of an aristocratic Russian mother who immigrated to Japan, who was raised after his mother’s death by his samurai surrogate father. Contemporary thriller author Don Winslow (Savages) has taken up Hel’s story in Satori, revealing how Hel came to be a professional assassin working for the CIA—a mastermind fluent in English, French, German, Chinese and Japanese, and trained in the complex strategies of “Go,” the ancient Japanese board game similar to chess, but much more intricate. It’s 1951, and Hel, 26, is just emerging from three years of solitary confinement. The Americans— actually the CIA—are releasing him, his freedom contingent on his agreeing to go to Beijing and assassinate Yuri Voroshenin, the Soviet commissioner to China. To aid in the completion of this difficult assignment, considered by the CIA to be a suicide mission, Hel is given a new face and a new identity—that of Michel Guibert, a French national and the son of an arms dealer with ties to the French Communist Party. The many obstacles in Hel’s path include Solange, a highly paid French prostitute who may or may not be an assassin herself; Major Diamond, a ruthless CIA operative who will stop at nothing to avoid losing control of his lucrative Southeast Asia drug operation; and a motley mélange of drug lords, pirates and the Corsican Mafia. Armed with “naked kill” karate skills and a superhero-like heightened “proximity sense,” which gives him an early warning of approach-

FICTION ing danger, Hel dispatches one enemy after another, maiming or killing them like pawns on a chessboard. And he accomplishes all of this while striving to reach his ultimate goal: an understanding of the Zen Buddhist concept of satori—living in harmony with the world. Winslow superbly carries on the Shibumi tradition in this actionpacked novel that will appeal not only to Trevanian fans, but readers of contemporary thrillers as well. —Deborah Donovan

THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT By Carol Edgarian Scribner $25, 304 pages ISBN 9781439198308 eBook available

fiction

Edgarian’s characters fully inhabit this all-too-familiar world of marital squabbles, wounded pride and unpaid bills. Her depiction of the frustrations and joys of motherhood is hilariously on target, when it’s not tragic. Her characters are caught in the rhythms of trying, failing and trying again—patterns that superbly mimic those of everyday life. Perhaps in an attempt to provide a more panoramic snapshot of the times we live in, Edgarian creates additional problems for her couples, including the presence of an old flame of Lena’s who also works for Cal. This and the too-tidy ending threaten to capsize the network of believable emotions and events that Edgarian has so carefully constructed. Yet Three Stages of Amazement is notable for its attempt to explore how families navigate through hard times, both financial and emotional. —Lauren Bufferd

T.C. Boyle presents an interesting question in When the Killing’s Done: If one species has a right to live in a certain area, shouldn’t all species be able to live there? Boyle’s novel is not just a ripped-from-theheadlines page-turner, but also a careful study of two memorable antagonists. Alma seems to leap from the page, and Dave will appeal to anyone who detects a whiff of hypocrisy in the idea of exterminating invasive species. Boyle’s lyrical, energetic prose is a pleasure: Anger surfaces “like a submerged log riding a contrail of swamp gas,” and a flashlight is “a darkened cylinder . . . held out like a homing device.” Anyone who enjoys the topical, provocative novels of Jodi Picoult will want to pick up a copy of When the Killing’s Done. And, of course, Boyle’s countless fans—who have followed his career from Drop City to The Women—will want to get their hands on this new book. —Dan Barrett

Carol Edgarian’s second novel explores how many trials a marriage can stand. Lena and Charlie are struggling emotionally and financially. At one time a successful surgeon, Charlie has given up most of his practice to develop a robotic surgery device, and in the economic reversals of the current decade, few are eager to invest in his invention. After the tragic loss of a prematurely born twin, Lena gave up her job to care for the surviving daughter, who suffers from severe developmental problems, and a precocious five-year-old son. When Charlie goes behind Lena’s back to make a deal with her estranged uncle Cal, a Silicon Valley tycoon, Lena’s sense of betrayal threatens to destroy the already fragile threads that hold the family together. Lena and Charlie’s marriage is not the only one that comes under Edgarian’s microscope. Cal and his socialite wife Ivy are at the other end of the spectrum, with financial stability and grown children. But the creature comforts of an affluent lifestyle can’t always soften the petty cruelties and misunderstandings that occur over a decades-long partnership. As Lena and Charlie are drawn more deeply into Cal and Ivy’s world, they each face the limitations a shaky economy can place on life and love.

WHEN THE KILLING’S DONE By T.C. Boyle Viking $26.95, 384 pages ISBN 9780670022328 Audio, eBook available

Literary fiction

Trouble is brewing on the Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara. Here, on America’s version of the Galapagos Islands, many unique species are under assault. Someone has inadvertently introduced a species of rat—rattus rattus—to this fragile and ecologically rich area, and the rats are driving out rare, more exotic animals. The problem creates two warring camps. On one side, crusader Alma Boyd Takesue proposes to kill the rats with a method as humane as possible, so that the Islands’ delicate biological balance can survive. On the other side, fierce-tempered businessman Dave LaJoy feels that no group of animals deserves priority over any other; all creatures deserve to live, even rats. The conflict leads to several tense moments—a shouting match at a museum, a court case and an escalating sense of dread and hysteria.

tem, he is sent to distant relatives deep in rural Humboldt County, California. He arrives scared, angry and wild, barely speaking but constantly running, unable to trust anyone. But soon he finds a family in a group of misfits who had never imagined raising a child—stoic uncle Len, his convalescent wife Meg, and Ruth, Willow, Melody and Johnny Appleseed, the neighbors at Bow Farm who have all left more conventional lives to live together in a commune. As a novel, Wrecker lacks a certain level of sophistication and complexity. But the author, a foster mother herself, writes with a warmth and compassion that radiates from her pages. It’s impossible not to fall in love with Wrecker as he grows up, and perhaps more importantly, with his family—not only the many who took him in and made sacrifices for his well-being, but also the mother who, despite her mistakes, always loved him and missed so much of the way that he became a man. —Rebecca Shapiro

WRECKER By Summer Wood Bloomsbury $20, 304 pages ISBN 9781608192809

fiction

In 1996, then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton published her iconic book on child-rearing, It Takes a Village, which emphasized the necessity not only of good parenting, but also of unconventional families, of communities coming together to support children and of the many kinds of people that can make all the difference in a child’s life. Rarely has there been a better example of that message than Wrecker, a big-hearted novel about a boy who finds love and acceptance in an unlikely home. Born in San Francisco in 1965 to a troubled single mother, Wrecker has enough problems early in life to warrant his unconventional name. But when he is just three years old, his mother is sent to jail for such a long time that she won’t be eligible for parole until Wrecker is grown. After a brief stint in the foster sys-

Soho 1/8

reviews A Widow’s Story

NONFICTION

The long, dark nights of grief Review by Catherine Hollis

Joyce Carol Oates’ intense, raw memoir of her husband’s unexpected death in 2008 provides a compelling window into the writer’s working life by exposing the gap between “Joyce Carol Oates,” the masterful, prolific American novelist, and Joyce Smith, a wife of 48 years, suddenly widowed. After Raymond Smith dies of a hospital-acquired staph infection, “the Widow” (as she refers to her new role) must learn to negotiate the world of “death duties”: a funeral home, the will, sympathy cards she can’t bear to read, a ringing telephone she can’t bear to answer and endless crates of Harry & David sympathy gift baskets, a “quantity of trash” that she must roll out to the curb, weeping in February’s icy rain. Retreating to “the nest”—the marriage bed remade into a safe place to grieve—the insomniac Widow tries to lose herself in work and in emails to longtime friends. This generous memoir gives its readers intimate access to the most By Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco, $27.99, 432 pages, abject moments of sorrow, even as it explores the boundary between ISBN 9780062015532, eBook available private and public selves. The solace of work, of inhabiting the role of “Joyce Carol Oates,” helps the Widow get through her days, though she struggles through the long dark nights, when even the cats avoid her. We learn that the Smiths retained a certain “privacy of the soul” in their marriage: Raymond never read Joyce’s many novels, and she never read his single unfinished one. The Widow’s struggle over whether or not to read this abandoned novel prompts uneasy reflections over how well she knew her husband, or how well we might know anyone we deeply love. There is a breathless, antic quality to Oates’ prose in A Widow’s Story, an abundance of exclamation marks, dashes and repetitive phrases, stylistic markers that mirror the shock of unanticipated loss and its debilitating physical and psychological repercussions. This gives the memoir a kind of lightness and manic energy that make it a (paradoxically) pleasurable reading experience, and readers will come away grateful for having been granted such an intimate glimpse of a long and happy marriage.

TOWNIE By Andre Dubus III Norton $25.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780393064667 Audio available

MEMOIR

When Andre Dubus III was 11 years old, his parents parted ways. The oldest of four siblings, Dubus watched as his father drove away, while his younger brother ran after the car, throwing handfuls of gravel in its wake, shouting “You bum!” With a hopeless resolve, Dubus realized that “Mom would need to be comforted now. . . . There was food to think about. How to get it with no car. I tried to keep standing as straight as I could.” With little money or emotional support from their father (the writer Andre Dubus), young Andre and his siblings grew up poor in a series of Massachusetts mill towns, living in

rundown neighborhoods plagued by street-fighting, crime and drugs. A self-professed coward and physically weak, Dubus retreated into apathy and drugs, helplessly witnessing violence and aggression against himself and his family. After years of such attacks, Dubus’ rage surfaced: He decided to fight back. He lifted weights, boxed at the local gym and became a strong, viciously adept and habitual brawler. In this emotionally resonant and often achingly beautiful narrative, Dubus traces the arc of his hurt, anger, revenge and despair as he fights a battle for the survival of his soul and spirit, which grew weaker as his body gained strength. Eventually entering the rarified Bradford College, where his father was a professor, he was an out-of-place and indifferent student, especially after he overheard a fellow student refer to him as “such a townie.” Dubus writes: “I’d heard the word before. . . . Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty cops: townies.” Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) renders his eventual life path—

leaving his hometown, returning to college, turning to writing, coming back to his hometown and caring for his injured father—in powerfully nuanced scenes and dialogue. An honestly told story of fights and fighting, filial love, loneliness, bodily misery and soul-hunger, Townie exquisitely explicates one writer’s beginnings and his consuming need for expression—not through the delusive potency of physical violence, but through the redemptive, alchemical power of words. —Alison Hood

MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN By Joshua Foer Penguin Press $26.95, 306 pages ISBN 9781594202292 eBook available

psychology

Quick: Can you list all the American presidents in order from first

to most recent? How about most recent to first? If I say “pi,” is your first thought “I can recite that to 200 places” or “I’ll take mine with whipped cream”? There are people for whom these questions are taken very seriously, and their sport is competitive memory. Journalist Joshua Foer set out to cover the U.S. Memory Championship, and ended up so obsessed with the culture and rituals of memorizing that he competed in the 2006 Championship himself. Moonwalking with Einstein chronicles his training, explains many of the techniques that memorizers use—the title refers to one of Foer’s visual cues—and looks at some of the people for whom these aren’t skills but a lifestyle. Unsurprisingly, the people who gravitate to memorization are an eccentric lot. Foer befriends some competitors from the World Championship, and they’re a wild bunch. There are also many hucksters out to resell widely known information about memorization in the form of books, videos and live seminars. What is surprising is how easy the basic techniques are to learn. Virtually anyone can create a “memory palace,” visualizing a place they know intimately, then stocking it with vivid images to help recall information. It’s just a matter of consistent practice and making the images as striking as possible— which often means sexually explicit (some of Foer’s cues are both filthy and hilarious). Yet these techniques aren’t the cure-all that some might hope: After studying like a madman and competing in the U.S. Championships with impressive results, Foer goes to dinner with his parents and takes the subway home . . . where he realizes he had driven his car to the restaurant and forgotten all about it. So why would anyone want to recite pi to 10,000 places anyway? We have so much technology storing our memories for us; what’s the point of using antiquated skills? Foer finds one answer in the case of an 84-year-old man who, due to illness, has no short-term memory at all. He occasionally eats breakfast three times in the same day, and is touched to the point of tearing up each time someone mentions that he has grandchildren, since he’s just learning of their existence for the first time. Foer describes him as attaining “a kind of pathological en-

NONFICTION lightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.” Our memories hold the content of our relationships and give us a context in which to view it—all the more reason to fine-tune this important and easily honed skill. —Heather Seggel

CRAZY U By Andrew Ferguson Simon & Schuster $25, 240 pages ISBN 9781439101216 eBook available

parenting

“You don’t have a brother Timmy,” Ferguson points out. “Exactly,” his son retorts. “Then what am I going to write about?” Ferguson makes a superb case for stopping the insanity in higher education, from the overblown marketing to the broken financial aid system. Yet Crazy U is not a diatribe, and in fact Ferguson doesn’t offer a prescription to cure what ails college admissions. He simply shines a (very funny) light on the issues, and offers an important reminder that not every young American needs a $200,000 degree to live a good life. —Amy Scribner

JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM

Reading Crazy U—journalist Andrew Ferguson’s hilarious, scary account of his son’s college application process—made me think my own children should get cracking. They are 6 and 3. Ferguson, editor of the Weekly Standard, takes no prisoners as he writes about the big business that our higher education system has become. He eviscerates the inane, tightly choreographed college campus tours (try not to snort when he describes a Harvard admissions officer “shimmering” into the room for an open house). He meets a $40,000-a-pop private counselor who helps grease the wheels for admission into the Ivy League. He takes the SAT, earning a math score “somewhere below ‘lobotomy patient’ but above ‘Phillies fan.’ ” All the while, Ferguson’s son is sweating through this in real time. He applies to the Big State University (they live in Virginia—draw your own conclusions), a couple of stretch schools (Georgetown, Villanova) and some safety schools (Virginia Tech, Indiana University). The application essays are just as tedious as I remember from my own college days: It seems nowadays colleges insist that every 17-year-old describe a life-changing epiphany in a 500-word essay. So what happens to those teenagers who are not yet in touch with their rich inner life, as required in our Oprah-fied society? “I’m a white kid living in the suburbs,” Ferguson’s son moans. “I’m happy. My family is happy. My brother Timmy didn’t die.”

By James Carroll HMH $28, 432 pages ISBN 9780547195612 Audio available

history

The title of James Carroll’s latest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the compelling follow-up to his best-selling Constantine’s Sword, refers in part to Jesus’ lament in the Temple: “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!” But it’s also an apt two-word summary of Carroll’s multifaceted argument: that Jerusalem, as city and concept, is the source of both “good religion” and “bad religion” in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. To Carroll, the good Jerusalem is found in the Jews’ spiritual breakthrough during their exile in Babylon, as they reflected on their physical absence from the city and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple. They came to believe that God is Oneness—inclusive, endlessly compassionate and present in all things. The bad Jerusalem, he contends, is seen in the recurrent backsliding by all three faiths into violent bipolarity in response to the city’s unlucky history as regional “cockpit.” The God of that religion is not Oneness, but a deity who demands a bloody war against the evil Other. Carroll uses a chronological framework, but ranges widely and knowledgeably through anthropol-

ogy, archaeology and philosophy as well as history. Nor does he confine himself to the Middle East. He believes the idea of the United States as “New Jerusalem,” John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” affects our nation’s outlook in often deleterious ways. Whatever their origin, he argues, all American wars become “holy wars,” as leaders and combatants justify the loss of soldiers’ lives as necessary martyrdom in the struggle with Satan. As with Constantine’s Sword, much of Carroll’s argument in Jerusalem, Jerusalem will be controversial. For example, he believes Christianity’s millennium-long focus on Jesus’ crucifixion—what he calls its “tomb cult”—is a fundamental misinterpretation of Jesus’ true message. Jesus, he believes, was the prophet of peace, life and Oneness, while his followers, traumatized by the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem in the generation after his death, reverted to the belief in martyrdom and apocalypse that dated from the time of the Maccabees. But instead of blaming the Romans, Carroll says, they scapegoated the Jews who resisted their evangelism. Whether or not readers agree with Carroll’s analysis, his use of Jerusalem as a prism to examine the development of monotheism, and his prescription for what he believes might be a more positive future path, provide a powerful and provocative intellectual journey. —Anne Bartlett

THE INFORMATION By James Gleick Pantheon $29.95, 544 pages ISBN 9780375423727 Audio, eBook available

the messages carried by drumbeats and emails to the designs imposed on our bodies by our DNA. In the end, he presents the universe as a giant computer that is ever making calculations to dictate its own fate. In his early chapters, Gleick traces the progress of human language from vocal intonations to distinct units of sound (or words), to the encapsulation of these sounds into written symbols, to the dissemination of these words to every corner of the world. Each advance is at once liberating and disruptive to the existing social order. The shifting of his own culture’s knowledge from oral to written transmission caused Plato to grumble, “This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” Similar alarms followed the introduction of movable type, the mass production of books, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television and Twitter, the last of which, the author reminds us, is a colossal generator

top shelf

this month’s top publisher picks

Through Sophie’s Eyes Catherine Gibson

A deaf girl that loves to dance! This is a story about empathy, following one’s dreams and perseverance. It’s a book for all HC 9780578009803 $15.95 www.forchildrenwithlove.com children—hearing or deaf—which delivers a positive message about the differences between people. For Children With Love

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World

science

What constitutes information? What are its properties? And how have our lives adjusted to its omnipresence? Ambitious though he is in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick does not pretend to answer these questions fully. Rather, he aims to show the possibilities these questions pose for the human race, which evolves from both obvious and obscure forms of information, from

Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens PB 9781893670471 $20 http://tebotbach.org/publication.html#godseed

“A lovely, singing book, in both art and language— intricate beauties informed by informed passion.” —William Kittredge “A beautiful mix of words and images, light and deep.” —William Wiley Tebot Bach Press

reviews of trivia as well as the vehicle that “provided emergency information and comfort during terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 and . . . made the Iranian protests visible to the world in 2009.” Gleick’s chapters on information theory will be tough sledding for readers not grounded in physics, advanced mathematics or cellular biology. But even these become accessible and valuable when he focuses on the contributions of specific scientists who looked beyond the mere utility of information to discover its measurable essence—people such as Charles Babbage, who conceived and built an ingenious computing machine that never worked as it was supposed to, and Alan Turing, who imagined a computing machine in such detail that it always worked. Then there is the ubiquitous Claude Shannon, who conceptualized the “bit” as “a unit for measuring information.” All of us are now beneficiaries (or victims) of that insight. The flood of Gleick’s subtitle is, of course, the torrent of words and images that courses through the Internet into our computers, and thence into our consciousness. But this condition doesn’t scare him. “Infinite possibility is good, not bad,” he asserts. “Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared. . . . We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened.” —Edward Morris

RIVER OF DARKNESS By Buddy Levy Bantam $27, 352 pages ISBN 9780553807509 eBook available

history

Buddy Levy’s River of Darkness is brimming with mystery, adventure, murder, hidden treasure and naked women. That’s a lot to tackle in a work of nonfiction. But Levy succeeds, thanks to a confluence of detailed research and lively writing. River of Darkness is the story of Spanish conquistador Francisco Orellana, the first foreigner to navigate the Amazon River in South America. It’s a remarkable

NONFICTION tale, considering that Orellana and his men traversed the 4,200-mile length of the Amazon in 1542, and did so with crude wooden ships, scant supplies and no knowledge of the route, or what lay ahead. Orellana was a relative of the famed Pizarro family, a band of five conquistador brothers who made their living conquering native empires in South America and bringing the spoils back to Spain. (Francisco Pizarro was the eldest, most notable for crushing the Incan Empire.) It was a younger brother, Gonzalo Pizarro, who journeyed to South America in 1540 with his nephew, Francisco Orellana, on a quest to find El Dorado, a legendary land where the king was said to bathe in gold dust. At one point on the expedition, the pair took separate routes; Gonzalo Pizarro’s exploration ended in starvation and failure, while Francisco Orellana continued an arduous trip down the Amazon from the Andes Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. History has deemed the journey a success, but it came with extreme hardship. The Spaniards encountered deadly snakes and savage natives, and frequently found themselves in a desperate search for food. Sometimes they foraged on plants and insects. Other times, they happened upon friendly natives who provided sustenance. If gifts weren’t forthcoming, or if the natives refused to convert to Christianity, the conquistadors pulled out their swords and firearms and executed their hosts. In one noteworthy chapter, Levy describes Orellana and his soldiers battling a band of tall, naked warrior women who came to be known as the infamous Amazons. River of Darkness is a worthwhile read because of such swashbuckling adventure, and Levy is a gifted writer who makes it all the more enjoyable; his narrative flows as smoothly and rapidly as the Amazon River. The book is also a treasure hunt of history, offering readers an appreciation of the accomplishments of the early discoverers, while also chronicling some of the appalling aspects of imperialism. —J o h n T. S l a n i a

MADE FOR YOU AND ME By Caitlin Shetterly Voice $23.99, 256 pages ISBN 9781401341466

MEMOIR

the economic collapse, Made for You and Me is more than a relatable read; it’s a straightforward and unsweetened source of inspiration from someone who was knocked out by the American Dream but still keeps fighting. — P ete C r o a tt o

THE SAVAGE CITY

Caitlin Shetterly is not coy. In her memoir Made for You and Me, partially adapted from her pieces for National Public Radio, we endure her bedridden pregnancy and see her screaming at her loyal husband, Dan. Not surprisingly, Shetterly offers no tidy ending to the couple’s rage against the current recession. But her honesty compels you to keep reading, even as your heart breaks. Dan and Cait believed that moving from Maine to California would have nothing but benefits. Dan was ready to escape his full-time photographer job, and Shetterly—an actor who founded her own theater company—had her own creative aspirations. They both loved Los Angeles, and their friends were thriving there. In March 2008, Dan and Cait packed up their car and ventured west to seize the opportunities that surely awaited them. But they couldn’t escape reality— dumpy apartments covered with mold, Shetterly’s unexpected (but cherished) pregnancy—and the recession finally wrapped its tentacles around their livelihoods. Almost overnight, Dan and Cait’s security unraveled. Jobs were nonexistent. Funds ran dry. Eventually, the only option was to return to Maine and move in with Shetterly’s mother. “I don’t even know what I’d smash,” an angry Dan says shortly before they depart. “It’s all getting smashed for me.” Shetterly’s honesty is an enormous asset, and it’s not her only one. She’s a personable and humorous narrator who turns her American tragedy into an examination of how love carries us to the next day. Her dreams flattened, her life in tatters, at one point Shetterly feels crushed. Then she looks at her infant son. “I knew I needed to choose life and hold on tight,” Shetterly writes. For anyone still buried underneath the rubble of

By T.J. English Morrow $27.99, 496 pages ISBN 9780061824555 eBook available

history

Since the early 1990s, violent crime in New York City has dropped so precipitously that officials now call their city the Safest Big City in America. Homicides, for example, which climbed past 2,000 in 1990, stood at 496 in 2009. Reason to celebrate? Of course. But in The Savage City, his gripping account of the decade between 1963 and 1973, “the ten-year period when New York City began its now-legendary descent into mayhem,” T.J. English sounds a cautionary note. He argues that the city’s criminal justice system is still based on assumptions about race and class, and fear is still its major tool of coercion. “The fault lines remain,” English concludes in his customary vivid style, “lift up the rock and you will see.” It’s hard to argue with English’s conclusions, but it’s fortunate for readers that he confines this sort of overt analysis to his introduction and epilogue. Because what is best about The Savage City is English’s hurtling narrative of a city going seriously out of whack. The story begins on August 28, 1963, the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C. On that day in New York two well-educated young women were found savagely murdered in their Manhattan apartment in what became known as the Career Girls Murders. After months of investigation, the police arrested George Whitmore Jr., an impoverished, sweet-natured black teenager, for the crime. The egregious police frame-up of Whitmore will

NONFICTION make readers’ blood boil, and his arrest and his decade-long struggle to be exonerated are the bookends of The Savage City. Why was Whitmore so easily framed? In large part, because the city’s police department was rife with racism and corruption. English follows the career of Bill Phillips, a thoroughly corrupt cop who spent more time collecting payoffs than enforcing the law. Exposed at last, Phillips wore a wire and testified before the anti-corruption Knapp Commission, thus doing more to expose a polluted police culture than Frank Serpico of movie fame. The final element in The Savage City’s combustible mix was the rise of black nationalism, as represented by the story of Dhoruba bin Wahad, a small-time criminal who was radicalized in prison and became a much-feared member of the Black Panther Party—and a man violently opposed to the sorts of injustices visited upon Whitmore by the likes of Phillips. English digs deeply, and often sympathetically, into the murky lives of these three men. Weaving their stories together, he delivers a pulse-raising narrative about an era we dearly hope is gone forever. —Alden Mudge

liberty’s exiles By Maya Jasanoff Knopf $30, 480 pages ISBN 9781400041688 eBook available

history

The American Revolution was routinely regarded at the time as a civil war between rebels who desired to break away from Great Britain and loyalists who retained allegiance to the monarchy. As Maya Jasanoff, associate professor of history at Harvard University and author of the award-winning Edge of Empire, tells us in her sweeping, consistently enlightening and beautifully written Liberty’s Exiles, there is much about the loyalists we do not often hear. At the end of the war, 60,000 loyalists emigrated from the United States to every part of the British

Empire, taking 15,000 black slaves with them. Loyalists came from varied social, geographic, ethnic and racial backgrounds, including former slaves who were granted freedom because they fought for the British Empire. Several nations of Native Americans also aligned themselves with the monarchy. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the loyalists was how varied a role ideology played in their decisions. Often much more important were such personal considerations as employers, profits, faith, land, family and even the desire to maintain the status quo: Many loyalists believed the revolution would fail. Jasanoff has done original research on four continents, and the result is a compelling narrative that takes us into the ordinary lives of these refugees. After a vivid portrayal of the war as loyalists experienced it, including threats and violence directed at them and the imposition of anti-loyalist laws, Jasanoff then covers their evacuation from the U.S., their relocation and their often frustrated expectations for their new lives. Many refugees—particularly in British North America (the eastern provinces of present-day Canada), where the largest numbers of loyalists were sent—held protests similar to those heard earlier from American patriots, about the Empire’s unjust policies, which eventually had a significant influence on imperial reforms. Wherever they relocated—to the Caribbean, to Africa, to India, to England—the loyalists, despite their earlier allegiance to the Crown, resisted imperial authority in other settings. Jasanoff paints lively portraits of such refugees as Elizabeth Johnston, who, at age 22, had already lived in five different places and arrived in a Jamaica full of staggering violence; Joseph Bryant, a Mohawk leader who hoped to bring about a new western Indian confederacy but died trying; and David George and George Liele, both born into slavery, who became influential Baptist leaders, establishing churches in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and Kingston, Jamaica. This richly rewarding narrative and analysis—the “first global history of the loyalist diaspora”—is an important look at the lesser-known consequences of the American Revolution. —roger bishop

spotlight

business

WHY WE DO THE THINGS WE DO By Linda M. Castellitto

hy do we hate to admit our mistakes? That’s just one of the questions explored in a trio of intriguing new books that explore the intersection between business and human behavior.

What’s it worth to you? Why do consumers pay more for one thing—a cup of coffee, a printer, an employee—than another? Business journalist Eduardo Porter decided to find out. In The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do (Portfolio, $27.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781591843627) he offers food for thought regarding the conscious and unconscious reasons behind the prices we’re willing to pay for everything from license plates to lap dances. Each exploration is at once thoughtful, detailed and fascinating; standouts include his conclusion that women are more valued in polygamous societies, and his take on the eventual price Americans will pay for the housing crisis. “[Prices are] indicators of human preferences and guides of humankind,” he writes, which might sound like hyperbole—until you read this book.

To err is human It started with a goof: Alina Tugend made an error in her “Shortcuts” column for the New York Times business section. She owned up and ran a correction, but something stuck with her: She wondered why, even though we’re told we learn from our mistakes, they’re still seen (and felt) as bad. She wrote a popular column about that dichotomy and delves even deeper into the issue in Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong (Riverhead, $25.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781594487859). As the subtitle indicates, mistakes are good for us, but only when handled properly. On TV and in conversation, forgetting your car keys and misdiagnosing an ill-

ness are both called “mistakes.” This lack of distinction is compounded by a societal tendency toward perfectionism and an unwillingness to concede wrongdoing, let alone apologize. Tugend’s research is extensive and well explained; she skillfully shows that everyone from CEOs to doctors to parents is affected by this inability to admit mistakes, and we’d be better off accepting that “perfection is a myth.” That doesn’t mean we’re settling for less, but rather allowing for more creativity and communication— and who could argue with that?

Get involved It’s hard not to notice—thanks to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube—that sitting and watching a movie or TV show is no longer enough. Now people want to participate in a multifaceted experience. But where is all this interaction going to take us—and how should creators and advertisers handle it? In The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (Norton, $25.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9780393076011) Frank Rose, a contributing editor at Wired, examines the ways in which the lines between author and audience, advertisement and entertainment, are blurring. He uses in-depth, compelling case studies to show how creators and advertisers are striving to keep viewers committed and engaged. As Rose writes, “The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it.”

children’s books

FRANNY BILLINGSLEY Interview by Deborah Hopkinson

he compelling, complex heroine of Chime, Franny Billingsley’s eagerly awaited romantic fantasy for teens, is haunted by remorse.

“I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged,” declares Briony Larkin in the book’s opening line. And she means it. She’s not only guilty—she’s wicked. Briony is convinced that this is the truth of who and what she is. The real truths—of her emotions and the events of the past—are secrets, buried so deeply that there is only one thing that drives her to tell her story: She is on trial as a witch and about to be hanged. Well, there might be something else. Possibly, just possibly, she might be in love. Seventeen-year-old Briony Larkin and her developmentally disabled twin sister Rose, whom Briony has always felt responsible for, are the daughters of a clergyman. They are also the stepdaughters of a stepmother who has recently killed

herself, three years after telling our heroine that she—Briony—is a witch: “If I wasn’t a witch, she asked, how else was it that I had the second sight?” Franny Billingsley didn’t start out writing about witches, though. “At first I thought it would be a changeling story set on the moors, but after five years I gave that up,” Billingsley says in an interview. The current setting is a swamp, inspired loosely by the Fenlands of England. The time is 1910, when traditional folk beliefs were coming into conflict with the ever-advancing industrial revolution. “The swamp becomes a character in the story,” notes Billingsley. Indeed, the swamp is a dangerous force for Briony and the village. It is also under siege: An engineer named Mr. Clayborne has arrived

Grandma’s smile is missing. She can’t find it anywhere. But she knows just who to call . . .

“Randy Siegel and illustrator DyAnne DiSalvo perfectly capture the bond between children and their grandparents in this charming picture book” –PARADE magazine

Grandma’s Smile By Randy Siegel Illustrated by DyAnne DiSalvo One of Examiner.com’s Top 10 Books of 2010 for Kids

“Long-distance grandmothers everywhere will sympathize with Grandma . . .” –Kirkus Reviews

Untangling dark family secrets

Mackids.com

A Neal Porter Book/Roaring

Brook Press

An imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group

from London to drain the swamp, to improve life in the Swampsea. Progress will create more farmland, make room for the railroad and perhaps even get rid of the dreaded swamp cough. And that’s not the only change Mr. Clayborne is bringing; his 22-year-old son, Eldric, with “golden lion’s eyes and a great mane of tawny hair,” has also arrived from London, and he is determined to uncover Briony’s secrets. Billingsley, an inveterate reader as a child, spent one childhood summer in England, and the memories of the folk tales she read during that time have always stayed with her. Some of the creatures that haunt Briony’s world, such as the Boggy Mun, are based on the traditional folklore of the Fenlands. “I read a lot of fantasy as a child,” says Billingsley, whose two previous books for young readers are the acclaimed fantasies Well-Wished and The Folk Keeper. “I think one is often moved to write the kind of books one most loved,” she says. Billingsley tries to keep a regular daily writing schedule in her Chicago home, where she lives with her husband and two children. She turned to writing after an unfulfilling career as a lawyer and has now become a popular lecturer and teacher as well. She is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she teaches in the MFA program, Writing for Children and Adults, and has been called “one of the great prose stylists of the field.” In Chime, Billingsley has created a character with one foot in the ancient world of magic and another in the early 20th century. But Briony’s struggles to uncover family secrets and find her true identity make her a heroine sure to appeal to 21stcentury readers.

“We as writers are digging below the surface of things, and family secrets are especially fascinating,” Billingsley explains. “At the same time, I think Briony in an exaggerated way has the same feelings as many high school girls—she is unsure about herself, and she is searching for her identity. I think these aspects, and her voice, will draw in readers.” As it happens, finding Briony’s voice was the most exciting aspect of writing Chime, which took Billingsley 12 years. It’s not often that writers have the perseverance to stick with a story for more than a decade, but Billingsley’s patience was rewarded when her character finally began to take shape. “At one point I was worried that I might never write a novel again,” says Billingsley. “But then Briony’s voice came alive. I had found my character!” Billingsley’s choice of words is apt; the heroine of this multilayered fantasy is a character who will remain alive in readers’ imaginations for a long time.

Chime

By Franny Billingsley, Dial, $17.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780803735521, ages 12 and up

reviews Small as an Elephant

Inside Out and Back Again

By Jennifer Richard Jacobson Candlewick $15.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780763641559 Ages 10 to 14

Finding a home in America Review by Robin Smith

Inside Out and Back Again, an autobiographical novel written in verse, captures one year in the life of 10-year-old Kim Hà. Her unforgettable story begins and ends with Tét, the first day of the Vietnamese lunar calendar. It’s February 1975 and Saigon is about to fall. Hà flees Vietnam with her mother and two brothers, boarding a ship in a nearby port. One poignant poem lists some of what they must leave behind: “Ten gold-rimmed glasses . . . Brother Quant’s report cards . . . Vines of jasmine.” After weeks at sea and a stay in a refugee camp on Guam, Hà’s family ends up in Alabama, where a sponsor is found. Holding tight to the 10-year-old point of view, first-time author Thanhha Lai draws on memories of her own childhood, when her family fled Vietnam after the war and moved to Alabama. The reader will smell the incense, long for the taste of fresh papaya and feel the rocking of the By Thanhha Lai, Harper, $15.99, 272 pages, ship. Hà’s difficulty in learning English, coupled with her desire for perISBN 9780061962783, ages 9 to 14 fection, makes assimilation nearly impossible, especially when some of the kids in her class cruelly tease her about her hair, her accent and the flatness of her face. She grows up, tries to learn the art of making do from her mother, and leans on her brothers and her tutor, Mrs. Washington. And she learns to fly-kick like Bruce Lee. Lai’s spare poetry, full of emotion and infused with humor, is accessible to young children and adults alike. This moving and beautifully told story is a must-read for anyone who works with children new to the country.

New from New York Times bestselling illustrator Tom Lichtenheld! Cloudette by Tom Lichtenheld

“Reminiscent of the determination and courage of The Little Engine That Could, this title delivers its message with charm.” —School Library Journal

picture book MID-

Camping out with his mother in Maine’s Acadia National Park is supposed to be the best three days of 11-year-old Jack Martel’s summer vacation. But when he awakes after their first night and discovers that his presumably bipolar mother has driven off and disappeared, Jack deduces that she must be “spinning.” Jennifer Richard Jacobson’s nuanced and heart-wrenching middle grade novel, Small as an Elephant, gives a quiet force to one resilient boy and his mentally ill mother. Afraid that Social Services will take him away from his dysfunctional home, his mother will go to

The 2003 Caldecott Medal Winner—available in board book for the first time!

Now available in board book from New York Times bestselling author Nancy Tillman!

My Friend Rabbit by Eric Rohmann

It’s Time to Sleep, My Love illustrated by Nancy Tillman written by Eric Metaxas

“This gentle lesson in patience and loyalty . . . will leave young readers clamoring for repeat readings.” —Publishers Weekly

Henry Holt

“A luxuriant bedtime retreat for children and parents alike.” —Kirkus Reviews

Roaring Brook Press

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Calling All Young Scientists!

children’s books

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Rocket into Learning with Imaginative Experiments, Hands-On Activities, and Explosive Fun!

jail, he’ll have to change schools and a host of other worries, Jack begins a 248-mile walk home to Massachusetts. Finding strength in his obsession with elephants, based on one of his first and strongest memories with his mother, he figures out how to forage for food, spend the night after hours at an LL Bean store and evade police when he learns that he’s the “Missing Boy” on the news. Hoping to make his long trek meaningful, Jack detours to York’s Wild Kingdom to see Lydia, Maine’s only elephant. Jack’s endless repertoire of elephant facts and stories, as well as the elephant information and quotes that begin each chapter, show that elephants and humans share many qualities. Both want to be accepted and loved. With a makeshift herd that helps him throughout his journey—supplying food, transportation, friendship and encouragement when he needs it—Jack accepts the truth about his mother and finds forgiveness and a new sense of home. —Angela Leeper

CLOUDETTE By Tom Lichtenheld Holt/Christy Ottaviano $16.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780805087765 Ages 3 to 7

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There are many things that Cloudette loves about being small: the adorable nicknames, the ability to fit into small spaces and the way she can really hide during a game of cloud hide and seek. But when it comes to helping out the big clouds during storms or doing important cloud jobs, Cloudette doesn’t feel needed. At all. It is only when Cloudette ends up all by herself after a particularly violent thunderstorm that she discovers “the big and important things a little cloud can do.” Normally I can live without little life-lesson books about fitting in and finding your bliss, but Cloudette is just so darn cute and the story so droll that I had to give it another peek. Tom Lichtenheld’s watercolor and ink illustrations, especially the sweetly smiling Cloudette, draw the young reader right in, and the side chatter from the other clouds (“Hi, pipsqueak!” or “Prodigious precipitation, pipsqueak!”)

will keep adults smiling. In Cloudette’s struggle to produce rain, she grew larger and grayer and “shook her behind until it made a little rumbling sound”—an image that will amuse little readers and remind grownups of toddlers’ frequent frustrations. Little people who feel small and want to do important things will be inspired by Cloudette and will cheer when she finds her own pond-making mission. —ROBIN SMITH

STRINGS ATTACHED By Judy Blundell Scholastic $17.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780545221269 Ages 13 and up

teen

“Nate stood up. He was very still, but I knew from dance how stillness could explode into movement.” That tension, between the threat of violence and the act, is at the heart of Strings Attached, the latest thriller by National Book Award winner Judy Blundell. Kit Corrigan is a struggling chorus girl in New York City, having fled her home in Rhode Island for a shot at life onstage. It’s 1950, the Korean War is just beginning, and Kit’s ex, Billy, has enlisted in the Army. She’s surprised when Billy’s father, Nate Benedict, offers her a leg up. He provides her with an apartment, tailored clothes and connections leading to bigger and better jobs. In exchange, Kit must keep tabs on Billy and do occasional favors for his dad. Easy enough, right? But Nate Benedict is a lawyer with mob connections, and his favors have potentially fatal consequences. If that wasn’t enough, there’s something not quite right about how close Billy was with Kit’s brother Jamie. And the family is still smarting from a falling-out that sent their aunt so far away that nobody can find her. Strings Attached sets a murder mystery, love story and rich family history in a meaty stretch of American history. Between two wars, the anti-Communist blacklists, air-raid drills, automats and a thriving nightclub scene largely run by the Mafia, Blundell weaves

reviews a complex story. Readers will get a generous dose of history here, but it’s the glamour and mystery, along with concern for Kit and her family, that will keep them hooked. Strings Attached is a winner. —Heather Seggel

EXPOSED By Kimberly Marcus Random House $16.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780375866937 Ages 14 and up

meet Ben hatke

will undoubtedly provoke reactions from readers, who will wonder if justice has been served in the end. —Angela Leeper

blink & caution By Tim Wynne-Jones Candlewick $16.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780763639839 Ages 14 and up

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In the tradition of Ellen Hopkins and Patricia McCormick, Kimberly Marcus uses free verse to tell a hard-hitting, realistic story in her debut novel, Exposed. High school senior Liz Grayson lives to find the perfect photographic shot, while her “forever-best friend” Kate has spent most of her life dancing. At their monthly sleepover, Liz berates Kate for wanting to give up dance, and after the two argue, Liz storms off to sleep in her own bed, leaving Kate alone on the couch. In the days and weeks that follow, Kate is unusually reluctant to make up with Liz. Thinking Kate’s avoidance is due to their fight, Liz is shocked when her friend accuses her college-age brother Mike (on whom Kate has had a longtime crush) of raping her the night of the sleepover. Mike denies the accusation, even after being arrested. In Marcus’ searing poems, Liz agonizes over her own culpability (would anything have happened if she hadn’t fought with Kate?) and who to side with (“So which one’s telling lies?”). She endures endless school gossip and loses her best friend, the brother she thought was easygoing and even her love for photography. Yet her photography serves as a fitting metaphor as she comes to realize that an entire story lies beneath a single snapshot and that the story, unlike her black-andwhite pictures, is filled with shades of gray. Called to be a witness at her brother’s trial, she doesn’t know how to fit her years of memories into yes-or-no responses. If she can ever return to photography, she knows that she’ll have trust her own point of view. Liz’s dilemmas

Escaping an abusive stepfather has left Brent Conboy a homeless street kid. When he tries to swipe some breakfast leftovers off a hotel’s room service tray, he stumbles onto the scene of a crime in progress . . . only the truth is nothing like what’s being reported on the news. Kitty Pettigrew ran from a terrible mistake and has been running, and making more dangerous mistakes, ever since. Stealing her violent drug-dealer boyfriend’s money and hitting the road is only the most recent. When these two cross paths, sparks fly. Welcome to the nonstop action of Blink & Caution. Author Tim Wynne-Jones has created two winning stories here and combined them into an artful whole. When Kitty—aka Caution, as in “Contents under pressure”—first spots Brent, she easily robs him of an ill-gotten windfall. But a lingering sense of responsibility draws her back to him. And Blink (who has a nervous facial tic) tempers his resentment, since having someone so quick on her feet in his corner can only help him. If you smell a love story brewing, you’re not wrong, but it’s unconventional, to say the least. Blink & Caution begins in downtown Toronto, portrayed as unsparingly harsh; when the twosome follow up on the crime Blink saw, they’re led into the wilderness. Though they are in grave danger, the trees, water and air seem to clear Blink’s head, enabling him to strategize instead of merely reacting to whatever happens around him. And Caution’s role as his “guardian angel” is a chance to put right the terrible thing she did years ago. A fast-paced mystery with intelligence and heart, Blink & Caution snags readers and doesn’t let go. —Heather Seggel

ZITA THE SPACEGIRL Ben Hatke is a writer and artist whose work ranges from fine art to comics. His first full-length graphic novel is Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, $10.99, 192 pages, ISBN 9781596434462), which follows the cosmic adventures of a spunky young Earthling who is transported to a doomed planet and must find her way home. Hatke lives in Front Royal, Virginia, with his wife and three daughters.

WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

A SEA AT REST

A CRYSTAL CURE

Dear Editor, What is the story behind the expression halcyon days? S. J. Marshall, Texas

Dear Editor, I heard that amethyst is an ancient remedy for a hangover, and that’s how the stone got its name. Is there any truth to this? P. T. Rogers, Arkansas For the ancient Greeks and Romans, gemstones had medical as well as ornamental value. It is true that the violet-colored quartz known as amethyst was believed to protect against the effects of overdrinking, and this quality is reflected in its name. The Greek word amethystos means literally “not inducing drunkenness” and is a derivative of the verb methyein, meaning “to be drunk,” itself from the noun methy, meaning “wine.” (Methy is related to the English word mead.) The Roman author Pliny associated the stone’s supposed magical property with its color. To him, it resembled wine that had been heavily diluted with water and was, therefore, not very intoxicating.

The word halcyon can be used as a name for the bird more commonly known as a kingfisher, or as an adjective meaning “calm,” “happy” or “prosperous.” The story behind the word goes back to Greek myth. Alkyone, the daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds, was so distraught upon learning that her husband had been killed in a shipwreck that she threw herself into the sea and was changed into a kingfisher. Henceforth, the bird was known to the Greeks as alkyon or halcyon, the latter associated with hals, meaning “sea.” Legend had it that the kingfisher built a floating nest on the sea every year before the winter solstice. For two weeks before and after the solstice Aeolus charmed the wind and waves while the bird incubated its eggs, and alkyonides hemeral (literally, “kingfisher days”)

became a proverbial expression for a time of peace and tranquility. The Romans borrowed the Greek word as alcyon or halcyon, and the Latin word found its way into Middle English as a poetic name for the kingfisher. Subsequently, halcyon has been used as an adjective first meaning “tranquil” and later “happy” or “prosperous.”

PLAYING GAMES

Dear Editor, Where does that great word rigmarole come from? I’m finding it more and more useful these days. B. H. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania In the Middle Ages a game was played that featured a roll with a series of verses written on it and a separate string attached to each verse. Each player chose a string and then read the selection to which it was attached. The game was called Rageman or Ragman, a name perhaps derived from the Old French phrase Ragemon le bon, meaning “Ragemon the good,” which was a

EVERYTHING LITERARY

crossword solution

27. Child who has lost both parents 29. One-named Spanish singer 30. Holden’s dead younger brother in The Catcher in the Rye 32. Coffee order: Abbr. 34. Buoyant tune 35. Bear 36. Bleacher feature 37. Prefix with cycle or sex 38. Van Gogh’s village 39. Unrefined 40. Place where business is conducted 42. Lacking skill 43. Alternative to acrylics 44. Intangible qualities 46. Early times 48. Age of the narrator in The Catcher in the Rye 52. Years in old Rome 53. ___ operandi 54. Not working 55. “You know how ___” 56. Some showdowns 57. Beaks 58. Wyle of “ER”

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

27 30

38 40

DOWN 1. “Blondie” cartoonist Young 46 2. Verdi slave girl 52 3. Cordon __ 4. Steadfast partisan 55 5. Babe Ruth’s 58 number 6. Return on an investment 7. Admonish 8. Pop the question 9. Leader of a revolt 10. Institution where Holden is narrating The Catcher in the Rye 11. Sort 12. Shrub with plumlike fruits 14. Rip off 20. Pooch’s name 21. Snowman prop 23. ___-dieu 24. Rights org. since 1920

59. Res ___ loquitur 60. Little biter

The catcher in the rye ACROSS 1. Street fleet 5. Banks of note 9. Inquires 13. Sword handle 14. Recoils 15. Catch red-handed 16. Notion 17. Inflict, as havoc 18. Before mundi or regni 19. Holden’s last name in The Catcher in the Rye 21. Leonine group 22. Effaced 23. Early Brit 24. Area with coin-operated games

heading that appeared on a set of Anglo-French verses from the late 13th century. The roll with which the game was played was known as Ragman roll or Ragman’s roll. By the 16th century, both Ragman and Ragman roll were being used figuratively to mean “a list or catalog.” The terms fell out of written use soon afterward, but ragman roll persisted in speech, and it resurfaced in writing in the altered form rigmarole during the 18th century. By that time it had come to mean “confused or meaningless talk.” In the last century, an additional sense of rigmarole has blossomed; it’s now most commonly used to mean “a complex and ritualistic procedure,” as in, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I had to go through just to get a refund!” The word is sometimes also spelled rigamarole, reflecting a common pronunciation.

25. Rhinoceros 26. State where Holden is narrating The Catcher in the Rye 27. Auto pioneer Ransom Eli __ 28. Cries out for 30. Skilled 31. Tell a whopper 33. Western writer Zane 35. Bows 36. Trustful 38. Is out of sorts 39. Family group

41. Complete 42. Salad green 44. Dangerous mosquito 45. Palate appendage 46. Large pipe 47. Wised up 48. Liquid food 49. Scene of a temptation 50. Seat of Coffee County, AL 51. Place that allows “eggstradition”? 53. Start of the 16th century

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