BookPage May 2011

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m ay

2011

A new novel from

CALEB’S CROSSING An unforgettable journey from Martha’s Vineyard to Harvard

america’s book review

paperback picks penguin.com

Black Ghosts

Blue-Eyed Devil

Dragon Bound

One Magic Moment

During the Cold War, the Black Ghosts were the elite of the KGB. Now, after years in prison, their commander has reactivated them with the goal of overthrowing the powers-that-be and restoring the sleeping bear of Russia to her former glory. And he will declare his might by doing the impossible.

Once, Appaloosa law was Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Now it’s Amos Callico, a vindictive, power-hungry tin star with bigger aims—and he could use Cole and Hitch on his side. This time the paid guns aren’t for hire, which makes Callico a very vengeful man. But threatening Cole and Hitch ignites something just as dangerous.

Pia Giovanni spent her life keeping a low profile among the wyrkind and avoiding the continuing conflict between them and their dark Fae enemies. But after being blackmailed into stealing a coin from the hoard of a dragon, Pia finds herself targeted by one of the most powerful— and passionate—men of the Elder races.

9780425241462 • $9.99

9780425241455 • $9.99

9780425241509 • $7.99

A trip to the village brings Tess Alexander face-to-face with the owner of the local garage, who looks a great deal like the man who married her sister...800 years in the past. She’s determined to remain objective about magic and destiny, but she can’t help wondering about that mysterious, sword-wielding mechanic.

9780515149517 • $7.99

Shoot to Thrill

Summer at Seaside Cove

The Unbearable Lightness of Dragons

Under the Lake

The FBI asks the ingenious Monkeewrench crew to help them find the chilling link between a dead bride found floating in the Mississippi and a series of gruesome murder videos posted anonymously on the Web—before the killer claims his next victim.

Jamie Newman leaves New York behind for the island of Seaside Cove, North Carolina.

But the cozy cottage she booked turns out to be a rundown bungalow. And she’s not alone. Her drama-prone mother, angstridden niece, and newly dumped half-sister all follow her down. With a cottage this crowded, will she ever have a chance at finding love again?

Ysolde Bouchier is trying to free her Black Dragon lover from the weyr, get Baltic to meet with the dragons who want him dead, rescue a half-dragon damsel in over her head, raise the shade of the man everyone says killed her, and once and for all clear Baltic’s name of the murder charges that continue to plague him.

John Howell, a former investigative journalist trying to escape from his past, finds a perfect sanctuary in a lakeside home in the North Georgia mountains.

But little does he realize the town harbors a dark and evil secret, hidden deep within the lake’s waters.

9780451413055 • $7.99

9780425241493 • $7.99

9780451233448 • $7.99

9780451233462 • $9.99

The fiction debut of the New York Times bestselling author of My Fair Lazy.

Follow Amish-zombie-teen-romance author Mia and her husband Mac (and their pets) through the alternately frustrating, exciting, terrifying—but always funny—process of buying and renovating their first home in the Chicago suburbs. Throughout their harrowing renovation, Mia and Mac get caught up in various wars with the homeowners’ association, meet some less-than-friendly neighbors, and are joined by a hilarious cast of supporting characters, including a celebutard ex-landlady. As they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings—with Mac taking on the renovations himself—Mia and Mac will discover if their marriage is strong enough to survive months of DIY renovations.

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

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A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

9780451234384 • $24.95

contents

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

features

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12 erik larson An American family witnesses the rise of the Third Reich

cover story

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks brings 17th-century Massachusetts to life in her riveting new historical novel

16 julia spencer-fleming Meet the author of One Was a Soldier

Cover photo of Geraldine Brooks by Randi Baird Background photo @ iStockphoto.com/kickstand

17 betty white Capturing hearts onscreen and on the page

18 heidi murkoff How to raise a bookworm

19 mother’s day Warm, witty and wise books for Mom on her special day

20 graduation Inspiring new grads to look to the future

23 lorraine lópez Where community and spirituality meet

27 william deresiewicz Becoming a man by reading Jane Austen

28 helen frost Satisfying children’s “hunger for poetry”

31 mo willems Meet the author-illustrator of Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!

departments 04 04 05 06 06 07 08 10 11

book clubs author enablers buzz girl lifestyles audio well read whodunit cooking romance

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geraldine brooks

reviews 21 Fiction

top pick:

My New American Life by Francine Prose a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon; You Are Free by Danzy Senna; The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt; The Great Night

by Chris Adrian; Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill; The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt; The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine López; In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard; 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson; The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson; Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle

25 NonFiction top pick:

Lost in Shangri-La

by Mitchell Zuckoff a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma; Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy; To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild; Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron; A Bittersweet Season

by Jane Gross; David Crockett

by Michael Wallis; A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

29 Children’s top pick:

True (. . . sort of)

by Katherine Hannigan a l s o r e v i e w e d : Me . . . Jane by Patrick McDonnell; The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies; The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall; Troubletwisters by Garth Nix and Sean Williams; The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente; What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen; Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier; Shine by Lauren Myracle; I’ll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan

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a m e r i c a’ s b o o k r e v i e w

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NONFICTION EDITOR

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Michael A. Zibart

Kate Pritchard

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CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER

Lynn L. Green

Sukey Howard

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

WEB EDITOR

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

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columns This month’s best paperbacks for reading groups

MARRIAGE & MURDER Tense, edgy and disturbing, Mr. Peanut (Vintage, $15, 464 pages, ISBN 9780307454904), the first novel from Adam Ross, bravely explores the dark side of love and the emotional complications that cause marriages to implode. David Pepin, a computer game programmer, claims to adore Alice, his overweight wife, even though he has the strange habit of imagining her death. When, after a tempestuous phase in their marriage, Alice really

book clubs

author enablers

by julie hale

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

poet Rumi.

Its author, an intriguing photographer named Aziz Zahara, soon becomes Ella’s email correspondent. As she reads Aziz’s manuscript, which traces Rumi’s spiritual emancipation under the guidance of Shams, a Tabriz dervish, Ella undergoes her own transformation. Thanks to Aziz, she becomes receptive to life’s opportunities and courageous enough to follow them. This is an uplifting novel about personal evolution and the pursuit of dreams. Drawing on Rumi’s writing, Shafak channels his passion and wisdom, but she has a mesmerizing voice that’s uniquely her own.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS

does die—to all appearances from a peanut allergy—David becomes a suspect in the investigation that follows. Detectives Ward Hastroll and Sam Sheppard (yes, the character is based on the real-life doctor accused of murdering his own wife in 1954) feel certain that David killed Alice. Add to the mix David’s odd preoccupations—M.C. Escher, Alfred Hitchcock and the violent, unpublished piece of fiction he frets over in his spare time—and he seems all the more suspicious. Ross’ novel is a searing exploration of love and its opposite, of the nature of passion and the difficulties of intimacy. Mr. Peanut is a finely crafted and unforgettable debut.

TURKISH DELIGHT

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With The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi (Penguin, $16, 368 pages, ISBN 9780143118527), Turkish writer Elif Shafak offers an ingenious narrative that’s rooted in the history of her homeland yet firmly connected to the present. In what turns out to be one of the most important commitments of her rather humdrum life, bored Boston homemaker Ella Rubenstein takes a job reading manuscripts for a literary agency. Her first project, Sweet Blasphemy, is a fascinating novel about the beloved 13th-century Sufi

Set in New York in the not-toodistant future, Super Sad True Love Story is a delightful hybrid—an oldfashioned love story with a speculative sensibility. As an employee of the Indefinite Life Extension Company, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is preoccupied with immortality.

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he’s also an intractable romantic. The object of Lenny’s affection—a trendy Korean American named Eunice, who’s obsessed with shopping—is more than a few years his junior. Shifting between Lenny’s emotion-filled diary entries and Eunice’s robotic emails and text messages, the book is convincingly presented from both characters’ perspectives. This clever narrative device sets up a revealing contrast between generations and mindsets.

Gary Shteyngart’s comic cautionary tale offers profound insights on the importance of maintaining a sense of humanity in a rapidly changing world.

Super Sad True Love Story

By Gary Shteyngart Random House $15, 352 pages ISBN 9780812977868

fiction

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

FACING THE MUSIC Dear Author Enablers, I’m in a band and have been a songwriter for years. Although my songs have never become hits, everyone who hears them says that I’m a natural storyteller and should try my hand at writing a book. I’ve started a novel but am not sure how to apply my songwriting skills to a longer piece. Does being a good songwriter help a fiction writer, or are they two different skills entirely?

J.T. Georgetown, Texas We recently returned from the SXSW music festival, where storytelling through song rules the day.

Artists like Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson and John Gorka have perfected the art of telling a story in three verses, a bridge and a chorus.

Songwriters Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell have both written terrific books this year, providing inspiration to others who want to make that leap. That said, we think that while your songwriting skills will help you on many levels (description, narrative and mood), writing a novel is very different. A song is a snapshot of a thought, feeling or moment in time; a successful novel creates a whole world.

Why not join a writing group or take a writing class to work on longer-form fiction? You’ll be able to explore concepts like story arc and character development in a safe and nurturing environment.

SELLING YOURSELF Dear Author Enablers, I am attending my first conference for writers. I’ll be meeting with two agents to discuss my co-authored, nonfiction work (both agents are reviewing a proposal and 40 pages in advance of the date). How should I prepare myself for these encounters?

Karen M. Rider Cromwell, Connecticut Working on your 25-word “elevator pitch” can’t hurt. You’ll meet other agents and authors at the conference, and the ability to inspire interest with a short, snappy description of your book idea is always a plus. You might also prepare an arsenal of ammunition in case

you are asked questions related to sales and marketing. Who is going to buy this book and why? Why are you the best candidate to write the book? How is your book similar to others that have sold well? How is it unique and different? A little rehearsal (take turns with your co-author, role-playing agent and author) will make you feel more confident and help you refine your pitch. Best of luck!

KIM EDWARDS ON WRITING Your trusty Author Enablers are introducing a new feature in which we ask established authors to share their writing secrets. Our first “Craft of Writing Spotlight” comes from Kim Edwards, author of the new novel The Lake of Dreams and the bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

“I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but when I look back, two things stand out as crucial in my development. First, that I went to graduate school at Iowa and spent two years immersed in the art and craft of writing, surrounded by teachers and peers who were passionate about the written word.

And second, that I moved from this environment to teach on the rural east coast of Malaysia, where the only literary life that existed was the one I created for myself. This was before email, and since it was almost impossible to submit stories, I didn’t worry about publishing. I just wrote, for the joy of it, with an enormous sense of freedom: stories, letters, essays, journals.

“Over the next six years and two more countries, my perspective changed and grew as well. I was an outsider, with a certain detachment, and I kept that detachment when I returned to the United States. I think of this time in Asia as an essential period of apprenticeship, one I didn’t plan, but am very grateful to have had.”

Email your questions about writing to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

BUZZ GIRL his friend discover a portal to 1958 and decide to stop the Kennedy assassination.

King’s last novel was 2009’s lengthy, enjoyable Under the Dome.

11/23/63 is reportedly another doorstop clocking in at more than 1,000 pages—but if anyone knows how to keep them turning, it’s King.

amy tan returns

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

all hail the king Great news, Stephen King fans!

The author will be publishing a new novel this year: 11/23/63. On sale November 8, it is an alternate history that explores the idea of whether one can—or should—change the past after an English teacher and

It’s been six years since Amy Tan released Saving Fish from Drowning, and Tan fans have been itching for something new. And soon, they’ll have it! Tan has sold a new novel to HarperCollins called The Valley of Amazement.

Here’s what Tan has to say about the book: “[It’s] about 1890-1940 San Francisco, Tan Shanghai and the valley in between . . . A painting called the ‘Valley of Amazement’ is passed along through three

generations of women of the same family. Despite vast differences in their upbringing, culture and circumstances, each of the women is drawn to discover the meaning of the painting and the unknown histories of their mothers.”

Readers have come to love Tan’s stories about the Chinese-American experience and the complex relationships between women. Sounds like The Valley of Amazement will be another winner.

kostova changes houses Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian and The Swan Thieves, will publish a new novel in 2013.

Formerly with Little, Brown, Kostova will move to Ballantine Bantam Dell at Random House for book #3.

Here’s a bit more on the book, from Kostova’s new publisher: “The new novel will be set in the U.S. and Eastern Europe, and like The Historian will move between past and present, and combine elements of suspense, myth and folklore.” We can’t wait to hear more!

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

2 10th anniversary

By James Patterson

Little, Brown, $27.99 ISBN 9780316036269 Detective Lindsay Boxer is finally getting married in Patterson’s latest, but her newlywed glow won’t last long.

3 Dead Reckoning

By Charlaine Harris

Ace, $27.95, ISBN 9780441020317 After Merlotte’s bar is firebombed, Sookie Stackhouse must figure out who—or what—is to blame.

10 lies that chelsea handler told me Grand Central, $24.99 ISBN 9780446584715 It’s no secret that comedian Chelsea Handler likes to abuse her friends and family. Now we get their side of the story.

From the bestselling author of The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes comes a story of deception that asks

“How much is too much to forgive?”

The lives of two friends are irrevocably changed when an unaddressed letter reveals a terrible secret… and a legacy of guilt that changes everything they thought they knew about the woman who delivered their children.

“A beautiful novel about mothers and daughters, about secrets, friendship, love and loss.

It will make you cry, but it will also fill you with hope.”

—Tatiana de Rosnay, author of A Secret Kept and Sarah’s Key 11_046_BookPage_Midwife_2.indd 1

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columns

lifestyles

audio

by joanna brichetto

by sukey howard

A coffee shop in Kabul

CHANGE FOR GOOD Catch the Wind, Harness the Sun: 22 Super-Charged Projects for Kids (Storey, $16.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9781603427944) by Michael J. Caduto is an empowering book, literally and pedagogically. It’s all about power, both the renewable energy technologies that can help us live in balance with the environment, and the surprising power of each kid to reduce emissions, conserve resources and change the world. Catch the Wind helps the next generation get a head start by way of genuinely fun activities—22 big ones, plus hundreds of suggestions, questions and tangents in sidebars—that spark discovery and exploration of clean energy sources:

wind, sun, static electricity and electromagnets. Projects range from quickies like mini-sailboats and sun tea, to the more complex like a bicycle-powered generator, which, along with the solar panel and backyard windmill, can actually charge iPods, laptops and cell phones. Meanwhile, crucial concepts and vocabulary are introduced at appropriate junctures, creating personal reference points and a good foundation for future scientists, smart consumers and keepers of the Earth.

FOLDING FOR FUN

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Origami Zoo (Gibbs Smith, $19.99, 128 pages, ISBN 9781423620167) is aimed at children, but kids at heart will have just as much fun folding these 25 cute critters ranging from “very simple” to advanced. Not all are typical zoo residents. Along with the more familiar hamster, pig, cow, puppy and butterfly come a penguin, a koala and even an errant monster. After a brief explanation of papers, basic symbols and folds, clear step-by-step instructions take beginners and experienced folders through the moves to make a simple square of paper come alive. Sixty pieces of origami paper are included. The authors are origami superstars: Paul Jackson is a paper artist, teacher and prolific author, and Miri

Golan is a professional origami educator and founder of the Israeli Origami Center, which trains teachers in Jewish, Muslim and Christian schools.

The husband-and-wife team also co-founded Folding Together, a project that brought Jewish and Arab children together to make origami.

Who knows? We may be helping our children fold their way into world peace by the next generation.

TOP PICK FOR LIFESTYLES One Year to an Organized Life with Baby might sound like a fantasy novel, but as a parenting and self-help book, it’s legit. Regina Leeds, New York Times best-selling author of One Year to an Organized Life and other books in the series, teams with parenting expert and mother of five Meagan Francis to produce “a weekly system to ease parental stress and get organized.”

The book takes readers from the eighth week of pregnancy to the 20th week postpartum, and can be referenced at any point in between.

With impressive thoroughness, the authors pay attention to every possible topic, including closet purges, sleep schedules, home budget, delivery options (babies and dinner), medical testing, childcare options, nursery décor, infant care and a zillion other things, most of which new parents will not have thought of yet. Luckily, One Year does it for them. It may seem harsh to stick to a weekly prescription of to-do (and to-imagine and to-be) lists and tips, but for those who surrender to the structure, the payoff is profound: the chance to “fully enjoy the changing landscape of their lives.”

One Year to an Organized Life with Baby

By Regina Leeds and Meagan Francis Da Capo $17, 352 pages ISBN 9780738214559 eBook available

Parenting

Deborah Rodriguez’s debut novel, A Cup of Friendship (Random House Audio, $35, 9.5 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780307879172), has all the charm, warmth and insight that marked her best-selling memoir, Kabul Beauty School, plus the added advantage of Mozhan Marno’s pitch-perfect narration.

It’s a feel-good story backed up by real, on-the-ground knowledge— the kind of inside understanding we rarely get from sound bites and headlines. Sunny, a gutsy girl from Arkansas who owns and runs a coffee shop in Kabul, is the centerpiece. She attracts good people, local and foreign, who form a strong family of friends. Among this cast of memorable characters

is a BBC journalist with her own demons, determined to expose injustice against Afghan women; a rich Boston divorcée who finds selfworth in taking up the cause; the tradition-scoffing Afghan woman who works with Sunny; and the lovely young woman from Nuristan whom Sunny takes in and gives new life to. All are touched by the problems of living in a war-ravaged, corrupt society—and by the power of friendship to salve them.

Portrait of a marriage “There is so much good and evil in breaking secrets.” Sally Ryder Brady uses that quote from G.K. Chesterton to let you know that a secret lies at the heart of her remarkably candid memoir, A Box of Darkness (Tantor Media, $29.99, 7 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781452600567), convincingly read here by Joyce Bean. When Sally met Upton Brady, she was a Boston debutante and he was a dashing Harvard classics major who danced like Fred Astaire. They married, had four beautiful, bright children and lived what looked like a charmed life among the literati glitterati, with all the trappings of the wealth they didn’t have. But urbane, clever Upton, a man who could rewire the house or make an exquisite evening

dress, drank to excess and had a closeted gay life, one he hid and denied with Sally’s seeming compliance. They’d been married for 46 years when Upton died suddenly; going through his things after his death, Sally was no longer able to deny who he had been. Thus she began to ask the questions that led to this “story of a marriage,” to the peeling back of layers of memories, trying to understand this complex man, yearning to have her “partner for eternity” back.

Audio of the Month Judi Dench is a treasure, and her latest commentary on acting, actors, directors and her celebrated, multi-decade career is a treasure trove of memories and moments, onstage and off. She insists that And Furthermore is not an autobiography, but rather a filling-in and a follow-up to what has been written by and about her. Narrated in perfect Dench style by Samantha Bond, this is the ideal format for quick glimpses, drawn with humor and charm, of her incredibly full working life, from her earliest appearances with the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company to her many roles in West End and on Broadway, in television and on the silver screen, including an Academy Award-winning portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.

Acting seems to be as important to Dame Judi as breathing; it’s what she does and who she is—and it’s her greatest joy, a joy she delights in sharing with her audiences and, here, with us. Dench doesn’t intend to quit, so if we’re lucky, there will be a further And Furthermore.

And Furthermore

By Judi Dench Macmillan Audio $29.99, 6 hours unabridged ISBN 9781427211026

MEMOIR

WELL READ by robert Weibezahl

Literary adventures in South America In many ways, Rahul Bhattacharya’s atmospheric debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, is more travelogue than work of fiction. Its young Indian protagonist, never named, is likely a stand-in for the author himself, who fell in love with the South American backwater while traveling the world and reporting on cricket—travels that produced an acclaimed work of nonfiction, Pundits from Pakistan.

In the novel, his fictional incarnation returns to Guyana in search of adventure and a carefree life unattainable amid the overpopulated hustle of his native country. Postcolonial Guyana, one of the poorest nations in the world, is populated by the descendents of African slaves, Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch and English settlers, and some indigenous people, but the largest percentage of the population is East Indian, descendants of indentured laborers who emigrated there in search of work. This cultural mish-

mash infuses the country’s music, food and language with a quirky singularity.

Our hero wants to be participant rather than mere observer, and he settles into a squalid room in a Georgetown warren where he mingles freely with the diverse citizenry. Hooking up with an excon named Baby, he ventures into the interior on a diamond-hunting expedition that ends badly—like so many of his misadventures. With an East Indian named Ramotar Seven Curry, he samples a series of local weddings. He moves lodgings to a Georgetown strip noted for its prostitutes, nightclubs and rum shops. Sneaking across the Brazilian border, he meets Jan, the girl of his erotic dreams. He finds her again back in Guyana, and together they embark on a journey to Trinidad and Venezuela that ends in heartbreak.

Picaresque in structure, Bhattacharya’s first crack at a novel is a

bit episodic, and lacks strong overriding dramatic tension—although some delightful individual scenes carry the narrative forward. The true virtues of the book lie in his talent for capturing the absurdity of daily Guyanese life, which he accomplishes by tapping into the casual everyday humor—much of it off-color—and also by expertly conveying the local patois. Unfamiliar territory for many of us, this small South American country certainly comes alive through Bhattacharya’s lush description, whether he is describing the tropical terrain, communicating the delights of the local brand of reggae or observing the incongruous goings-on through a ganja-fueled haze.

Bhattacharya’s alter ego makes numerous references to the few writers who have ventured into this territory before him, particularly V.S. Naipaul and Evelyn Waugh.

While the author shares a sense of irony with these literary forebears, The Sly Company of People Who Care has a wide-eyed innocence

one doesn’t associate with their work. It has much humor, to be sure, but not much bite, perhaps because Bhattacharya is so enraptured by Guyana that he is reluctant to seek its darkest underpinnings. In the end, the book is an unabashed love letter to an eccentric people and their culture.

The Sly Company of People Who Care

By Rahul Bhattacharya FSG $26, 288 pages ISBN 9780374265854

Debut fiction

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Now a CompaNioN EditioN to thE

Film oN

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“Compelling...A complex, vivid and sympathetic history of a civil-rights milestone.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“A meticulous, all-encompassing study of the 1961 Freedom Riders and their subsequent efforts. It is a must-read for all students of America’s freedom movement.”

—The Alabama Review

“Arsenault has written what will surely become the definitive account of these nonviolent protests...

His fine narrative shows how the Freedom Rides were important journeys on the long road to racial justice.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Available Wherever Books are Sold www.oup.com/us

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columns

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

SPENSER GOES OUT WITH A BANG The quote “always leave them wanting more,” attributed to Walt Disney, has rarely been more applicable and bittersweet than in the case of the late Robert B. Parker’s final Spenser novel, Sixkill (Putnam, $26.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780399157264). The title references Spenser’s new protégé, Zebulon Sixkill, a young Cree warrior with impressive natural combat skills, riding shotgun with the Boston P.I. in the absence of Spenser’s usual sidekick, Hawk. The plot bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1920s real-life case of actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: the mysterious death of a young party girl in a corpulent movie star’s hotel room, possibly as a result of some sexual shenanigans of the sort that may be only obliquely referenced in news reports; it falls to Spenser to sift through the hints and allegations in search of something resembling the truth of the matter. Sixkill (the book) features staccato dialogue,

bordering at times on smugness, just the way Parker’s readers love it.

Sixkill (the individual) is complex, markedly different from either Spenser or Hawk, but clearly cut from the same bolt of cloth, and he is definitely a character who will leave readers wanting more.

Like father, like son Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy won the Edgar Award for best first mystery novel back in 1983. The title character, orphaned at age 10, was adopted by a local butcher—

The cemetery was her sanctuary.

The Graveyard Queen View the trailer at www.AmandaStevens.com

On sale now.

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who moonlighted as a hired killer.

By the time the boy reached his teens, he was well-versed in both of the family trades. Fast forward some 30 years, and the butcher’s boy is largely retired, living the good life in England as “Michael Schaeffer” with his titled wife in The Informant (HMH, $27, 336 pages, ISBN 9780547569338). Then he has the misfortune of being recognized by a trio of American mobsters on holiday in Brighton. He is able to dispatch two of the three to their just rewards, but the third one escapes.

Schaeffer realizes that the mobsters will keep coming for him until either a) he is dead, or b) he has killed every member of the opposing team, a daunting task for someone out of the game as long as he has been. Nonetheless, there is nothing for it but to bring the fight to them, so he boards a flight to America and once again gets in touch with his inner killer. Relentlessly plot-driven, briskly paced and undeniably violent, Perry’s latest is the quintessential “guy book.”

One day at a time Late one evening, Matt Scudder sits in a Hell’s Kitchen saloon with his longtime friend, barkeep Mick Ballou. Scudder, a recovering alcoholic, drinks club soda. The two are waxing philosophical about roads not taken when the name of an old school chum, Jack Ellery, pops up.

“Interesting, really, the things that happened to him,” Scudder reflects.

“Well, don’t stop now . . .” Ballou rejoins. Thus, A Drop of the Hard Stuff (Mulholland Books, $25.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780316127332) is told in flashback, peppered with details of Scudder’s struggle with alcohol, and his one-day-at-a-time efforts to work within the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step Program.

Indeed it is this very program that precipitates the death of Jack Ellery, himself a two-year veteran in AA. The problem lies in the eighth step, in which the alcoholic makes a list of everyone he has ever harmed.

In Ellery’s case, the list is long and comprehensive, and it enumerates crimes which have never been

solved; it would seem that somebody from the list is Ellery’s murderer, and it is up to Scudder to ascertain which one and bring him to justice. Understandably, A Drop of the Hard Stuff is heavy on the AA component, detailing as it does Scudder’s early days of sobriety; that said, it is a compelling read, and provides some excellent backstory for one of the iconic detective series of our time.

Mystery of the Month Jo Nesbø returns to the Mystery of the Month winner’s circle with his latest Norwegian thriller, The Snowman. Oslo cop Harry Hole is once again in the limelight, if anything a bit more jaded than before, and perilously closer to the alcoholic abyss, as well. His relationship with longtime lover Rakel is on the skids, his apartment is overrun with creeping fungus and his belief that Oslo is in the grip of a serial killer is roundly pooh-poohed by his superiors. In short, little seems to be going right for Harry Hole. He is right about the serial killer, though, and he means to prove it, but it will push him to the precipice, and threaten everything he holds dear in life.

Nesbø has created in Harry Hole a virtually perfect (by which I mean thoroughly flawed and imperfect) suspense protagonist, driven by demons from within and without, with just a speck of ragged hope that engages the reader and dares you to hope along with him. The other suspense elements are here in spades, too: tight pacing, crisp dialogue and the requisite red herrings. The Snowman is a chilling Scandinavian journey not to be missed.

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9

columns

cooking by sybil PRATT

Bring on the good times

Discover your next great book To find more than 10,000 book reviews, weekly contests, e-newsletter signups and more—including our popular blog,

The Book Case visit us at

BookPage.com

The Deen brothers, Jamie and Bobby, grew up loving the outdoors as much as they love good Southern food—after all, their mama is Paula Deen. In The Deen Bros.

Get Fired Up (Ballantine, $25, 224 pages, ISBN 9780345513632), their new addition to the Deen family cookbook collection, they celebrate these dual passions, cooking up a storm of Southern sensations to be savored al fresco, while the sun or the stars shine down. The more than 125 recipes Jamie and Bobby

Cookbook of the Month

share here are outside-informal, the kind of food that’s meant for paper plates and lots of napkins. These boys don’t hold back—no calorie counting when you’ve got Stuffed Corn Bread with Ham and Cheese on the grill, Hot Buffalo Burgers with Blue Cheese or a whole turkey breast filled with smoky kielbasa.

Off for a hike or a picnic? The brothers have the right stuff, like Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwiches, Classic Southern Slaw and Muffaletta Salad, prepped in advance to make the day easy and special. In fact, “easy and special” goes for all the Deen boys’ entertaining ideas.

Under the Tuscan sun

see OUR fresh NEW LOOK! 10

based Grosetto in the south, with its penchant for wild boar, bottarga (salted mullet roe) and gnudi (ricotta and spinach dumplings). Some beloved standards, like Cacciucco (fish soup) from Livorno, have noble lineages, while others, like Tomato and Bread Soup, are hearty examples of la cucina povera, peasant cooking born of necessity. Take this Tuscan tour cooking in your kitchen, or dreaming in your armchair.

Tuscany: Just the word conjures up visions of Bella Italia, with its incredible landscapes, fantastic art and fabulous cuisine. Now Tuscany (Phaidon, $39.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780714860787), a cookbook with 50 recipes plus gorgeous photos and travel essays by Mario Matassa, offers us a new way to appreciate this fabled region. Most Americans think of Tuscany as one place, but like everything Italian, it’s really made up of many local areas, each with its own special topography and culinary traditions. There are actually 10 treasure-packed Tuscan provinces, each proud of its signature dishes, from mountainous, marble-producing Massa-Carrara in the north, where savory pancakes called Testaroli are cut up and served with pesto, to Etruscan-

Sara Foster has shared her love of fresh, seasonal eating and simple home cooking in all of her best-selling cookbooks. In her latest, Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen, she’s gone home, returning to her Southern roots and the regional dishes that inspired her love of food. Ever an innovator, Sara adds her own twists to classic dishes, mixes and matches new ingredients with old favorites (like Grilled Peach Salad with Shaved Country Ham), cuts out some of the down-home fat and never boils her greens for hours, though she maintains, in good Southern style, that “you can never have too many vegetable sides.”

Her riffs on grits, rice, biscuits and cornbread are worth the price of admission alone, as is “Pig: A Food Group of Its Own,” a whole chapter devoted to the delights of Southernstyle pork. Sara’s very personal take on the traditional goes from breakfast fare to her luscious, linger-longer sweets (including a to-die-for Molasses-Bourbon Pecan Pie), plus more than 80 full-color photos and sidebars galore filled with tips on techniques, ingredient swaps and what to serve with what. What Sara calls “a little slice of Southern” is a big, beautiful cookbook.

Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen

By Sara Foster Random House $35, 416 pages ISBN 9781400068593

southern

romance b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way

A DARING HERO SAVES THE DAY A wealthy security expert with a beautiful lakeside compound saves a woman from human traffickers in When You Dare (HQN, $7.99, 448 pages, ISBN 9780373775712) by Lori Foster. And said security expert’s first name is Dare . . . what female could resist him? Heroine Molly Alexander certainly finds it difficult. While rescuing a family friend from bad guys in Mexico, Dare frees Molly, who’s been drugged and beaten, and who can’t fathom

in the big city. While Austin finds the joys— and hard work—of rural life appealing and is tempted by sexy Rye, she considers herself an urban girl. But the cowboy across the way is applying his own brand of charming coercion. Peopled with quirky characters and full of sassy fun, this book will leave readers smiling.

Romance of the Month

why she was kidnapped. A successful author of romantic suspense novels, Molly hires Dare to help her uncover the mystery, and Dare is happy to comply. Not only is he impressed by Molly’s strength and her accomplishments, but their sexual chemistry is explosive. Though Dare can’t duck his sense of responsibility for those more vulnerable than he is, he knows the feelings he has for Molly are something more.

As they work together to determine who had her taken, Dare also must work at making Molly see them as a permanent couple. Foster puts together a sizzling combination of alpha hero, determined heroine and menacing danger in her latest scorcher.

For love of country Watermelon raising, rattlesnake festivals and rodeo bull riding are just a few of the new experiences for heroine Austin Lanier in Love Drunk Cowboy (Sourcebooks, $7.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9781402253584) by Carolyn Brown.

After her grandmother dies, Austin travels from Tulsa to tiny Terral, Oklahoma, to pack up the woman’s home. But when she arrives at the watermelon farm, she learns it’s planting time and is persuaded to prepare for another crop by rugged rancher Rye O’Donnell. Rye has never been so affected by a woman, and he’s determined to convince this one to stay beyond the two weeks she’s taken off from her job

A medieval lord passing as a modern man encounters a woman who knows too much in Lynn Kurland’s One Magic Moment.

John de Piaget has spent eight years creating a life for himself in the 21st century. He doesn’t get too close to anyone, though, in case they ask questions about his past. Tess Alexander, a scholar of medieval thought, is mourning for the younger sister she lost to a man from 800 years before her time.

When she meets John, however, she’s less confused by his mysteries than he might think—because he could be twin to the man her sister married. And she’s fairly confident that’s exactly who he is. But how does a woman bring that up? She’s sure John will run if he suspects she knows his secret, and her instant attraction to him makes her want to keep him very close. John feels the same for Tess, but how can he have a relationship with her while still hiding what era he’s from? Though they try to keep apart, unexpected danger brings them close together . . . and then to a place—and century—from which one or both might never return. Kurland pens a sweet and tender story that never goes past kisses, but still proves that love can last beyond space and time.

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interviews

eriK laRson

by Alden Mudge

Confronting the rise of the Nazis

E

rik Larson, author of the nonfiction bestsellers The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm, believes he has the “tiniest office in the world.” He’s never actually measured it, he admits. But he says the teeny room—a sort of foyer to the master bedroom’s closet—once served as the makeup room for a previous owner who was a prominent local newscaster.

12

“It is very small, but it’s cozy,” Larson says during a call to the home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that he shares with his wife, Dr. Christine Gleason, who heads the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. “It’s probably the best office I’ve ever had.”

One of its saving graces, Larson says, is that “a good chunk of it has windows. I’ve got what you call territorial views to the north. I see a hilltop, then a valley, then the next hilltop and the next hilltop, then a little lake. It’s very, very nice.”

And that captivating perspective—along with his “addiction to tennis”—seems to have provided at least a partial antidote to the gloom Larson experienced while researching and writing his riveting new book about the first year of Nazi rule, In the Garden of Beasts.

“When you get immersed in this era there’s something so repulsive about it that it can really drag you down,” Larson explains. “No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon.

“What I found was that when you’re writing a book like this, in territory that has been pretty heavily mined in other ways, you have to read the basics. And there are a lot of basics to read. You just have to read and read and read. That’s what starts to infect you,” he says.

“It’s the accumulation of these little bits and pieces of horror. It began to drag me down. And you feel this immense frustration: Why didn’t anybody do anything?”

That is one of the needling moral questions that haunts a reader throughout In the Garden of Beasts. To bring that and other questions vividly to life, Larson presents the experiences of an

American family who were there and witnessed the almostovernight changes in Germany.

Charles E. Dodd, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to be U.S. ambassador to Germany, arrived in Berlin in 1933 with his wife, his son and his daughter Martha.

“Dodd and his daughter were probably ideal characters to follow because they came from very different perspectives,” Larson says. “Martha’s life in Berlin really does follow an almost novel“No one istic arc. She really studies begins utterly enthralled with the very the Nazis, first year of becomes less Hitler’s rule. so, and is finally This is about so disgusted that she goes the first dark over—as many warnings on did—to seeing the horizon.” the salvation of the world in Communism.

She became a very mediocre, more or less useless agent, and it destroyed her life.”

Martha is, frankly, a piece of work. She has affairs with highly placed Germans and a long-term affair with a Russian agent. She is out and about provoking grumbling, if not consternation, among consular staff. How did this not exasperate her rather straight-laced father?

“My sense is that this is a time when people gave their children a lot more independence at a younger age,” Larson says. “I’m a father of three daughters [they are 22, 20 and 17 years old] and we’re close, but I can’t pretend, at this moment, to know what goes on in their REAL lives. They could be dancing on a table in a bar right now. I think there is a sort of wishful blindness

that all fathers engage in.”

Ambassador Dodd, on the other hand, is an almost Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character. A history professor with a dry sense of humor and a strong belief in Jeffersonian principles, he was friends with Carl Sandburg and President Woodrow Wilson. He shipped his unprepossessing Chevy to Berlin, raising eyebrows among both scornful U.S. State Department elites and the Nazi leadership, which prized symbols of wealth and brute power.

Many in the foreign service thought he was out of his depth.

“To his credit I actually think he did exactly what he should have done in that era,” Larson says. “He wasn’t kowtowing to the Nazis. He had his own prejudices about the Jews and so forth, but they were sort of an ambient background prejudice, they weren’t going to get in his way. I think in some weird way he was the right man, in that place at the right time, because he drew a line, a moral line. Especially after the events of June 30, 1934, he reacted appropriately, with horror. If the world had done the same thing, who knows how things would have turned out. The conventional wisdom is to criticize him. But there are those who refer to him as Cassandra, because he knew before everyone else what was happening.

I think that’s accurate.”

In Larson’s telling, what happens in Berlin unfolds in chilling detail.

“Getting the detail right is a very important part of my mission,” Larson says. “I want to present, to the extent I can, what something smelled like, what the weather was like.”

Yet despite his love of discover-

ing historical detail, Larson doesn’t think of himself as a historian.

“Partly that’s because there are multiple layers of dust that accumulate in one’s mind when one says the word historian,” he says, laughing. “I think of myself more as an animator of history. Now I’m not talking at all about making stuff up.

I mean finding enough details to put into the narrative that readers will connect the dots and the story will come alive. So my goal is to bring the past alive and to create a historical experience.

“Ideally, I want somebody to jump into the book at the beginning and in one night or two or three or four read all the way through it and at the end come out of that book feeling as though they had experienced a past time in almost a physical way,” Larson says.

By that measure in particular, In the Garden of Beasts is a resounding success. It will keep you up late at night, turning the pages.

In the Garden of Beasts

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13

interviews

geraldine brooks © randi baird

by trisha ping

Finding a piece of history in her own backyard

W

hether she’s imagining the history of an ancient manuscript, as in People of the Book, or an English town determined to survive the plague in A Year of Wonders, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks is a master at bringing history’s little-known but fascinating stories to life.

14

For her fourth novel, Caleb’s Crossing, she found inspiration close to home: the tale of a Wampanoag boy who became a Harvard graduate. Brooks first learned about Caleb after seeing a notation on a map. “I’m thinking [this happened in] 1965, the Civil Rights era, and when I found out it was 1665, my imagination started spinning,” she says during a call to her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which she shares with her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.

But that line on an old map of the island was one of very few records of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk’s existence. “To tell you the truth, I had a hesitation about creating him too much in full, seeing that we know so little, and I wanted to respect that historical distance with him,” Brooks says.

Instead, she approaches the story through another character: Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s daughter with a hungry mind who has picked up her learning a piece at a time while eavesdropping on the lessons of her older (and less intellectual) brother Makepeace. Bethia meets Caleb while gathering clams on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard,

near Gay Head. The daughter of a minister and the granddaughter of the island’s governor, both of whom pride themselves on their good relationships and just dealings with the native tribes, Bethia is less intimidated by an Indian boy “Whenever her own age than the averanyone says, age colonial your women girl. When are ahead of she speaks to him in his their time, language, a I tell them, friendship is go and read born.

“I don’t remore 17th member who century said this, but women!” there’s a saying ‘learn another language and you gain another soul.’ I found that very true when I was studying Arabic,” Brooks says.

“The way it’s structured and the way the root words have developed give you such insight into the thinking of people. So it was fun to sort of think about that at a time when the English were trying to put their very foreign stamp on the landscape and bring in foreign species and things

like this, to think of the original names for things on the island.”

The understanding that Bethia and Caleb develop as a result of their friendship utterly changes their lives. Bethia is fascinated by the shaman of the tribe, Caleb’s uncle, whose rituals are considered the devil’s work by her father. Caleb is eager to adopt the ways of the colonists in order to level the playing field for his people.

Eventually Caleb comes to live with Bethia’s family so he can be tutored by her father; then the two (along with Makepeace and another Wampanoag boy, Joel) go to Cambridge. Their story is narrated

by Bethia in a diary written at three different points in her life, though no actual journals by colonial women before 1750 exist.

“There were literate women, certainly,” Brooks says, “but they were just so damn busy! They were working from before sunup to after sundown, and you can imagine how fatiguing that all was. Also paper was very scarce, and the stress was on women reading the Bible but not necessarily writing, so it was a small population that would have found writing easy or pleasurable.”

Bethia, of course, is among that small number. Living in a time when being an intelligent woman carries few rewards, she struggles to match her desires with the role that society has set for her (even her name means “servant”). Though she is perhaps an unusual woman for her time, Bethia deals with her situation in a way that feels authentic to the period—as do the people around her, even those who love her. Her father’s pleasure in her learning, for example, “was of a fleeting kind—the reaction one might have if a cat were to walk about on its hind legs. You smile at the oddity but find the gait ungainly and not especially attractive,” Bethia muses.

Though Caleb is also seen as an oddity, his gender still gives him more privileges than Bethia, and though she’s proud of him she can’t help but resent this injustice, especially as her personal trials and tribulations mount.

“I think it’s a slightly arrogant view to imagine that it’s only in our lifetime that women have had the wit to see that their lot stank,” Brooks says, citing examples like the poet Anne Bradstreet as well as multiple court cases from the period that involve women speaking up for themselves “in ways that are very recognizable to second-wave old feminists like myself. So whenever anyone says, your women are ahead of their time, I tell them, go and read more 17th-century women!”

Readers will come away from Caleb’s Crossing with a new appreciation for this time in American history, and an interest in the Wampanoag people, who are going through something of a renaissance these days. Tiffany Smalley will be the first Wampanoag from the Gay Head Aquina Tribe since Caleb to graduate from Harvard later this month. And thanks to a MacArthur genius grant, Jessie Little Doe Baird has resurrected Wopanaak, the language of the Wampanoag, which had been lost for several generations. “When the tribe’s medicine man died the year before last, the language was heard on the cliffs at his graveside ceremony, probably for the first time in very many years,” Brooks says.

Perhaps we’ll get to hear that language in the film version of Caleb’s Crossing—though the novel hasn’t been optioned for film yet,

From ”One of the biggest hearts in modern literature”

Brooks is hard at work on a screenplay. “Previously I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and I would just sling the option in the direction of the West Coast and not think about it anymore, but this one I felt very strongly about and I had such a strong visual sense of it. It just so happened that a friend of mine, who actually knows how to do this, was between projects, so we’ve been collaborating on it. Even if nothing comes of it, I feel that I’ve learned an immense amount from the process of doing it.”

Brooks is also finishing up her selections as editor of Best American Short Stories 2011 (she was working on the introduction just before our talk). “I’ve got them all scattered at my feet now and I’m looking down and remembering what the very specific pleasures of each [story] were. It was a wonderful exercise, because I started it with a high heart and finished it in a complete state of moral collapse!” Reading 120 stories (she chose about 20 for the collection) also introduced her to new favorites. “I’m absolutely embarrassed to say I didn’t know Steven Millhauser before this!”

In a novel that so carefully dissects the joy and pain of learning, it seems natural to ask Brooks what she thinks about knowledge and its boundaries. Not surprisingly for a trained journalist, she doesn’t believe there should be any.

“I’m a big supporter of Julian Assange, let’s just put that out there,” she says laughingly of the WikiLeaks founder. “It’s not for anybody to tell anyone what they’re entitled to know. Put the information out there and let the chips fall where they may.”

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Combining mystery, romance and social issues such as the problems of returning soldiers, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series starring combat veteran/priest Clare Fergusson has won accolades from critics and readers alike. The series’ latest entry is One Was a Soldier (Minotaur, $24.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780312334895). SpencerFleming lives with her family in Buxton, Maine.

interviews

betty white

by Deanna Larson

B

etty White has been on a roll—a tear, really— for decades. Her show business career has only paused a few times since the late 1940s, when she debuted at the dawn of television with the ad-libbed “Hollywood on Television,” then moved to her own pioneering sitcom “Life with Elizabeth,” which she cocreated, co-wrote and produced in the 1950s at the ripe old age of 31.

“I didn’t know any better,” says White, who is now 89. “There wasn’t an alternative—the job was there to be done and you did it. I was so lucky to get in television on the ground floor when it was starting out. I was on five and a half hours a day, six days a week, so it was like going to television college.”

While attending “television college,” White hosted classic TV game shows and starred in many awardwinning sitcoms including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.” Last fall she hosted “Saturday Night Live” and now she stars in the cable television hit “Hot in Cleveland.” All the while, White was writing books about her time in Hollywood and her love of animals, beginning with Pet-Love: How Pets Take Care of Us in 1985.

“The bottom line is: I’m the luckiest old broad!” White says by phone from her Hollywood home, her beloved Golden Retriever Ponti on her lap. “I have been so blessed.

If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!”

Her new book, If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), has the scoop on her white-hot career and latest projects, including impres-

if you ask me

By Betty White, Putnam, $25.95, 272 pages ISBN 9780399157530, audio available

sions from the sets of SNL and “Hot in Cleveland” and her work on films like The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and The Lost Valentine with Jennifer Love Hewitt.

White also touches on her childhood, her funny parents and her charmed early days in show business, as well as her present popularity, with anec“I have been dotes about so blessed. If the perils of typecasting you ever hear and fascinatme complain ing stories about anyfrom her long performthing, throw ing career. me away!”

Chapters include Body and Mind (“Somewhere along the line there is a breaking point, where you go from not discussing how old you are to bragging about it.”); Love and Friendship (including being a stepmom and dating when most interesting prospects are “much younger men—maybe only 80”); and Animal Kingdom, with touching but unsentimental stories about the animals she has rescued, loved and lost. The final section, Since You Asked, features White’s spirited ruminations on integrity, aging, keeping your head on your shoulders and remaining relevant in a “tough business.”

“Right now I’m doing ‘Hot in Cleveland’ with the greatest gals in show business,” White says. “We all adore each other! From the word go, we fell in love. I’m having the best best time. But that’s a whole different experience from going home and writing.”

White and husband Allen Ludden (who died in 1981) were good friends with John Steinbeck, and she was inspired by the author’s work ethic, right down to his habit of writing with a dog lying on his feet. She writes all of her books in

longhand and finds that a fresh pack of paper is her greatest incentive to write. This funny, gregarious lady can think of nothing better than being alone with her animals, writing.

“It’s such a private thing,” White says. “You work it out in your head and you can work anywhere. All of a sudden, if something hits you that you want to put down on paper—it’s just a lovely experience.”

White wanted to be a park ranger or writer when she grew up and jokes that her first book was written at 14.

“I wrote it with a pen dipped in ink, in longhand. It was a wonderful original story,” she deadpans. “A girl on a ranch and her “She’s my baby!” White says. “I brother was sick. I didn’t know quite had the privilege of visiting with how to finish it off. It was 106 pages.

Koko three times. She knows me Finally I had an idea: It turned out now—she calls me ‘Lipstick.’ When to be a dream. She woke up and she sees me she runs her fingers her brother was well and everyacross her lips. She’s so magnificent, thing was fine. I just thought it was I can tell you. genius.”

“That’s my love—my animal If You Ask Me is White’s sixth book work,” White says. “I have to stay (her recently reissued book, Here We in show business to pay for all my Go Again: My Life in Television, “is animal work!” the closest to an autobiography”) From her 1950s TV appearances and she has another one planned to her recent SNL skits, Betty White for next summer, a photography has been the very definition of book with anecdotes about the ania trooper, throwing herself into mals at the Los Angeles Zoo, where making people smile. But this feisty she was zoo commissioner for three octogenarian refuses to take credit years and an active board member for her incredible likability with for 47 years. The little girl who colaudiences across generations. lected blown-glass animal figures “Have I got you fooled,” she says. rather than dolls has been a lifelong “But I’m not going to talk you out advocate for animals, also spendof it.” ing 48 years on the board of the Betty White visits with Koko, a gorilla that has learned sign language.

Morris Animal Foundation. The organization funds studies into specific health problems of dogs, cats, horses and wildlife, including gorillas in Rwanda.

In the book, White tells about her up-close visits with Koko the signing gorilla at the zoo. © KWAKU ALSTON for stocklandmartel.com

We’ll have what she’s having

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features

BEHIND THE BOOK

By Heidi Murkoff

RAISING A READER

I

t doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon— or even a parenting author—to figure out how to raise a reader. All it takes is a cozy lap, a pair of loving arms, an open book and a few common-sense tips.

Read early. True, newborns don’t know a cat from a hat. And toddlers are more wiggle worms than bookworms. But there’s no better way to get a child in the reading habit than getting off to an early start. Build storytime into your little one’s routine right from the beginning.

Read often. Bedtime is the obvious time for storytime—and a particularly good one, too, especially if it comes after a soothing bath (a wound-down little one is more open to sitting down—and more receptive to listening). Plus, bedtime stories, especially when combined with cuddles, can quickly become a treasured ritual on both sides of the armchair—the perfectly relaxing end to your child’s busy day . . . and

yours. Another good time to get a child hooked on books: wakeup time. By catching your bookworm early, while she’s still sleepy, you’ll minimize squirming and maximize attention. And then—there’s any time. Tote a book with you wherever you go and whatever you’re doing and reading will become your little one’s favorite go-to distraction.

Issue an all-access book pass.

Keep stacks of books of every variety everywhere in your home—by your bed, on the coffee table, next to the armchair, in the kitchen, in the car and definitely in your child’s room.

Don’t make any book (except, perhaps, a very valuable one) off-limits to your little one. Even a toddler who tends to devour literature (as

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in, bite on edges and chew paper) should be allowed supervised page-turning stints. When shelving your child’s books, keep them accessible on low, open shelves or in easy-to-reach bins.

Be a borrower (and maybe a lender, too). The best way to keep a fresh stash of reading material at the ready? Make a weekly trip to the library with your budding book buddy. Don’t have a library in your neighborhood? Set up your own book co-op with fellow playgroup or preschool parents.

Get ready to repeat. Most toddlers and preschoolers can’t get enough of a good thing—they find it comforting to hear the same book over and over, night after night, day after day. But there’s another reason why little ones benefit from the read-and-repeat approach to storytime: When you’re new to the language game, repetition helps you pick up skills faster. Being able to fill in the last word in a line or anticipate the so-familiar plot is also super-satisfying.

Do some editing—and editorializing. While you can definitely read a book to your tot straight through, don’t feel obligated to stick to the script verbatim. If too many hardto-understand words are making your captive audience restless, edit them down or out. Paraphrase.

Summarize. Simplify.

Make reading interactive. Even a child who doesn’t yet know an A from a Z can point to the doggy, the boy on the bicycle, the sun in the sky, the monkey in the zoo. Or answer simple reading comprehension questions (“What is the girl eating?” “Where is the mommy going?”

“Is the boy happy or sad?”). Not only does interaction enhance learning but it boosts enjoyment and attention span, too.

Read to yourself. Children are master mimics—especially when it comes to their parents—and they’re always more likely to do what you do than what you say. So to raise a reader, be a reader. Never had the reading bug? Try contracting it. Join a book club. Check out reading lists online. And make sure your little one catches you reading often.

Power off. Even books that come with dials, flaps and pop-ups can’t compete with the light-and-sound show of computer games and TV. Wired toddlers and preschoolers— or those who spend too much time zoning out in front of a TV screen—

may have a harder time sitting still for words and pictures on a page.

In fact, research has shown a 10 percent increase in the risk of attention problems later on for every hour per day of TV a tyke watches now. So limit TV time (the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for the twoand-under set) and computer time.

Using the TV for background noise?

Power that off, too.

Nurture that love of reading, but don’t push it. If you’ve been a parent for any amount of time you know this above all: Pushing will get you nowhere. Not when it comes to using the potty, not when it comes to eating—and definitely not when it comes to reading. Make reading a part of your family’s daily routine— but also don’t forget to make it fun.

Heidi Murkoff is the author of the What To Expect series of pregnancy and parenting guides that have sold more than 34 million copies. The latest book in the series is What to Expect the Second Year: From 12 to 24 Months. Murkoff lives in Southern California with her husband, Erik, and two children.

What to Expect the Second Year

By Heidi Murkoff, Workman, $24.95, 540 pages ISBN 9780761163640, paperback, eBook available

mother’s day By amy scribner

and doctors. They do occasionally lapse into medical jargon, but mostly this is a thorough and useful guide from conception to pregnancy and delivery.

THE GIFT OF LOVE

ON THE FRONT LINES OF MOTHERHOOD

W

e mothers know it isn’t an easy job. You struggle to find work-life balance. Your house is a wreck. You haven’t had a full night of sleep since Clinton was president. But these inspiring, honest and heartfelt books will remind you that raising children is both a blessing and a challenge—and that you deserve to celebrate Mother’s Day each year.

A FRESH NEW VOICE In this wry, warts-and-all memoir, Good Housekeeping contributing writer Kyran Pittman offers up snapshots from her life, and she is nothing if not very, very human.

We’re barely into the first chapter of Planting Dandelions (Riverhead, $25.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9781594488009) when she reveals that she cheated on her first husband. Later in the book, she writes about very nearly cheating on her second husband, and she is equally candid on plenty of other topics, including nearly losing their house to foreclosure.

Yet this confessional tone is balanced with her clear affection for family life in all its messiness. Now a mommy of three, Pittman is just as passionate when writing about life in suburbia as when musing on postpartum sex.

“The slope of my nutritive backslide can be plotted by each of my kids’ first birthday cakes,” she writes. “When the oldest turned one, I made him a whole wheat carrot cake with pineapplesweetened cream cheese on top.

Two years later, it was a homemade chocolate layer cake, frosted with buttercream, for my middle child.

Three years after that, I ran by the warehouse club and picked up a slab of corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil, spray-painted blue, for the baby.”

Being a mom isn’t always (or even usually) glamorous, but Pittman recognizes the beauty of family life in this interesting, funny and fresh entry in the mommy memoir genre.

ADVICE YOU CAN TRUST I’ll be honest: This book reminded me why I will never, ever have another baby. I was exhausted just reading the section called “A baby’s life: sleeping, eating, peeing and pooping,” with its accompanying chart on 24 hours in the life of a newborn. On the plus side, I was glad to learn my stomach wouldn’t be in any better shape had I used cocoa butter during pregnancy.

The Mommy Docs’ Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth (Da Capo, $15.95, 544 pages, ISBN 9780738214603) is full of such useful tidbits, penned by three Los Angeles OB/GYNs whose TV show “Deliver Me” airs on Oprah’s new network. With common-sense information and advice on everything from breastfeeding to baby blues, these are the doctors every new mommy wants at her side.

The comparisons to the seminal What to Expect When You’re Expecting are inevitable, but the Mommy Docs write in a more conversational, matterof-fact tone. With anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, authors Yvonne Bohn, Allison Hill and Alane Park share their own experiences as mothers

This book touts itself as “dispatches from the ridiculous front lines of parenthood,” but it’s actually more like “dispatches from two incredibly selfless and loving humans.” Astonishing and deeply humbling, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (FSG, $26, 368 pages, ISBN 9780374223069) is twotime National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene’s account of raising four biological children and five more adopted from Bulgaria and Ethiopia.

After their eldest biological child left for college, Greene and husband Don worried they’d be empty nesters before they knew it. Some might solve this by planning a home remodel or a retirement vacation. Instead, the couple brought home five more children over the next decade.

“Donny and I feel most alive, most thickly in the cumbersome richness of life, with children underfoot. The things we like to do, we would just as soon do with children,” Greene writes. “Is travel really worth undertaking if it involves fewer than two taxis to the airport, three airport luggage carts with children riding and waving on top of them, a rental van, and a hall’s length of motel rooms?”

But Greene is no Mother Theresa (thank goodness). In one of the most affecting chapters, she writes candidly about her struggles after bringing home their new son, Jesse.

He doesn’t speak English and is developmentally delayed from years in a Bulgarian orphanage. Greene anguishes over her decision, at one point thinking, “If I leave right now, drive all night, and check into a motel in southern Indiana, no one could find me.”

Needless to say, Jesse eventually fits into the family as one of many puzzle pieces. In the end, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a lovely patchwork of moments from a house filled with love, life and acceptance.

LIFE GOES ON “Four months ago I saw my husband lying in a coffin. Tomorrow I get to hold my baby boy in my arms for the first time.”

In Signs of Life (Broadway, $24, 320 pages, ISBN 9780307717498), a clear-eyed account of the months following her husband’s accidental death at age 27, author Natalie Taylor recounts what it was like to be a five-months-pregnant widow, navigating a strange new world with humor and honesty.

A high school English teacher, Taylor turns to classic literature to help tell her tale. It’s a neat trick that works surprisingly well. She compares her sense of powerlessness to that of migrant farm worker George from Of Mice and Men, and her grief and frustration to the scene from The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield breaks his parents’ windows after the death of his brother. Pop culture also figures in Taylor’s imagination, as when she fantasizes about a version of the popular TV series “The Bachelor,” which she would call “The Widowette”: “I’d insist that the entire show be filmed here in Michigan, in the middle of February when the days are gray and bleak and snowy and no one has a tan,” she writes.

“The first guy to wake up early and scrape the ice off of my car and shovel the driveway gets a rose.”

Taylor’s story really kicks into high gear after she gives birth to son Kai. Through sleepless nights and maternity leave, she struggles to find her new normal. This is a story remarkably free of self-pity, instead focusing on the power of relying on others and drawing on the strength you didn’t know you had.

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features

GRADUATION b y L i n d a M . C a s t e ll i t t o

Romp and Circumstance

I

sourcebook that can be used to find specific information (on, say, taxes or etiquette or health) or thoughtprovoking exercises to help establish long-term goals. Advice from college graduates, tidbits from Twitter and quotes from famous figures make for interesting, quick reads, and “Jenny’s Tips” address seemingly every question that might cross a graduate’s mind, regarding work, money, home, family, dating, health and plenty more. This guide will prove at once useful, inspiring and reassuring for graduates who are ready to embark on an exciting new phase of life but aren’t quite sure where or how to begin.

t’s always a challenge to select the perfect graduation gift. (Do kids these days even use pen sets?) Books THE SAVVY SECRETARY to the rescue! With their mix of advice, humor and Lynn Peril has long been thinking encouragement, any entry in this quartet would make a and writing about women in history thoughtful gift for those about to leap into the real world. and pop culture; she’s the author of

YOUR FUTURE LIES AHEAD

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Anyone who’s delivered a graduation speech, or listened to one, or hopes to make one someday—so, pretty much everyone—will enjoy Everything is Going to Be Okay (Simon & Schuster, $12.99, 112 pages, ISBN 9781416556923). This quirky illustrated book sprang from the clever mind and skillful pen of Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), perhaps best known for his witty single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker. He’s also served as a writer for “Six Feet Under” and “Seinfeld” and written seven other books. Two of his earlier tales feature Edmund and Rosemary, a loving and lovably neurotic Brooklyn couple. In Everything is Going to Be Okay, the duo has a new challenge: Edmund’s been asked to make a college graduation speech, but he worries he won’t be able to come up with anything interesting or meaningful. It’s not helping that the cat is silently judging him, someone’s already talked about the places people will go, and he has an irresistible urge to extrathoroughly clean their apartment.

Rosemary eventually gets Edmund to just write the speech, and off they go to the college. Despite intense nervousness, Edmund launches into his talk, which goes swimmingly—and then takes an unexpected turn . . . actually, a lot of longer-than-expected turns. The book is funny throughout, but it’s here that Kaplan makes evident his gift for finding (and creating) humor and sweetness at the inter-

section of quotidian and profound.

Just as Edmund and Rosemary send off the graduates with a sense of possibility and well-being, so, too, will readers turn the last page of Everything is Going to Be Okay.

READY, SET, GO! Jenny Blake knows about postcollege life because she’s experienced it twice: first, when she took a leave of absence from UCLA in her junior year, and again when she returned to UCLA two years later to finish her degree and graduate with the class of 2005. She’s been a career development program manager and internal coach at Google since 2006, and she launched LifeAfterCollege.org in 2007. Now, she offers the lessons she has learned in Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want (Running Press, $17, 304 pages, ISBN 9780762441273). Blake confides that, while she’s always been a go-getter (she finished college in three years with a double major and honors, while working full-time beginning at age 20), she found herself exhausted at age 25 and unsure what she wanted to do next. She writes, “I finally . . . took steps to figure out what I wanted, and who I really was under the shiny veneer of achievement.” The author urges readers to view the book not as a narrative meant to be read beginning to end, but as a

Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons and College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Coeds, Then and Now. This time around, she takes on the workplace in Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office (Norton, $16.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780393338546). There are some four million secretaries in the United States, Peril writes, and she’s been one for 20 years, even as she published a zine, got a graduate degree and wrote books. But despite the accomplishments of office-workers everywhere—who include writers, artists, filmmakers, parents, entrepreneurs and future executives—there remain certain stereotypes regarding the secretary role: “husband-hunting, pencilpushing, coffee-getting, dumbbunny, sex-bomb.” Peril chronicles and questions those assumptions and offers up myriad snippets of secretary-centric history, including newspaper articles, advertisements and anecdotes. Fans of vintage fashion and ephemera (not to mention the TV show “Mad Men”) will delight in the plentiful visuals, many of which are hilariously

sexist by today’s standards. Sidebars include “Wife versus Secretary (1936)” and “Pants in the Office.”

Peril notes that secretarial schools, shorthand and formal dress codes have gone by the wayside, even as new avenues are opening up via the virtual-assistant role. Graduates curious about the evolution of women in the workplace will find plenty to think about here, as will those who decide that they, too, are administratively inclined.

FIGURING IT ALL OUT Graduation is one of many occasions sure to inspire the big question: “What does it all mean?”

In Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life’s Milestones (Free Press, $19.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781439186879) author Robert Rowland Smith examines the big moments we humans have in common—from Taking Exams and Casting Your First Vote to Moving House and Retiring. Smith expands on the formula that made his Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day popular by viewing grand milestones (as opposed to everyday ones) through the lens of philosophy. This appealing, readable and thought-provoking mashup of musings touches on everything from virginity (Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Christ and Leonardo da Vinci are cited) to the midlife crisis (Nietzsche, menopause, Greek myths, gray hair).

Through it all, Driving with Plato offers an excellent framework for sizing up what’s vital. Those who worry that staying up until 3:00 a.m. discussing the meaning of life might be an activity limited to their college years will find this book handy for inciting just those sorts of free-wheeling conversations any time (and anywhere). As Smith writes, “Yes, to philosophize is to learn how to die, as Montaigne said, but it’s also to learn how to live.”

reviews My New American Life

FICTION

Coming to the “new” America R e v i e w b y K e l ly B l e w e t t

There has been a lot written about the Bush and Cheney days, but rarely from such an amusing perspective as in Francine Prose’s My New American Life. In the novel, Lula, a 26-year-old Albanian living in New York City with an expiring tourist visa, finds work as a nanny for the son of a Wall Street executive. She mainly spends her days on the couch in the family’s suburban New Jersey home, contemplating the supposed differences between her new country and her homeland—and the two are more alike than initially meets the eye.

The novel is worth the read for chapter three’s brilliant dinner scene alone. Lula, newly granted access to the next rung on the immigration ladder, celebrates her status with a meal in Manhattan. As her boss tells her, to avoid going out to eat on someone else’s dime would be “deeply un-American.” After debating what to wear, Lula settles on a new skirt

By Francine Prose, Harper, $25.99, 320 pages and vetoes “the knee socks that would have nudged her outfit over the ISBN 9780061713767, eBook available line from college girl to role-playing, escort-service college girl.” She enjoys certain privileges for this dinner—sitting up front in the car on the way there, unlimited wine and the opportunity to discuss her budding interest in writing short fiction. “To Lula and her new American life!” the party toasts. But the dinner—like her new life—is far from perfect. Lula is relegated to the same side of the table as the children, where she sucks down too much wine, realizes that her benefactors are being haplessly swindled by the kitchen staff and then rides home in the backseat. The rest of the novel, like this scene, revels in Lula’s unique, sardonic and totally refreshing perspective. Lula, we see, is often more aware of U.S. dynamics than the citizens who have lived there for decades.

“She wanted it all,” Prose writes of Lula, “the green card, the citizenship, the vote. The income taxes! The Constitutional rights. Two cars in the garage. The garage.” In this post-9/11 world, the road to realizing these desires has no map. But in My New American Life, Lula carves her own way in a journey that is at once honest, complicated, sexy, funny and—ultimately—uplifting.

THE STORY OF BEAUTIFUL GIRL

By Rachel Simon Grand Central $24.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780446574464 Audio, eBook available

Fiction

It all begins with the impossible—a white woman and an African-American man are in love in 1968. But that’s not the only obstacle in The Story of Beautiful Girl: Lynnie and Homan met as patients at the abusive Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded. Lynnie has a developmental disability, which makes speech nearly impossible, and Homan is deaf, but their disabilities don’t keep them from falling deeply in love—and trying to create a family.

After escaping from the state school and giving birth to a baby

girl in widow Martha Zimmer’s barn, Lynnie is caught by the institution’s staff and dragged back to the corrupt school, leaving the child in the widow’s care. Homan flees, and suddenly the little family’s chance for happiness seems to vanish. But Lynnie, Homan, Martha and baby Julia—along with social worker Kate—have a permanent connection that leads them on a 40-year journey to repair what has been broken. Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective, and we watch as the individuals find the confidence to somehow make their way back to each other.

The Story of Beautiful Girl makes a beeline for the heartstrings in capturing a seemingly impossible love story—and the secret pact that makes it so unforgettable.

Rachel Simon, who gained critical acclaim for her best-selling memoir Riding the Bus with My Sister, graces readers with an illuminating and affecting view into a unique and misunderstood love.

— C a t D . Acr e e

YOU ARE FREE

By Danzy Senna Riverhead $15, 240 pages ISBN 9781594485077 eBook available

through giving up her social life in order to “care” for the dog. In “What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?” an interracial couple with a new baby struggles to interact with their neighbors (also interracial with a child) whose reverse racism and odd parenting methods ultimately put them at war with one another. And in the eerie opening story “Admission,” tensions mount between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to an elite private Los Angeles preschool, which they applied to on a whim.

Senna—having received stellar praise for her novel Symptomatic— is no stranger to exploring women in stages of pre- and post-motherhood. Her analysis of the mother—tethered down by children, responsibilities, dogs and jobs—is swiftly counterbalanced by the single woman, weighed down by work, relationships and the looming prospect of having children. In the end, the question of who exactly is free applies to all of the women within these stories, making the reader pause and wonder what it is they long to be free from.

—Megan Fishmann

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

By Patrick deWitt Ecco $24.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062041265 eBook available

Western

Short stories

Although Danzy Senna is primarily known as a novelist, literary critics should sit up and take notice of her arrival as a short story writer.

With her superb collection You Are Free, Senna emerges with insightful stories that explore gender, race and motherhood.

A female protagonist links each of the stories in You Are Free; what makes them most interesting is the fact that not all of these characters are likable ones. In the powerful “The Land of Beulah,” a woman takes out her frustration from a failed relationship by abusing her new puppy, which she justifies

Readers of The Sisters Brothers will hardly be surprised to learn that it has been optioned for a film. After all, the fast-paced, gun-slinging Western is cinematic in scope, while its terse and comically stilted dialogue is reminiscent of recent film homages like No Country for Old Men and True Grit.

But Patrick deWitt’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut Ablutions is also a thrilling, smart and surprisingly touching read—the kind of book that translates to the big screen precisely because it’s so visual and visceral.

The brothers of the book’s title are Eli and Charlie Sisters, professional hit men who travel the frontier carrying out the underhanded orders of their enigmatic boss, an

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reviews off-screen baron known only by the name “The Commodore.” At the novel’s start, The Commodore sends them to assassinate Hermann Warm, a man whose crimes neither trouble nor interest the pair. They know only their assignment, and set out from Oregon City in search of their target.

As the brothers make their way through Indian Territory, prospectors’ campsites, noisy whorehouses and finally into the heart of California Gold Rush country, the two emerge as very different men.

Charlie, the oldest, is a bloodthirsty alcoholic, content to live by the laws of the Wild West and without remorse for his deeds. Meanwhile, Eli, the novel’s thoughtful and funny narrator, proves a more sensitive soul—exhausted and conflicted by his way of life, befuddled yet entranced by women, self-conscious about his rotund physique and touchingly delighted by his most recent acquisition: a toothbrush.

Though the book is more

“An expert at good old-fashioned, gimmick-free storytelling.”

—Steve Berry

NOW IN PAPERBACK Look for Trader of Secrets, the new Paul Madriani hardcover.

On sale May 31st.

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HarperCollins.com

FICTION episodic (think murderous trappers, gold-gathering schemes and encounters with bears) than plot-heavy, it is always compelling and surprising. When the brothers finally come upon their mark, he is hardly what they expected. Luckily they’re in the habit of rolling with the punches—a technique that will cause readers to follow suit.

—J i l l i a n Q u i n t

THE GREAT NIGHT

By Chris Adrian FSG $26, 304 pages ISBN 9780374166410 eBook available

literary fiction

joy or ruin.”

Over the course of the evening the human and faerie worlds collide in a series of tragicomic encounters. Into that account, Adrian patiently stitches the moving backstories of his human protagonists, exploring the tragedies that have upended their lives, forcing them to confront their own losses and the universality of human suffering.

The novel’s episodic, at times frustratingly obscure plot is balanced by the strength of Adrian’s imagination, rendering the world of the faeries and the realm they cohabit with the humans for this single night in wild, often fantastic detail. Think of The Great Night as a triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch: riotous, occasionally inscrutable and yet consistently stimulating.

—Harvey Freedenberg

Joining a distinguished list of predecessors who’ve re-imagined Shakespeare’s work, in his third novel, Chris Adrian, one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” offers a contemporary version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. It’s a lively, bawdy and at times perplexing tale that pulsates between fantasy and reality to explore the themes of loss and grief.

On a mid-June night, the faerie queen Titania, deep in mourning for a son she had seized from the human world who’s now dead of leukemia, and abandoned by her husband Oberon, impulsively frees the trickster Puck. In the fogshrouded park where he and his companions work their mischief, they come upon three troubled humans searching for a party none is eager to attend: Henry, a pediatrician whose lover, Bobby, has left him; Will, an arborist, similarly haunted by his girlfriend Carolina’s decision to end their relationship; and Molly, a former divinity student whose boyfriend has committed suicide. All of these characters are connected in unexpected and meaningful ways. Contributing to the chaos and complication is the presence of a group of homeless people rehearsing a production of Soylent Green, intending to dramatize their belief that the mayor of San Francisco is attempting to reduce their population by turning them into food. It’s a complex stew, ensuring a night that “would end in

TABLOID CITY

By Pete Hamill Little, Brown $26.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780316020756 Audio, eBook available

tary are ruthlessly murdered.

As the night and following day progress, Hamill weaves these seemingly unrelated stories together in a cohesive narrative, showing both the deep chasms and the uncanny connections between the city’s many threads. He writes with an almost cinematic flair, evoking films like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Paul Haggis’ Crash, and as with those movies, the links in the story can at times feel overwhelmingly coincidental, while characters and neighborhoods border on cliché. But despite these flaws, Hamill is, as always, a consummate storyteller, and his prose vibrates with raw energy. With a little suspension of disbelief, Tabloid City is an exciting, thought-provoking read.

—Rebecca Shapiro

THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN

By Siri Hustvedt Picador $14, 192 pages ISBN 9780312570606

Literary fiction

fiction

Few authors are as synonymous with New York City as Pete Hamill, so it is fitting that the Brooklynbred darling of The Post and The Daily News returns with a story as frenetic, complicated, harrowing and alive as his beloved town.

We begin Tabloid City at midnight with Sam Briscoe, an aging editor of a daily newspaper, putting the next day’s afternoon edition to bed. But the night is far from over in the city that never sleeps, and anything could happen before the ink hits the page. In the depths of Brooklyn, a young woman cries out for her mother as she suffers the throes of childbirth alone. A legless veteran of the Iraq War wheels through the Upper East Side looking for a place to sleep. An angry young terrorist plots a desperate, defiant act. A cop heading home to an empty house has the terrible instinct that something is dreadfully wrong. And after an elegant dinner party, a socialite—Sam Briscoe’s girlfriend—and her longtime secre-

When Mia Fredrickson’s husband of 30 years asks for a “pause” in their marriage while he pursues a relationship with a much younger colleague, Mia enters a tailspin that ends with her recovering in a psychiatric ward. Fleeing from a life that is no longer her own, she slinks back to her childhood hometown.

Finding strength in the place where she first took root, Mia takes additional solace in the presence of her mother, who lives in a nearby extended care facility, and her young neighbor Lola, who juggles raising two young children with the demands of her fractious marriage, and in teaching poetry to a group of 13-year-old girls. As Mia slowly ensconces herself in the lives of those around her, she takes the time to reflect on where she has been and where she is headed; what results is a mesmerizing and powerful meditation on marriage, the differences between the sexes, aging and what it means to be a woman.

The Summer Without Men is Siri Hustvedt’s fifth novel, and a truly breathtaking one at that. Borrowing

from science, philosophy, poetry and literature, Hustvedt boldly burrows deep into the feminine psyche, exposing the dark doubts and insecurities we all keep locked deep inside. Mia’s candid musings on the cruelty of young girls alongside the harsh reality of growing old are unflinchingly honest, and Hustvedt’s bravery in presenting an unvarnished portrait of the “fairer sex” is exhilarating.

Late in The Summer Without Men, Mia suggests that “there is no human subject outside the purview of literature,” a principle embodied by this very novel. Rich with both the pleasures and sorrows that make life complete, this is a powerful and provocative novel that will have astute readers reconsidering where exactly the boundaries between truth and fiction lie.

—Stephenie Harrison

THE REALM OF HUNGRY SPIRITS

By Lorraine López Grand Central $13.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780446549639 eBook available

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people out of her house. In a way, Marina fails in her search for a spiritual center, instead discovering what she really believes in: the lives of others.

The characters in The Realm of Hungry Spirits, while permanently connected to one another, battle tooth and nail over just about everything: women against machismo, family against family. Each person attempts to apply his or her own solutions, and the book’s religious and spiritual wingspan is seemingly unlimited, touching on Buddhism, Christianity and Latino mythology reminiscent of stories by Sandra Cisneros. Were it not for López’s humor in the face of unflinching pain and humanity, the novel could come across as angry—or even hopeless. Fortunately, Marina’s world, despite all its flaws and chaos, is as tight as a woven water basket, and it not only gives new life to the broken but also feeds her own hungry spirit.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

IN ZANESVILLE

By Jo Ann Beard Little, Brown $23.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780316084475 Audio, eBook available

Debut fiction

PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Lorraine López, author of the critically acclaimed The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters, has a talent for crafting characters so fleshed out that they could be your sister, your neighbor, your best friend. The Realm of Hungry Spirits introduces Marina Lucero to the list of fierce Latina heroines whom López has brought to life, and Marina’s humor and begrudging kindness are what make her so very unforgettable.

Marina has one goal, and it is for peace—peace of mind and peace in her house. The daughter of a meditating, womanizing father and a mother who deserted her for a Carmelite convent, Marina feels a close connection to the spiritual realm, but for some reason it eludes her. It doesn’t help that her little home is the go-to for the brokenhearted, the beaten and the world-weary men and women of the San Fernando Valley. She’s Marina, not “Maria” and not some kind of spiritual guide, but she finds it nearly impossible to keep

The protagonist in Jo Ann Beard’s debut novel, In Zanesville, is one we’ve met before. The unnamed 14-year-old narrator is reminiscent of Lee Fiora in Prep, Eveline in Anthropology of an American Girl and writer Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake). But she’s seemingly sourced from every girl’s childhood.

There are the disastrous babysitting escapades the teen and her best friend Felicia, who feign British accents, find themselves in; the horrible and oh-so-familiar feeling when a clique of popular girls leave her at a slumber party to meet, ugh, boys; and the three feral kittens the besties hide in a camper, much to their mothers’ chagrin.

So goes In Zanesville: The story of a few months in a 1970s adolescent’s life is so accurately portrayed, the dialogue so precisely rendered, the inner monologue

q&a

LORRAINE LÓPEZ

come together now

T

he latest novel from PEN/Faulkner nominee Lorraine López revolves around a lost young woman who hopes to find peace and purpose by opening her Southern California home to wayward souls.

What inspired this story about spiritual and religious wanderings?

Curiosity. I write about what intrigues or perplexes me in order to gain a better grasp on what is at first elusive to me. I’ve noticed how certain people seem to gain greater serenity and equanimity through faith. In the novel, I pursue my curiosity about that through the protagonist who feels shut out from the realm of spirituality. For her, spiritual faith is like music she can’t hear or a work of art she’s unable to see. Her life is hectic and demanding, so she’s also after the peace of mind that spiritual people appear to enjoy.

How did you create Marina— the wisecracking, confused heroine forcing herself to try to be a lighthouse in chaos?

Marina’s voice came to me first, and it was an insistent voice that guided me into the story. Usually, I will draft fiction on my computer, but for the early chapters of this novel, that voice insisted on dictating to me while I wrote in longhand. And the voice led me to create Marina’s character, a reluctant benefactress who paradoxically strives for both peace of mind and the well-being of others. These traits were inspired for me by my oldest sister, who is well known in her community for being the go-to person for people who have problems. Though unflappably good to others, my sister has a biting wit and a sharp and profane tongue that provides a nice edge to her nurturing nature.

Why did you set your novel in a splintered community?

I have to say that I don’t perceive it as especially splintered. To me, the community in the novel is much more cohesive than, say, the middle-class suburban Nashville neighborhood in which I now live. In Marina’s community, members rely on and support one another in multiple ways. Beyond the novel, and despite negative

© louis A. siegel

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stereotypes about Latino communities, these can be exceptionally cohesive and cooperative networks that provide practical help and emotional support to their members. In fact, writers from other cultural groups have expressed to me their regret that they do not have the same community that Latino authors sustain and benefit from. To my thinking, we are a communityoriented people. Of course, we have conflict as regularly as any other group, but in my experience, this is not a splintered community, and I have chosen to set the novel in this community because it portrays what I have experienced living most of my early life among Latinos in Southern California—to me, it feels real and true.

One of the book’s big “lessons” is to let tormentors be the teachers. How did this become one of the novel’s messages?

This is the Dalai Lama’s message, and I must confess—like Marina in the novel—I don’t always grasp it as I should, especially on the highway when some other driver behaves rudely, though it is a powerful and illuminating perspective that I would like to maintain. I must also admit that I have limited attention for reading that does not contain a narrative, so self-help and spiritual books don’t sustain my interest beyond a page or two. But this idea appeared in a book by the Dalai Lama, and it jumped out at me, anchoring in my long-term memory and re-emerging when I was creating Marina and articulating her self-defining challenge.

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reviews so painfully evocative that the reader plainly remembers being the late-blooming teen herself.

The book isn’t nostalgic, because Beard doesn’t write as an adult recalling how she thinks she felt way back when. Instead, the novel reads like a diary of a girl’s 14th year, complete with the dual terror and delight of a possible phone call from a boy and the gut-wrenching discovery of parents’ flawed humanity.

Beard’s narrator is eclectic, thoughtful, witty, imaginative and constantly trying to catch up to her peers, who already seem to know how the world works. The novel is as aching as “The Wonder Years,” but instead of following Kevin and Winnie, the book celebrates the relationship between two misfit best friends. To read In Zanesville is to step back in time—revisiting the bitter and the sweet memories we all share.

—Katie Lewis

22 BRITANNIA ROAD

By Amanda Hodgkinson Viking/Pamela Dorman $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780670022632 eBook available

debut fiction

FICTION sounds. Silvana is fiercely protective of him, as he is the only thing she has left from Poland and their years of deprivation. As she travels to England, she worries about how Janusz will react to her—“the ghost of the wife he once had.”

Janusz worries, too, about whether they will ever be able to be a family again. He had a lover in France who, though killed in the war, he knows he can never forget.

Of Janusz, Hodgkinson writes, “He can understand nothing of the last six years . . . the way he left Warsaw and didn’t go back . . . the love he feels for another woman.” He knows he can never share this with Silvana, but he also knows he must try, so he buys a small house at 22 Britannia Road in Ipswich, plants an English garden and hopes they can somehow morph into a typical English family once reunited.

Hodgkinson moves back and forth in time between Poland, France and Ipswich, adeptly juxtaposing poetic descriptions of their pre-war lives with horrific memories from their years spent apart.

This moving tale of what war has wrought on one family captures the reader from beginning to end, when these flawed characters finally come to their own fragile peace.

—Deborah Donovan

THE YEAR WE LEFT HOME

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The rippling effects of war lie at the heart of Amanda Hodgkinson’s haunting debut novel, as one fractured family tries to build a new life together while each member struggles to bury memories from the past.

As 22 Britannia Road opens, Silvana Nowak, a 27-year-old Polish woman, and her son Aurek are on a boat to England where her husband Janusz awaits them. They have been apart for six years, since Aurek was one. Janusz joined the Polish army at the start of WWII, lost his regiment and ended up first in France, then England, where the RAF helped him locate the family he left behind.

Silvana and Aurek have spent most of the past six years hiding in the forests outside Warsaw, afraid to return there after the Germans arrived. Aurek has become a feral child, fearful around strangers and speaking with animal and bird

By Jean Thompson Simon & Schuster $25, 336 pages ISBN 9781439175880 Audio, eBook available

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of a central role in the story. Readers become intimately acquainted with Ryan, Blake, Anita and Torrie as they experience all of life’s stages. Thompson’s nuanced prose echoes each of their distinct voices as she explores the most heartbreaking times in all four characters’ lives.

Ryan, endowed with good looks and brains, leaves the nest with aspirations outside the rural Midwestern perimeter. For most of the book, readers reside with him after he’s landed in Chicago. Ryan struggles with an undercurrent of guilt: He has lost connection to his roots since leaving home, and there are moral missteps, marital skirmishes and paternal responsibilities that weigh heavily on him.

Meanwhile Blake, a carpenter, Anita, a housewife, and the youngest, Torrie, who is forever changed after a tragic accident, remain close to their roots. Although they have the luxury of familial support, they only lean on one another in the worst times.

Thompson paints a compelling, realistic picture of four siblings slugging through issues such as alcoholism, infidelity and handicaps in The Year We Left Home. Thompson tackles the stuff of real life, and it’s clear that she has great compassion for her characters.

Their gut-wrenching, honest inner monologues and resilience imbue them with humanity. Readers will undoubtedly see slivers of themselves in this flawed family, and while the content in The Year We Left Home may be heavy, it’s not without an occasional glimpse of a silver lining.

—Lizza Connor Bowen

BULLFIGHTING Jean Thompson’s poignant The Year We Left Home chronicles life as it unfolds for the Erickson family over a span of 30 years. The book begins in Iowa circa 1973. The novel’s matriarch and patriarch are salt-of-the-earth folks, each of their four children “some gradation of blonde, long-boned Nordic-ness.”

Servant-hearted and fiercely loyal to family who abide in the area, Mom and Dad are subtly written into the background as Thompson narrates the passing years.

As the parents gray with age and irrelevancy in the lives of their children, their progeny play more

By Roddy Doyle Viking $25.95, 224 pages ISBN 9780670022878 eBook available

Short stories

has also written nine novels. The stories here are largely focused on aging men who are coping with the loss of family, the breakdown of the body and the disintegration of marriages.

As moribund as the collection sounds, each story is imparted with brilliant moments of joy— or at least an understanding by the characters about the general malaise of their lives. Doyle’s characters express gratitude for small moments of happiness, however insipid—or temporary—they may seem.

In “Ash,” Kevin is struggling to understand why his wife repeatedly shows up at the house after saying she is leaving him. He spends a week trying to figure out if his marriage is really ending, largely in council with his brother, mostly via text message.

One morning Kevin calls the family down to see the eruption of the Icelandic volcano on the news. As they watch, his daughter asks him what ash is. Kevin realizes that she couldn’t have any concept of ash (the burners are electric, the fireplace is gas, there is no devout Catholicism in the schools anymore). As he explains ash as best he can to her, Kevin and his wife smile at one another. It is the first warm moment between the two in a long time, and a good example of Doyle’s style, in which a moment of beauty, nearly inexpressible in its simplicity, arises and overwhelms a mundane reality.

Bullfighting is a contemporary collection, touching on the 2010 volcano, the current recession and modern forms of communication.

Still, the characters are timeless Irishmen, adrift in a subtly modern world. The use of the modern in this type of realism can often be either jarring or absent; in Bullfighting, Doyle grounds the stories in the present while remaining faithful to the classical realism he so adeptly employs. With this collection, Doyle is operating in the same mode as Chekhov and Raymond Carver—and with comparable mastery.

—J o n a t h a n S t o n e P h i ll i p s

Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting is a collection of short stories that portrays a contemporary Ireland with touching, dialogue-heavy realism. This is the second collection of stories from Doyle, who

Read more reviews at BookPage.com

reviews Lost in Shangri-La

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Plane crash in paradise R e v i e w b y E d w a r d M o rr i s

It started as a Sunday afternoon lark and developed into one of the strangest survival stories of WWII. On May 13, 1945, a group of American soldiers—among them several members of the Women’s Army Corps— boarded a twin-engine C-47 in Hollandia, New Guinea, intending to do a brief flyover of a remote valley located high in the island’s central mountains. With luck, they’d be back in time for dinner.

A year earlier, an American pilot had spotted the lush valley and the tribes that inhabited it. The natives were so visibly excited when his plane swept in low above them that he concluded they had never seen an aircraft before. He also surmised that they might be headhunters or cannibals. News of his discovery spread quickly, and soon others were lining up to take the tour. To some, the valley’s beauty and inaccessibility brought to mind the mountain-fringed paradise James Hilton described in his 1933

By Mitchell Zuckoff, Harper, $26.99, 400 pages novel Lost Horizon. Hilton called his valley “Shangri-La.” ISBN 9780061988349, eBook available Less than an hour into the flight, the pilot miscalculated the C-47’s altitude and flew it into the side of a mountain. Three of the 24 on board survived: Lieutenant John McCollom, Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker and Corporal Margaret Hastings. Drawing on a wealth of documents and personal recollections, author Mitchell Zuckoff has reconstructed an almost hour-by-hour narrative of how the survivors, two of whom are seriously wounded, descend the mountain into the mythical valley, deal with the suspicious but generally friendly natives and eventually aid in their own perilous escape from Shangri-La. A lot of readers are going to fall in love with Hastings. Thirty years old at the time of the crash, she is smart, flirtatious, fearless and gorgeous, a thoroughly modern woman even by today’s standards. It is a joy witnessing how adroitly she holds her own in situations normally controlled by men. Zuckoff’s impressive research includes dozens of photographs of the survivors and those involved in their rescue. He even makes a pilgrimage to the valley—now a much-violated Eden—to interview tribespeople who were children when the strange trio first hobbled into their midst. Lost in Shangri-La is a movie waiting to be made.

THE READING PROMISE

By Alice Ozma Grand Central $24.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780446583770 eBook available

MEMOIR

Alice Ozma grew up with a single father who was a dedicated elementary school librarian. Even her two middle names, under which she writes, testify to a love of children’s literature. So it wasn’t out of character when the two decided to formalize their nightly reading sessions into an attempt at reading aloud for 100 consecutive nights.

When that was handily completed, “The Streak” grew . . . and grew . . . and eventually continued for eight years, until Ozma started college.

The Reading Promise is a memoir woven from the stories they shared.

Some of the book’s funniest moments stem from the pair’s commitment to get their reading session in by midnight: Ozma’s father might have to pull her from a late theater rehearsal and recite from Harry Potter by streetlight, or barely whisper when he had laryngitis. It’s both funny and touching when he tries to protect her from a book’s frank discussion of puberty by reducing it down to “all the stuff,” having one character add, “Yes, I already know about that so we don’t need to talk about it.” Generally obedient, Ozma nevertheless sneaks into her father’s room later to read the chapter, laughing at his censorship of a completely age-appropriate and informative passage.

After Ozma leaves for college, her father suffers a setback when his school decides to eliminate its reading program and replace the library’s books with computers. He tries to keep the program in place, since it serves poor children who may struggle to attain basic literacy without it, but is overruled and

ends up leaving the school—and finding a new audience as a reader in retirement homes.

The Reading Promise is a sweet tribute to a devoted single parent and a powerful reminder of the bond that shared stories can create.

—Heather Seggel

SIDEWAYS ON A SCOOTER

By Miranda Kennedy Random House $26, 352 pages ISBN 9781400067862 eBook available

TRAVEL

professional living away from her family who alternated between Indian and Western clothes.

Unsurprisingly, Geeta’s life turned out to be more complex than it initially seemed. Yes, she aspired to Western-style independence.

But she also had strong ties to the traditional Indian culture of family, religion, caste, regional identity and female subservience. Her internal conflicts culminated in her search for an appropriate “boy”: Should she let her parents arrange her marriage? Or should she find her own true love?

Sideways on a Scooter is partly a memoir about Kennedy’s comingof-age experience in India during this century’s first decade. But the heart of the book is her sensitive depiction of Geeta and her other Delhi friends, Indian women facing the challenges of a society that is fitfully becoming an often confusing amalgam of South Asian tradition and Western “modernity.” Another friend, Parvati, was frighteningly unconventional by Indian standards, an unmarried career woman in a semi-open longterm relationship, while Radha and Maneesh, Kennedy’s servants, had lives constricted by poverty, caste and discrimination against women.

Kennedy learned something from each of them as she coped with her own romantic complications.

Kennedy is candid and evenhanded, showing readers both the splendid side of Indian culture and those aspects that many Americans will find difficult to accept, and the outcome is mostly hopeful. Of course, Geeta did eventually find a husband. But the journey had as many intriguing twists as one of her beloved Bollywood movies.

—Anne Bartlett

To End All Wars

By Adam Hochschild HMH $28, 480 pages ISBN 9780618758289 Audio available

HISTORY

When Miranda Kennedy, an American public radio correspondent in India, first made friends with the Delhi neighbor whom she calls “Geeta,” the young woman seemed to personify the new urban India: a college-educated, single

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild pairs an account of British soldiers at war in France during World War I with a report of the

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reviews efforts of pacifists and war resisters back home in England. The result is a book that is powerful in its detail and that engenders a gut-level understanding of the terrible disruptive impact of war in the field and at home.

The so-called “War to End All Wars” turns out to have been anything but, for in its ending lay the seeds of World War II. The death toll of that second total war was higher than the first but, as Hochschild clearly shows, it was only technologically and morally possible because of the first, whose scale of carnage—futile, needless carnage at that—had simply been unimaginable before.

What makes To End All Wars so moving, so convincing and so readable is that Hochschild, who also wrote King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains, grounds his narrative in the lives of a fascinating array of historical personalities, ranging from Rudyard Kipling, who glorified the war and lost a son to it, to Emmeline Pankhurst, a feminist and anti-war activist who changed sides and alienated her activist daughter. Among the most interesting and telling of these personalities was anti-war activist Charlotte Despard, who continued to love and support her brother, John French, an ambitious military officer “who was destined to lead the largest army Britain had ever put in the field.”

Near the end of his book, Hochschild notes that “the conflict is usually portrayed as an unmitigated catastrophe,” but recently some historians have begun to argue that the war was necessary. Readers of To End All Wars will surely beg to differ.

—Alden Mudge

READING MY FATHER

By Alexandra Styron Scribner $25, 304 pages ISBN 9781416591795 Audio, eBook available

MEMOIR

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On October 31, 2006, the great novelist William Styron died, surrounded by members of his family who tried to ease his journey into

NONFICTION the life beyond. For Alexandra Styron, his youngest daughter, this deathbed scene might just as easily have been his family’s attempt to help him write the ending to his story, a “great yarn, furiously told, urgent and grand.” In Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron offers her own riveting tale, similarly “urgent and grand,” of growing up in the ambivalently loving Styron household, in the shadow of the celebrated author of Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Styron’s elegant reflections are as much a search for her father and a memorial to his life and work as they are a quest for redemption, forgiveness or closure. Following her father’s death, Styron goes to Duke University in search of his papers, especially his unfinished manuscript, titled The Way of the Warrior. William Styron had intended this World War II story to explore his own ambivalence about the glory and honor associated with patriotic service, raising questions about the Vietnam conflict in much the same way that The Confessions of Nat Turner raised questions about civil rights.

He put aside the manuscript, however, after he awoke from a powerful dream about a woman, a Holocaust survivor, whom he had met in Brooklyn as a young man.

Very quickly he began work on Sophie’s Choice and set aside The Way of the Warrior.

This unfinished manuscript acts as Alexandra’s madeleine, leading her into extended reflections on her relationship to her father and the celebrated family in which she grew up. She remembers that dinners at her house were magical affairs with guests from Philip Roth and Arthur Miller to Mike Nichols and Leonard Bernstein. She recalls her father’s deep slide into depression and her early bewilderment at his mood swings. After 1985, and his own chronicle of his depression, Darkness Visible, William Styron found himself sinking further and further into a depression from which he would never recover.

Alexandra Styron’s electrifying memoir reveals her father’s heroic struggles with the black dog of depression, but it also offers us a glimpse of the ways that his daughter so ably mitigated her father’s illness in her own days with him.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

A BITTERSWEET SEASON

By Jane Gross Knopf $26.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780307271822 eBook available

the onset of old age with sagacity and sensitivity, and readers will find it valuable whether they are caring for themselves or their parents, or hoping to make the road to aging less treacherous for future generations.

—J o h n T. S l a n i a

aging

DAVID CROCKETT

A Bittersweet Season is a cautionary tale for every generation. It is a story about aging, told through the eyes of author Jane Gross as she watches her mother grow old.

The book offers enlightening, often alarming information for the elderly; for adult children responsible for taking care of their aging parents; and finally, for younger generations who face a grim future, as money is running out for Social Security.

For sure, A Bittersweet Season deals with a sobering topic. But the narrative is so lively and informative that readers will come away feeling more prepared than pessimistic. Gross doesn’t wallow in self-pity; instead, as she chronicles her elderly mother’s journey from independence to assisted living to a nursing home, she provides broader information about each step in the aging process, so that A Bittersweet Season becomes both a memoir and a how-to book on aging.

As Gross navigates a difficult journey with her mother, she acquires knowledge that she shares with readers. Among her tips: Don’t be impressed by the fancy décors of upscale nursing homes; they are designed to impress family members but do nothing to enhance the care of patients. Pay more attention to the size and qualifications of the staff. She also offers advice on navigating the insurance and government entitlement maze, choosing the best doctors and surviving the emotional rollercoaster of having to care for an elderly parent.

A gifted and experienced journalist, Jane Gross has been providing this kind of insightful writing for many years as a reporter for The New York Times, and most recently as the founder of a Times blog titled The New Old Age. As the nation’s 77 million Baby Boomers approach retirement age, A Bittersweet Season is just the book they need to read.

It is an intelligent guide to handling

By Michael Wallis Norton $27.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780393067583 Audio available

BIOGRAPHY

One of America’s first celebrity heroes, David Crockett (as he always wrote his name) declared in his autobiography, “I stood no chance to become great in any other way than by accident.” He was born into a poor family and grew up in harsh circumstances in the back woods. As chance would have it, however, he became a mythical figure in his own lifetime, and the myth has continued to grow since his death as a martyr at the Alamo in 1836.

Crockett first became legendary for his expertise and passion as a hunter and masterful storyteller, and then later in life as a populist member of the Tennessee state legislature and the U.S. Congress.

In the authoritative, fast-paced and very readable David Crockett: Lion of the West, Michael Wallis adroitly separates fact from fiction and shows us both the flawed human being who led a colorful life and the symbolic figure who represented the poor and downtrodden as well as the country’s philosophy of “Manifest Destiny” (a concept that did not have an official name until after his death).

As one of Crockett’s early hunting companions characterized him, he was “an itchy footed sort of fellow,” always ready to move on and take the next risk, without much concern for his family. His first wife died soon after they married and his second wife, Elizabeth, grew tired of her husband’s failure to keep the family out of debt and put the blame on his poor business judgment, his strong inclination to drink and his inability to cultivate

any kind of spiritual life.

Of particular interest here is Wallis’ discussion of Crockett’s political career. He was a new kind of politician, a backwoodsman wanting to help people like himself who had not been able to purchase property of their own. He offered a contrast to his fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, who presented himself as a populist but was really a patrician with large holdings in land, cotton, tobacco and slaves.

As a legislator, Crockett was independent and frequently at odds with members of his party, a stance exemplified by his vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Although Crockett had fought alongside Jackson in the Creek Indian War, he was one of the few men in government to oppose him. In doing so, he voted against a president from his own political party, all other members of the Tennessee congressional delegation and the vast majority of his constituents. Years later Crockett wrote that his opposition was a matter of conscience and described the bill as “oppression with a vengeance.” Some of his critics claimed that he was motivated by his escalating hatred of Jackson and the favorable attention Crockett was receiving from the Whig Party, which saw him as a possible presidential candidate. Overall, in fact, his refusal to compromise made him an ineffective legislator.

Wallis, author of acclaimed biographies such as Billy the Kid and Pretty Boy, has given readers a superb account of the real David Crockett, helping us to appreciate his place and time in American history.

—Roger Bishop

A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION

By William Deresiewicz Penguin Press $25.95, 272 pages ISBN 9781594202889 eBook available

MEMOIR

Equal parts sentimental education and literary guidebook, William Deresiewicz’s enjoyable memoir about coming of age through reading Jane Austen’s novels offers

life lessons from which any reader could benefit. Discovering Austen as a callow graduate student, Deresiewicz finds himself surprised and humbled by her intelligence, and ultimately changed forever by her insight into “everything that matters.”

Emma is the tool of his conversion: Reading it for the first time, Deresiewicz finds himself bored and irritated by the endless discussions of card parties and neighborhood matters, identifying with Emma Woodhouse’s disdain for the provincial town of Highbury. But when Emma insults the scatterbrained Miss Bates at a picnic, Deresiewicz has his “a-ha” moment: Emma’s cruelty mirrors his own, and Austen knows it. Therefore, Emma’s lesson in humility must also be his own; both must learn to appreciate the “minute particulars,” those apparently trivial details that make up the fabric of real life.

With Jane Austen as his teacher, Deresiewicz learns from Pride and Prejudice that growing up is a never-ending process; from Mansfield Park that truly listening to other people’s stories is the best way to be helpful to them; and from Persuasion the importance of building a community of friends. Vignettes from Deresiewicz’s life and episodes from Austen’s biography are seamlessly interwoven with discussions of the novels, beautifully illustrating the interdependence of reading, writing and real life. Whether it is the challenge of gaining distance from his overbearing father, the temptations of friendship with wealthy, idle people or the pursuit of forreal adult love, Deresiewicz turns to Jane Austen as a wise and kind, if occasionally tart, teacher/aunt/ elder. This is a fresh and appealing take on the coming-of-age memoir, pleasurably demonstrating that books really can change your life.

Deresiewicz is an award-winning literary critic and a former professor of English at Yale University. It is sure proof of his literary talent that A Jane Austen Education is so eminently readable, both substantive and entertaining. I found myself galloping through it, inspired to turn back to Jane Austen myself to see what lessons her novels have for me.

—Catherine Hollis

q&a

WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

a sentimental education

L

iterary critic William Deresiewicz discusses his charming new memoir, A Jane Austen Education, and Austen’s timeless appeal.

Your book describes a series of “life lessons” you learned by reading Jane Austen. Do you think Austen intended to embed these lessons in her novels?

Definitely. As someone once said, she was a moralist without being moralistic. She didn’t preach, but she wanted to teach by example. The examples are what happens to her heroines.

The lessons Austen imparted are the ones they learn themselves.

Their stories are about learning to live better, and we’re supposed to get the idea, too.

Why do you think it was Austen who brought about these changes in you, and not another writer?

Partly it was simply a matter of timing. I discovered Austen at an age when I was probably ready to start learning these things, and through a professor in whose company I was eager to learn. But I also think it’s Austen.

For reasons that I still don’t fully understand, she just spoke to me in a way that no other novelist ever has. There’s something intensely personal about her writing, which is why so many people feel they have a personal relationship with it. You feel like she’s talking directly to you.

What drew you to write this hybrid of memoir and literary criticism for a general audience, as opposed to your scholarly work on Austen?

I’ve been writing about literature for a general audience for a long time, as a book critic.

The memoir part is new for me, though, and it’s been an interesting challenge: a technical challenge to blend the two and a personal challenge to be so candid in such a public way. The second part is a little frightening.

As for why I decided to write the book this way, well, the idea was to convey the lessons I learned by reading Jane Austen, and I realized pretty quickly that the best way to do that would be to actually talk about the way I learned them.

© Studio3dotcom

NONFICTION

Jane Austen taught you moral seriousness, how to be an adult and, ultimately, how to love.

What would you like your book to convey to its audience?

First, that her books aren’t just soap operas and aren’t just fun— though of course they’re incredibly fun—they also have a lot of serious and important and very wise things to say. Second, that they aren’t just about romance.

And finally, that they aren’t just for women. I would love it if the book helped introduce more men to her work. Maybe people could get it for their boyfriends/ husbands/brothers.

What advice do you think Jane Austen would give to a contemporary single woman in want of a relationship?

Ha! Great question. The first thing I think she would say is, don’t settle. Then, marry for the right reasons: for love, not for money or appearances or expectations. But most importantly, don’t fall for all the romantic clichés about Romeo and Juliet and love at first sight. For Austen, love came from the mind as well as the heart. She didn’t believe you could fall in love with someone until you knew them, and then what you fell in love with was their character more than anything else, whether they were a good person and also an interesting one. So I guess that means, date someone for a while before you commit, and don’t get so carried away by your feelings that you forget to give a good hard look at who they are.

Do you think Jane Austen still has more to teach you?

Absolutely. Every time I read her books I learn something new.

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children’s books

HELEN FROST Interview by Sharon Verbeten

© James D. Gabbard

a story that’s More than meets the eye

S

ometimes it’s hard to discern what lies behind the façade of a young girl. Take Wren and Darra, the characters in Helen Frost’s intriguing new novel, Hidden. While they have never actually met, these girls share a secret that unites them—a secret that they’ve kept, individually, for years.

After reading just the first two pages of Frost’s novel-in-poems, young readers will be drawn into the vivid tale that unfolds, written alternately from Wren’s and Darra’s points of view. Their perspectives offer an inside look at how one moment in time, one unfortunate act, can both bind and alter many lives collectively.

Presenting those two perspectives was the challenge for Frost, who has cleverly woven such intricate details and dialogue into many of her past novels. And it’s a challenge she takes seriously. “It’s very important, and I try to get it right,” says Frost, an award-winning poet who won a 2004 Michael L. Printz Honor for her YA novel-in-verse, Keesha’s House.

As Hidden unfolds, Darra’s abusive unemployed father steals a minivan, not realizing young Wren is in the back. When Darra guesses that Wren is hiding in her family’s garage, she’s torn between helping the young girl she has never met (and seen only on TV news reports) and protecting her father.

The ensuing fear, confusion and uncertainty—experienced by both Wren and Darra—are vocalized through first-person accounts by the two eight-year-old girls. Wren’s insights, written in carefully crafted stanzas, make up the first third of the book. The second section illuminates Darra’s angst about

Hidden

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By Helen Frost, FSG, $16.99 160 pages, ISBN 9780374382216, ages 10 to 14

the event, coupled with the blame she puts on Wren for her father’s eventual arrest. The denouement, which comes six years later when Wren and Darra unexpectedly meet at summer camp, brings all the memories, confusion, blame and turmoil to a head.

While some authors start with an event or a kernel of a plot for a novel, Frost instead allowed her compelling characters to take her in a direction she never expected to go.

“In this one, I really started with the characters,” Frost says during a call to her home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had this idea that this family, Wren and her brother, were going to go to the Isle of Barra” (the setting in Frost’s 2006 book The Braid).

But soon, Wren’s character became quiet, withdrawn and overshadowed by her brother. Frost began to envision that something must have happened to Wren to spark her silence.

“It became a very different story,” Frost says. “After I started telling the story, Darra kind of poked her head in. She wasn’t there until six or seven versions of the story went by.

I had to keep asking myself questions.”

While the story changed, one thing remained consistent: Frost’s impeccable talent for creating novels in the form of poetry. She says that after she wrote The Braid, where form also plays an important role, “I felt like anything was possible with language. Language itself helps tell the story.”

Language definitely helps to convey the story of Hidden, with each girl’s words captured in a different format. “There were hidden elements of each girl’s life,” Frost says.

“The language itself works to bring the two stories together.”

To relay Wren’s experience, Frost says she worked hard “to put her poems in a structured form.” For Darra’s dialogue, she created an ingenious form specifically for this novel. The last words of the long lines, read vertically down the right

side of the page, form sentences that elucidate Darra’s memories.

While the form was intentional, the author says the words came organically—to create an authentic, naturalsounding dialogue. “[I] trust the DNA of the language. It creates tension and really interesting reverberations in the story. For kids reading it, I think they will think this is a really fun thing to discover.”

A native South Dakotan who was born fifth in a family of 10 children, Frost says she “grew up in a family that made me feel like I could do anything.” She received a degree in Elemen“There were tary Education hidden from Syracuse elements of University, and it was there that each girl’s she discovered life. The poetry. language “I feel really lucky in the itself works introduction to to bring the poetry I had. two stories It has always been a part of together.” my life,” says Frost, noting that the much-decorated poets Philip Booth and W.D. Snodgrass were among her teachers.

As her writing career progressed, “I was writing prose for children and poetry for adults,” she says, expressing amazement at how long it took her to meld those two worlds.

“I realized that I had all those tools.

I sometimes start my books in prose, but then I miss those tools.

It’s like a really precise paintbrush.

I want the structure, the sound of language.”

Frost has seen firsthand the impact of poetry on young readers.

“I saw how much [children] loved poetry,” she says, recalling a time she once worked with a group of tween-age boys. “I remember putting out poems on a table . . . and a

fistfight practically erupted. They were fighting over Shakespeare; I really saw a hunger for poetry.”

In addition to drawing on her background in poetry, Frost also infuses her writing with experiences from the many places she’s hung her hat over the years—from a progressive boarding school in Scotland to a one-teacher school in a tiny town in Alaska.

“I think I just grew up with a sense of adventure,” Frost says.

“All these places came back when I became a full-time writer; I realized just how much I had to draw on.”

Next up for this talented author is Step Gently Out, a picture book collaboration with photographer Rick Leider due out next year. She’s also starting a new novel-in-poems, and it’s likely there are even more ideas “hidden” somewhere in her imagination—but don’t worry, she’ll get them down eventually.

“The main thing is to keep from being distracted,” says Frost, a mother of two and grandmother of two. “I love writing, and I love children. To have those two things combined . . . it’s been a long journey to get to this point. It feels really lucky.”

Find more children’s and teen book reviews at BookPage.com

children’s books True (. . . sort of)

reviews

the truth comes out REVIEW BY ANGELA LEEPER

Fans of the resilient and spirited young heroine in Katherine Hannigan’s 2004 debut Ida B will welcome the equally irrepressible and unforgettable Delaware “Delly” Pattison in Hannigan’s new novel, True (. . . sort of ). With a tremendous sense of adventure and a fiery temper to boot, the fifth grader is tired of getting in trouble and not knowing why.

She’s given one more chance to control herself or else she’ll be shipped off to reform school. Her younger brother, RB, suggests counting to cool her fire, but Delly tires of the nonstop numbers and gives up on finding the good inside herself.

All that changes when a new student arrives. Ferris Boyd may not talk or want to be touched, but she plays basketball better than anyone in her class and accepts Delly as she is. Though Delly is usually better at chasing people away than making friends, she begins to follow Ferris

By Katherine Hannigan, HarperCollins, $16.99 home from school every afternoon. She learns to pause and listen to 368 pages, ISBN 9780061968730 what is said in a quiet way, instead of reacting without thinking. Knowing eBook available, ages 8 to 12 that she shouldn’t be unsupervised at Ferris’ house, Delly pretends to be working on an after-school project. Soon the whole world seems like a doughnut: “Sweet, beautiful, and delicious. And she was the floppy cream filling.” Then she notices the fear in Ferris when her father arrives early one day—and she realizes that sometimes the truth is just too awful to keep quiet.

This novel’s real truth is revealed in Hannigan’s poignant storytelling. Once again the author proves her ability to get inside her characters and bring out their strengths. Readers witness not only Delly’s tender transformation but her influence on other characters, such as Danny Novello, who only knows how to show his feelings for Delly by picking a fight. And her “liver and onions” relationship with her older sister, Galveston (“it was always bad, but it was part of being a Pattison”), even begins to sweeten. Especially endearing, though, is Delly’s unique lingo, which warrants her own dictionary, from Ferris’ secret tree house or “hideawayis” to her “bawlgrammit” nocuss words. Her story is perfexcellent!

ME . . . JANE

By Patrick McDonnell Little, Brown $15.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780316045469 Ages 4 to 8

picture book

If you read this fantastic new picture book to children, I suggest you put off telling them who the knobbykneed girl on the title page really is.

Then, when you’ve read Me . . . Jane from beginning to end, they’ll want to hear every word of the author’s note to learn more about the book’s title character, Jane Goodall.

Patrick McDonnell’s loving illustrations celebrate Jane’s rather solitary but happy childhood. Whether she is reading in a tree or happily stretched out in the grass, this little girl is in love with and curious about the natural world. Accompanied

by Jubilee, her stuffed chimpanzee, Jane observes squirrels, shells, leaves and birds, and even hides in the hay to see an egg being laid. The book’s font has a hand-stamped look, and

what appear to be rubber-stamped pictures float lightly beneath the text, just like the replicated pages from Jane’s childhood journal.

Children will enjoy looking at Jane’s handwriting and puzzles, her observations and research. Her passions are so obvious and she loves nature so much that it is not at all surprising that this little schoolgirl would one day be recognized by the Queen of England for her work with animals. Some might have seen Jane’s dreams as ridiculously big, but, happily for us, she did indeed go on to live in the jungles of Africa, like another Jane in Tarzan of the Apes.

Little girls—and this big one, too—will be inspired by the childhood of Jane Goodall and will, every time they read this charming volume, get a little misty-eyed at the book’s closing photograph, which shows Jane holding her hand out to a baby chimp. It’s a perfect image of “Dr. Jane,” reaching out to animals and inspiring young naturalists everywhere.

— R o bin S m i t h

THE GREAT HAMSTER MASSACRE

By Katie Davies Beach Lane $12.99, 192 pages ISBN 9781442420625 eBook available Ages 8 to 12

insisting, of course, that both pets be the same gender.

Fate has a way of intervening, however, and when Number One and Number Two reproduce, Anna and Tom are elated . . . until they wake up to find the hideous and disturbing “great hamster massacre.” With Number One missing a leg and Number Two just missing, the siblings and their next-door neighbor Suzanne launch a fullscale investigation of the monstrosity. Who are the likely suspects? Will they ever be brought to justice? And what will become of the empty cage and silent hamster wheel?

This debut novel by British author Katie Davies is a flippy, fun and extremely fast-paced journey into the world of a very likable brother and sister—and their amusing family and friends. Intermittent silly pencil sketches fill the pages diarystyle, creating a whimsical mood and adding comic relief.

Hilarious happenings, surreptitious outings, secret passwords and a lighthearted mystery liven up The Great Hamster Massacre. Giggles are frequent among the kids in this book, and they will infect readers as well.

— S h ar o n V erbe t en

THE PENDERWICKS AT POINT MOUETTE

By Jeanne Birdsall Knopf $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780375858512 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12

middle grade

middle grade

Ever wanted a pet so badly you’d promise to do anything to get one?

Anna and her brother, Tom, have been pestering their mom seemingly forever, to no avail. They already have New Cat (Old Cat was run over), but they desperately want a hamster. They’ve tried everything— begging, praying in church and even asking their sick Nana to lobby for them. But it isn’t until Nana dies that Mom comes around.

Even though Mom has an unfortunate history with rascally rodents, she finally agrees to let the kids have Russian Dwarf hamsters. In an unexpected turn of events, she agrees to buy not one, but two(!)—

“The Penderwick Family was being torn apart,” begins this third entry in Jeanne Birdsall’s always delightful Penderwick series (the first having won the National Book Award). For three of the four energetic Penderwick sisters, this means spending two weeks with their Aunt Claire at Point Mouette, Maine, while their father and his new wife are honeymooning in England. The oldest daughter, Rosalind, will be separated from her sisters for the first time as she heads to the New Jersey shore with a classmate.

Skye is worried that she doesn’t have what it takes to be OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick). Her OAP-dom is indeed tested when five-year-old Batty needs constant

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children’s books supervision and Aunt Claire sprains her ankle, requiring help from Alec, the musician next door. Meanwhile, Jane, usually content to pen Sabrina Starr tales, falls in love for the first time and experiences writer’s block, causing no-nonsense, budding astrophysicist Skye to muse, “Killer asteroids, a frozen Earth, the end to humanity—all this was much easier to handle than a besotted sister.”

Yet perhaps the biggest surprise in this summer of adventures is when some of the Penderwicks begin to notice that their musically talented friend Jeffrey, who has never known his biological father, resembles Alec.

Amid the beauty of New England, where a moose and her twin babies make appearances, time seems to slow down, with only a brief mention of a cell phone to remind readers that The Penderwicks at Point Mouette takes place in the present day. With exquisite descriptions, charms reminiscent of a bygone era and the Penderwicks’ endearing loyalty, Birdsall’s gentle stories— destined to become classics—continue to get better. Readers can only hope that her best one yet isn’t her last.

—Angela Leeper

TROUBLETWISTERS

By Garth Nix and Sean Williams Scholastic $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780545258975 Ages 8 to 12

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Twelve-year old twins Jackaran and Jaidith Shield are complete opposites. Jack has dark eyes and hair, Jaide has light. Jack can run faster than his sister, but Jaide can jump higher. They do, however, have one thing in common—they’re both troubletwisters. In this first book in a new series by Garth Nix and Sean Williams, Jack and Jaide are sent to live with their grandmother after their house explodes under some very strange circumstances. And they are about to find out just how strange things can get.

As soon as Jack and Jaide arrive at Grandma X’s house, nothing seems right. Weather vanes point in the wrong direction, and doors and signs disappear from around the

reviews

house without warning. Perhaps strangest of all, Grandma X’s cats start talking to the twins. However, it is not until they see Grandma X creating whirlwinds inside the house and controlling thousands of white-eyed rats that they begin to realize that things are not just strange, but possibly dangerous.

Will Grandma X help them, or is she behind the Evil that is threatening to steal Jack and Jaide away?

Troubletwisters is an exciting beginning to what promises to be a fast-paced series. Although this book is very different from Nix’s The Seventh Tower and The Keys to the Kingdom series, fans of those books will enjoy the action, magic and suspense that Nix and Williams both write so well. This is a perfect book for both boys and girls who enjoy fantasy set in the “real” world.

For all their differences, Jack and Jaide are equally strong characters, and they work together to create a story that can be enjoyed by anyone.

(witches, fairies, pookas) as well as many original ones, including a wyverary (a wyvern whose father is a library). In her quest for a witch’s stolen spoon, she is also sent by the evil Marquess to bring back a magical sword that only September can retrieve.

September wonders at one point if she is in a merry tale or a serious one, but the narrator cautions us that “no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move.” However, she will learn that the choices she makes have everything to do with how her life will unfold. When September first arrives in the land of Fairy, she sees signposts directing her to lose her way, lose her life, lose her mind or lose her heart. She chooses (sensibly, considering) to follow the path where she will lose her heart, and, as a reader, you will lose your heart as well as you revel in Valente’s writing. Recommend this book to advanced readers in middle school. They will appreciate the challenge and love the story.

—Kevin Delecki

— J ENNI F ER K I T C H EL

THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND IN A SHIP OF HER OWN MAKING

By Catherynne M. Valente Feiwel & Friends $16.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780312649616 Audio, eBook available Ages 10 to 14

WHAT HAPPENED TO GOODBYE

By Sarah Dessen Viking $19.99, 416 pages ISBN 9780670012947 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up

teen

middle grade

In the barest sense, this is a fantasy book with all the elements you might expect, but as any happy reader knows, it is not the story that makes the book so much as how it is written. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a mouthful of a title, but the prose throughout this book is wonderful—a “mouthful” in the most satisfying sense.

Award-winning author Catherynne M. Valente writes beautifully with a rich and deep vocabulary that is every bit as enjoyable as the plot of the story.

September, the 12-year-old protagonist, is a perfectly ordinary girl, bored with her perfectly ordinary life, who eagerly accepts the offer of the Green Wind to bear her away to Fairyland. Here she meets the creatures you would expect

McLean’s old life was normal, back before her mother left her father for another man. But after their sticky divorce, her dad, eager to get away, took a Gordon Ramsay-style job reorganizing failing restaurants that necessitated a long-distance move every few months. Against her mother’s wishes, McLean went with him. In three years she’s gone to four high schools in four suburbs, and each time she’s used a new name and adopted a different personality to go with it. But now they’ve landed in Lakeview, and thanks to the charming characters at the restaurant and the smart, quirky boy next door, this temporary home feels like a real one.

Readers will root for the likable McLean as she meets people and softens her defenses. As a narrator she’s authoritative and self-aware, sounding almost like a movie voiceover—not surprising, maybe, since

Dessen’s first two books were made into the movie How to Deal. A nice subplot that has McLean and her friends building a model of their town gives her the opportunity to make poetic insights about community, family and home. Dessen’s confident style makes What Happened to Goodbye a smooth and entertaining read.

— K at i e H a e g e l E

RUBY RED

By Kerstin Gier Holt $16.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780805092523 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up

teen

As Ruby Red begins, Gwen Shepherd is just an ordinary 16-year-old living in London with her mother, brother and sister and her eccentric extended family in a “posh” house full of paintings and antique furniture. She attends St. Lennox High School with her best friend, Lesley.

But on closer inspection, “ordinary” may not be exactly the right word to describe Gwen. First, she just happens to be able to see and converse with James, a young local ghost. (“Like so many ghosts, he refused to accept that he wasn’t alive anymore.”) Second, although the family tradition predicts that her cousin Charlotte is meant to be the special one, destined for magic, something extraordinary is about to happen to Gwen.

One day in the school cafeteria, Gwen finds herself overcome by the strangest sensation: a dizzying feeling, a bit like swooping down from the top on a roller coaster ride. And suddenly she finds herself transported to the past. As Gwen discovers, it is she—not Charlotte— who has inherited the time-travel gene that runs through her family lineage.

Gwen has a lot of ground to make up. She must learn the rules of time travel—and fast, too—because Gwen and her time-traveling counterpart, a boy named Gideon, are at the center of a desperate quest to track all the previous time travelers to close the Circle so that the Secret of the Twelve will be revealed.

An enormous success in Germa-

ny where it was first published (the English version has been translated

by Anthea Bell), Ruby Red ends on a cliffhanger, with many of its mysteries unresolved. Teen readers will be eager to find out what happens to Gwen and Gideon in their next adventures, to be revealed in the second book of the trilogy, Sapphire Blue, followed by Emerald Green.

—Deborah Hopkinson

SHINE

By Lauren Myracle Amulet $16.95, 376 pages ISBN 9780810984172 Ages 14 and up

teen

Shine is the story of a hate crime, or so it seems. Cat’s dear friend Patrick has been savagely beaten and left in a coma, and everyone in town knows it’s because he’s gay.

But no one, including the sheriff, knows what actually happened—so Cat makes it her mission to find the attacker herself. This is serious stuff, and author Lauren Myracle doesn’t shy away from the tough emotions her characters face: “Why does God let bad things happen?”

Cat wonders in anguish. “Could he not see her, or did he not care?”

Beyond the strife and violence, Shine is also a Southern story, a country story, refreshingly regional amid a sea of novels set in suburban Anywhere, USA. Black Creek, North Carolina, is a tiny village of 500, idyllic in setting but isolated, and with more than its share of poverty and problems. Myracle gets in all the details: the beauty of the woods and the comfort of home cooking, but also the drug use that threatens the community, and the embarrassed anger Cat feels at being thought of as a hillbilly by the people in town.

In becoming a small-town sleuth, Cat not only solves the mystery of the night her friend was attacked, but also confronts pain from her own past she hasn’t yet dealt with.

She has an essential sweetness— and a bit of sass—that make her a winning main character. But the novel’s ending, while satisfying, has the main characters perpetuating a lie, which feels strange after so much truth-seeking. All in all,

meet Mo WILLEMS the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

© Cher Willems

reviews though, this is an engaging story with characters who really come to life.

—Katie Haegele

I’LL BE THERE

your book in one Q: Describe

sentence.

By Holly Goldberg Sloan Little, Brown $17.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780316122795 eBook available Ages 12 and up

teen

The course of true love, as Shakespeare wrote, never did run smooth, and nowhere is that truth more apparent than in Holly Goldberg Sloan’s debut novel, I’ll Be There. From the moment Emily— wracked with nerves while (badly) singing a solo at church—spots a scruffy but undeniably handsome boy in the back pew, her heart is his. And Sam, quiet and mysterious though he is, seems to really like her, too.

Sam and his near-mute little brother, Riddle, are taken aback by the generosity, kindness and normality of Emily’s family. After all, the only lessons they’ve learned on the road with their violent, thieving father are, according to Sam, “if you cared about something, it would be taken away. If you stood up for yourself, you would be beaten down. If you spoke out, you would be silenced.” The two boys have learned to keep secrets, stay out of the way and look after each other.

So when they’re forced to go on the move again, can Sam find his way back into a normal life—and real love?

Holly Goldberg Sloan might be a first-time novelist, but she’s an experienced writer and director of many popular family films. No surprise, then, that I’ll Be There has a cinematic feeling, rapidly shifting setting and perspective in a free indirect style that helps reinforce the novel’s themes of interconnection. Are coincidences meaningful? What motivates people to help others, become friends, fall in love? Can those who have been deeply damaged seize a fresh start?

Emily and Sam’s journey is a rocky one—literally so, for Sam—but it’s also romantic, heartfelt and deeply satisfying.

—Norah Piehl

your favorite thing about Amanda?

Q: What’s

are the three best qualities a friend can have?

Q: What

something your readers would be surprised to learn Q: Tabout ell usyou.

your own (of course!) what are some of your favorite Q: Besides

characters from children’s books?

Q: W ords to live by?

HOoRAY FOR AMANDA & HER ALLIGATOR! Three-time Caldecott Honor winner Mo Willems has created many adorable characters, including Cat the Cat, Pigeon and Knuffle Bunny. His latest book is Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!

(Balzer + Bray, $17.99, 72 pages, ISBN 9780062004000). Willems and his family live in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

A POPULAR PUPPET

WATCH YOUR STEP Dear Editor, Can you tell me the origin of the word jaywalker?

S. R. New Haven, Connecticut Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition defines jaywalk as “to cross a street carelessly or in an illegal manner so as to be endangered by traffic.” The verb jaywalk and the noun jaywalker both entered American English in the early 20th century with the introduction of the automobile.

Use of the word jay to mean “a simpleton” dates back to the early 1500s. It was still in use in the early 1900s as a slang term for a stupid person or a greenhorn. Anyone who was not used to the sight, sound and speed of cars, or not familiar with the meaning of traffic signals, might look like a jay when confronted with a busy street. Jaywalk and jaywalker were presumably first used to refer contemptuously to careless and confused pedestrians.

Dear Editor, Could you please explain the origin of the expression pleased as Punch?

Y. D. Westminster, Maryland Pleased as Punch comes from the name of that self-satisfied troublemaker Punch, of the Punch and Judy puppet shows. To be pleased as Punch is to be very pleased indeed.

The name Punch derives from the Italian Pulcinella, a character who appeared in 17th-century Italian comedy. When Italian actors and puppeteers arrived in England sometime after 1660, Pulcinella was anglicized to Punchinello and then shortened to Punch. Punch and his wife Joan (later Judy) were immediate popular favorites, along with a cast of other characters including their dog, their baby, the Hangman and the Devil. Although the plays were comedies, they were typically quite violent and involved Punch beating Judy and committing other crimes.

Because of his enormous popularity, expressions alluding to Punch soon entered the language. The earliest known written use of pleased as Punch appeared in 1813. Another popular expression, proud as Punch, has been found in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) and in the letters of Charlotte Brontë and George Bernard Shaw.

’ROUND AND ’ROUND Dear Editor, During some sporting events, you hear of a round robin. Could you explain this term and its origin?

J. B. Brick, New Jersey Round robin is used for a tournament in which every contestant meets every other contestant in turn. In this arrangement, losing a match does not result in automatic elimination. Instead, win-loss records are tallied at the end of a predetermined number of matches.

This use of round robin has been seen in print since the late 19th century. It sprang from an earlier

EVERYTHING LITERARY

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

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use of the word, dating to 1730, denoting a written petition to which signatures are affixed in a circle, so as not to indicate who signed first.

This use of robin has been claimed to derive from the French ruban, meaning “ribbon,” the theory being that it was originally a ribbon that was signed, joined in a circle and attached to any petitions. However, no evidence supports this story. In fact, the robin of round robin is derived from the name Robin; exactly why the name was adopted for this purpose isn’t known.

The original meaning of round robin was later extended and altered a bit to refer to a letter sent to all members of a group in turn, each of whom signs and forwards it. It is perhaps from a common denominator of these meanings—a group activity involving all participants in turn and equally—that the sports sense derives.

Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102 5

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ANIMAL FARM

crossword solution

23. Iraqi terrorist act in 2004 news 26. Animal Farm author 29. Diminutive suffix 30. Doomsayer’s recommendation 33. Star Wars dancing girl 35. Center 37. Here, in Le Havre 38. Chekhov 39. Hoops nickname 40. Milk and egg drink 42. Old cartoonist Hoff 43. Complete reversals 45. Dieters’ lunches 47. Muslim holiday 48. Papa Doc ruled it 50. Name of several Norwegian kings 52. Final Animal Farm law: “All animals are equal but some are ___ ___ than others.”

56. A hand tool 57. Songwriter Novello 58. Push 59. Match up 60. Meddle (with)

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DOWN 56 1. Cauldron stirrers 59 2. Repeat 3. Secular 62 4. Pat on the back 5. Curry herb 6. Quick and active 7. Storm preceder 8. Name of character who becomes the undisputed tyrant in Animal Farm 9. “Once ___ a time...”

10. Backgammon equipment 11. Old English letter 13. Deceive 14. Take up again 19. Disassembled 22. ‘80s Peppard costar 23. Mooches

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ACROSS 1. Lend a hand 5. Blue Jays airer 8. Art subject 12. Rent-___ 13. __ mater: brain covering 14. Speedy 15. Karmann __ 16. Giles or Jannings 17. Historical period 18. Political system illustrated

by Animal Farm 20. Not a lick 21. Precious mettle?

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24. Yale of Yale University 25. Assailed 26. “Come ___!”

27. Mucho 28. Bridges in movies 31. Animals who rule in Animal Farm 32. ER test 34. Last-minute considerations 36. Minister of Propaganda in Animal Farm 38. Quartz marble 40. Sign off

54

55

41. Willows 44. Ransack 46. Whiskey 48. Hang like a hummingbird 49. Came to mind 50. Licentious revelry 51. Former Italian capital 52. Chevalier song 53. Indic language 54. Gets on 55. Watch readouts, briefly 56. Pop

H E L P A C A R G H I A S O C I S B E H E U L A M I D S S H A Q U T U E O L A D R I L A G R E D Y E R

C D U E M A L I P U N A D R E P I T E G R N S I D F M I L M E I

H O V E R E C G B R I S K

A R O S E

C A L M M O R N T I N O S I E R S

N R A E P N O E L W E O A N G A L T I E Q U O R

A G E S

U R D U

L E D S

L L O Y D

L O T S A

D E I D C H E

U P O N

A N D S