BookPage September 2011

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america’s book review

Tom Perrotta’s

When millions of people suddenly disappear, what happens to those left behind?

INTERVIEW

Vanessa Diffenbaugh on the healing power of love

MEET THE AUTHOR Film critic Roger Ebert gives life a thumbs-up

paperback picks penguin.com

Revenge at Bella Terra

Canyons of Night

Port Mortuary

The island of Rainshadow is home to the privately-owned woods known as the Preserve. After fifteen years away, Charlotte Enright and Slade Attridge have returned.

But will their psi talents and Slade’s dust bunny companion be enough to keep them from getting drawn into the darkness at the heart of the Preserve?

As the chief of the Cambridge Forensic Center, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility. A young man drops dead, but there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch.

Scarpetta races against time to discover who and why before more people die.

9780515149883 • $7.99

9780425243602 • $9.99

Eli Di Luca lives in Bella Terra, but now the family vineyard he runs is in financial trouble. Conte makes a proposition Eli can’t refuse: marry his daughter. Unfortunately, the beautiful Chloe has no intention of getting married without a fight. She discovers Eli’s been keeping secrets, and the truth will put them both in mortal danger.

9780451413109 • $7.99

Lost Empire While scuba diving in Tanzania, Sam and Remi Fargo come upon a relic belonging to a long-lost Confederate ship. An anomaly about the relic sets them off chasing a mystery. The Fargos and their ruthless opponents pursue the hunt—but only one team can win.

And the penalty for failure is death.

9780425243619 • $9.99

Painted Ladies

Getting Warmer

Leonard Maltin’s 2012 Movie Guide

Strategic Moves

Spenser had a simple job—protect an art scholar during a ransom exchange for a stolen painting. No one was supposed to die. But the scholar had secrets no one knew, and uncovering them will endanger Spenser as well.

Natalie Quackenbush is approaching thirty, drowning in debt—and living with her parents. It’s the kind of small talk she’d rather avoid. So she and her friends have found a way to entertain themselves on the Scottsdale, Arizona, singles scene: lying. Which isn’t a problem—until Natalie finally meets a guy she likes.

The 2012 edition of this bestselling movie guide includes more capsule movie reviews, DVD listings, mail-order and online sources for buying and renting, leading performer and director indexes, and Leonard’s all-new personal recommendations for movie lovers.

Stone’s undercover dealings with M16 have brought in a big new client. That means a huge bonus and a partnership—until Stone gets wind of an impending scandal that might torpedo his big promotion…and his life.

9780425243640 • $7.99

9780451234476 • $9.99

9780425243626 • $9.99

9780451234452 • $9.99

“One of the best first novels I’ve ever read.”

— #1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family’s old estate—the Savoyard Plantation—and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand. Where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten.

ACE

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A Penguin Group (USA) Company

9780441020676 • $24.95

contents

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

features

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12 roger ebert Meet the author of Life Itself

cover story

tom perrotta

Perrotta’s latest takes a post-apocalyptic turn, but he still finds humor in the darkest circumstances

15 vanessa diffenbaugh A very personal cause inspires a compelling and compassionate novel

20 miriam toews When coming of age means leaving behind everything you know

23 christian fiction Mystery, prophecy, love and faith

25 alexandra fuller A tribute to her remarkable parents

27 september 11 Ten years later, the lessons of 9/11 live on

28 linda urban On taking risks and being brave

31 tom angleberger Meet the author-illustrator of Darth Paper Strikes Back

departments 04 book fortunes 05 05 07 08 10 10 11 12

author enablers well read book clubs whodunit lifestyles cooking romance audio

Cover image from The Leftovers courtesy of St. Martin’s Press

reviews 18 Fiction

top pick:

Blueprints for Building Better Girls

by Elissa Schappell a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen; The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern; The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach; We The Animals by Justin Torres; The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker; Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward; Irma Voth by Miriam Toews; There But For The by Ali Smith; I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck; The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch; The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate

24 NonFiction top pick:

Holy War

by Nigel Cliff a l s o r e v i e w e d : The EightyDollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts; Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller; Love and Capital by Mary Gabriel; South With the Sun by Lynne Cox; What It Is Like To Go To War by Karl Marlantes; Yoga Bitch by Samantha Morrison

30 Children’s top pick:

Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos a l s o r e v i e w e d : Grandpa Green by Lane Smith; BumbleArdy by Maurice Sendak; Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier; Wonderstruck

by Brian Selznick; Shelter by Harlan Coben

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BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate and select for review the best books published each month in a variety of categories.

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Book FortuneS by eliza borné

was influenced by Dickens and Austen, and her novel is a beautifully crafted delight. Already read it? Try The Magicians—and then its follow-up, The Magician King—by Lev Grossman. As our reviewer wrote in August 2009: “Think J.K. Rowling meets C.S. Lewis meets Donna Tartt.” Can’t beat that!

Our crystal ball predicts your next great read Reader name: Rosario Hometown: El Monte, CA Favorite genre: fantasy Favorite authors: Chaim Potok, Keith Donohue, J.K. Rowling Favorite books: My Name is Asher Lev, The Stolen Child, Harry Potter Rosario’s next great read might just be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke—an epic history about a magical England that, at 800 pages, seems far too short. This debut novel is about a magician and his pupil. Clarke

Reader name: Jennifer Hometown: Bedford, TX Favorite genre: cozy mysteries, Austen-alia, historical fiction Favorite authors: Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Jeanne M. Dams, Lauren Willig Favorite books: Persuasion, Pride & Prejudice, 4:50 from Paddington The best cozies are the British cozies, in my humble opinion, and you can’t go wrong with Nancy Atherton’s delightful Aunt Dimity series, set in the small British village of Finch. The latest installment, Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree, was described in BookPage as “cozy and charming as a cup of Earl Grey.”

When you have a long weekend on your hands, turn to Jennifer Donnelly’s Rose Trilogy, which concludes with the The Wild Rose, published in August. The series takes place from the late Victorian era until pre-World War I and features intrigue and romance spanning multiple generations. My advice? When that long weekend comes, make a date with all three books. They total nearly 2,000 pages—and they’re good enough to merit a reading-straightthrough marathon.

Reader name: Anna Hometown: Plainwell, MI Favorite genre: family drama, popular fiction Favorite authors: Richard Russo, Mary McGarry Morris, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Strout Favorite books: Bridge of Sighs, Songs in Ordinary Time, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Peace Like a River There are many books we could recommend about family drama, but I’ll limit this list to three Book-

From New York Times bestselling author

comes a provocative story about standing at the crossroads—and finding danger at every turn.

“[Neggers] forces her characters to confront issues of humanity, integrity and the multifaceted aspects of love without slowing the ever-quickening pace or losing the many plot threads.”

—Publishers Weekly

4

On sale August 30!

Page favorites. In her three published novels, Lily King has become known for her exploration of family, and her most recent book, Father of the Rain, looks at a type of relationship that receives, perhaps, less “page time” than it should: that of a father and daughter. The story addresses alcoholism, divorce, interracial dating and the evolution of an imperfect parent-child relationship—and makes a strong emotional impact. Two books that center on a more commonly discussed relationship—husband and wife—are Private Life by Jane Smiley and Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart. Both recently available in paperback, each smart novel takes you intimately inside the world of one woman’s life.

For a chance at your own book fortune, email bookfortunes@bookpage.com with your name, hometown and your favorite genre(s), author(s) and book(s).

Also, visit bookpage.com/newsletters to sign up for Book of the Day, our daily book recommendation e-newsletter.

author enablers

WELL READ

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

by robert Weibezahl

A Fitzgerald compendium

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT Dear Author Enablers, I have written two 200-page (singlespaced) stories. The second is a sequel to the first. Should I combine them as one long novel, or should I submit only one at a time? What would a publisher prefer: a long, richly detailed story, or a good short read with the understanding that there is a sequel already completed?

Charles North Atlanta, Georgia Bigger is not better; better is better. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is probably shorter than either of your stories. Within reason, publishers do not base their acquisition decisions on length.

A general guideline is that your manuscript is of adequate length to be called a novel at around 60,000 words. If you have a piece that is 53,000 words long, don’t add writing just to make it longer. Publishers can do a great deal with design to present your novel to the public in an appealing manner.

There is also nothing wrong with a mighty epic; some novels can log in at 250,000 words or more. But a first-time novelist submitting anything that long might be perceived as undisciplined (and possibly uneditable).

It’s the publisher’s job to discover great writing. If you go with the shorter version, the sequel will not come into play until you have a sale; first-time authors are unlikely to get two-book deals. But if your book is successful, your publisher will be happy to know that you can quickly deliver a second book.

NAME OF THE GAME Dear Author Enablers, Can I copyright a title for a book even though I have not written the book yet? I remember reading that Margaret Mitchell’s original title for Gone With the Wind was scrapped by her publisher; then she thought of Tomorrow’s Another Day but learned that a book with that title had recently been released so she couldn’t use it. I have a title and would like to protect it at this point in my book-writing endeavor.

Carol Haring Spartanburg, South Carolina

The short answer is no. As the U.S. Copyright Office puts it, “Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases.”

The good news is that most any title is fair game. Twilight might be a good one. Sam has always wanted to write a book called Moby Dick.

Legally, Margaret Mitchell and her publisher could have used the title Tomorrow’s Another Day, but they probably chose not to in order to avoid confusion.

If you have a good title, run with it. But be prepared—when you sell your book, no matter how much you love your title, your publisher might insist on a different choice.

CRAFT OF WRITING SPOTLIGHT Author and editor Arthur Plotnik has written several books on the use of expressive language, including his latest, Better Than Great: A Plenitude of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives.

“Language matters! In the posting-texting-tweeting world, one might thrive with generic, messageoriented prose and a touch of snark.

But for getting published, you’ll want to develop the texture that excites editors and readers—the texture that comes largely from figurative, evocative, unexpected language,” Plotnik says.

“Read expressive writers and pay attention to word choice, how one word coupled with another can change everything. Yami looked at him with regal hatred. That’s how a language-meister like novelist Will Self turns a phrase. A Self character doesn’t just pour tea: Billy slung bags in cups and rained hot death down on them. And Michael Chabon has his own language for waking up and smelling the coffee: The coffeemaker began its expectorations around seven. A few thousand molecules of coffee vapor tumble into the bedroom and worry the hairs inside Landsman’s beak.

So grab a latte, read and savor the language.”

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography, although readers can feel his presence in the guises of his stand-in narrators, not least of all Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. As the pre-eminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald— born 115 years ago on September 24—freely borrowed from his own experiences, as well as those of his wife, Zelda, and many of his friends, in writing his evocative fiction. Twice during the last decade of his life, Fitzgerald did consider putting together a collection of some nonfiction pieces he had written for magazines, but as editor James L.W. West III tells us in his introduction to A Short Autobiography, the idea was shot down by legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins.

Seventy-some years after Fitzgerald’s untimely death, West has at last realized a version of the writer’s intention. Though not by any measure A Jazz Age an autobiography (the title for the literary book is taken from icon tells one of the shorter his own pieces—a pithy catalog of a year’s story. drinking that ran in The New Yorker in 1929), this charming compilation of unfamiliar pieces does manage to provide an illuminating and varied portrait of the writer and the man. The essays span the length of Fitzgerald’s relatively short career, beginning in 1920 and ending with a piece he was writing at the time of his death.

The earliest essays in the book have an archness befitting the undoubtedly cocky young man who took the literary world by storm with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Two companion essays, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing,” published less than six months apart in two 1924 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, are brilliant, tongue-in-cheek depictions of his and Zelda’s spendthrift ways. With a similar self-aware insouciance, albeit one tempered by age and professional disappointment, “One Hundred False Starts” (1933) will speak to anyone who has put pen to paper. “An Author’s Mother,” from 1936, though couched as a story about someone else, undoubtedly reflects the painful truth that his

own mother never accepted his chosen profession as respectable: “An author was something distinctly peculiar—there had been only one in the Middle Western city where she was born and he had been regarded as a freak.”

There are repetitions and recurring themes, understandable since these pieces were written independently over many years and, given the nature of magazine pieces, regarded as largely disposable.

Fitzgerald reiterates the idea that his generation was soft, the result of having been raised predominantly by mothers. His views on modern “girls” are complicated at best, wavering between admiration and disapproval. A piece about Prince­ ton and another written after the death of his father, both published posthumously, underscore a nostalgia for a certain American gentility that he sees as a vague memory.

One of the finest pieces is the last, “My Generation,” not published until 1968. Those who hold dear the story and literature of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “The Lost Generation” will welcome Fitzgerald’s retrospective take on his World War I compatriots, trudging reluctantly into middle age, still holding onto an America that has disappeared. “So we inherited two worlds,” he writes, “the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time.” An imitable Fitzgerald passage, to be sure.

A Short Autobiography

By F. Scott Fitzgerald Edited by James L.W. West III Scribner $15, 224 pages ISBN 9781439199060

Literature

5

Award winners, beloved authors, novels, mysteries, classics, memoirs, true stories, movie tie-ins and so much more.

Great New Reads for Your Book Club.

A wonderful selection for every reading experience—in paperback and eBook “ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE….

“DESERVES TO BECOME A CLASSIC....

A suspenseful, deeply haunted book….

A marvel.”

An astonishingly mature achievement for a first-time novelist.”

—The Washington Times

—The New York Times

A gorgeous, sexy, and disquieting debut from an award-winning author

One of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists • Selected for the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 • Nominated for the Orange Prize

“AT ONCE INTELLECTUALLY STIMULATING AND MOVING.... Like a

“A MASTERPIECE….

One of the few novels that feel as though they have made a difference in the world.”

—The New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Notable Book and a New Yorker Yorker, Washington Post Post, Economist, Christian Economist Science Monitor Monitor, and New Republic Best Book of the Year

—USA Today

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award • A Nationwide Best Book of the Year

From the National Book Award-Winning Author of Three Junes

“[AN] INSTANT CLASSIC....

One of the most hilarious and emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter.”

Read the Book, See the Movie and Have a Fantastic Meeting

—Oprah Winfrey

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Munn and Christina Hendricks

ReadingGroupCenter.com Join the Discussion

Set up phone and video chats with our authors and your book club, find recipes in the “Recipe by the Book” section, explore destinations and book settings in the “Armchair Adventurer” section, connect with other readers, print reading group guides and other helpful materials, watch videos, find author tour schedules, and much more.

VINTAGE

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

delicate, nuanced, socially conscious story of one family’s neardestruction, and how a slew of seemingly bad moves reconnects it.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“THE NATIONAL ANTHEM FOR WORKING MOTHERS.”

—People

“MARVELOUS.... A

masterful album, this one demands a replay.”

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“MOVING, FANCIFUL,

and gorgeously strange.”

—People

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess

Print a Reading Group Planner:

The Reading Group Center eNewsletter gives readers the latest information on great books along with exclusive behind-the-scenes publishing news, author updates, special offers, and more.

twitter.com/RGCenter • facebook.com/ReadingGroupCenter

ANCHOR

columns This month’s best paperbacks for reading groups

GROWN-UP CONCERNS Alison Espach’s impressive debut, The Adults (Scribner, $15, 336 pages, ISBN 9781439191866), is a witty and perceptive novel that chronicles the coming-of-age of 14-year-old Emily Vidal. Raised in a well-to-do corner of Connecticut, Emily is an intelligent, cynical teen with a solid set of parents—or so she thinks, until her father, at his 50th birthday party, declares that a divorce is imminent. Things get stranger for Emily when it’s dis-

book clubs by julie hale

of bawdiness and violence are not misplaced, the truth about Cleopatra, as Schiff shows, is more complex.

The lavishly quartered queen (her palace featured gold and onyx appointments) took her duties seriously, handling war, diplomacy and powerful men with the cunning of a seasoned diplomat. Schiff—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)—is a skillful storyteller who knows how to spin the threads of history into a compelling narrative. Here, she clears away the tall tales to get at the truth about Egypt’s elusive queen.

New from the New York Times bestselling author of Natural Born Charmer “Romantic, funny, sexy, and poignant.

I loved this book.”

–Kristin Hannah

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS

covered that the family’s neighbor, Mrs. Resnick, is carrying Mr. Vidal’s child. After her father departs for Prague and her mother takes to drinking, Emily finds herself at loose ends, with little respect left for the so-called adults in her life.

As a sort of experiment, she begins an affair with an older man—an English teacher named Jonathan with whom she forges a long-term connection. Absorbing the shocks of loss and change, Emily evolves from sarcastic teen to mature adult, and her story—populated with offbeat neighbors, rebellious friends and boring teachers—makes for an unforgettable read. A stylish writer, Espach offers an insightful and convincing tale of young adulthood.

A REGAL PORTRAIT Cleopatra (Back Bay, $16.99, 432 pages, ISBN 9780316001946), Stacy Schiff’s much-acclaimed biography, sheds new light on one of history’s most misunderstood monarchs.

Offering fresh perspectives on the controversial queen, Schiff revises Cleopatra’s licentious image and presents in its stead a portrait of a multifaceted leader—a savvy statesperson and capable administrator who was adept at navigating tumultuous political waters. Although the oft-repeated allegations

Although it’s set at a Catholic boys’ school in Dublin, Paul Murray’s second work of fiction is anything but straight-laced. Daniel “Skippy” Juster is a 14-year-old student at Seabrook, and his death occurs early in this comic-ironic novel. Flashing back into Skippy’s past, Murray presents him as something of a loner, more thin-skinned than his gang of friends, which includes Ruprecht, a brainiac who’s obsessed with string theory; Mario, a wannabe lady-killer; and Carl, a demented drug-pusher. Among Seabrook’s student body, academic performance frequently takes a back seat to more pressing topics, such as the opposite sex. Indeed, matters of the heart make life complicated for Skippy, who competes with Carl for the affections of a girl named Lori. This classic tale of adolescence is filled with the requisite references—sports and sex, technology and religion—while Murray’s wit colors the entire proceedings. Skippy Dies is a delight from start to finish.

It’s hard to live happily ever after when your motherin-law is a witch—literally.

“Pure evil has never been this much fun!”

–Kerrelyn Sparks

From the author of Another Summer

“Bockoven is magic.”

–Catherine Coulter

Skippy Dies

By Paul Murray Faber $16, 672 pages ISBN 9780865478619

FICTION

Share threimends. with f @WMPaperbacks

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columns

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

Murder and mayhem around the globe We have another cross-global collection this month, with mysteries from the U.S., Denmark, Canada and even Botswana!

First up is Death of the Mantis (Harper, $14.99, 448 pages, ISBN 9780062000378), number three in the series featuring portly policeman David “Kubu” Bengu. Kubu’s debut adventure, A Carrion Death, earned author Michael Stanley (a pen name for two authors, Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip) the nod as our Top Pick a couple of years back.

Both authors are old Africa hands, and their experience with the land and its people permeates every paragraph. This time out, Kubu is solicited by an old school chum to look into a murder case involving Bushmen, by nature a peace-loving group of folks quite disinclined to take a human life. Although Kubu is able to cast reasonable doubt regarding the guilt of the Bushmen, he decides that the case merits his continued participation, a choice

that will put him, his staff and even his family in grave peril—and from a most unexpected source. Released as a trade paperback with a list price of only $14.99, Death of the

Mantis is, without a doubt, Bargain Mystery of the Month!

Pelecanos’ new hero Fans new and old will celebrate George Pelecanos’ return to the ring with his latest novel, The Cut (Little, Brown, $25.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780316078429). A new Pelecanos

TRUFFLES, CHEESE, WINE, AND MURDER .

CRIME IS EVERYWHERE, EVEN IN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PARTS OF FRANCE …

M A R T I N WA L K E R

BLACK DIAMOND “CAPTIVATING…sure to appeal to readers with a palate for mysteries with social nuance and understated charm.” —The Wall Street Journal

“HIGHLY ENJOYABLE”

8

stallment The third in featuring in the series e Bruno lic Po of Chief

—The Christian Science Monitor

Also available as an eBook



hero has been brought into the fold, one Spero Lucas, a specialist in retrieving items deemed irretrievable by legal means. Lucas is an Iraq vet, world-weary at a young age and with a pragmatist’s view of the fine line of legality—a line he steps over with some regularity. Hired by an inmate to recover several packages of marijuana that have mysteriously gone missing, Lucas discovers that bent cops are in on the swiping of the drugs, not to mention the redistribution thereof. It goes without saying that they will pull out all the stops to keep Lucas at bay—murder included. You may want to keep a jargon dictionary on hand, as Pelecanos has perhaps the best ear in the business for contemporary street lingo, and he passes it on to the reader without editorial commentary. His writing is masterful, and The Cut deserves a place among his best work, which, as his legions of readers well know, is high praise indeed.

Must-read Nordic noir When The Keeper of Lost Causes (Dutton, $25.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780525952480) hit stands in the U.K.—where it was titled Mercy— the London Times called author Jussi Adler-Olsen “the new ‘it’ boy of Nordic Noir.” (I wish I had said that. . . .) Other reviewers threw around adjectives like “gripping,” “impressive” and “atmospheric.”

Let me add a few more: “chilling,” “unsettling” and “downright disturbing.” When cranky detective Carl Morck returns to work after an assignment that went deadly wrong—in part thanks to him—the last thing he expects is a promotion.

To his surprise, he is put in charge of Department Q, the cold-case unit of the Copenhagen police department.

One such case is the disappearance of Merete Lynggard, once a leading light in the Social Democrats, missing for five years and presumed dead. But she is not dead—far from it. Can Morck find her, and perhaps find a morsel of redemption in the process? All you fans of Scandinavian mysteries (in my opinion some of the finest suspense novels in con-

temporary fiction): Be sure to grab this book now that it’s on sale in the U.S. You’ll thank me.

top pick in mystery Louise Penny’s previous novel, Bury Your Dead, was our Top Pick last October, and she continues her winning streak this month with the latest Chief Inspector Gamache novel, A Trick of the Light. Gamache returns to the Quebec border town of Three Pines to investigate a murder in the tiny artists’ enclave.

The victim is Lillian Dyson, a wellloathed art critic. The list of people who would have liked to see her dead is both lengthy and distinguished, as her exhibition reviews were catty and scathing, and her poison pen savaged newcomer and veteran alike. But by all reports, in the months before her death, Dyson seemed to have turned over a new leaf: She was a regular attendee at Alcoholics Anonymous, and she practiced the 12-step program religiously, particularly Step 9, the making of amends to people she had harmed. Apparently, however, someone remained singularly unmoved by Dyson’s contrition, ending her life with a vicious twist of the neck and leaving the body in the garden of an up-and-coming artist on opening night of said artist’s Montreal exhibition. The sole clue: an AA “beginner’s chip” carelessly(?) left behind in the freshly turned soil of the garden. Penny’s characters are, to a one, rich and multifaceted, her plotting is intricately laced with backstory and her depiction of modern-day Quebec is spot on.

A Trick of the Light, like all the Gamache novels that precede it, is simply not to be missed.

A Trick of the Light

By Louise Penny Minotaur $25.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780312655457 Audio, eBook available

mystery

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EntEr for a chancE to win! • one (1) Grand Prize of a $300.00 Smithsonian gift card and a library of Smithsonian books published by DK (total approximate retail Value (“arV”) of Grand Prize = $490.00) • ten (10) runner-up prizes of a copy of Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide, published by DK (arV of each prize = $50.00). no purchase necessary. open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of columbia, ages 18 and older. Entries must be received no later than September 30, 2011, 11:59:59 PM Eastern time. winners will be selected on or about october 15, 2011.Void where prohibited by law. Go to www.bookpage.com/ and click on the animal Sweepstakes banner for complete details and official rules.

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columns

cooking

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

by sybil PRATT

THE HOME ENVIRONMENT

CASSEROLES FIT FOR A QUEEN

The word terrarium may conjure grade-school memories of empty peanut butter jars and dead plants, but Terrarium Craft (Timber, $18.95, 196 pages, ISBN 9781604692341) will dispel that notion at a glance. Artist and boutique owner Amy Bryant Aiello and garden writer Kate Bryant redefine the terrarium as art form, gardening complement and undeniable “eye candy.” They present 50 stepby-step projects adaptable to any mood or style and incorporating tiny treasures like found objects, trinkets and special shells or rocks.

Plants are optional, believe it or not, but most projects recommend specific varieties selected for size, shape, color and habitat, and are

It’s back to reality time: back to school, back to work, back to putting a wholesome, inviting dinner on the table almost every night. No problema! The Casserole Queens, Crystal Cook and Sandy Pollack, two ebullient Austin cooks, have managed to put their special magic for making one-dish wonders between the covers of a cookbook.

The Casserole Queens Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, $17.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9780307717856) sets the classic American casserole back on center stage, refreshed and revitalized with a healthy helping of retro-chic and gourmet flair. With their bubbly header notes, advice on a wellstocked kitchen and a casserole-

easy to maintain. Terrariums can be almost any size—even wee glass baubles on a string—and can have a lid or remain open. After an introduction that takes readers through the basics—containers, foundations, materials and plants— the book divides the projects into Forest, Beach, Desert and Fantasy landscapes. The photographs throughout are simply gorgeous.

Readers will be inspired to look for potential containers everywhere, to try and match the creativity and charm on display.

KITCHEN GIFTS

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lifestyles

Presents from the kitchen are a lovely gesture. Whether baked, mixed, cooked or assembled from store-bought goodies, they are proof of time spent preparing something special. But how often do we end up stuffing a carefully created gift into a boring plastic zipper bag or disposable pan?

Creative packaging ideas can make gifts from the kitchen twice as nice. The Creative Kitchen (Leisure Arts, $19.95, 160 pages, ISBN 9781609001247) has recipes for drinks, breads, candy, cookies, pies, cakes, sauces, mixes, jams, snacks and holiday fare, but recipes are only half the story. The other half is presentation. The book pairs

each recipe with quick and cute packaging suggestions.

Choose from sew and nosew fabric options, ribbons, fancy cupcake liners, papers, labels and non-traditional containers to spice up offerings. Templates and images to scan, trace and photocopy are included. Next time you need an edible gift for a host, sick friend or new baby, check here first. Plus, any of these recipes and wrappings will guarantee sell-outs at a bake sale.

TOP PICK In LIFESTYLES Toxic Free is a “quick-start” guide to help readers understand how toxic chemicals affect our health and how to avoid them. Consumer advocate and “Queen of Green” Debra Lynn Dadd (Home Safe Home) starts by targeting the home.

Most of us figure on finding bad stuff in our cleaning products, but the author also scrutinizes various beauty products, indoor air pollution, pest control, water, food, textiles, office supplies and interior decoration. Who knew about formaldehyde in no-iron bed sheets, PVP plastic in toothpaste, lead wicks in decorative candles, hazardous chemicals in perfume and DDT in our coffee? For each toxic consumer product in this formidable list, the author offers simple, natural substitutions. She’s not out to scare us, but to mentor us into better health. Another chapter clues us in on how toxic chemicals harm the environment and how we can minimize our “toxic impact.” And what about the harm already done to our unsuspecting bodies? The book suggests many simple and sometimes surprising things we can do to help protect and support our natural detoxification system.

Toxic Free

By Debra Lynn Dadd Tarcher/Penguin $15.95, 272 pages ISBN 9781585428700

GREEN LIVING

stocked freezer, the Queens show you how to make weeknight delights like Royal Cottage Pie, Shrimp and Grits with smoked gouda or Corn Dog Casserole (adults love it too) that are guaranteed dinner winners. When friends are coming over, the same goes for phyllotopped Greek Pastitsio or saffroninfused Pimpin’ Paella. Whether a casserole starts the day, dresses up for dessert or stars as the main event, it gets the royal treatment— in fact, the Queens have turned them all into casseroyals!

RANCH CUISINE GOES HAUTE What happens when a staunch Texan from the rural ranching world goes to culinary school and trains in high-end restaurants? If that Texan is Louis Lambert, you get haute ranch cooking that blends the bold, simple flavors of his cattleranching heritage with sophisticated cooking techniques, a rustic repertoire touched with elegance.

Now Lambert shares his West Texas food heritage in Big Ranch, Big City (Ten Speed, $40, 272 pages, ISBN 9781580085304). This is a serious cookbook by a serious chef with five successful restaurants. The 125 recipes included are the kind you want to read through carefully, savoring the details and the often intriguing

juxtaposition of ingredients. I’d save most of these dishes for weekend cooking when time is not an issue. You don’t want to rush through the prep or the enjoyment of dark roux-based Port Arthur Seafood Gumbo (his grandmother’s pièce de résistance), Grilled Bacon-Wrapped Quail Stuffed with Chorizo Corn Bread, Bock-Braised Beef Short Ribs or any of the proudly Texan treasures served up here.

TOp PICK in cookbooks The timeworn neon sign on Highway 100 southwest of Nashville simply says “Cafe Loveless Hot Biscuits Country Ham.” It should say “the iconic place for country food,” the place you can come home to, even if you’ve never been there before.

Started 60 years ago by Annie and Lon Loveless (“loveless” isn’t, as I was sure, a country music comment on romance gone bad), the name has stuck through good and not-sogood times. But since it was bought in 2004 and spiffed up in every way, the Loveless has attracted crowds of country connoisseurs, native and otherwise. Adding a fabulous array of traditional South­ern desserts to the time-honored menu was a major part of the spiff-up, and adding Alisa Huntsman as queen of confections was a culinary coup. With true Southern hospitality, Alisa offers us her trove of recipes in Desserts from the Famous Loveless Cafe. Although your mama may never have baked a Double Coconut Cream Pie, Blueberry Skillet Cobbler or Lady Lemon Squares, the Loveless legacy is now yours.

Watch a video of Alisa Huntsman at youtube.com/bookpagedotcom

Desserts from the Famous Loveless Cafe

By Alisa Huntsman Artisan 232 pages, $24.95 ISBN 9781579654344

desserts

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

Go west, young woman San Francisco of 1870 is the setting for Jo Goodman’s delicious western, Kissing Comfort (Berkley, $7.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780425243909). After being rescued from a raided wagon train, Comfort Kennedy was raised by ex-soldiers who ultimately became successful bankers. Along the way, she gained a good education and experience in martial arts. The first comes in handy for her job at her uncles’ business; the second helps when she’s embroiled in danger thanks to the handsome DeLong brothers. When younger brother Bram, also Comfort’s best friend, rashly declares their engagement, she agrees to go

While Lokan and Bryn face them together, they also confront the feelings that have grown between them since the night they conceived their child.

Both realize they love each other, but their very survival isn’t guaranteed. Even if they do live to reach the final gate, there is still a heartwrenching sacrifice to be made.

Characters from previous books in Silver’s Otherkin series enter the story to render aid and to round out an exciting, imaginative read.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE

along with the pretense. But the announcement brings older brother Bode into her life, and she quickly realizes that it’s not friendship growing between them. When a criminal gang comes after Comfort and Bode, menace and their passion for each other escalate. Engaging and entertaining, this story is steeped in historical detail. Readers will root for the clever hero and heroine who trade both witty repartee and sizzling kisses.

Worlds apart Eve Silver offers a passion-filled paranormal adventure in Body of Sin (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373775927). Lokan Krayl, son of the most powerful Underworld god, worked as his father’s righthand man until he was betrayed and murdered. Now bodiless and with his soul trapped in purgatory, Lokan can only despair for his human daughter and her mother, Bryn. Who will look after them? But it’s Bryn who comes for Lokan once his brothers reunite him with his body. He discovers Bryn is not human, but a supernatural guide who can help him return to the Topworld, where his daughter awaits his protection. First, there are trials to overcome and tests to pass.

Tense action and fascinating forensics come together in Laura Griffin’s Snapped, the latest novel in the Tracers series. After nearly being murdered six months before, Sophie Barrett is getting her life back together when she witnesses a university shooting. Homicide detective Jonah Macon comes to her aid, and the handsome cop can’t stand the idea that Sophie was again at risk. After more brushes with death, he vows to keep her close—but his attraction to her runs strong, and it’s hard to stay strictly professional when Sophie is sending out “I think you’re sexy, too” signals. But mutual attraction doesn’t mean complete cooperation, and they bump heads while investigating the mysterious events. The Delphi Center crime lab and the police department are on the case, but will the killer be caught before the lovers find themselves as targets? Electric chemistry between two believable and interesting characters coupled with the investigative details make this page-turner especially compelling.

snapped

By Laura Griffin Pocket Star $7.99, 432 pages ISBN 9781451617368 eBook available

Romantic suspense

by

Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

Stunned to learn that her killer was never prosecuted, Harlan Donnally soon finds himself in battle against a broken justice system and on a trail of evil into a dangerous borderland in which the falsely pious and the wealthy abuse the young and the poor.

And though each step takes him farther down a perilous path that wrenches him between his inner demons and his mission to redeem a brother’s love, he won’t stop until he knows the truth.

9780062025067, $9.99

The Deed

by Lynsay Sands

Lady Emmalene Eberhart finds herself with an ample dowry and promised to Amaury de Aneford, a landless knight whose able sword helped defend the King’s crown. Surely her new husband would want to do the deed, for his rugged good looks certainly make Emma’s heart skip more than a beat. And Emma suspects there is more to a wedding night than just a sound sleep…and more to true love than she ever imagined.

9780062019707, $7.99

One Grave at a Time

by Jeaniene Frost

Centuries ago, Heinrich Kramer was a witch hunter. Now, every All Hallows Eve, he takes physical form to torture innocent women before burning them alive. This year, however, a determined Cat and Bones must risk all to send him back to the other side of eternity—forever. But one wrong step and they’ll be digging their own graves.

9780061783197, $7.99

The Redbreast

by Jo Nesbø

While monitoring neo-Nazi activities in Oslo, Detective Harry Hole is drawn into a mystery with deep roots in Norway’s dark past. With only a stained and guilty conscience to guide him, an angry, alcoholic, error-prone policeman must make his way safely past the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind.

For a conspiracy is taking rapid and hideous shape around Hole…and Norway’s darkest hour may be still to come.

9780062032997, $7.99

The Seduction of Scandal

by Cathy Maxwell

If Thorn wants Lady Corinne’s silence, he must hide her until her wedding day passes. It’s a devil’s bargain and one that can only lead to a hangman’s noose.. Corinne believes it the perfect plan—until he reveals a passionate lover’s heart, and she realizes that in the seduction of scandal, she may have found the hero she’s been waiting for her whole life.

9780061772122, $7.99

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

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meet ROGER EBERT art shay

the title of your new Q: What’s

book?

columns

audio by sukey howard

THE POWER OF FOUR would you describe the Q: How

book?

sentence would you choose to open a review of your Q: What

own life?

Q: W hat is the most important thing you have learned from your illness?

When Ann Brashares’ beloved, best-selling Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series ended, Tibby, Lena, Bee and Carmen were 19 years old. Now, 10 years later, they’re back in Sisterhood Everlasting (Random House Audio, $40, 10 hours, ISBN 9780307912220), read with the right inflection and timbre

by Angela Goethals. The fab four— out of college, out of the YA genre, into adulthood with all its angst and ambiguities—still have their magnetic appeal. And Brashares still captures the enduring strength of female friendship whether you’re five, 25 or 75. On the brink of 30, the “sisters” have moved on with differing degrees of success, but have stayed in touch, except for Tibby,

Q: H ow has the loss of your voice influenced your writing?

Q: Omeaningful? f all the books you have read, which has been the most Q: If you could change places with one person for a day, who would it be and why?

who’s been almost incommunicado since her move to Australia with her boyfriend. Suddenly, to everyone’s joy, Tibby invites them all to meet in Santorini—but she isn’t there when they arrive. Why she disappeared and what she left behind prompts Bee, Carmen and Lena to consider themselves carefully, who they’ve become and how they’ll find fulfillment. Whether you watched these girls grow up or have just met them, this is a KKC (Keep the Kleenex Close) audio for sure.

JIMM JUREE, CRIME REPORTER

Q: W ords to live by?

LIFE ITSELF

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Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert chronicles his life and career—from growing up in Urbana, Illinois, to dealing with the cancer that resulted in the loss of his lower jaw—in a vivid new memoir, Life Itself (Grand Central, $27.99, 436 pages, ISBN 9780446584975).

Ebert lives in Chicago with his wife, Chaz.

If you’re an aficionado of murdermystery-lite in exotic surroundings, laden with lots of local color (yes, think Precious Ramotswe), then you’re in for an audio treat.

Killed at the Whim of a Hat (Highbridge, $34.95, 10 hours, ISBN 9781611744965), the first in a new series by Colin Cotterill, stars Jimm Juree, a 30-ish crime reporter with a droll take on the world and a wonderfully weird family. After Jimm’s mother, whose marbles are beginning to get lost, moves Jimm, her brother (a gentle buffed-up hunk) and her semi-silent grandfather to a tiny fishing village in southern Thailand (her transgendered, computer-hacking sibling stays in

Chiang Mai), Jimm bemoans the end of her blossoming career. But when two skeletons in tattered hippie clothes are found in an old VW camper and a visiting Buddhist monk is brutally stabbed to death, Jimm is back in business and listeners get both a lively crime caper and a perceptive look into Thai culture, all charmingly narrated by Jeany Park.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO The James Bond I loved was the Ian Fleming version, and try as I might, I’ve never fallen for the many Bonds in the many books (more than 25) written after Fleming died. But that was before Jeffery Deaver took over. Deaver’s Bond in Carte Blanche, his first foray into Fleming-dom, is a perfect mix of old and new. This 21st-century Bond, armed with an ingenious iPhone and bleeding-edge spyware, saw heroic action in Afghanistan before taking on licensed-to-kill 007 status. Like the Bond of before, our knight-errant thinks like a master chess player, sizing up dangerous situations in a nanosecond, planning evasive action many moves ahead of his adversaries, while he charms every beautiful woman into his arms and quaffs shakennot-stirred martinis. When British intelligence picks up an encrypted whisper about an attack that will kill thousands, Bond is on the case, racing from London to Dubai to Cape Town to reveal the twisted villain and stop him . . . or her.

Performed by Toby Stephens, whose array of spot-on accents comes with a Bondian ability to deftly switch from derring-do to debonair, it’s fabulous, exciting, cinematic fun.

Carte Blanche

By Jeffery Deaver Simon & Schuster Audio $39.99, 13.5 hours ISBN 9781442340640

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From the author of the critically acclaimed Elsewhere

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This September, Avon Books and the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance urge you to K.I.S.S. AND TEAL: Know the Important Signs & Symptoms

September is National Ovarian Cancer Awareness month, and Avon Books is urging our authors and readers to learn about the symptoms of ovarian cancer, and to help spread the “K.I.S.S. and Teal” message. Avon Books has made an initial donation of $25,000 to the Alliance. And—with your help—Avon Books has also committed to donating 25¢ from the sale of each book, physical and eBook, in the “K.I.S.S. and Teal” promotion between 8/30/2011 and 2/28/2012, up to an additional $25,000 toward programs that support ovarian cancer patients and their families. So, help us spread the word and reach our goal of $50,000 which will benefit all the women in our lives.

Log on to www.kissandteal.com to learn how you can further help the cause and donate.

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Avon Books is proud to support the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. www.OvarianCancer.Org

interviews

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

fostering A LIFE IN FULL BLOOM

E

ach year, nearly 20,000 young people “age out” of America’s foster care system, and many of them have nowhere to go. Writer Vanessa Diffenbaugh has transformed this sad statistic into an extraordinary debut novel.

The focus of a fierce bidding war among publishers, The Language of Flowers tells the visceral and deeply touching story of Victoria, a teen who has been discharged from foster care, leaving her alone and emotionally barricaded. It’s also a compelling story about spiritual hunger and the power of nature— and human connection—to help heal hearts.

“It came pouring out of me,” Diffenbaugh says of the six-month process of writing the book. “It was about a year and a half from the time I started it to the time I sold it.

Pretty quick for a first-time novel and a bunch of kids in the house,” Diffenbaugh laughs, as she juggles a bit of background chaos, plus kids and a babysitter’s schedule, at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Set in San Francisco and Napa Valley, The Language of Flowers draws heavily on Diffenbaugh’s upbringing in Northern California, with its fertile farms and vineyards, as well as her experience as a foster parent. Born in San Francisco, she studied creative writing at Stanford and taught art and writing to young people in low-income communities before becoming a full-time parent.

She and her husband, PK Diffenbaugh, have two biological children, and have fostered children throughout their marriage. They recently moved from California to

The Language of Flowers

By Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Ballantine, $25, 336 pages ISBN 9780345525543, audio, eBook available

Cambridge, first dropping their foster son Tre’von, 18, at New York University, which he is attending on a Gates Millennium Scholarship.

In the novel, Diffenbaugh takes two strands—nature and created family—and spins them into an absorbing story that is as complicated and exhilarating as any human relationship. But instead of reading like a polemic disguised as fiction, The Language of Flowers is full of startling and masterful dialogue, intense, emotional scenes that crackle and come alive as they unspool, “My book is and flawed yet helping to sympathetic characters. tell a story “As you can that needs to tell, I’m pasbe told.” sionate about two things: writing and helping kids in foster care,” Diffenbaugh says. “I could recite statistics that would blow your mind about what is happening to these kids, especially as they emancipate from the system—25 percent become homeless within two years—but you’re not going to . . . feel empowered to do something about it if you haven’t had some kind of connection with a story that helps you feel on an emotional level. My book is helping to tell a story that needs to be told.”

Narrated by Victoria in flashbacks, the novel follows her life as she bounces from one foster situation to the next until she’s emancipated from foster care at 18.

Her most significant relationship is with Elizabeth, a gardener who grew up on a Northern California vineyard and is now estranged from her family. Elizabeth introduces her to the Victorian-era symbolism of flowers and their secret meanings, and Victoria embraces it as a way to express difficult emotions to the adults in her life. She describes the situations that led her to become an often abrasive young adult, the

© Infinity Portrait Design

by Deanna Larson

self-sabotage that left her homeless in a San Francisco park, and the twists of fate that lead to her work with a high-end city florist and her guarded relationship with a Napa Valley farmer who understands her secret language like no one else.

From the smell of warm summer fruit to the sounds of a busy farmer’s market on a Saturday morning, every scene in the novel feels authentic and immediate. (Red Wagon Productions has optioned the book for a film adaptation.)

Diffenbaugh says the truth about foster care lies somewhere between the frequent demonization of foster children in the media and the rosy picture of fostering a child portrayed in the film The Blind Side.

“We’re all human and we’re all struggling. I didn’t want to end the story tied up with a ribbon, but it’s possible for people to change, it’s possible for people to overcome, it’s possible for people to reconnect even when they’ve been so hurt,” she says. “I wanted to show the whole picture.”

While she’s already working on her next book, Diffenbaugh is also launching a new organization, The Camellia Network, to help build support for young adults leaving foster care. “I think it’s one of the most pressing and most disastrous issues facing foster care right now,” she says.

“In the language of flowers, camellia means ‘my destiny is in your hands,’ and the idea is that we’re all interconnected. The destiny of our country lies in the hands of the youngest citizens.”

Like the Sisterhood before them, the world is no match for these formidable friends…

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fern Michaels’ Godmothers series has the ladies on a quest to look after one of their own.

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15

cover story

TOM PERROTTA Interview by Alden Mudge

T

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© Mark ostow

LEFT BEHIND IN THE SUBURBS om Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole.

But it’s just not true.

“The classical definition of satire is that you’re exposing the folly of human behavior,” Perrotta says during a call to his home in the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perrotta lives there with his wife, the writer Mary Granfield, and their two teenaged children. “For me there is no position where it is possible to be a human and not be implicated in the folly of human behavior. I always feel I’m implicated in that folly.”

Perrotta supposes he earned the satirist label from the movie Election, which starred Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. He wrote the novel on which the movie is based.

“Election is one of the great satires in recent film history,” Perrotta says.

“It was much more satirical than the book. Just compare Tracy Flick in the book with what Reese Witherspoon does with her in the film. The book is a comic novel but it’s not a satirical novel. The film pushes out!

Because Election first brought me to the attention of most people, I’m in this box: People think of me, they think of Election, and they think of the movie.”

Not that Perrotta has any objections to the movie. “I really loved the movie, myself. I still do. It really holds up too, and it’s been really influential in all sorts of ways. I think the success of the movie basically changed my life. I had published a few books and I was struggling to find an audience. I felt a real difference in the aftermath.

“I used to have that moment where I’d be introduced at a party and say, oh, I’m a writer, and people would say, have you written anything I’ve read? And I’d name my books and I’d get that terrible blank look. Now I could say, well, there was this movie with Reese Witherspoon, and people would light up,” Perrotta recalls. “It felt like a big difference that my name was attached to something people had positive feelings toward. The other concrete thing it did was allow me to find work as a screenwriter, which allowed me to stop teaching and really solidified my sense of myself as a professional writer.”

Still, the satire label that has trotted beside Perrotta like an overfriendly stray dog does not come close to encapsulating his estimable gifts as a writer. Or, as Perrotta says wryly, “Certainly what I’m doing now is very far away in terms of tone from that movie.”

That’s for sure. Perrotta’s early novels were set in working-class New Jersey, where he grew up and developed a passion for writing that eventually took him to Yale.

But since his novel Little Children (2004), “there’s been a shift in the suburban territory that I write about” that both comically and tenderly reflects the attitudes and personal dilemmas of residents of the more affluent middle-class suburb where he now lives.

Not only that, his use Perrotta’s of language boldest novel has matured.

Reminded to date puts that he once a whole proclaimed that new spin on he wrote in the plain American apocalyptic English tradianxiety after tion of Ernest a RaptureHemingway, Perrotta laughs like event. and says, “If you go back to Bad Haircut (1994) you’ll definitely see more of the Hemingway influence. I mean those sentences were just so short! But even then I was using that shortness for comedy in a way that Hemingway didn’t.

Probably since Joe College (2000) the sentences have gotten looser and more complex in terms of syntax. So I’ve moved away from the Hemingway impulse. But I have to say that I have not moved away from the idea that literary fiction should work the way that popular fiction works, in terms of being a pleasure to read, with a story that moves swiftly.

“I have always wanted to be democratic,” Perotta says. “My parents didn’t go to college and a lot of people I grew up with are not ­‘intellectuals’ in the graduate

school sense. I never wanted to write for a self-selected group of people who see themselves as literary. I want to write for anybody who is interested.”

All of these maturing impulses meld in near-perfect harmony to bring us Perrotta’s newest, most audacious and best novel to date, The Leftovers.

Set in the leafy suburb of Maple­ ton, The Leftovers opens on Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection, three years to the day after a Rapture-like event has caused millions of people all over the world to disappear in an instant.

In reaction, some people, like Laurie Garvey, join a monastic penitential cult called The Guilty Remnant, whose members dress all in white, smoke cigarettes as an article of faith and ghost about Mapleton to remind people that the end is near.

Others, like Laurie’s college-age son Tom, follow the prophet Holy Wayne, a former UPS delivery van driver, and his Holy Hugs Movements. But many, like Laurie’s husband Kevin, the mayor of Mapleton, struggle to lead normal lives and keep their children—in Kevin’s case his teenage daughter Jill—from going off the rails. The action of the novel unfolds over nine months, as the Garvey family and their friends and acquaintances struggle to make sense of a world that is in most ways much the same as before but is also profoundly different.

Perrotta, who devours literary biographies and hardboiled detective fiction rather than literary novels while he is composing his

own books, admits that he was thinking about books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while writing The Leftovers.

“Obviously The Road was on my mind. But I think this book is almost the opposite of The Road.

The landscape of The Road is utterly altered in the physical and in the human/social sense. What I wanted to do was create a world where the landscape wasn’t altered at all physically or socially. But psychologically it’s completely different. So whatever strangeness there is, is hard to locate, aside from the people dressed in white who are smoking, I mean. There are some changes that are visible and troubling. But in most cases it’s just much more a sense of ‘I can no longer trust the nature of the world,’ and that creates this feeling of anxiety.”

Another huge difference between The Leftovers and The Road is Perrotta’s gift for comedy. “I certainly found subject matter that is hard to treat comically. Loss is not easy to treat in a comical way,” he says with a laugh. Yet Perrotta is such a keen observer of human psychology— and human foibles—that many moments in The Leftovers are laughout-loud funny. “I think the comedy in this works best when it’s organic to the situation,” Perrotta says.

“There’s comedy in incongruity.

This juxtaposition of almost clinical grief with this insistence on living a normal life does create certain kinds of very dark comedy.”

But Perrotta’s comedy is colored by great empathy for his characters.

“Certain characters open up over time. It’s very satisfying for me as a writer to live with these characters long enough to get a fuller sense of who they are and how they fit into the story. They just seem to get more agency somehow to tell you a little bit about who they are.”

Among The Leftovers’ most appealing characters are the smart, vulnerable teenager Jill and her Goth friend Aimee. “I’ve written a lot about my own teenage years and coming of age. But with this book I suddenly realized I had to write the Jill sections from Jill’s perspective, and this time I was filtering that through my daughter and her friends, not through my own personal memories.”

Perrotta notes, “I had this idea and it seized my mind—but for a long time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It’s probably good for a writer to feel that way, to feel like you’re delving into messy, interesting, important subject matter without exactly knowing why. And I was starting to feel my identity was almost too solid. Like people talked about me in a certain way. Like they knew what a Tom Perrotta novel was. I wasn’t comfortable with that. You start going into the old bag of tricks too much.

“Obviously some things in this book will be familiar—the setting and the subject matter will remind some people of other things I’ve written. But I think on the most basic ground level, I’ve forced myself into unfamiliar territory.”

It’s true. In this brilliant novel, he has definitely gotten himself a whole new bag of tricks. If you’ve never read a Tom Perrotta novel, now’s the time.

The Leftovers

Don’t miss the first book in an explosive new trilogy where angels fall from grace and demons fall… in love!

On sale September 2011.

“Move over Dan Brown!

Chong’s angels and demons inspire, seduce and entertain in a wicked paranormal tale.”

—New York Times bestselling author Caridad Piñeiro

By Tom Perrotta, St. Martin’s, $25.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780312358341, audio, eBook available

Visit www.StephanieChong.com for more information and an exclusive excerpt.

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7/6/11 5:00:09 PM

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reviews Blueprints for Building Better Girls

FICTION

The feminine mystique R e v i e w B y A bb y P l e s s e r

Mothers, daughters, friends, wives and lovers—from the late ’70s to the present day—fill the pages of Elissa Schappell’s wise and witty linked short story collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls. Schappell, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair with an impressive literary pedigree (The Paris Review, Tin House, PEN/Hemingway finalist for Use Me, her debut novel), paints a multifaceted portrait of modern womanhood with the conflicted, interconnected female protagonists of her eight compelling stories.

In “A Dog Story,” New York couple Kate and Douglas struggle to have a baby and decide to adopt a dog, which leads to unforeseen realizations about their relationship. Two young Brooklyn moms take stock of their lives and wonder if they would have children if they had to do it all over again in “Elephant.” Emily, a reformed anorexic, calls her devoted mother for a family chicken recipe in “The Joy of Cooking,” thinking that if she can just make a perfect meal for the new man in her life, she will have some control

By Elissa Schappell, Simon & Schuster, $24 over her chaotic world. In “I’m Only Going to Tell You This Once,” a mother 304 pages, ISBN 9780743276702 tells her teenage son about a tragic, defining moment from her past and Audio, eBook available remembers herself at his age.

Schappell writes with piercing insight and good humor, but one of her greatest gifts is her restraint. In “Are You Comfortable?,” one of the collection’s strongest pieces, we don’t know what caused young Charlotte to take a leave of absence from college and return home to care for her ailing grandfather until the very end of the story. We see Charlotte again as a young mother in “Elephant,” and learn exactly what happened to her through a college friend with problems of her own in “Out of the Blue and into the Black.” Blueprints isn’t a novel in stories, and the pieces certainly stand on their own. But the thoughtful ways in which Schappell ties her characters’ lives together add much to the significance of the collection as a whole. Schappell’s stories read like snapshots—capturing precise moments from a woman’s life from a distinct perspective. Considered together, Blueprints for Building Better Girls is a treasured photo album.

THE GRIEF OF OTHERS

By Leah Hager Cohen Riverhead $26.95, 384 pages ISBN 9781594488054 eBook available

fiction

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Simon Ryrie only lived for 57 hours, but the impact his life has on his family (mother Ricky, father John, siblings Biscuit and Paul) reaches beyond the brief moments of his existence in Leah Hager Cohen’s fourth novel, The Grief of Others. One year later, Ricky, working toward redemption for an infidelity, must now own up to another terrible secret she’s concealed, this one involving her pregnancy with Simon.

As the revelation rips open old wounds, John and Ricky’s wavering relationship threatens to give way, and the Ryrie children sink into their own lonely realities: Young Biscuit

plays hooky and cultivates a fascination with funeral rites, while Paul weathers his classmates’ torturous bullying. With anger, shame and confusion now complicating their mourning, the Ryries struggle for normalcy, an effort made all the more difficult when John’s daughter from a previous relationship shows up, pregnant and in need of a place to stay. When the family is forced to confront a grief within her that is too close to their own, the added heartbreak could be the final blow.

Inspired by her own experience with loss, Cohen demonstrates a masterful command of storytelling, instilling a melancholy power and grace in her words and driving an already gripping narrative with a quiet but brutal intensity. Using the viewpoints of each character makes it easy for readers to give the family the acceptance and forgiveness they fight so hard for, even when their actions don’t exactly warrant it.

With this incredibly moving commentary, Cohen has secured a place in the lineup of today’s great writers.

—Rachel Norfleet

THE NIGHT CIRCUS

By Erin Morgenstern Doubleday $26.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780385534635 Audio, eBook available

Debut fiction

Fans of J.K. Rowling, Susanna Clarke and all forms of magical realism—rejoice. Erin Morgenstern’s long-awaited and much buzzedabout debut The Night Circus has all the makings of a historicalfantasy-for-adults hit: chronologically complicated and interweaving plotlines, wide-eyed descriptions of ever-changing labyrinths, a turn-ofthe-20th-century European setting and a forbidden love practically swelling with Hollywood appeal.

(Indeed, a Harry Potter producer has already snapped up film rights.) But perhaps most importantly, it creates a fantastical world so fully imagined

and captivating, one cannot help but be swept along for the ride.

The story begins when Celia, a five-year-old with an already keen supernatural power, goes to live with her father, Prospero the Enchanter, a magician and key member of the world’s oddest, most awe-inspiring traveling circus: Le Cirque des Rêves.

Sensing his daughter’s untapped power, Prospero pits Celia against another magician in a years-long (and exceedingly dangerous) battle of skill. Her opponent is Marco, a budding magician who begins studying the circus in order to learn his rival’s ways. But what neither he nor Celia anticipates is how much they will grow to like, and eventually love, one another—launching the novel into an age-old tale of star-crossed romance.

Intertwined with the lovers’ narrative are stories of other circus fans and workers—among them Friedrick Thiessen, Le Cirque des Rêves’ most enthusiastic scholar; Isobel, driven by unrequited love for Marco; and Bailey, a farm boy with a wanderlust who observes one magical performance and embarks upon a lifetime obsession.

This first-time novelist is heavy on description, and readers may find themselves skimming details about vanishing contortionists and mystical rainstorms to get back to the actual plot and characters. But she is also dogged in her pursuit of epic love and tragedy. Once you’ve entered Morgenstern’s world, you are not likely to forget it.

—J i l l i a n Q u i n t

Read an interview with author Erin Morgenstern on BookPage.com

THE ART OF FIELDING

By Chad Harbach Little, Brown $25.99, 528 pages ISBN 9780316126694 eBook available

debut fiction

You don’t have to like baseball to savor Chad Harbach’s sumptuous debut novel, a wise and tender story of love and friendship, ambition and the cruelty of dashed dreams, featuring an appealing cast of characters.

From the day he discovers Henry Skrimshander on a sun-bleached American Legion baseball field, Mike

FICTION Schwartz is on a mission to turn the gifted shortstop into a major-leaguecaliber player. Mike, the team captain who’s writing his senior thesis on the Stoics and quotes Schiller in his pregame speeches, persuades Henry to enroll at tiny Westish College, a school with a charming, if eccentric, attachment to Herman Melville that stems from the unearthing of a longforgotten lecture the novelist gave there in 1880.

Thanks to Mike’s obsessive coaching, Henry is on the fast track to a hefty signing bonus, until the day a routine throw to first base sails wide, nearly killing his roommate, outfielder Owen “Buddha” Dunne, probably the only player in baseball history to read Kierkegaard in the dugout. But Owen is much more than a victim of Henry’s errant arm. He’s the lover of Guert Affenlight, Melville scholar and Westish College president, whose 23-year-old daughter Pella appears on campus, fleeing her brief marriage, and eventually falls into a relationship with Mike Schwartz. The ensuing intricate emotional dances only add to the growing tension as the Westish Harpooners improbably claw their way to the Division III national championship game.

Harbach demonstrates an impressive gift for balancing his exploration of these fragile entanglements with an absorbing, well-plotted story, so we’re rooting as hard for the small company of troubled souls as we are for the ragtag Westish nine.

There aren’t many books of 500 pages that feel too short. But like a true fan enjoying a game of baseball as it scrolls its leisurely signature across a summer afternoon, there are moments when you will find yourself wishing The Art of Fielding would never end. It’s that good.

—Harvey Freedenberg

WE THE ANIMALS

By Justin Torres HMH $18, 144 pages ISBN 9780547576725 Audio available

received a considerable amount of pre-publication buzz for his quirky— and delightfully written—We the Animals. This work revolving around three brothers is a pitch-perfect book to read through in one sitting.

While classified as a novel, We the Animals could be viewed as linked short stories. Torres displays each chapter like a photograph for his readers to study. The three young brothers live with their hard-working white mother and loving—yet abusive—Puerto Rican father in upstate New York. Their lives are disrupted by violence, passion and the endless question of whether enough money is coming in to pay the bills.

In “Night Watch,” the boys accompany their father to the building where he works as a security guard, curling up in sleeping bags on the floor. In “Seven,” the youngest of the brothers (our main protagonist) reaches his seventh birthday, much to his mother’s dismay over his no longer being her baby. And in a personal favorite, “The Lake,” readers witness the youngest boy’s attempt to learn how to swim. These poignant glimpses of everyday life are fraught with emotion and heavy with rich, evocative language that taps into one’s primal side. Torres displays a sense of urgency and calamity with the language he uses so precisely.

Although the plot veers off into territory that is unexpected and most definitely rushed, Torres’ portrait of each boy is succinct and beautifully composed. The tension that hovers beneath the surface of these stories vibrates electrically, and readers cannot help but feel connected to the boys who careen around and off the page.

If all this angst sounds confusing, stereotypical or even onerous, rest assured, The Winters In Bloom is exquisitely rendered and incredibly addictive. It will resonate with—and terrify—any parent who lies anxiously awake at night, fretful of the maladies and mayhem that can befall a child. This is a beguiling novel, alternately infused with despair and hope, and above all, the redemptive power of love.

—Karen Ann Cullotta

SALVAGE THE BONEs

By Jesmyn Ward Bloomsbury $24, 272 pages ISBN 9781608195220

Southern fiction

The Gulf of Mexico is about to birth a storm, and it’s headed straight for Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. But

— M e g a n F i s hm a n n

THE WINTERS IN BLOOM

By Lisa Tucker Atria $24, 288 pages ISBN 9781416575405 Audio, eBook available

women’s fiction

Debut fiction

Recent Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate (and current Stegner Fellow at Stanford) Justin Torres has

possible to categorize, bending the confines of the psychological thriller with an eloquent literary narrative of tangled family ties between not only mother and child, but sisters, exspouses and even former in-laws.

Without exception, the characters that populate The Winters In Bloom are fatally flawed from damaged childhoods, yet Tucker’s mastery of voice, time and place prevents their stories from sounding clichéd. Abandoned by their mother and raised by an emotionally distant father and stepmother, sisters Amy and Kyra forge an intense sibling relationship when they are forced to parent one another. Kyra’s husband David was blessed with a loving, albeit longsuffering mother, but he struggles to suppress bad memories of an abusive father and is haunted by the ghosts from his first marriage to the mentally unstable Courtney, whose own maternal experiences bear the imprimatur of Greek tragedy. Still, Kyra and David manage to create a happy life together—until their fiveyear-old son, Michael, goes missing from their backyard.

Motherhood, in all its magical and messy incarnations, is at the heart of Lisa Tucker’s The Winters In Bloom, a story that skates gracefully amid wonder, terror and redemption.

Indeed, Tucker’s sixth novel is im-

orld War I is on the horizon, women are fighting for the right to vote, and explorers are pushing the limits in the most forbidding corners of the earth. Be swept away by Jennifer Donnelly’s epic multi-generational saga as it reaches its dramatic conclusion. now available wherever books are sold.

Also available as a Hyperion ebook.

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Hurricane Katrina’s approach isn’t the first thing on teenage Esch Batiste’s mind; she’s more concerned about her newly discovered pregnancy and the baby’s father, Manny, who is dating another girl. Her brother Skeetah, on the other hand, is fixated on his pit bull China’s newborn puppies. If they live, the dogs may provide money for the Batiste children, who are living in poverty and fending for themselves as their father drinks to dull the pain of their mother’s death.

There’s an unmistakable contrast between Skeetah’s love for China and the indifference of Manny toward Esch. Manny dotes on his girlfriend but approaches Esch for sex; he pushes her away when she seeks emotional connection. Esch repeatedly draws parallels between her situation and her assigned school reading about the mythological Medea, whose husband Jason betrays her. Manny refuses her, but Esch finds support from her brothers, her father and their friends.

“This baby got plenty daddies,” one

FICTION boy says.

It would be easy for the events of Salvage the Bones to take on a pitying, cloying quality. But Mississippi native Jesmyn Ward’s second novel is a pitch-perfect account of struggle and community in the rural South. No doubt Ward’s own upbringing, in DeLisle, Mississippi, factored into the landscape she paints. The fictional Bois Sauvage is based on Ward’s hometown, where the population is mostly poor, black and uneducated. Ward herself broke out of that cycle with help from her mother’s employer, who paid for her private-school education.

The fictional world Ward creates sings with the speech of uneducated but wise people without stepping into caricature dialect. Though the characters in Salvage the Bones face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn’t really about the storm. It’s about people facing challenges, and how they band together to overcome adversity.

—Carla Jean Whitley

Irma Voth

New York Times Bestseller

By Miriam Toews Harper $23.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780062070180 Audio, eBook available

fiction

Heather Cynster steps out of her safe, dull social circle in search of a dashing hero to wed and ends up kidnapped, scandalized and whisked out of London, with her only hope for salvation—and love—resting with a notorious rogue lord.

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AvonRomance.com StephanieLaurens.com

Canadian novelist Miriam Toews returns to the subject of Mennonite teenage girls in Irma Voth. Living in a Mennonite enclave in northern Mexico, 19-year-old Irma has been shunned for marrying a local man who abandons her soon after the marriage. Despite her father’s bullying and threats, Irma remains in touch with her mother and younger sister, Aggie. When a notable Mexican filmmaker comes to town to make a movie about the insular religious community, Irma is hired as a translator. To her Mennonite neighbors, Irma’s collaboration proves almost as outrageous as her marriage, and she finds herself at odds with many in the community. It is not long before Irma starts thinking about leaving Mexico altogether and bringing her sister with her.

The novel comes alive in the beautifully handled relationship between the overburdened Irma and the

q&a

MIriam toews

Mennonites, movies & mexico

I

n her fourth novel, an acclaimed Canadian writer transforms a stranger-than-fiction experience into a memorable coming-of-age tale.

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas cast you in his film Silent Light, which was shot in much the same way as the film in Irma Voth. How did that experience inform the novel?

It was certainly the source of it.

I had never been in a film before and I was unfamiliar with the whole process, which at times seemed utterly chaotic. Often the crew would be conferring in a Spanish I couldn’t understand, often I’d be off to the side waiting as big decisions were being made. . . . It was easy to extend my own unfamiliarity and bewilderment to the character of Irma Voth.

Here’s this young girl, raised in a conservative Mennonite encampment in a remote part of Mexico, suddenly surrounded by men and women smoking and drinking, talking about sex openly, and whose creative pursuits and their ways of getting there are wildly exotic.

You wrote about the Mennonite community beautifully in A Complicated Kindness. What made you return to this subject?

So many authors return time and again to the communities they know intimately; there they find the stories that are universal to all of us. My Mennonite background is a big part of who I am and it’s an identity I can work with and explore in various ways, directly or obliquely. Everyone in this world defines themselves against some kind of authority, whether religious, familial or social.

Writing is a big part of Irma’s journey to find herself. She keeps a journal and embroiders subversive words on the inside of her clothes. Why are words so important to Irma?

It’s her circumstances that make words so vital. She lives in the desert, she looks after cows, she has no stimulation. She’s not a particularly literary person or anything, but words are the only tools she has access to and she writes more out of desperation and urgency than anything

© CAROL LOEWEN

reviews

else. But then she discovers herself through them: by trying to memorize a poem that Wilson has recited to her, for example, or by changing words until she begins to impose her voice—her style—over top of reality. By inventing her own way of weaving words, she is turning real, lived experiences into imaginative experiences, and this gives her the courage she needs.

You write so thoughtfully about the positives and negatives of growing up within a religious community. With the popularity of Amish fiction and TV programs like “Sister Wives,” it’s obviously a topic of interest in the culture at large. Why do you think these stories are so fascinating?

I think you’re referring to the curiosity people have, not so much with religious communities, but with utopian communities. All of us have considered renouncement of the ugly, duplicitous world at some time or other, so these people who have removed themselves from the world can seem attractive, especially for people who have trouble navigating the “real world.” You don’t have to think so much, constantly consider your values and assess situations and make decisions. Instead, you just obey, let decisions be made for you, kind of like joining the army.

That’s pretty appealing.

What do you hope readers will take away from Irma Voth?

I’m genuinely excited for friends and readers to pick up this book and engage with the ideas. You read to feel less alone but you also write to be less alone.

FICTION carefree Aggie, who unlike Irma has been able to achieve an emotional distance from her parents. While she and Aggie make their move, Irma struggles to solve the twin mysteries of the family’s initial move to Mexico from Canada and the whereabouts of her older sister, Katie.

Irma Voth may be the most emotionally complex of Toews’ novels. Irma is determined to create a different life for her sisters, but is frustrated by her own feelings of guilt and regret, having inherited her father’s view that the girls were responsible for his abusive behavior.

Irma recounts her life with a direct yet artful stream-of-consciousness, and the reader never feels far from her thoughts, whether they are passing observations or her deepest emotions.

Toews based this novel on her own experience working in Mexico with director Carlos Reygadas on the film Silent Light. There she observed firsthand the interaction between the filmmakers and the Mennonite community, descendents from the small group who had first emigrated from Canada in the 1920s in search of religious freedom. Though the combination is almost surreal, this clash of cultures proves truth can often be stranger than fiction.

—Lauren Bufferd

THERE BUT FOR THE

By Ali Smith Pantheon $25, 256 pages ISBN 9780375424090 eBook available

to leave. Leave it to Smith to take a seemingly simple and straightforward (and absurd!) idea and transform it into anything but.

A postmodern writer at her very core, Smith uses multiple narrators, ranging from a 10-year-old girl to a woman on her deathbed, to tell the story. Although the title of the novel is itself a frustratingly incomplete fragment, readers will find it fitting: Each of the narrators offers only a snippet of insight into Miles, none of them truly being privy to his entire person. It is only by sifting through and synthesizing these wisps that a larger picture begins to emerge.

This isn’t to say that by the end everything is made clear; this is one novel that will have you puzzling over it well after its final page has been turned. There But For The isn’t the kind of book you read in order to find answers, but rather to ponder questions. This is a novel that is deeply cerebral and is guaranteed to get your synapses firing. For those who relish a bit of an enigma and are looking for something extraordinary when it comes to fiction, There But For The delivers in spades.

—Stephenie Harrison

I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS

By Lily Tuck Atlantic Monthly $24, 208 pages ISBN 9780802119919

fiction

—Clare Swanson

THE HANGMAN’S DAUGHTER

By Oliver Pötzsch Mariner $18, 448 pages ISBN 9780547745015 Audio, eBook available

fiction

British author Ali Smith has never been what you’d call a conventional novelist. Whether she is using a hotel as a metaphor for the various stages of life, examining the impact of uninvited guests or re-envisioning a classic Greek myth, Smith has proved she isn’t afraid of taking chances or pushing boundaries.

Smith’s novels tend to begin with a slightly outlandish but irresistibly intriguing premise. Her latest novel, There But For The, is the story of Miles Garth, a man who attends a dinner party only to lock himself in his hosts’ spare bedroom partway through the meal and then refuses

meal and recalling their life together.

Her fractured web of memories results in something of a meandering obituary for Philip, as well as their marriage, and carries us from their meeting at a cafe in 1960s Paris to his unexpected end. At first, it appears to be a classic case of love that relies on the joyful equilibrium of opposites—Nina, an artist, is the dreamer; Philip the logician. But as the novel progresses, her grief and introspection expose a decidedly more complicated relationship, one that is dominated by Philip’s relentless devotion to probability, yet, paradoxically, ridden with uncertainty.

The writing is lyrical and striking, vividly capturing the nature of memory and the way in which love, though never simple, is contained and proven in the small, indelible moments of our lives. Many writers attempt to navigate the territory of grief: those manic days after loss, the weeks where life repairs itself and the months when normal begins to feel, once again, possible. But this slim, magnificent novel is rarified by its heartbreaking immediacy, and the moving, aching stream of consciousness chronicles not only the psychology of shock and mourning, but also the minute-by-minute way in which Nina begins to put life as she knows it in the past tense.

Lily Tuck, who won the 2004 National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, has long been heralded for her elegant, spare prose and predilection for complex characters and philosophical inquiry. Her latest novel, I Married You for Happiness, which potently documents one woman’s response to her husband’s death, displays everything critics and readers have come to expect from this talented writer.

Philip, a successful mathematician at a university in Cambridge, arrives home from work and tells his wife, Nina, that he needs to lie down before dinner. A short while later, Nina discovers his lifeless body in the bed they shared. She spends the remainder of the night by his side, drinking the red wine meant for the

historical fiction

The Hangman’s Daughter, written by a descendent of the very family this historical mystery features, was already an international bestseller before being released in the U.S. And it’s not hard to see why; the novel’s page-turning plot keeps readers guessing, and the setting—1689 Bavaria—is no slouch, either.

While the book is called The Hangman’s Daughter, the character who seems to interest author Oliver Pötzsch the most is the hangman himself, Jakob Kuisl. A hulking creature who is ambivalent about his career as a state-approved murderer,

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Sophie Hannah returns with her most transfixing mystery yet.

“Not just a perfectly executed psychological thriller, but a pertinent meditation on society itself.” —The Guardian “When it comes to ingenious plots that twist and turn like a roller coaster, few writers can match Sophie Hannah.”

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reviews the hangman proves to be smarter, faster, stronger, more sensitive, more decisive and (against all odds) the best doctor in town. Despite these remarkable credentials, he is also an outcast: lowly, disrespected and considered a sign of bad luck.

Our hangman has an unusual case on his hands. A group of orphans is being murdered one by one, and the town suspects the midwife of witchcraft. Tattoos that feature a witch’s sign in elderberry juice on the shoulders of the victims terrify the townspeople and stir up talk of a witch hunt. Meanwhile, a certain treasure has gone missing, and a group of itinerant soldiers seems to be pulling off all kinds of minor disturbances. Can the hangman and his friend Simon, a physician, figure out who really killed the orphans in time to save the wrongly accused midwife?

Or is the midwife perhaps not what she seems?

Readers who like a plot-driven story with identifiable heroes and villains will be drawn to this ambitious

FICTION novel. And unlike some stories in the genre, The Hangman’s Daughter only gets better as the climax approaches—an exciting duel between the hangman and his nemesis. It truly delivers the thing so many of us look for in our novels: entertainment.

— K e l ly B l e w e t t

THE TASTE OF SALT

By Martha Southgate Algonquin $13.95, 288 pages ISBN 9781565129252

fiction

A reader coming to the end of Martha Southgate’s devastating fourth novel might think, “What did the Hendersons do to deserve this?” For they are a normal American family whose members are, at

heart, kind and decent—and yet they struggle with more than their share of problems.

The Taste of Salt is narrated by the daughter of the family, Josie, an African-American marine biologist. She is drawn to her profession, perhaps, because her love of the water has always been a refuge from a difficult family life. In chapters that alternate between past and present, Josie tries to puzzle out how her family got to be the way it is. She wonders especially about her father and her brother, for Ray and Tick are both alcoholics. Maybe for Ray, her father, it was thwarted literary ambition, or the pressures of being an AfricanAmerican man trying to raise a family in a dying industrial city. Who knows?

The reasons for the handsome and charming Tick to fall as far as he does are even less explicable—he’s not only an alcoholic but has an off-andon drug problem as well. Sarah, the stalwart wife and mother, always willing to support her men, is still healthy enough to know she can’t

live with her husband; she finally kicks Ray out when Josie and Tick are young adults. But when the grownup Tick comes home and begins to drink and drug again, Sarah can’t bring herself to turn her son away.

Not even Josie escapes. Though she’s neither an alcoholic nor an addict, her family’s troubles have taught her to armor herself emotionally, which affects her marriage to the gentle and goodhearted Daniel. She’s cruel to him, unintentionally, almost helplessly. She embarks on a crazy affair with a colleague that she doesn’t much trouble to hide. She refuses to have the children that her husband wants, a refusal that seems to occur even on a cellular level. Moreover, Josie won’t have anything to do with her father or brother unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it becomes absolutely necessary sooner than she’d like. With compassion and a quiet grief, Southgate examines the ways families self-destruct even as they try to hold it together.

—Arlene McKanic

Like Being On Vacation Fiction

Available Everywhere Books Are Sold

.com

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features

christian fiction

By Dee Ann Grand

Suspense, laughter and love

D

o you prefer your fiction to be pulse-pounding, heart-wrenching, sprinkled with belly laughs or loaded with hairpin twists and turns? These new inspirational fiction titles offer something for everyone and are sure to deliver.

Tim LaHaye’s best-selling Left Behind series cast him as an expert on prophetic fiction. The second entry in the End Series, written by Lahaye and Craig Parshall, Thunder of Heaven (Zondervan, $24.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780310326373), does not disappoint. Political squabbling, governments and agencies butting heads, an angry Mother Nature, global warming and unemployment aren’t only today’s top news headlines—they are the bones of this knockdown, drag-out tale that grips readers from the start.

Almost anyone can identify with Deborah Jordan as she sits in a plane on a tarmac awaiting departure. The hassle of security, boarding and cramped seating just isn’t fun. But unbeknownst to her, her plane—along with several others in other cities departing at the same time—is part of a coordinated attack on America. From there, the pace doesn’t let up until the last page as all the members of the Jordan family do their dead level best to thwart the destruction of our country, in spite of the politically driven media, inept government, soulless terrorists, global threats and enormous personal sacrifice.

A MOTHER’S HOPE Mark Schultz, an award-winning Christian music artist, has touched millions of hearts with his song

even as well-meaning friends say hurtful things. The ripple effect of how one missing soldier can change the lives of so many people is vividly portrayed in Letters from War (Howard, $19.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9781439197318). But most powerful throughout the story is Beth, who continues to give to her family and to her community even though her heart is fighting despair.

A true master at storytelling, whether in song or in prose, Schultz has written a tale that will bring a tear and lift your spirit, all while honoring the service of our military families.

A MYSTERIOUS SCROLL HOLDS THE KEY TO MANKIND’S DESTINY.

2011

Whether you’ve read the previous five Bug Man novels by Tim Downs or not, Nick of Time (Thomas Nelson, $15.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9781595543103) will show you just who Nick Polchak, aka the Bug Man, really is deep down inside. Though Nick is a forensic entomologist who studies insects from murder victims’ remains, this time he faces a much more precarious situation: He’s getting married. And never has Nick Polchak ever been more out of his element. Dead bodies and bugs? No problem. Wedding cake and honeymoon decisions? Run! And whether consciously or unconsciously, he does run—or rather, accepts an invitation from the Vidocq society to at-

END OF DAYS

“Letters from War.” The song tells an unforgettable story, reminding listeners of the sacrifices our military men and women make for our freedom and the unwavering courage of their families. Now, writing with Travis Thrasher, Schultz has expanded that song into a novel that follows the emotional journey of one soldier’s family, friends and community. Readers get to know one military mother, Beth, who refuses to give up hope even after two years of not knowing whether her son James is being held prisoner, wounded or dead. She finds strength in her faith, continuing to pray and write letters to her son,

/ Available September

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

tend a forensic specialists meeting just a few days before the wedding ceremony.

Alena Savard, the bride-to-be and a trainer of cadaver dogs, is none too happy about Nick’s sudden departure. Then Nick and Alena, along with several other interesting folks— most of whom are forensic professionals who relish solving dead-end crimes—suddenly find themselves fearing for their lives. Downs uses plenty of humor to expose the quirks of these odd characters. In fact, Bug Man fans might be in for a jolt at the story’s close when the day arrives for Nick and Alena to tie the knot.

978-1-61626-278-5

As if the complicated emotional relationships between animals and humans weren’t enough to stir the soul, Neil Abramson adds a harrowing twist of legal suspense to his moving first novel. Hauntingly told through the voice of a dead woman, Unsaid (Center Street, $23.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9781599954103) finds former veterinarian Helena caught between this world and the next as she watches her loved ones and worries about a dark secret she’s taken to the grave. Her widower, David, is still struggling to get back to his law practice, deal with his grief and find a way to care for the many rescue animals (all with their own issues) that Helena had nurtured.

But David is forced into action when Cindy, a chimpanzee Helena had loved, suddenly becomes the target of a dangerous lab experiment. It is up to David to save Cindy through a harrowing legal battle that (unbeknownst to him) could release Helena from her sad purgatory. Unsaid explores the miracle of sentience in humans and animals, and every character in this story makes heartbreaking mistakes. This compassionate and suspenseful story will remind you to savor every moment of every meaningful relationship you may ever be blessed with—whether human or animal.

, where one rld of The Guardian demons Plunge into the wo ter protector encoun ystery of woman and her m e strive to solve th and angels as they an ancient scroll.

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Meet the faMily

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NONFICTION

An explorer’s lasting legacy

Holy War

R e v i e w b y A n n e Bar t l e t t

available now wherever books are sold

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Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama had the same goal: a sea route to “the Indies.” Despite our October holiday, it’s abundantly clear who succeeded. The Portuguese da Gama decisively won the contest by rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and finding his way to the wealthy spice port of Calicut in India in 1498. Columbus’ voyages had the greater long-term impact by opening the Americas to European colonization.

But historian Nigel Cliff argues in his sweeping Holy War that da Gama’s deeds had a huge influence on the economic and cultural competition between East and West that continues today.

Da Gama’s sea journeys provide the framework for Cliff’s epic, but he is only a symbol of the larger Portuguese imperial effort in the 15th and 16th centuries. Portugal’s royal house had two interwoven objectives: the worldwide spread of Christianity and the acquisition of wealth. Spurred

By Nigel Cliff, Harper, $29.99, 560 pages on by their mistaken belief in a nonexistent Eastern Christian king called ISBN 9780061735127 “Prester John,” they set out to break the Muslim Arab monopoly on the spice trade from India to Europe. Da Gama was the perfect spearhead.

Da Gama’s encounters with Africa and India make a compelling adventure tale, told by Cliff with the right mix of sweep and detail. Cliff portrays da Gama as tough, smart, ruthless and consumed with the hatred of Islam typical of his Iberian crusader background. He was a far better leader than Columbus, and although he certainly made mistakes—for example, he was long under the strange misapprehension that the Hindus were Christians—he got results.

Christianity didn’t triumph throughout the globe, but Cliff argues that the maritime empire created by da Gama and his successors through bloodshed and guile did tip the economic balance of power from the Middle East to Europe. That empire was mismanaged and short-lived, but the Dutch and English followed where the Portuguese led. The consequences linger.

THE EIGHTY-DOLLAR CHAMPION

By Elizabeth Letts Ballantine $26, 352 pages ISBN 9780345521088 Audio, eBook available

ANIMALS

America, it seems, loves a good horse story. In the wake of the huge success of books and movies like Seabiscuit and Secretariat comes Elizabeth Letts’ poignant chronicle, The Eighty-Dollar Champion.

It is, most likely, the “underdog” aspect of these stories that accounts for their popularity: America cheers for those who can beat overwhelming odds to achieve their dreams. Letts’ narrative about Harry de Leyer, an impoverished Dutch immigrant, and Snowman, a broken-down plowhorse, fits firmly in this genre, but also adds history and perspective on the devastations of Hitler’s war machine, the horse’s

place in American culture and the art, skill, social structure and politics of the equestrian sport of show jumping. Letts’ tale, set mostly in the ’50s, is written in evocative, skilled prose that rings true to the tenor of postwar America, when new social structures were evolving as America was shifting from an agrarian, small-town society to one more mechanized and suburban.

This backdrop of social evolution would play an important role in Snowman and Harry’s story.

After the hardscrabble years following his immigration to America, Harry worked as a riding instructor at a private girls’ school, and was able to establish a small horse farm on the side. In the winter of 1956, he was late to a horse auction, where he had hoped to buy a mount for the school’s use. Harry spotted a truckload of horses meant for the slaughterhouse; one skinny white-grey horse in the bunch stood calmly—and looked him straight in the eye. Harry bought the animal for $80 and took him home, where one of his kids piped up, “Look, Daddy, he has snow all over

him. He looks just like a snowman.”

Harry nourished the gentle horse back to health, put him to work at the school, then subsequently sold him to a neighbor. But Snowman loved Harry and kept jumping the high paddock fences to return home. Impressed with Snowman’s devotion and jumping talent, Harry trained him and indulged his own love of show jumping, gradually entering the horse in local competitions and persisting until he made the cut for prestigious national competitions.

Amid the high-strung thoroughbreds, the media hoopla and the white-tie-and-tails society that surrounds the show-jumping circuit, Snowman and Harry, humble and homespun in appearance and manners, awed the crowds that were hungry for a champion to cherish.

The “teddy bear” horse and his loving owner eventually leapt their way to national and international acclaim. Letts deftly calibrates the emotion and suspense that are an indelible part of this tale, which, at its end, may bring a tear or two.

—Alison Hood

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

By Alexandra Fuller Penguin Press $25.95, 256 pages ISBN 9781594202995 eBook available

Memoir

Most parents are familiar with the figurative “landmines” of childhood: scraped knees, hurt feelings, unsuccessful playdates. But few, at least in the West, have to worry about actual ones. Landmines are but one of the hazards that Alexandra Fuller, author of the memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), had to contend with while growing up in war-torn Rhodesia in the 1970s.

With her latest memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Fuller returns to Africa and her endlessly fascinating family. In this follow-up, which easily stands alone, Fuller revisits familiar terrain, but with a vastly different perspective—that of someone a decade older who’s now a parent herself.

While her first memoir chronicled her Rhodesian childhood, this one focuses on the lives of her intrepid parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller, who resolved to make a life for themselves on their African farm despite personal heartbreak and political upheaval. At its core, however, Cocktail Hour is the story of Fuller’s dynamic mother, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she is sometimes known. Fuller recreates scenes of her mother bumping across treacherous terrain in a Land Rover, an Uzi lying across her lap, and striding across the land with an assortment of dogs in her wake.

Fuller interviewed both her parents extensively for this book, especially Nicola, whose voice she has captured with remarkable precision.

Born “one million percent Highland Scottish” on the Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya during the 1950s, Nicola rode a donkey to school, where she endured harsh treatment at the hands of the nuns; became an accomplished equestrian at an early age; and married a dashing Englishman before settling down on a farm, first in Kenya, then Rhodesia, where the author and her

sister Vanessa were born in the late 1960s. When a civil war broke out in the mid-1970s, Fuller’s tenacious parents decided to dig in rather than leave Africa. We follow the young Fullers as they traverse the continent, fleeing from war and unspeakable heartache, hopscotching from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia.

When the girls moved away as grownups (the author lives in Wyoming with her American husband, a river guide), their parents procured a fish and banana farm in Zambia, where they remain to this day. It is here that Fuller returns at the end of the book to sit under the legendary Tree of Forgetfulness, where, according to local lore, ancestors reside and villagers meet to resolve disputes.

Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir. She renders this portrait of her family with both humor and compassion—from Nicola and Tim’s early years, awash in that fragrant Kenyan air, to their later ones in the Zambian valley where they seem to have finally found home.

—Katherine Wyrick

LOVE AND CAPITAL

By Mary Gabriel Little, Brown $35, 768 pages ISBN 9780316066112 eBook available

biography

Don’t be misled by the silly title: Love and Capital is a serious and tremendously well-researched biography of a remarkable family who worked together to change the world. Karl and Jenny Marx were unlikely sweethearts—he a scruffy, volatile Jewish scholar and she the lustrous daughter of one of Prussia’s oldest and noblest families—but from their marriage in 1843 until the end of their lives they sweated and starved and suffered together for the sake of the dispossessed.

Their marriage was passionate but not always happy. Apart from their persistent poverty, brought on

q&a

ALEXANDRA FULLER

An African love story

A

fter chronicling her African childhood in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller turns to the adventurous and sometimes tragic lives of her parents.

Your mother often refers to your first memoir as “The Awful Book.” What does she think of Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness?

It’s never easy to read about yourself. You think, “Well, yes, I said something like that, but that wasn’t the whole context, truth, intention of what I meant. . . .”

So I can understand Mum’s hesitation at being too enthusiastic about this book, although she does seem to prefer it to Dogs, about which she was initially furious!

How did becoming a mother change the way you view your own childhood and see your parents?

I think I am kinder and certainly slower to judge my own parents now than I was before I had children. I also have more compassion for them: I can’t imagine surviving the loss of one of my children, let alone surviving the loss of three.

Did you learn anything about your parents that surprised you?

I don’t think I was surprised by what they told me—some of these stories are the old standards that come out at dinner parties—but what I was surprised by was how much they have lived. “Never a dull moment,” as Dad often says.

And now with nearly 20 years of my own marriage to look back on, I am surprised—or maybe more impressed—by my parents’ unflagging commitment to one another and their support of each other nearly 50 years after they first met in Kenya.

Given their lives—the death of children, war, the loss of so much, the occasional really bad decision—their continuing, dare I say deepening, love seems so miraculous.

This book is partly my parents’ love story; the way they have always been so delighted in one another, so deeply impressed by one another’s gifts, even as drought, war, madness, tragedy and bad luck ensued.

© Ian Murphy

NONFICTION

Your parents lived as expats in Africa; now you live as an expat in the United States. How are those experiences different?

The whole point of Cocktail Hour is to show how my parents have made a decision to relinquish their expat status and live in Africa as Africans. This is essential: As long as they lived as expats and fought Africa (literally), their losses accumulated.

Once Dad accepted that he was African (fundamentally, Mum has always been African), their lives took on something approaching peace.

I am not an expat here in the U.S. I have become an American citizen. That being said, I don’t think living in the U.S. has forced me to relinquish the lessons and values I learned from my African childhood. Partly, this is because I am not an ethnic minority in this country: I am white so it is easy for me to fly under the radar.

My parents had to work at becoming African—their journey from expats to Africans is the major theme of the book. But I have not had to work at becoming an American nearly as hard.

You briefly allude to certain writers in your book—Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham. How do you see yourself fitting in with this literary tradition, if at all?

I attempt to be the antidote to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham: the white writer who refuses to swallow the nostalgic view that it was all so wonderful under colonialism. I would hope that my African work falls more under the tradition of writers like Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head and Chenjerai Hove.

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reviews

by Karl’s chronic inability to meet a deadline and the utter indifference with which his books were received once finally published, the Marxes endured constant illnesses, the deaths of several children and even a few moments of shocking infidelity on Karl’s part. Indeed, Karl Marx comes across as a bit of a cad in this story, the sort of tortured artist around whom everybody else must orbit. Jenny, however, is the real revelation here: an intelligent, sophisticated woman who remained devoted both to her husband and to his cause, despite the considerable sacrifices demanded by both.

Mary Gabriel tells their story with great empathy and verve, using the copious letters that passed between Karl, Jenny, their children and close friends like Friedrich Engels (Karl’s frequent collaborator and sugar daddy to the entire Marx clan) to illuminate what Karl called his “microscopic world” of home and family. Gabriel also provides plenty of excursions into the “macroscopic world” of 19th-century revolutionary politics, as well as some lucid explanations of Karl’s earthshaking ideas. In the 20th century those ideas would be appropriated more often than they were understood, but this fascinating immersion into the Marxes and their era might inspire some readers to give Karl’s own books a closer look.

—Mark Doyle

SOUTH WITH THE SUN

By Lynne Cox Knopf $26, 320 pages ISBN 9780307593405 eBook available

NONFICTION paced and inspiring chronicle that is part biography and part memoir, Lynne Cox, a seasoned explorer herself who’s already shared her aquatic adventures in the breathtaking Swimming to Antarctica, feels compelled to follow Amundsen’s path. He becomes for her a waypoint along her life’s journey, providing hope, inspiration and guidance as she retraces his steps across the Northwest Passage. From her own adventures along the Amundsen trail, Cox learns that he succeeded where others had failed because he prepared extensively for his journeys and he took calculated risks.

In preparation for his journey to Antarctica, for example, Amundsen learned how to sail and navigate and started to earn his skipper’s license.

In addition, he learned to listen to the experts on the ship; unlike many of his fellow explorers, he avoided a devastating bout of scurvy during the Belgica expedition to Antarctica simply by following the suggestions of the ship’s physician to eat raw meat.

Cox weaves her own adventures into her narrative about Amundsen.

She prepares methodically for her swims on the coast of Greenland, Baffin Island, King William Island and Cambridge Bay in water as cold as 28.8 degrees without a wet suit.

As she swims the Chukchi Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, she survives her encounters with masses of jellyfish and feels elated that her swims have taken her into waters that few have ever entered—and that she has traveled through the same Arctic that Amundsen had, a place where one misstep could mean disaster.

—Henry L. Carrigan jr.

WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR

memoir

26

As a young man, Roald Amundsen set out with a friend on an Arctic training exercise, skiing west of Oslo to a mountain range with a plateau that extended to Bergen. While the two hoped to reach their goal in two days, a blizzard, combined with the pair’s lack of preparation for the trip, turned a training exercise into a misadventure that almost ended in tragedy. As a result of this event, Amundsen never again went unprepared into a polar environment.

In South With the Sun, her fast-

By Karl Marlantes Atlantic Monthly $25, 448 pages ISBN 9780802119926 Audio available

History

r J.

Last year Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, the best novel to date about American soldiers’ experience of combat in Vietnam.

Gritty, gripping and remarkably soulful, it offered readers a profoundly moving picture of what it

was like to go to war.

Now Marlantes has written a sparklingly provocative nonfiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War. In it, readers will discover the outlines of some of the events he heightened and fictionalized in Matterhorn. Marlantes is an exceptional writer and his depictions here are vivid. But his purposes in this book are quite different from the purposes of his novel.

Here Marlantes uses his personal experiences as illustrations of the psychological, philosophical and spiritual dilemmas that combat soldiers face—in the field and upon returning home. He reflects with crackling insight on such topics as killing, guilt, lying, loyalty, heroism.

He warns of the perils to a culture’s psyche in fighting war at a remove, as we now do with unmanned drones. And he writes of his own experiences with searing honesty, rejecting what he calls “jingoistic clap trap.” In one passage, for example, Marlantes says, “The least acknowledged aspect of war, at least these days, is how exhilarating it is.”

This will be off-putting to some, but Marlantes is not a warmonger.

He is a realist. Part of his argument is that, since we will continue to fight wars, we risk damaging both the young warriors and the society that sends them to war if we avoid integrating those experiences into our collective psyche. At its simplest, his idea is that we must create rituals and reflective spaces in which frontline soldiers (usually in their teens and 20s) can care for their spiritual and psychological health. To do so one must be truthful about the full experience of combat, including what Marlantes, borrowing from Carl Jung, calls its shadow side.

Marlantes, a Yale graduate, left a Rhodes scholarship to join a Marine combat unit in Vietnam as a second lieutenant. He won the Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts and numerous other medals. He knows whereof he speaks. What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes says, is the product of 30 years of reading, writing and thinking about the meaning of his combat experiences. His reading has been wide, and his thinking deep. In his final chapter, he offers advice on how our society can improve its relationship with the gods of war. It’s advice worth heeding.

Disregard the in-your-face title— Yoga Bitch is actually a hilarious, thoughtful and only occasionally profane account of one young woman facing mortality and bad habits head on.

Suzanne Morrison was 24 years old when the Twin Towers fell.

Shortly thereafter, feeling stressed and spiritually disoriented, she found herself wandering into a yoga studio on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Yoga was, to say the least, not really her thing up until that point: “My idea of exercise was walking up the hill to buy smokes,” Morrison writes.

“Rearranging my bookshelves.

Having sex. Maybe an especially vigorous acting exercise. Most of the time I lived above the neck.”

But Morrison finds herself drawn to her yoga practice in a way she can’t quite explain. She puts her plans to move to New York City on hold so she can head to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat. Yoga Bitch is something of a travel journal, in which she records her thoughts from the moment her plane leaves Seattle to her arrival in a steamy Balinese village. “Wellness is very big among my yogamates,” she muses on Day 3. “If Wellness were a person, it would be Michael Jackson circa 1984, and my yogamates would be screaming, crying fans, jumping up and down just to be so near to it. Kind of the way I would act around a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes right about now.”

Anyone who has read her eponymous blog or seen her one-woman show knows Morrison is whipsmart and irreverent. In her first book, she proves that she’s also wise and has a singular way with words.

Whether you relate to Morrison more in her cigarette-smoking, stressed-out urbanite phase or in full-on Yoga Bitch mode, this book will inspire you to walk your own path to enlightenment—or at least make you laugh a lot.

—Alden Mudge

— Am y S c r i b n e r

yoga bitch

By Suzanne Morrison Three Rivers $15, 352 pages ISBN 9780307717443 eBook available

memoir

features

SEPTEMBER 11

By Martin Brady

REFLECTING ON OUR DARKEST HOUR

T

he 10th anniversary of 9/11 is a solemn occasion that will be noted by all Americans. Several new books recall the events of that day, with emphasis on heroism, courage under fire, sacrifice and loss.

WITNESSES TO TRAGEDY In tandem with Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office, a team of editors has compiled After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed (The New Press, $26.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9781595586476). This compelling collection of reminiscences by survivors of, and witnesses to, 9/11 has particular resonance because the subjects were interviewed first after the attack, and then several years later, as a means of monitoring their post-trauma reactions and behavior. The project’s Q&A approach offers readable access into the feelings—both personal and political—of the respondents, including firefighters and police, surviving family members of victims and residents of Lower Manhattan.

Another volume comes from Tuesday’s Children, a nonprofit founded by the relatives and friends of 9/11 victims, which has put together The Legacy Letters (Perigee, $22, 272 pages, ISBN 9780399537080), gathering missives written to the deceased victims by their loved ones. With the tragedy now 10 years in the past, these plaintive letters from wives, children, siblings and parents are nonetheless palpably moving, and the poignant expressions of love, hope, regret, sadness and longing serve as stark reminders of the human toll exacted by the brutal attacks.

In a similar vein, but with broader scope, is 9/11: The World Speaks (Lyons Press, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780762777990). Compiled

by the Tribute WTC Visitor Center and a project of the September 11th Families’ Association, this book compiles the thoughts, prayers and heartfelt ruminations of worldwide visitors to Ground Zero, reproducing the actual note cards and original drawings contributed by the respondents. A paperback with a somewhat ephemeral feel to it, this item is nevertheless a worthy addition to the 10-year commemoration, with a foreword by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and a preface by Tom Brokaw.

STORIES OF HOPE There are, of course, many noteworthy stories of survival from 9/11, but perhaps none are as stirring as the one related in Angel in the Rubble: The Miraculous Rescue of 9/11’s Last Survivor (Howard, $24, 240 pages, ISBN 9781451635201). Genelle GuzmanMcMillan was employed by the New York Port Authority and was working on the North Tower’s 64th floor on September 11, 2001. Her escape from the building following the crash of American Airlines Flight 11 begins almost as a comedy of errors involving misdirection and official confusion. Alas, what should have been a fairly straightforward evacuation turned into a nightmare, and her survival was truly miraculous. She and her colleagues in fact never really escaped from the tower. The building collapsed just as they were nearing the exits, and only Guzman-McMillan

survived, discovered alive amid the rubble by rescue workers more than 24 hours later. Guzman-McMillan, along with co-author William C ­ royle, crafts a readable account of that ill-fated sequence of events, effectively framing the 9/11 story within the context of her own confused personal life, including her illegal status with the INS. Her story has a happy ending on many fronts and serves to remind us that hope can spring from despair.

Michael Hingson’s 9/11 survival story is unique, to say the least. A salesman beginning a normal workday at the World Trade Center that morning, Hingson happens to be blind, his guide dog, Roselle, ever at his side. In Thunder Dog (Thomas Nelson, $22.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781400203048), Hingson, with a deft assist from co-author Susy Flory, intersperses a solid overview of his life—blind almost from birth— with the tale of his escape from the 78th floor of Tower One. Hingson describes feeling the impact of the plane that morning, the sway of the building, the smell of airplane fuel and his subsequent evacuation with a colleague, traversing some 1,400 stairs to the tenuous safety of the chaotic New York streets below, Roselle determinedly and faithfully leading the way.

Hingson’s well-written story does more than provide a slice of 9/11 history. Readers will learn enlightening information about the blind experience in general and take away some good advice for how the sighted can better interact with their blind brethren.

making history Finally, the 9/11 anniversary has induced two publishers to re-­ release valuable books on the event.

In 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books, $17, 400 pages, ISBN 9780805094213), authors Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn provide a chronological narrative of the dramatic developments at Ground Zero, with focus on the stories of individuals in both towers caught up in the horror and confusion. Originally published in 2005, the latest edition features a new postscript with updates on the lives of some of the people involved in the events.

First published in 2002, when it was rushed into print as a timely summary of 9/11, the reissued What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, In Words, Pictures, and Video (Simon & Schuster, $29.99, 144 pages, ISBN 9781451626667) includes the DVD from the original publication plus a new reflective essay by Joe Klein.

This package cogently gathers contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other major print sources; the authors represented include Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd, Howard Kurtz and Pete Hamill, among others. There are also transcripts of CBS News radio and television coverage, and the video disc—narrated

by Dan Rather—offers an informative visual look back at the terror and its aftermath.

27

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A writer’s first brave steps

n just one week, fifth grader Mattie Breen, custodial apprentice and secret storyteller, will face the moment she always dreads: introducing herself in front of her classmates in yet another new school.

This time, as she helps her Uncle Potluck, director of custodial arts at Mitchell P. Anderson Elementary School, prepare for the opening of school, Mattie stands in the empty classroom and wonders what it will be like. Is it possible that, for once, she can find words to say that will magically bring her friends? Can she say something that will make her more than “that shy girl?”

Mattie is the engaging young heroine of Linda Urban’s lyrical new novel for young readers, Hound Dog True. Urban brings Mattie’s emotions to life so perceptively it’s natural to wonder if the author herself was shy as a child, or if, like Mattie, she had the experience of being teased about her writing.

“When I was a kid, I wrote all the time—joyfully and fearlessly,” Urban remembers during a call to her home in Vermont. “Then in seventh grade, we were given an assignment to write about Christmas Eve. I wrote a piece that was filled with memory and detail—I really put my heart into it. We were asked to read our pieces aloud and I did, and a boy in my class said that one of the words I used was weird. And that I was weird for having used it.”

The incident had an effect on the direction Urban took. She stopped writing fiction and went on to study advertising and journalism in college. Eventually she became a bookseller at an independent

Hound Dog True

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FOR MORE INFO GO TO BOOKPAGE.COM

Interview by Deborah Hopkinson

By Linda Urban, Harcourt, $15.99, 160 pages ISBN 9780547558691, ages 9 to 12

bookstore in Pasadena, California, before moving to Vermont with her family seven years ago.

But as for writing fiction herself?

“Too risky. Too scary,” the author says.

In fact, Urban didn’t begin writing fiction again until age 37, when she started reading picture books to her baby daughter. She began getting up early (a writing habit she continues now as the mother of a nine- and seven-year-old), and didn’t even admit to her husband for months that she was trying her hand at writing children’s literature.

Urban’s first novel for children, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, published in 2007, tells the story of a “It is risky to girl who dreams of getting a be earnest. baby grand It is risky to piano but show that gets an organ instead. The you care. book received Irony is like many accowearing lades, including being named a bubble selection of the wrap.”

Junior Library Guild. In 2009 Urban published a picture book, Mouse Was Mad, illustrated by Henry Cole. This amusing story for preschoolers about an angry mouse who tries to handle his emotions was also praised by reviewers.

Now, with three books to her credit and another novel in the works, Urban is an advocate for young writers like Mattie. “My own memories of writing that Christmas piece in seventh grade and the reaction I got from my classmates had a little to do with the emotional core of Hound Dog True and Mattie’s fear about sharing her writing,” she says.

“I do a lot of school visits and hear from young writers who are afraid to tell people they write. It’s common, that fear. Not just of sharing writing, but of risking. It is risky to show how much you care about the things you do or try. I think that is why we live in such an ironic age.

It is risky to be earnest. It is risky to

© julio thompson

children’s books

LINDA URBAN

show that you care. Irony is like wearing bubble wrap.”

In Hound Dog True, Mattie learns a lot about what it means to take risks—not just in showing her writing to others, but in taking the first small steps toward friendship with another girl, Quincy Sweet, who, like Mattie, must find her own way amid the expectations of others.

Having a real, intimate friend—a friend you can be honest with—is scary for Mattie, but as her new principal tells her, “You can’t have brave without scared.”

Urban is an acute observer of these small steps toward bravery, independence and friendship. An inveterate reader herself (her entire household dedicates Tuesday evenings to “Read at the Table Night,” where kids and parents bring a book to a finger-food dinner), Urban loves “heart and honesty and humor. I love brilliant turns of phrase that never threaten to hijack the story. I love people who understand the underside of kids, but maintain an outlook that is hopeful and generous.

“I tend to write about moments and choices that seem small to outsiders but are huge to the people experiencing them,” Urban continues. “In this book, I hoped to show how hard those small, brave, risky steps can be—and also how rewarding.”

And so, when Mattie Breen does find herself standing in front of her new fifth grade classmates on the first day of school, readers will be pulling for her to speak up and declare who she is—a girl who writes stories.

Ooohs and Oz! Glittering ruby-red cover!

Y

ou won’t believe your eyes—it’s Oz as you’ve never seen it before.

Through the magic of Scanimation®, THE WIZARD OF OZ™ brings to life 10 memorable scenes from the motion picture classic that’s enchanted generations of viewers. $14.95 • 978-0-7611-6373-2

And don’t miss the full series of amazing, New York Times bestselling books-in-motion—MORE THAN 4.8 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT COMBINED!

™&© Turner Entertainment Co. (s11). Judy Garland as Dorothy from THE WIZARD OF OZ. Scanimation is a registered trademark of EyeThink, Inc.

www.workman.com • www.scanimationbooks.com

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children’s books Dead End in Norvelt

reviews

Back from the dead Review by angela leeper

— A LI C E C A RY

Small-town life has never been funnier than in Jack Gantos’ Dead End in Norvelt. The 11-year-old main character, who suffers from profuse nosebleeds, also happens to be named Jack Gantos. Jack is enduring the summer in his hometown of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, a model community created during the Great Depression and renamed to honor Eleanor Roosevelt. While not strictly autobiographical, the story’s gothic humor is classic Gantos.

The summer of 1962 should be carefree for Jack, but when he accidentally fires his father’s WWII Japanese rifle and mows down his mother’s corn to make way for the backyard runway his father is planning, he is permanently grounded. His only reprieve is helping his neighbor, Miss Volker, with her unique obituaries of the last of the original Norvelters.

Suffering from severe arthritis, which even “cooking” her hands in parafBy Jack Gantos, FSG, $15.99, 352 pages fin wax can’t cure, Miss Volker enlists Jack as her scribe. In the process, ISBN 9780374379933, ages 10 to 14 the boy learns the importance of history, especially now that his economically depressed town is dying like the ancient Lost Worlds he’s been reading about while cooped up in this bedroom.

When a string of Norvelter old ladies start dying, there’s no time for anything but obituaries (not even sneaking out to play baseball with Bunny, who knows a million dead-people jokes since her father owns the local funeral home). The story takes on an air of mystery when it appears that several townsfolk could be responsible for the deaths. Maybe Jack could figure things out better if he weren’t also afraid of a group of Hells Angels bent on revenge for the death of a buddy; if he didn’t have to dig a fake bomb shelter as a ruse for his father’s runway; and if his nose would ever stop bleeding.

Sure, this boy’s life is over the top, but readers would expect nothing less from Jack Gantos (either one of them).

grandpa green

By Lane Smith Roaring Brook $16.99, 32 pages ISBN 9781596436077 Ages 5 to 9

Picture Book

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Whether he’s humorously reminding readers of the power of the printed word in It’s a Book or taking a nonconformist look at the founding fathers in John, Paul, George & Ben, author-illustrator Lane Smith never ceases to amaze. His latest endeavor, Grandpa Green, offers a unique perspective on family relationships that will resonate with both children and adults alike.

A young boy walks through a topiary garden and narrates the life of his great-grandfather, who wanted to study horticulture but went to fight a world war instead, met his future wife in a café and returned to have a large family. While the boy, rendered in ink, blends into the background, his great-grandfather’s lush and meticulously sculpted bushes and hedges, created with

watercolor, oil paint and digital paint, tell the real story.

It’s not long before readers notice that the boy is gathering gloves, eyeglasses and other items misplaced by his great-grandfather along the path.Though his greatgrandfather is now forgetful, the boy knows that as long as the garden flourishes, his memories will always be preserved. To sum up the boy’s sentiments, a double-page spread shows the old man’s handiwork in all its glory. Even more surprises hidden in the illustrations await observant readers, who will find Grandpa Green an unforgettable blend of story and art.

—Angela Leeper

BUMBLE-ARDY

By Maurice Sendak HarperCollins $17.95, 40 pages ISBN 9780062051981 Ages 4 to 7

picture book

In the world of children’s literature, Maurice Sendak, the beloved

brine. Eventually, Bumble’s aunt returns home, shouting at the revelers to scram. Meanwhile, Sendak fans have been treated to page after page of the master’s wild, wonderful illustrations.

Let’s hear it for Maurice Sendak and these delightful party animals!

creator of Where the Wild Things Are, is a giant, and fans have been waiting 30 years for him to both write and illustrate another book. The wait is finally over with Bumble-Ardy, a riotous birthday tale that began as a character Sendak first developed in 1971 for an animated short on “Sesame Street.”

Over the years, Sendak transformed the character from a boy into a pig—a poor, poor pig who is about to turn nine and has never had a birthday party.

Sendak tells the story in narration reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s wonderful black humor, explaining that Bumble-Ardy’s parents “frowned on fun” and didn’t celebrate birthdays. Then, things got even worse. When Bumble turned eight, his family “gorged and gained weight. / And got ate.”

Luckily, Aunt Adeline, a cosmopolitan working pig, adopts the orphaned Bumble. June 10 approaches, which is Bumble’s (and Sendak’s) birthday, so Bumble decides to throw himself a party while his aunt heads to work.

A riot of fun ensues, with costumed pigs guzzling Aunt Adeline’s

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes

By Jonathan Auxier Amulet $16.95, 400 pages ISBN 9781419700255 Ages 10 and up

middle grade

Imagine the characteristics of a good thief: He would need to be a child (to fit in small spaces, and pick locks with small fingers); an orphan (so that no one would miss him); and blind (so that his senses of smell and touch far exceed those of anyone else). In Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes, the exciting debut novel by Jonathan Auxier, Peter is all of these things, and much more. In fact, he is the greatest thief who has ever lived, and that is what changed his life forever.

Peter begins his thievery under the guidance of the despicable Mr. Seamus. Every night, Peter is sent out into the town to steal from its residents, and to bring everything he has taken to Mr. Seamus. This all changes when Peter decides to steal a beautiful box from the Haberdasher who has just arrived in town. In the box are three sets of fantastic eyes—eyes of gold, onyx and emerald—which transport Peter to a fantastic new world.

Auxier has written a stunning novel, one that transports not just Peter Nimble, but the reader as well, to the Troublesome Lake, where every ocean in the world eventually ends; to the Just Deserts, where troublemakers spend and end their lives with the King’s Ravens; to the Vanished Kingdom, where an evil king holds a nation hostage, and a brave Princess Peg waits for their hero to return.

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes is, at first glance, a fast-paced, exciting adventure story. It is also much more. It is a story of friendship and loyalty between Peter and his companion Sir Tode. It is a story

reviews of strength, as Princess Peg cares for the children she has rescued from the diabolical king. It is, finally, and most importantly, a story of destiny, as Peter comes to discover that what he is—a poor, dirty orphan— is not who he was meant to be.

—Kevin Delecki

WONDERSTRUCK

By Brian Selznick Scholastic $29.99, 608 pages ISBN 9780545027892 Ages 9 and up

middle grade

The 2008 Caldecott Committee made a bold decision in selecting Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret as its Medal winner.

A 544-page novel as best picture book? It did have 158 illustrations central to the telling of the story, and the committee decided it was a new form of picture book.

Now, Selznick is back with Wonderstruck, an even bigger novel.

As in Hugo Cabret, artwork tells much of the story, two independent threads of visual and prose narrative weaving in and out, eventually coming together as the protagonists meet and their stories join. Young Ben’s prose narrative begins in 1977, at Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, and young Rose’s visual narrative begins in 1927, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Both characters yearn for a better life, trying to find their places in the world. Ben’s mother has died, and his journey takes him to New York City in search of the father he never knew. Rose is deaf and her parents are protective, but she, too, is lured by the big city.

Selznick’s pencil drawings perfectly capture Rose’s heartbreak­ingly earnest expressions, and a full-page spread evokes in careful detail the “cabinets of wonders,” early museum displays of objects that evoke the wonders of the world. By the end of the novel, Ben wonders if we’re not all collectors of objects, moments and experiences, “making our own cabinet of wonders” during our lives. This becomes the novel’s theme: being open to the wonders of the world.

Not everyone is open to being wonderstruck, but Ben and Rose are; as they say (in a line borrowed

from Oscar Wilde), “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

—Dean SchneideR

meet TOM ANGLEBERGER of: Q: Author

would you describe Q: How

the book?

Shelter

By Harlan Coben Putnam $18.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780399256509 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

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Harlan Coben’s young adult debut might be a new direction for the internationally best-selling author, but Shelter treads familiar and much-loved terrain. Coben has written 10 books on wisecracking sports agent Myron Bolitar, and the end of the latest, Live Wire, left the Bolitar legacy in the hands of Myron’s nephew, Mickey Bolitar.

Mickey resembles his uncle in many ways, including his 6-foot stature and basketball wizardry.

Unfortunately, the two don’t get along—but after Mickey’s parents vanish from his life (his father dies in a car accident; his junkie mom admits herself to rehab), he’s stuck with Uncle Myron as a guardian.

Despite Myron’s experience in digging himself out of danger, Mickey has no interest in seeking help from his uncle when things start to get weird at his new high school.

His sort-of-girlfriend vanishes and the crazy Bat Lady who lives in a dilapidated mansion sends him a disturbing message: His father is not dead. Mickey is soon sneaking into strip bars, questioning tattoo artists and chasing down the suited man who seems to be following him—all in search of the truth.

In true Coben spirit, Mickey acquires two ragtag sidekicks in the course of his search: Ema, a sharptongued, overweight Goth girl, and Spoon, a geeky guy whose easy access to security tapes and personnel files secures his place on the team.

Shelter has all the twists and turns of a Coben classic, but on a teen scale—including run-ins with the hottest girl in school and confrontations with a brutish bully. Full of mystery that stretches back through Mickey’s and Myron’s past, Shelter will turn more than a few young readers into excited Coben fans.

—Cat Acree

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

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

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

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

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

DARTH PAPER STRIKES BACK Tom Angleberger is the author-illustrator of the 2010 bestseller The Strange Case of Origami Yoda, a zany story about misfit sixth grader Dwight and his strangely powerful Yoda finger puppet. Dwight starts seventh grade in his latest adventure, Darth Paper Strikes Back (Amulet, $12.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781419700279). A former columnist for the R­ oanoke Times, Angleberger lives in Christiansburg, Virginia, with his wife, author-illustrator Cece Bell.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

TIED UP IN KNOTS Dear Editor, What do people mean by the phrase cutting the Gordian knot?

I have heard this term used a great deal lately with regard to the fiscal problems in Washington. Where does it originate?

T. B. Buffalo, New York The term Gordian knot refers to an extremely tricky problem, in particular one that seemingly cannot be solved. To cut the Gordian knot means to take action in a swift and decisive manner in order to completely eradicate a problem.

Gordius was the name of a peasant who went on to become king of Phrygia, an ancient country located in what is now central Turkey.

Legend has it that when the king of that land died without an heir, the elders of Phrygia consulted the Oracle at Delphi, who declared that the next king would arrive in an ox-drawn wagon. Gordius won the throne by driving his wagon up to the temple of Zeus, and as a show of gratitude dedicated the wagon

slang, an exact origin of this expression is nearly impossible to discern.

As usual, though, there are theories.

One farfetched hypothesis is that the expression is somehow related to the word rhino, which in 17th-century British slang meant “money.” Rhino resembles the Greek word for “nose” (which can be seen in English words like rhinoceros and rhinoplasty), so the assumption is that pay through the nose reflects an established relationship in the public mind between money and noses.

This theory shows imagination, but there appears to be no reason to take it seriously.

THE NOSE KNOWS A second, perhaps more probable Dear Editor, theory holds that the expression deCan you please tell me the origin of veloped in association with the slang the expression pay through the nose? use of bleed to mean “to pay out It seems a peculiar image. or give money” or “to have money R. D. extorted.” The assumption here is Huntsville, Alabama that bleed in this sense became asThe phrase to pay through the nose sociated especially with a nosebleed, so that bleeding was equivalent to is older than you might think. Its first recorded use was in 1672, when paying through the nose. This explanation does have the advantage over the English poet Andrew Marvell the first of preserving some suggeswrote, “. . . Made them pay for it tion of the pain that comes from most unconscionably and through the Nose.” As is the case with much parting with too much money. to Zeus. Gordius tied the wagon to the temple with an intricate knot.

Whoever could undo this knot, it was declared, would go on to rule all of Asia. Many tried unsuccessfully until 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great arrived and promptly sliced through the knot with one motion of his sword. (Earlier versions of the story had Alexander untying the knot by hand or uprooting the pole to which the wagon was secured.) The phrase cutting the Gordian knot now refers to the use of similarly bold means to solve a complicated problem.

GIVE YOUR BRAIN A BOOST!

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2 3 Malicious gossip 25 Siege site 26 Heady order 29 Unidentifiable entrée 34 “That’s it!”

36 Chow down 37 “By logic, then . . .”

38 Aleutian island 39 Euro fractions 41 Mujahedin land 42 Stadium replaced by Citi Field 43 Bullfight bravo 44 Govt. bill 45 Distressing experience 49 Business owner’s dreaded ink color 50 Green Gables girl 51 Trite theatrics 53 Show signs of 56 standstill 57 FEMA recommendation, briefly 61 Omelet on bread 64 Cleveland’s lake 65 Gray of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 66 Hello from Honolulu

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6 7 Stood up 68 Certain Scandinavian 69 Tippecanoe’s mate

Umpteen means “very many, indefinitely numerous.” It was created as a combination of the word umpty and the ending -teen. Umpty means “such and such,” or “something not named or specified,” referring especially to an unspecified number.

English speakers probably created umpty as an alteration of actual numbers ending in -ty, such as twenty or seventy. Likewise, umpteen was no doubt created in imitation of numbers ending with -teen, and it suggests a rather large but unspecified number. The earliest examples of umpteen and the adjective umpteenth in print date to around 1920.

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

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Dear Editor, My mother uses the word umpteen a lot, as in “I’ve been there umpteen times.” Can you tell me where it came from?

S. C. Cody, Wyoming

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DOWN 61 1 Drug dealer’s nemesis 64 2 The golden calf was one 3 Manhattan cultural ctr.

67 4 Cattle identifier 5 Japanese currency 6 Tool holders 7 “S.O.S.!”

8 Investor’s option, for short 9 Twists out of shape 10 Eager joiner’s comment 11 Land on the Arabian Sea 12 All the (wildly popular) 13 Scott who sued for his freedom 18 Grant of Notorious 19 City on Lake Michigan 24 “I think,” succinctly 25 Remarkable achievement 26 Make ashamed

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IN THE FICTION AISLE ACROSS 1 “Anywhere but here” acronym 6 À la mode 10 Part of a parachute 14 Like very much 15 Life-saving firefighter 16 Bridge maven Sharif 17 Spanish or Italian 20 The Hatfields or the McCoys 21 Cleopatra biter 22 Like many beach bums

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Excerpted from Mensa 10-Minute Crossword Puzzles by Fred Piscop, on sale now from Workman Publishing.

V E R O

E W E R

L I T H O

A B A S H

I D O L

N A R C

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

G U A R A N T E E B R A N D

O N C E

C O R N E R E D

Y E N C A I R M Y O

C H I C H E R O E L A N S P T T F O S T E R E A T E N T S L E S T O R E C O A T A N S A N R I N A N E

C O R O M A G U A G A N N E R T Y M E A E R G I R A T N O T R E Y R N E V A D W I C A L O H T Y L E

www.workman.com

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NUMEROUS AS THE STARS

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2 7 Art print, for short 28 Big PC key 30 Principle 31 Debugger’s target 32 Banded stone 33 up (got in shape) 35 Written assurance 39 Trapped, in a way 40 “What is new?”

44 Norse war god 46 A Grimm beginning?

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48 Speckled horse 52 As of late 53 Water server 54 Beach, Fla. 55 Fertility goddess 56 X, “xylophone” 58 Old fiddle 59 Persistent pain 60 Blacken, as steak 62 Shooters’ grp.

63 “Who ?” (New Orleans Saints fans’ chant)

C H A R T O N E D D R E D