BookPage September 2009 by BookPage

September 2009

America’s BoOK Review

s r e n r u t e g a p e m i r P n all fictio f our top s n o i t c e l e s

uelyn q c a J • torow E.L. Doc Brown • n a D • Mitchard cholas i N • e r oo Lorrie M mant • a i D a t i An Carol Sparks • e c y o J kind • d o o G y Terr Chaon n a D • Oates

Nonfiction favorites, too! Sue Monk Kidd • Tracy Kidder David Small • Margaret Drabble

America’s BoOK Review

CONTENTS

September 2009

on the cover

FEATURES 5 Fall Fiction A preview of the season’s biggest books

THE BEST IN NEW BOOKS

6 Terry Goodkind Meet the author of The Law of Publisher Michael A. Zibart Associate publisher Julia Steele Editor Lynn L. Green fiction Editor Abby Plesser web Editor Trisha Ping Contributing Editor Sukey Howard Contributor Roger Bishop Children’s books Allison Hammond Advertising Sales Julia Steele Angela J. Bowman Production Manager Penny Childress Production Designer Karen Trotter Elley SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER Elizabeth Grace Herbert Customer Service Alice Fitzgibbon ONLINE SERVICES manager Scott Grissom

R E V I E W S Our editors evaluate and select for review the best new books published each month. Only books we highly recommend are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

Nines

8 Behind the Book Jacquelyn Mitchard on her

return to the Cappadora family

12 Well Read E.L. Doctorow’s fictional spin on two of

New York City’s most infamous residents

14 Christian Fiction Stories of faith and hope 24 Animals The best books about our furry friends

INTERVIEWS 13 Tracy Kidder The incredible odyssey of one man’s

Featured on the cover of this issue is an illustration from the upcoming children’s book How to Clean Your Room (Ideals Children’s Books, $18.99, 20 pages, ISBN 9780824955519). In this whimsical tale, author Eileen Spinelli takes a boring chore and turns it into an adventure, using a child’s room as a metaphor for life—it’s where children laugh and cry, dream and play and store their cherished memories. David Leonard’s illustrations leap from the pages and provide the perfect backdrop for Eileen’s words. Cover illustration by David Leonard, www.davidleonard.com. Copyright © 2009 by David Leonard. Reprinted with permission of Ideals Publications.

search for freedom

19 David Small On his harrowing graphic memoir

Children’s Books 22 Matthew Cordell Meet the author-illustrator

Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk

After You by Julie Buxbaum

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

Nonfiction 6 The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble

REVIEWS

8 Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel and

Fiction

Bret Witter

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Taraborrelli

The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis

16 A Mighty Long Way by Carlotta Walls LaNier

Day After Night by Anita Diamant

26 Dancing in the Dark by Morris Dickstein

20 After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

28 Shake the Devil Off by Ethan Brown

New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro

Baking Cakes in Kilgali by Gaile Parkin

Moonlight in Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles

Suzanne Collins returns with a sequel to ‘The Hunger Games’ page 23

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S U B S C R I B E

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In Cheap We Trust by Lauren Weber

Sue Monk Kidd’s journey with her daughter, Ann

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Buzz Girl The Author Enablers Whodunit? Bestseller Watch Romance Book Clubs Audio Science Fiction Cooking

buzz girl ➥ Our publishing

insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers From the return of a literary wunderkind to a snarky response to a beloved bestseller, Christmas is coming early for readers.

➥ zadie’s back When she was just 24 years old, British author Zadie Smith published her first novel, White Teeth. The book went on to become an international bestseller. Two years later came The Autograph Man and in 2005, On Beauty, another bestseller, was published. And this fall— November 12 to zadie smith be exact—brings Smith’s first foray into nonfiction: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. In a foreword, Smith writes: “When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you—and in public. Changing My Mind seemed an apt, confessional title to describe this process.” Changing My Mind is divided into four sections—“Reading,” “Being,” “Seeing” and “Feeling”—and the essays cover topics ranging from personal experiences traveling the world to authors who have influenced her own writing to thoughts

on public figures like Katharine Hepburn and President Obama to advice and lessons on the writing process. Smith says many of these essays were written at the request of editors for different occasions and publications. Some came from her own work on what might have been a new novel. Still others might have composed “a solemn, theoretical book about writing: Fail Better.” But instead they come together to form a unique, deeply personal collection from one of our most talented—and talked about—writers.

➥ bee’s buzz

Web exclusives

author Sarah Hall.

More chances to win Looking for more free books? You’ll find contests in every edition of our email newsletter, BookPageXTRA, and on our blog, The Book Case, where we highlight books, authors, publishing news and more. BookPage.com has the details! 

➥ eat pray tell In 2006, a little memoir called Eat, Pray, Love became a surprise bestseller. The book, which chronicles writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s trip around the world to recover from a divorce, is still a popular book club pick and has been translated into several languages. Next fall, Gilbert’s fans and foes alike will get to hear

A TRUE STORY OF HOMETOWN HEROES

MIKE SIELSKI

➥ Missing christmas It might only be September, but publishers are already planning for the holiday season. Any best-selling author worth her salt seems to have a holiday-themed book headed to shelves before that juicy Thanksgiving turkey is carved. Many of the usual suspects are appearing—Anne Perry, Donna Kate jacobs VanLiere, Linda Lael Miller, Debbie Macomber, Richard Paul Evans, Melody Carlson—but this season also brings notable new members of the holiday fiction club: Kate Jacobs had a smash hit with her debut, The Friday Night Knitting Club—and its sequel proved equally popular. Now she brings back some of the same characters in Knit the Season (Putnam). We predict: More than a few craft-lovers will find this yarn under their tree. Gregory Maguire is the modern king of fractured fairy tales, which makes him a natural fit for the Christmas novel. With Matchless (Morrow), he reinvents Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” for the holidays. We predict: This classic story will now inspire more laughter than tears. In novels like P.S. I Love You, Cecelia Ahern has managed to give a tweesounding concepts emotional depth without veering into sentimentality. Her holiday novel, The Gift (Hyperion), was published last year in the UK and promises more of the same entertainment with an emotional pull. Plus, it’s beautifully packaged. We predict: This won’t be her last holidaythemed work. Garrison Keillor’s folksy voice takes on the holiday in A Christmas Blizzard (Viking). When a weathly art collector is stranded in North Dakota for Christmas instead of lounging on a Hawaiian beach as he’d planned, he’s changed forever. We predict: An upswing in North Dakota holiday tourism. 

FADING ECHOES H Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was home to the greatest high school football rivalry in the state. Bryan Buckley and Colby Umbrell met each other as opponents on the playing field, but their dreams and devotion to their country after the horrific events of September 11, 2001 led each of them to the conflict in the Middle East. Only one returned.

$24.95/9780425229743

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Nicole Kidman has optioned Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. Kidman will both produce and star in the film, according to Variety. In case you’re put off by the back cover copy (which basically says, this book is so good we can’t tell you anything about it), read a nicole kidman few pages of the novel and see if you’re not captivated by the voice of Little Bee, a 16-yearold Nigerian refugee with a surprising connection to Kidman’s well-to-do character, INTERNET ENVY Sarah, and her husband. Unlike many over-hyped novels, this one delivers. Little Bee follows Cleave’s Incendiary, a Our new site means MORE BookPage novel in the form of a letter to Osama bin Laden in response for you to love. September highlights to an (imaginary) terror atfound only on the new BookPage.com tack on a London football stainclude interviews with Kate Grenville dium. Unfortunately, the pub date for Incendiary was July 7, and David Byrne, behind-the-book 2005, the day of the London features with John Shors, Jill McCorkle tube bombings, and the novel and Tasha Alexander, and many webfailed to get the promotion only reviews—including the latest from it deserved. We’re glad to see Little Bee bring Cleave some Betsy Carter and Booker-shortlisted well-earned success.

the other side of the story in Michael Cooper’s (aka the ex-Mr. Gilbert’s) Displaced, which was sold to Hyperion recently. Apparently Cooper set out on his own globe-trotting adventure through the Middle East to cure his heartache. Will it acheive the same success as Gilbert’s story? Only time will tell.

HHHHHHH

NEW IN HARDCOVER BERKLEY A Member of Penguin Group (USA) penguin.com

FICTION

The Moore the merrier By Jillian Quint Lorrie Moore fans are a patient bunch. It’s been more than 10 years since her most recent short story collection, and nearly 15 since her last full-length work of fiction, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Fortunately, her latest offering proves well worth the wait. A Gate at the Stairs, the author’s third novel, is solidly and delightfully Lorrie Moore territory; there’s the isolated, intelligent female narrator who both hides and survives through her humor and nonchalance; the Midwestern landscape that stretches with ennui and possibility; the pithy wordplay that is as haunting as it is lighthearted (“I had been the minibar—and not the minbar—in this temporary room of lodging,” the main character says, after her boyfriend leaves her for the callings of Islam). But mostly there is the “spot-on-ness” that readers have so come to identify with Moore’s work. Set soon after the events of September 11th, A Gate at the Stairs follows Tassie Keltjin, the 20-year-old daughter of a potato farmer and an undergraduate at a large Wisconsin college who accepts a babysitting job for an upper-class couple. The catch: there is no baby. Or not yet, at least. A Gate at Rather, the pair is trying to adopt and sees no problem with the Stairs inviting Tassie to take part in the process. If this sounds odd, that’s because it is—and it only gets more odd once they get By Lorrie Moore their child and Tassie’s nanny duties become increasingly Knopf $25.95, 336 pages blurred and all-consuming. After all, what is she to them? ISBN 9780375409288 An intellectual equal and friend? An inferior member of the Also available on audio “help”? Or a sort of middle ground between themselves and the biracial baby for whom they are now responsible? The plot takes several bizarre twists, and readers may be tempted to skim the passages where other white parents of African-American children talk about social inequity. But ultimately, we avoid the overly didactic as Moore explores everything from race to class to the war in Iraq in a fairly organic fashion—that is, behind the guise of a refreshingly agenda-less narrator and with a voice so pitch-perfect as to appear effortless. o Jillian Quint is an editor at a publishing house in New York. She lives in Brooklyn.

New from Axios Press

he Wisdom of the Jewish Mystics is a selection of the most important writings, commentary, and ideas of the Jewish mystical tradition through the ages. The sayings are drawn primarily from the great Hasidic writers, like the Baal Shem Tov, who produced a new genre of mystical literature for laypeople. In his introduction, DR. ALAN UNTERMAN explains the background of kabbalistic thought and distills the quintessence of the mystics’ wisdom.

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

$12 (softcover) • ISBN 978-1-60419-013-7

n his introduction to the anthology The Wisdom of the Sufis, KENNETH CRAGG offers the Western reader valuable insight into the religion, richly poetic literature, and deeply experiential inner tradition of Islam. Bishop Cragg’s selections of prayers and legends reveal the task, search, and goal of the Sufi mystic—the dervish—and in his introduction explains the unlikely growth of mysticism out of medieval orthodox Islam. $12 (softcover) • ISBN 978-1-60419-014-4

lthough LAWRENCE DURRELL spent much of his life beside the Mediterranean, he wrote relatively little about Italy. Based on a semi-fictionalized bus tour of the island of Sicily, Sicilian Carousel is his only piece of extended writing on the country and, naturally enough for the islomaniac Durrell, it focuses on one of Italy’s islands. As Time Magazine put it, “His travel books arrive like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend—the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves.” $12 (softcover) • ISBN 978-1-60419-015-1 Available from leading booksellers everywhere

XIOS

Books to help you think through your personal values

THE AUTHOR ENABLERS What’s the big idea? Dear Author Enablers, I retired from the software industry in late 2007 and have been working on some ideas that never gained traction at the office. One of your recent replies was to a saw player who wondered if her blog readers were right [in suggesting she write a book]. I’m wondering if a blog for my topic is the way to start. My problem is that I can see how this collection of ideas could evolve if I could just figure out how to share it with others. I’m wondering if I’m shooting myself in the foot if I publicize the idea with a blog and then someone else starts the business I want to create, after reading my postings. Am I hurting my chances for a book deal later if I publish myself, using a BY SAM BARRY & service like lulu.com? John K. KATHI KAMEN GOLDMARK Springwater, New York When it comes to blogging, there is no surefire answer that works for everyone, even musical saw players in the New York City subway. But there is a new view in the world that the Internet has made it less logical to try concealing information before getting paid for it. It’s an idea that’s really not that new—like the loss leader item in retail stores: free or very cheap stuff attracts the customers, and then the store or company makes money by offering other premium services. As a businessman, it’s really up to you. We certainly don’t want you to shoot yourself in the foot; for one thing, it would hurt. Looking around the publishing world today, there is precedent for blogs attracting a platform that can lead to other success, including the publication of a book. And if your idea is a good one, the fact that you blogged about it shouldn’t prevent publication or hurt the book, since books sell to a different market. We think blogging might help you hone your idea, get some public reaction and maybe even gain some of that traction you were missing at the office. The only way you could hurt yourself by self-publishing is if you saturate the market with your own publication—in other words, if there is no one left for the traditional publisher to sell to. That would be their worry. But this is an unlikely scenario—and it would mean that you’d already have made a lot of money, which you can use to repair your foot. Dear Author Enablers, My best friend said that movie studios are so desperate for ideas that they are making movies from old TV shows. I would like to know, is this true? Is Hollywood desperate for new ideas? Also, do the children’s film studios need new ideas? David Cross Dixon, Illinois Judging by shows like “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF” and movies like Battlefield Earth and Gigli, your friend has a point. However, we think the answer is a lot more complicated than it might appear. People in Hollywood and publishing are desperate for good ideas—that is, timely ideas, fully realized and well executed. There are not as many of these as one might think. Publishers are looking for good writers with good ideas who understand the process and are willing to do the work with reasonable expectations of the outcome; the same goes for the movie industry, the music industry, big business, small business, educational institutions, the medical community, entrepreneurs and Elvis impersonators. A writer’s job begins with having an original idea that is of interest to enough people to warrant its publication or production, and this is no small feat in itself. Then it falls to the writer to compose an intriguing presentation that will pass muster with the toughest critics in the world: Elvis impersonators! No, actually we mean the people who work in publishing and the movie industry. Why are they tough? They have to be in order to stay competitive. Many writers don’t understand how to present their work properly. Some slam out half-baked ideas; others labor over their projects for years without getting objective feedback. So yes, the publishers and movie industry are desperate for good material, but that’s because timely, fully realized, good ideas are not easy to come by. o With more than 25 years of experience, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry have the inside scoop on writing and publishing. Sam is the author of How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons; National Women’s Book Association Award winner Kathi is the author of And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You. Their book on publishing is scheduled for release in 2010. Email your questions (along with your name and hometown) to authorenabler@aol.com or visit their blog at bookpage.com.

FICTION PREVIEW

Fall fiction heats up as the temperatures drop By Abby Plesser hile the end of summer marks the conclusion of the beach-reading season, publishers are saving some of the year’s biggest books for the cooler months. From the return of Robert Langdon and another novel from Nicholas Sparks to the newest novels from literary powerhouses like Audrey Niffenegger, Margaret Atwood and John Irving, this fall is shaping up to be the season of the next big book.

While early reviews have not been entirely favorable, readers will have to make up their own minds about this much-hyped spooky story.

Apocalypse now Another big-name author to return to bookstores in September is the brilliant and inventive Margaret Atwood. Her first full-length novel since 2003’s Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, $26.95, 448 pages, IBSN 9780385528771) is being hailed as another “dystopic masterpiece.” Of returning to the desolate landscape she mined in Oryx, Atwood explains: “In the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world? What can we do to reverse the damage? How long have we got?” Looks like we’re in for another fascinating—and important—literary treat from the incomparable Atwood.

Dan Brown is back When Dan Brown’s publishers announced the title and on-sale date of the long-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code this spring, fans went absolutely wild. You couldn’t check an online bookseller without being cheerfully encouraged to “Pre-Order Your Copy Today!” And for good reason. To be released on September 15 with a first printing of five million copies, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday, $29.95, 528 pages, ISBN 9780385504225) is the follow-up to Brown’s record-breaking international bestseller. The new book will once again feature symbologist hero Robert Langdon, this time in a thriller that revolves around the Freemasons, an organization that Brown has called the “oldest fraternity in history.” The book jacket features the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., lit up against the background of a large red wax seal. Embedded in the wax is an unidentifiable symbol. There have long been theories tying the Freemasons to our nation’s capital—including speculation that the streets of Washington, D.C. were planned to physically mirror important Masonic symbols. Does the jacket offer clues to the plot? “Nothing ever is as it first appears in a Dan Brown novel,” says Jason Kaufman, Brown’s longtime editor at Doubleday. “This book’s narrative takes place in a 12-hour period, and from the first page, Dan’s readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. The Lost Symbol is full of surprises.” Since the books will no doubt be under lockand-key until the on-sale date, all we can do is wait and wonder. And pre-order, of course.

From father to son Many John Irving fans were unsure what to make of the author’s last offering, 2005’s Until I Find You. Supposedly his most personal work to date, the novel received mixed reviews and didn’t come close to hitting the sales marks of Irving’s beloved bestsellers. But early readers are buzzing about his October 27 release, Last Night in Twisted River (Random House, $28, 576 pages, ISBN 9781400063840), a dark father/son story and Irving’s 12th novel. In 1954, in a small New Hampshire town, a nervous 12-year-old boy mistakes the local sheriff’s girlfriend for a wild animal. Tragedy follows, and the boy and his father start a life on the run, traveling from Coos County, New Hampshire to Boston, Vermont, Toronto and back again. At nearly 600 pages, Last Night is being compared to Irving classics like The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany. But as with all pre-publication hype, the proof will be in the literary pudding. o

Familial love and loss Considered the reigning champ of the contemporary family drama/love story genre, Nicholas Sparks seems to churn out a new bestseller every year. After last year’s The Lucky One, Sparks is back this month with The Last Song (Grand Central, $24.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780446547567). In this, Sparks’ 15th novel, we meet troubled teen Veronica “Ronnie” Miller as her world is falling apart. Still heartbroken and angry about her parents’ divorce three years earlier, Ronnie is furious when her mother decides she should leave their home in New York City and join her now-reclusive father for the summer in Wilmington, North Carolina. Readers who dive into Sparks’ soon-to-be bestseller should count on equal doses of raw emotion, young love, family angst and— ultimately—sweet resolution. A movie version is due in early 2010, and sources say Sparks wrote the novel (and co-wrote the screenplay) with teen queen star Miley Cyrus in mind.

A beautiful epic of lov e, longing, redemption, a nd ench a ntment

Betsy Tobin

Six years (and a reported $5 million advance) after her debut smash The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger is back with the September 29 release of Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner, $26.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9781439165393). The story begins as Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer in London. She has long been estranged from her twin sister, Edie, but nevertheless leaves her London flat to Edie’s twin daughters—Julia and Valentina—who never knew their Aunt Elspeth. Twenty-year-old Julia and Valentina have lived in America their whole lives, and they are intrigued by their aunt’s generosity and a chance at an exciting new life in London. But their inheritance has specific conditions: the twins must live in Elspeth’s apartment together, and they must stay for at least one year; even stranger, Edie and her husband Jack are forbidden to set foot in the flat. The twins will have another roommate in their new London home—the ghost of Aunt Elspeth.

“ICE L AND is a lyrically written epic inspired by the beauty and the history of that island, and the rich world of Norse mythology that infuses it.” —Sunday Telegraph

Plume

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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More from The Time Traveler

Terry Goodkind

MEET

PERSONAL HISTORY

Drabble contemplates the puzzle of life By Maude McDaniel Margaret Drabble is the dean of English fiction writers, with some 17 novels and two biographies on record, not to mention having served as editor of two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her latest book is an eccentric foray into personal and public history, an examination of the rich and intricate interchange between cultural artifacts and the people from whom they spring: children’s games, old houses, family relationships, Italian ceilings, art, aging, the “half-arts” (crafts) and the relatives with whom she shared them. (Or not.) The Pattern in the Carpet, which the author insists is not a memoir, combines the appeal of one’s childish occupations—and the personal memories that surround them— with an adult’s curiosity about their origins. Having recently renounced writing fiction, Drabble here draws instead on many disparate facets of her life. She does it sometimes briskly, sometimes enigmatically, always inventively. Jigsaw puzzles, one “way of getting quietly through life until death,” are Drabble’s first love, and a perfect allegory for the baffling parts of life that never quite seem to fit together until their time comes. Surprisingly, they were invented as The Pattern in early as the 1700s. Jigsaws went through several historical the Carpet changes, from “dissected maps” at the start to super-sophisBy Margaret Drabble ticated Jackson Pollocks in the 1960s. Mifflin Harcourt Those are just a few tidbits of the history Drabble recounts Houghton $25, 368 pages here, but the personal touch is never far behind. Auntie Phyl, ISBN 9780547241449 her trusty jigsaw puzzle partner, and other family members (including her estranged sister and fellow novelist A.S. Byatt) make appearances, adding a human element. Despite the author’s disclaimers, this quirky book shares many qualities with the memoir. Without the memories of the people in her life who used them, a hopscotch history of the incredible world of human time-killers that existed before TV and the Internet might have been arid and lifeless. But read it fast; many of these games and occupations may be gone before you next look up from the page. o Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

FICTION

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Mistaken identities

Terry Goodkind rose to fame with his Sword of Truth novels, an epic fantasy series that has sold more than 25 million copies and inspired a TV spinoff. He introduces a new hero in The Law of Nines (Putnam, $27.95, 512 pages, ISBN 9780399156045): Alex, an artist who finds he is heir to a surprising—and dangerous—legacy. A native of Nebraska, Goodkind now divides his time between Maine and Nevada.

By Harvey Freedenberg Like his first novel, You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon’s latest is a profound and haunting exploration of the shifting, often tenuous, nature of identity. The fact that Chaon has chosen to revisit this theme in the context of a tense, chilling story of modern cybercrime enriches his novel and gives it a disturbingly timely feel. Much of Await Your Reply consists of three superficially unrelated plot threads: Ryan Schuyler is a college dropout who makes his way to a cabin in northern Michigan where he lives with Jay Kozelek, a man he’s been told is his uncle. In truth, Jay is Ryan’s father, a man who makes his living in the business of identity theft. Orphaned in a car accident, 18-year-old Lucy Lattimore flees her stifling Ohio town with her mysterious high school history teacher on a journey that will take them from an abandoned motel in the middle of Nebraska to the Ivory Coast. And Miles Cheshire drives from Cleveland to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, believing he’ll find his missing twin brother Hayden there and end a 10-year quest. Ryan’s observation that he “had been traveling away from himself for a long time now” aptly describes Await Your Reply all three of these characters and their plights. Patiently following these parallel lines to the vanishing By Dan Chaon point, Chaon takes his time weaving together the novel’s Ballantine plot strands. Methodical pacing is made even more tanta- $25, 336 pages lizing by the story’s fractured chronology. But these brave ISBN 9780345476029 Also available on audio narrative choices pay off in a series of revelations that, while hinted at, are brought home with both subtlety and a stunning force that illuminates and deepens the meaning of all that has preceded them. What makes the novel even more appealing is Chaon’s coolly observant, measured prose. Like a skilled musician, he’s chosen the perfect pitch for a story in which so many characters are not who they appear to be. Far more than an absorbing mystery, in this complex and psychologically astute story Dan Chaon puts on a virtuosic display of his literary talent. It’s a thrilling example of the best of contemporary literary fiction. o Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

INTERVIEW

Mother-daughter journey

Finding themselves—and each other—on a trip abroad By Rebecca Bain uring the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose create and make a difference. That was a very hard reconciliation best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and for me. It went right to my core.” The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward Taylor had just broken up with her fiancé and was struggling her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a colwith the “what do I do with my life” issues young people often lege graduation present for her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, she face. The shattered romance and lack of direction had put Taylor whisked the two of them off to Greece. Thus begins Traveling into a fairly severe depression. As she writes in the book, “Being With Pomegranates, a memoir in Greece did not resolve the of their journey together, literal big questions for me, but I did and spiritual, written by both discover some things. I learned women. It was a journey that how easy it is to give up and beallowed them to discover and come draperies while everyone appreciate each other as adults, else is dancing. I learned there as well as mother and daughter. is a name for how I feel—deKidd and Taylor reconvened pression—and I had to face recently at Kidd’s home in up to that. I learned that PerseCharleston, South Carolina, the phone does eventually come city where both women live, back from the underworld and to reflect on their unique joint that maybe I would, too. That I project. According to Kidd, could talk to my mother. That the most difficult aspect of the while I have no idea what to do book was figuring out how to with my life, I am not a total structure it. loser.” “There was my story, there Speaking from her mother’s ANN KIDD taylor and SUE MONK KIDD was Ann’s story, and then we home, Taylor says she sees spehad this third story which was cial significance in the story of about the two of us and our rethe pomegranate. lationship. So really, there were “The pomegranate and the three intersecting layers to this swallowing of the seeds, it’s book,” Kidd recalls in an intersuch a perfect example of how view with BookPage. “It just got a symbol can take on individual more and more complicated. connotations. For my mom it The main thing was, we knew was about Demeter’s loss. For this had to be the narrative of me, it was about Persephone’s our relationship. But trying to transformation and the return figure out how to make all these that she made back to the world different layered stories work together and feel seamless and flow from this naïve, untested girl to someone transformed.” into one another was the biggest challenge.” In fact, symbols and talismans form a huge subtext in the The title, Traveling With Pomegranates, resonates on several memoir. Kidd wears a small silver bee charm around her neck, levels, beginning with the significance of the pomegranate. In hoping it will inspire her to write her novel. She buys two glass Greek mythology, Hades, lord of the dead, kidnaps the young pomegranates for herself and her daughter while in Greece, to maiden, Persephone, and takes her with him to the underworld. remind them of Demeter and Persephone. She carries a small Persephone’s mother, the Earth goddess Demeter, goes into deep statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, on the trip. Kidd believes symbols mourning, allowing crops to wither and turning fields and orand talismans can tell individuals a great deal about themselves. chards into a wasteland. To save the Earth and its people, Zeus “Symbols take us to a world that is deeper than our conscious orders Persephone released, but she has eaten four pomegranate minds are usually operating with. They open the door to a world seeds while in captivity. Thus, she must return to the underworld that’s often under the surface and that has larger meanings than the four months of the year, while her mother again mourns her abones we are consciously, on the surface, dealing with on a day-tosence and the land sleeps in winter. day basis. So a pomegranate is not just a piece of nutritious fruit.” Kidd and Taylor were going through some difficult life exLaughing, she continues, “I was compelled by the pomegranperiences of their own at the time of their trip to Greece. Kidd ate because of the myth, and when I explored that myth, I was was coming to terms with aging, looking for the courage to try amazed to discover a whole story about a mother’s necessary loss writing a novel (her first, which became The Secret Life of Bees), and finding reunion. That took me in a very moving and meanhoping to reconnect in a meaningful way with her daughter, and ingful direction in my life. So I came through being open to symrealizing that as a person with great drive and ambition, her life bols. They give me courage.” lacked the joy of just “being.” It was almost 10 years after that first trip to Greece together (the “This reconciliation of the opposites, the reconciliation of these book also chronicles a return trip to Greece and one to France) poles of polarity we’ve lived and experienced in life, it seems like that Kidd and Taylor finished their memoir. The two women had they come home to roost as we get older,” Kidd says. “It became kept detailed journals, which proved invaluable when writing something about learning how to both their story. But Kidd believes memory is like a muscle—the more ‘be’ and to accomplish and write and you flex it, the stronger it becomes. “Memory can be very elusive, but I do think it’s almost like a living, breathing thing inside of us. It’s all there, somewhere inside. If we can learn how to tap it, it does come flooding back. ” Traveling With An afterword to Traveling With Pomegranates closes with one Pomegranates of Kidd’s favorite quotes: By Sue Monk Kidd “‘We write to taste life twice,’ Anais Nin wrote, ‘in the moment and Ann Kidd Taylor and in retrospection.’ Living the experiences in this book and Viking then writing them was a privilege and a gift, but what I savored $25.95, 282 pages most was doing so with Ann. Tasting life together. Twice.” o ISBN 9780670021208 Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville. Also available on audio

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BEHIND THE BOOK

An author finds inspiration in familiar terrain

From bestselling author Melody Carlson

An enchanting and heartwarming story for the holidays Miracles can

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Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A mile from our apartment, a friend parked his car on the railroad tracks until an eastbound train dragged him and his 15-year-old girlfriend away. She was already dead, from an overdose. Mr. Curry beat his wife so badly he put out her eye and didn’t go to jail. Our great-uncle raped my first cousin. What I felt wasn’t really a crush on a boy, but on the past— particularly the sweet and profane world in which I grew up. When I wrote Deep End, I keened my own grief through the grief of another mother, Beth Cappadora. My children’s blunt suffering became the blunt suffering of Vincent Cappadora about his little brother’s kidnapping. The book was a hit and a triumph. I put away my west-side Chicago youth. Or so I thought. Last year, I had another book ready to go—one day to be published. But I found myself writing (around the edges) about the Cappadoras. Finally, it was clear I had the answer to the question that so many readers had asked me since the publication of my first novel: what ever happened to Vincent and the rest of the Cappadoras? Back to the beginning I went with a purpose. I rewrote and followed the strands. The book bloomed into No Time to Wave Goodbye. Not everyone who read it will have read The Deep End of the Ocean. That’s not necessary. This new story didn’t come from the previous story. It came from that great interlaced weave of lace and chain link that is my place, my locative past. And as soon as I finished it, I wanted to go there again, because the further we get from the life we once lived, the clearer the details. Why keep that universe under lock and key? Of course I hope readers like revisiting people whom they once considered beloved, as I did. But more than that, I turn to those streets and those nights to find myself. I walk down a block of two flats, and a dog barks. A passing car trails the ribbon of a Frankie Valli song under the viaduct. Under the light in a kitchen window, a girl opens her books. Her hair is mayonnaised with Dippity-Do and wound on rollers the size of a car’s tail pipes. I know her. I am her. o Jacquelyn Mitchard has written many books for adults and children since her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was published in 1996. Her latest, No Time to Wave Goodbye (Random House, $25, 240 pages, ISBN 9781400067749), will be released on September 15. © LIANE R. HARRISON

By Jacquelyn Mitchard hen is a series not a series? The easy answer is . . . when I write it. But the real answer is more complicated. Now, they say that a sequel for a writer is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But it’s not a sequel when the primary character is—well, when she has to share the stage. Far more accomplished writers than I (Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner, to whom I’m not comparing myself) have written books that didn’t so much continue the history of one or two people but dipped into a familiar universe for the next story. That’s what I’ve done with my new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye. It does, in fact, take up where my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, left off, 13 years ago. But it begins a series of new events, not a new take on old ones. What I learned from No Time to Wave Goodbye, other than that I could do this with dignity, was that I had the time of my life. I didn’t realize how vital these ancient characters still were. I didn’t jacquelyn recognize the places they inhabit in my writer’s heart. mitchard And so, perhaps not so surprisingly, I’m back in that universe for the novel I’m currently writing, to be published in 2010. There’ll be new people with new stories and old faces turned toward new complexities. Turns out, I have a crush on my own Yokapanowtha County—Chicago’s Italian neighborhood at Taylor and Racine Streets and the exurbs beyond. In fact, The Deep End of the Ocean started with a crush. I thought it was a crush on a boy. Back when I was a young widow with four young kids, pushing 40 and ever so alone, I began to dream at night of my high-school sweetheart, taking refuge in the endless summer nights we shared, lying on a quilt on the hood of his grandpa’s Bonneville, smoking and stroking skin that would never be so soft again. My honey and I were plumbers’ children, but still privileged. While we had to work, it was only after school. Before our dates, we girls dropped by the cologne counter at Marshall Fields—as one of my pals put it, “renting to own” our cosmetics. Four guys once serenaded me under the window of our apartment, singing “Jackie” instead of “My Girl” in the refrain. Yet, there were stains on that place and time, just as there were for Francie Nolan in A

MILITARY HISTORY

Saving Europe’s greatest treasures By Howard Shirley From 1939 through the last months of the war, the Nazi army seized priceless paintings, sculptures, tapestries and more, from museums, palaces, cathedrals, private homes, even tiny chapels—the Nazis plundered everything, carting off the cultural history of every nation they entered. But just as the Allied Forces fought to save the Western world, others fought to save Western Civilization. They were “the Monuments Men,” a handful of soldiers given a unique assignment: to preserve the cultural soul of Europe by protecting Europe’s art. Robert M. Edsel’s masterful book The Monuments Men shares their story, in a tale that is part history, part war story and part treasure hunt. Undermanned, undersupplied and with virtually no authority, the Monuments Men (and women) faced bullets, bombs and Nazi booby traps to rescue works by Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Vermeer, Michelangelo and more. Edsel and his co-author, Bret Witter, have crafted an account that moves like a Hollywood action adventure, with scenes ranging from a peasant’s cottage in the middle of an artillery battle, to the depths of an ancient salt mine. There are heroes to root for, villains to hiss at and an increasingly The Monuments pressing race against time as the Nazis, in a last vicious act of Men defiance, set about to destroy the art rather than give it up. By Robert M. Edsel Edsel and Witter interviewed the few surviving Monuwith Bret Witter ments Men, examined family letters and even Nazi archives Center Street in their research. Whether you’re a fan of art, military his- $26.99, 496 pages tory or stories of real-life heroes, The Monuments Men is a ISBN 9781599951492 treasure worth the hunt. o Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

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Towner Whitney hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations. Now the disappearance of two women is bringing Towner back home to Salem—and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

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WHODUNIT? Back in the U.S.S.R.

Mystery of the month

It doesn’t always work out that I get a theme to exploit in my column, but this time I got lucky: three novels of modern-day Russia and a Mystery of the Month set in steamy Bangkok whisk readers away on a suspense-laden magic carpet ride across the far reaches of the Eastern Hemisphere. Loosely based on the real-life story of a disgraced Russian billionaire, The Hunted (Grand Central, $25.99, 464 pages, ISBN 9780446195591), traces the trajectory of Alex Konevitch, a brilliant entrepreneur riding the crest of the economic tsunami that is the new Russia. All waves must eventually crash ashore, though, and Alex’s is going to crash bigger than most. The problems start when he hires an ex-KGB thug as his head of BY BRUCE TIERNEY corporate security, a mistake akin to hiring the proverbial fox to guard the henhouse. Alex finds himself stripped of his assets and forced into a life on the run, scarcely one step ahead of a lethal team of assassins. Brian Haig takes every opportunity to roast the Russian hierarchy, portraying Gorbachev as “pathetically naïve,” and his successor Yeltsin as a “loudmouthed lush.” Still, amid the chaos, a theme emerges: despite the dubious leadership skills of the power players, a clever and ruthless element is rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the Soviet Union, and heaven help whoever stands in their path, especially the aforementioned Alex Konevitch. An author’s note at the end offers a brief look at the tragedy and triumph of Konevitch’s real-life doppelganger, Alex Konanykhin, a fitting coda for this crackling suspense novel.

Breathing Water (Morrow, $24.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780061672231), Timothy Hallinan’s long-awaited (by me, at least) follow-up to last year’s The Fourth Watcher, has finally arrived, and I am happy to say it is well worth the wait. For those unfamiliar with Hallinan’s earlier work, his Bangkok thrillers feature gonzo expat travel writer Poke Rafferty, author of Looking for Trouble in . . . (insert exotic Asian locale here). He certainly has no trouble finding trouble, and in fact trouble often finds him—this time in the person of a ruthless mob boss who is the subject of Rafferty’s forthcoming book. A biography of this sort will inevitably polarize opinions—and promises to reveal sensitive information that the power elite would prefer remain unearthed. Almost immediately, an anonymous death threat arrives, warning Rafferty not to write the book. Problem is, equally influential forces want to see the book go forward, and they respond with death threats of their own. What’s a boy to do? At the heart of the action is a baby-selling ring, a reflection of a real-life heartbreak that plagues the Third World, featuring a pair of charismatic young guerilla urchins who wage covert war on the Bangkok criminal element at every turn. Breathing Water is action-packed and steamily atmospheric, and as cleverly plotted a mystery as you are likely to read this year. A final note: as a book reviewer, or as a Japanese immigration agent referred to me, a “rittererry clitic” (soon to be the new job title on my business cards), I get countless new books to read, and never have to pay a cent for them. In fact, I have been known to become somewhat cranky at the notion of having to shell out my hard-earned cash, particularly at pricey international airport bookstores, where I most often find myself short of reading material. Tim Hallinan is highly placed on the short list of authors whose books I would happily pay retail to read; if you think about it, that has to be just about the highest compliment a book reviewer (or rittererry clitic) can pay. o —BRUCE TIERNEY

Keeping the Cold War hot The chaotic milieu of post-Soviet-era Russia forms the backdrop for Brent Ghelfi’s series featuring Alexei “Volk” Volkovoy, a shadowy underworld figure who doubles as an agent for an enigmatic quasi-governmental individual known simply as “The General.” In The Venona Cable (Holt, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9780805088946), the third installment of the series, Volk finds himself dispatched hither and yon, from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, in an effort to avenge the death of a compatriot, and to establish the facts about a legendary reputed double agent—a man who happens to be Volk’s estranged father. Incidentally, the Venona Cable was a real-life KGB missive intercepted by the Allies, which was instrumental in the arrest and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for their part in providing atomic weapons secrets to the Soviets. The Venona Cable offers an intriguing fictional backstory to this highlight of Cold War espionage, as well as giving fans a further look into the complex, violent and yet strongly moral character of protagonist Volk. (A quick note: for an in-depth look at the true history of the Venona Cable, have a look at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona, the website of the PBS Nova television series “Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies.”)

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This may seem a bit of a non sequitur, but I have been a big fan of Brit comedy team Fry (Stephen) and Laurie (Hugh) for years, so when I saw their complimentary blurbs on the cover of my review copy of Alex Dryden’s Red to Black (Ecco, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780061803864), I eagerly plunged into the book, anticipating a rollicking tongue-in-cheek espionage romp. I could not have been farther afield in my expectations. Red to Black is, instead, a critical fictional look at the new Russia, which, under close examination, looks remarkably like the old Russia, complete with pogroms, intimidation, stifling of the press and heavy curtailment of personal freedoms. Dryden’s debut novel chronicles the adventures of British spy Finn and his Russian counterpart Anna, each charged with extracting sensitive information from the other. Both are young, clever and beautiful, so it is no surprise that with close contact they would begin to feel a strong affection for one another, complicating their respective missions in ways neither could begin to foresee. This of course begs the question: who is playing whom? The story is told primarily in flashback by Anna, from the safety of a medieval vault on the southern border of Germany, at a far remove from her singularly unpleasant Russian handlers. Dryden skillfully weaves together the disparate elements of love story, taut spy novel and contemporary political treatise into one seamless volume. o

BIOGRAPHY

Revelatory bio of bombshell icon By Pat H. Broeske Marilyn Monroe is the subject of a cottage publishing industry, so it’s surprising and laudatory when a revelatory and insightful book comes along. That makes The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, by celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, a must-have not only for Monroe fans, but for anyone who loves a juicy Hollywood saga. Just 36 when she died of an overdose of prescription medication in 1962, Monroe remains the ultimate sex symbol. Her imitators are many, but no one has come close to the original. Taraborrelli, author of books on Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Michael Jackson, the Kennedy women and others, conducted interviews over decades and utilized FBI files. He digs especially deep into Monroe’s (fractured) family ties, which imparted feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Born Norma Jeane Mortensen, she was the daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic. Thus, she was alternately raised by an unofficial foster family, her mother’s close friend, a greataunt and an orphanage. She was a ravishing 16 when she was pushed into marrying the son of a family friend. It was that or another orphanage. She was working at a Burbank factory when she was The Secret Life of snapped by Yanks magazine. So began her enduring rela- Marilyn Monroe tionship with the camera. In less than two years she apBy J. Randy Taraborrelli peared on 30 magazine covers. Movies followed—as did Grand Central pills, booze and therapy. There was a star-crossed affair with $26.99, 576 pages Sinatra, marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller and a ISBN 9780446580823 fling with JFK that made her think she could be First Lady. She was by then borderline paranoid schizophrenic—and trapped within her own shrewdly crafted persona. Serious questions persist about the circumstances of her death. But there is no mystery about her stature in Hollywood. In this age of throwaway tabloid celebrities and instantaneous reality show “fame,” Monroe is the iconic reminder of true superstardom, and the terrible price it can exact. Read it and weep. o Pat H. Broeske has written about Monroe for the New York Times.

Make sure you have a tissue nearby, because you are going to need it! — T e r r i B l a c k s T o c k , bestselling author

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Well Read Retracing the lives of two packrats E.L. Doctorow has a singular way of reshaping our national mythology to tell us something new about ourselves. Most recently, his Pulitzer Prize finalist and NBCC Award-winning novel, The March, swept readers along on General Sherman’s relentless drive to the sea, putting a human face on that darkest of Civil War episodes. In his latest, Homer & Langley, this dean of American storytellers takes unexpected liberties with history, playing fast and loose with many facts in retelling the story of the Collyer Brothers, arguably the world’s most famous packrats. But as readers will come to appreciate, Doctorow has his reasons. Real-life figures Homer and Langley Collyer, the sons of a prominent New York City gynecologist and an opera singer, grew up in a palatial townhouse on upper Fifth Avenue. After their parents’ deaths, they inherited the house and lived there as virtual recluses for the rest of their lives. Homer eventually went blind and relied on Langley for his care. For his part, Langley was something of a “mad BY ROBERT scientist,” fascinated by any discarded object’s potential WEIBEZAHL usefulness. Thus, he filled every inch of the mansion with stuff—pianos, the chassis of a Model T, dressmaking dummies—even formaldehyde-preserved specimens from his father’s medical practice. And newspapers: thousands of newspapers bundled and stacked to create narrow walkways through the house. Eventually, Homer was found dead, having starved. Nine days later, Langley’s partially decomposed body was retrieved by rescue workers—just 10 feet away. He had been crushed to death by a suitcase and some bundles of newspapers. Apparently, New York City firemen still refer to an emergency call to an over-cluttered apartment as a “Collyer.” Doctorow tells his version of the Collyers’ story through the first-person narration of Homer, who

Doctorow cuts his way through the clutter left behind by the real-life Collyer brothers. proves a charming and engaging tour guide through the junk-filled labyrinth his brother has created. Doctorow Homer & Langley pushes the action forward about two decades, and this By E.L. Doctorow change allows him to link Langley’s madness to time Random House served in the trenches of World War I. Shell shock and $26, 224 pages mustard gas, therefore, become the tangible, if fictional, ISBN 9781400064946 Also available on audio culprits behind Langley’s mental descent. The time-shift positions the story in the 1960s (the real Collyers died in 1947). For less clear reasons, the novelist switches the brothers’ ages, making Langley the elder; changes some of the circumstances of Homer’s ailments; and makes Homer, rather than his brother, a pianist. But altered facts aside, Doctorow works his usual magic in bringing history to life and larding it with disturbing implications. As Homer shares the brothers’ peculiar story, they become witnesses to a century of American progress and cyclical retrenchment, from Jazz Age prosperity to the Great Depression; from wars in Europe, Korea and Vietnam to the Summer of Love. Their reclusive world is breached by gangsters, hippies, the occasional woman (one can’t really call these women “love interests”), Japanese-American political refugees and a former servant girl who becomes a martyred missionary nun. Through it all, Langley grows more and more “self-reliant.” But one by one the utilities are cut off, their living space shrinks to claustrophobic proportions and the brothers grow thin from an insubstantial diet. Their ugly end, preordained by history, is nonetheless heart wrenching. Homer, as narrator and arguably the saner of the two brothers, wins our hearts. Langley remains a more enigmatic figure, though, the sources of his paranoid eccentricities filtered through Homer’s loving perceptions. Langley’s major project is “the collection of daily players with the ultimate aim of creating one day’s edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof.” This speaks to his visionary lunacy, but we still never fully understand it. Are we meant to see the Collyer brothers as geniuses? Or merely willing inmates in a bedlam of their own making? In this fictional rendering, they can clearly be both. As with much of Doctorow’s masterful fiction, Homer & Langley turns the American dream on its ear, offering us a glimpse of the dark side of our national—and personal—eccentricities. o

INTERVIEW

BESTSELLER WATCH

A healing path

Kidder traces a survivor’s escape from African genocide

Spartan Gold By Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood Putnam, $26.95, ISBN 9780399156427

Two treasure-hunting brothers seek French Napoleonic bounty in this series debut.

The Spire By Richard North Patterson Holt, $26, ISBN 9780805087734

This twisting tale of psychological suspense and murder is set on an Ohio college campus.

Official Book Club Selection By Kathy Griffin Ballantine, $25, ISBN 9780345518514

The D-list celebrity hopes to catapult herself onto the bestseller list with this hilarious retrospective on her ascent to fame.

The Lost Symbol By Dan Brown Doubleday, $29.95 ISBN 9780385504225

Robert Langdon is back in Brown’s Da Vinci Code follow-up. Need we say more?

An Echo in the Bone By Diana Gabaldon Delacorte, $30, ISBN 9780385342452

In the seventh installment of the beloved Outlander series, we travel to the 1770s, when the future of America is at stake.

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By Alden Mudge hile working on Strength in What Remains, the excruhis story and told me about it. The memory of someone else’s ciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of memory stuck with me,” Kidder remembers when asked about the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy the origins of Strength in What Remains. “For me the only hard Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote thing about being a writer is deciding what to do next. My wife on airplanes. said, why don’t you go see Deo? I did. And once I heard the story “I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder when for myself, I thought I had to tell it. Deo is an enormously charmI’m working,” Kidder says during a call ing person. Captivating. One feels to the summer home in Maine that he that even before one knows his story, and his wife, a painter, bought in the but the story only enhances that— 1980s, around the time when The Soul that a guy could be so good-hearted of a New Machine earned him a Puand so strong that he could return to litzer Prize. “Privacy is a big thing for Burundi and open a clinic, which is me.” really such an instrument of peace. Usually Kidder has found privacy in There’s a radiance about him.” what he describes as his uninsulated, Kidder spent hours with Deo, “beautifully built little cottage down dredging up often painful memories, by a salt water cove” on the couple’s “just talking and talking and talking, property in Maine. Or in the quiet and listening really carefully. I’m not office “with plenty of room for paca good listener in my regular life, but ing” in their house—an old, converted I’m pretty good when I’m working,” creamery not far from Northampton, Kidder says. Deo was at first a reMassachusetts. But over the last five luctant subject, Kidder says. “I don’t or six years, while he was researchblame him. I would never let anying and writing Strength in What Rebody do what I do to other people. mains, Kidder traveled frequently to And Deo is, of course, completely college campuses all over the country, publicity shy. There were times when tracy kidder where his marvelous account of Dr. I thought I should stop, and I felt like Paul Farmer’s effort to heal the world, a real creep for doing this to someMountains Beyond Mountains, has inone. But once he decided to do it, he spired enough interest that, as Kidder did it.” In the dramatic finale to the “My wife said, why don’t you puts it, “hundreds of schools have inbook, Kidder accompanies Deo on a flicted it on their incoming students.” return visit to Burundi and Rwanda. go see Deo? I did. And once I So out of necessity, Kidder learned to Kidder lets Deo’s story unfold in write “a little bit” on airplanes. an unusually affecting double narheard the story for myself, I “Writing is for me, and I suspect for rative—first as a sort of page-turner, many other people, a way of thinking,” which Kidder says is meant to presKidder says. “It is the only way that I ent “as accurate an account of Deo’s thought I had to tell it.” can begin to make sense of things for memories as I can,” and then from a myself. So I don’t write in a very effibit of a distance, “to show Deo in the cient way. I have to concentrate. The throes of memory.” A postscript adds whole idea is to lose myself somewhat, to lose self-consciousness. historical context for the chaos and violence unleashed between And when I do that, I feel very vulnerable.” Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda. But nothing can anIf Kidder feels vulnerable writing under normal circumstancswer the question Deo seeks to answer when he enrolls in a phies, imagine how he must have felt writing Strength in What Relosophy course at Columbia: what kind of human being can take mains, a stunning account of the harrowing journey of a young up a machete and slaughter his neighbor? medical student, Deogratias (Deo), when the horrific civil war Ultimately, Kidder says, Strength in What Remains is about between Hutus and Tutsis broke out in Burundi in 1993. memory—and forgetting, and taking action. Visiting a genocide It is an amazing journey. Deo witnessed some of the most memorial site with Deo in Rwanda, he writes that of course we unimaginable acts of cruelty human beings can commit against need such memorials. But “too much remembering can be suffoone another. He barely escaped death himself. Through luck and cating.” Afflicted by “ungovernable, tormenting memories, Deo the kindness of a schoolmate, he arrived in New York City with first sought solace by studying philosophy at Columbia. But it $200 in his pocket, not knowing a soul and not speaking Engdidn’t work.” lish. Haunted by his nightmarish memories, Deo slept in Central “I think Deo’s solution is not to dwell on memories and not Park and worked for about a dollar an hour delivering groceries to extinguish them either,” Kidder says, “but, rather, to act. The while trying to learn English by reading dictionaries in libraries best solution is for him to go back and try to bring public health and bookstores. Helped, eventually, by a number of unlikely New and medicine to one village. The phrase ‘never again’ has clearly Yorkers, Deo entered Columbia University, studied philosophy, become an empty platitude, because genocide keeps happening went back to medical school and then everywhere. The real answer is remembering, being guided by began working with Dr. Paul Farmer. those memories, and acting.” Eventually he found a healing path for Growing more reflective Kidder says, “Over the last nine years his return to Burundi. I’ve spent the better part of my time with Paul Farmer and De“My wife heard an outline of ogratias. They lead you beyond conventional wisdom. A lot of conventional wisdom represents an attempt to ignore the fact that most of humanity is impoverished and in deep misery. These guys and their colleagues are confronting that misery. Strength in What Remains Through that, I believe another way of looking at the world is By Tracy Kidder bound to arise.” Random House Kidder’s Strength in What Remains offers a glimpse of that $26, 304 pages new world arising. o ISBN 9781400066216 Also available on audio Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

Release dates for some of the guaranteed blockbusters hitting shelves in September:

INSPIRATION

The latest in Christian fiction has something for everyone By Joanne Collings hristian fiction always deals with faith, but these five books demonstrate how differently authors approach the matter. There’s something here for most readers, including those who are simply looking for wonderful, well-written stories.

A twist of fate Tracie Peterson kicks off an engaging new series with Dawn’s Prelude (Bethany House, $13.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780764201516). It is 1871 when Lydia Sellers receives word that both her father and abusive husband have been killed in the same accident. A legal twist names Lydia heir to both fortunes, and while her scheming stepchildren are determined to prevent Lydia from inheriting any of their father’s money, Lydia realizes that she is pregnant with her deceased husband’s child. Having been forced into marriage at the age of 16 by her father as part of a business deal, Lydia believes that God “didn’t care about [me]. If He did . . . why He would allow [me] such a heinous existence for twelve years of [my] life.” Lydia flees Kansas City to live with her aunt in Alaska. But not only is she dangerously close to her murderous in-laws, she’s also landed among believers: both her aunt and the man whose arms she literally falls into are firm in their faith. Dawn’s Prelude has turns galore and convincingly scary villains, and it’s clear that Peterson will have plenty to work with in future books.

To follow an impossible dream Jane Kirkpatrick bases her young protagonist—Jessie Gaebele, who yearns to become a photographer in 1907 Minnesota—after her grandmother in A Flickering Light (WaterBrook, $13.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9781578569809). Jessie comes from a religious family with a long list of things that are not allowed. Though money is tight, they agree to allow her to work as an unpaid apprentice for six months to photographer F.J. Bauer. Bauer has a troubled marriage to another Jessie and is still reeling from the loss of a child. A Flickering Light makes small-town Minnesota come alive, and the difficulties, dangers and early growth of photography are vividly portrayed; so too are the inner conflicts faced by the two Jessies and the man between them. It is here that faith and its requirements reside. Jessie finds herself increasingly attracted to her employer; he returns her feelings. Mrs. Bauer, perhaps the most fascinating character in a story filled with well-drawn ones, is battling her own demons. But the novel is young Jessie’s story—she is blessed with faith stronger than she realizes, as well as parents wiser than she suspects. Jessie finds herself “given grace, an unwarranted second chance.” She will use it to follow her dream.

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

For chick lit fans Another Jessie takes center stage in Never the Bride (WaterBrook, $13.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780307444981), contemporary chick lit by Cheryl McKay and Rene Gutteridge. Jessie Stone has spent much of her life planning how she might be proposed to. But she’s in her 30s, with no proposals in her past or near future. After a discouraging evening of speed dating she wonders aloud, “[W]hen has God ever shown up to help me?” Almost impossibly, God—young, good-looking and funny—soon shows up in her living room, offering his own challenge: let him write her love story. He knows what kind of man she wants and is prepared to find him. Never the Bride is often laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also a poignant tale about Jessie’s past and what happens when an ordinary person begins to see God—and those around her don’t. That Jessie has a history of seeing people and things others don’t—at nine she was sent to a psychologist because of an imaginary friend—further complicates matters. Jessie has a lot of difficulty letting go, refusing at times to listen to God and to do what he asks. She’s a loveable character and you want her to have her happy ending, but also to realize that her fantasies have never gone beyond the wedding to recognize the hard work of marriage.

Contemporary romance

Judy Christie begins her career as a novelist with Gone to Green (Abingdon Press, $13.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9781426700248), the first in the Route 2 series. Big city newspaper editor Lois Barker inherits The Green News-Item, a twice-weekly paper in northern Louisiana. She can sell the paper, but only after she’s run it for a year. Lois quickly has 14 to adjust her ideas about what the town of Green will be like,

while acknowledging that Green and the paper have its own expectations of her. Lois lost her faith after her mother’s death, and she’s reluctant—despite a positive encounter with a minister—to become involved in a church. Green weaves a spell on Lois, who becomes actively involved in the community that proves to be rife with corruption, scandal and racial discrimination. Still, she resists the pull of the town and its people, planning on selling the paper. No astute reader will be really surprised at what Lois finally decides, but the journey is enjoyable, and it will be interesting to see where the series goes next.

The end of days Whether it’s in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, or Rob Stennett’s The End is Now (Zondervan, $14.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780310286790), there’s something about Kansas. In Stennett’s case, the inaptly named Goodland, Kansas, is about to play host to the apocalypse. What’s worse, Goodland is the only target; consider it a dress rehearsal to work out all the kinks for the real deal. Practice run or not, this is little consolation for the Henderson family, who find themselves smack dab in the middle of all the chaos. While lost in a cornfield, it is 10-year old Will who first receives visions of the darkness that will descend, as if he didn’t already have enough on his plate trying to navigate the fifth grade. The news isn’t much welcomed by his sister Emily either, who fears the end may come before homecoming queen is announced. Through it all, their parents, Amy and Jeff, struggle to keep the family afloat and themselves out of hot water, all while the rains get thicker and the clouds get darker. With good humor tempered by tenderness, Stennett offers readers a thoughtful, fresh spin on the traditional teachings, and effectively portrays the apocalypse in our modern world. With equal parts thriller, mystery and satire, this is a novel almost guaranteed to enrapture readers of all beliefs. o Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

Making the most of final moments By Howard Shirley The day Warren Harlan Pease returns home from the war in Iraq, the first person he meets is Jesus. Dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, Jesus walks from the ocean onto the New Hampshire beach where Warren goes to find solace. What follows is a journey through Warren’s life, as Jesus—who insists Warren call him “Ray”—travels with Warren to meet the family and friends who stayed behind when Warren went to war. One by one, Warren introduces Ray to his loved ones: first to Bethie, Warren’s high school sweetheart and the mother of his daughter, Dodie; then, in turn, his father, his best friend, Ryan, to whom Bethie is now engaged, and even Warren’s dead mother. As the unlikely pair moves from place to place, Warren’s life unfolds before him again. Soon Warren begins to understand that the journey is one of healing for his soul as much as for his wounds. As the meaning of Warren’s return unfolds, the bitterness of war and loss turns into a discovery of peace and hope. James Landis’ novel The Last Day (Steerforth, $14.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781586421656) is haunting and beautiful, rippling with skillfully intertwined themes of faith, love, religion and war. The voice of the young soldier is powerfully real, carried forth in a simple, direct style that is nevertheless richly poetic and thoroughly compelling. And while Warren does not question his duty in the war, the story does not shirk from the graphic, horrible reality of Iraq itself. Flashback scenes are told in the voice of one who has been there, a soldier in the midst of blood, filth and violence—a vivid contrast to the quiet, intimate moments that surround Warren as Jesus leads him through his home. What makes these disparate visions work so well is that the author completely disappears into Warren’s voice. Reading The Last Day is like sharing Warren’s thoughts, as if the story were a memoir rather than a novel. But it is a novel, and an exceptional one. Landis writes with mastery and grace, weaving together fiction and philosophy with profound beauty. Through an ordinary hero, Landis has crafted an extraordinary literary work. Like Warren, the reader will discover that The Last Day is worth sharing with loved ones. o Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

A mother’s worst nightmare. A daughter’s deadly addiction. A cop’s search for truth. Sometimes the path to heaven goes straight through hell.

The latest thriller from bestselling author Terri Blackstock. Barbara Covington will do anything to save her daughter from her drug addiction, but when the intervention leads to murder, her family enters a whole new nightmare. This story of unyielding faith, fierce love and spiritual redemption is one of Blackstock’s most suspenseful and rewarding reads. Available September 22 wherever books are sold. Visit zondervan.com/intervention to watch the promotional trailer.

Up All Night Fiction

™

MEMOIR

A pioneer of integration recalls the struggles of the Little Rock Nine By Faye Jones In the summer of 1957, 14-year-old Carlotta Walls, like any teenager preparing to attend a new school, was excited and anxious. Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was an excellent school that would open up many doors for her future. But Carlotta was concerned about whether she could keep up academically. In many ways, she was a typical teenager. But her high school experience was anything but typical; in fact,

it was historic. She was one of the Little Rock Nine, the students who integrated the Little Rock school system. For those who lived through those days, the events will never be forgotten: a white mob surrounded the school and troops escorted the students to class. For the young, Carlotta Walls LaNier’s memoir is a timely reminder of where we came from, how much we’ve accomplished and the progress

Onyx, $7.99, 9780451412799

Jove, $7.99, 9780515146899

Signet, $9.99, 9780451227751

PARANORMAL

THRILLER

Mounting Fears President Will Lee’s vice president just died during surgery, and his new pick may be hiding something. Meanwhile, rogue CIA agent Teddy Fay is plotting revenge on the First Lady. Plus, some nuclear weapons are loose in Pakistan, and the prevention of WWIII depends on Lee’s efforts to resolve the situation.

Obsidian Prey Independent prospector Lyra Dore lost her heart and a rare amethyst ruin to cutthroat businessman Cruz Sweetwater. But the ruin’s mysterious powers have put everyone in danger. Only by trusting their psychic instincts will the pair survive—and live to surrender to the desire that binds them.

The Pawn Patrick Bowers specializes in tracking down the killers who elude the FBI’s best investigators. Called upon to consult on a gruesome murder, Bowers finds himself in a deadly duel with a serial killer who transcends his analytical powers—putting his techniques and instincts to the ultimate test.

Jove, $7.99, 9780515146905

Berkley, $7.99, 9780425230671

SUSPENSE

Heartless Investigative journalist Zoe Greene has been traumatized by a serial killer. When soap star Warren Clark asks her to join him in Mexico, she’s delighted. Then one by one, people end up dead—their hearts torn out—and Zoe’s investigative instincts kick in. But is she next on the killer’s list?

Berkley $9.99, 9780425230169

SUSPENSE

Berkley, $9.99, 9780425230176

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Obsidian Mysteries, $7.99, 9780451228673

PAPERBACK PICKS

SUSPENSE

FICTION

PARANORMAL

ROMANCE

Rough Weather Hired as a bodyguard at an exclusive society wedding, Spenser witnesses an unexpected crime: the kidnapping of the bride. Her disappearance opens the door for murder, family secrets, and the return of an old nemesis— the infamous Gray Man, who has helped and hunted him in the past.

Scarpetta Leaving her private practice behind, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment with the NYPD to examine a man in Bellevue’s psychiatric prison ward. Oscar Bane has specifically asked for her, and when he begins to talk, the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard.

Servant: The Kindred Gabrielle Cody is a paladin—God’s enforcer on earth. But can she endure the life of a holy warrior? Her relationship with Detective Luther Cross is under constant strain already, and it’s going to get worse. There’s a soul-devouring monster on the loose, and Gaby must stop him.

Viking Heat Psychologist Joy Nelson thinks things are bad when she finds herself training in the female Navy SEALs program. But then her life takes a turn for the worse when she’s thrust back in time to the cold Norselands, and auctioned off as a thrall, or slave—a gift for a Viking warlord.

we still need to make. The first African-American students at Central High School suffered constant harassment. Some white students and teachers were openly hostile. Classmates tripped them in the hall, knocked their books out of their arms and spat at them. The AfricanAmerican students were told they could not retaliate. The suffering went beyond the classroom. Suddenly, Walls LaNier’s father had a hard time finding work. Their home was bombed. Walls LaNier’s memoir emphasizes that she and her fellow students were not civil rights professionals, but children. She was a young girl who had little interest in being on the front lines. She chose Central because she was a good student and thought she would get the best education there. When legal wrangling closed the school, her main concern was how far behind she would be in her classes. Her response to the daily racism was to keep her head down and find ways to disappear. She felt guilty at the worry and financial burden her choice placed on her parents. Yet her story is a positive one as she recounts her own successful life and her pride in watching Barack Obama win the presidency in 2008: “We were indeed a country ready to move beyond its racial scars and wounds into a more hopeful future.” o Faye Jones is dean of learning resources at Nashville State Technical College.

A Mighty Long Way By Carlotta Walls LaNier with Lisa Frazier Page One World $26, 304 pages ISBN 9780345511003

Visit BookPage.com where readers discover their next great book • more than 10,000 book reviews • exclusive author interviews and features • three new blogs

DEBUT FICTION

A lush, Latin family affair By Rebecca Stropoli With a lyrical voice and vibrant descriptions, Carolina De Robertis brings the stories of three generations of dynamic women and a period in Latin American history to life in her impressive debut novel, The Invisible Mountain. The tale kicks off on the first day of the 20th century, as an apparent miracle takes place in the Uruguayan countryside: a girl who had disappeared as an infant mysteriously reappears in a tree when she is almost one year old. After she seems to fly from the tree into her aunt’s arms, she is christened Pajarita (Little Bird). Thus begins a narrative that spans the next 90 years, as De Robertis tracks the fascinating lives of Pajarita, her daughter Eva and granddaughter Salomé, and brings her readers on a journey through the tumultuous histories of Uruguay and Argentina. De Robertis took eight years to research and write her first novel, and it is easy to see why—she is meticulous with the details on everything from the political and cultural transformations in Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo, to the revolutions of Evita Perón’s Argentina. The facts blend seamlessly with the fiction as the reader becomes intimately acquainted with the three women, each of whom handles severe adversity with amazing strength: Pajarita watches as her husband turns to gambling, whor- The Invisible ing and alcohol while she struggles to support her family Mountain in Montevideo by selling healing herbs. Eva is pulled out By Carolina De Robertis of school to labor at a shoe shop at the age of 10; she deals Knopf with horrific sexual abuse at the hands of her boss before $24.95, 384 pages eventually fleeing to pursue freedom and poetry writing in ISBN 9780307271631 Perón-era Argentina. And Salomé’s story is the darkest of Also available on audio all; her radical zeal leads her to join the Tupamaros revolutionaries in Uruguay—with utterly disastrous results. The descriptions of her imprisonment and torture are stark and disturbing, but they work to make her story the most compelling of the three. The Invisible Mountain is a poetic and absorbing generational epic that pays tribute to a colorful culture and amazing history. De Robertis is a promising young writer, and we can only hope there is much more to come from her. o Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

This fall let fiction be your

escape

FICTION

Living in the shadow of the Holocaust

The days are getting cooler… time to curl up by the fire and let our novels take you deep into a murder mystery, or to ancient Egypt for a historical romance, or into a modern day family that will warm your heart. Whichever you choose, this is pure escape.

Local Bookstores 800-448-8032 PureEnjoyment.com

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

By Linda White Anita Diamant, the best-selling author of The Red Tent, turns her attention from biblical narrative to the story of a decidedly more modern group of Jewish women in her latest novel, Day After Night. The tale takes place in the latter half of 1945 at Atlit, a camp in Israel where those fleeing Europe and hoping for a homeland are held if they do not have papers—or if there is any other problem with their status. Diamant focuses on four women housed at Atlit: Zorah, Leonie, Tedi and Shayndel. Although the story covers just a few months, past years are explored through the women’s varied memories of the harsh, cruel and sometimes tragic experiences they have endured. Each woman’s sorrow is her own, but the shared horror of the Holocaust and the burdens each one bears as a survivor serve to unite them in a friendship that will nourish them as they take on the challenges of starting anew. All of the women await their freedom from Atlit, although the notions of what this means, how to find it and where to go once it has been achieved are different to each. Talented, beautiful and strong, each of these women brings a different layer to the multi-faceted story of Diamant’s poignantly rendered Jewish experience. The story is dispensed in small measures, with the lives of Day After Night the four women peeled away like the layers of an onion. At By Anita Diamant times the narrative is not as compelling as one might hope; Scribner there is always the sense that the women are held at arm’s $27, 320 pages length, and the true horror of what they have experienced is ISBN 9780743299848 somewhat muted by everyday concerns. Despite these issues, Also available on audio it is clear that this is a story close to the author’s heart—she lost her uncle and grandfather in the Holocaust—and she tells it lovingly. Day After Night stands out as a unique depiction of a piece of the Holocaust that is little known, and in the end, the human element of this story will captivate readers, regardless of their knowledge of the history of Judaism. o Linda White is a writer and publicist in St. Paul, Minnesota.

CONTINUE THE SUMMER FUN!

Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods 978-1-59582-247-5 | $14.95

Thumbelina: The POP Wonderland Series 978-1-59582-268-0 | $16.95

Solomon Kane Volume 1 978-1-59582-282-6 | $15.95

Usagi Yojimbo Volume 23: Bridge of Tears 978-1-59582-298-7 | $17.95

DARK HORSE GRAPHIC NOVELS OFFER AN ADVENTURE FOR EVERYONE!

Star Wars Adventures: Princess Leia and the Royal Ransom 978-1-59582-147-8 | $7.95

Star Wars Omnibus: Menace Revealed 978-1-59582-273-4 | $24.95

Oh My Goddess! Volume 33 978-1-59582-376-2 | $10.95

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project Volume 1 978-1-59582-321-2 | $9.95

AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE | FOR MORE INFORMATION ON DARK HORSE BOOKS VISIT DARKHORSE.COM Indiana Jones™ & © 2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization. Oh My Goddess! © 2009 Kosuke Fujishima. All rights reserved. First published in Japan in 2006 by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo. Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd. Star Wars © 2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™. All rights reserved. Used under authorization. Text and illustrations for Menace Revealed and Adventures are © 2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. Solomon Kane © 2009 Solomon Kane Inc. (“SKI”). SOLOMON KANE, and related logos, characters, names, and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of SKI. All rights reserved. NEON GENESIS EVANGELION IKARI-SHINJI IKUSEI KEIKAKU volume 1 © OSAMU TAKAHASHI 2009 © GAINAX • khara. First published in Japan in (2006) by KADOKAWA SHOTEN Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA SHOTEN Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo, through TOHAN CORPORATION, Tokyo. Usagi Yojimbo™ © 2009 Stan Sakai. Thumbelina: The POP Wonderland Series copyright © POP 2009. All rights reserved. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

INTERVIEW

Breaking the silence Graphic memoir chronicles artist’s horrific childhood

By Becky Ohlsen eached at his home in Menden, in the southwest corner of the state, David After that, his brother visited. “We laughed and cried and drank and talked and Small says, “It’s a gray day in Michigan.” Gray seems appropriate for the con- reminisced,” Small said. “After 30 years, I have my brother back. If nothing else hapversation; somehow, discussing Stitches, Small’s grim, deeply affecting graphic pens with this book, it’ll be worth it just for that.” memoir, in bright sunshine would feel wrong. Small’s drawing in Stitches is both roomy and precise, with lots of open space in and The book describes Small’s gothic-horror childhood, his weird, remote parents around the panels but an intensity of focus—especially on facial expressions—that and deranged grandmother and the catastrophe that shaped his young life. As a boy, feels almost claustrophobic. Often, panels zoom in on an angry frown, a narrowed eye, Small had sinus problems; his father, a radioloa kitchen cupboard slammed shut. One twogist, treated him with X-rays, state of the art at page spread shows a close-up of David seeing the time. When David developed a lump on his his stitches for the first time, opposite three neck, no one seemed worried. A doctor friend dizzyingly abstract details of the gash. Turn the diagnosed him with a cyst at age 11. At age 14, page and the cut is even more abstract, just a his parents finally took him to get the cyst reseries of lines over shadow. moved. He underwent not one but two surgerIt’s also a loud book. David’s brother is conies and woke up missing half his vocal cords, stantly banging on drums, his mother bashes unable to speak. No one told him he had canaround in the kitchen, his father peels out in cer—no one told him anything. the car. (Meanwhile, of course, David is silent, An acclaimed illustrator of children’s books, first by choice and later against his will.) Small Small says his early attempts to write his memis deft with angle, as in the scenes drawn from oir as prose got him nowhere. He’d been having a hospital-bed’s-eye-view that force the reader bad dreams and knew he had to write someinto David’s position, helpless and vulnerable. thing, but he couldn’t dredge up the memories. Small describes his drawing style as cin“When I started making it a graphic [memoir], ematic. “I’m sort of glad I didn’t know anything it started coming back,” he says. He worked “by about comics to begin with,” he says. “I took identifying one object in the room and then, in my own approach, which came straight out of my mind’s eye, making the camera pan around cinema.” the room.” The first image that came back to In the acknowledgements, Small thanks “Dr. him in this way is also the scariest scene in the Harold Davidson for pulling me to my feet and book: six-year-old David wanders through hosplacing me on the road to the examined life.” pital corridors at night, waiting for his father to Davidson appears midway through the book as finish work. He stumbles into the pathology a therapist who looks like a rabbit with a pockdepartment where, on an eye-level shelf, he sees etwatch, part Donnie Darko, part Alice in Wona tiny, shriveled human form preserved in a jar, derland. “He was an unusual analyst,” Small little hands cradling its enormous head. It looks says. “He let me stay at his family’s house, for furious and sad, just like him. Then it looks at example. I’d called him at 2:00 in the morning him, and he flees, but the creature haunts him. just terrified that my mother was going to come “I think I identified with him somehow,” Small into my room and shoot my head off. So he let says, “that angry little face.” me spend the night on the couch in his home Despite the difficulty of the material, he says, office.” the memoir process was rewarding: “I feel like “I had no conception of how to be in the a new man, like a cinderblock’s been lifted off world,” Small continues. “It was like being In one of the book’s scariest scenes, a young David my neck.” raised by alcoholics. He really cared for me and One thing he didn’t have to worry about took extra care with me.” Davidson’s philosoSmall spots a preserved human form in the was how his parents might react. “My mother phy was that “in order to really effect anything and father are dead, so I don’t know what they close to a cure you have to really love your papathology department of his father’s hospital. would’ve thought,” he says. “I can only guess. tients,” Small says. “If you’ve been raised by an My editor asked me, ‘What would your mother unloving mother it leaves a hole in your heart, have thought about this book?’ And I said, well, she probably would never have spoken and you just learn to live with it. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me. . . . to me again. And there was a pause. And then he and I spoke at the same time and said, I’m so thankful to him. I feel really lucky. I’ve kept in touch with him all these years.” oh well, that wouldn’t have been anything new!” Small illustrates children’s books written by his wife, Sarah Stewart, but they work About a year ago, he says, his editor called him in a panic. “Have you seen the New in separate phases. “We like each other too much to collaborate,” he says. “We come at York Times today?” he asked. “Go online and read the the world from two points of view. She’s a much more optimistic person than I am. front page and then call me back.” Small did, and im- My poetry is the poetry of slagheaps and mediately saw a story about Margaret Seltzer, whose ironworks.” sister had just denounced her gangland memoir as a Small says if there are hints of his troufabrication. His editor said, “David, I know this has bled childhood in the children’s books he nothing to do with you, but is there anybody left who has written and illustrated (Imogene’s Antmight remember these events and contradict what lers, Hoover’s Bride, Paper John), they only you’re saying?” appear in subtext. “It’s all very hidden,” he “I don’t think so,” Small replied. “I do have this says. “When you’re working for children, brother . . . I don’t talk to him much.” you’ve got to put some restraints on. Doing “You have to send him the book,” said the editor. the graphic memoir was a big relief, to just “I can’t, it’s not even done!” Small protested, but in be able to say and draw whatever I wanted.” the end he sent his brother the book. After a few days, Small is currently working on more chilhe says, “I called him up with much heart-pounding dren’s picture books. “I don’t know what the and said, what did you think of the book?” next graphic will be,” he says. “I hope there Stitches There was a long pause. “And then, in his sepulchral will be one. It was such a great experience— By David Small tones—he sounds like Richard Nixon—he said, ‘Da- I guess it will take another story as compelNorton vid, your book blew me away. It was like a snapshot ling to me.” o $24.95, 344 pages of my youth.’ He asked me if he could show it to his Becky Ohlsen writes from her home in ISBN 9780393068573 david SMALL 19 Portland, Oregon. therapist. It was just amazing.”

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

DEBUT FICTION

Tracing broken family ties across time and place By Lauren Bufferd In After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, debut novelist Evie Wyld chronicles the stories of three generations of an Australian family whose lives are shaped by conflict and trauma. Battle may be the experience that connects the Collard men, but it also proves to be the family’s ruin. Again and again, family bonds crumble in the aftermath of death and war. Lack of a simplistic resolution and the searing descriptions of the changeable

land and seascapes make this gritty, passionate novel stand out. After the Fire unfolds against a precisely rendered backdrop of quiet city streets, dense bush and the vivid expanse of the ocean. The book opens with Frank’s journey to a beachfront cabin that belonged to his grandparents. We learn that his mother died when he was a child and that his father Leon was an alcoholic. Frank barely man-

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ages his temper and has bolted after a bad break-up with his girlfriend. He cobbles together a passable life for himself, living in the cabin without running water, using the sea for his daily ablutions and picking up work at the docks. The book then shifts back in time to Leon’s childhood in 1950s Sydney, to the small bakery his immigrant parents ran, and to the devastating effects of his father’s wartime experience in Korea. Soon after Leon takes over the bakery, he is drafted to serve in Vietnam. At this point, the chapters following Leon’s experience as a soldier alternate with those that trace Frank’s troubled life by the beach. As their lives unfold and the wounds are recounted, the reader begins to wonder if any kind of reunion is possible—or even desirable. After the Fire is not a book of simple feelings. The visceral descriptions of the emotional and physical anguish experienced by the characters grow numbing, and the plotline involving missing girls in Frank’s seaside neighborhood is an unnecessary diversion. Still, one must admire Wyld for her courage—a less tough-minded writer would find an easy way for these two damaged souls to reconcile. Wyld shows that there are some ties that, once broken, may not be worth repairing. But like the still small voice referenced in the scriptural passage of the title, she also knows people carry on after a disaster, perhaps in an unimagined direction, but moving forward all the same. o Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

After The Fire, a Still Small Voice By Evie Wyld Pantheon $24, 304 pages ISBN 9780307378460

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ROMANCE Hearts on the mend September means the end of summer and the beginning of new routines for most of us. But reading is a habit for every season—and this month’s offerings are sure to provide a vacation for the heart and mind. So take a time-out from your busy days within the pages of four sure-to-be favorites. Kathleen Fuller offers a window into the world of the Amish in her gentle and touching love story, A Man of His Word (Thomas Nelson, $14.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9781595548122). Moriah Byler is looking forward to her wedding to childhood friend Levi Miller, and even the distance his twin, Gabriel, has put between them doesn’t mar her contentment. But four months following the nuptials, Levi is distant from his bride as well—though she’s completely shocked when he abandons her, his family and his BY christie ridgway faith. Because the Amish believe that marriage lasts until death, at four months pregnant, Moriah can only return to her parents’ home where she fiercely guards her broken heart. But events—and Gabriel’s unspoken yet unending love for Moriah—offer another opportunity for happiness. A second love story entwined with Moriah and Gabriel’s adds to the warm and sweet atmosphere of the novel.

Lovers all around Readers will find a charming romp in Jill Mansell’s Millie’s Fling (Sourcebooks Landmark, $14, 512 pages, ISBN 9781402218347). Millie Brady may be man-less and jobless in Cornwall, but that doesn’t mean her life isn’t worth writing about—as she discovers when best-selling author Orla Hart decides to make 25-year-old Millie the star of her next novel. Millie tells her friend Orla about her adventures in delivering kissograms (dressed as a gorilla), the dates that don’t go right and also the alwaysgood-for-a-laugh escapades of her friends and family. But she keeps the passion she feels for the recently widowed Hugh Emerson—a man who keeps turning up in Millie’s path—to herself. Love, it seems, is on everyone’s mind and the fun of the story is seeing the many characters’ missteps in its pursuit. Will all find their soulmates? Mansell’s dry humor and engaging story make it an undeniable pleasure to find out.

Writers with passion

Vampires on the run Tall, Dark & Fangsome (Grand Central, $6.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780446505857) by Michelle Rowen takes place in the dangerous world of one Sarah Early, a newly turned vampire being blackmailed by a billionaire vampire hunter. What does he want? Just immortality, in order to escape the hellfire inflicted on him by a demon. If Sarah doesn’t comply, he’s threatened to kill her loved ones, and she believes him, even going so far as to pretend she’s broken up with her master vampire boyfriend in order to keep him safe. But there’s also the question of who will save Sarah herself, what with vampire hunters roaming the streets, the vampire council who may think Sarah is a liability and a dark curse fighting to take over her personality. The last of Rowen’s Immortality Bites series, this story told in Sarah’s witty voice is a fast-paced read about otherworldly creatures and the love that makes them seem so very human. o Christie Ridgway writes contemporary romance from her home in Southern California.

antastic F ICT ION by abulous AUTHORS A Dark Love

By Margaret Carroll $7.99, 9780061652783 Only Caroline knows the truth about her husband, the brilliant psychoanalyst whose list of patients includes some of Washington, D.C.’s, most celebrated. She has seen the darkest side of this cruel, controlling psychopath who watches her every move. Caroline must run for her life— as far and fast as she can. But a new identity, a new town and a new love won’t protect her from Porter. There will be a reckoning.

Night’s Cold Kiss By Tracey O’Hara $7.99, 9780061783135 Since witnessing the murder of her mother, Antoinette Petrescu has burned with hatred for the vampire race— even for Christian Laroque, the noble, dangerously handsome Aeternus who rescued her. Now, Antoinette must reluctantly accept Christian’s help to achieve her vengeance—even as he plots to use the beautiful, unsuspecting warrior as bait to draw out the bloodthirsty “dreniacs.”

Seduced By His Touch By Tracey Anne Warren $7.99, 9780061673412 Marry a young woman because he lost a bet? Unreformed rake Lord Jack Byron would do anything to get out of it. But the rich merchant who holds his debt insists that Jack lead his on-the-shelf daughter to the altar and make her believe it’s a love match. When he first encounters Grace Danvers in a London bookstore, Jack is struck by her tempting sensuality and soon becomes determined to bed--and wed--her (in that order).

Trigger City By Sean Chercover $7.99, 9780061128707 A routine investigation of an open-and-shut case is just what PI Ray Dudgeon needs. But the victim was no quiet, unassuming, unlucky single woman; she lived a double life in the shadowy realm of covert intelligence—and she died for the truth. Suddenly, Ray’s ensnared in a conspiracy of darkness that weaves its way through the very fabric of the nation—and his greatest enemy may be himself.

Unbound By Kim Harrison, Melissa Marr, Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Pettersson and Jocelynn Drake $7.99, 9780061699931 Revisiting the paranormal realms they’ve made famous in their wildly popular fiction, New York Times best-selling authors Kim Harrison, Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Pettersson and Jocelynn Drake—plus New York Times best-selling YA author Melissa Marr with her first adult supernatural thriller—unleash their full arsenal of dark talents, plunging us into the shadows where the supernatural stalk the unsuspecting, and every soul is a target.

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Fascinating glimpses into the writer’s life are entwined with a delightful love story in Laura Lee Guhrke’s With Seduction in Mind (Avon, $6.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780061456831). Outspoken “girl-bachelor” Daisy Merrick loses yet another job in London at the end of the 19th century. But fate and optimism provide a new opportunity to pursue her interest in writing a novel. When her first submission is rejected, she agrees to act as editor for famed bad-boy author Sebastian Grant, the Earl of Avermore, in hopes that both can improve their work. But Sebastian’s muse has abandoned him and he doesn’t want Daisy or her opinions in his life. Still, he’s contractually stuck with her, and the private hours spent with the luscious redhead begin to have a distinct attraction. A flawed but compelling hero and a likeable, innocent heroine bump heads and hearts in this appealing romance. The authentic portrayal of the characters’ attitudes toward their craft gives this story extra appeal for readers who enjoy looking inside a writer’s mind.

1 F

MEET Matthew Cordell Title of your new book:

Describe your book:

Who or what has been the biggest influence on your work?

What was your favorite subject in school? Why?

Who was your childhood hero?

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Creatures great and small By Dean Schneider Jerry Pinkney’s latest picture book is an absolutely gorgeous example of book making and pictorial storytelling, a wordless book readers will “read” over and over again, each time noticing new treasures in the pictures. The dust jacket places the lion and the mouse head-to-head, the lion on the front cover, the mouse on the back. Take off the dust jacket, and there are additional images: the lion and the mouse on the front cover, still eyeing each other, and on the back cover an African Serengeti group portrait. In the front endpapers, the animals are up, out of their group picture, wandering the Serengeti, the big lion yawning amidst his family. Turn the page, and the mouse is introduced, standing in a lion’s footprint. And the story proceeds, succeeding brilliantly in what the best picture books are all about—the drama of the turning page. An owl scares the mouse, the mouse runs off and ends up dangling upside down in the clutches of the great lion. This is not a completely wordless book, as there’s a “Grrr” and a “Squeak” here, and other animal sounds and the “putt-putt-putt” of a jeep elsewhere. In a full-page spread, the lion contemplates the mouse, and in the following spread he lowers his paw and lets The Lion & the Mouse the mouse return to her family. In the meantime, By Jerry Pinkney poachers set their trap, the lion steps into it, and Little, Brown, $16.99, 40 pages the mouse’s chance to be courageous and repay the ISBN 9780316013567 Ages 3 and up lion’s kindness is set up. In an artist’s note, Pinkney discusses how he was able to capture on the book’s jacket the “powerful space and presence” of both the lion and the mouse. That phrase perfectly captures what makes this book so striking—the space and presence the characters command on the page, and by the end of the tale, the meek mouse and the mighty lion, two spirited creatures in their own ways, have some good family time together, the back endpapers depicting the mouse family hitching a ride on the lion’s back for a stroll on the Serengeti. o Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

Kate DiCamillo’s captivating fable What books did you enjoy as a child?

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What one thing would you like to learn to do?

What message would you like to send to children?

Trouble Gum (Feiwel and Friends, $16.99, 48 pages, ISBN 9780312387747) is Matthew Cordell’s first book as both author and illustrator. He has illustrated several previous picture books, including Toby and the Snowflakes, which was written by his wife, author Julie Halpern. Find out more about Cordell and his work (and his adorable young daughter) at his website, matthewcordell.com.

By Sharon Verbeten At first glance, the intriguing title and cover illustration will pique readers’ curiosity about the eponymous pachyderm of The Magician’s Elephant. Once inside, however, that intrigue builds immediately, as Kate DiCamillo—in her eloquent, yet understated, prose—unveils the book’s suspense-filled theme. From page one, readers are transported to the market square in Baltese, some 200 years ago. There they follow 10-year-old Peter Augustus Duchene, a poor orphan who spends his last coin on a fortune teller, seeking the answer to one question—whatever became of his long-thought-dead sister? The fortune teller reveals that his sister is alive and advises Peter, in enigmatic soothsayer fashion, to “follow the elephant” to find out more. The puzzled boy begins his quest to unravel the fortune teller’s meaning. When a magician’s trick goes awry, an elephant is sent crashing through the roof of an opera house, disabling a town noblewoman. This spectacular event proves fortuitous for Peter and the rest of the town, who become inexplicably drawn to the elephant—a vessel, of sorts, through The Magician’s which they channel their hopes, dreams and wishes. Soon, a Elephant chain of events—some mundane, some amazing—results By Kate DiCamillo in a simple but impeccably well-told tale about belief, won- Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka der and making the extraordinary come true. Candlewick Newbery Award winner DiCamillo has long been a $16.99, 208 pages word virtuoso, and this novel solidifies that role. Every- ISBN 9780763644109 thing about this story is masterful. The prose is remarkably Ages 8 to 13 simple, with underpinnings of delicious dry humor. Yoko Tanaka’s illustrations have a soft Chris Van Allsburg-esque quality, which lend atmosphere to the tale. The Magician’s Elephant is a well-paced fable about following the ever-elusive truth— a truth that is “forever changing,” as the beggar in the book observes. At its most ambitious, it’s also a haunting analogy of belonging—whether man or beast, rich or poor, beggar or countess, we all just want to be home, to be loved, to belong. o Former children’s librarian Sharon Verbeten is right at home with a husband and toddler, but no mysterious elephants, in De Pere, Wisconsin.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS A riveting return to the world of ‘The Hunger Games’ “If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that impossible . . . it’s the Capitol’s way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate.” From Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

proposed it as a trilogy from the outset, with the main story laid out. I started out as a playwright, and have an M.F.A. from New York University in dramatic writing. After I graduated, I began writing for television. Since I’ve worked in television so long, the three-act dramatic structure comes naturally to me. But I don’t like to “over-outline.” I like to leave breathing room for the characters to develop emotionally—which they often do. Characters always have surprises for you. They try on possibilities and even make some decisions you don’t anticipate. It’s a good thing, and I think it indicates that a story has vitality.

By Deborah Hopkinson ans of The Hunger Games, the riveting and wildly In Catching Fire we see a side of Katniss where she is not popular novel by Suzanne Collins, have been eagerly always as sure-footed or aware, especially in matters of politiawaiting the publication of the second book in the cal intrigue. trilogy, Catching Fire, out this month. And they won’t be I think the thing to remember is how limited her experience is disappointed. to her world and politics. Even as she becomes more embroiled Katniss Everdeen hails from District 12, a poor, coalin events, no one sees that it is in her best interest to educate her. mining region, part of the nation of Panem, with its shining Capitol surrounded by 12 districts, each with its own prodIt’s rare to find a book with two such appealing romantic heroes ucts and geography. The Capitol is focused on controlling as Peeta and Gale. Do you know how the romantic triangle will the districts; rebellion or dissension simply isn’t tolerated. In turn out in Book Three? order to maintain its tight hold on the outlying regions, for Yes, I do. [Sorry, readers, that’s about all she would say!] the past 74 years the Capitol has required that each district It’s impossible not to ask about the third book and the movie. send one boy and one girl between ages 12 and 18 into a Will you be involved in any way with the film? horrifying, televised spectacle—a fight to the death. Yes! The Hunger Games has been optioned and I’m signed on to In Catching Fire, Katniss, an expert with a bow and arrow do the screenplay. I am looking forward to telling the story in a who has grown up hunting in order to help feed her sister different medium. Of course we will and widowed mother, begins to encounter the ramifications be handling the subject matter very of the events that propelled her into the spotlight of the 74th carefully and anticipate that the film Hunger Games, when she volunteered to take her little sissuzanne collins will have a PG-13 rating. ter’s place. She now finds that her actions there have placed her, as well as her friends and family, in even greater danger. What do you hope these books will Although she’s working assiduously on the final book in the trilogy, Suzanne Col- encourage in readers? lins graciously gave BookPage some of her time to discuss the books. Despite her suc- I hope they encourage debate and questions. Katniss is in cess, Collins is friendly, forthcoming and down-to-earth (her two kids keep her that a position where she has to question everything she sees. way, she says). And like Katniss herself, young readers are coming of age And, a promise: no spoilers! politically. © CAP PRYOR

You’ve been a successful writer of books such as Gregor the Overlander series. Did the overwhelming reaction to The Hunger Games take you by surprise?

The reaction did surprise me somewhat. I’ve been writing for television a long time, books not so long. Writing for TV is very collaborative, and relatively anonymous. Since there are usually so many writers involved, there’s not much attention on an individual writer. Has it been difficult to find time to write?

It has been harder to find time to write, especially last fall, when I was promoting The Hunger Games, finishing Catching Fire and developing book three. However, the good news is I think we’re right on schedule!

Where do you live and what does your family think about your success?

We now live in Connecticut. We lived in New York City for a long time but with two children we were bursting out of our apartment. I have a daughter, age 10 and my son, 15. My son’s a great reader for me. And they both have a good time teasing me about all the attention. What are some of your favorite things to do when you’re not writing?

Catching Fire By Suzanne Collins Scholastic $17.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780439023498 Ages 12 and up

At what point did you know that your story was a trilogy?

I like to read and watch old movies. And these days, when I can, sleep! o

I knew from the beginning. Once I’d thought through to the end of the first book, I knew there would be repercussions from the events that take place there. So I actually

Deborah Hopkinson’s new books for young readers are Michelle and Stagecoach Sal.

By Norah Piehl Many writers of fiction for adults have tried to bridge the gap to writing for young people, with mixed success. Adriana Trigiani, the popular author of the Big Stone Gap series, among other novels, breezily navigates the transition to young adult fiction with her first book for teens, Viola in Reel Life. The last place 14-year-old Viola Chesterton wants to be spending her freshman year of high school is at all-girls Prefect Academy. But when her parents, documentary filmmakers, head to Afghanistan on assignment, they decide that boarding school in South Bend, Indiana, is a much safer option than home-schooling in Kabul. Viola’s sure she’ll hate everything about boarding school. She’s an only child, unused to sharing anything—let alone a single dorm room with three other girls. She’s a lifelong New Yorker, not sure how her unique fashion sense will go over with her Midwestern classmates.

Viola in Reel Life By Adriana Trigiani HarperTeen $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780061451027 Ages 12 and up

Fortunately, Viola is also creative—something that goes a long way toward both saving her sanity and improving her social standing. She’s inherited a dramatic flair from her actress grandmother and the filmmaking bug from her parents. Over the course of her year at Prefect, Viola’s creative talents come into their own, as she creates multimedia sets for the Founder’s Day pageant and eventually writes and directs her own short film. As if that weren’t enough, over the course of this single pivotal year, Viola gains three new friends, falls in love, and falls right back out again. Narrated by Viola herself, Viola in Reel Life is loaded with Viola’s wryly funny observations about boarding school life, as well as with plenty of pop culture references and IM-speak. Although Viola’s three roommates may seem a little underdeveloped in this novel, they’ll get their own chance to shine in three subsequent books in this projected series. With its light, optimistic tone and easygoing storytelling, Adriana Trigiani’s boarding school novel might just be the perfect way for young readers to ease back into their own school days. o Norah Piehl is a writer and editor who lives near Boston.

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Learning to live, love and share at an all-girls boarding school

NATURE

A walk on the wild side Making new connections in the animal world

By Deanna Larson he animal kingdom is full of insights into human nature. These new books give readers a fascinating glimpse of some of the connections.

Near and deer Nature as nemesis is a foreign concept to anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Secret Life of Dogs), who embraces and even encourages the scourge of modern suburban gardeners in The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World (Harper, $24.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780061792106). One fall, Thomas noticed that acorns were thin on the ground around her New Hampshire farmhouse, so she sprinkled corn on the ground for the wild turkeys. Then came the hungry deer. Thomas, who grew up with her scientist parents among the Kalahari people of Africa, started scattering pounds of corn each day, the better to attract, track and observe usually hidden deer behaviors. “I could do no more than the bears and whitetails do—keep looking and listening for more information,” Thomas writes of her curiosity about the deer. “You find questions you cannot answer, and mysteries you cannot solve.” As she begins to identify each doe, buck and fawn and follows the herds from season to season, Thomas draws readers into her compassionate, insightful accounts of everyday courage on behalf of wildlife, including standing up to an armed neighbor to make sure an injured bear wasn’t shot dead (he later bends her backyard birdfeeder pole like a paper clip and casually empties the seed into his mouth, proof of his vitality). Her accounts of the treatment of whitetail deer that survive impacts with cars are heartbreaking, but this “tree-hugging grandmother” passes a hunting license course with a near perfect score at the age of 68 and then goes hunting with her neighbor in the name of conservation and research. “I didn’t learn how to hunt but I did learn how it feels to hunt,” she writes, “which is all I really wanted.” Anyone with an interest in wildlife will adore spending time with Thomas and her sensitive, inquisitive mind.

Amazing animal rescues

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World-renowned ethologist and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall made her name studying and living among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She later founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a nonprofit that encourages individuals to take “informed and compassionate action to improve the environment of all living things.” Horrified by the destruction of primate habitats, she left the field in the mid-1980s to raise awareness about conservation. Her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink (Grand Central, $27.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9780446581776), co-written with Cincinnati Zoo director Thane Maynard, host of the NPR’s The 90-Second Naturalist, is a report on species once on the verge of extinction whose populations are now being revived. Gathered firsthand by Goodall and colleagues in the field, and from scientific and historical record, these accounts detail the heartening yet life-threatening challenges of conservation work. From the graduate student 24 who dyed the tufts on the heads of cotton-top tamarin

monkeys to tell them apart while observing this endangered primate, to the 19th-century lighthouse cat that killed the last remaining wrens on Stephen’s Island, New Zealand, to the California condor chick reintroduced into the wild and then rushed into surgery after its young parents fed it trash instead of bone fragments, these stories could galvanize even the most cosseted animal lover to action. “It comes down to a conflict between concern for the individual and concern for the future of a species,” Goodall writes. “[But] I found that people got really excited about the idea of sharing the good news, shining a light on all the projects, large and small, that together are gradually healing some of the harm we have inflicted.”

Finding the wolf within

ence. As he muses on his dog as an “amplifier of nature,” Franklin leads dog lovers to ponder the critical role their own pets may play in shaping their daily lives.

Cat fancier Millions of viewers fell in love with the story of Christian the lion on YouTube, wishing they were the ones getting that big cat hug. Kevin Richardson has lived that fantasy as a self-taught behaviorist and animal custodian at Kingdom of the White Lion in South Africa. He teams with writer Tony Park for a fascinating glimpse into the dangers and joys of working with lions, hyenas and other predators in Part of the Pride: My Life Among the Big Cats of Africa (St. Martin’s, $25.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780312556747). Working as an exercise physiologist after college, Richardson met a rich man who had just bought a local lion park and encouraged him to visit with two little lion cubs, Tau and Napoleon. “Before I knew it,” Richardson writes, “I was responsible for an entire family of extreme creatures.” Without aspirations to become an animal wrangler or leeu boer (Afrikaans for lion farmer), the former zoology major instead developed relationships with these dangerous animals without a stick—the usual way of handling lions at the time—feeding them from his hand and following his own observations and instincts. Richardson still gets his fair share of lion “slap arounds” and tooclose encounters, which make for hair-raising reading. His respect for the big cats as he continues to learn and risk all makes his story endlessly fascinating. o

Did the dog and human evolve together, and did canines become so successful because they had access to the even bigger human brain? PulitzerPrize winning journalist Jon Franklin (Molecules of the Mind) uses research in brain science and anthropology, plus interviews with experts and primary experience with his own dog, to explore the relationship between ancient wolves, canines and humans in The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection Between Humans and Dogs (Holt, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9780805090772). “With respect to dogs,” Franklin writes, “the picture science had painted for us was woefully inadequate.” So he sets out on a long, smart and sometimes meandering research trip into the evolution of the wolf brain and its possible relationship to human and canine developClassic suspense and intricate plots are the usual domain of megament. bestselling writer Dean Koontz—a touching story about a beloved Franklin tracks down the sexy and dog, not so much. But Koontz’s boundless love for his golden retriever non-sexy research into canine evoTrixie shines through his latest book, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a lution, and therefore, human evoJoyful Dog (Hyperion, $24.99, 288 pages, ISBN lution—from current research 9781401323523). Koontz had always been good at capinto what transformed humans turing the canine spirit in print, and he did in-person 12,000 years ago, canine fosresearch on guide dogs for one of his books at Canine sil material found in China, Companions for Independence, an organization that 150,000-year-old wolf skulls in trains assistance dogs. Koontz and his wife Gerda had an ancient cave and the lack of spent nearly every moment of 24 years together, childgrant money to research dogs. less workaholics who thought they were too busy for a (“I can’t get money for work dog. But CCI kept asking if they were ready to adopt on dogs,” one scientist laments. one of their course “failures.” Enter Trixie, the force that “I’m tired of struggling with it. would change Koontz’s middle age forever. Nobody cares about dogs.”) The It’s not every pooch that has the opportunity to rub story really gets interesting when its Kong toy on a pricey oil painting, or get a dish of Franklin gets a poodle puppy, Swedish meatballs at a favorite restaurant. Trixie’s down-to-earth joy Charlie, as a “marriage price” from and antics are the cheerful squeaky toy at the center of this moving story. his wife, then reluctantly observes Part sitcom, part prose portrait, spiritual quest and eulogy, A Big Little the lengths to which humans go to Life is a page-turner in its own right—even if every dog lover knows “train” their companions, and how how the plot must play out. “Most of us will never be able to live with their efforts often say more about the as much joy as a dog brings to every moment of his day,” Koontz writes. humans than the dogs. He watches “But if we recognize that we share a tao, we then see that the dog lives his wife prepare Charlie for competimore closely at that core than we do, and the way to achieving greater tive obedience trials (“Could dogs be joy becomes clear. . . . Dogs know.” And so will readers and dog lovers a tool of one’s ambition?”) and goes everywhere who bask in the reflected glow of Koontz’s unwavering love to the nursing home where Charlie for Trixie. o performs “songs” and realizes he —DEANNA LARSON can’t laugh with him, only at him, and that the dog knows the differ-

Lessons from a golden retriever

This month’s top publisher picks iWant

A Walk for Sunshine

Jane Velez Mitchell

Jeff Alt

The host of HLN’s Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell and nationally recognized expert on addiction and recovery shares her personal journey of stripping away compulsive cravings for just about everything to lead a more authentic life. A wonderful and compelling book!

An entertaining walk along the Appalachian Trail with bears, bugs, blisters, skunk bedmates and hilarious food cravings; all for a noble cause. Outdoorsmen and armchair travelers will enjoy A Walk For Sunshine—critically acclaimed; featured on ESPN and the Hallmark Channel; includes gear lists and hiking tips for the whole family.

HCI Books PB 9780967948232 $15.95

HC 9780757313714 $24.95

The Rock & Roll Queen of Bedlam Marilee Brothers One of Allegra Thome’s students is missing and the answer Allegra seeks may be more shocking than she could ever imagine. Medallion Press PB 9781934755464 $15.95

Dreams Shared Publications

Getting it Through My Thick Skull Mary Jo Buttafuoco A NY Times Bestseller! After 17 years, Mary Jo breaks her silence about why she stayed with Joey Buttafuoco after being shot in the head by his mistress, Amy Fisher, what it’s like to live with a sociopath, her drug addiction and her new life. HC 9780757313721 $24.95

The Guardians

Wild Magic

Richard Williams

Ann Macela

Imagine a world where there are special dogs whose only task in life is to lead their masters back to the path of God’s love. The Guardians is such a story; it tells of two shelties named DJ and Maggie who have the ability to speak, but their unusual talent is a closely guarded secret. Visit www.lovingeyesarewatching.com

Can Irenee Sabel stop the Cataclysm Stone from falling into the wrong hands? Will she find her soul mate in the process? Book four in the Magic series.

AuthorHouse

Medallion Press PB 9781434376633 $16.98

May Earth Rise

Reclaim My Life

Holly Taylor

Cheryl Norman

In this fourth book of the Dreamer’s Cycle series, cruel deprivation and a full-scale conflict bring the Y Dawnus to the brink of annihilation.

A killer from the past threatens his future – and her life.

PB 9781933836997 $7.95

Imola Richard Satterlie Bloodthirsty Lilin lives inside the head of Agnes Hahn. When Lilin wants out of the asylum called Imola, Agnes can do little to stop the violent rampage that ensues.

Medallion Press

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Gregory Lamberson Sequestered in rooms veiled in secrecy is the worst crime Jake Helman will ever see – the theft of the human soul. Medallion Press

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Book clubs Best paperbacks for reading groups Home By Marilynne Robinson Robinson’s best-selling follow-up to the Pulitzer Prizewinning Gilead is another beautifully crafted meditation on the nature of family and matters of the spirit. Set in Gilead, Iowa, in the 1950s, Home is centered on the family of Reverend Robert Boughton, who is widowed and slowly dying. After a 20-year absence, his trouble-making son, Jack, has returned to Gilead. Shifty and mysterious as a lad, Jack left Gilead in disgrace, deserting his young girlfriend and their child. Now 43 and a belligerent alcoholic, he argues with his Picador father but soon tries to make peace, and he grows close, for $14, 336 pages ISBN 9780312428549 the first time, to his youngest sister, Glory. Weighed down with her own share of troubles, 38-year-old Glory has also recently returned home to care for their father. Both she and Jack have tempestuous personal histories they’ve tried to bury—a fact that draws them together. The family is soon turned upside down when Jack reveals the truth about his restless life. A compassionate and wise writer, Robinson has a gift for portraying the dynamics of family and the motivations that drive human relationships. In Home, she captures with realistic rawness the tensions that exist between generations of kin as they come to terms with hard truths. Melodically written and skillfully plotted, her latest book—a finalist for the National Book Award—is everything her many fans hoped it would be. A reading group guide is available online at picadorusa.com.

Beat the Reaper

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By Josh Bazell Josh Bazell’s much-praised debut is a fast-moving mystery filled with edgy humor, smart dialogue and unpredictable plot twists. The antagonist of the tale, an unassuming doctor named Peter Brown, isn’t quite the person he seems. A former hitman known as Bearclaw, Peter was in deep with the mafia until he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and embarked on a new life. He now works at Manhattan Catholic Hospital, a dilapidated establishment that serves all sorts of characters. When a patient with ties to the mafia—a can- Back Bay cer victim named Nicholas LoBrutto—recognizes him, Peter $14.99, 336 pages knows he’s in danger. But LoBrutto strikes a bargain: if Peter ISBN 9780316032216 can treat him, LoBrutto won’t rat him out; if LoBrutto dies, the mafia will come for Peter. As Peter works to keep LoBrutto alive (with the aid of a less-than-expert medical team), he gets mistakenly injected with fluid from a patient who has a strange illness. Entwined with this slightly screwball storyline is the fascinating tale of Peter’s past, including the murder of his grandparents, which led to his involvement with the mafia. During those years, he modeled himself after Robin Hood, eliminating the worst gangsters he could find. Can he muster his old powers now and save himself? Bazell, an M.D. who wrote the book while completing his medical internship, delivers a very funny and entertaining first novel. A reading group guide is included in the book.

The China Lover

By Ian Buruma Based on the true story of Asian movie star Shirley Yamaguchi, this meticulously researched novel spans decades and continents, offering readers a fascinating look at Japan’s film industry. The book’s opening section is recounted by Sidney Vanoven, a gay film buff who moves to Japan during America’s occupation of the country after World War II. Sidney—a narrator of great wit and intelligence—is swept away by Japan and its customs, and he soon becomes obsessed with the glamorous Yamaguchi. Moving backward in time, Penguin the novel’s second part takes place before World War II and $16, 400 pages is narrated by Sato Daisuke, who has mysterious ties to the ISBN 9780143116080 movie business, and who bears witness as Yamaguchi scales the heights of stardom. The book’s final segment is set in recent times and related by a Japanese scriptwriter, who becomes embroiled in problems in the Middle East. Through the overarching story of one mysterious movie queen, Buruma traces the lives of three very different cinephiles. He’s an expert at blending fact and fiction, and his remarkably detailed account of Japan’s invasion of China makes for thrilling reading. Buruma’s affection for Japan and for the movies shines through in this fascinating novel. A reading group guide is available online at penguin.com.o 26 —JULIE HALE

HISTORY

Art inspires during time of crisis By Roger Bishop The arts and culture flourished in many ways during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Writers such as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and the playwright Clifford Odets sought to understand and convey what was happening. Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers brought dancing to the screen in imaginative ways. George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter wrote musical standards. There was the elegant music of Duke Ellington and the audience-friendly populism of Aaron Copland, while Woody Guthrie’s songs evoked the open road and his concern for social justice. Noted literary critic and cultural historian Morris Dickstein brings this period vividly to life in his richly insightful, endlessly fascinating and deliciously readable Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. Dickstein believes the Depression offers an incomparable case study of the function of art and media in a time of social crisis. In addition to writers whose books were bestsellers at the time, he discusses in detail the diverse writers whose work Dancing in read decades later helps us to understand the period: Henry the Dark Roth, Nathanael West, Zora Neale Hurston and James Agee. By Morris Dickstein Dickstein says the Depression was probably the first time Norton in American culture when the great myth of “a man alone,” $29.95, 624 pages represented by such writers as Emerson and Thoreau, ISBN 9780393072259 yielded to images of collective activity. A significant aspect of cultural life was the fascination with American history and geography, its diverse peoples, stories of its folk culture and social myths. Dickstein knows that artists and performers are limited in what they can do “but they can change our feelings about the world, our understanding of it, the way we live in it. . . . They were dancing in the dark, but the steps were magical.” o Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

NONFICTION

Frugality is back in fashion By Mary Hance Several years back, most readers probably wouldn’t have given a wooden nickel for a book about thrift. But in today’s challenging economic environment, Lauren Weber’s In Cheap We Trust makes for a most interesting read. Weber, herself a notorious cheapo and the daughter of the “ultimate cheapskate,’’ gives us a rare look at frugality in America, through historical perspective, provocative questions and great stories about thrifty people. “This book is a reconsideration of cheapness. It asks why we malign and make fun of people who save money,” Weber tells us. “After all, when we as a nation and as individuals are so dangerously over-leveraged, when we’ve watched our global financial system teeter and then tumble because of greed and ill considered spending . . . why is it an insult to be called ‘cheap?’” Frugality can be born out of necessity but other factors figure in, too—patriotic wartime thrift (“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without’’), the morality movement in which frugality was a virtue because it proved one’s immunity to the temptations of In Cheap We Trust the world, the simplicity movement (think Thoreau) By Lauren Weber and more recently the environmental movement (ecoLittle, Brown cheap) of recycling and using/buying less stuff. $24.99, 320 pages Weber includes fun stories about ultra-thrifty ISBN 9780316030281 people—like her father, who forbade the family from turning the thermostat above 50 degrees; a doctor who uses surgical forceps to hang up his tea bags so he can reuse them; and the author herself—who admits to dumpster diving, giving up her car and making her own laundry detergent. Weber gives us more than many would want to know about frugality—but hey, isn’t that what being cheap is all about—getting more than you bargained for? o Mary Hance writes a frugal consumer column called “Ms. Cheap” for The Tennessean and is the author of three books, including 99 Ways to Help Your Household Budget, due out later this month from Turner Publishing.

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THE SPOKEN WORD Risky business: behind the scenes of the Wall Street bust Most of us have been scratching our heads (tearing our hair might be more accurate) trying to fathom the whos, the hows and the whys of the mega-financial meltdown we’re in. Answers have been scarce and understanding the abstruse financial instruments that paved the way, difficult. Help is here in Gillian Tett’s totally engrossing Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Tantor, $34.99, 10 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781400112838), performed by Stephen Hoye with the care this complex story deserves. Tett has the remarkable ability to make swaps, derivatives and their arcane securitized, synthetic offspring understandable to a financially challenged dummy BY SUKEY HOWARD like me—and she does it while telling the tale of how this brainstorming group of J.P. Morgan whiz kids came up with a way to make risk, riskless, removing old constraints and unleashing a great wave of capital into the economy that should have been beneficial. But, sadly, it was all too good to be true. When Morgan’s rivals combined this financial alchemy with subprime mortgage madness, without considering that a boom could bust, it was all over, leaving us battered by the rippling toxic aftereffects of unregulated greed.

A key to the past Two narratives tangle and untangle in Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel, Sarah’s Key (Macmillan Audio, $29.95, 10 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781427208477), read by Polly Stone. The first story is Sarah’s. In the early hours of July 16, 1942, more than 13,000 French Jews—men, women and children—were taken from their homes by gendarmes, herded into the Vel’ d’Hiv hippodrome, and kept in inhumane conditions before being shipped to Auschwitz and death. Ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, stunned and disbelieving, was one of them. Just

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as the police burst into her parents’ apartment, she hid her little brother in the closet, locked it, pocketed the key, sure she’d be home soon. The second story begins 60 years later when Julia Jarmond, an American journalist who’s lived in Paris for 25 years, married to an attractive, arrogant French architect, is asked to write a story to commemorate the anniversary of the infamous Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. Instinctively drawn into those dark days, she discovers secrets long held by her husband’s haute bourgeois family and a surprising connection to Sarah. As she follows clues to Sarah’s fate, Julia finds herself questioning her own life in France, her marriage, her chic, distant in-laws, her very future. Sarah’s Key opens a door into this heartbreaking WWII episode that’s been cloaked in silence, making it intensely real and affecting.

Audio of the month Full disclosure time—I find the combo of writer James Lee Burke and reader Will Patton irresistible. And their latest, Rain Gods (Simon & Schuster Audio, $49.99, 15 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780743582438) is proof positive that my audio affection (OK, addiction) is well deserved. Hackberry Holland, the small-town Texas sheriff whose nightmare captivity in a North Korean POW camp still informs his dreams and his determination to set a bit of the world right, is back fighting injustice and the aches and pains of aging joints. When Pete Flores, a young Iraqi war vet with scars inside and out, reports that nine Thai prostitutes were machine-gunned and pushed into a mass grave behind the local church, it sets off a chain of murders, maimings and mounting menace, noir enough to please Sam Spade. While weaving a web of intricately entwined back stories, Burke, doing what he does best, dissects the continuum of good and evil in all of us, some of his creations wrestling with personal demons, others carelessly mortgaging today for tomorrow and a small few finding courage when it most counts. Patton, doing what he does best, captures every nuance, every shift of mood, every character’s unique cadence. o

TRUE CRIME

Murder in post-Katrina New Orleans By Alison Hood Journalist Ethan Brown delves straight into the heart of darkness with Shake the Devil Off. Billed by the publisher as a true crime story, it is that—and more. Brown tells the true tale of a grotesque murder in New Orleans, but he also manages to chronicle the tragic effects of one large hurricane and a brutal, ongoing war. When he was a young teenager in California, Zackery Bowen was sweet, shy and gangly. That changed when he turned 18 and found a different life in New Orleans—one that included a wife and baby son. More confident and charismatic, Bowen took his responsibilities as a provider seriously and enlisted in the army in May 2000. First sent to Kosovo, where he served in a unit of military police, Bowen was then posted to Germany and finally, Iraq. Bowen left the army in 2004 under a general, though honorable, discharge—one that did not allow for adequate veterans’ benefits or support. He and his family returned to New Orleans, where his marriage—and his morale—disintegrated. He found new love with a quirky bartender named Addie Hall and, together with a tenacious group of fellow residents, they toughed it out through Hurricane Katrina and its terShake the Devil Off rible aftermath. On October 17, 2006, Bowen jumped off the roof of a By Ethan Brown French Quarter hotel. In his pocket authorities found a note Holt confessing to a murder and directing them to Hall’s apart- $25, 304 pages ment where they found her dismembered and partially ISBN 9780805088939 cooked body. One spray-painted message on the wall read: Also available on audio “Please help me stop the pain.” Though it is well-investigated, well-written and tautly paced, this book is not a pleasant read. It aptly relays the terrible suffering that serves as a reminder of what still exists: the ongoing devastation and homicidal violence in New Orleans and the chaos and destruction wreaked by the Iraq war. Beyond the story of a gruesome murder, Brown has given us a unique portrait of tenacious New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, and a reflective—though utterly chilling—account of how veterans of the Iraq war are suffering from mental degradation and lack of support. o Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

FICTION

A literary rabble-rouser shifts his focus By Michael Alec Rose In the world of letters, Nicholson Baker is our Shakespearean fool, our Old Testament prophet. He makes a brilliant ass of himself (or of his fictional characters) in order to speak hard truths and expose the intrinsic insanity of our civilization. His unruly achievement from last year, Human Smoke, asserted that the political “heroes” of World War II (Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, above all) were, in fact, diabolical rogues. Checkpoint (from 2004) took the form of a fictional dialogue about a plan to assassinate President Bush. And in 2001’s Double Fold, Baker exposed the scandalous campaign of libraries to destroy their paper materials to make way for electronic resources. As with the fool and the prophet, Baker’s relentless axgrinding leaves a lasting impression because of the sustained glories of his language. He knows that all he can do in the face of limitless human folly is to sing a memorable song. The fool and the prophet are not pundits or politicians: they are poets. And so, at last, in The Anthologist, Baker has turned to poetry, the true home of his radicalism. In its own way, this new novel is bound to cause an uncomfortable stir in literary circles, just as his previous three books have. The protagonist—the almost-but-not-quite Poet Laure- The Anthologist ate Paul Chowder—is, like Baker, a champion of unfashion- By Nicholson Baker able or outrageous ideas. In Chowder’s case, the lost cause Simon & Schuster is the poem that actually rhymes, in an era when free verse $25, 256 pages reigns. While procrastinating from writing an overdue intro- ISBN 9781416572442 duction to his anthology of rhyming verse, Chowder gives rein to lyrical confessions about his own failures as a poet and lover and an assortment of critiques on various other poets. The meaner Chowder gets, the funnier he gets. The funnier he gets, the more heartbreaking becomes his predicament: he is a poet past his prime, with nothing to show but an abiding affection for what he loves. At last, Chowder realizes that what he’s been doing all along is composing his introduction. The rest is poetry. Baker’s beautifully vexed and inviting novel throws open those magic casements and we are all the luckier for it. o Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

DEBUT FICTION

A wonderfully beastly tale

A dark vision of our near future This month’s selections in science fiction and fantasy turn to themes as old as the story itself—the quest, whether for a panacea, vengeance, freedom or justice—and to the very roots of our civilization: muscle and morality. Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the near-future world of his best-known short stories in his first novel, The Windup Girl (Nightshade, $24.95, 300 pages, ISBN 9781597801577). Oil is no more and coal is precious; calorie companies control the food supply with sterile grains engineered against evermutating diseases; and generippers hope to break the calorie companies’ monopoly. Set in an isolationist Thailand threatened by the rising oceans, The Windup Girl focuses on Anderson Lake, a calorie man hunting for seedbanks, along with his faithless Chinese refugee manager Hock Seng, hoping to rebuild his fortune with gigajoule kinksprings (the future equivalent of a 500 mpg engine). They encounter BY SEAN MELICAN the Environmental Ministry ‘tiger’ Jaidee, whose war against Trade will bring revolution or disaster, and the windup girl Emiko, who dreams of escaping slavery while struggling to overcome her genetic and learned subservience. Bacigalupi is as unflinching in his examination of the unthinkable cruelty, humiliation and banal evil that humanity inflicts on the Other as he is on the bleak future that our mass consumption society will inevitably unleash. In his fictional vision, there will be no miraculous rescue from our moral or environmental sins. The Windup Girl will almost certainly be the most important SF novel of the year for its willingness to confront the most cherished notions of the genre, namely that our future is bright and we will overcome our selfish, cruel nature.

Shakespeare, re-imagined L. Jagi Lamplighter’s first novel, Prospero Lost (Tor, $24.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780765319296), starts with the fabulous (entendre intended) idea that Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a mostly true story. In this contemporary retelling, Miranda is the first of Prospero’s seven children, and the only one faithful to him and their company, Prospero Inc., which is responsible for a recent decrease in natural and supernatural disasters. But Prospero has disappeared and Miranda must try to rescue him. Her only companions are the Aerie One called Mab, who dons a human disguise imitating the hard-boiled detective character—fedora, trench coat, lead pipe, notebook and sarcasm—and her brother Mephistopheles, who might be insane . . . or a demon. The rest of her siblings have problems of their own and a serious lack of concern for their sire’s possibly infernal plight. Miranda’s trouble is that her 500 years of memories are unreliable. As she searches the present for her father, she is confronted with the uncomfortable realization that neither the past nor her sainted father is what she remembers. Prospero Lost is a charming re-examination of one of the genre’s venerated ancestors, populated by a large cast skillfully drawn from history and mythology.

Keep your enemies close . . . In Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue (DAW, $7.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780756405717), October “Toby” Daye is the runaway child of a mortal and a faerie, with limited magical powers, an extended (but not immortal) lifespan and a list of friends almost as long as her enemies. She’s escaped the clutches of Devlin, another changeling, who keeps a home for such runaways. Toby is a mother and a PI. But while on a case, she is turned into a fish for 14 years. Having effectively lost her family, Toby abandons her heritage and career and barely scrapes by, until a full-blood leaves a telephone message recording her murder—a message that magically and morally compels Toby to seek the killers. Toby’s quest will lead her through the seamy underside of San Francisco and the political intricacies of the Faerie world, as she recalls old friends and collects on old debts while discovering a reality even the immortals thought mythical. Although the narrative thread is sometimes lost in the tangle of fae trivia (much of which is likely familiar to longtime genre readers and some of which is unnecessary) McGuire successfully blends Robert B. Parker-like detective fiction with love and loss, faith and betrayal—and plenty of violence. The first in McGuire’s planned trilogy, Rosemary and Rue will have readers clamoring for the next genre-bending installment. o Sean Melican is the science fiction and fantasy columnist for BookPage. In alphabetical 29 order, he is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

SEPTEMBER 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

By Jessica Inman In New World Monkeys, former advertising copywriter Nancy Mauro offers a debut novel that cannily and artfully shows the wild side of human nature. Lily and Duncan are spending the summer in a small town upstate. On the drive into town, they hit a snag—specifically, they run over a wild boar with their car. And in the moment that sets the story spinning into motion, Lily puts the animal out of its misery with a tire iron. Unfortunately, the boar was the town’s mascot, and soon his owner seems to have the whole town in on his thirst for revenge. Then Duncan discovers a human femur in the backyard, which they discover may have belonged to Lily’s grandfather’s nanny. All they have to do before the summer ends is dig up the dead nanny and hide their guilt in the death of the boar, thus avoiding the wrath of the eccentric residents of Osterhagen. Meanwhile, Lily works on her dissertation and Duncan, an ad man, dreams up a new campaign. All the while, the couple must navigate the next bend in their tired, chilly marriage. Duncan may not be exactly what he seems. Underneath his urbane, Saab-driving exterior may lurk something nearly bestial. The academic Lily, for her part, has her own contradictions. Sure, she killed the boar when Duncan showed New World reticence to do so, but she also clings desperately to him at Monkeys social gatherings. Duncan and Lily may not truly know each other’s depths and capabilities, and the events of the summer By Nancy Mauro Shaye Areheart hold surprises for both. $23, 304 pages And then there’s Lloyd, Lily’s fellow library patron and the ISBN 9780307461414 local peeping tom with whom she, crazily enough, finds herself going on expeditions. As his thrill at seeing what people are really made of grows ever more frightening, it also becomes a mirror to show Lily parts of herself that she didn’t know existed. With narration that sounds at times like the work of Zadie Smith, New World Monkeys weaves a funny and macabre tale. Its quirkiness and ingenuity should earn this novel a spot on many fall reading lists. o Jessica Inman writes and edits in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

SENSE OF WONDER

FICTION

From despair to hope in Rwanda By Carla Jean Whitley Baking Cakes in Kigali begins as a series of vignettes, with author Gaile Parkin introducing characters and plot elements through visits to cake baker Angel Tungaraza’s apartment. The residents of Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, turn to Angel for their celebrations—and sometimes just a weeknight dinner party—and in the process share their lives and hopes with the Tanzanian transplant. But as more characters enter the fold, their lives and these vignettes intertwine. Angel’s cakes are the route into relationships and people’s lives. She charms her clients with tea and conversation as she learns what occasion each cake will mark. Baking is a way to show you care, even if the cake is for hire. She meets women with cheating husbands, women longing for love, men who have traveled the continent searching for their families. And Angel brings people in her community together, introducing one friend to another and building community through relationships. After the premature deaths of her children, Angel has become both mother and grandmother to her grandchildren, and her love extends to others in the neighborhood. She serves as mother of the bride for shopkeeper Leocadie’s wedding, and when sex worker Jeanne d’Arc comes to her Baking Cakes to order a cake for her sister’s confirmation, Angel offers the in Kigali girl her grandchild’s confirmation gown. By Gaile Parkin Throughout, these interwoven friendships reveal despair Delacorte turning to hope as people find trust and faith in each other. $24, 320 pages So much in Kigali is colored by AIDS and genocide. It seems ISBN 9780385343435 the lives of everyone Angel encounters have been touched by those perils. Angel herself saw her son diagnosed with the virus. But as Angel celebrates weddings, confirmations and life with her clients, Baking Cakes in Kigali reveals a hope and joy not often associated with Rwanda. Zambia native Parkin’s own experience as a relief worker in Rwanda inform this first novel, creating a complete view of life in this African nation. o Carla Jean Whitley writes and bakes in Birmingham, Alabama.

DEBUT FICTION

International romance avoids cliché

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By Becky Ohlsen In her debut novel, Janet Skeslien Charles pulls off a couple of feats. First, the Montana native manages to write convincingly like a Ukrainian who’s tackling the English language. Perhaps more impressively, she crams fascinating cultural and historical information into what might otherwise be merely a diverting beach romance. It’s like sneaking vitamins into a chocolate shake. Moonlight in Odessa is the story of Daria, a smart and feisty young Ukrainian woman who has just landed a job at an Israeli-run shipping firm that pays 10 times better than any comparable job in Odessa. She loves the work; the catch is that her boss can’t stop chasing her around the office trying to get his hands on her. Opting for a none-toosubtle bait-and-switch strategy, Daria introduces her boss to her friend Olga, who has made it plain she’d be happy to have such an admirer. Problem solved, sort of—now Daria has to worry that Olga might take her job. So Daria takes a second job, just in case: in the evenings, she helps arrange “socials,” dances at which groups of American men come to meet available Odessan girls. These duties lead her into an Internet correspondence with Tristan, a California schoolteacher much older than Moonlight she is. Both jobs require her to navigate the complicated forest of corruption that is Odessa shortly after perestroi- in Odessa ka. The local mob king, Vladimir, comes around to collect By Janet Skeslien Charles “protection” money, and to ask Daria out, repeatedly. He’s Bloomsbury suave, handsome, rich, persistent and sensitive: before the $25, 352 pages mafia, he worked as a marine biologist, possibly the most ISBN 9781596916722 wholesome profession ever invented. Daria is torn—will her heart lead her to America and Tristan, or is she tied to her beloved Odessa and the passionate Vlad? True, this could be a gooey and overwrought story, but Daria’s sharp humor and keen insights into human nature make her a winning narrator. In fact, all of the characters are well-drawn, complex and interesting, even the initially sleazy boss. It all goes to show that the romantic beach-read formula needn’t be silly, or even formulaic; in the right hands, it can be instructive. o 30 Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

COOKING Mother’s little helper Beth Hensperger, author of a long list of very successful Not Your Mother’s cookbooks, has the answer to your back-to-school, back-to-reality cooking quandaries. Beth is a true believer in the wonders of the slow cooker for solving that persistent how-do-super-busy-families-get-to-eat-homemade-meals problem. With 125 recipes for everything from drinks and dips to soups, sandwiches (just the fillings, don’t worry), sides, stews, pasta and more, Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Family Favorites (Harvard Common, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9781558324084) is her latest contribution to the craft of muss-less and fuss-less meals. Beth starts off with “Slow-Cooking 101,” a fast way to learn all you need to know about getting the best results from your cooker. If you’re already up to slowBY SYBIL PRATT cooking speed, you can go directly to the assembled homey and comforting food that harks back to what Beth calls our “American cooking roots,” and some inviting takes on contemporary chow, like Mini Turkey Meatball sliders. Corned Beef, a St. Paddy’s day treat, nicely spiced and cooked in beer; sumptuous eye-round braised in Barolo; cornbread stuffed Rock Cornish hens, plus a batch of ever-popular chilis, are just a few of the main courses that cook safely while you carry on with your overscheduled life. Do the easy prep, turn the cooker on and turn your dinner worries off.

Pronto subito “Meals in minutes,” “good food express” and all the variations on that theme are a mushrooming cookbook subgenre, matched only by the sustainable-seasonal-know-who-raised-that-chicken-orgrew-this-radish category (I’m a fan of both and sure they’ll soon be combined, sprouting titles like The Loping Locovore). Giuliano Hazan, heir to his mother’s great talent for spreading “the gospel of pure Italian cookery,” and a master teacher and cookbook author himself, has thrown his chef’s hat into the fast and fabulous ring with Guiliano Hazan’s Thirty Minute Pasta: 100 Quick and Easy Recipes (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $27.50, 176 pages, ISBN 9781584798071), loaded with luscious full-color, full-page photos. These recipes are simple, sometimes simply elegant, truly doable in a short time and come in pairings of shapes and sauces that range from vegetarian to seafood and meat, not to mention a selection of super-comforting pasta soups. Just savor a sampling: subtly tangy Fettuccine with Lemon or rich, creamy Fettucine with gorgonzola dolce; Spaghetti with Mussels, plus fresh tomatoes, garlic and white wine; Linguine with a Pink Shrimp Sauce; Rigatoni with a Veal Roast Sauce; Fusilli with Sausage and Zucchini; Penne with Spinach and Ricotta; Farfelle with Fresh Salmon. Grazie, Guiliano, you’ve made busy weeknight dinners pasta perfect.

Cookbook of the month Cobblers, crisps, crumbles, bettys, buckles, pies, pandowdies, grunts and galettes—every single recipe in Rustic Fruit Desserts (Ten Speed, $22, 175 pages, ISBN 9781580089760) is a turn-on, a true tempter that makes you want to stop everything and cook. James Beard Award-winning chef Cory Schreiber and small-batch bakery owner Julie Richardson have teamed up, pooled their special talents and produced a fruit-filled fantasia for all seasons, with treasures to brighten a cold, snowy day or celebrate a sultry summer evening. Right now, you might want to whip up an easy, elegant, no-cook Raspberry Fool made with creamy mascarpone, a caramel-drenched, biscuit-topped Peach Grunt, or an irresistible Upside-Down Pear Chocolate Cake. When cranberries show up, use them in a Buckle with Vanilla Crumb or with apples in an Oat Crumble, and don’t pass up the Pumpkin Custard with Cookie Crumb Crust, a new treat for the holidays. A Fresh Strawberry and Ricotta Tart and a yummy Lemon Buttermilk Rhubarb Bundt Cake herald spring and then we’re back to summer and all the glory of berries, blue and otherwise, and stone fruit of every variety. Excellent header notes, detailed instructions, storage tips and asides on technique ensure that nothing is left to the imagination. o

FICTION

Re-imagining Christopher Columbus

Oates’ chilling small-town mystery

By Dennis Lythgoe The setting for Canadian writer Thomas Trofimuk’s inventive, charming new novel, Waiting for Columbus, is a mental institution in Sevilla, Spain. There, a 21st-century inmate persuasively argues that he is actually the legendary 15th-century navigator Christopher Columbus. Although medical personnel initially suspect his is a stereotypically disturbed mind—like that of an inmate who calls herself Pope Cecilia, purporting to be the first woman Pope—they are startled by his detailed and colorful knowledge of his subject, time period and descriptions of his ostensibly first-person experiences. Columbus, as they dutifully call him, speaks with an incisive vocabulary and tells 15th-century stories with uncanny credibility. At the same time, he also has a disjointed, perhaps playful habit of interspersing his stories with contemporary elements that do not fit—like telephones in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Nurse Consuela, a beautiful and witty woman, listens intensely to his stories and writes them down for psychiatrists. In spite of Columbus’ sometimes destructive behavior, she Waiting for finds herself increasingly attracted to the intellectual, cul- Columbus tured side of this mysterious man and patient. Soon, however, Consuela becomes frustrated with Co- By Thomas Trofimuk lumbus; his salacious stories of romantic encounters with Doubleday $26, 336 pages women exotically named Beatriz, Selena—and even Queen ISBN 9780385529136 Isabella—make her inexplicably jealous. And the more she Also available on audio comes to know about Columbus, the more questions she has about the nature of his true identity. Dr. Fuentes, the medical chief of the facility, loses interest in Columbus, but Dr. Balderas, who replaces him, is anxious to unravel his personal story. His chats with Columbus create rapport, just as Consuela’s have—and together Balderas and Consuela begin to unravel the nature of Columbus’ past. The author is inventive in structuring a multifaceted story that never loses its vitality. His literary gifts allow him to portray each character with depth, while at the same time creating a rising sense of suspense at the possibility of uncovering Columbus’ true identity. While the name Thomas Trofimuk is hardly one that trips easily off the tongue, we can only hope that this promising novelist will continue to create fascinating fiction. o Dennis Lythgoe is a writer who has lived in Boston and Salt Lake City.

By Nancy Fontaine Murder and small-town life mix in Joyce Carol Oates’ latest literary offering, Little Bird of Heaven. Through the eyes of young Krista Diehl, we are transported to the fictional town of Sparta in upstate New York, where life is hard and few ever leave. Krista is but 11 years old when her childhood begins to splinter. Her father, Eddy, has been having an affair with Zoe Kruller, known for her job at Honeystone’s Dairy as well as her nighttime singing gigs with a local band. Zoe moves out of the house she shares with her husband Delray and son Aaron, only to turn up murdered not long afterward. Aaron discovers Zoe’s body, and Delray and Eddy are detained as possible suspects. Although neither man is charged with the crime, neither escapes unscathed: Eddy loses his family when his wife kicks him out; Delray nearly loses his business and his drinking spirals out of control. Throughout the novel, the town of Sparta, with its uneducated, hard-living inhabitants and crumbling infrastructure, is more than just a backdrop. It ensnares its citizens— people in the town cannot free themselves from its grasp. Prosperous folks are not at the forefront here, yet class dif- Little Bird ferences, particularly between the inhabitants of Sparta and of Heaven the nearby reservation, are keenly observed. In part one, Krista’s life is vividly imagined. The narrative By Joyce Carol Oates meanders through her recollections, delicately painting the Ecco $25.99, 448 pages picture of her family’s disintegration while building toward ISBN 9780061829833 an electrifying scene that caps off Krista’s story. When the tale switches its focus to Aaron in part two of the novel, Oates’ writing opens up while the story itself becomes more compact. The contrast between these two elements results in a shorter and sparser, but equally affecting, narrative. Little Bird of Heaven is classic Oates. Its depiction of violence, families falling from grace and social class disparities, as well as its location, recall her 1996 bestseller, We Were the Mulvaneys. Fans of Oates will delight in this offering and newcomers to her work will receive a first-class introduction. o Nancy Fontaine is a librarian and freelance writer in West Lebanon, New Hampshire.

FICTION

Literature heals amid grief

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By Carla Jean Whitley Ellie Lerner is devastated when her best friend Lucy is murdered while walking her eight-year-old daughter Sophie to school. Ellie immediately flies from America to London, helps Lucy’s husband plan the funeral and tends to Sophie, her goddaughter who has fallen silent after witnessing her mother’s brutal death. As she copes with the loss of her best friend, Ellie attaches herself to Sophie, clinging to the child for purpose and meaning in the wake of her best friend’s murder. Ellie and Sophie find escape in literature, as they read a chapter of The Secret Garden each night before bed. Ellie feels about books the way some do about cooking: sharing them with others is an act of service and love. It’s the act of reading that convinces Sophie to break nearly a week of silence. But in the process, Ellie neglects her own marriage. There’s already distance between her and Phillip, an emotional remoteness that began when their own child died in After You utero, and now Ellie adds physical distance to the equation. Julie Buxbaum crafts a tale filled with the nuance of bro- By Julie Buxbaum ken relationships, just as she did in her debut novel The Dial Press Opposite of Love. And though her first novel was widely ac- $25, 352 pages claimed, Buxbaum’s writing has clearly matured. Her char- ISBN 9780385341240 acters possess emotional depth that’s evident from page one, and her storytelling is more streamlined and precise. While The Opposite of Love danced on the edges of chick lit, After You steps toward literary fiction. It’s a promising move for a young author who sidesteps the sophomore slump. o Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama.

Finished already?

WORDNOOK Rumor has it

Dear Editor: I learned that the word gossip used to mean “a relative.” How did we get from that meaning to “a person with loose lips”? W. R. Fort Pierce, Florida Strange as it may seem, the fodder of today’s tabloids has sacramental roots. In Old English, sib occurs as a noun meaning “kinship” and as an adjective meaning “related by blood or kinship.” By the 11th century, a compound had been formed from the noun sib prefixed by god, the predecessor of Modern English god. A godsibb, therefore, was a person spiritually related to another, specifically by being a sponsor at baptism. Today, of course, we would call such a person a godmother or godfather. By the 14th century, the “d” of godsibb had begun to disappear; the word developed into gossib and then, through devoicing of the final consonant, gossip. The meaning, too, had begun to change, and the sense of gossip as a close friend or comrade developed alongside the sense of a godparent. Since close friends normally talk about family and other friends, it was only a short step to the gossip of today, a person who is no longer necessarily friend, relative or sponsor, but someone filled with irresistible tidbits of rumor. A further extension of meaning occurred in the early 1800s, when gossip was first used to refer to the rumors or reports that such people like to spread. This was the sense used by Washington Irving in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

IT’S A MYSTERY JAMES LEE BURKE

ACROSS 1. Alcoholic, as main character Dave is 4. Verbal responses to pleasure 7. Ethnicity of Dave, i.e. French Canadian 12. Title of Kildare, Welby or House 13. Northern Ireland acronym 14. Cook with intense heat, as do the characters in the Louisiana sun 15. 17-Down wears this on a string to ward off evil 16. Main character Dave __ 19. Acronym for Sybil’s illness 20. Shaped like an egg 21. Muscles 22. Edible mollusk Dave might dig up 24. Covers with liquid 25. Morning 26. Poet cummings 28. A written column of things 32. Dave’s second wife from Kansas 33. Where Dave’s daughter is from

S O L U T I O N

of derby so that it rhymes with fur, but the British pronounce it so that it rhymes with far.

By the editors of Merriam-Webster (1820), when he described Ichabod Crane as “a kind of traveling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house.”

Hat’s off Dear Editor: What is the origin of the word derby? My brother and I got into a discussion about this while watching the Kentucky Derby on TV recently. We are also wondering which came first, derby meaning “horse race” or derby meaning “a man’s hat”? G. P. Wauwatosa, Wisconsin The history of the word derby is closely intertwined with the history of the derby race itself. In America, we tend to think of Kentucky when we hear the word derby, but the original derby is actually a race that takes place once a year on a racetrack not far from London, England. The first of these races took place in the year 1780 and was named for the race’s founder, Edward Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby. (Stanley’s title comes from the name of an English county and town.) Later, people started using the word derby for important horse races in other countries, and then for a race or contest of any kind. The sense of derby meaning “a stiff felt hat with a dome-shaped top and a narrow brim” came later (it was first recorded in the late 19th century). No one knows just how this hat came to be called a derby, and nothing seems to link it with horse races. We Americans, of course, pronounce the first syllable

All ears Dear Editor: We hear so much about controversial earmarks in congressional budgets. It got me wondering. What is the origin of the word earmark? P. E. Bridgeport, Connecticut Earmark as a noun dates back to the 15th century; the related verb was first recorded about 100 years later. The word derives from the (still current) practice by farmers of cutting identifying marks in the ears of their animals. The marks are called earmarks and, like brands, are intended to prevent the animals from being stolen. By the 17th century, both the noun and the verb forms of earmark had spread into general use. Any identifying mark could be called an earmark, and anything that had been given such a mark could be said to be earmarked. The 19th century saw the development of the now familiar use of the verb earmark in the sense “to designate (as money) for a specific purpose or user,” as in “A large percentage of the company’s profits was earmarked for research and development.” The corresponding noun use we now hear so often followed the verb.  Please send correspondence regarding Word Nook to:

Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

37. Happen afterward 39. Look out when Dave is on a killer’s __ 40. Not applicable (abbr.) 42. Continent of 51-Across (abbr.) 44. City in Nigeria 45. Articles 47. Mr. Brown and his band of renown 48. Jogged,what Dave did to avoid drinking 49. Immediately, __ once 50. Dave finds a __ in a bayou in The Neon Rain 51. Lima is its capital 52. Dave’s remarried 1st wife 53. Bury 54. Today’s album 55. Ms. Ramirez of “Grey’s Anatomy” 57. Not a Congressional Sen. 60. “Little __” or what Dave calls his daughter 61. Internatl. org. founded by a yogi 62. A cocktail, __ Tai 64. Anger, or what Dave needs to control 66. Dave’s ironic choice for breakfast, __ Nuts 68. Inflated boat 70. Physicist known for nuclear reactor 73. Slang for arrest, as Dave did as a cop 74. Trill these letters in Spanish 75. Thanks in Britain 76. What the badge was for Dave 77. Dave’s nickname from a white patch in his hair (poss.) 78. Dave’s favorite music meaning “mixed vegetables”

DOWN 1. A death of someone close __ Dave to drink 2. Subdivisions of military group 3. Pleasant, agreeable 4. Member of the Middle East 5. Kind of boat Dave lives on in 50-Across 6. The series begins in 198__ 8. Commercial 9. Forces open 10. Baseball official for short 11. __ Nickerson, Nancy Drew’s beau 12. How Dave’s father died off an oil rig 14. Dave’s liquid friend, Jim __? 17. Dave’s loyal employee 18. Heaven’s Prisoners involves a __ crash 23. Shortest distance between 2 points 27. Made money, as Dave with his boat rental and bait business 29. In Dave’s world the only incorruptible government agency 30. Dave’s daughter 31. Dyslexia is the most known one 34. Mr. Onassis to friends 35. War Dave served in 36. Dave’ s father’s name 38. Taker of illegal drugs 41. Belonging to actress Brenneman 43. Louisiana beer popular in the series 45. New __, home of Dave and Tabasco Sauce 46. Ripped 47. Book for bookkeeping 48. Quits, or what Dave does to get out of the NOPD

Burke’s first book was rejected 111 times and nominated for a

51. Term for non-Mac home computer 55. Single step up or down 56. More than enough 58. Dave’s daughter has 2, a raccoon and a horse 59. Dave’s age in Black Cherry Blues

63. Fitting crafts for Dave (and Noah’s) location? 65. Dave’s father could not __ or write 67. Rodent 69. Execute, or what Dave’s state will do to a killer in 59-Down 71. Sound amplifier for short 72. Dave’s response to all his wives