July 01, 2013: Volume LXXXI, No 13

Featuring 320 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXI, NO.

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REVIEWS

FICTION

The Daylight Gate

by Jeanette Winterson A nightmarish novella that burns like a hot coal p. 23

INDIE

I Know Very Well How I Got My Name

by Elliott DeLine The transgender writer's new novella confirms his impressive range and talent. p. 122

Neil Gaiman His new novel for adults isn't a fairy tale—it harbors the weightier injustice of myth. p. 14

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Bugs in My Hair!

by David Shannon The creator of No, David! takes up arms against head lice in this very funny, very necessary picture book. p. 87

NONFICTION

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2

by Mark Twain The eagerly awaited second volume of the great American author's autobiography p. 65

Also in This Issue: Our Semiannual Board-Book Roundup p. 90

The Poet’s Bones B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE

I t i s a h au n t e d, h i s t o r y- b u r d e n e d d ay, S e p t e m b e r 1 1 —not just in the United States, where it has become the modern rejoinder to December 7, but also in Chile, where, 40 years ago this year, the democratically elected government of a socialist named Salvador Allende fell before a military coup. The soldiers who overthrew Allende were in turn armed, funded and otherwise helped along by key figures in the Nixon administration. Even on his deathbed, Christopher Hitchens insisted that one of those figures in particular should be brought to trial, a demand that makes ever more sense the more we learn of his terrible contributions to our time.

No one was more prepared for that coup d’état, in which Allende was killed, than a certain poet. Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, much better known by his nom de plume Pablo Neruda, had, in a sense, been preparing for it all his life, having seen it before, in Spain and Central America.

He hurriedly noted the parallels to an earlier coup in the draft of the autobiography he was writing, “Allende was murdered because he nationalized...copper....The English companies in Balmaceda’s time, the North Americans in Allende’s time, instigated and financed these military actions.”

Neruda would be dead less than two weeks after writing those words. He was 69 years old, and he had been ill, granted. Nonetheless, he had been planning to leave Chile for Mexico, where he intended to mount whatever resistance poets can mount in the face of fascism. Instead, he was taken under guard to a hospital. In the penultimate paragraph of the book that he called Confieso que he vivido—“I confess that I have lived,” published under the neutral rubric Memoirs in English—he writes of Allende, “The aggressors’ version is that they found clear signs of suicide on his lifeless body.” In Neruda’s case, the verdict was similarly bloodless: He died of natural causes, felled by cancer. And then the answer changed: No, he died of a heart attack.

No one who knew Neruda believed it then: not Neruda, who burst with energy even when ill. And when, a couple of years ago, a former assistant of Neruda’s charged that Neruda had been killed at the orders of the generals, Chile’s judiciary took the notion seriously. After all, other opponents of the regime, including a former president, had been killed while hospitalized, and in at least one instance, the men who did the killing had been found out and jailed, even as the men who gave them their orders to do so still moved about freely.

Having taken the possibility seriously that Neruda had been poisoned while in confinement, a Chilean judge ordered an autopsy. So it was that on April 7, Neruda’s remains were exhumed from his grave at his home on Isla Negra, not far from Santiago, a place that has assumed an almost shrinelike quality as the object of literary pilgrimage. The bones were taken to Santiago, where first they will be examined for the presence of cancer, which would lend credence to the naturalcause claim.

If cancer is not present—well, murder will out, as another poet said. Stay tuned.

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This Issue’s Contributors

Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Michael Autrey • Joseph Barbato • Gerald Bartell • Amy Boaz • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Sara Catterall • Dave DeChristopher • Gregory F. DeLaurier • Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Bonnie Ellman • Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Faith Giordano • Amy Goldschlager • Michael Griffith • Jeff Hoffman • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Sarah Norris • Mike Oppenheim • Derek Parsons • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • William E. Pike • Gary Presley • Kristen Bonardi Rapp • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • Bob Sanchez • Rosanne Simeone • Elaine Sioufi • Arthur Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Claire Trazenfeld • Mark Tursi • Steve Weinberg • Carol White • Chris White

Cover photo by Kimberly Butler

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contents fiction Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS.................................................................................................5 Neil Gaiman returns to writing for adults with his new novel..................................................................................14

The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

Mystery..............................................................................................23 Science Fiction & Fantasy.......................................................... 33 Romance............................................................................................ 35

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 37 REVIEWS............................................................................................... 37 Literary icon James Agee’s masterpiece is re-discovered.............................................................................52

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews......................................................... 67 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 67 D.J. MacHale hits a home run with the first of an expected trilogy...........................................................................84 Board-book roundup.................................................................90 interactive e-books...................................................................112

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................115 REVIEWS..............................................................................................115 Transgender writer Elliott DeLine’s new novella confirms his impressive range............................................ 122

Reza Aslan delivers a well-researched, readable biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

Read the starred review on p. 38.

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Photo Courtesy Brandon Ng

Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawaii, making the fabled destination her own in This Is Paradise. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an uncanny portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua’i and the Big Island. Comprised of a set of short stories, This Is Paradise is the nuanced expression of the troubles people face every day, even those who live in paradise. In “Wanle,” a beautiful and tough young woman wants nothing more than to follow in her father’s footsteps as a legendary cockfighter.

In the title story, the women of Waikiki tell their tale of a young tourist drawn to the darker side of the city’s nightlife. “The Old Paniolo Way” limns the difficult nature of legacy and inheritance when a patriarch tries to settle the affairs of his farm before his death. Kirkus writer Jessica Gross talks to Kahakauwila about her new collection.

Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites began originally as a foodthemed blog, in which the noted writer shares scenes from an unusual upbringing and an unusually happy present-day life, providing an audience for this book that is already primed.

Christensen has authored six novels, now moving on to memoir, where her work will be justly compared to that of Ruth Reichl, Gabrielle Hamilton and other foodcentric memoir authors. Blue Plate Special chronicles Christensen’s life, from a childhood in a separated home, discovering the exquisite subtleties of flavor combinations and culinary creativity, to an adulthood of hard drinking and binge eating. Christensen weaves an intriguing tale of her life’s high and lows strung together by the food she eats. On the Kirkus site in July, Christensen tells Megan Labrise about why she wrote the book.

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Photo Courtesy St. Martin’s Press

Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9

In Jincy Willett’s Amy Falls Down, 60 year-old author Amy Gallup has isolated herself from the world, spending the last two decades teaching, reviewing and thinking but doing very little writing. On an unassuming morning, in her slippers, Amy trips in her backyard and goes head over heels into the side of a birdbath. The hospital clears her of head injury—so Amy returns home. When a local reporter shows up for a scheduled interview, Amy is not quite herself. The article paints Amy as a master of writing, publishing and life. Her bizarre interview was interpreted as the ramblings of a true genius. The next thing she knows, friends and fans are coming out of the woodwork. Suddenly, Amy is on radio shows, keynoting a major publishing event and guiding a local writers’ retreat. But the strangest thing of all: Amy starts to write. This month, Willett talks to Kirkus about her inspired new novel.

9 For the latest new releases every day, go online to Kirkus.com. It’s where our editors and contributing blog partners bring you the best in science fiction, mysteries and thrillers, literary fiction and nonfiction, teen books and children’s books, Indie publishing and more.

And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors. Each week, we feature authors’ exclusive personal essays on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.

w w w. k i r k u s r e v i e w s . c o m / i s s u e Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre-publication reviews as they are released on kirkus.com—even before they are published in the magazine. You can also access the current issue and back issues of Kirkus Reviews on our website by logging in as a subscriber. If you do not have a username or password, please contact customer care to set up your account by calling 1.800.316.9361 or emailing customers@kirkusreviews.com.

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fiction ALL THE LAND TO HOLD US

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Bass, Rick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (384 pp.) $25.00 paper | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-547-68712-4

NEVER GO BACK by Lee Child.............................................................8 THE LAST ALIBI by David Ellis.......................................................... 11 FALLEN LAND by Patrick Flanery......................................................12 WHAT THE RIVER WASHED AWAY

by Muriel Mharie Macleod..................................................................18 THE WICKED GIRLS by Alex Marwood.............................................19 THE DAYLIGHT GATE by Jeanette Winterson.....................................23 A PLAYER TO BE MAIMED LATER by John Billheimer.................... 24 THE SHADOW TRACER by Meg Gardiner........................................ 26 THE FIRE WITNESS by Lars Kepler....................................................30 BLOOD OF TYRANTS by Naomi Novik.............................................. 33 STORM RIDERS by Margaret Weis; Robert Krammes........................34

NEVER GO BACK

Child, Lee Delacorte (416 pp.) $28.00 Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-385-34434-0

Texas oil, contaminated water, the scorching sun over an arid landscape, a runaway elephant and a humungous catfish dwarf the human characters in this fever dream of an environmentalist novel.

Like a more modern McTeague or a Cormac McCarthy parody, the latest from Bass (The Lives of Rocks, 2006, etc.) falls short of its epic ambitions. It begins in Midland with the relationship of unlikely soul mates: Richard, a geologist compromised by his association with the oil industry, and Clarissa, who finds and sells fossils to subsidize her plan to escape the region. Their relationship may be as doomed as their love is passionate, but “their hands clasped together, it would seem to Clarissa that she and Richard were emotionally in some similar place and time, and that for the time being that might even be how they preferred it—neither east nor west, nor past nor future.” In contrast to the novel’s prim evocation of “the interior acts of love,” it reserves greater rapture for the life force (in the face of mortality) reflected in the landscape, “the thunderous force that drove the world, exceeding even the powers of gravity; as if longing were destiny, as if longing were sacred and sacrament, as if longing were holy, as if longing were as elemental a force of the world as magma or stone, or water or fire or spirit....” And so on. The novel expands to encompass Mexico as well as Texas and to include a woman transformed by an attempt to rescue a circus elephant, a young girl of unknown parents who is perceptive beyond her years, a Mormon schoolteacher, some evil oilmen and a variety of arts-and-crafts folk. It also includes cameos by the high school football team, which seems to have stumbled over from Friday Night Lights and serves as sort of a mute Greek chorus: “All of the players’ faces would be limned with saintly agony, each of them pushing himself farther than ever before, entering each morning into a new country....”

A touch of humor, even a little more dialogue, might have tempered the thematic self-importance. (Author tour to Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Missoula)

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“...busy, lightly absurdist...” from the madonna on the moon

THE MADONNA ON THE MOON

Bauerdick, Rolf Translated by Dollenmayer, David Knopf (416 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 5, 2013 978-0-307-59412-9 A busy, lightly absurdist coming-ofage tale driven by the confusions of communism, religion and the space race.

Bauerdick doesn’t say in which country his debut novel is set, but the small town tucked near a Carpathian mountainside is plainly Romanian. The story opens in 1957, as young narrator Pavel observes his family and neighbors dispute the meaning of the second Sputnik launch. Communism thus far has been a distant drumbeat in the town of Baia Luna, but its threats soon draw closer: The local priest is found murdered, and Pavel’s teacher is discovered hanged. What ensues is largely a detective story, led

by Pavel, involving the sexual peccadillos of Communist Party functionaries, complete with sordid photos and anguished diary entries. He won’t grasp the full extent of the drama till communism’s fall three decades later, but the story is leavened by a subplot involving Pavel’s grandfather’s determination to understand the fate of the Virgin Mary. In numerous set pieces, he argues with a local Gypsy about whether the holy mother ascended to the moon and whether the U.S. and Soviet space missions are really just efforts to prove (or disprove) her existence. As the men hunker down over Bibles and telescopes, Bauerdick reveals the bubble of ignorance that surrounded those living under communism, and he explores the push and pull between faith and growing totalitarianism. Bauerdick, via Dollenmayer’s translation, is a plainspoken writer, not given to metaphorical language or lyrical turns of phrase, and some plot turns feel baggy and overwritten.

However, the novel captures the way communism slowly ground down its subjects, yet it doesn’t feel like a falsely inflated epic, and the comic passages involving Pavel’s grandfather give the story a likable, quirky tone.

Though the prose doesn’t set off sparks, Baeurdick finds an off-kilter way to explore a dour period in history.

THE COLOR MASTER Stories

Bender, Aimee Doubleday (240 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-385-53489-5

Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender’s versatility as an author.

“Appleless” starts us out with an allegorical tale of a girl who refuses to eat apples, a lack of appetite that makes her suspect in an appleeating world. She eventually inspires such suspicion that she’s assaulted by a pack of apple eaters, and in response, the orchard 6

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withers. (One startling and disconcerting note in this story is that the narrator identifies as one of the pack of attackers.) The titular story also verges on fairy tale. In it, the Color Master is consulted whenever a dyeing job of particular importance is needed—the duke’s shoes, for example. One day, the narrator, a lowly apprentice, gets a request for a dress the color of the moon, a task made more challenging because the Color Master has become ill. Bender mines a more sensual vein in stories like “The Red Ribbon,” in which a woman spices up intimacy with her husband by insisting on being paid for sex (this after hearing her husband recount an incident about his college roommate once bringing in prostitutes). Her entire marriage then starts to work on the basis of quid pro quo, even down to washing the dishes. “On a Saturday Afternoon” involves the narrator’s indulgence in a sexual fantasy in which she invites two male friends to come to her apartment so she can get turned on by watching them kiss.

Bender’s gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways. (Agent: Henry Dunow)

THE NIGHT OF THE COMET

Bishop, George Ballantine (352 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-345-51600-8

Filled with the kind of wistful longing that characterizes the coming-ofage novel, this latest from the talented Bishop brings stardust and domestic disillusionment to the bayous of Louisiana.

In 1973, when Junior Broussard blows out the 14 candles on his birthday cake, his wish takes the form of one word—Gabriella. Instead of her magical appearance, he receives a telescope from his father, the high school’s geeky science teacher, an amateur astronomer and author of the newspaper’s weekly Groovy Science column. His father has become obsessed with the sighting of the comet Kohoutek; the new telescope will provide a father-son bonding opportunity. Junior could care less and soon points his telescope across the bayou to Gabriella’s mansion. As his father is involved with Kohoutek, Junior becomes fixated on the wealthy Martellos across the water. Their life is like a television show—they dress better, look better, seem happier—and he watches them like an anthropologist and a lover and wonders what will become of himself, raised in a house of small dreams and missed opportunities. His mother, Lydia, befriends Mrs. Martello, and the two hatch a plan to throw a charity ball with a comet theme. Lydia is also bewitched by the Martellos (especially husband Frank) and begins to feel she deserves so much more than science teacher Alan Broussard can offer. Their meeting years ago—the beautiful pharmacy counter girl and the new science teacher—is a story Junior begs from his parents, as if the re-telling will provide some magic to keep them together. His father becomes dangerously unhinged, his mother runs away, harboring

fantasies of a life with Frank Martello, and the comet will soon appear. Junior is sure it will bring both disaster and magic to their lives. Coming-of-age novels examine youthful revelations about the world—filled with cynicism and wonder and rearranged expectations—and the quality hinges on the honesty of the voice, the truth of the observations, the handling of innocence lost; Bishop succeeds on all these fronts.

A fine story of everyday sadness and otherworldly joys.

(Agent: Marly Rusoff)

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BIG EGOS

Browne, S.G. Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $16.00 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-4767-1167-6 Image, celebrity, truth and consequences all come to a head in this wild satire of a future where everybody can get Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame anytime they need a fix.

A reader would be forgiven for mistaking this razor-sharp sendup for fan fiction at first glance: An unnamed narrator cruises a Beverly Hills soiree, mingling with Jackie O., Freddie Mercury, Evel Knievel and Sid Vicious, among many other celebs. Instead, this fourth novel from comedy virtuoso Browne (Lucky Bastard, 2012, etc.) turns out to be a smart and darkly funny thriller that looks at America’s obsession with celebrity through a truly skewed lens. Our narrator turns out to be head of investigations for a

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“A haunting debut.” from the ghost bride

company called Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, and it makes one consumer product: “Big Egos.” Using genetically modified DNA, the company’s drugs can turn people into a virtually flawless simulation of their favorite dead celebrity or fictional character for up to six hours. Drop a couple thousand dollars and head out for the night as Captain Kirk, Elvis Presley or James Bond—and our narrator has tested thousands of them during his tenure. But things are starting to come apart at the seams with his girlfriend, Delilah, who just can’t seem to stand being herself anymore, and his best friend, Nat, who shuns the drugs at first but then takes to them like an addict. When black-market copies of the Big Egos start killing users, our hero has to use all his wits to get to the root of a nefarious scheme whose origins may be uncomfortably close to home. Browne’s gifts are manifold, and his combination of witty conceptual twists and fast-paced plot and narration are unique. The barrage of pop-culture references may be off-putting, but readers who get the idea should dig it.

A speculative, menacing thriller that asks, “Who are you supposed to be?”

NEVER GO BACK

Child, Lee Delacorte (416 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-385-34434-0

Jack Reacher pokes a head into his old D.C. office, and things promptly go ballistic.

Reacher wants to get a gander at Maj. Susan Turner, his successor as head of the 100th Military Police Special Unit. But she’s been sent to Afghanistan, he’s told, and he’ll have to deal with her temporary replacement, Lt. Col. Morgan. Morgan’s idea of dealing with Reacher is to accuse him of beating Juan Rodriguez to death 16 years ago and shortly afterward fathering Samantha, a 14-year-old whose mother, Candice Dayton, is now looking for child support. To make sure Reacher doesn’t run off, as he’s certainly wont to do (A Wanted Man, 2012, etc.), Morgan recalls him to active Army service and restricts him to a five-mile radius surrounding the building. Naturally, things promptly get worse. A pair of thugs offer to beat Reacher to a pulp if he doesn’t go AWOL. Maj. Turner turns out to be in jail, not Afghanistan. And when her lawyer, Col. Moorcroft, is beaten into a coma a few hours after one of Reacher’s own lawyers—Capt. Helen Sullivan, the one handling the Rodriguez charge—witnesses Reacher’s fraught meeting with Moorcroft, Reacher is escorted to an adjoining cell in the same building. But Reacher, never one to let temporary reversals get him down, escapes from jail, taking Turner with him, and sets out to escape the District, rustle up some cash and some wheels, elude the two thugs (now four) who remain in hot pursuit, and hightail it to L.A. to satisfy himself as to whether Samantha Dayton really is his daughter. Any questions?

For the pure pleasure of uncomplicated, nonstop action, no one touches Reacher, who accurately observes that “I trained myself...to turn fear into aggression.”

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THE GHOST BRIDE

Choo, Yangsze Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-06-222732-4 A young woman risks giving up the ghost as she roams the afterlife in Choo’s fascinating debut set in 1893 colonial Malaya.

Young Li Lan’s family was once rich and respected, but since her mother succumbed to smallpox when she was 4, her father, scarred from his own near-fatal struggle with the illness, has squandered the family fortune in a haze of opium. But she’s still shocked and disturbed when her father asks her if she’ll consent to become a ghost bride to the dead son of Malacca’s wealthiest family, the Lims. Marriage to a dead man isn’t exactly what Li Lan had in mind when she dreamed of her future, but after a visit to the Lim mansion, she does, indeed, dream of the dead son. Actually, the dreams are more nightmares since Lim Tian Ching is pretty creepy and persistent in his pursuit of Li Lan. He also informs Li Lan that his cousin, Tian Bai, the current heir—to whom she’s attracted—murdered him. The dreams, which haven’t exactly been conducive to a good night’s sleep, take a toll on Li Lan’s health, and she finally admits to her amah that she’s being visited by ghosts. Her amah takes Li Lan to a medium, who supplies her with potions. After taking more than the recommended dosage, Li Lan’s spirit leaves her near-lifeless body and enters the land of the dead and the near-dead, where she finds that most ghosts are pretty rude and uncivil. As she attempts to discover the true nature of Lim Tian Ching’s death, Li Lan enlists the assistance of a selfish spirit named Fan who guides her to the Plains of the Dead. Her investigation into the Lim household is fraught with danger as Li Lan’s spirit becomes weaker and she tries to avoid vicious ox-headed demons, Lim Tian Ching and other ghosts who wish her harm. But she’s not totally alone: A mysterious stranger in a broad-brimmed hat, an elderly-appearing servant and a cool steed help her.

Choo’s multifaceted tale is sometimes difficult to follow with its numerous characters and subplots, but the narrative is so rich in Chinese folklore, mores and the supernatural that it’s nonetheless intriguing and enlightening. A haunting debut.

KILLER AMBITION

Clark, Marcia Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (464 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-316-22094-1 An amateur kidnapping suddenly turned lethal poses a third case for Deputy District Attorney Rachel Knight, of LA’s Special Crimes Unit (Guilt by Degrees, 2012, etc.).

It’s obvious from the get-go who snatched megabucks Hollywood producer Russell Antonovich’s teenage daughter Hayley.

All the evidence leads straight to her boyfriend, Brian Shandling. Pleasing complications follow anyway, though they’re not so pleasing for Rachel or her friend Bailey Keller, the robbery/ homicide detective who lands the case when Antonovich pays the $1 million ransom and his daughter’s not returned. Item: Brian Shandling doesn’t exist; the boyfriend stole his identity from a long-dead infant. Item: Hayley was almost certainly in on her own kidnapping. Item: Both Hayley and Brian have paid the ultimate price for their little plot, stabbed to death miles from the ransom drop-off point, presumably by someone who got wind of their scheme and stepped in to rewrite the rules. Doing her best to roll with each punch, Rachel follows the forensics to a new pair of suspects and has them arrested, tossing the case into court, where Murphy’s Law prevails. When new evidence exonerates one of the two suspects of the actual murders, Rachel reduces the charges against him, and he promptly makes bail and disappears. Jury selection favors nasty defense attorney Terry Fisk. So do the invidious rulings of Judge Osterman.

Rachel’s star witness gets impeached on the stand. The most sympathetic of the jurors has to discontinue her service. Desperate, Rachel goes behind her boss’s back to hire a very iffy consultant, knowing that if she loses the case, she’ll get fired.

Not to worry. Rachel does it all: from her fine first-half detective work to her routine, overextended courtroom duty. Next time, she’ll probably be judge, jury and executioner too.

rape victim from India. The girls have a lawyer, Macon Ventri, and soon he and Willie have fallen into a rhapsodic love affair involving lots of sex, romantic journeys to southern beaches and delicious meals cooked in Willie’s apartment, into which Macon moves. But as well as bliss, there are problems. Luke is diagnosed as HIV positive; Gita loses her court case; and Willow makes a bad mistake by helping her to abscond—an impulsive action which threatens both Macon’s job and the center’s future. Eventually, Willie is forgiven, and she travels with Macon to India, an interlude of travelogue and togetherness during which Conley adds further variations to the theme of mothering which courses through her tale, before the couple returns to Paris for the inevitable crisis of grief, restoration and continuity.

There aren’t many surprises in Conley’s first novel, but the sympathetic storytelling and limpid first-person narration succeed in casting a spell.

PARIS WAS THE PLACE

Conley, Susan Knopf (352 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 7, 2013 978-0-307-59407-5

In an affecting debut, Willow Pears learns not only to love, but also what matters when dealing with loss and problems that have no solution.

It’s 1989, and Willie, a 30-year-old American poetry professor, has followed her gay older brother, Luke, to Paris, where she starts helping out at an asylum center teaching vulnerable teenage girls from many lands who want to make a life in France, including Gita, a |

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ONE HUNDRED APOCALYPSES And Other Apocalypses Corin, Lucy McSweeney’s (192 pp.) $22.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-938073-33-5

Three longer short stories and one hundred very short stories, all about what comes before, during or after an end—of a relationship, the world or some conflation of the two.

The book’s long, titular work is a series of short works, some just a few lines long. Many are curiosities. With their toneless tone, they read like in-jokes, the meaning tied so deeply to their constituencies that the rest of us won’t find them funny.

One of the shortest, entitled “For Real,” is a single sentence: “Slowly, carefully, gingerly, I began to suspect I remained ironical.” Corin (The Entire Predicament, 2007, etc.) is serious about her irony but not ironic about what, if anything, she takes seriously. The irony of considering anything other than the end of the world as apocalyptic makes it hard to see how we are to evaluate stories in which almost nothing happens, unless we are to reflect on the loss of action and agency. Even if limited, Corin is inventive. It’s possible that she is working within a set of constraints, that she is a member of the constituency that finds her in-jokes funny and chooses not to explain or elaborate why. In the three longer stories (“Eyes of Dogs” is a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinderbox”), situations develop and characters emerge as more than tics or habits of speech. Then Corin’s elliptical style becomes her greatest asset: Strangeness becomes estranging, unsettling.

Experimental, postmodern and quirky.

WINDS OF SALEM

de la Cruz, Melissa Hyperion (320 pp.) $23.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4013-2470-4 Series: Witches of East End, 3 In the third installment of de la Cruz’s Witches of East End series, the Beauchamp family must rescue one of their number from being hanged as a witch—again.

When we last left the Beauchamps, who are not only witches, but also Norse deities, the escape of Joanna Beauchamp’s long-lost son Freddie (Fryr) from limbo was causing all manner of repercussions, not least the whisking of daughter Freya (goddess of love) back to Salem just in time for the notorious witch trials. When Freya awakens in 1692 Salem, she has no memory of her past (or future). An apparent orphan, she is taken as an indentured servant into the household of Thomas Putnam, the sanctimonious and scheming farmer who was the prime mover of the witch trials. Freya soon 10

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discovers she has magical powers, very helpful in getting the endless round of Puritan women’s work done. Freya’s eternal beloved, Killian (the god Balder), appears in the guise of an eligible bachelor, whose good looks have also attracted Freya’s fellow servant and fickle friend, Mercy. Crazed by jealousy, Mercy reveals that she witnessed Freya causing cows to milk themselves and potatoes to self-harvest. Then Mercy joins the attention-seeking teenage girls whose feigned mass hysteria dooms so many accused Salem witches. Meanwhile, in the present, Freya’s family works feverishly to find a way to interrupt the witch hunt. Her parents, Joanna (Earth goddess Skadi) and Nord, aka Norman, were warned by an Oracle that although Freya, along with her sister Ingrid (hearth goddess Erda), was reincarnated after being hanged at Salem, Freya will not return to Midgard (Earth) if executed a second time.

Though an introductory summary and a family tree help to keep these complex relationships, worlds and dual identities straight, too many subplots and characters, not to mention the increasingly impenetrable Norse arcana, draw focus away from the more coherent and compelling Salem plotline.

Some readers may struggle to pay attention.

SLINGSHOT

Dunn, Matthew Morrow/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-06-203802-9 A single piece of paper that could trigger massive fatalities disappears in this cryptic thriller.

Ex-MI6 field officer Dunn turns to a plot centering on a doomsday scenario.

At an abandoned Soviet military barracks in Berlin in 1995, two Russians and two Americans gather to sign a document for an operation called Slingshot. Slingshot could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and so secret are its plans that the signatories are told they will be killed if they leak details. With the mystery of the plan’s contents hovering, proceedings shift to the present and to Gdansk, Poland, where Will Cochrane, the eponymous protagonist of Spycatcher (2011) and Sentinel (2012), waits at night by the Vistula River to connect with a defector from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Allegedly, the defector carries “a single piece of paper” that is “lethal.” But no sooner does the defector leap from an arriving Russian ship—in a swift and sharply written chase scene—than he is apparently kidnapped by a group of men in a van, who, it turns out, may be a privately funded group.

Cut to Langley, where Flintlock, a CIA group so exclusive even the CIA at large knows not of its existence, assembles a group to retrieve the Russian agent and the vital paper. Eventually, all turn to Cochrane to spearhead the hunt. As usual, the opaque Cochrane remains a swift and deadly killing machine and an aficionado of Assam tea (brewed from leaves). But this time, he enters into—and sometimes becomes lost in—an infinitely more complex game, one played by many hands from several

sides and involving enough characters (few entirely trustworthy, of course) to populate a minor Russian novel. Tricky and circuitous as the plotting becomes, it ultimately converges on a moving, personal story.

Perhaps more cerebral and less breathtaking then Spycatcher but as rewarding as championship bridge.

THE LAST ALIBI

Ellis, David Putnam (480 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-399-15880-3

From Edgar winner Ellis, a complex courtroom thriller filled with tension and twists as the protagonist stands trial for murder.

The story opens with the trial but moves back and forth in time. As the

reader quickly learns, a man calling himself James Drinker asks attorney Jason Kolarich to represent him for a murder that no one has accused him of, because he “knows” someone is going to frame him. How do people even go about framing a person, Drinker asks conversationally, and Kolarich mentions a variety of ways. But Kolarich soon finds himself on trial for the slashing murder of five women. He’s been framed. Can you guess who framed him? Yep, that’s right. But why? And how can Kolarich defend himself? He can’t talk about Drinker without violating attorney-client privilege, which would destroy Kolarich professionally and not help him legally. It’s a great premise made even better by flaws in Kolarich’s character that Drinker exploits to the hilt with malicious delight. Many of the short chapters focus on the trial itself, where the prosecution presents a powerful case for sending Kolarich to prison for life. The defendant, by all appearances, has been a successful and honest lawyer.

But, in this case, he might have to take liberties with his ethics, including telling lies. And then there is his problem with oxycodone, which can turn out to be almost as dangerous as the murder charge. Luckily, his law partner, Shauna Tasker, has his back.

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“...beautifully written...” from this river awakens

But is that also true for his girlfriend, Alexa, the court reporter?

Tasker doesn’t think so, suspecting that Alexa may not have her partner’s best interests at heart. Hero and villain are both smart and motivated, making for an even match in this exciting drama.

Ellis ranks among the best writers in the genre, and this book will keep readers entertained from start to finish.

THIS RIVER AWAKENS

Erikson, Steven Tor (432 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7653-3500-5

Published for the first time in the U.S., a bleak bildungsroman from 1997 that’s quite a departure from the author’s subsequent success in epic fantasy (Forge of Darkness, 2012, etc.).

This depressing little slice of life is set in 1971 in Middlecross, a rural community outside an unnamed Canadian city. The town’s unhappy denizens include a drunk chasing his own demons; his abused, cowed wife; his rebellious 13-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who’s rejected a musical gift in favor of taking and pushing drugs; a widowed mink farmer with PTSD; and the groundskeeper of the local yacht club, who’s slowly going blind. Their downward slide heads rapidly toward greater tragedy when 12-year-old Owen, a tough who’s learned to hide how smart he is, arrives in town, falls in like with Jennifer and makes a frenemy of a local boy. Erikson’s prose is lovely, and he certainly knows his way around the landscape of madness and hallucination. But even that prose and the faint hope of redemption at the story’s close can’t lift the unrelenting grimness of the book, nor compensate for the near absence of a plot.

Apparently, Owen and his friends’ discovery of a body is meant to be significant, but it just doesn’t seem as crucial as the author means it to be. If this were a King novel (which it resembles in some respects), there’d at least be a supernatural evil lurking in the woods, but those expecting magical doings from the author best known for the sorcery, gods and battles of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series are bound to be disappointed.

While there’s a hint of psychic ability and the echoes of both Norse and Danish mythologies, most of the beautifully written book is remorselessly concerned with very real troubles. (Agent: Howard Morhaim)

THE MEMORY KEY

Fitzgerald, Conor Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-62040-111-8

Fitzgerald presents the fourth installment in a series involving Alec Blume, an American expat (and now Italian citizen) who slowly and methodically tracks down the killer of a young lab assistant and solves the mystery behind a terrorist bombing.

The novel opens in 1980, when a woman leaves a suitcase full of explosives at a train station in Central Italy, killing everyone within 15 meters of the explosion. While this is obviously an act of political violence, there’s no certainty as to its perpetrator, though some leads point to professor Pitagora, a brilliant man who’s popularized a method of mnemonic memorization but who’s also a fascist—and he flaunts his beliefs proudly. A generation later, two things happen in such close sequence that Blume suspects they’re connected. First, the woman responsible for the train station bombing, Stefania Manfellotto, is hospitalized with brain damage after she’s shot (and after having served 27 years for her earlier crime). The week before she’s shot, she’d had an argument with professor Pitagora, though according to the latter, arguments between the two of them were a regular occurrence. Second, Sofia Fontana, a young woman working as a lab assistant at a health institute, is shot by the same rifle used against Stefania. Although Pitagora proclaims his innocence, his mocking and ironic bantering rubs Blume the wrong way. And, as if working out the intricacies of these murders is not enough, Blume is having trouble on the home front with Caterina, his lover—and fellow police officer. While Blume gets words of wisdom about love and loneliness from his terminally ill mentor, Magistrate Filippo Principe, it turns out Filippo might also be involved in the case Blume is investigating.

Occasionally slow-moving, Fitzgerald’s novel is heavy on both procedure and the convolutions of character.

FALLEN LAND

Flanery, Patrick Riverhead (416 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-1-59463-180-1 The cataclysm at the root of Flanery’s (Absolution, 2012) second novel is an act of mob violence 100 years past.

Two men are lynched, one white, one black. The deed to the white man’s farm falls to the black man’s brother, Louise Washington’s ancestor. Louise was a teacher; her husband, Donald, farmed, but he was caught between high interest rates and low crop prices. Before he could recover, he died. Now, Louise, evicted by eminent domain, trespasses in her own home. Paul Krovik, an ambitious contractor, secured rights to build Dolores

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Woods, a McMansion development, on Louise’s land. Then the housing bubble burst, the development failed, and Paul was evicted from his model home while also losing his family. In this “dolorous forest of infinite sorrow,” Paul lurks in his house’s secret basement shelter. From their lairs, these outliers watch Nathaniel and Julia and their boy, Copley, move into Krovik’s house. Julia is a research scientist. Nathaniel, reluctant to leave Boston, will be National Director of Offender Rehabilitation for EKK, once into security and incarceration management but now exerting massive influence in areas ranging from biotech to entertainment. Nathaniel and Julia are profession-centered and blind to reality, but Copley, “unfailingly polite, reserved, self-contained, all of his processes and emotions hidden,” encounters Paul. No one believes Copley, but Paul, increasingly paranoid, soon surfaces to destroy more dreams than his own.

In a literary effort far different from his accomplished debut, Flanery explores family and social mores, cataloging emotional damage tumbling from generation to generation, all woven into a metaphorical tale about the human cost of bubble economics, the undermining of personal freedoms in the name of homeland security and the ugly consequences of the privatization of public service. Characters and back stories are both authentic and chilling, as when EKK’s CEO declares “[p]rivate is now public, in the interests of security.” In a novel both symbolic and philosophical, Flanery’s dark view of human ambition, weakness and complacency is both thoughtful and terrifying.

A haunting, layered allegory.

its margins into her own life. Was her thesis really a failure?

What were Suter’s true intentions? The answers can only be found by traveling back to Tarble, where another young woman has attempted suicide on the eve of the reunion. Ghostly sightings of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath throw Ruby’s sanity into question as they emphasize a thread stitching each of these women’s lives to each other’s: All are madwomen in the attic.

Despite some implausible coincidences, Hansen’s debut cleverly entwines these literary ghosts into a suspenseful and swiftly paced light mystery. (Agent: Elisabeth Weed)

THE BUTTERFLY SISTER

Hansen, Amy Gail Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-06-223462-9 After a disastrous semester, Ruby Rousseau returns home to tend her wounds. A broken heart, a suicide attempt, a failed thesis—all have left her devastated, unable even to read her favorite books. But the delivery of a mysterious suitcase forces her to face her demons.

The suitcase belongs to Beth Richards, an acquaintance, not even a friend, from Tarble College, and she’s gone missing.

Inside the suitcase, Ruby finds not only a postcard invitation to Tarble’s Reunion Weekend, but also a copy of A Room of One’s Own, a book that sings to her with the siren call of her abandoned thesis. Under the guidance of the handsome, charismatic and married professor Mark Suter, Ruby had spent her final semester immersed in the literature of women whose creativity and intelligence had driven them to desperate, suicidal acts.

Now working as a journalist—well, really just writing obituaries—Ruby is perhaps fulfilling the echoes in her college’s namesake of muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell. Unable to resist, she opens the book and discovers a comment in the margin that she cannot ignore. Encouraged by her editor, Ruby begins investigating Beth’s disappearance, a search that quickly splashes over |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Neil Gaiman

The best-seller, continually in motion, returns to writing for adults with his new novel

By Amy Goldschlager

Photo Courtesy Kimberly Butler

Neil Gaiman is a very, very busy man. He’s writing a prequel to his fanatically adored Sandman comic-book series. He’s recording a role in The Fall of the Kings— part of Neil Gaiman Presents, an audiobook imprint raising awareness of seminal, sometimes-neglected, and personally beloved works, mainly in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. He’s also negotiating the publication rights to the six-part audio miniseries adaptation of his first novel, Neverwhere, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this past spring, and he’s plotting with HBO to get a series based on his book American Gods on the air.

It was therefore a minor miracle that I managed to score a few minutes to speak to Gaiman about his new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a slim volume

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that’s his first book for adults in several years. It begins with the middle-aged narrator returning to the English countryside of his childhood for a funeral.

He finds himself at neighboring Hempstock Farm and suddenly remembering the curious events that occurred when he was 7: A former opal miner killed himself in his parents’ car, which led to the boy meeting and befriending (apparently) 11-year-old Lettie Hempstock. Lettie is a bit…odd; for one thing, she claims that the pond on her farm is really an ocean. For another, she takes him on a journey right out of this world, a trip which unfortunately creates an inadvertent connection between the narrator and a sinister creature who covertly returns home with him and ultimately assumes the position of his family’s new housekeeper.

“This is a book about memory if it’s about anything else,” says Gaiman. Although the narrator subsequently forgets these literally life-changing events (for reasons revealed later in the story), they clearly affect him profoundly. “I really do hope he’s a better person at the end of the book. I think he is.”

Readers will soon notice that neither the narrator nor anyone in his family has a name. “There was a short period where the narrator had a name, but…I lost that sentence [in a revision],” Gaiman notes. There’s also a “primal quality” to leaving people nameless. “It was something I’d done before, in Violent Cases and in Mr. Punch, where the narrator is a sort of me at that age.” The family is not quite Neil Gaiman’s family: It’s missing one of his two sisters, and Gaiman assures me that a particularly monstrous act by the novel’s father is pure fiction. Nevertheless, Gaiman admits, the book is “weirdly personal. On the one hand, it’s not true. On the other hand, it’s as close to a look at a 7-year-old Neil Gaiman as you’ll get.”

The novel also shares some notable elements with Gaiman’s young-adult novel Coraline. In both books, a

child must face an evil masquerading as a human adult, and the child’s parents are of absolutely no help. Gaiman notes that someone once told him that Coraline was an “immoral book” because it involves a child setting herself against an adult and winning. The same week he received that complaint, he read an article about a 9-year-old girl making a supreme effort to escape her adult kidnappers, suggesting that kind of opposition can be necessary and, indeed, admirable in real life as well as fiction.

But such resistance doesn’t come easy. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman particularly wanted to emphasize how difficult it is for children to cope with the adult world and the profundity of the power differential between children and grown-ups. At its most basic, “adults are bigger and they can pick you up,” he points out.

Children against monstrous adults—the theme might bring fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Juniper Tree” to mind. But Gaiman definitely does not want the reader to think of this book as a fairy tale. Rather, it draws more from myth. Gaiman regards that distinction as extremely important. “Fairy tales have an intrinsic set of rules,” he argues. But “myths have no justice. You don’t have to do something wrong to have something terrible happen to you” in a myth, he says. “There is no feeling that the story itself will sustain you and look after you.

You can rely on the hero getting to the end of the fairy tale not because of virtue on his part, but because he is the lead character. There’s no such feeling that a myth is going to take care of you.”

Gaiman hopes that The Ocean at the End of the Lane partakes of myth’s weighty, inevitable texture. “I wanted to write something that seemed as if it had always been there. I think that’s my favorite bit; after you write something, you can’t quite imagine the world without it.”

The women of Hempstock Farm—the youngseeming Lettie, her mother, Ginnie, and Lettie’s grandmother—have a strongly mythic quality to them, certainly. Could they be a recurrence of the triple goddess who played such an important role in Sandman?

Maybe. But, Gaiman offers, it’s “definitely possible that it’s weirder than one person in three aspects. There’s nothing goddess-y about the Hempstock ladies. They do not want your worship. They barely want your respect.” He claims as his inspiration Henry Kuttner’s Hogben stories about a clan of mutant hillbillies.

Gaiman read the stories as a child, and they obviously made a strong impact: In his clearly nonexistent spare time, he’s co-helming a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign to publish them in a single collection entitled The Hogben Chronicles.

While the imagined young Gaiman may be somewhat of a victim of myth, the adult, real-life writer Gaiman seems to be some kind of creative shark. He’s continually in motion, taking on more and more new projects and looking for fresh ways to astonish his ever-growing audience of readers, listeners, viewers and, of course, Twitter followers (@neilhimself).

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Amy Goldschlager is an editor and book/audiobook reviewer who lives in New York City. She has worked for several major publishers and has also contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Locus, ComicMix and AudioFile magazine.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane Gaiman, Neil Morrow/HarperCollins (192 pp.) $25.99 Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-06-225565-5

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“...layered, thrilling...” from hunting eve

TELL NO LIES

Hurwitz, Gregg St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-0-312-62552-8 A San Francisco silver spoon heir trying to do good becomes entangled in a serial murder case in Hurwitz’s (The Survivor, 2012, etc.) latest thriller.

Daniel Brasher, last heir to a family fortune that can be traced back to the Union Pacific’s golden spike, left the private investment business to become a counselor for violent offenders. The only child of widowed Evelyn Brasher, a community mover and shaker more powerful and feared than appreciated and respected, Brasher strayed further by marrying Cristina, a Hispanic community organizer.

Money, an Audi, a gentrified three-story in Pacific Heights mean the couple lives well while doing good, the only pothole on the road to happily-ever-after being Cristina’s cancer. Then Brasher discovers an anonymous murder threat in his work mailbox. The threat, however, is directed at another person. Soon, other murder threats, and bodies, accumulate. Every corpse is left with “knife slits leaking blood below either eye.” The Tearmaker’s notes always demand that victims “admit what you’ve done.” Hurwitz is brilliant with characterization. Evelyn and Cristina are spark-striking opposites. Leo Rizk, shadowy, silent hired bodyguard, has a dark history revealed in strobe flashes. Theresa Dooley, hard-charging young African-American inspector, leads the investigation. And Martin, A-Dre, Big Mac, Martin, Lil and Xochitl, the sextet that makes up Brasher’s counsel group of violent offenders, are broken and brave but worthy suspects all. Hurwitz’s writing is more lyrical than noir— one chapter delineates San Francisco perfectly—with occasional literary flashes—“watched the sunbeams’ relentless creep along the floorboards, ushering in the threats of a new day).” Hurwitz is no slouch at plotting either, dragging Brasher from one murder scene to another, either consulting with Dooley or giving in to his own curiosity—or guilt. Every suspect seems legitimate, but then the narrative makes a hard U-turn and aims The Tearmaker at Brasher and his wife only to stumble beyond a satisfying conclusion and tack on the trite tying up of one minor narrative thread.

Another winner from a top-tier thriller writer.

HUNTING EVE

Johansen, Iris St. Martin’s (400 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-250-01999-8 978-1-250-02000-0 e-book After escaping Jim Doane, Eve Duncan navigates the Colorado wilderness to gain her freedom, while the people she loves scramble to find and rescue her.

Jim Doane is a father determined to avenge his son’s murder, and to that end, he has kidnapped Eve 16

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Duncan, a forensic sculptor, to reconstruct Kevin’s skull. But there are other reasons he wants Eve under his power, secrets in Eve’s past, of which she’s not even aware, that will place her in grave danger. After learning some of Doane’s intentions, as well as the shocking truth that compelled him to make Eve a pawn in his deadly plan, Eve has escaped him and must keep out of his reach in dense forest far removed from civilization. Doane is a lifelong hunter, but Eve has great instincts, along with some tricks she’s picked up from her lover, Joe, an ex-SEAL, and she manages to hold her own. Meanwhile, Joe, their adoptive daughter, Jane, and a small posse of new and old friends and allies are using every weapon at their disposal to find Eve. The quest will force Jane and two possible love interests to work together; demand that Joe partner with the mysterious Zander and his enigmatic assistant, Stang; and forge an alliance between Margaret, a complex psychic, and Dr. Kendra Michaels, an investigator with finely honed powers of deduction and observation. Working in different corners of the country, the three teams will ultimately wind up in the same forest where Eve is fighting for her life, but a couple of surprising turns will make her Doane’s hostage again.

In an explosive final scene, all seems lost until Margaret opens the door to hope—and another cliffhanger ending leading to Book 3. Johansen’s second in a planned trilogy revolving around Eve’s kidnapping and (readers can only expect) rescue will keep readers engaged in Eve’s fate and intrigued by the many characters who are working together to bring her to safety.

A layered, thrilling read that will likely motivate fans to read the final book, too.

NEVER FUCK UP

Lapidus, Jens Translated by von Arbin Ahlander, Astri Pantheon (512 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-307-37749-4 Amazing. The cleansing violence that swept through Stockholm in Easy Money (2012) has left the city no safer for three misfits who seem incapable of heeding this sequel’s title.

Self-styled commando Niklas Brogren has returned home from paid service to the U.S. government determined to go underground, until an unrecognizable corpse that turns up in the basement of the building where he’s been living with his mother—and watching Taxi Driver a few too many times— turns his mind to a more activist project: finding and executing abusive men. Mahmud el-Askori, mired in debt to a rising star in the Born to Be Hated gang, finds that the price of extricating himself from his obligation is to incur a much graver obligation to Yugoslav crime boss Radovan Kranjic. Police Inspector Thomas Andrén turns in a by-the-numbers report on the dead man in Marie Brogren’s basement and then finds, to his astonishment, that the needle marks he plainly indicated on the victim’s arm are nowhere mentioned in the pathologist’s findings.

At first, these three free agents seem to have little to do with

each other, but although his prose style often seems based on Action Comics, Lapidus draws their stories together gradually, gradually, with the patience of Dickens. Once Andrén is forced off the case by a combination of anonymous threats, official pressure and the obligatory beatings, he wastes no time going independent and soon links the dead man whose drug use no one wants to know about to Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister whose assassination has never been officially resolved.

The case, once reopened, will inevitably ensnare both Niklas and Mahmud, though neither in the roles you might expect.

Outsized, low-minded, mannered (at least in English translation) and often downright tedious. But there’s no doubt that Lapidus creates a dark world that feels, while you’re immersed in it, like the whole world.

APPROACHING THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Lustbader, Victoria Forge (367 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-7653-3490-9

BLOOD GAME

Lyons, David Atria (416 pp.) $15.00 paper | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4516-2932-3 Jock Boucher, the Cajun federal judge– turned–unlikely action hero, returns for his second life-threatening adventure: investigating the smuggling of arms across the Mexican border by superpowerful New Orleans industrialist Ray Dumont.

In Ice Fire (2012), the first installment in Lyons’ series, Jock saved the world from an insidious plot by strangling two bad guys with his bare hands. Now, shaken by his propensity for killing people, he has decided to leave the bench. Then the president summons him to Washington for a personal talkingto. Temporarily relieved of trying cases, the well-off Jock is assigned to seek out and help victims of Hurricane Katrina and

Lustbader’s angst-ridden novel revolves around a young man with a burning need to resolve his child-abuse–riddled past.

Jody Kowalczyk doesn’t look Polish like the rest of his family for a good reason: He was born Christopher Cannavarro, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old Italian girl whose father refused to let her terminate the pregnancy. Unloved by everyone except his Aunt Marie, Chris spends his earliest years hearing from his volatile grandfather how much he is hated and unwanted. His mom, Marian, talks to him as if he is dirt, and, after Marie collapses and dies while teaching him to play the piano, Marian is forced to take custody of young Chris. Enter Scott, a former Vietnam medic and drug addict. After badly injuring the child, Scott waxes remorseful, but the incident sets off a pattern of physical abuse that eventually, after Marian abandons the two of them, results in sexual molestation. Society, his teachers and everyone else in the world appear to be oblivious to the child’s searing ordeal, which is told in a series of memoirs written by the older Jody, who tells his story to an elderly Italian woman, Tess. Through Tess, Jody reconnects with Ella, a woman he met as a teenager and has never forgotten, and her young son, Evan. In a distracting and extraneous side story, Jody’s adopted brother, Brendan, becomes engaged to a stylish but self-destructive young woman named Fern, who comes between the two men and upsets the fragile balance that has kept them together. Lustbader’s graphic tale of abuse won’t please readers who prefer the seamier details of their stories on the subtle side, but she nails the mental and physical horrors of living without love, approval or basic comforts. And, although Jody’s childhood is over-the-top terrible, few will fail to be moved by the child’s plight.

Lustbader’s refusal to allow Jody any happiness whatsoever will prove a disappointment to many readers.

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the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But after he and his police detective buddy Fitch discover a floating body during a fishing outing and Jock is threatened on the street by a gunman he kills with one punch, the judge goes into investigative mode—once again putting himself at mortal risk by looking into Dumont’s ties to Mexican terrorists and a brewing conflict over Mexican oil and gas deposits. Dumont, hoping to get a federal judge in his stable, sidles up to Boucher socially, charming him and widower Jock’s brilliant, beautiful, Mumbai-born girlfriend, Malika, at his casino. Jock draws unlikely support from a down-and-out shrimper whom he bullies into cleaning up his act. The narrative is peppered with minilessons on past conflicts between the U.S. and Mexico and tourist-guide–like commentary on New Orleans culture, cuisine and physical landmarks (Jock lives in a historical house).

Though not as winning or involving as Ice Fire, this is a solid, engaging thriller with a protagonist cut from a different cloth.

WHAT THE RIVER WASHED AWAY

Macleod, Muriel Mharie Oneworld Publications (288 pp.) $14.95 paper | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-78074-234-2 No doubt about it, Scottish author Macleod is a master storyteller who plumbs the breadth and depth of emotions in this inspiring debut about a young black girl whose direction in life is defined by her inner strength and courage.

Arletta Johnson lives an insular existence in a small cabin near Brouillette, La., in the early 1900s, which she shares with her Mambo, the local voodoo priestess. They have a volatile relationship, and Arletta’s comments and actions often bring thwacks from her mother, who abandons her at home as she spends time drinking with boyfriends or using her voodoo to help the neighbors. Arletta fondly remembers her grandpa, the stabilizing influence in her life, who taught her to read and encouraged her to make something of herself. She cherishes his tin box, containing papers and his old wooden pipe, which she keeps buried near the shack. But being left alone in the cabin endangers Arletta in ways that Mambo never imagines: Two white pedophiles often visit Arletta while Mambo is gone and brutally rape and threaten her to keep her silence. After each vicious encounter, Arletta cleanses herself in a nearby creek, and it’s there, as she contemplates drowning herself, that she first hears a disembodied voice named Nellie who sings to her and encourages her to remain strong. When she’s 10, Mambo finally sends Arletta to school, where she excels and becomes friends with another young girl, Safi. But before Arletta’s 15th birthday, she and Safi find themselves working in a cotton mill and boarding with a sympathetic white widow and her black employee. Mambo and Arletta’s relationship changes as joyous events and misfortune touch their lives, but it’s the news that 18

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another young girl has been brutally assaulted by one of Arletta’s former attackers that ultimately unites mother and daughter in a single-minded purpose—and which permanently alters the path of Arletta’s life. Macleod brilliantly hooks the reader from beginning to end with a narrative that opens a floodgate of emotions and overflows with unforgettable characters.

Be prepared to shed a tear or two.

A TREACHEROUS PARADISE

Mankell, Henning Knopf (384 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-307-96122-8

The chronicler of Kurt Wallander (The Troubled Man, 2011, etc.) sets his sights on something dramatically different: the African odyssey of a young turnof-the-century Swedish woman that’s based on facts—just not very many facts.

Five years after her lumberjack father’s death in 1899, Hanna Renström’s mother, Elin, sends the 18-year-old off to businessman Jonathan Forsman’s home in coastal Sundsvall, where the chances of survival look brighter. Forsman not only treats Hanna kindly and respectfully and gives her a job as a maid, but arranges her passage to Australia as a higher-salaried cook on a ship he partly owns. Hanna finds love aboard the Lovisa, but barely a month into her marriage to third mate Lars Lundmark, a fever carries him off. Armed with £50 in widow’s benefits, and lacking any strong ties to the ship or its destination, Hanna decides on the spur of the moment to steal away while the Lovisa is docked one night in Lourenço Marques and runs smack into another world. When she finds that she’s seriously ill, she begs help from women she thinks run a hotel. They’re actually prostitutes in Senhor Attimilio Vaz’s brothel, O Paraiso, and he’s the highest-contributing taxpayer in all of Mozambique. Here, Hanna once again finds unexpected kindness and romance even before she ends up as the owner of O Paraiso, but this time, the world in which she’s landed is shot through with a racism so pervasive that it defines every human relationship, and Hanna’s closest and most enduring emotional connection turns out to be with Carlos the monkey.

Hanna’s adventures, based on elliptical hints from the journal of a real-life Swedish madam in 1905 Mozambique, make a story as magical as a fairy tale and just about as brutal too.

“...suspenseful, buzz-worthy...” from the wicked girls

THE WICKED GIRLS

Marwood, Alex Penguin (384 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jul. 30, 2013 978-0-14-312386-6 Marwood’s chilling tale of two girls involved in the death of a small child and the resulting impact that act has on them is absorbing, plausible and unsettling.

After circumstances throw Bel, the unwanted stepdaughter of a wealthy man, and Jade, the child of an outcast pig farmer, together, the two 11-year-olds find themselves on a destructive path that eventually reunites them more than two decades after the terrible deed that branded them as child killers. Hated and scorned by the public, vilified by the press, the two women are given new identities when they are released from custody and instructed never again to have contact with each other. Now they are Kirsty, a respectable freelance journalist with a husband and BW•Kirkus MagC:Kirkus Mag

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two children, and Amber, the manager of an amusement park in a slightly shabby seaside town. After a string of young women are murdered there, Kirsty travels to the town to cover the killings for one of her clients, eventually stumbling across Amber. It doesn’t take long for them to realize how they know one another, and despite the order to remain apart, they soon find their paths intersecting with a deadly certainty. Marwood, a journalist writing under a pseudonym, constructs a tightly woven story that exposes the seamier side of human nature and the devastating circumstances that interwove the lives of these two women. Riveting from first page to last, this book unfolds by building on the unexpected. The author skillfully manages to populate the story with evil characters without ever going over the top, making the women sympathetic to the reader and keeping the suspense alive throughout.

A suspenseful, buzz-worthy novel offering a surefooted depiction of two women who lost their childhoods.

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“An ingenious, thoroughly absorbing twist on the military-fiction genre. ...extremely clever, infectiously readable ...will appeal equally to fans of Tom Clancy and True Blood.”

-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A DEBUT SCI-FI TECHNOTHRILLER in which US troops find themselves the subject of a bizarre government experiment read the full review on kirkusreviews.com Available at Amazon.com For information about publication or film rights email: projectgitmores@gmail.com or call 281-433-2538

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A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH

McAdam, Colin Soho (336 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-61695-315-7

Canadian novelist McAdam’s third book (Fall, 2009, etc.) begins with Walt and Judy, a loving, childless Vermont couple beset by the feeling that they don’t have sufficient outlets for the love they have to give.

One day in 1972, Walt comes across an article in Life about chimpanzees conversant in sign language, and soon he’s gone off to a traveling circus in search of a cross-species surrogate son. Alongside the story of Walt and Judy and Looee, the baby chimp they acquire and adopt—from the beginning there is a presentiment of tragedy—McAdam places a parallel narrative set at a primate research institute in Florida, where, for decades, the intricate cultures of chimpanzees have been documented and their formidable linguistic and problem-solving abilities have been developed and celebrated. Here, too, the crux of the story has to do with loneliness and empathy; people (and nonpeople) are to be marveled at for their ability and willingness to offer fellow creatures the balms of love, compassion and friendship, and McAdam doesn’t flinch from the workings of cruelty and brutality, either. There’s daring, and some pleasure, in the switches of point of view and especially in McAdam’s effort to come up with a subtle, sensitive way to inhabit the chimpanzees and approximate their version of English idiom. Alas, the book founders on McAdam’s human idiom, which tends all too often toward abstraction and glib faux profundity: “Walt was in love, and held close the fact that there is nothing more natural or right than buying the world for the woman of your dreams. Try to name the value of that smile to Walt and his life-worn heart.”

What might be—and occasionally is—touching is undercut by McAdam’s indulgences in a clankingly poetic style.

DRIFT

McGoran, Jon Forge (384 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7653-3470-1 A big-city cop suspended from Narcotics after an angry outburst retreats to his late mother’s house in bucolic Dunston, Pa., only to find that Philadelphia was a lot safer than this little hamlet.

As if Meredith Carrick’s death weren’t enough, more bad news swiftly follows for depressive Detective Doyle Carrick: His stepfather, Frank Menlow, has died as well. Since there’s no one left to tend their place and Doyle has no reason to stay in the city, he rusticates himself to Dunston, where neighboring organic farmer Nola Watkins offers at least the promise of sweet diversion. Little does 20

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Doyle know that by the time he gets Frank buried, there’ll be four other bodies cooling in the Dunston morgue, casualties of Doyle’s repeated run-ins with a passel of drug dealers. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Redtail Holding Company has been buying up parcels of land in unseemly haste, and the anonymous calls pressing Nola to sell soon escalate to more florid misfortunes. The designer blue corn she’s contracted to raise for a wedding reception is infected with a mysterious blight.

Someone sets fire to her cornfield after methodically harvesting the infected crop. Doyle’s attempts to interest Police Chief Francis Pruitt in Nola’s troubles are stymied by the fact that Pruitt already has his eye on Doyle as a troublemaker. Then people who aren’t drug dealers begin to die, heralds of a deep-dyed conspiracy to genetically modify innocuous crops like apples and corn in ways that will make your head spin.

Drug dealers, suspect developers, Russian gangsters, mad scientists—Dunston’s got them all, and McGoran’s debut piles on the menace as if there were no tomorrow, which maybe there isn’t. (Agent: Stacia Decker)

THE FIRST AFFAIR

McLaughlin, Emma; Kraus, Nicola Atria (304 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4516-4344-2 The authors of The Nanny Diaries have written a transparent account of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal through the perspective of the female protagonist.

Although the novel is placed in the present with our familiar political woes, the plot plays out identically to the events of the Clinton administration. As a recent grad, Jamie McAllister has little luck job hunting, but then her best friend’s mother pulls some strings, and Jamie finds herself as a White House summer intern in the government of Greg Rutland, a charmer with Robert Redford good looks. Amid the usual worries—finding a real job, student loans, family problems—President Rutland is encouraging and kind. And then their flirtation becomes something else. Document deliveries turn into bathroom quickies, with his secretary all but covering for these trysts. The president calls late at night to talk, and Jamie begins to fantasize about their future life together. Meanwhile, Rutland is getting ready to defend himself in a sexual harassment lawsuit (remember Paula Jones?), and aides suggest sending Jamie elsewhere, as she’s proven to be a distraction and potential liability to the president’s re-election campaign.

Jamie is furious—she had finally gotten a real job at the White House (on her own merit)—and complains to her friends, many of whom know she’s having the affair. At this point, it is hard to muster sympathy for either Jamie and her imprudent naïveté or the president and his manipulations, but then the authors introduce Mike, Jamie’s first boyfriend, an adult sexual predator who seduced Jamie when she was 12. The president? Well, he has panic attacks, and his wife doesn’t understand him, and

“...good fun.” from middle man

Jamie is so fresh and hopeful. But not after the trial. In a turn of events à la Linda Tripp, one of Jamie’s friends records their conversations, and soon, Jamie is on the witness stand regaling the world with humiliating details of her affair—her only option to prevent a prison term.

A dishy, sometimes somber, scandalous tale of what happens when you fall in love with the president of the United States.

THE RIVER AND ENOCH O’REILLY

Murphy, Peter Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-547-90477-1 An Irish river floods; nine people drown, presumed suicides. Folklore and radio transmissions provide part of the answer in this work of magic realism, the Irish journalist’s second novel (John the Revelator, 2009).

On the first of November 1984, the torrential rains begin, causing the river Rua to overflow its banks in the town of Murn. Nine bodies will be retrieved, six of them young adults.

The flood begins the novel and is reprised toward the end, so Murphy has begun with the climax—a daring move. The rest of the novel sketches the protagonist, Enoch O’Reilly, and offers haphazard vignettes of the dead. (In the inevitable comparison, Jeffrey Eugenides’ tightly focused The Virgin Suicides fares better.) Enoch grew up in a small town south of Murn. Mother Kathleen was a devout Catholic; father Frank owned an electrical business and was a published authority on sound waves.

This tight-lipped man had built his own machine. The pivotal moment of Enoch’s life came when the 12-year-old snuck into his dad’s workshop and heard a thundering preacher’s voice through the headphones. That same night, his idol, Elvis, the King, exhorted him to emulate the preacher, which he did after a fashion, espousing the Word (but not God) and years later hosting a parodic Revival Hour on local radio. The trouble with this Elvis freak is that he has no interior. He is less complex than Frank, who gathered data on historical flood patterns through his machine and concluded the river was a force to cull the population. Certainly the Rua Nine were mentally troubled or miscreants. One was an arsonist; another, a farmer, shot all his cattle. As a battlefield casualty in Korea, Frank had a vision: “chains of men descending into a river.” And after Enoch’s incursion, he suffered a breakdown, babbling in “riverish.”

It’s the rightness of Murphy’s language that thrills us into temporary submission, but as the novel progresses, its odd structure becomes increasingly problematic.

STARGAZEY POINT

Noble, Shelley Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-06-225834-2 A child’s fingers slip away from Abbie Sinclair’s frantic rescue attempts, drowning into the mud, while her lover, Werner, is captured and left to die due to corporate greed in Peru.

The trauma leaves her suffocating in confused, guilty nightmares, unable to resume her work as a documentary filmmaker. Why did Werner continue to film instead of helping her rescue the child? Why did she allow herself to be dragged to safety? Her best friend, Celeste, sends Abbie to recuperate with her relatives in the genteel poverty of Stargazey Point, S.C. The three octogenarian Crispin siblings, of course, need Abbie as much as she needs them. Marnie’s mysterious past gives her the strength to manage her sister, Millie, who refuses to give up on their dilapidated house. Their brother, Beau, obsessively sculpts wood and helps Cabot Reynolds—the small town’s prodigal son—restore his uncle’s carousel. Abbie meets darkly handsome Cab at dinner her first night with the Crispins. Suspicious of Abbie’s motives, Cab reluctantly squires her about town. Things turn sentimental at this point, with a flock of neglected, impoverished—and in some cases abused— children, who desperately need Abbie’s attention, and an old Gullah woman, whose second sight penetrates to the very core of every troubled soul. Noble’s (Beach Colors, 2012) sophomore novel unfortunately does little with the intriguing threads of Abbie’s haunted past, instead weaving her troubling tale into a standard romance. From Cab’s flight from a materialistic fiancee and heartless corporate exploitation to Beau’s mysterious reluctance to show his art, the troubles in Stargazey Point evoke little surprise. Even the careful restoration of the carousel becomes a metaphor for the simple notion that helping others is the key to healing the self.

In this romance, emotional damage is no match for the power of kindness.

MIDDLE MAN

Rich, David Dutton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 29, 2013 978-0-525-95323-4 USMC Lt. Rollie Waters remains mired in the misdeeds of a greedy and ghoulish cabal in Rich’s (Caravan of Thieves, 2012) second action-adventure novel.

As the saga begins, the crime uncovered in Thieves is the same but exacerbated. Waters’ con-man father, Dan, had uncovered a conspiracy that looted millions of Saddam’s dollars after the invasion of Iraq, all supposedly shipped home in caskets of troops killed in action. |

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Dan was murdered by the conspirators, but Waters got revenge.

That involvement brought combat veteran Waters to the attention of mysterious Maj. Hensel of SHADE (Shared Defense Executive), an uber-secret spinoff of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Hensel suspects the purloined money is to finance a conspiracy to control Kurd oil resources. Waters, SHADEassigned to exhume graves to unearth the millions, becomes an assassin’s target. The shooting brings Waters’ investigation unwelcome FBI attention, and so Henley dresses Waters up as Robert Hewitt, oil speculator, and dispatches him to Houston to meet the self-styled king of Kurdistan. The action moves from Houston to Erbil, Iraq’s Kurd stronghold. Waters is pursuing a one-eyed Welshman named Bannion who has supposedly kidnapped Maya, his own ex-wife and the king’s daughter. Rich is a film writer, with a firm grip on pacing, always ready to stop and flesh out characters and then to pull a knife and draw a little blood. Waters is the perfect edgy, flawed hero—“loaded up five cylinders for Russian roulette with chivalry, gallantry, righteousness, sincerity and plain old lust”—and Rich’s supporting cast is solid. Bannion is Machiavellian evil. Gill, supposedly Bannion’s silent muscle, is three layers deep. Pushing credibility is Ethan Williams, a purported hippie drug dealer Waters once rescued in Afghanistan and who is now in Bannion’s employ. The adventure unreels in first person from Waters’ point of view, and Rich uses a nifty narrative device—Waters’ interior dialogue with his dead con-man father—to flesh out the now-you-see-it, nowyou-don’t machinations of the bad guys.

Above-average action-adventure with a touch of noir.

This one is good fun.

HELIUM

Singh, Jaspreet Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-60819-956-3 A melancholy novel, under the influence of W.G. Sebald, about a dark moment in India’s contemporary history: the retaliatory pogrom against Sikhs after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on November 1, 1984. “[W]e all need a little private madness and a little lie in order to live....The problem is that your madness and your lie harmed so many.” Raj Kumar is addressing his father, a retired police official with whom he has a tense relationship. Kumar, who left India and thrived in the States, has returned to confront the past and India’s history. Kumar is a professor at Cornell, an expert on rheology, the science of the flow of materials. Marvelous details about rheology, and the unique characteristics of helium, Kumar’s mentor’s specialty, appear throughout the book but are too often deployed in a heavy-handed, symbolic manner. The book is so heavily indebted to Sebald (it even includes photographs of the sort Sebald lately made famous) that it might be called an imitation. Kumar’s mood of unease, his bouts of nausea and confusion, his strange desires and 22

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stranger consummations—all seem derived from Sebald. In his title and method, Singh nods as well to Primo Levi’s masterpiece of memoir The Periodic Table. Despite these profound debts and its curious style, Singh’s (Chef, 2010, etc.) book has its own power. The story emerges slowly, following Kumar’s return to India, a brief visit with his father, a return to his old school, and then a long interlude in the hill station of Shimla, where he tries in vain to have an in-depth conversation with Nelly, the wife of his old mentor.

A gloomy but forceful novel.

TRAGIC

Tanenbaum, Robert K. Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4516-3555-3 Tanenbaum (Bad Faith, 2012, etc.) goes on the waterfront in his latest in his crime series featuring Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi.

Charlie Vitteli runs the New York City–based North American Brotherhood of Stevedores. That’s bad for its members. Vitelli wants to hold onto power and continue to take bribes for avoiding safety regulations while also dipping into embezzled pension fund money. Using Joey Barros, his razor-toting enforcer, as go-between, Vitteli contracts with a Russian mob wannabe for the assassination of a union reformer.

The murder’s done, but the ugly punk from St. Petersburg is soon caught, along with two local mopes. That’s when Roger “Butch” Karp, district attorney for New York County, steps in.

One of the trio turns state’s witness. The three are convicted.

The Russian wannabe is quickly eliminated in a prison murder engineered by the Brighton Beach–based Malchek bratka. That convinces the other mope to turn state’s witness, and Vitteli is indicted and convicted. With killers and motives laid out, this is no page-turning whodunit. Instead, Karp flexes his Jack McCoy muscles, giving courtroom-theater fans something to do when television is bereft of Law and Order re-runs. While Marlene Ciampi is a minor player, the narrative is bloated, with some contradictions and “that can’t happen” moments. Most characters are clichés, but two or three break out: Jackie Corcione, weakling son of the union founder who is kept in line by the threat of outing his homosexuality; “Dirty Warren,” Tourette’safflicted, street-wise newsstand operator; and Ivgeny Karchovski, retired USSR colonel and boss of a not-so-bad Russian gang, thugs who are willing to deal in illegal immigration, false papers and black markets but draw the line at drugs, guns and prostitution. Conveniently, Ivgeny is Butch’s cousin and part of an underworld pipeline. Tanenbaum tosses in quotes and references to Macbeth—“I have murdered sleep” being handy shorthand for a beleaguered conscience—but that’s an elaborate blueprint for a small structure.

No action thriller this—it’s all courtroom drama.

THE PASSION OF THE PURPLE PLUMERIA

Willig, Lauren New American Library (480 pp.) $15.00 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-451-41472-4 Series: Pink Carnation, 10

The 10th in Willig’s witty series about Napoleanic-era spies focuses on a far-from-drowsy chaperone.

Gwen, lady companion to Jane, aka the notorious English spy Pink Carnation, is enjoying her sojourn in Paris. There, she is not a pitied, unmarriageable spinster but a proficient and daring spy in her own right: She sallies forth at night disguised as a gentleman to learn, among other state secrets, what Napoleon’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, is up to with a certain opera diva, Aurelia Fiorila. Too abruptly, Jane and Gwen are recalled to England: Jane’s sister Agnes has disappeared from her boarding school. At the school, Gwen meets Col. Reid, who’s come from India to reunite with the daughters he sent to England to be educated years before. Now, his daughter Lizzy has gone missing along with Agnes. Reid assumes the girls have taken refuge with his older daughter Kat in Bristol.

After journeying there and learning, to Reid’s dismay, that Kat is now taking in laundry and living in a hovel, Reid and Gwen are set upon by brigands. Although Gwen handily fights them off by deploying her sword parasol, Reid is wounded. Mutual attraction smolders as Gwen nurses Reid back to health. Back with Jane’s family in Bath, Gwen is alarmed that Jane seems so susceptible to the blandishments of the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent, who is either a double agent or a charlatan or both. The plot thickens when the colonel and Chevalier escort the two spies to an opera performance starring Fiorila. Gwen chronicles and exaggerates the exploits of her alter ego, Purple Plumeria, in a swashbuckling novel in progress, the Convent of Orsino. A present-day frame story features Colin, a descendent of the Pink Carnation, and his Harvard historian girlfriend, Eloise. The writing is acerbic, arch and funny, but the complex back story demands familiarity with the earlier books.

For fans enmeshed in this intricate world, a welcome installment which those new to the series might find a bit too in media res.

THE DAYLIGHT GATE

Winterson, Jeanette Grove (240 pp.) $24.00 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-8021-2163-9

Witchcraft in 17th-century England: from the prolific British author (The Stone Gods, 2008, etc.), a nightmarish novella that burns like a hot coal.

It was a notorious trial. The Lancashire Witches were tried and executed

in 1612. England was jittery. The Protestant king, James I, was intent on hunting down witches and Catholics. The Gunpowder Plot had been a close call; all the Catholic plotters had fled north to Lancashire. Winterson uses the historical framework, grafting her inventions onto it. Entering the past with her is like walking through an open door. You are there. It is a world of rape and pillage. The most conspicuous witches are the Demdikes, a fearsome family of wretched indigents. The gentlewoman Alice Nutter, wealthy from inventing a dye, lets them live in a grim tower on her land. It is Good Friday. The Demdikes are planning a Black Mass. It is Alice’s misfortune to be at the tower when the magistrate arrives. All of them, save Alice, are placed under guard. Alice does not believe in witchcraft, but she does believe in magic, which flickers throughout the narrative. Thirty years before, in London, she had known the alchemist John Dee and the beautiful Elizabeth Southern, one of her two great loves. Then Elizabeth sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman, but Alice stayed young, thanks to Dee’s Elixir of Life. Now she is in danger, for her other great love, the Catholic plotter Southworth, has materialized at her house. The magistrate offers a deal: Give up Southworth and go free, or be tried as a witch with the others. Alice refuses, sealing her fate. As the tension mounts, Winterson weaves into her story a voodoo doll stuck with pins and an eerie meeting on haunted Pendle Hill between Alice and the dead John Dee. There will be torture and false testimony.

An electrifying entertainment.

m ys t e r y DAMNED BY LOGIC

Ashford, Jeffrey Severn House (192 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8279-0

An advertising man, whose Mediterranean cruise ends with him turned into a fool and a smuggler, finds still bigger problems awaiting him at home.

David Ansell’s marriage has never been happy, and his firm hasn’t paid for his shrewish wife, Eileen, to accompany him when they book his passage on MV Helios so that he can work up a new ad campaign for the Rex Cruising Company. So he’s a perfect target for Melanie Caine, an upscale tart who entices him to her cabin, makes him forget both his marriage vows and his good judgment, and then asks him to carry home Georgie, a stuffed Barbary ape she can’t fit into her luggage. When Ansell returns home, Eileen’s gossipy friend Barbara Morley instantly spots the toy, sees a few telltale blonde hairs it’s picked up, smells the perfume and tips a wink to Eileen. The next day, Ansell gets a frantic call from Melanie demanding that he return the ape |

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“...ingenious...” from a player to be maimed later

to her, but it’s too late, says Eileen triumphantly: She’s already burned Georgie out of jealousy and spite. Even worse, Melanie soon meets a similar fate at the hands of her criminal masters, who, skeptical of her claim that Georgie’s been burned, decide to break into Ansell’s house to look for him and find only Eileen instead. In a darker mood, Ashford (Justice Deferred, 2012, etc.) would turn their unauthorized visit into the opening move in an all-out squeeze play against Ansell. Instead, he focuses on the members of the county CID—DI Jim Glover and DS Josh Frick, who are convinced Ansell killed his wife, and DC Belinda Draper, who finds herself caught in the middle between her superiors and their prey.

Accomplished, routine work disappointing only due to the fact that the most interesting development, Draper’s unlikely romance with Ansell, gets such short shrift.

NOT THE KILLING TYPE

Barrett, Lorna Berkley Prime Crime (320 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-425-25222-2

A New Hampshire mystery bookstore owner uses all the knowledge she has gained from reading her wares to help solve a murder.

Tricia Miles is surprised when her sister Angelica suddenly announces her candidacy for president of the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce. The longtime incumbent, Bob Kelly, owns oodles of local real estate and is also one of Angelica’s former lovers. Another last-minute nominee is Stan Berry, who runs the Stoneham sign shop. Angelica wants to improve the attractive tourist destination; Stan wants to cut spending on everything. Before he gets the chance to stump for his ideas, Trisha finds him stabbed in the bathroom of the Brookview Inn, where the chamber is having a breakfast meeting. Trisha’s boyfriend, Chief Baker of the Stoneham PD, is never happy when Tricia sticks her nose into his investigations (Murder On The Half Shelf, 2012, etc.), and his preoccupation with the health of his ex-wife has put a further strain on their relationship. Tricia’s own ex-husband shows up in town seeking reconciliation. So does Stan Berry’s son, who can certainly use the money his father left him. Although Tricia is getting ready for a busy Christmas season and supporting a friend who is soon to marry the handsome manager of the Brookview Inn, she still finds time to snoop. But she may not be pleased with what she learns.

Barrett continues her winning ways with another mystery chock full of interesting suspects and a surprising denouement.

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A PLAYER TO BE MAIMED LATER

Billheimer, John Five Star (312 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 21, 2013 978-1-4328-2719-9

Sportswriter Lloyd Keaton (Field of Schemes, 2012) gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to pen the biography of a famous pitcher.

It shouldn’t be too hard to write about Cleveland Indians’ pitching star Blaze Stender. On the field, the career 253-game winner was a tough competitor. Off the field, he was modest and generous, donating equipment to kids’ teams, visiting sick fans and spearheading The Tommy Fund, named for his late son, who had Down syndrome. And Keaton certainly can use the money, since his compulsive gambling cost him his pension and caused him to leave the prestigious Cleveland News for the shoestring Menckenburg Herald. But the project is bedeviled from the get-go. First, Stender’s former teammate, erratic Lanny Morton, hints that Blaze’s record may not be as squeaky-clean as Keaton thinks. Then, Blaze goes missing after his yacht, Three Strikes, hits a breakwall and sinks in Cleveland Harbor. Soon, Keaton realizes that the numbers just don’t add up: Blaze has been writing checks that aren’t accounted for in any of his expense sheets. Blaze’s wife, Barb, who wants Keaton to stop, dons her slinkiest dresses to help persuade him. But Keaton wants the truth, and he won’t stop until he gets to the bottom of a case as deep and murky as Lake Erie.

Baseball fans and mystery fans alike will cheer as Billheimer goes into extra innings with a puzzle as ingenious as he offered in Keaton’s debut.

A DECENT INTERVAL

Brett, Simon Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-78029-044-7 After a 16-year absence, reprobate actor Charles Paris totters back on stage.

Still not quite ready for stardom, Charles Paris is grateful to accept the dual roles of First Gravedigger and Father’s Ghost in Tony Copeland’s roadcompany production of Hamlet, to be directed by Ned English, whose outré artistic sensibilities demand that the stage set be a replica of the interior of Hamlet’s skull. To fill seats, Copeland has hired television pop stars Jared Root and Katrina Selsey to play the doomed lovers. And that’s when everything goes wrong.

Jared is hospitalized when a bit of the set’s parietal bone falls on him; Katrina falls dead when she switches dressing rooms, pokes her eye with a doctored mascara wand and sags backward off a chair. Who’s to blame? The understudies, of course, who now have the starring roles. But Charles, lubricating his

synapses with pints at the pub and nips of Bell’s whiskey at home, has other ideas, which include sexual fantasies about the actress playing Gertrude, romantic notions about getting back together with his wife, Frances, and, in the odd moment when he’s not thinking about drinking or shagging, wondering who else in the troupe might have a motive. Katrina’s personal manager lacks a persuasive alibi. The assistant stage manager seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hamlet’s understudy, now replaced by a young man Copeland is grooming for stardom, is seething. So is most of the supporting cast, and the nymphet the director is bonking wants to play Ophelia.

The show, however, must go on, though it’s destined never to reach London’s West End. A cheeky sendup of TV competition shows, tweeting, texting and backstage egos. If the plot recalls that of Brett’s Sicken and So Die (1997), well, that was funny too, even if both their final acts could have used a bit of tweaking.

NEARER HOME

Castro, Joy Dunne/St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-250-00458-1 The murder of a New Orleans journalist sets off a battle between a reporter determined to tell her story and a shadowy opponent equally determined to keep the truth under wraps.

When Times-Picayune writer Nola Céspedes (Hell or High Water, 2012) goes on her morning run, the last thing she expects to find is the body of her former journalism teacher, professor Judith Taffner. Though Nola was no fan of Judith back at Tulane, she’s soon chasing the story of Judith’s life, not only because it’s her job, but also due to her intense personal desire to help solve the crime. When Nola meets Judith’s husband, Luke Jourdan, and young daughter, Chloe, she starts to wonder if Judith had changed from the hardened woman Nola knew. But she questions her reassessment when she reads the files Judith saved on her work computer. It seems that Judith had a few stories in the works guaranteed to make her a target of people in high places. Soon, Nola has more leads than she has time for. Her overwhelming list of to-do’s is extended even further when Marisol, Nola’s designated “little sister” from the national program, decides to skip out on her parents and bunk with Nola. But all this activity has a silver lining: It keeps Nola from having to respond to her pseudo-boyfriend Bento’s repeated requests for greater intimacy.

The highlight here is in Nola’s personal relationships, which show her to be funny, flawed and formidable.

BOMBSHELL

Coulter, Catherine Putnam (400 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-399-15733-2 FBI agents tackle several high-profile cases in and around the Beltway.

On his way to Washington to join fellow agents Dillon Savich and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, Griffin Hammersmith plans to stop off and visit his sister Delsey, a student at the prestigious Stanislaus School of Music.

But he has to go to the hospital to find Delsey, who was discovered in her apartment unconscious and covered in blood.

Meanwhile, Savich and Sherlock are called in when a body turns up at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial with injuries consistent with a fall from a great height. Before the police even arrive, the body is identified by a picture posted online as the grandson of the much-reviled former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Although the consensus is that the bright young university student was killed in revenge for his grandfather’s failed policies, Savich and Lacey do not rule out a more personal motive, especially when the victim’s two lifelong friends end up equally dead. Back in Virginia, Delsey recalls being attacked by at least one Latino man, and Hammersmith’s uncanny ability to read people reveals the fact that Delsey’s best friend is an undercover drug agent working on a case involving a visiting professor and a major drug cartel. When Delsey is targeted by the gang, Hammersmith scrambles to break the case before her obituary follows the others.

The latest addition to Coulter’s FBI series (Whiplash, 2010, etc.) uses a run-of-the-mill mystery to bring together some of her fans’ favorite characters.

GONE WITH THE WIN

Daheim, Mary Morrow/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $23.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-06-208984-7 Innkeeper Judith Flynn tackles her 28th homicide investigation.

Judith’s retirement from amateur sleuthing (The Wurst Is Yet to Come, 2012, etc.) lasts only until Hillside Manor guest Ruby Tooms checks in. Ruby wants to know who strangled her mother, Opal, 15 years ago. Since the unsolved murder took place in Seattle’s Thurlow District, where Judith grew up and where her first husband, Dan, ran the Meat & Mingle Cafe into bankruptcy, Judith is forced to revisit her old haunts. She drags along her acerbic cousin Renie and gets a helpful boost from her second husband, Joe, a retired cop eager to solve the very first case his ex-partner Woody worked on.

Ruby, however, is not the ideal client. She mistakenly lands on the neighbors’ doorstep in a drunken stupor with no memory of |

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how she got there or what happened to her purse and cellphone.

After a break-in at the B&B and a hit-and-run that claims a neighbor, Ruby packs her suitcase and vanishes into the night. A firefighter called to subdue a garden flare-up Judith has started turns out to be related to Opal’s past, which included several flirtations, a stint as a caregiver in a nursing home and a lost son disinclined to learn any more about his mom’s demise. Judith’s uncle Al puts the girls onto possible links with racetrack stalwarts, and Judith keeps bumping into a certain horse trainer.

She also learns who got the proceeds from a winning ticket and how they were spent, facts which do not help her solve the murder, which involves another kind of jealousy entirely.

Judith’s mother is as abrasive as ever, but the inn’s cocktail nibbles are tasty and the plot palatable.

THE IDES OF APRIL

Davis, Lindsey Minotaur (352 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-250-02369-8

A second-generation Roman sleuth who lives by her wits needs all of them to solve a string of killings that strike too close to home.

In A.D. 89, during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, Flavia Albia works as an informer in the shadow of her famous father, Falco. It’s a difficult job, especially for a woman. Hired by a woman named Salvidia to “apply legal pressure to some compensation-seekers,” Flavia gets stiffed when her client turns up stiff, a victim of botanical poisoning. She doesn’t originally suspect foul play, but when Salvidia’s stepson Metellus Nepos hires her to investigate, Flavia is certainly willing to take the gig. She finds a handful of enemies of the deceased, but none quite rises to the dubious status of suspect. What she doesn’t see coming is the unexpected death of Salvidia’s friend and neighbor, Celendina, right after attending Salvidia’s funeral ceremony. Nepos is apoplectic.

Flavia visits the lazy local investigator, Titus Morellus, for his opinion, and he immediately implicates the elaborately grieving stepson. A spate of similarly suspicious deaths follows, but the victims—a toddler, a teen, an athlete, etc.—range far and wide in age and gender. There seems no conceivable pattern, unless Flavia can find one. Flavia Albia makes her debut courtesy of the author of the long-running Marcus Didius Falco series (Nemesis, 2010, etc.). This installment includes the same helpful map of the city and cast of characters and a feistier style.

The whodunit unfolds slowly, but Flavia demonstrates appealing wit and grit.

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THE UNBURIED PAST

Fraser, Anthea Severn House (208 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8111-3

Siblings work to solve their parents’ murders.

Twenty-six years ago, the parents of Adam and Kirsty were killed while on a family vacation in England’s Lake District. Adam was adopted by his paternal aunt’s family and grew up to become a teacher in Canada; Kirsty was taken in by her childless maternal aunt and husband in England. Over the years, their families’ strained relationship kept the siblings from seeing much of each other. Only when Adam announces his intention of going to his English hometown to teach for a year and research his family history do the panicstricken relatives tell him and Kirsty the truth. Their parents were not killed in an automobile accident, as they had always thought, but were murdered for unknown reasons by someone who left their two children alive in their vacation rental. Kirsty doesn’t initially share Adam’s determination, but after they meet again, they quickly grow closer, and both set off for the Lake District looking for clues to the past. They’re assisted by their father’s best friend and fellow photographer, who’s saved a tape of a TV segment that examined the cold case. Meanwhile, Kirsty must deal with a stalker who’s sending her creepy messages and gifts and may be a rapist and murderer the police are searching for. The pair soon discover that a man went missing the same day as the murders. Although his body was found in a lake weeks later and his death written off as an accident, the incident gives them a starting point in their search, which will change their lives forever.

There’s not much mysterious in this pleasant cozy, but Fraser (A Question of Identity, 2012, etc.) provides some sympathetically prickly characters.

THE SHADOW TRACER

Gardiner, Meg Dutton (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 27, 2013 978-0-525-95322-7

Gardiner’s latest stand-alone revisits the story of Thelma and Louise, with Thelma played by a professional skip tracer and Louise by a refugee from kindergarten.

As she escaped a burning building five years ago, Sarah Keller promised her dying sister, Bethany, that she’d protect Bethany’s daughter Zoe from the monstrous Worthes, the polygamous family of self-anointed prophets— “white trash mafia who got a bad dose of God”—into which Bethany had unwisely married. With the unexpected help of Deputy Marshal Michael Lawless, Sarah succeeded in going

off the grid in Oklahoma City and raising the little girl as her own. When a series of freak accidents outs Sarah and Zoe and makes national headlines, imprisoned patriarch Eldrick Worthe, whose desire to recover Zoe for their family is intensified by darker motives, sends Grissom Briggs, the Worthes’ “Shattering Angel,” after Sarah, together with two of Eldrick’s granddaughters, Fell and Reavy, to serve as his “wives of the wind” and well-armed wingmen. Sarah, whose experience as a skip tracer has taught her a bit about vanishing without a trace, grabs Zoe, phones Lawless and heads to Roswell, N.M., where he’s arranged a more secure hideout for her. But “more secure” is only a relative term when you’re pursued by avenging angels with shotguns, and Sarah’s flight leaves a blood-soaked trail behind her. Realizing eventually that she can’t remain on the run indefinitely, Sarah hatches a scheme to turn the Worthes against each other. A series of expertly planned surprises awaits both the pursuers and their prey.

If you can accept the preposterous setup, the ruthlessly two-dimensional villains and the world’s most uncomplaining 5-year-old, Gardiner (Ransom River, 2012, etc.) will keep you up half the night with nonstop action and nary a pause for breath.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND FRANKENSTEIN’S DIARY

Grant, Barry Severn House (183 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8218-9

The world’s greatest detective confronts a Rupert Murdoch–like adversary.

Now thawed after years embedded in a Swiss glacier, Holmes is approached

by Andrew Swann to investigate the biggest ongoing crime in Britain: the suppression of animal rights and the subversion of human democracy. Swann’s father, who retired after a career in Fleet Street, created the Rabbit Underground, an animal rights activist group whose legislative efforts have been squelched by media titan Gerald Gurloch. Gurloch’s fortune, which began with slaughterhouses and expanded to salacious tabloids, cybermalfeasance and political bribery, is now dedicated to three goals: Kill Sherlock Holmes, blow up Nelson’s Column and defame the queen. To achieve these ends, Gurloch buys up a Caribbean island from which to conduct nefarious enterprises. He hacks into Google and Scotland Yard’s files, putting pressure on Lestrade’s grandson, also a detective inspector, to resign. He corrupts Nigel Greenwood, current head of the Metropolitan Police. And he may just be underwriting professor Droon’s experiments on apes. Just what he has to do with the quiet deaths of Lord North and Sylvia Swann has yet to be proved. The quest to do so sends Holmes’ amanuensis, journalist James Wilson, scampering overseas and Holmes himself reconnoitering the Swiss Alps in his Aston Martin. Disguises come into play, as does a bit of code-breaking, the bickering of Gurloch’s twin daughters, Google-hacking under

the nom de blog Black Swan and a master criminal’s gift of Dr. Watson’s little tin box of unpublished Holmes stories to Wilson.

The denouement, which saves Lestrade’s job, defeats Gurloch and solves all the murders, finds Holmes facing his third deadly skirmish with death in peaceful Switzerland.

Sherlock-ians, as is their wont, may quibble, but lovers of ratiocination (Sherlock Holmes and the Swedish Enigma, 2012, etc.) will have a field day.

GREEN-EYED LADY

Greaves, Chuck Minotaur (288 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-250-00524-3

A California senatorial candidate’s tumble into a honey trap is only the beginning of attorney Jack MacTaggart’s brightly daffy second case.

Former LA mayor Warren Burkett calls it a setup. The newspapers call it the Goldilocks Affair. Everyone agrees that when the LAPD arrived at a vacationing cardiac surgeon’s house, they found Burkett lying naked in bed after he’d broken in—just helping a green-eyed lady whose purse and keys had been snatched, he maintained, a lady who wanted to thank him for letting him into what turned out to not be her house. Oh, and a Berthe Morisot painting has vanished. With three weeks left till the election and his opponent, mega-developer Larry Archer, moving in for the kill, Burkett hires Jack to find the lady who set the trap and promises a bonus if Jack can get her indicted before election day. Unfortunately, someone’s determined to make Jack’s job even harder, and the first time Jack meets green-eyed Jordan Mardian is after someone’s thrown her off the Colorado Street Bridge. Detectives Mike Madden and Chico Alvarez, assuming that someone was Jordan herself, lose interest in the case. But once he’s learned that Santa Barbara art dealer Jordan was once working girl Joan Marsden, linked to graffiti artist Ricky Rio and, through him, Angela G. Archer, the opposition candidate’s wife, Jack won’t be thrown off the scent, not even when Burkett cuts him loose. From here on in things get a little murky. Puzzle fans will watch closely as Jack, prompted by a clue delivered by Etch-a-Sketch, searches for Jordan’s safe-deposit box, while keeping in mind that he may find nothing worth his trouble, which is considerable.

Greaves (Hush Money, 2012) plots far more waggishly than real life could hope to imitate. Not one reader in a thousand will guess the ending.

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“Die-hard Frost fans will be pleased...” from first frost

MORE BITTER THAN DEATH

Grebe, Camilla; Träff, Åsa Translated by Norlen, Paul Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4516-5460-8

A second round of homicide, troubled patients and scarcely less troubled personal relationships for Stockholm psychotherapist Siri Bergman.

You wouldn’t think the murder of a mother whose 5-year-old daughter is a most unhelpful witness would have anything to do with a therapy group for women who’ve been in abusive relationships, and, outside the pages of fiction, you’d probably be right. But Grebe and Träff linger for so long on the dynamics of the latest group Siri runs with her partner, Aina Davidsson, that it’s only a matter of time before the crime is connected to one of the group members: Malin, who was raped on her first meeting with a new acquaintance; Sofie, who was beaten by her stepfather; Sirkka, who didn’t realize how abusive her husband had been until he was dead; Kattis, whose ex, Henrik, claims that she’s a pathological liar; and Hillevi, a pediatric oncologist who would have stayed with her violent husband if he hadn’t started beating one of their children too. And, in fact, the murder of Susanne Olsson turns out to have ties to more than one member of the group—a fact that leads to a truly shocking development halfway through the story. Unfortunately, matters proceed along more routine lines thereafter. Siri’s lover, Markus, isn’t happy that she’s shutting him out of her pregnancy. Siri finds herself getting maybe too close to one member of the group. The 5-year-old witness is kidnapped. Siri has to be rescued from a narrow brush with death.

Siri is an interesting heroine, but this case, like her debut (Some Kind of Peace, 2012), lacks the core of cold logic that fuels the best of the recent flowering of Scandinavian thrillers.

LET IT BURN

Hamilton, Steve Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-312-64022-4 Michigan’s Upper Peninsula will have to take care of itself this time. A newly paroled convict has recalled Alex McKnight (Misery Bay, 2011, etc.) to Detroit past and present.

Before a shooting sidelined him from the Detroit PD, Alex helped put away Darryl King, a 16-year-old black kid he saw running from the scene of Wayne State student Elana Paige’s murder. Over several grueling days, Alex first chased the boy, then went through volume after volume of mug shots and finally played a key role in the arrest that was credited to Detective Arnie Bateman. Now Alex’s old sergeant, Tony 28

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Grimaldi, wants him to know that Darryl is back on the street.

Alex, who admits that “I don’t have much of a talent for putting things out of my mind,” can’t stop himself from making the fivehour drive down to Detroit, where he has dinner with FBI agent Janet Long and improbably shares milk and chocolate cake with Darryl’s mother, Jamilah King, who thinks he’s come to apologize for locking up the wrong man. And, in fact, the more Alex thinks about it, the more he wonders if Darryl really did stab Elana Paige to death. Just as he’s convinced himself that Darryl’s mother is right after all, Arnie Bateman is killed under circumstances that make Darryl look guiltier than ever. So Alex is left in the ironic position of desperately trying to track down and vindicate a man he was once equally desperate to track down and lock up.

Hamilton always gives good value, and this swift-moving, moody tale is no exception, even if the very last twist is perhaps one too many.

FIRST FROST

Henry, James Minotaur (352 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 23, 2013 978-1-250-02553-1 Publisher James Gurbutt and crime reviewer Henry Sutton team up as James Henry to give readers another crack at R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost, hero of the long-running British television series A Touch of Frost.

The latest Frost is actually an earlier incarnation, working under Stanley Mullett as the newly minted superintendent tries to manage the “overstretched and under-resourced” Denton Division. His two detective inspectors, Jim Allen and Bert Williams, are out of action. Allen is on a walking tour in the mountains, and Williams is simply missing. That leaves Mullett his two detective constables, aging Arthur Hanlon and young, energetic Sue Clarke, along with DI Jack Frost, to deal with a rash of crimes that would stagger hardier forces. First, teenager Julie Hudson is snatched from a dressing room at Aster’s. Next, Julie’s mother, Wendy, is beaten nearly to death. Then, Vanessa Litchfield, a teacher at Julie’s school, finds a body in Denton Union Canal. Not to be outdone, single mom Liz Fraser reports that her toddler, Becky, has been attacked by a wild animal.

Frost responds to these emergencies by turning off his police radio, revving up his Cortina and defying everyone, including his beleaguered boss, to rein him in. He stashes Becky Fraser in the hospital by launching a story of a rabies threat, browbeats the head of St. Mary’s School for Girls into telling more than she’d like about Ms. Litchfield, interviews and re-interviews anyone remotely connected to Julie Hudson. But as the bodies pile up and the threat level goes nuclear, Frost focuses more on Williams’ disappearance as the key to Denton’s crime wave.

Gurbutt and Sutton pack enough incidents into their prequel to generate an entire season of A Touch of Frost. Diehard Frost fans will be pleased, but neophytes will more likely be sent into shock.

SPIDER WOMAN’S DAUGHTER

Hillerman, Anne Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-06-227048-1

A daughter takes on her famous father’s legacy in resuming a series focused on Navajo culture.

Bernadette Manuelito is at the helm of a mystery that involves all of Shiprock’s Navajo Tribal Police force when one of her longtime colleagues is gunned down after a breakfast with co-workers. Bernie is on hand when a hooded figure shoots her colleague, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, and she’ll do anything it takes to find his assailant while his life hangs in the balance. Unfortunately, as witness to the crime, Bernie is forced to take a back seat in the case. Luckily, her husband, Sgt Jim Chee, is leading the inquiry, so she’s still a party to insider information.

In the time she has open from investigating, Bernie connects with the American Indian Resource Center, trying to finish a job Joe had contracted to help with. The AIRC houses an unbelievable collection of Indian art and artifacts, and Bernie soon finds herself drawn not only to the beauty of what she sees, but also to the connections of the staff to Jim’s and Joe’s pasts. At the same time, she’s forced to shift some attention to her little sister Darleen’s care of their mother when it becomes apparent that Darleen’s drinking is affecting her caretaking abilities.

With big shoes to fill, Hillerman does her best to copy the style of her father Tony’s beloved series (The Shape Shifter, 2006, etc.), maintaining the integrity of Navajo culture throughout. Fans will spot the guilty party a mile off.

DEATH OF THE DEMON

Holt, Anne Translated by Bruce, Anne Scribner (288 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4516-3480-8

The murder of an Oslo foster home director points, inexplicably and disturbingly, to her latest charge.

Olav Håkonsen has always been different from other children—capable of elaborate courtesies, yet prone to uncontrollable rages. By the time he was 3, his mother, Birgitte, was already afraid of him, and his diagnosis years later with Minimal Brain Dysfunction would have come as something of a relief if it hadn’t prompted the social services authorities to take him away from her. When he joins the seven other children at the Spring Sunshine Foster Home, things instantly go wrong. Despite the best efforts of kindly caregiver Maren Kalsvik, he gets into a shouting match with a younger child, throws food across the room and hurls a string of obscenities at director Agnes Vestavik, who retaliates by keeping his loving, incapable mother from visiting him for a

fortnight. The air is abruptly cleared by the discovery of Agnes’ body, stabbed to death, and the news that Olav vanished into the night. Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen, who catches the case, focuses on ostensibly more likely suspects, from assistant director Terje Welby, who’s been embezzling from the foster home’s funds, to Agnes’ unnamed lover, a used-car salesman who’s been forging checks he’s stolen from her checkbook. But a second violent death only muddies the waters further, and at any rate, none of the adults casts anything like the shadow of pitiable, monstrous Olav.

Not the finest hour for Hanne (Blind Goddess, 2012, etc.) and her detective team, who are equally upstaged by the unforgettable 12-year-old at the heart of the matter.

PURGATORY KEY

James, Darrell Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (336 pp.) $14.99 paper | Aug. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-2371-6 The search for two missing teens is sparked by an unexpected connection between one of the missing and the investigator herself.

Lissa Rogers has always been an adventurous girl. So when she takes her closest friend, Kendra Kozak, on a kayaking trip in the Louisiana bayou, Kendra isn’t sure what to expect. Terrebonne Key, where they finally come ashore, proves to be more mysterious and less friendly than anticipated. The two girls soon find themselves held hostage by the island’s inhabitants, brothers Payton and Teddy, who are able to enforce their will on the girls by threatening them with Gigi and Java, two captive white tigers.

Meanwhile, Lissa’s grandfather Edgar Egan gets in touch with investigator Del Shannon due to her reputation for being able to find anyone, and fast. Del’s reluctant to take the case, since she thinks that Lissa’s just an irresponsible teenager who’s failed to keep in touch. But a surprising connection between Del and Lissa convinces her otherwise. It’s icing on the cake that FBI agent Frank Falconet gets assigned to track down Payton and connects with Del in doing so. The two embark on a road trip to Louisiana to track down Lissa and Kendra and find out along the way if there’s any love left between them.

Though he features a female protagonist, James tends to treat his female characters badly. That’s a shame, since they’re often the brains in the house (Sonora Crossing, 2012, etc.).

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THE FIRE WITNESS

Kepler, Lars Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (512 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-374-29866-1 Superb, spooky whodunit from the Swedish couple who write as Kepler (The Nightmare, 2012, etc.).

Considering the nasty things that the likes of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and now Kepler have been turning up underneath Sweden’s soft, pine-clad, liberal veneer, it seems surprising that the entire country has not emigrated to safer climes. Some cannot, though, notably the young women who live at a home for wayward youth in the country’s chilly north—a place where Very Bad Things are about to happen. The mayhem begins with the extremely graphic murder of a ward nurse (“She cannot see her body lying on the floor or the dog sneaking in and tentatively lapping the blood leaking from her crushed head”), and that’s just the start. Enter world-weary detective Joona Linna, whom one of the girls tellingly calls “the Finn” and who really shouldn’t be on the case; he’s in trouble, it seems, for having leaked information to a leftist group back home in Stockholm, and in any event, he’s a little shellshocked, “searching for that mental stillness that will allow him to observe and not give in to the impulse to look away.” There’s plenty to look away from, though Joona immediately sees things that others do not, even as one of his informants sees a malevolent ghost in the hallways. But why would someone, real or supernatural, go to all the work of killing a nurse and trying to pin it on a troubled kid? Ah, cherchez la chose: Someone wants something, and that someone figures in the worst of Joona’s dreams and case files. As the story unfolds, the mad look sane and the sane look mad, and Kepler’s novel turns from simple mystery to an intriguing, satisfying blend of police procedural and horror story.

A rich, nuanced tale, ideal for beach reading, just as long as the beach doesn’t harbor too many shadows.

THE LAST WORD

Lutz, Lisa Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-1-4516-8666-1 Now that she’s assumed control of her family’s detective agency (Trail of the Spellmans, 2012, etc.), Isabel Spellman finds that riding herd on the crazies she’s related to is no bed of roses.

Nobody, it seems, wants to play nice with Izzy. That’s not entirely surprising, given the whimsically dictatorial memos she’s flooded the office with since she assumed a controlling interest in Spellman Investigations. It isn’t bad enough that Edward Slayter, the venture capitalist who 30

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supplied the money to finance her hostile takeover, is beginning to lose his mind to Alzheimer’s and control of Slayter Industries to an unknown insider who’s clearly trying to implicate both him and Izzy in a money-laundering scheme; Edward insists on conducting his briefing sessions with Izzy while they’re jogging three times a week. Izzy’s brief stint undercover at Divine Strategies, a religious-software firm Edward’s looking to buy, discloses secrets unbecoming its avowed mission. When parttime Spellman employee Vivien Blake’s determination to sue the Lightning Fast Moving Company for overcharging her and damaging her stuff gets thwarted by the movers’ highly predictable stonewalling, Izzy’s kid sister Rae proposes a new strategy: conflict resolution, formerly known to the uninitiated as vigilante justice. Maggie Mason, the pro bono lawyer married to Izzy’s brother, David, is working for the release of Louis Myron Washburn, who may be guilty of every felony in the Bay Area except for the robbery and murder he was convicted of 12 years ago. And serious illness lurks right around the corner for one of the Spellmans, although serious crime once again pretty much leaves them alone.

Another fizzy round of Mystery Lite with the cast of You Can’t Take It with You off their meds. Izzy seems even more dissociated than in her previous five outings, though fans will either cheer or not notice. (Agent: Stephanie Rostan)

LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF MURDER

Martin, Nancy Obsidian (384 pp.) $23.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-451-41525-7

A new boss spells trouble for socialite-turned-reporter Nora Blackbird (No Way to Kill a Lady, 2012, etc.).

Aussie expatriate Gus Hardwicke knows how to sell papers. He’s turning the Philadelphia Intelligencer into a National Inquirer wannabe, dragging the names of Philly’s rich and famous through the mud.

And he wants help from Nora Blackbird, whose blue-blood lineage gives her access to all those A-listers. At first, she’s willing to probe the stabbing of 60-something fashion designer Swain Starr on the farm he and his second wife, a supermodel named Zephyr, hoped to make a model of organics. After all, Nora’s sister Libby’s eldest, Rawlins, is questioned by the police just because his abandoned car has been found near the crime scene.

But Nora soon learns the social consequences of her snoop-andtell. She also learns that Gus’ interest in her is not entirely platonic. It’s not clear why the hunky Australian would mess with someone who shares a bed with mobbed-up Michael Abruzzo, but mess with Nora he does. And Gus’ advances are one more mess Nora definitely does not need, distracted as she is by caring for her gracious but decaying family farm, riding herd on her two ditzy sisters and, of course, trying to locate her lost pig, Ralphie. It takes a night in the slammer, a barn fire and the appearance at Blackbird Farm of Noah, the infant Nora thought her

sister, Emma, gave up for adoption, to solidify Nora’s position as Philadelphia’s patron saint of lost causes.

Martin’s ninth Blackbird sisters entry pushes the envelope over a cliff.

EVIL AND THE MASK

Nakamura, Fuminori Soho Crime (368 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-61695-212-9

A moneyed, aimless Japanese kid struggles against the curse his father has laid on him.

Like his own father before him, Shozo Kuki has great things in mind for his youngest son. Even before Fumihiro Kuki turns 12, his father tells him that he plans to make him “a cancer” whose life will be dedicated to making other lives miserable. As the months go by, Fumihiro’s father hints at the particulars of the plan, which reiterates a family pattern generations old. After introducing a girl named Kaori into his household as Fumihiro’s playmate, confidante and intimate, Kuki senior plans to have her gang-raped as his son looks on, destroying his belief in the goodness of humanity and his own power to battle its evil. The only way Fumihiro can rescue himself and Kaori, whom he has indeed fallen in love with, is to kill his father. Yet not even the perfect crime Fumihiro hatches and executes can save him from his father’s clutches, for committing a murder at such a tender age permanently warps his mind and estranges him from Kaori. And when he comes of age in the shadow of his father’s mysterious disappearance, Fumihiro’s attempts to find out more information about Kaori, now a hostess in a nightclub, and protect her from whoever else has taken a close interest in her welfare, only entangles him more deeply with the anti-government terrorist group JL and with his own deeply divided nature.

A spare, fast-moving parable whose lure, even more than that of The Thief (2012), is more philosophical and abstract than visceral.

THE BAT

Nesbø, Jo Translated by Bartlett, Don Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (384 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-345-80709-0 Inspector Harry Hole’s 1997 debut finally follows its seven successors into English translation.

It’s an unusual debut since the very first page finds Harry clearing passport control in Sydney, half a world away from his native Oslo, from which he’s improbably been sent to observe the Australian

investigation into the probable rape and undoubted strangling of Inger Holter, who once hosted a Norwegian children’s TV show but had been working in a Sydney bar when she died. Neil McCormack, head of the Surry Hills Crime Squad, explains to Harry that although he’s been paired with Aboriginal detective Andrew Kensington as a professional courtesy, he’s not to take a leading role, not to make any inquiries on his own, and not to interfere with McCormack’s chain of command. Right. Fans of Harry’s later adventures (The Redeemer, 2013, etc.) will wait with bated breath to see how long it takes him to break every rule in the book. Nor does Harry disappoint. He converts a key witness, Inger’s fellow barmaid Birgitta Enquist, into his bedmate. He starts drinking again. He adds a local prostitute to his list of conquests. He gets into a series of increasingly violent brawls. As it becomes more obvious that the cops are dealing with a serial rapist who has no reservations about killing, Harry brushes elbows (and more) with Inger’s new boyfriend, Evans White, a drug dealer in New South Wales; with Teddy Mongabi, the baddest pimp in Sydney; and with transvestite clown Otto Rechtnagel, whose status as the most likely suspect is canceled for the best possible reason.

Harry is already every bit as volcanic as in his later cases. The big difference is Australia, which Nesbø, seeing it through the eyes of both a tourist and a cultural pathologist, makes you wonder how much different it is from Norway after all.

ENIGMA OF CHINA

Qiu Xiaolong Minotaur (288 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-250-02580-7

Can Inspector Chen toe the Communist Party line and certify a suspicious death as a suicide?

As he listens to a lecture at the Shanghai Writers’ Association in which scholar Yao Ji deplores the “moral bankruptcy” of modern China, esteemed poet and police detective Chen Cao again notes the incongruity and delicacy of his job.

Matters like these are much on his mind when Chen is called to help investigate the death of Zhou Keng, the director of the Shanghai Housing Development Committee, who’s recently fallen under an ethical cloud. Zhou has been “under detention” for weeks in the luxe Moller Villa Hotel. His death by hanging has been judged a suicide, and Chen’s been called in to confirm this party ruling even though Inspector Liao, the head of the homicide squad, and his assistant, veteran detective Wei, are also working the case. Chen and Wei are greeted at the hotel by a pair of party officials, Jiang and Liu, who barely let them work in peace. Although these bureaucrats are anxious to close the case, Chen and Wei find many troubling inconsistencies, like the fact that Zhou had taken sleeping pills on the night of his death. Chen’s Internet search for more about the controversial Zhou reveals mainly that information about him has been |

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blocked. When a colleague is run down in a suspicious incident, Chen knows what he must do.

In his ninth Inspector Chen novel (Don’t Cry, Tai Lake, 2012, etc.), Xiaolong again uses a mystery to focus a large and nuanced portrait of contemporary China.

THE CHRISTMAS WASSAIL

Sedley, Kate Severn House (256 pp.) $29.95 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8275-2

Even the Christmas season of 1483 can’t slow down Roger the Chapman’s propensity for problem-solving.

Roger is at home with his family in Bristol working to make the 12 days of the holiday festive. The children are particularly pleased with a small troupe of mummers, and Roger is enjoying all the extra food and drink, when a prominent citizen is found murdered and mutilated. The man was a friend of Sir George Marvell, a wealthy war hero disliked by almost everyone, including his own family. After saving Marvell from an assault by an Irish slave trader, Roger is surprised to hear Marvell write off the incident as a case of mistaken identity. When Marvell vanishes, a determined search reveals nothing until Roger and Marvell’s grandson James discover his mutilated body in his former home outside Bristol. Roger and James follow the trail of a young man who had paid court to Marvell’s wealthy older sister, only to be beaten and chased out of the area. Certain that he’s seeking revenge, they do their best to track him down. In the meantime, Roger is attacked several times by someone who thinks he knows too much. Roger’s determination to find the killer reaches a white-hot pitch after a young family friend to whom he’s given his old cloak is murdered—mistaken for him?

Not much nourishment for puzzle-solvers who want to compete with Roger. But Sedley (The Tintern Treasure, 2012, etc.) does provide a most interesting look at historical Christmas customs, many of which survive to this day.

GREY DAWN

Simon, Clea Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8261-5 A fascination with gothic novels colors a grad student’s perception of a crime.

Dulcie Schwartz is still working on her Ph.D. at an unnamed but prestigious university in Cambridge, Mass. In the university’s Mildon collection, she’s found passages from a novel she believes were written by the author on whom her dissertation focuses. When coed Mina Love, who looks a lot like Dulcie, is viciously attacked, Dulcie, who’s in the vicinity, hears wolflike 32

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howls and sees her faculty advisor, Martin Thorpe, nearby looking very strange. Dulcie’s determination to investigate redoubles once Mina’s roommate, Emily, is also attacked, though she escapes with less serious injuries. Emily is sure the attacker is Mina’s possessive boyfriend. But Dulcie still wonders about professor Thorpe, who’s been acting very odd lately. It’s no wonder that Dulcie’s boyfriend, Chris, who works nights, is worried about Dulcie, since her only protection is the occasional apparition of her deceased cat, Mr. Grey, warning her of approaching trouble. Meanwhile, Dulcie’s dreams are filled with scenes from the novel she is slowly piecing together. A visiting professor may have some papers that will help her if Dulcie can stay alive and continue her research.

Simon’s feline mysteries (True Grey, 2012, etc.), best read in the order in which they were written, show Dulcie’s growing obsession with the fragments of a mysterious novel—a novel that presents a better mystery than her latest case.

UNSEEN

Slaughter, Karin Delacorte (400 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-345-53947-2 Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent’s undercover assignment leads predictably to more actionfueled heartache for him and the rest of Slaughter’s continuing cast.

Will’s exacting boss, Deputy Director Amanda Wagner, has recreated Will as bad-boy Bill Black in the hope of getting information that could help shut down the operations of Big Whitey, a legendary (or perhaps nonexistent) Florida gangster whose tentacles have extended further north. Will has made good progress in worming himself into the confidences of petty crook Tony Dell and his stepsister Cayla Martin, a trashy pharmacy nurse with access to exactly the sorts of drugs that Big Whitey supplies to his clients. But Will’s friends in the Macon Police Department know nothing about his undercover work, and he’s constantly threatened with exposure or violence by their own activities. As usual, Slaughter (Criminal, 2012, etc.) gets things off to a supercharged start with an opening scene in which three men break into the home of two Macon officers, Detective Lena Adams and her husband, Jared Long, and open fire on Jared—a scene that ends with the shocking revelation that the third housebreaker is Will. The rest of the tale revolves around the widening gulf between Lena and Jared’s stepmother, Dr. Sara Linton, who considers wild-child Lena responsible for Jared’s shooting, as the GBI and the Macon cops try to smoke out Big Whitey. This time around, however, Slaughter keeps leaping from one time frame to another, so characters who’ve been wounded or killed in previous chapters return in perfect health to discuss their strategy or cross swords with each other.

As lurid and sanguinary as any of Lena and Will’s earlier cases but a lot more distractingly kaleidoscopic, as generic professional criminals battle for attention with the far more compelling histrionics of series regulars.

“...slyly entertaining satire...” from shoot the dog

SHOOT THE DOG

rather at cross-purposes with Bruno’s. The body, when Dr. Gelletreau finally gets a chance to examine it, can’t be identified, but it tells quite a story: its torso marked with a pentagram and its organs showing evidence of high recent alcohol consumption and rough recent sex. The contents of the punt—a sizeable black candle, a decapitated cockerel—tell their own story of a Black Mass. These hints, so scandalous to Father Sentout, are confirmed by further evidence of satanic rites in the Gouffre de Colombac, a cave that’s hitherto been a rather innocuous local tourist attraction. It’s up to Bruno to trace the links among a man accused of beating his wife and daughter, a suspicious deal to develop a vacation village, and a possible descendant of the notorious royal mistress Madame de Montespan, on whose behalf the first Black Mass was offered 300 years ago.

The case is just as complicated as it sounds, although the mystery is more conscientious than surprising. As usual in this series, the high points are Bruno’s decorously offstage bouts of sex and his far more titillating meals.

Smith, Brad Scribner (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-4391-9756-1 Another Hollywood production ventures into the sticks, with results that are predictably droll, dry and homicidal.

Now that she’s cut director Peter Dunmore out of Frontier Woman, “the Eat, Pray, Love of the nineteenth century,” just as it’s about to begin shooting in Woodstock, N.Y., scheming producer Sam Sawchuk is ready to install her husband and producing partner, gutless rookie Robb Fetterman, in his place.

Little does Sam know she’s about to be outmaneuvered by two new colleagues even sharper than she is. When she approaches suspiciously red-haired Indian casino owner Ronnie Red Hawk for the last $6 million she needs to shoot the picture, he responds by writing a check and then grabbing the reins from Sam’s Big Deal Productions. Virgil Cain, the Woodstock farmer last seen under arrest for murder in Red Means Run (2012), demonstrates a quieter, funnier mode of resistance once he and a pair of Percherons he’s nursing back to health are hired for some background shots. Virgil befriends all the wrong people, from veteran second-unit director Tommy Alamosa to 10-year-old actress Georgia Lee Thompson, and gets under the skin of selfimportant types like Robb and producer Levi Brown. The death of leading lady Olivia Burns, well-liked but scarcely mourned by the hard-bitten crew of Frontier Woman, sets the stage for Ronnie to replace her with starlet Kari Karson, who’s better known for her tabloid exploits than her acting chops. There’ll be more violent deaths, but the criminal byplay is less engaging than the puncturing of the Hollywood blowhards by the country bumpkins who run rings around them.

Smith’s slyly entertaining satire makes it easy to overlook the perfunctory, forgettable mystery.

science fiction and fantasy BLOOD OF TYRANTS

Novik, Naomi Del Rey/Ballantine (448 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-345-52289-4 Eighth and penultimate entry (Crucible of Gold, 2012, etc.) in Novik’s historical fantasy series that presents the Napoleonic wars as a global conflict whose armed forces include intelligent dragons.

Washed ashore alone in Japan, William Laurence finds he has no memory of the last eight years. He recalls captaining a royal navy vessel, but, puzzlingly, he wears an aviator’s green jacket. As the guest, or prisoner, of a local lord who serves Lady Arikawa, he finds that he can speak Chinese—a fact that makes the isolationist Japanese all the more suspicious. Laurence escapes, but, oddly, Lady Arikawa—she turns out to be a powerful dragon—makes no great effort to recapture him.

Assisted by Lady Kiyomizu, a boozy water-dragon with a taste for Shakespeare, Laurence makes his way to Nagasaki, the only Japanese city that permits foreigners, where he’s reunited with his companions, including his dragon partner, Temeraire, but his memories still stubbornly refuse to return. Some officers of the Aerial Corps, an astonished Laurence discovers, are women; even more surprising, he learns that he’s an adopted son of the Chinese emperor and that his mission is to persuade China to

THE DEVIL’S CAVE

Walker, Martin Knopf (336 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 12, 2013 978-0-385-34952-9

More trouble in paradise comes to Bruno Courrèges in the form of a dead woman who may or may not be involved with a Black Mass—and not just any Black Mass.

Despite four earlier brushes with homicide (The Crowded Grave, 2012, etc.), residents of the Périgord village of St. Denis are still prepared to show a healthy interest in a corpse, especially when it’s that of an attractive nude floating down the River Vézère in an otherwise deserted punt.

Bruno, the chief of police, struggles to pull the little boat ashore.

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join an alliance against Napoleon. Unfortunately, the Chinese court is riddled with traitors, and the British are suspected of involvement in the opium trade. Meanwhile, backed by an alliance with the powerful Incan empire, Napoleon has invaded Russia. Novik has a firm grasp of 19th-century styles, sensibilities and manners. Her fantasy extrapolations of real history are both charming and realistic. She writes vivid action prose with a good feel for the fog of battle. Best of all, the dragons are characters as fully realized as the humans.

A first-class entry in a remarkable and appealing series; this one’s mostly independently intelligible, though newcomers will want to start from the beginning. (Agent: Cynthia Manson)

ASSAULT ON SUNRISE

Shea, Michael Tor (288 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-7653-2436-8

Second of a trilogy begun with The Extra (2010), a near-future dystopia in which “extras” are cannon fodder in liveaction movies.

Much of Los Angeles has degenerated into a horrific ghetto known as the Zoo, whose inhabitants will do almost anything to escape. Bigshot movie director and coldblooded psychopath Val Margolian has developed Anti-Personnel Properties, mechanical killing machines, to hunt, battle and devour the extras. The extras that survived Margolian’s last box-office smash are now rich and have taken up residence in Sunrise, a thriving, idyllic small town populated by hearty can-do types who know how to take care of themselves. Margolian’s big new idea, born partly of artistic vision and partly from a desire for revenge, involves tricking the Sunrisers into killing some cops. Once the town is found guilty of “corporate homicide,” it’s turned over to Margolian and his APPs to execute the death sentence. So ex-extras Curtis, Japh and Jool stand alongside Sunrise natives sent from central casting to battle mechanical wasps, mantises and other unpleasant surprises. Shea brings in a few fresh details to this otherwise vacuously predictable enterprise. One battle scene blends into the next. It gives nothing away to point out that there’s never a question about who will win.

Despite the endless gore, the action is curiously bloodless. As an exercise in which money does most of the talking, it’s almost as cynical as its premise. In the end, marginally more intriguing than watching paint dry.

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TWO FRONTS

Turtledove, Harry Del Rey/Ballantine (416 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 23, 2013 978-0-345-52468-3 Series: War That Came Early, 5 Turtledove (Coup d’Etat, 2012, etc.) delivers the fifth installment in his latest series—a final volume is promised— developing an alternate-history version of World War II. This widescreen Technicolor what-if began with Turtledove’s 2009 novel Hitler’s War, which portrayed a World War II starting with a 1938 German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Real history and Turtledove’s imaginary version continued to diverge thereafter, as Britain and France allied themselves with Nazi Germany to battle the communist Soviet Union. The U.S. goes to war with Japan while avoiding the European theater, and in Spain, fascist Nationalists with German backing wage trench warfare against mingled Communists and Republicans allied with free Czechs and independently operating Americans and British. Now, however—and we’ve only reached 1942—following an anti-fascist coup, Britain has joined with France to open a western front against Germany. Again, the number of plotlines and characters can be bewildering: frontline soldiers on the European western and eastern fronts, sailors and marines on Hawaii, Japanese pilots in China, civilian Americans and German Jews, Ukrainian partisans and Czech snipers, among others. Inevitably, major historical figures merely rate a mention or die offstage in plausible fashion. Patience is a necessary virtue when reading Turtledove’s slow, knowledgeable, scattershot saga, and any earlier impressions of his building toward some earth-shattering conclusion are shown, here, to be quite incorrect. Instead, Turtledove embeds many small, subtle hints—to reveal them would be to give the game away—that his real objective is to paint, brush stroke by brush stroke, a postwar landscape quite different than the one that prevailed in the real world.

Stick with it—there will be surprises, just not the ones you were expecting. (Agent: Russell Galen)

STORM RIDERS

Weis, Margaret; Krammes, Robert Tor (512 pp.) $27.99 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-0-7653-3349-0 Series: Dragon Brigade, 2 Action, adventure, revenge, political intrigue and magical technology soar in the second volume in the Dragon Brigade series (Shadow Raiders, 2011).

Father Jacob Northrop and Sir Ander Martel have confirmed the identity of the bat-riding, demondisguised attackers responsible for massacres and collapsing buildings. The Bottom Dwellers, descendants of an island sunk

by powerful magic, have spent 500 years plotting retribution against all other countries of the world and developing the use of contramagic, spells which destroy other magical constructs.

Unfortunately, the mere mention of contramagic is considered heretical, and the Grand Bishop will do anything to hide the church’s complicity in the Bottom Dwellers’ plight. Meanwhile, Capt. Stephano de Guichen of Rosia and his friends are powerless to counter the threat, as they’re stranded on a remote island—unless Stephano can persuade the island’s wild dragons to help. And Freyan spymaster Sir Henry Wallace also opposes the Bottom Dwellers (whom he inadvertently funded), while seeking what advantages he can for his own country. The novel is a great ride, offering shifting political alliances, thrilling battle sequences, angst-y romance and hairpin plot twists. Basing each fantasy nation’s language and culture on a European country is a bit of a cheat, but that’s outweighed by the floating palaces, magically steered dirigible ships and wyvern-drawn carriages. The series is also blessedly rich in strong, intriguing female characters, including Miri, the stubborn captain of the balloon ship Cloud Hopper; her mute, damaged but magically powerful sister, Gythe; Eiddwen, the ruthless mistress of disguise who serves the Bottom Dwellers; and especially Countess Cecile, the true power behind the Rosian throne, who has hidden her marriage to an executed traitor and her love for their apparently bastard son Stephano so that her many enemies will not target him.

Sheer epic fantasy fun.

r om a n c e SOME LIKE IT HOT

Andersen, Susan Harlequin (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jul. 30, 2013 978-0-373-77776-1 Harper, a dedicated wanderer, and Max, a man with deep roots in his community, embark on a red-hot affair, despite the fact that Harper will be leaving after a few months.

Harper Summerville is in Razor Bay, Wash., to covertly investigate a nonprofit for her family’s foundation. In order to do so, she takes a job as an activities coordinator for a local resort and immediately— and uncharacteristically—settles into friendships with Jenny, the resort owner, and her circle of intimates. Among them are Jake, Jenny’s fiance, and Max, Jake’s half brother. Max is a sheriff ’s deputy, a former Marine and a volunteer at the nonprofit Harper is checking out. He’s also one of the most intense and sexy men she’s ever met, so while she knows she should stay well clear of him, she’s drawn in and allows herself to explore an explosive attraction she’s never experienced before. Along

the way, she learns that Max’s quiet, stoic exterior hides a passionate, intriguing personality, and the more she gets to know him, the less she wants to leave. Yet Harper has built her life and her career around travel and the attractive lifestyle of a rolling stone, so staying put in Razor Bay with the only man who’s truly touched her emotionally is an alien, frightening idea. As for Max, he knows Harper is The One, and he’s willing to consider adopting a nomadic existence to keep her in his life, and his arms—even if all he’s ever dreamed of is settling down in his hometown; meeting Harper suddenly makes him visualize happy-ever-after. Andersen pens a hot, sexy, yet touching story of two lovers who must come to terms with making changes in their lives in order to be with the person they were meant for.

A sexy, surprising romance that goes to some unexpected places, with details, conflicts and characters that flesh out a story that is all the better for them.

ROSE HARBOR IN BLOOM

Macomber, Debbie Ballantine (336 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-345-52893-3

Jo Marie Rose continues to harbor struggling guests in her Cedar Cove inn while she works through her own grief.

After learning of her husband’s death in Afghanistan, Jo Marie bought a B&B in Cedar Cove and christened it The Inn at Rose Harbor. Settling into the charming community, becoming a first-class baker, and opening her home and her heart to guests have contributed to her own healing process, and she always feels especially connected to guests who are working through their own issues. She believes that the inn and the town offer sanctuary to anyone who needs it and is gratified when visitors seem buoyed by them. It’s spring in Cedar Cove, and guests to the inn include Annie, a young woman who has recently broken off her flawed engagement, and Mary, who is fighting cancer and wants a last glimpse of Seattle and some important people who live there, including George, the only man she ever loved.

As for Jo Marie, she has a few concerns this season, including the ornery handyman she works with and some difficult news regarding the husband she still mourns. Each woman will find strength and refuge in facing painful aspects of their pasts, and romance is in the air for Annie from the least expected direction. Mary faces an uncertain future but is heartened by some long-hoped-for reconciliations. And Jo Marie still finds peace in her home and business, even if her personal life lacks resolution.

In the second of Macomber’s Rose Harbor series, readers will find the emotionally impactful storylines and sweet, redemptive character arcs for which the author is famous.

Classic Macomber, which will please fans and keep them coming back for more.

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“A sweet, sexy, fun romance, with clever accents of suspense and entertaining dollops of humor.” from an english bride in scotland

AN ENGLISH BRIDE IN SCOTLAND

Sands, Lynsay Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-06-196311-7

Instead of taking the veil as planned, Annabel is whisked away from the convent and ordered to marry Scotsman Ross MacKay, her runaway sister’s intended groom.

Since being sent to a convent as an oblate before she was 10 years old, Annabel has known a stern, joyless existence. Now, just weeks before she’s meant to take her vows, Annabel’s mother shows up to bring her back home, forcing her to marry the man her sister, Kate, has been betrothed to since birth. But Kate has eloped with a servant, and her parents, desperate for the dower, pass Annabel off in her place. After two decades in a stifling religious environment, Annabel’s enthusiasm for her newfound freedom and a thousand new experiences is irrepressible, and Ross MacKay, her new husband, is captivated by her charm and spirit, despite the realization she is not his intended bride. Settling into his home and her place as wife of a clan laird, Annabel falls in love with her new life—and her husband—but she has been warned by her mother to keep her convent existence a secret, a detail which rests uneasily beside her honesty and straightforward nature. Navigating her new happiness against a wealth of secrets becomes even more complicated when an unknown enemy seems determined to harm Annabel; Ross must protect and defend the English wife he never knew he wanted but now finds he cannot live without. With humor, wit and compassion, Sands spins the touching tale of a lonely outsider who is rescued from the jaws of a bleak future and finds emotional and physical happiness through a marriage that was never meant to be. Ross is Annabel’s perfect hero, allowing her to come into her own and standing up for her in quiet, powerful ways. Watching Ross and his clan fall in love with Annabel is touching, and Ross’ prowess at maneuvering the church’s “bedding laws” and Annabel’s entrenched religious obedience are highly amusing.

A sweet, sexy, fun romance, with clever accents of suspense and entertaining dollops of humor.

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nonfiction THE AMERICAN WAY OF POVERTY How the Other Half Still Lives

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: ZEALOT by Reza Aslan.........................................................................38

Abramsky, Sasha Nation Books/Perseus (320 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-56858-726-4

MERLE HAGGARD by David Cantwell............................................. 40 THE SPORTS GENE by David Epstein............................................... 44

An updating of Michael Harrington’s influential 1962 report on poverty, The Other America, written in the hope that it, too, will launch a new war on poverty.

For 18 months, freelance journalist Abramsky (Inside Obama’s Brain, 2009, etc.), creator of the oral history project Voices of Poverty, traveled across more than half the states in the country to talk with the newly poor and the long-term destitute. These interviews, many of which can be heard on the project’s website, form the bulk of the first part of the book, “The Voices of Poverty.” They are accompanied by data from documented sources and hard statistics and by the author’s analysis of what he discovered as he looked into such issues as jobs, wages, health care, housing and education. His portrait of poverty is one of great complexity and diversity, existential loneliness and desperation—but also amazing resilience. In the second section, “Building a New and Better House,” Abramsky calls for basic changes in the economic landscape to reduce poverty. He bases his proposal on four major revenue sources: a public-works fund; an educational-opportunity fund; a poverty-mitigation fund backed by a financial transaction tax and energy profit taxes; and higher taxes on capital gains and highend incomes and inheritances. He spells out in some detail just how this money could be used to bring about a more equitable social compact in America. The author sees this as a moral imperative that will require an informed, proactive electorate and a citizen-led push for reform.

Abramsky’s well-researched, deeply felt depiction of poverty is eye-opening, and his outrage is palpable. He aims to stimulate discussion, but whether his message provokes action remains to be seen.

BREAKING THE LINE by Samuel G. Freedman................................. 46 SOUL FOOD by Adrian Miller............................................................. 55 HEADHUNTERS ON MY DOORSTEP by J. Maarten Troost............. 64 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, VOLUME 2

by Mark Twain................................................................................... 65

HEADHUNTERS ON MY DOORSTEP A True Treasure Island Ghost Story

Troost, J. Maarten Gotham Books (304 pp.) $26.00 Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-592-40789-7

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“Why has Christianity taken hold and flourished?

This book will give you the answers in the simplest, most straightforward, comprehensible manner.” from zealot

THE INTERNET POLICE How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed

even eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life. In fact, most of the incidents in them are pure fiction. Aslan (How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror, 2009, etc.) has made the study of religion his life’s work, and it shows. After explaining the origins and evolution of Islam, the author now turns to Christianity and its unlikely beginnings. The Gospels weren’t written during Jesus’ lifetime, but rather between A.D. 70 and 120, and they certainly weren’t written by the men whose names are attached to them. In fact, every word written about Jesus was written by people who never knew him in life—even though Paul claimed to know Jesus intimately, not as man, but as God. Jesus neither fit the paradigms nor fulfilled scriptural prophecies to meet the requirements of being a messiah. As he described himself, the historic “Jesus…was a Jew, and nothing more.” He was concerned only with Israel and his fellow Jews. For readers who believe that the Bible is the true word of God and its meaning must be taken literally, Aslan’s book will awaken doubt. The ancients did not see a difference between myth and reality, and eyewitness history did not exist; it was all propaganda. The authors of the Gospels were writing for the express purpose of explaining that Jesus wasn’t just another professional wonder worker; one thing set him apart.

Why has Christianity taken hold and flourished?

This book will give you the answers in the simplest, most straightforward, comprehensible manner. (Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles)

Anderson, Nate Norton (256 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 19, 2013 978-0-393-06298-4

A nuanced study of crime on the Internet and how government and law enforcement agencies have been tackling it.

Ars Technica senior editor Anderson seems somewhat sympathetic to the notion of the Internet’s borderless, innovative exceptionalism. But unlike advocates of unfettered creative chaos and online liberty, the author argues that since the Internet went global in the 1990s, it has been followed by a rise in online criminal activities harmful to life, limb and property in the “real” world. These problems include offshore havens, child pornography, cyberpeeping and extortion, spambotting and identity theft, all of which have made policing it not only necessary, but inevitable. Rather than create new entities to handle these crimes, governments have relied on boots already on the ground—local police forces, the Federal Trade Comission, the FBI, even Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has pursued overseas violators of American copyright protections with unusual—sometimes indiscriminate— aggressiveness. Anderson isn’t altogether impressed with the results. While scoring some impressive arrests and convictions of the creators and consumers of child pornography and of a creepy peeper named Luis Mijangos, law enforcement and the courts have had more difficulty going after spammers, pirates and other online crooks. In some cases, they have breeched privacy as brazenly as Mijangos, using remote access tools to spy on “owners” of stolen laptops, for example, without troubling themselves with obtaining court-issued warrants. Spammers and other fraudsters have proven elusive in the courts; on the other hand, penalties handed down by juries to copyright violators, like single mom and Kazaa user Jammie Thomas, have been thrown out by judges for being obscenely excessive. Unfortunately, there are few simple solutions on the horizon. “[W]e need the Internet police,” Anderson writes, “but we need to keep an eye on them—and on their tools.”

A thought-provoking primer on the state of cybercrime.

BREACH OF TRUST How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Bacevich, Andrew J. Metropolitan/Henry Holt (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-8050-8296-8

A former military officer and current professor assails the concept of the current all-volunteer Army and the general disconnect between the military and civilians.

Bacevich (History and International Relations/Boston Univ.; Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, 2010, etc.) offers a subtitle that is more than a little misleading, suggesting as it does that his complaint is a general failure to “support our troops.”

Instead, the author sees the widespread support-the-troops sentiments only as periodic feel-good moments for citizens who otherwise have nothing to do with the fighting and dying—and as crass opportunities for merchandisers. He takes us back to the anti-war sentiments fomented by the draft during the Vietnam War, noting that in our earlier wars, our practice had been to have an Army comprised of citizen-soldiers: everyone’s involved; everyone’s affected. No more. After 9/11, writes Bacevich, came the “great decoupling”—it was then that President George W. Bush told us to go on shopping and living as if we were not at war. The author notes the current widespread apathy about our armed conflicts.

After some sections dealing with the Cold War and its aftermath,

ZEALOT The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Aslan, Reza Random House (336 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-4000-6922-4 978-0-679-60353-5 e-book

A well-researched, readable biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

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A story of disgusting people doing disgusting things, told with relish and undisguised disdain.

Bacevich blasts our moves in the Middle East and our outsourcing of military functions to private contractors (who, he notes, have made vast fortunes). He writes with deep skepticism about our declarations of “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a World War II–type conclusion is impossible. He goes after some individuals, too; among them is Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose understanding of the challenges in Afghanistan, Bacevich claims, were “spectacularly arrogant or stunningly obtuse.” The author argues that the current system benefits only those in power and that the national security state does little but enrich some people and keep them in power. He deals with topics ranging from Israel to drone strikes, and he ends by advocating public service for all.

A mixture of passion, dismay and cynicism, with streaks of perhaps hopeless hope.

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR The Path to a Better Way of Death Butler, Katy Scribner (336 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4516-4197-4

A forthright memoir on illness and investigation of how to improve end-oflife scenarios.

“Every day across the country, family caregivers find themselves pondering a medical procedure that may save the life—or prevent the dying—of someone beloved and grown frail,” writes journalist Butler. But when is it time to stop intervening and

SWASTIKA NATION Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund

Bernstein, Arnie St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-250-00671-4 978-1-250-03644-5 e-book

The author of Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing (2009) returns with the disturbing story of the pro-Nazi movement that grew in 1930s America—until legal troubles and Pearl Harbor destroyed both the mad dreams and the dreamers.

Bernstein begins with a moment almost impossible to imagine: a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Tens of thousands were involved, including some 17,000 cops to keep control of the 100,000 protestors outside. (The author returns later with much more detail about the event.) Bernstein focuses on Fritz Julius Kuhn, born in Munich, a young man at the time Hitler began his improbable ascent to power. The author follows Kuhn to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen, and tells about his employment with Henry Ford, another who was dazzled by Hitler and besotted by anti-Semitism. Kuhn joined the Bund, worked his way into the position of Bundesführer and thereafter lived with blithe disregard for social conventions. The Bund found lots of supporters—on both coasts and in between—in Depression-era America, though it had some high-profile opponents, as well, including columnist Walter Winchell, who regularly blasted them. They founded publications and youth and women’s groups—in the youth camp, it seems, there was some sexual activity along with the canoeing and propaganda. Bernstein tells us about the odd outreach to Native Americans and reminds us of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here (about a fascist takeover of America). Eventually, the authorities in New York—Fiorello La Guardia and Thomas Dewey among them—decided they’d had enough and went after Kuhn. They got him, and he spent some jail time and ended up in Europe, dead and forgotten. |

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“Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.” from merle haggard

let nature take its course? Should medical procedures be performed to save a life regardless of the monetary costs and the toll it takes on an entire family? These are the questions Butler examines in this honest, moving memoir, as she details the last several years of her father’s life after he suffered a severe stroke.

The once-vibrant, sometimes-caustic man she knew from her childhood was no longer fully there, and a pacemaker was installed prior to a hernia operation to help ward off complications from this procedure. However, the device didn’t prevent a slow, steady decline of body and mind, and Butler describes the often agonizing physical and emotional toll this disintegration took on her father, her mother (who was the primary caregiver) and herself. Her mother gave up having a life of her own as she tended to her husband, who more resembled an adult-sized infant than the husband she had known and loved for more than 40 years. Ultimately, the placement of the pacemaker prolonged a life that possibly should have ended many years before, and it is this decision that Butler struggles with throughout the book.

When her mother grew ill, she refused treatments and “died like a warrior. Her dying was painful, messy, and imperfect, but that is the uncontrollable nature of dying.” With candidness and reverence, Butler examines one of the most challenging questions a child may face: how to let a parent die with dignity and integrity when the body has stopped functioning.

Honest and compassionate thoughts on helping the elderly through the process of dying. (Author tour to Denver, New York, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle)

from an early age means tapping into a network of career opportunities, as the author shows through interviews with various members. The network is controlled from top to bottom, and participants are willing and well-compensated. “Reforms” take place strictly within the one-party system, where there is no separation of powers or self-criticism. It is a mind-boggling modus operandi, but the Chinese will keep it this way, until they don’t.

Fascinating glimpses inside the frustrating machinery of power in China.

MERLE HAGGARD The Running Kind

Cantwell, David Univ. of Texas (244 pp.) $19.95 paper | $19.95 e-book Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-292-71771-8 978-0-292-75417-1 e-book

An incisive, critical analysis of one of the most complicated and misunderstood artists in country music.

Cantwell describes this as “the attempt of this critic and more or less lifelong Merle Haggard fan at writing a monograph on the man’s music,” admitting that this is not the in-depth, full-scale biography that his subject deserves. As the co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles (2003), Cantwell combines sharp critical insights and encyclopedic knowledge of the music with a fan’s passion, as he provides a personal engagement with Haggard’s discography, along with context of the times. The author shows how the politics of the man most famous for “Okie from Muskogee” and the more belligerent “Fightin’ Side of Me” resist pigeonholing and how many contradictions one confronts in his music. He’s a country artist who served time but sang of prison less often than singers who never did. He’s a country artist who sings often of the city and refuses to romanticize the bucolic.

He recognizes that the term “Okie” (which he isn’t, though his parents were) is an insult before he turns it into a source of pride (and Cantwell is very good at illuminating the fragility and ambiguity of the pride running through Haggard’s music).

Occasionally, the assessment seems a little over-the-top, as the author writes that on his late-’60s albums, “Haggard’s writing is as smart in its way as Dylan’s at the same time or Lennon and McCartney’s, his singing is as powerful as Aretha Franklin’s or Van Morrison’s,” and he proceeds to encompass the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown in his comparative superlatives. But for an artist who has been dismissed too easily for too long, such perspective provides a dialogue-opening corrective.

Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.

THE PARTY FOREVER Inside China’s Modern Communist Elite

Callick, Rowan Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $27.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-137-27885-2

An Australian journalist probes the perplexing presence of the Chinese state in all aspects of Chinese life and culture.

For all that China has transformed itself over the last 30 years, the more it has stayed the same, as Callick finds in this engaging look around the “screened scenery” of the political system. Although the Chinese Communist Party is no longer run by a personality like Mao or Deng, the tentacles of power and control can still be felt in all aspects of Chinese life. While the rest of the world has been assuming that China’s growing middle class, the result of its recent spectacular economic surge, will naturally demand greater liberties and freedoms that the West takes for granted, that has not been the case. In fact, writes Callick, that successful middle class, bolstered by its ties to an all-pervasive state, has grown increasingly nationalistic and not timid about adopting traditional Chinese values, such as those propounded by Confucius, as a way to balance Western bias against China. A strong state is viewed as the country’s success. The state has generated the country’s enormous prosperity, modernity and wealth, and joining the party 40

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THREE SQUARES The Invention of the American Meal

development. Early on, the author describes his father’s recurrent escape fantasy of road-tripping to Alaska with a clarity that essentially characterizes the thematic structure of the memoir and his life: “saturated with abandon and testosterone and bound with some kind of twisted love plot.” Buffeted on the one hand by his artist father’s rather public paranoia concerning all things adult and, on the other, his mother’s fear of self-revelation, Coleman’s identity formed in the fulcrum of these opposing forces, and he displayed a dramatic penchant for passionate attachments and anti-establishment behavior. As the author matured, he often found himself pining for some unattainable or unsustainable love interest while trying and often failing to measure up to traditional expectations, whether in an MFA writing program or the workplace. One particularly memorable scene occurred in Maine, where Coleman had landed a temporary position as a substitute teacher and had been asked to give a talk on education at a fundraiser for the incumbent governor. His original plan was to “speak for five minutes and then give a short whirling dervish demonstration.” Instead, for some reason unbeknownst even to him, Coleman slowly removed all his clothing, which resulted in the eventual losses of both his job and his love at the time. While the author’s account exhibits flashes of humor and thoughtful introspection—passages analyzing his mother’s reasons for hiding her Jewish identity prove especially moving—the memoir is far too episodic and inconsistent to cohere.

An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.

Carroll, Abigail Basic (304 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-465-02552-7

An information-packed history of American eating habits.

“We live in a food environment shaped by culture and history,” writes Carroll in her first book, a heavily researched and wide-ranging history of American meals and snacking that takes us from colonial times to the present day. She begins with the “messy” simple meals of the early colonists and Native Americans, followed by the rise of more formal habits and dishes. Later chapters concentrate on the stories behind individual meals. Carroll discusses the transgressive status of snacking in relation to the sacred and patriotic family dinner; the invention of the fast and often cold lunch; and the evolution of breakfast from a simple meal to an indigestible meat-based feast to a lighter spread formed by modern marketing and convenience foods. She discusses home cooking, street food, restaurants, foreign influences, domestic management, kitchen technologies and utensils, the servant problem, and the roles of housewives, health reformers, nutrition scientists and marketers. She ends with a survey of the commonly described dysfunctions and trends of our current food culture, relating them to the past and encouraging a better awareness of our history so that we may make more conscious choices for ourselves. The rich variety of stories and information about the contents, structure, setting and meaning of American meals can be a little overwhelming, and general readers may want to take this book in small bites. On the other hand, there are many anecdotes to enliven the text and much genuinely original and intriguing information throughout, from the cultivated fasting skills of Native Americans to the tidal wave of new snack foods flooding American life today.

A dense but enjoyable history of American food culture. (25 b/w illustrations)

THE OUTSIDER A Memoir

Connors, Jimmy Harper/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $28.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-06-124299-1

Four decades after his heyday, the controversial tennis star serves up a suitably cocky autobiography.

It doesn’t take Connors long—three pages, in fact—to get to the word “arrogant,” which might have been coined to describe him. He delivers numerous reasons for why he might have been overweeningly proud, including the fact that he rose from a not-so-nice childhood in not-so-nice East St. Louis to become one of the most lauded players of the day. Repeatedly, however, he tells us that he has OCD (“Yup. I have it. Didn’t know that, did you?”), which, if not entirely effective as an excuse for some of his bad behavior—including, as he later admits, a gambling addiction—at least explains some of it. If readers soon get the feeling that Connors wouldn’t be the ideal choice of seatmate on a long plane ride, the better parts of his book describe not his prideful unpleasantness, but the business of tennis, from the importance of early coaching (in his case, by both his mother and grandmother) to the deep rivalries that exist among champions. One whom Connors says didn’t like him one bit was Arthur Ashe, who had good reason, since Connors once painted Romanian tennis star Ilie Nastase

THE BOHEMIAN LOVE DIARIES A Memoir Coleman, Slash Lyons Press (304 pp.) $19.95 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-0-7627-8698-5

Professional storyteller and Psychology Today blogger Coleman looks to his past in this eclectic coming-of-age memoir.

Acutely aware of the influences of his drifter sculptor father, “a cross between Ringo Starr and Daniel Boone,” and Holocaust-surviving mother, the author trumpets the bohemian tendencies that inspired his own artistic |

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“A charming, warm, welcome read for Crystal’s legions of fans.” from still foolin’ ’em

STILL FOOLIN’ ’EM Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?

in blackface before a doubles game with Ashe. (“We weren’t all that bright back then, to say the least,” he writes.) Connors is chatty, gossipy—Nastase thoroughly disliked German player Hans-Jürgen Pohmann, he writes, and even called him a Nazi after a match—insightful and often, yes, arrogant, which makes this book a solid match of object and subject.

It could have benefited from the self-reflection of an R.A. Dickey, but a readable autobiography all the same.

Crystal, Billy Henry Holt (288 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-8050-9820-4

A humorous take on mortality by famed comedian and actor Crystal (700 Sundays, 2005, etc.).

In his latest book, the always-affable author proves yet again his ability to translate his comedic chops from the screen to the page. On the morning of his 65th birthday, Crystal peered into the mirror to find he was no longer the “hip, cool baby boomer” he thought he was, but now resembled “a Diane Arbus photograph.” Horrified by the transformation, Crystal dedicates the rest of the book to finding his old self in his new saggy skin—a self-deprecating shtick that proves as endearing as it is silly. Melding the personal with the professional, the author recounts his rise from unknown comic to acclaimed entertainer, a journey that has included run-ins with everyone from Mickey Mantle to Muhammad Ali. Yet through it all, Crystal makes clear that his brushes with greatness—and, in fact, his own greatness—were often the result of luck, timing and hard work in equal proportions. Though he revels in his self-portrayal as a key-losing, liver-spotted old man, in truth, Crystal’s wit and writing remain sharp, as do his reflections on the more disappointing moments of his career. Of the mild success of his directorial debut, Mr. Saturday, Crystal chalks up the film’s struggles to audiences’ inability to leave his past characters behind and embrace the one he portrayed in the film. “I’d had a great run playing a certain kind of guy,” he writes. “Audiences liked that guy; they didn’t want to see that guy get old.” By book’s end, it’s evident that Crystal himself has grown old, but rather than make a secret of his age, he turns it into a punch line. In the final chapter, he confronts his impending death in perfect Crystal fashion. “I do see a silver lining,” he admits; “it’s the satin in my coffin.”

A charming, warm, welcome read for Crystal’s legions of fans. (29 b/w photos)

UPTON SINCLAIR California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual

Coodley, Lauren Bison/Univ. of Nebraska (264 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8032-4382-8 Coodley (California: A Multicultural Documentary History, 2008, etc.) claims that Sinclair (1878–1968)—social justice advocate, California gubernatorial candidate and author of the classic The Jungle—deserves to be viewed through a feminist lens.

Unlike most men of his era, Sinclair understood women’s issues and advocated effectively for them. Coodley painstakingly explains Sinclair’s interactions with his female family members, his wives and various feminists—some of them well-known (e.g., Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), some of them nearly forgotten. (In an appendix, Coodley lists his “women friends,” along with citations for readers interested in learning more about each one.) Since the story behind Sinclair’s traveling to Chicago in his early 20s to investigate meatpacking practices in the stockyards has been told countless times, Coodley mostly avoids discussion of The Jungle and instead focuses on some of Sinclair’s many other books and pieces for periodicals. The child of an alcoholic, Sinclair campaigned in favor of temperance, often thought of as a “woman’s issue,” understanding as he did the ill effects of alcoholism on the family unit, especially wives and mothers. The range of issues for which Sinclair sought reform affected the poor more than the middle class or wealthy, and his sincere compassion comes across as boundlessly admirable. Coodley refers multiple times to exemplary full-length biographies of Sinclair and does not pretend to cover his entire life in depth in such a slim volume.

Rather, she hopes to ignite curiosity in readers, who will then study Sinclair’s life more fully by consulting his own writings and other biographies.

A thoroughly engaging monograph. (27 illustrations)

CRACKED The Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry Davies, James Pegasus (372 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-1-60598-473-5

Exposé of the practices of contemporary psychiatry and its uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous, relationship with pharmaceutical companies who profit from an increasingly medicated public.

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This year, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was released. The ensuing controversy over its contents begged the very question that spurred Davies, a practicing psychological therapist (The Importance of Suffering, 2012, etc.), to write this book: Why has psychiatry become the fastest-growing prescriber of drugs when neither the causes of mental illness nor the effects of these drugs is well understood? The author writes that 254 million prescriptions for antidepressants were dispensed in the U.S. in 2011, many of them to children. That these drugs are moneymakers for big pharma is not news, but when every diagnosis is justified by a “disorder” included in the DSM, how many of those 254 million prescriptions were medically sound based only on what the industry itself deems warranted? Davies points out that there is very little consensus among medical practicitoners on the diagnoses of depression, anxiety, ADHD and other common disorders, yet patients are medicalized for these issues at unprecedented rates. Additionally, the author argues that the psychiatrists who compose the DSM (many of whom have ties to drug companies) have the power to reclassify natural causes of mood change—for example, bereavement—as a disorder that qualifies for pharmaceutical treatment. Perhaps even more alarming, then, is the fact that pharmaceutical companies regularly publish only clinical trials that have positive results and spend twice as much money on advertising as on research. By controlling both the product’s image and its distribution, big pharma has effectively succeeded in putting its financial interests above public health.

Disturbing and uncompromising.

the Boston Consulting Group’s inventory of organizational techniques, which they have used with clients from around the world (e.g., the French postal service and glass manufacturer AGC Glass Europe). The authors focus on the case of the Bic company, which transformed itself from a one-box company— the maker of low-cost disposable plastic pens—into one that would be a “designer and maker of all manner of disposable, non-expensive plastic items”—e.g., cigarette lighters and razors.

An array of brain-teasing games and ice-breaking–type techniques, which they call “warm ups” and “mini-world explorations,” flesh out the approach.

The authors provide some intriguing nuggets for thought, but the lack of discussion about the usual parameters of business success, like increasing sales, revenues, productivity and profit, is glaring.

DOWN IN THE CHAPEL Religious Life in an American Prison

Dubler, Joshua Farrar, Straus and Giroux (400 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-374-12070-2

A week in the life of a maximumsecurity prison chapel.

After spending a year visiting the chapel at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Graterford while studying for his dissertation, Dubler (Religion/Univ. of Rochester; co-author: BANG! THUD: World Spirit from a Texas School Book Depository, 2006) capped off his studies with an intensive week of observance and interaction with four men in particular: Baraka, Al, Teddy and Sayyid, who are all serving life sentences. The prison chapel presented a mix of religious beliefs all but impossible to find elsewhere under one roof: Muslims, Protestant Christians, Catholics, Jews and variations of each of these groups. “Is it not truly bizarre,” Dubler asks, “how unremarkable it has become that for so many Americans—black men, especially—the practice of religion takes place in spaces like these.” He observed the worship of followers of the Moorish Science Temple, an intriguing mix of sermon and chant, looked upon with some skepticism among other believers at the prison. Dubler discovered certain constants at the chapel, not least of which was the full-time chaplain, whom he calls Baumgartner, a wise, beleaguered and caring man who knows only to trust the prisoners to a point. Around him swirled almost daily worship services, debate, discussion and other activities of faith. Dubler presents a highly detailed account of his week of immersion, but he cannot escape the simple fact of his own identity as an outsider in this setting. Even Baumgartner admitted to not really knowing what happens inside the prison at night.

Once the prisoners leave the sanctuary of the chapel, readers lose them. Dubler knows that the prisoners enter a different world, far removed from the trappings of chapel life, but he is unable to relay that part of the story.

Intriguing and diverse, but necessarily skin-deep.

THINKING IN NEW BOXES A New Paradigm for Business Creativity de Brabandere, Luc; Iny, Alan Random House (352 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-8129-9295-3

Boston Consulting Group advisers de Brabandere (The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity Through Changes in Perception, 2005, etc.) and Iny showcase their company’s approach to helping organizations develop that next big transforming idea.

The authors use the idea of boxes as the frame for their presentation—not the trope of thinking outside one but rather, how to organize the process to make new ones. The boxes are mental models that they contend people use to make sense of themselves and their world. The “new boxes” represent the idea of creating ways of thinking about oneself, one’s organization and the world. The authors discuss a five-step process for bringing about transformation: doubt everything, probe the limits of possibility, encourage expression of different points of view, choose the options that seem to have the most potential for success, and re-evaluate relentlessly. They buttress their presentation with thought games and exercises and examples from |

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“Readers may feel overwhelmed at Epstein’s avalanche of genetic and physiological studies, but few will put down this deliciously contrarian exploration of great athletic feats.” from the sports gene

RAISING MY RAINBOW Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son

In his first book, Sports Illustrated senior writer Epstein makes no secret of his debt to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), in which the author famously argued that success owes less to inherited ability (i.e., genes) than to intense practice and circumstance (i.e., luck). While agreeing with many critics that Gladwell oversimplifies, Epstein admits that he is on to something and proceeds to apply Gladwell’s approach (many scientific studies and entertaining anecdotes; lucid, accessible prose) to athletic prowess. Genes definitely contribute to great performance. Jumpers benefit if born with a longer, stiffer Achilles tendon. Baseball players have superior visual acuity, and major leaguers see better than minor leaguers. Practice definitely helps, but, ironically, the ability to benefit from training is partly inherited, as is the will to train obsessively. However, even the most dedicated athlete is out of luck without genes that produce the right body type. Africans have longer legs and slimmer hips, allowing them to run faster. Caucasians are stockier, with thicker, stronger upper bodies. Of the 81 men who have run the 100 meters in less than 10 seconds, 80 are black, but sub-Saharan Africans have never won an Olympic weight-lifting medal. Epstein turns up no single sports gene. Hundreds exist, and researchers are nowhere near understanding their interactions. They seem more essential (but still not sufficient) for physical than intellectual achievement.

Readers may feel overwhelmed at Epstein’s avalanche of genetic and physiological studies, but few will put down this deliciously contrarian exploration of great athletic feats.

Duron, Lori Broadway (224 pp.) $15.00 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-7704-3772-5

A memoir about raising a gendercreative child.

Like most parents, Duron and her husband had certain expectations about who their sons would grow up to be, but when their younger son, C.J., discovered and fell in love with Barbie, they had to slowly begin changing their ideas. C.J. liked dolls, his favorite colors were pink and purple, and he enjoyed dressing up in girls’ clothes—all atypical behaviors for a 3-year-old male. Having grown up with a brother who is homosexual, Duron was on the lookout for potentially gay behavior in C.J. It was only as C.J. continued to cross-dress and then announced one day to his father that when he grew up, he was going to be a girl, that Duron realized she might have a gender-nonconforming child. The author honestly and humorously expresses the delight and dismay her family lived through as they watched and adjusted to the increasingly interesting and sometimes very awkward moments of life with C.J. Like all good parents, Duron and her husband didn’t squelch C.J’s desires but encouraged him to become who he was meant to be, allowing him to have princess-themed birthday parties and “girl” toys from Santa Claus while ignoring the looks and comments of neighbors and the parents of classroom friends. As the first few years passed and C.J.’s behavior continued on the gendernonconforming spectrum, Duron searched for information on how to safely raise an LGBTQ child. When she couldn’t find as much help as she needed, she decided to blog about her experiences in order to connect with and help others in this same situation. Many decisions still lie ahead—for example, hormone therapy and/or surgery for C.J., as well as the need to address the bullying both sons have received—and the author tackles these issues head-on with intelligence and compassion.

A heartfelt examination of raising a boy who wants to be a girl.

ART ON THE BLOCK Tracking the New York Art World from Soho to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond Fensterstock, Ann Palgrave Macmillan (288 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-137-27849-4

An overview of the constantly migrating New York art scene in the second half of the 20th century.

Fensterstock begins with an intriguing question that has several potential meanings: “What moves the art world?” What follows is a survey of the major dealers, curators, artists, gallery owners, journalists, entrepreneurs, real estate developers and politicians who have played a role in shaping and transforming the New York art scene as it shifts from SoHo to the East Village to Williamsburg to Chelsea and elsewhere throughout the city. The author explores some of the underlying causes for these artistic migrations, arguing that they involve more than simply increased rents. Neighborhood loyalties, artists’ sense of community, political and legal considerations, gentrification, and the broader social, civic and economic milieu all play a part.

Unfortunately, Fensterstock does not devote enough attention to the artists and their work and how aesthetic sensibilities

THE SPORTS GENE Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

Epstein, David Current (368 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 5, 2013 978-1-59184-511-9

What makes a great athlete? Being born with talent was the traditional answer, but like so many traditions, it is

under attack.

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THE ART OF SLEEPING ALONE Why One French Woman Gave Up Sex

were also transformed within and by these different scenes. The author also never addresses a third possible definition of “move,” involving affect, poignancy and emotion. Instead, Fensterstock provides a litany of names: Gallery owners and the artists they represent make up the majority of the book, with some historical and cultural contextualizing that includes brief glimpses of parallels in the music industry, drug scene, and restaurant and bar culture. Although several images are included—some quite striking—more description and discussion of the art and artists would have buoyed what ultimately becomes a somewhat tedious catalog of names, dates and addresses. Some personal anecdotes are welcome but scant.

Informative for art and cultural historians, especially New York art scene insiders, but this lacks a descriptive, compelling and entertaining core. (24 pages of color inserts)

Fontanel, Sophie Scribner (160 pp.) $19.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4516-9627-1

Parisian novelist and Elle France editor Fontanel explores her decision to practice celibacy for more than a decade, beginning at age 49, and avers that sexual liberation ought to include the freedom

to not have sex.

“I’d had it with being taken and rattled around,” she confesses, adding that she was tired, both physically and emotionally, of saying yes to lovers. In need of tranquility, she opted to stop having sex and, in the months that followed, found that she’d never been happier; she felt safe, confident and nurtured.

In chapters averaging two to three pages, Fontanel cuts her life into vignettes that jump between time periods to reveal personal details about her romantic endeavors and heavy social calendar.

Upon learning about her decision, friends and acquaintances offered endless questions and skepticism, and Fontanel artfully and humorously describes the couples who cast aspersions on her choice. “Why valorize the concept of a sex life simply because it’s a sex life?” writes the author. “Leave people the treasure they posses: their indescribable equilibrium.” Fontanel had been sexually active with men since her teenage years. Her depiction of celibacy isn’t prudish or dry but lush; she isn’t shy when describing either her previous affairs or her current erotic fantasies, and her frankness keeps the book from straying into polemical territory. The writing is stripped bare, with no extra fat or flair, and this simplicity works in the author’s favor. Fontanel highlights encounters with male friends and dates, detailing their conversations in a way that underscores her conclusion that sex requires meaning; it is more than merely a superficial connection.

The author thankfully avoids self-righteousness, so while she offers a guide of sorts for those who may be interested in following the same path, her voice and story hold up on their own, as do her insightful, darkly funny observations on societal expectations regarding sex.

THE GREAT DEGENERATION How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

Ferguson, Niall Penguin Press (192 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 13, 2013 978-1-59420-545-3

As Oswald Spengler’s massive 1918 classic Decline of the West approaches its 100th anniversary, announcements of the apocalypse continue to pour off the presses. Readers could do much worse than read this one from the prolific Ferguson (History/Harvard Univ.; Civilization: The West and the Rest, 2011).

Unlike Spengler, Ferguson requires a mere 150 pages to describe four splendid Western institutions whose decline he deplores. The first is democracy. Led by Ferguson’s native Britain, democracy produced governments that operated with the consent of the governed, secured property rights, and aimed at fairness and (in theory) equality. All this is now threatened by crushing national debts, mostly the result of social programs such as pensions and health insurance. Readers unfamiliar with Ferguson’s political views will now see the light. The author’s second essential is capitalism, now in its fifth year of crisis provoked by deregulation, according to liberals but not Ferguson, who blames bad regulation. No. 3, the rule of law, a glory of Western democracy, is now decaying into the rule of lawyers growing fat on litigation and government over-regulation. Especially disturbing to Ferguson is the decline of No. 4, “civil society,” voluntary associations of citizens with an objective other than private profit—clubs, PTAs, sports leagues, town meetings and more. Many observers believe that the Internet serves as well but not the author. Ferguson mentions the growing income disparity between rich and poor, crumbling infrastructure, poverty, irresponsible financial entrepreneurs, and their compliant regulators, but these are liberal priorities, not Ferguson’s.

The author’s apocalypse will result from conservative bugaboos, and he delivers an entertaining, often convincing polemic. |

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“Much more than just a sports book.” from breaking the line

BREAKING THE LINE The Season in Black College Football that Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights

An admitted West Village “city girl,” the author reminisces about her “almost comically idyllic” childhood in suburban Media, Pa., and then smoothly examines how attitudes about the upholstered American dream of life in a bedroom community with “a house and a yard” have permanently shifted. She attributes this urban renaissance to several factors: lengthy, impractical commutes; environmental consciousness; an influx of poverty-stricken citizens into the suburbs forcing the wealthy to the city; changing familial demographics; and, most importantly, the economic crash that either plunged many mortgagebound homeowners underwater or made them fear foreclosure.

This point is highlighted best with Gallagher’s story of her drive through a once-flourishing subdivision in Las Vegas, now riddled with foreclosed homes poorly camouflaged by desperate realtors. The author presents suburbia from a historical perspective that’s entertaining and educative and juxtaposes the old with the new using unfiltered opinions from builders, homeowners, “sprawl refugees” who fight for suburban redevelopment, and developers pushing rural, mixed-use “city replicas.”

Though she focuses on a marked downturn in suburban affinity, Gallagher’s reportage is evenhanded and comprehensively researched. In fairness, she notes that there are a large number of suburbs attempting their own reinvention in an effort to adapt to the changing climate of smaller communities and the myriad challenges they face. Good or bad, “a new kind of Great Migration is taking place,” though the author admits it’s still too early to elaborate further on any concrete solutions for those still harboring that pastoral American dream.

A somewhat melancholic reality report made pleasant and palatable by the author’s congenial delivery and promising vision.

Freedman, Samuel G. Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4391-8977-1

With campuses and the nation in an uproar over civil rights, two legendary coaches prepared their teams for a football classic.

When Texas Western’s all-black starting lineup defeated national powerhouse and all-white Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA title basketball game, everyone understood immediately the historic implications. The significance of the Grambling Tigers’ narrow victory over the Florida A&M Rattlers in the 1967 Orange Blossom Classic, the de facto championship of black college football, however, emerged only over time. Freedman (Journalism/ Columbia Univ.; Letters to a Young Journalist, 2006, etc.) memorably revisits an era when, due to still-widespread segregation, black colleges were at their athletic apogee. Tigers’ coach Eddie Robinson and A&M’s Jake Gaither had already sent scores of players to the NFL, but, notwithstanding their distinguished tenures, campus militants harshly criticized both for their public silence on civil rights. Innovative coaches, father figures to countless young men, by 1967, they were marginalized, even ridiculed by a new, impatient generation that knew little of each man’s struggles and achievements. Neither responded directly to the turmoil of the times, but each harbored a private ambition: Robinson to groom a player sufficiently talented and self-possessed to become a quarterback in the NFL and Gaither to play one game against a predominantly white team, a potentially explosive event for the South. During the summer and fall, they laid the groundwork for breaking both barriers. As he takes us through the season for both teams and recreates their bowl matchup, Freedman mixes in revealing information about the cultures of the schools, their rivalries with other black colleges, sensitive portraits of the coaches and players, and an evocative description of a racial and political climate that Robinson and Gaither, each working quietly, did so much to alter.

Much more than just a sports book. (16-page b/w insert)

SHOT ALL TO HELL Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape Gardner, Mark Lee Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-06-198947-6 978-0-06-224888-6 e-book

An action-packed, admiring portrait of the James-Younger gang that robbed people, banks and trains for a decade before retiring, dying or stewing in prison.

Western historian Gardner (To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West, 2010) has done impressive research in the Old West’s abundant but relentlessly unreliable sources (lurid newspaper articles, jailhouse interviews, self-serving memoirs by elderly gang members) to deliver a colorful portrait of men who do not deserve his admiration. Jesse James (1847–1882), Frank James (1843–1915) and the Younger brothers grew up in the Midwest. Confederate sympathizers, most participated as “bushwackers” in the nasty partisan insurgency that wracked Missouri during the Civil

THE END OF THE SUBURBS Where the American Dream Is Moving

Gallagher, Leigh Portfolio (272 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-59184-525-6

Fortune editor and public speaker Gallagher presents illuminating, persuasive data on the recent preference for vibrant city life over softer suburbia.

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A fact-driven, scholarly account that lacks slightly in narrative drive.

War. Inured to violence, they later coalesced into a criminal band that traveled widely and became national news. Gardner summarizes their lives and early depredations before settling in to describe their last, spectacularly bungled 1876 robbery of a Northfield, Minn., bank. The clerk refused to open the safe.

By the time the gang lost patience and killed him, the citizenry had gathered whatever weapons they could find, killed two gang members and wounded the rest before the robbers fled. There followed a massive, disorganized manhunt from which only Jesse and Frank escaped. Jesse later recruited another gang and committed several robberies before one member killed him for the reward.

Written in the breathless prose that seems obligatory for this genre and with more sympathy to the subjects than seems necessary, the book is still a gripping read and probably tells all there is to tell about a legendary group of psychopaths.

HARLEM NOCTURNE Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

Griffin, Farah Jasmine Basic Civitas (256 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-465-01875-8

Griffin (English/Columbia Univ.; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, 2001) explores the brief period of opportunity in the 1940s when the remarkable talents of Pearl Primus, Ann Petry and Mary Lou Williams changed art and society.

Unlike the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, when people with talent flocked to Harlem, the war years fostered homegrown talent and enabled artists the freedom to mix their art with politics. The music, dance and writing of these three women, mixed with their politics, helped to usher in the modern civil rights movement. Four factors laid the foundation for this grand awakening: World War II, the second great migration from the South, the Popular Front in politics and culture, and the Double V Campaign. With Double V (Victory at Home and Abroad), black Americans insisted on their social and civil rights while fighting for their country overseas. The author meticulously shows how each woman used and expanded her art to increase awareness of a society that had been ignored and abused too long. Their extraordinary talents ensured that she would find abundant information about each, and Griffin effortlessly relates each story. All three women were associated with communist activities, but only Primus was an actual party member. In a period when class differences were finally being threatened, it was the communists who attracted the downtrodden and taught them how to affect politics with the tools at their disposal. Petry, Primus and Williams exposed the limits of the democracy of their time while unceasingly clinging to the firm belief that these wrongs could be righted.

An engaging biography of three remarkable women who taught art to reflect life.

PAUL ROBESON A Watched Man

Goodman, Jordan Verso (320 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-78168-131-2

The story of the U.S. government’s persecution of entertainer and peace advocate Paul Robeson.

In his latest work, Goodman (The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness, 2010, etc.) recounts the life of Paul Robeson (1898–1976), “one of the most famous African Americans of the twentieth century.” Though he was initially most well-known for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” among other tunes, Robeson soon began employing his voice not merely for entertainment purposes, but also to share with the world the truth of America’s social injustices. While in Paris, the communist-leaning Robeson remarked that it was “unthinkable” that African-Americans “would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations.”

His remarks were poorly received back in America, where both the African-American and white presses placed Robeson squarely in their cross hairs. The U.S. government was equally perturbed by what they deemed to be his disparaging remarks; as a result, Robeson soon found his passport revoked. Newly grounded, the controversial figure remained a lightning rod for civil rights, and much to the government’s chagrin, all attempts to silence him only managed to further the reach of his voice.

“They can keep me from going overseas,” Robeson remarked in a 1957 Ebony interview, “but they can’t keep news of Emmett Till and Autherine Lucy from going over.” Goodman’s meticulous research provides the underpinnings for a compelling story, though his propensity for the tangential often distracts more than contributes. While Robeson’s story is indeed engaging, the author’s inability to bring the man to life keeps his carefully researched work from hitting the perfect note.

CONFESSIONS OF A LATTERDAY VIRGIN A Memoir Hardy, Nicole Hyperion (304 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-4013-4186-2

A poet and essayist’s candid account of how she came to painful terms with her sexuality and her Mormon faith. |

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“Poignant and powerful.” from the butler

Growing up in the Mormon Church, Hardy (This Blonde, 2009, etc.) learned early on that the only “right way to live” was by following Mormon doctrine. She also learned that, as a woman, a home, babies and a “hot dad” of a husband were the three most important things she could aspire to have. Unlike the Mormon girls she knew, though, Hardy wanted time to live life on her own terms before committing to the eternal partnership promised by an LDS marriage. But she faced two problems.

With every year that passed, the pool of available Mormon men grew smaller, and any males she dated outside the church were more likely to expect sex from her. Tormented by efforts to keep “[her] body separate from [her] spirit,” Hardy sought release from desire in the sexy rhythms of salsa and flirtations that sometimes led to more than she bargained for. Meanwhile, she fumbled her way through a series of unconsummated relationships throughout her 20s and 30s. Despite the endless sexual frustrations and the despair into which she eventually sank, the author still found the beginnings of the personal fulfillment for which she longed in teaching, travel and writing poetry. It wasn’t until she was over 35 that Hardy finally renounced celibacy and broke away from the church. To her credit, she still managed to maintain respect for the imperfect and often contradictory system that, though unable to completely accept or understand her need for independence, still “taught [her] so much about integrity and love.”

A searching, sensual celebration of one woman’s struggle for identity and autonomy.

Washington, D.C., where the author got a job at the Jewish Day School, and the couple started a family. In his erratic account that swings wildly back and forth in time, Harris-Gershon tracks the couple’s attempts at an emotional coming-to-terms with their Jewish identity, all the while sifting through the political stalemate and outright hostility between the two sides that resulted in the Hebrew University bombing. Obsessed by his failure to protect his wife from harm and Israel’s inability to protect its people from violence, Harris-Gershon recognized that “only through storytelling, I could reclaim myself.” That entailed returning to Israel and facing down the truth of the attack and even the attacker. Learning Odeh’s name, meeting his family and walking around in his shoes both confounded the author and helped in “choking out something transformative: choking out a blessing.”

An arduous, brave, messy, raw, emotional journey.

THE BUTLER A Witness to History

Haygood, Wil Atria (112 pp.) $18.00 paper | Aug. 30, 2013 978-1-4767-5299-0 A distinguished Washington Post journalist’s account of the black White House butler who bore witness to eight presidential administrations.

When Haygood (Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, 2009, etc.) was covering the campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, he knew beyond any doubt that the former Illinois senator “was indeed going to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House.” It was then that the author decided to see whether he could locate a black person “from the era of segregation” who had been a presidential servant. His investigations led him to an unassuming man named Eugene Allen. Born on a Virginia plantation, Allen grew up working as a houseboy for a white family. Possessed of refinement, discretion and a desire to make good in the world, he took a job as a waiter in a country club and then as pantry worker in the Truman White House, eventually rising to the rank of butler. From his unique vantage point “in the hard shadow of power,” Allen witnessed history unfurl before him. He watched as President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on federal troops to protect black high school students in Arkansas, and he witnessed a nation mourn the death of JFK, and become embittered over Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal. Allen’s story, which began as a front-page article in the Post, would become the subject of a much-anticipated film, The Butler, which Haygood also discusses in context of the fraught and elided history of African-Americans in Hollywood. The book is brief, but the two sections and many images of Allen’s quietly extraordinary life speak volumes about a nation struggling, and succeeding by degrees, to come to terms with an ignominious history of racial inequality.

Poignant and powerful.

WHAT DO YOU BUY THE CHILDREN OF THE TERRORIST WHO TRIED TO KILL YOUR WIFE? A Memoir Harris-Gershon, David Oneworld Publications (336 pp.) $17.95 paper | $17.95 e-book Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-85168-996-5 978-1-78074-222-9 e-book

An American journalist makes an ambitious, ultimately resigned attempt to achieve reconciliation for Israeli-Palestinian sins through a painful revisiting of the 2002 terrorist attack in Jerusalem that severely injured his wife.

Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, were both studying Jewish Education at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in the summer of 2002 when their happy plans were brutally derailed by the explosion of a backpack bomb at a university cafe, which gravely injured Jamie and killed her two companions. A Palestinian Israeli with a wife and young children from East Jerusalem, Mohammad Odeh, was indicted and imprisoned for the bombing. Odeh had been recruited by a Jerusalem Hamas cell that used his contacts as a university painter to infiltrate the grounds. Surgery to remove shrapnel and a long stint in the burn unit spelled months of recovery for Jamie, and the couple decided that they could not remain in Israel. They settled in 48

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THE REASON I JUMP The Inner Voice of a ThirteenYear-Old Boy with Autism

Waste Land (in book form, December 15). Along the way, he continually updates us on these two authors, describing the very mixed critical reception of Joyce’s novel and the efforts of Eliot to shape his poem. Jackson also makes clear the significant presence of Ezra Pound, but he follows a host of other stories closely, as well—the early career of Hemingway, the declining health and death of Proust, the emerging talents of Robert Graves, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Dashiell Hammett, Virginia Woolf and many others. The author also inserts some quirky cultural landmarks—e.g., the patenting of Eskimo Pie, the emergence of the word “flapper,” the opening of the Hollywood Bowl, the creation of Qantas Airways—and follows numerous political events: the declining health of Lenin, the rise of Hitler, the power of Mussolini, the end of the Ottoman Empire, the endless troubles in Ireland. Events of great cultural consequence are here: the discovery of the entrance to the tomb of King Tut, the premiere of Nanook of the North (the first feature-length documentary film), the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. Jackson’s focus is on the Western world, and his tone is both convivial and scholarly (detailed footnotes adorn most pages). In a long section called “Aftermath,” the author tells us what happened to his principals.

Astounding events and personalities, all contending for notice on the bright stage of 1922.

Higashida, Naoki Translated by Yoshida, KA and Mitchell, David Random House (192 pp.) $22.00 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-8129-9486-5

A 13-year-old Japanese author illuminates his autism from within, making a connection with those who find the condition frustrating, mysterious or impenetrable.

For the renowned novelist David Mitchell, who provides the introduction and collaborated on the translation, this book is “a revelatory godsend.” The father of a young autistic son, Mitchell had never felt well-served by books written by others who provided care for the autistic or by more scholarly analyses of the condition. The book takes the form of a series of straightforward questions followed by answers that are typically no longer than a couple of paragraphs or pages. “We really badly want you to understand what’s going on inside our hearts and minds,” writes Higashida. “And basically, my feelings are pretty much the same as yours.” He describes the difficulty of expressing through words what the brain wants to say, the challenge of focusing and ordering experience, the obsessiveness of repetition, the comfort found in actions that others might find odd, and the frustration of being the source of others’ frustration. “We don’t obsess over certain things because we like it, or because we want to,” he writes. “People with autism obsess over certain things because we’d go crazy if we didn’t. By performing whatever action it is, we feel a bit soothed and calmed down.” In addition to demystifying his condition and translating his experience, the author intersperses some short fables and a concluding short story that shows remarkable empathy and imagination, as the death of an autistic boy leaves a family transformed. “[Higashida] says that he aspires to be a writer, but it’s obvious to me that he already is one,” writes Mitchell.

Anyone struggling to understand autism will be grateful for the book and translation.

SLOW GETTING UP A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile Jackson, Nate Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-06-210802-9

An insightful memoir of an unlikely NFL career.

Jackson is likely a much better athlete than nearly all of his readers, but in the National Football League, he was just average—and he knows as much. Every season, he fought simply to make the team, which he did. The author successfully navigated the nearly unimaginable leap from a tiny Division III college to a six-year career as a wide receiver and tight end with the San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos, with ill-fated training-camp experiences before and after his tenure in the Rockies and a season playing for NFL Europe in Germany. Jackson has an original voice, honed as a writer for a number of newspapers, magazines and websites, perhaps most frequently with Deadspin. The author is wry and smart and has a love-hate relationship with the sport that gave him so much but also took a great deal from him. Jackson’s career was peppered with injuries: muscles torn from the bone, dislocations and sprains and the concomitant shots, pills and therapy sessions that would allow him to go back to the field. Jackson’s greatest strength is his self-awareness.

Every time one of his stories seems to be veering toward stereotypical athlete bluster, he takes an ironic swerve, usually making himself the butt of his own acerbic wit. That wit also manifests

CONSTELLATION OF GENIUS 1922: Modernism Year One

Jackson, Kevin Farrar, Straus and Giroux (448 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-374-12898-2

Annus mirabilis seems a most feeble phrase to describe this year of Joyce and Eliot, Chaplin and Keaton, Hemingway and Lawrence, Stravinsky and Hindemith and so many more.

Jackson (The Book of Hours, 2007, etc.) takes us day by day through 1922, noting the two towering bookends: the publications of Ulysses (February 2, a palindromic day—2/2/22) and The |

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THE KENNEDY CHRONICLES The Golden Age of MTV Through Rose-Colored Glasses

itself in a cynical approach to a host of issues ranging from tired sports-as-war metaphors to stadium naming rights. Ultimately, the injuries and the toll of the incredibly violent game got the best of him. Readers are the beneficiaries.

Jackson was never a household name, but his memoir is better than any ghostwritten self-homage from a superstar.

Kennedy Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 30, 2013 978-1-250-01747-5 978-1-250-02872-3 e-book

LET FREEDOM RING Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington

One of the original video jockeys waxes nostalgic on her time with the

MTV network.

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery was barely 20 when she began working for MTV during an era “when music mattered and time stopped” and found herself “roaming the streets of New York in men’s pajamas and combat boots interviewing rock stars and looking for trouble.” However trivial this “trouble” may appear to readers, Kennedy takes a curious pride in vigorously describing it in great detail throughout a memoir that’s as cheeky and snarky as her former on-air personality. A high school dropout who moved swiftly from an overnight radio internship in Los Angeles to a fill-in VJ spot, Kennedy plunged headfirst into the free-falling, adrenaline-fueled world of music videos, rock bands and rock stars. She shares a smattering of stories from encounters with musical dignitaries like Henry Rollins, Madonna, Dave Navarro, Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani, among others, all enriching an era that embodied a “collision of culture and media.” These vignettes complement pages of interviews with everyone from broadcast veteran Andy Schuon, who hired her at 19 with no broadcast experience, to Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. After many successful incarnations of the live-broadcasted MTV Beach House segments in Malibu and the Hamptons, the termination of a series of late-night talk show pilots signaled the end of her tenure in 1997. Despite a knack for snappish commentary that reads easily, Kennedy’s memoir doesn’t translate as particularly illuminating, especially when her opinionated commentary nips at the rockers and coVJs who made her youthful livelihood possible.

Mildly entertaining but superficial and unremarkable.

(8-page b/w photo insert)

Kelley, Kitty Dunne/St. Martin’s (176 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-250-02146-5 978-1-250-02283-7 e-book

Fifty years later, a stirring evocation of the 1963 March on Washington.

“We are not a pressure group; we are not an organization or a group of organizations; we are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

With these words, A. Philip Randolph opened the historic day of nonviolent protest that drew some 300,000 people of all races and religions to the nation’s capital for a march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. They included civil rights notables Roy Wilkins, John Lewis and Walter Reuther; celebrities from Marlon Brando to Rita Moreno and Dennis Hopper; and ordinary citizens from throughout the country. They hoped to sway Congress to pass comprehensive civil rights legislation. In this welcome celebration of an event that has passed into American memory, Kelley (Capturing Camelot: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the Kennedys, 2012, etc.) puts words to previously unpublished images by veteran photographer Tretick to tell the story of the gathering, from the arrival of black and white marchers by the busload to the famously moving “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Readers can see the passion and pride in the faces on these pages, the joy of people cooling their feet in the Reflecting Pool, and, with a little effort, they can almost hear the cries from the crowd of “Amen, brother, Amen!” at the words of speaker after speaker. The book will be a nostalgia trip for all who lived through the period and a perfect introduction to a seminal moment for younger generations.

Fine photos, concise text, including excerpts from remarks of the day, and a solid view of the Kennedy administration dragged into the American future. (100 color and b/w photos. First printing of 100,000)

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

Kenrick, Douglas T.; Griskevicius, Vladas Basic (288 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-465-03242-6 How do people make decisions, and how has the brain evolved to make the choices that it does?

Kenrick (Psychology/Arizona State Univ.; Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing

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“Positive, sympathetic and diverse perspectives for past, present and future mothers-to-be.” from a good birth

our View of Human Nature, 2011) and Griskevicius (Marketing and Psychology/Univ. of Minnesota) argue that our choices reflect a deep evolutionary wisdom. “Although it feels as if there is just one single self inside your head,” they write, “your mind actually contains several different sub-selves, each with a specific evolutionary goal and a completely different set of priorities.” For the most part, the authors avoid scientific jargon and touch on game theory only when it enters into their popular bailiwick. They vigorously investigate the subselves that readers may be wary of from the outset, since it is so much more comfortable to think of ourselves as a single creature. They lay out the subselves’ interests—roughly: kin care, mate retention, mate acquisition, status, affiliation, disease avoidance and selfprotection—and give evident examples of how they make us appear to be inconsistent decision-makers. But not so: Each is in service to reproduction, and if dead ends are a hearty part of the mix, then “[m]any of our seemingly irrational biases in judgment and decision making turn out to be pretty smart on closer examination.” They account for why an African president turned down food assistance that was labeled GMO and why the peacock strategy works—also why Don Juan looks good at first flush, but canny females know that he has trouble with commitment.

Sharp, piquant science/behavioral-economics writing.

(4 b/w illustrations)

her, Luttrell gradually became committed to her success. The author explains that learning to anticipate and respond to Daisy’s signals helped her become “a better, more patient mother,” and her desire to see Daisy succeed helped her deal with her separation anxiety. Each weekend, the author would pick up and then return Daisy to the prison, and she and her inmate training partner would share experiences. Her growing realization of the importance of the program in the prisoner’s life provides another thread to the narrative.

A deceptively simple but powerful account of family bonds, friendship and the special relationship we share with dogs.

A GOOD BIRTH Finding The Positive And Profound In Your Childbirth Experience

Lyerly, Anne Drapkin Avery (288 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-583-33498-0

An obstetrician and mother of four (all by cesarean) reveals the myriad ways women can feel empowered by pregnancy.

That Lyerly (Obstetrics and Gynecology/Univ. of North Carolina) managed to compose this astute guide amid the first year of her fourth son’s life seems an accomplishment on its own.

In “giving voice to women themselves,” she demonstrates how new outlooks on the process of birthing can surface. The author directly yet compassionately addresses the issues surrounding what constitute an unconstrained “good” birth and the primary goals associated with it. Besides preserving a healthy mother and child, Lyerly petitions to broaden the good-birth concept beyond that of a positive medical outcome. She writes that although the experience gained from her medical residency and obstetrics practice have helped to enhance her perception of what the optimal delivery can be, it was the groundbreaking three-year Good Birth Project, instituted at Duke University in 2006, which solidified her research. Culling hours of interviews with 100 pregnant women, midwives and maternity-care providers, Lyerly channels the fruits of these conversations (and her own personal anecdotes) into five thematic “domains”—what she found mattered most to expectant women: agency (the capacity to act on one’s own behalf), personal security, connectedness through adult-infant bonding and beyond, respect and essential knowledge. Throughout, the author’s focus is clear, and her unobtrusive approach succeeds in showcasing women with alternative pathways to handling, accepting and loving all aspects of the pregnancy and child-birthing processes. “What is needed in birth is not always intuitive or straightforwardly derived from other of life’s lessons,” she writes. Her comforting and informational guidebook will be useful for those seeking to explore the less-obvious components of parturition.

Positive, sympathetic and diverse perspectives for past, present and future mothers-to-be.

WEEKENDS WITH DAISY

Luttrell, Sharron Kahn Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4516-8623-4 Former journalist Luttrell had yet to find a replacement for a much-loved dog when a chance encounter with a service dog–in-training in a local supermarket changed her life.

The author describes how she mourned the loss of her dog and anxiously anticipated empty-nest syndrome as her two children approached college age. The young man leading the dog was a weekend volunteer with the National Education for Assistance Dog Services, an organization that places puppies in prisons. Specially selected inmates raise the dogs and train them for a wide range of tasks: turning on lights, pushing elevator buttons, alerting the hearing impaired to alarms, acting as a companion to autistic children and more. During the week, the dogs share a cell with their handlers, but on weekends, they are housed with volunteers who introduce them to more challenging, chaotic environments such as shopping malls and city streets. Luttrell relates her decision to embark on the program with support from her husband and children. Daisy was introduced into the family, and, over the next 16 months, morphed from an adorable Lab puppy who feared loud noises to a trained companion for an autistic young man. At first half hoping that the lovable puppy would fail to make the grade and remain with |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

James Agee & John Summers

A literary icon’s masterpiece is re-discovered

By Jenny Hendrix

Photo Courtesy Robert Birnbaum

Yet the book—and Agee says as much in his introduction—began its life as journalism, in the form of an article for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine, of all places. Agee, a staff writer, and Evans, “borrowed” from the Resettlement Administration, had traveled to Alabama’s Hale County on assignment in 1936, and there, they met and stayed with the families Fields, Burroughs and Tingle (later disguised, in Famous Men, as Ricketts, Woods and Gudger). Fortune ended up killing the piece, Agee expanded it into a book, and that, until recently, was that.

But now we have Cotton Tenants: Three Families, courtesy of the revitalized Baffler magazine and Melville House, which have, with the Agee Trust, resurrected the original 30,000-word report that Agee wrote for Fortune and published it along with a selection of Evans’ photographs. An ardent admirer of Agee’s, John Summers, who helms the Baffler and edited the new book, first learned of the manuscript’s existence in 2010.

He had recently left academia, where he’d been a lecturer in 20th-century American cultural history at Harvard, and taken over the Baffler magazine. “Suddenly I was in a position not just to write essays about Agee, which I had done, but to publish Agee,” Summers says. “So that was a nice gratuitous convergence of circumstances.”

It was clear to him from the 90-page typescript, Summers says, that Agee must have turned the piece in to Fortune. “It was done,” he explains. And so the editing process, according to Summers, was easy—in fact, Agee had done most of the work himself. “On every page, there were jottings or instructions or sublinear crossings-out,” Summers recalls. “They were all Agee’s, and editing the manuscript, pretty much all I did was follow his instructions.”

Cotton Tenants won’t add anything revolutionary to the picture of Agee as a writer—some of the text,

Photo Courtesy Deedee Agee after a photograph by Florence Homulka

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee’s sprawling, consciencestricken account of three sharecropping families in rural Alabama, Agee ends his foreword with a call to action of a kind: “This is a book only by necessity.

More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell.” The moral argument—that it is the reality of these people, above all, that must be completely seen and understood—is what necessitates, in some sense, the bizarre structure of Agee’s book: its wild stabs, in various registers, at a kind of holistic truth. To describe the families’ lives at all was, to Agee, an intrinsically fraught endeavor: “It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings…to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage, and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean).”

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like descriptions and the use of a textbook passage as organizing principle, will be recognizable from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—but it is a wonderful piece of writing on its own. The forceful prose is recognizably Agee’s. Written in his typical high style—a style Evans described as having “Elizabethan colors”— it picks out, thing by thing, what exactly Agee saw, making, as novelist Adam Haslett notes in his excellent introduction to the book, “the quotidian epic.”

Occasionally, Agee will even adopt the vernacular of his subjects, merging their voices into his own in a radical gesture of empathy. Despite the approach being largely documentary, there are moments of lyricism as well: Families on their way to the cotton gin travel “the withered vine of their red roadsteads and along the sedanswept blue slags of highway,” like “filings delicately aligned by a hidden magnet.” But detail and lyricism do not exist for themselves alone: They aim to excite the reader’s outrage at the wrecked human lives Agee describes. “A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage is worthy neither of the name or of continuance,” Agee writes, and those who profit from the disadvantage of others are human beings “by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.”

It’s easy to imagine passages like this being responsible for Fortune’s not publishing the article, but the real reason isn’t known. Common wisdom long had it that—judging by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men— Agee’s tone was too elaborate, his style something other than what a mainstream magazine might find reasonable in its pages. But now that Cotton Tenants has been found, the theory no longer holds water.

“Importantly, we know now that it couldn’t have been because it was baroque and full of meta-analysis and flight, the things that are characteristic of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That can’t be the case because it’s not here,” Summers says.

Instead, the reason may indeed have been political, or else it may have been merely a symptom of the ordinary caprice of the magazine world—the department for which the piece was commissioned, called “Life and Circumstance,” was axed before Agee turned it in. It may be that simple, or it may not. “A related speculation that comes from Walker Evans is that Agee wrote it in order to be rejected,” Summers adds, intriguingly—though Evans seems to be the

only person to have believed it. Granted, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee does evince a marked distaste for the journalistic form, calling it “a broad and successful form of lying,” among other things.

And Cotton Tenants is interesting in this sense as well—for here he is doing journalism. “We know that he knew what he was talking about,” Summers says. “It’s not that he tried to write a relatively conventional magazine piece and then decided that it couldn’t be done or shouldn’t be done. He wrote it, and not only did he write it, he mastered the form.”

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Jenny Hendrix is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.

Her work has appeared in The Believer, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate, among other publications.

Cotton Tenants: Three Families Agee, James Summers, John—Ed. Melville House (224 pp.) $24.95 May 29, 2013 978-1-61219-212-3 |

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THE NEW BLACK What Has Changed—and What Has Not—with Race in America

JPMorgan Chase, 2010) probes the leading business consulting company in the country, considering McKinsey’s role in the functioning of America’s corporations and their leadership.

The author leaves no doubt about his own critical views as he discusses such questions as whether the firm’s advice is worth what its customer pay. He discusses the extent to which it has been “preying on the insecurity of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ ” by feeding on the tendency of one organization to imitate another or simply providing corporate leadership with cover stories from the outside “disinterested expert” who recommends what corporations want to do anyway. McDonald asserts that McKinsey “made the bulk of its money helping its clients slash costs” and suggests the company may have been the impetus for more job losses than any entity in U.S. corporate history.

Originally, business consulting provided a way for corporations to maneuver around antitrust laws and a vehicle for swapping intelligence and business practices. Marvin Bower, successor of the founder, made McKinsey into the force it became as top companies like General Motors were recruited as clients in the 1930s. Contracts to reorganize national security and defense during the Eisenhower administration gave the company new leverage and clients. McDonald discusses whether the advice the company gave during the 1990s to clients like Enron and Citibank may have contributed to subsequent economic crises.

He also emphasizes the firm’s defense that they only provide advice; others choose whether to implement it.

A fast-paced account of a key business institution, its deeds and misdeeds.

Mack, Kenneth W.; Charles, Guy-Uriel—Eds. New Press (256 pp.) $21.95 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-59558-677-3 978-1-59558-799-2 e-book

Contemplating the current state of race in America.

Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, there have been countless discussions about the concept of a “post-racial America.” Whether unduly optimistic or simply silly, this assertion had legs even as some of the most aggressive opposition to the new president came in the form of barely cloaked racial animosity. In their new essay collection, Mack (Law/Harvard Univ.; Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 2012) and Charles (Law/Duke Univ.), who founded the Duke Center on Law, Race, and Politics, bring together 12 scholars and writers to reflect on the “New Black.” While the contributors take wideranging and often contradictory approaches to the issue of race in contemporary America, they all write from the perspective that “the civil rights idea,” the integrationist model expressed in the classical phase of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, “no longer provides an easy way to describe, or address, America’s continuing race problem.” The contributors cover an array of issues, from the infamous arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, which led to the so-called “beer summit” in 2009, to the relevance of politics (including the role of Obama) and law in the world of minorities, to reconsiderations of civil rights history and questions of the failures of a binary black-white view of race relations in the U.S. The contributors, who include Elizabeth Alexander, Lani Guinier, Glenn C. Loury and others, tackle this perpetual issue in thoughtful essays that vary in quality but rarely in the seriousness of their engagement.

Reveals some of the directions that questions of race and racism will take as we approach post-Obama America.

HOW MCGRUFF AND THE CRYING INDIAN CHANGED AMERICA A History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns Melillo, Wendy Smithsonian Books (240 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-58834-393-2

From the back stories of McGruff and Smokey through the conflicts of political polarization, this compact history of the Ad Council puts the relationship between government and the advertising industry in fresh perspective.

Solid reporting and analysis from Melillo, a former Pulitzer nominee for the Washington Post, distinguish this first history of the Ad Council to date. It also suggests that more of a feature approach rather than a drier tone more common in academic or public policy writing might better serve this very interesting story, one that shows how the industry has bolstered its own image through what it has termed “advertising’s gift to America” and how the council’s attempt to remain above the political fray has profound political implications. “Using simple messages to prompt individual action is the key to the Ad Council’s public service model,” writes Melillo, yet critics charge that placing such an emphasis on individual initiative

THE FIRM The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business McDonald, Duff Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4391-9097-5

A history of the McKinsey consulting business and an evaluation of whether it is a “net increaser of ‘value’ or merely the most capable mercenary force in the corporate world.”

In a timely book, Fortune and New York Observer contributor McDonald (Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and 54

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“An engaging, tradition-rich look at an often overlooked American cuisine—certainly to be of interest to foodies from all walks of life.” from soul food

tends to reduce environmental concerns to cleaning up litter rather than putting pressure on corporations that produce so much more packaging than is necessary and otherwise pollute far more than individual litterbugs. Similarly, Smokey’s message that “only you can prevent forest fires” oversimplifies the often complex relationships of various constituencies for forest use and the role of fire in conservation. “The organization has a tremendous responsibility to disparate constituencies: the client, the public, the ad industry, and the media companies that run public service ads free of charge,” writes the author. “Balancing the needs and interests of these groups in a way that is equitable to all involved is not always possible. That means that some campaign goals, despite good intentions, may not always serve the public’s best interests.”

Maintaining a balance generally free of polemics, Melillo shows that the campaigns have done a lot of good but have also generated more controversy than readers might have suspected. (12 b/w photos)

flour. Offering both recipes is just part of soul food’s “heritage of experimentation,” and Miller encourages professional chefs and home cooks alike to “name and embrace the new culinary form without jettisoning the old.”

An engaging, tradition-rich look at an often overlooked American cuisine—certainly to be of interest to foodies from all walks of life. (16 halftones; 4 maps; 22 recipes; 11 sidebars)

DALLAS 1963

Minutaglio, Bill; Davis, Stephen L. Twelve (336 pp.) $28.00 | $14.99 e-book | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-4555-2209-5 978-1-4555-2211-8 e-book In a chronological, episodic narrative that grows somewhat tedious yet chilling, Minutaglio (City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle, 2004, etc.) and Davis (J. Frank Dobie, 2009, etc.) unearth the various fringe elements rampant in Dallas in the three years (from January 1960 to November 1963) preceding John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

These anti-communist and racist groups were essentially sanctioned by officials and created a dangerous climate for the president and first lady during their visit on November 22, 1963. Indeed, Kennedy had been warned not to come, especially after the violent reception of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson

by Dallas crowds several weeks before. “Super-patriots” like Gen. Edwin A. Walker, formerly enlisted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in helping integrate Little Rock Central High School, had made an about-face and grown stridently pro-segregationist, distributing Wanted for Treason posters at the time of JFK’s visit; billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt was bankrolling right-wing groups; Frank McGehee was organizing a National Indignation Convention; and publisher Ted Dealey, whose paper the Dallas Morning News routinely attacked the Brown v.

Board of Education ruling, ran an incendiary full-page advertisement from Bernard Weissman’s American Fact-Finding Mission on the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas. In this xenophobic, anti-liberal, anti–East Coast atmosphere, Lee Harvey Oswald purchased a mail-order rifle, which he tried out first by shooting at Gen. Walker through a window of his home. Minutaglio and Davis alternate their doomsday scenario with chronicles of the upbeat attempts at integrating and liberalizing Dallas—e.g., international marketing efforts by showman Stanley Marcus (of Neiman Marcus) and New Hope Baptist Church pastor H. Rhett James’ engineering of Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to the city.

Despite the calendar slog, the authors make a compelling, tacit parallel to today’s running threats by extremist groups.

SOUL FOOD The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time

Miller, Adrian Univ. of North Carolina (344 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-1-4696-0762-7

Delving deep into the culinary (and social) history of one of America’s oldest cuisines: soul food.

During the 1960s and ’70s, soul food came out of the kitchen and into the spotlight, brought to the fore by African-Americans’ burgeoning racial pride. Today, however, it comes not only with a side of cultural baggage, but also an unhealthy dietary image—a plate of fried meat or fish with vegetables boiled nearly to death, followed by sweet desserts and even sweeter drinks. Although many other aspects of African-American culture have become globally accepted, “soul food has become a toxic cultural asset inside the black community and a cuisine stigmatized from the outside.” In his debut, Miller offers “a very public makeover” for soul food. Rather than take a broad overview of soul food as a cuisine, each chapter dives deep into the background of one specific dish, covering both the oldest food traditions (e.g., fried chicken, greens and corn bread) and some more recent additions (red Kool-Aid and macaroni and cheese). Miller’s historical trails are occasionally a bit speculative, such as his efforts to put Kool-Aid in a line of red beverages stretching back to drinks made with kola nuts in western parts of Africa. Overall, though, the author’s pages are lively, with few lapses into overly dry detail. Nearly every chapter concludes with two recipes for the food being discussed, usually a traditional recipe and a newer, healthier version. For instance, the chapter on desserts ends with the banana pudding made by Miller’s own mother, rich with egg yolks and whole milk, followed by a peach crisp made with little sugar and whole wheat |

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WHY WE BUILD Power and Desire in Architecture

reveals how emotional dysfunction, mental illness, and alcohol and drug abuse fractured her family. In her early teenage years, the author experienced hallucinations that included visits from people she called “the Suits.” At age 15, she overdosed on a cocktail of pills so that she could join them. For a time, alcohol helped still the voices “from the other realities;” then Morgan became addicted and eventually dropped out of college. Meanwhile, her middle sister battled on and off with drug addiction while her younger sister sank irretrievably into both substance abuse and mental illness. Morgan continued to be in and out of mental institutions for psychotic breaks that doctors believed were manifestations of dissociative identity disorder. A correct diagnosis of schizophrenia, along with the medication that helped her manage her illness, did not come until she was able to get over her own fear of telling the truth about her condition.

Yet through all the personal turmoil—which also included coming to terms with her own bisexuality and watching her mother die of alcoholism—Morgan learned how to cope with her alcoholism, finish college and harness a powerful imagination to write poetry and earn an MFA. Liberated from fear and filled with love for a God who “sen[t] sparrows” that let her “forget about the mud,” she found a peace that was all the more meaningful for its fragility.

Inventive, jaggedly lyrical and disturbing.

Moore, Rowan Harper Design (422 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-06-227753-4

A voracious exploration of emotion as part of the creation and evolution of architecture.

There are times in reading this book when Observer architecture critic Moore seems breathless, so unstoppable is his hunger to get at the soul of the building process. Architecture is desire, he writes; it “is not a thing of pure reason or function, but is shaped by human emotions... and shapes them.” Buildings, said the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, “act not alone, but reciprocally with the people and things around them, that they have to be open to chance, time, and life.” Moore gracefully draws out when architecture enables other events and experiences to happen, and he explains how a city can contain multiple versions of itself. The “collective marvel” of a city is not, ultimately, the work of great architects, but the creation of “property developers in pursuit of their selfinterest, real or perceived.” The author also shows readers the flamboyance and sheer brilliance of Zaha Hadid and a worshipful company of celebrity architects—heart-stopping in their vision one second, then indulging in the post-9/11 “carnival of bitch-slapping and back-stabbing, of name-calling, pretention, manipulation, and posturing.” Still, Moore supplies many exhilarating examples of architecture, from the wild exuberancy of Dubai to Prague’s Muller House by Adolf Loos, from the Moscow Metro to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and how they—and many more—all have shaped lives in profound ways as both symbol and instrument. The dozens of included photos are also helpful.

Form, light, scale, context, time—architecture, Moore ably shows, has the power to represent deep, abiding hope. (b/w photos throughout)

SCARCITY Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Mullainathan, Sendhil; Shafir, Eldar Times/Henry Holt (304 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-8050-9264-6

An intriguing discussion of poverty and scarcity that uses the tools of behavioral economics and offers some different approaches to mitigation.

Mullainathan (Economics/Harvard Univ.; co-author: Policy and Choice: Public Finance Through the Lens of Behavioral Economics, 2011, etc.) and Shafir (Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; editor: The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, 2012, etc.) compare scarcity in different forms—financial, but also in relation to time, diet and loneliness—reporting on psychological tests and human and organizational activity to develop their idea that scarcity can be approached from a cognitive standpoint. The authors discuss the concept of “tunneling,” in which focus is so tightly confined that alternate or broader considerations are excluded, and “bandwidth tax,” where “poverty itself taxes the mind…reduces fluid intelligence and executive control.” The authors stress that their approach to scarcity is different than that of economists. They distinguish between “physical scarcity,” which they say “is ubiquitous,” and “the feeling of scarcity,” which is not. They examine the mechanics of payday loans and the way market vendors in the Indian city of Chennai finance inventory, and they discuss how choices are constrained by habits of thought. They insist that scarcity “is

MIND WITHOUT A HOME A Memoir of Schizophrenia Morgan, Kristina Hazelden (260 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-61649-460-5

A poet’s anguished memoir about her struggles with schizophrenia and alcoholism.

Morgan grew up in a handsome family in which “Dad look[ed] like Burt Reynolds, Mom like Elizabeth Taylor.” But trouble brewed just beneath the surface. Work kept her father away from home while alcohol kept Morgan’s mother distant from her daughters.

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“Trenchant and thought-provoking.” from the idealist

THE IDEALIST Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

not merely the gap between resources and desires on average.”

Managing slack, as well as relative plenty, matters as much as managing scarcity, and incentives prove more powerful than education in changing habits. “As we contemplate the better management of scarcity,” they write, “we should remember that scarcity often begins with abundance. The crunch just before a deadline often originates with ample time used ineffectively in the weeks preceding it. The months just before harvest are particularly cash tight because money was not spent well in the easy months following last harvest.”

An appealing, very different approach to a pressing problem. (8 illustrations)

Munk, Nina Doubleday (304 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-385-52581-7

A journalist’s probing account of renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs’ Utopian experiment in ending global poverty.

In 2005, Sachs, a “guru” to celebrity activists like Bono and Angelina Jolie, published a best-selling book, The End of Poverty, which claimed that poverty could be eliminated by 2025. His proposal was simple. Developed nations and private donors would pool together massive amounts of foreign aid to invest in forms of self-help that included fertilizer and high-yield grain to improve agricultural output and mosquito nets to prevent malaria. Starting in 2006, Vanity Fair contributor Munk (Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, 2004) followed Sachs on his quixotic quest. She traveled with him on several occasions to Africa, where she watched as he and his team of development experts worked on the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment designed to improve the economic and social well-being of 12 sub-Saharan villages. Sachs’ success with the first Millennium Village in rural Kenya gave him the validation he needed to approach philanthropists like billionaire George Soros and ask for the funds he needed to implement his larger project. However, Sachs underestimated the difficulties he would encounter. Drought, political violence, aging infrastructure, traditional cultural values and resistance to change all undermined the goals of the project—as did the presence of other forms of foreign aid. In some areas, U.N. assistance programs fostered a dependency on outside sources that served as a deterrent to self-empowerment and created what one of Sachs’ colleagues called “refugee syndrome.” Munk is most effective in her depiction of the dangers inherent in imposing theories on the complex and ever-changing lives of real human beings. Radical new ideas are necessary to facilitate change, but no matter how brilliant, they will always and invariably have their limits.

Trenchant and thought-provoking.

THE SPY WHO LOVED The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville Mulley, Clare St. Martin’s (432 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-250-03032-0

Mulley (The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, 2010) delivers a biography of the first woman to serve as a field operative for British intelligence during World War II. The author examines the life of Christine Granville (1908– 1952), daughter of a marriage of convenience between a Polish nobleman and a Jewish heiress. A free spirit from birth, the loss of her family’s fortune and Poland’s freedom propelled her into a life of adventure and danger throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Gifted with a magnetic personality that gave her power over men (and dogs), Granville provided valuable intelligence to the Allies and, late in the war, support to the French Resistance, despite seemingly having to fight her superiors at every step to be given the chance to serve. In addition to the difficulty of unraveling the secrets of spies and the passing with time of most of the primary sources, the author faces a major problem in the near-total absence of the voice of her subject, who famously hated to write letters and was known to embellish her war stories. What Mulley lacks in access to Granville’s inner thoughts, she tries to make up for with meticulous research, though the level of detail occasionally slows the narrative momentum. Even after Granville began her service, much of her time was spent dealing with political infighting between various intelligence factions. Beginning with her assistance to France in 1944, Granville accomplished extraordinary feats, including freeing several of her colleagues from captivity on the eve of their scheduled executions. Following the war, Granville struggled to adapt in the face of what many Poles felt was the betrayal of their country by its supposed ally, Britain, and her abandonment by the postwar government. On June 15, 1952, she was stabbed to death by a rejected suitor.

A worthwhile biography of an unsung heroine of World War II, but its subject remains elusive. (Two 8-page b/w photo inserts)

THE TRUE GERMAN The Diary of a World War II Military Judge Müller-Hill, Werner Otto Translated by Chase, Jefferson Palgrave Macmillan (240 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-137-27854-8

A prescient World War II diary by a German judge who loathed the Nazi regime yet was a military judge during the war. |

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Taken up the day after his 59th birthday, on March 28, 1944, until the end of the war, and infused with his raging against the duplicity of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, this diary is a stunning document for all its cleareyed realism, impassioned scorn and historical potential. Since Müller-Hill began the diary at a time when Germany’s defeat for him appeared indisputable, was he writing with a sense of self-preservation after the country’s occupation, as he predicted correctly, or did he write out of a conviction that the diary would be “of some interest” to his young son, as he claims up front? Neither introducer Benjamin Hett (History/Hunter Coll.) nor translator Jefferson Chase indicates how and when the diary actually came to light.

Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating, readable narrative by an erudite, patriotic German from a wealthy family, a self-described “mild” judge with strong humanitarian and skeptical streaks and disgust for the Prussian military culture that, he believed (wrongly, according to Hett), bred the arrogance and “sense of power” that made the National Socialists drunk with power. The Nazi barbarity toward the Jews was “unheroic,” he writes; the reckless foreign policy led to catastrophe and the slaughter of senseless numbers of people. Throughout, the author heaps scorn on the newspaper accounts filled with false optimism about Germany’s impending “secret weapon” and “holy war,” and he despairs at the willful gullibility of his colleagues, all the while aware of how perilous his views were, if exposed. It’s an account of a man stuck inside a lunatic asylum.

A man of reason in Nazi Germany observes the approaching maelstrom.

consistent philosophy of music first, never allowing triviality or ego to take over. He has proved this ethos time and again during his marathon live shows, always remaining honest to the audience, never conforming “to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants.” There is much to glean from Springsteen’s insights as he talks about his unpleasant upbringing in New Jersey or how, upon seeing Elvis’ infamous waistup performance on Ed Sullivan in his early teens, he decided to dedicate himself to music. While the collection very clearly navigates a narrative of Springsteen’s life, it is a narrative already well-known by many and one that Springsteen is content to perpetuate throughout these interviews. As Springsteen admitted to Mojo in 2006, “Trust the art, be suspicious of the artist. He’s generally untrustworthy.” There is the music, after all.

A fascinating addition to the growing shelf of Springsteen studies, probably best read in doses.

THE PROFLIGATE SON Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency Britain

Phillips, Nicola Basic (352 pp.) $28.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-465-00892-6

British academic Phillips (History/ Kingston Univ.; Women in Business, 17001850, 2006) portrays an entire social history through the sad unraveling of one newly rich family ruined by the rakish pursuits (blending into criminality) of the sole son and heir.

In the late 1700s, William Jackson was a middling-born Englishman of the merchant class who ventured from Exeter to India to make his fortune. Jackson did indeed work his way up in the East India Company, and he married well and produced a son, also named William. But in 1798, a violent run-in with an ascendant poligar (chieftain) led to Jackson’s disgrace and dismissal. He returned to England a wealthy man, however, and moved his family to the fashionable town of Bath. Son William was the apple of his father’s eye, imbued with his sense of entitlement and hopes for social advancement but, unfortunately, Phillips writes, lacking in Jackson’s self-discipline and probity.

The boy bounced around various elite schools, proving himself “the most turbulent and refractory of pupils.” By age 16, William had fallen in with a group of aristocratic scoundrels in London who frequented prostitutes, ran up debts and drank prodigiously. A stint in the military ended badly, leaving the “thorny question of William’s status and condition in life...once more at the heart of the dispute between father and son.” Their feud deepened with William’s trail of rash debts, which led to incarceration in various debtors’ prisons and ultimately the threat of hanging. Jackson finally washed his hands of his son, who was eventually transported to Australia. The author draws heavily from Jackson’s own unpublished memoir, as well as extensive research in Britain’s Georgian era.

TALK ABOUT A DREAM The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen

Phillips, Christopher; Masur, Louis P—Eds. Bloomsbury (464 pp.) $20.00 paper | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-62040-072-2

A career-spanning collection of interviews with The Boss.

There is little doubt that Bruce Springsteen is among the most influential and important rockers of all time. The many books about him are only a small measure of his cultural impact. However, while critical and popular opinions about Springsteen’s work may change with time, there will always be The Boss’ own words about his career. Phillips and Masur (Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union, 2012, etc.), noted Springsteen scholars in their own right, have collected this definitive volume of interviews, even transcribing rare TV and radio broadcasts. The book charts Springsteen’s evolution from a withdrawn New Jersey teen playing the local bar circuit to an international rock star. From Springsteen’s earliest interview in 1973 with the Asbury Park Evening Press, which described his demeanor as “characteristically sullen,” to discussions with major media outlets like Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and 60 Minutes, Springsteen has, above all else, maintained a 58

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“A thought-provoking examination of counterculture through the eyes of those living life just outside the conventional box.” from republic of outsiders

An immensely readable work of literary depths. (14 b/w images; 2 maps)

Journalist Quart (Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, 2006) highlights a host of individuals she views as part of a continuing, modern rebellion movement that’s incrementally restructuring the country from the inside out. They are the social outsiders who’ve created an “America within America.”

The author deftly examines how these cultural oddities and outcasts bond through their separate differences yet remain determined to find common ground, whether through agricultural breakthroughs, mental deficiencies or the distillation of their creative preferences. The examples she presents are as diverse as the message of superfunctional nonconformity they are intent on disbursing to society at large. Quart describes time spent with a group of “Mad Priders” who dismiss the conventional clinical process for diagnosing and treating the mentally ill; a female-to-male transgendered activist; an autistic woman fighting to redefine how mainstream society views the “neurodiverse” community; substantive, un-Hollywood film collectives broadening the independent genre; and enterprising agricultural and animal rights innovators developing “faux meat.” Quart’s associations enhance and illuminate the plight of the free-thinker; even within the brevity of a paragraph, the author generously commemorates even more outliers: the rightto-lifers, married gay couples, DIY birthers, gun stockpilers and the “freegans” who dumpster-dive for meals. Quart asserts that while “their trust in authority faltered and they fell back on their own intelligence to survive,” the spectrum of these individuals’ reach in society is just beginning to manifest itself.

A thought-provoking examination of counterculture through the eyes of those living life just outside the conventional box.

NO PLACE TO CALL HOME Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers

Quarmby, Katharine Oneworld Publications (320 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-85168-949-1 978-1-78074-106-2 e-book

A journalist’s occasionally overdone sociohistorical study of conflicts between the Gypsy community and settled communities in the U.K. Quarmby’s involvement with British Gypsies and other traveling people began in 2006 when she covered one such group for the Economist. A Roma community at Dale Farm in Essex had caused a furor among members of the settled community. Gypsies owned the property, which, like so many other Roma-owned lands, was “undesirable” because it had been used as a waste site. But they did not have permission from the area’s district council to use it as a caravan park. By 2011, the conflict made international headlines and ended with the eventual eviction of the encamped Romas.

Quarmby’s quest to understand the British Gypsies, Irish and New (non-Roma) Travelers took her to similar communities all around England and Scotland, where she learned about the devastating toll the centuries-old struggle has had on Gypsies and their families.

Quarmby discovered that Romas were now turning to religion and, in particular, the Pentecostal Church, which she believes “will be the most likely source of political leadership in the coming years.”

The author’s commitment to telling the story of a misunderstood and persecuted people is admirable, but for all its meticulous attention to detail, the book suffers in places from overquoting and going too deeply into the life histories of her many subjects.

The result is an overwrought narrative that verges on ponderous.

Quarmby’s zeal is understandable, however. It is only recently that Gypsies, voiceless for centuries, have begun to access and/or create the platforms necessary to be heard.

Informative but flawed treatment of a vast, intriguing topic. (8-page b/w photos)

SUPERNORMAL Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

Radin, Dean Deepak Chopra Books/Crown (352 pp.) $14.00 paper | Jul. 16, 2013 978-0-307-98690-0 Radin (Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, 2006, etc.) combs the scientific, peer-reviewed literature—and much yogic lore and historical anecdote—to find evidence and validity for the claims of mysticism, miracles and the supernatural.

Has our sophisticated scientific society developed blinders when it comes to reports of the supernormal? This is the question the author asks in this mostly levelheaded investigation into precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis and clairvoyance.

The author’s aim is not to dismiss mechanistic materialism, but to recognize that its strengths have to be weighted against the prejudices and taboos of its adherents. Radin writes with an easy hand and a sense of humor, but readers may sense that part of the problem of the general population’s being accepting of the supernatural may not be religion or materialism, realism or

REPUBLIC OF OUTSIDERS The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels Quart, Alissa New Press (256 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-59558-875-3 978-1-59558-894-4 e-book

The ways in which a cross-section of intrepid renegades finds contentment and success by swimming upstream. |

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determinism or reductionism, but simply its language: “exalted states of intuitive awareness,” “ontological reality of the mystical realities,” etc. The author references historical yogic texts for instances of illuminated, unmediated reality, and then he describes the scientific research into transcendent experiences that has been published in respected journals, which shows that evidence of precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis and clairvoyance have statistical merit. Radin is careful to ask what is coincidence, what is a hallucination, a psychiatric problem or a sham, and for range and alternative visions, he delves not just into the yogic tradition of supernatural mental powers, but also into Catholic, Judaic and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. By the end, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that “some of the supernatural abilities found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are real.”

The Dalai Lama, ever the politician wrapped in his spirituality, as quoted by Radin, maybe put it best: “it would be wrong to deny that some Tantric practices do genuinely give rise to mysterious phenomena.”

Certainly not for everyone, but a smart reminder that we haven’t got the whole scene covered—look at quantum mechanics—and that openness is more fruitful than seclusion in dogma.

account feels rather biased in favor of Schoolcraft, and he tends to write off the NYPD’s criticisms of the man. Rayman also tends to repeat the most egregious offenses caught on tape, which loosens the cohesion of the narrative, reminding readers that it is based on a series of shorter pieces.

A fantastic story with enough minor flaws to irritate but enough real-life drama to keep readers coming back.

BEING A ROCKEFELLER, BECOMING MYSELF A Memoir Rockefeller, Eileen Blue Rider Press (336 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-0-399-16408-8

A mostly revealing look at the personal and professional life of the greatgranddaughter of American industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller.

“I come from a family of ledger keepers,” writes the author.

Though she claims the family no longer keeps up the practice, this memoir is an exacting emotional ledger, balancing slights and wrongs against kindnesses and fond memories. The source of both is, most frequently, her family. Her parents are often pictured as cold and distant, her siblings as aloof and exclusionary. In one chapter, she describes a meeting with her siblings: “[A]ll my life I have only seen the ways in which you and others have hurt me. I didn’t consider how my own angry barbs might have affected others.” Yet Rockefeller still relishes describing injuries done to her, both real and perceived, by her family. Though the self-absorption does grate, the least attractive quality of the book is the frequently patronizing tone toward anyone who is not wealthy. Poor people exist as receptacles for the Rockefellers’ benevolence; they pop up at convenient times as a method of humanizing the author or her family and then, just as conveniently, disappear. Of a young black woman, Gloria, who stayed with the family on their private island in Maine one summer, Rockefeller writes, “I didn’t know what it was like to feel racial discrimination, but in my own way I knew what it was like to feel falsely singled out by strangers or excluded by my own siblings.” The comparison is not exactly apt, and the lack of perspective is jarring.

Raw and honest but weighed down by a focus on old hurts and self-absorption.

THE NYPD TAPES A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage Rayman, Graham A. Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-230-34227-9

Village Voice staff writer Rayman turns his newspaper series about NYPD corruption into a full-length book.

Introducing the major players in this drama right at the climax of its conflict, the author’s account is immediately striking. Fast-paced and intriguing throughout most of the book, the story remains fascinating even when Rayman goes into intricate detail about the lives of Officer Adrian Schoolcraft and those around him. Schoolcraft’s story became noteworthy when he joined the NYPD in 2002 amid the success of CompStat, an accounting system designed to help the department pinpoint trouble areas for more officers. CompStat and Schoolcraft didn’t mesh well, though, and Schoolcraft believed the system was leading to corruption by those in the precinct who pushed for better numbers. He began wearing a wire to work, recording everything that happened in an attempt to prove not only that the problem existed, but also that it was due to pressure from the top. He went to Internal Affairs with his accusations. After that, his job—already in some jeopardy due to low numbers—became downright distressing. What the department said was simply good management, he saw as harassment and even a threat to his safety. Eventually, he was able to make his story public and bring a lawsuit against the city.

The tension remains high throughout, with Schoolcraft’s emotions described exceptionally well. Unfortunately, Rayman’s 60

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“Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here is consistently interesting.” from simple dreams

SIMPLE DREAMS A Musical Memoir

of seasonal affective disorder,” a winter depression caused by diminished daylight, and pioneering the use of artificial bright light to ameliorate its effect. While working at the National Institutes of Health, the author led a project that correlated its incidence with latitude and time of year, establishing that “SAD works via the eyes, not the skin.” He and his wife had both been afflicted, and he describes the “sense of foreboding” he experienced when daylight savings time ended. Later in his career, he became an advocate of St. John’s wort and Botox as treatments for depression. After 20 fruitful years at NIH, Rosenthal was the victim of a political shift there and was forced to resign.

This led him to contemplate the pain of loss and the need to “reclaim a feeling of control” (which in his case meant becoming a writer) and to take up Transcendental Meditation. The author weaves together stories taken from his career and relates them to his earlier life growing up as a member of the South African Jewish community during the time of apartheid. He writes of a meeting with Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl and his great admiration for Nelson Mandela.

Rosenthal makes a convincing connection between lessons learned from his personal experiences and contemplation of the lives of heroic figures.

Ronstadt, Linda Simon & Schuster (208 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-4516-6872-8

A personable and engagingly written memoir, though reticent and short on personal revelation.

The subtitle reinforces the focus, but even readers who don’t want to wallow in gossip might be expecting more than, “I was keeping company with then-governor Jerry Brown” and, “I was keeping steady company with journalist Pete Hamill,” without any context about how these and other relationships began or developed.

The epilogue begins, “I live these days with my two children,” which is the first mention of them. Yet for those content with an illumination of the artist’s musical eclecticism, and what music means to her, the book is informative and heartfelt. It suggests (without the singer ever belaboring the point) that Ronstadt deserves more credit than she often receives for popularizing country rock, for taking the then-daring but now commonplace initiative to interpret the pre-rock Great American Songbook, to follow her instincts wherever they might lead her, from The Pirates of Penzance to traditional Mexican mariachi. “I never felt that rock and roll defined me,” she writes. “There was an unyielding attitude that came with the music that involved being confrontational, dismissive, and aggressive—or, as my mother would say, ungracious.” She also explains, “I felt some stagnation setting in, and the relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine….I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.” So she made choices that others considered unwise, or at least noncommercial, and reaped all sorts of rewards.

Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here is consistently interesting.

PLAY IT AGAIN An Amateur Against the Impossible

Rusbridger, Alan Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-374-23291-7

The editor of the Guardian recalls his months trying to deal with significant international news stories while also practicing a moving Chopin piece so difficult to play that he often wondered if it was beyond him.

In the summer of 2010, Rusbridger, impressed with a fellow amateur who played Chopin’s G Minor Ballade, resolved that he would take a year to learn the piece then perform it the following summer. But life interrupted. Intervening were several massive news stories, including the WikiLeaks/Julian Assange controversy and the revelations that members of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World staff had hacked telephone accounts.

(Rusbridger’s publication was out front on both stories.) In addition to editing the paper, writing editorials and practicing Chopin, the author was playing in some ad hoc chamber groups, traveling the globe, building and furnishing a music studio, looking to buy a classic piano, attending concerts, and dining with friends, family and notables—and, one wonders, sleeping? Written in the form of a journal, the volume sometimes resembles the autobiography of a startled wren. The author does maintain an appealing tone of self-deprecation when he confronts Chopin (the piece continually frustrates and even defeats him), and he adds a thin glaze of self-help/inspirational icing (it’s good to challenge yourself, he says, whatever your age), but what’s missing (other than a few words in the acknowledgements) is any

THE GIFT OF ADVERSITY The Unexpected Benefits of Life’s Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections Rosenthal, Norman E. Tarcher/Penguin (304 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-399-16371-5

A psychiatrist takes instances from his own life to illustrate how “setbacks, reversals, and imperfections” can lead to

unexpected insights.

Rosenthal (Psychiatry/Georgetown Medical School; Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Transcendental Meditation, 2011, etc.) is best known for having defined “the syndrome |

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“A bright pathway directly into the hearts and minds of two compelling men.” from two prospectors

TWO PROSPECTORS The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

sense of the enormous gratitude he surely felt for the numerous talented (and in some cases celebrated) musicians who helped him prepare, the wealth and health needed for all the travel, lessons, research and equipment. It’s one thing to say, “challenge yourself ”; it’s another to have the wherewithal to do so. He concludes with an account of his public performance, which occurred some months after his original deadline.

The chronicle of a passionate professional and musical life lived at breakneck speed. (55 b/w illustrations)

Shepard, Sam; Dark, Johnny Hammett, Chad—Ed. Univ. of Texas (304 pp.) $35.00 | $35.00 e-book | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-292-73582-8 978-0-292-75422-5 e-book

A decadeslong friendship between the writer and his former father-in-law, revealed in a collection of letters, notes and transcripts.

Only three years separate Dark and Shepard, and in this engaging correspondence, we see the evolution of their relationship. They were buddies earlier, and they remained close despite Shepard’s rise to celebrity as a playwright and actor.

Oddly, neither seems to have thought about going online (computers are not mentioned), so—except for the transcriptions of taped conversations—the volume has the feel of an earlier age.

Editor Hammett notes that he has not assembled a complete collection but has edited heavily, arranging the pieces to tell a narrative, excising what he deemed repetitive or excessively quotidian (though some of the latter remains). The correspondence from both parties is rich with allusions to the writers they admire—principally Kerouac and Beckett, though many others appear as well, including Melville, Lardner, C.S. Lewis, Saroyan, Chekhov and Dickey. They write occasionally about money (the lack thereof) and about writing. The title comes from a play they began working on together but never finished. (One transcript records an initial plotting session.) Health issues occur continually (Dark’s wife declines as the book progresses), as do comments about life and writing. In 2008, Shepard wrote: “I continue to write because basically that’s all I’ve found I can really do.” Shepard’s career ignited, he wrote more often about his travels, his film and stage projects, and his relationship with actress Jessica Lange. And Dark becomes more of a fan than a potential literary collaborator. By the end, they are discussing the very letters project that became the book.

A bright pathway directly into the hearts and minds of two compelling men. (46 color photos; 95 pages of facsimiles)

STARTUP RISING The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East Schroeder, Christopher Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-230-34222-4

Entrepreneur and venture investor Schroeder debuts with a report on technology and entrepreneurial activities across the Middle East.

Involved with startup companies like Abraaj in Dubai and with the American University in Cairo, where he serves as a director for the School of Business, the author has an easy familiarity with individuals at all levels of business. Schroeder passes easily from reporting discussions with young wannabes, such as the Saudi Arabian working to develop and market a leather carrying case for IT products, to explorations of the development of Egypt’s arterial water-supply potentials and the establishment of health-monitoring capabilities in the Middle East and Africa. Schroeder draws examples from Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries, and he discusses the impact of Vodafone’s Safaricom and its fund-transfer apps in Kenya. The narrative really comes alive when the author chronicles the activities of the tech-savvy young Eygptians, Jordanians and Lebanese who are beginning to create new kinds of hope for their countries. He looks at weather-monitoring programs, apps that permit Cairo’s unbelievable traffic to be properly examined and startups working on making money out of creating a recycling system that can be tracked online. He shows how university environments are helping to attract the pools of talent from which such potentials are generated. The author’s accounts of Jordan, where youth programs are providing opportunities to explore notions of self-determination while learning about entrepreneurship, are particularly fascinating.

A lively introduction to a new generation’s efforts to shape a future free of outdated notions of entitlement.

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SON OF A GUN A Memoir

St. Germain, Justin Random House (256 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4000-6862-3

A taut, grim memoir weighing Western mythology against a family tragedy.

Central to this debut from St. Germain (Creative Writing/Univ. of New Mexico) is a horrific yet all-too-common act of domestic violence. While he was a struggling undergraduate, his mother was murdered by her fifth husband, Ray, who |

killed himself after a few months on the run. His mother was sexually independent, a former Army paratrooper and a smallbusiness owner in Tombstone, Ariz., “the toughest woman I’ve ever known.” Nonetheless, St. Germain was long concerned about her, as she married Ray (a taciturn cop who seemed like a “good guy” after several abusive relationships) and then embarked with him on a strange “adventure” that appeared to be an aimless drift through the Southwest. Before this, however, the author paints an acerbic picture of his upbringing in Tombstone: “Broke, single, getting fat, drunk, seventeen: I was white trash.” St. Germain thus constructs an audacious framework for his memoir, indirectly implicating Tombstone’s sour, touristy culture and the Western myths derived from the famous altercation at the O.K. Corral in his ponderings as to how his mother’s unorthodox life choices may have contributed to her fate. Some of these comparisons are compelling, such as the author’s examination of the unsavory distance between myth and reality in the real life of Wyatt Earp; others are less fully explored, as when he briefly looks at contemporary gun culture in his account of his attempt to purchase the small handgun that killed his mother. Admirably, St. Germain tries to understand how his young adulthood was shaped by the murder, and he considers the costs of the idea of American masculinity that seemingly produces inevitable bloodshed. Although he doggedly reconstructs the final months of his mother’s life, any real resolution seems limited: “I know more about Wyatt Earp than I do about my mother.”

An above-average personal narrative that takes a hard look at the aftermath of violence.

places such as Taiwan, Kerala and West Bengal, Studwell writes that “a country cannot sustain growth on agriculture alone” and then moves on to discuss the development of profitable (and sometimes not-so-profitable) industries and innovative financial sectors. The author also examines all of the lessons learned from throughout Asia in the light of how China has fared, with extremely mixed results: The country, he observes, has failed to truly serve its private sector and maintains a financial system “that has almost certainly been unnecessarily inefficient.” Removing such hindrances and encouraging freely moving institutional systems can only further China’s growth, he adds.

A solid blend of the descriptive and the prescriptive, with plenty of lessons that will be of interest to Asia hands, investors and policymakers.

WHAT MAKES A HERO? The Surprising Science of Selflessness Svoboda, Elizabeth Current (256 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-59184-528-7

A personal quest to become more mindful takes science writer Svoboda on a search for outstanding examples of heroism and how they relate to altruism.

The author chronicles her interview with psychologist Philip Zimbardo, architect of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed how ordinary students could be induced to become sadistic under certain circumstances. Now emeritus, he is investigating how ordinary people become heroes—and not only soldiers and firefighters. Svoboda notes former sky-diving instructor Dave Hartsock. During a sky dive with a passenger, her parachute malfunctioned, and he made a split-second decision to risk almost certain death by using his body to shield her. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Hartsock (now a lifestyle coach) says that he gets great satisfaction from his choice. He believes that such sacrifices may correlate to a lifestyle commitment to service. Svoboda also examines a five-year longevity study of older volunteers who showed a 60 percent reduction in the death rate of individuals regularly involved in charitable activities. She cites behavioral economist Paul Zak, whose research establishes an association between the pleasurable release of oxytocin and empathic moral behavior in general. The author visited laboratories where neuroscientists are using brain scans in an attempt to pinpoint what happens in the brain when people contemplate making sacrifices to help others. She participated in an experiment that showed a reward center in her brain lighting up when she imagined making charitable decisions. A visit to a charter high school introduced her to a pilot program developed by Zimbardo to train students to become “every-day heroes” by examining their values. Ordinary acts of goodwill are pleasurable and “enhance our ability to step up” should the need arise for “the kind of heroic choice that involves a high level of personal sacrifice.”

A satisfying investigation of the mechanics of heroism.

HOW ASIA WORKS Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region

Studwell, Joe Grove (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-8021-1959-9

China Economic Quarterly founder Studwell (Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, 2007, etc.) delivers a sometimes-contrarian, sometimes-counterintuitive look at the fortunes of Asia’s economies, for better or worse.

One of those success stories is Taiwan, which benefits from a tropical climate and the abundant rain and heat that come with it, making the island nation a vast garden as compared to much of neighboring mainland China. It benefits more, Studwell writes, from having undergone a program of land reform that preserves the “labor-intensive gardening approach” while rewarding individual ownership through an incentivized market structure.

By contrast, tropical Philippines is hampered by a land tenure system that concentrates ownership in a few hands, notably an “estranged first cousin” of Corazon Aquino, who had been a former crony of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. For all the success of |

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OUTLAWS One Man’s Rise Through the Savage World of Renegade Bikers, Hell’s Angels and Global Crime

LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers

Thompson, Tony Penguin (368 pp.) $16.00 paper | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-14-242260-1

Thorne, T.K. Chicago Review (288 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-61374-864-0

Straightforward account of the transnational rise of outlaw motorcycle

The overly detailed story of a decades-late and yearslong investigation into the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four young black girls were killed.

Thorne, a retired Birmingham police officer, focuses on two men: Ben Herren, a Birmingham police sergeant (later an FBI analyst), and his partner Bill Fleming, an FBI special agent. In 1997, Herren and Fleming were assigned to reopen the investigation into the bombing, which had been investigated twice before—once in the 1960s by the FBI and again in the ’70s by the state; the first was closed with no convictions, and the second led to a single conviction. Sorting through mountains of old files, the men compiled lists of possible witnesses, including Ku Klux Klan members and their associates and relatives. Tracking down these people, many of them now old and sick, and then interviewing them and persuading some to talk, took years.

In 2001, and again in 2002, a suspect was brought to trial and convicted. Thorne presents the arguments of both the prosecution and the defense in these two trials. The portrait of the two hardworking, persistent investigators contrasts with that of the violent Klansmen, a powerful force in 1960s Birmingham. If Southern racists are the villains, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover also comes across badly, with the Alabama attorney general later accusing the bureau of refusing to share evidence and thwarting the state’s first investigation. Thorne attempts to guide readers through the long years of interviews by providing a frontof-the-book list of names; it helps, but some judicious pruning would have made for a smoother, more readable story.

Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, this account, though ineptly written, does wrap up a sorry episode in the city’s history and may have considerable local appeal. (10 b/w photos)

gangs since the 1980s.

British true-crime author Thompson (Reefer Men: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Drug Ring, 2007, etc.) relies on interviews with Daniel “Snake Dog” Boone, a British member of the Warwickshire Pagans, a small club eventually absorbed by the Outlaws, one of the “big 3” along with the Banditos and the Hell’s Angels (the Outlaws’ bitter foes). Boone’s personal story forms Thompson’s primary narrative, but he also provides a broader journalistic canvas to explain how these clubs evolved from “an innocent throwback to the sixties” to criminal gangs involved in drugs, prostitution and violence. Yet, Boone claims that they were merely a group of jovial motorcycle-riding tough guys until they became involved in a bloody turf war. Simultaneously, the Hell’s Angels were steadily increasing their influence in Canada, Australia and elsewhere by persuading smaller clubs to “patch over.” Instead, the Pagans and other small English gangs formed a confederation, which they called the Outlaws; Boone disingenuously asserts that they failed to consider that this name alone would guarantee war with the Angels. Years of hostilities in Europe followed, including notorious bombings and shootings, leading the “American Outlaw Association” to offer an alliance. Boone and his associates learned of the benefits reaped by the major gangs, including profits from drug trafficking and from sponsoring purportedly mainstream motorcycle rallies.

However, Thompson also documents their descent into vicious criminality, assaulting any rival gang member on sight or arranging drive-by shootings; he even includes a chapter on the bikers’ unsavory fondness for sexual assault. Overall, Thompson’s approach is more lucid and less fevered than other recent books on this topic, but this only underscores the depraved nature of this otherwise romanticized subculture.

Will satisfy true-crime buffs wondering what seamy secrets lie behind the bikers’ vows of brotherhood and silence.

HEADHUNTERS ON MY DOORSTEP A True Treasure Island Ghost Story Troost, J. Maarten Gotham Books (304 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-592-40789-7

Following a stint in rehab, travel writer Troost (Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became 64

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“Twain admirers will find this volume indispensable and will eagerly await the third volume.” from autobiography of mark twain, volume 2

Comfortable Eating Live Squid, 2008, etc.) chronicles his journey toward finding his new sober self while following in the tracks of Robert Louis Stevenson.

For years, Troost lived the good life: “For a long while, decades even, the sun had shone on me. Life had been an effortless glide.” Then, suddenly, it wasn’t, and his wife dropped him at a rehab center along with an ultimatum to sober up or else.

On the road to recovery, the author delved into the literature of the South Seas, particularly Stevenson’s Treasure Island. His curiosity reawakened following his newfound sobriety, Troost set out on his own adventure for some of the most remote islands on Earth, including the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Tahiti, the Gilberts and Samoa. Whether detailing the boorish behavior of other travelers, the serenity/fright experienced when snorkeling with sharks, rising sea levels or his own inadequacies, Troost’s language rings true. The author candidly, humorously probes the nether regions of his addiction along with the temptations he encountered during his journey. “So now here I was,” he writes, “nearly twelve months sober, alone for the first time in a faraway place, on a boatful of booze.” Troost’s sly wit permeates the narrative, propelling his saga out of the ranks of many recovery memoirs. The author weaves together entertaining and illuminating pop-culture touchstones, history, and cultural, culinary and literary references with personal experiences while rambling across the South Seas.

A rambunctious, intimate trip well worth the armchair time.

as an unflinching social critic with a long list of targets, including the robber barons of his day and imperialist militarists like Leonard Wood. Yet, in this most personal of works, Twain also reserves plenty of spite for miscreant publishers: “Webster kept back a book of mine, ‘A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,’ as long as he could, and finally published it so surreptitiously that it took two or three years to find out that there was any such book.” Twain is, as ever, a sharply honed and contrarian wit, as quick to lampoon himself as anyone else. He is also capable of Whitmanesque flights: “I am,” he declares, “the entire human race compacted together”—for better and for worse.

Twain admirers will find this volume indispensable and will eagerly await the third volume. (b/w photos)

CUT TO THE CHASE Writing Feature Films with the Pros at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program

Venis, Linda--Ed. Gotham Books (352 pp.) $18.00 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-59240-810-8

A well-organized soup-to-nuts manual for aspiring Nora Ephrons and Charlie Kaufmans, from the faculty of a notable screenwriting program.

UCLA Extension Writers’ Program director Venis divides the book into four sections devoted to: preparations for writing the script, writing the first draft, rewriting and polishing, and working the system to get the script produced and your screenwriting career on track. A group of professionals—screenwriters, story analyst and readers—share advice; their film credits include Scream, Citizen Ruth, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Twilight, Event Horizon, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and scores of other projects for major Hollywood studios and TV networks. Encouraging without being unrealistic, the contributors use examples from dozens of award-winning and popular screenplays (The King’s Speech, Juno, Reservoir Dogs, Bridesmaids, The Hangover, etc.) to illustrate their points about how to set scenes, develop characters and propel stories through all of the scenes. Their advice to give script buyers—“The same, but different”; i.e., more of what’s selling tickets already, with a twist—may seem stifling to creative types, but it’s based on intimate knowledge of Hollywood tastes. Even if the fledgling screenwriter does not want to follow the UCLA team’s amazingly harmonious advice to the letter, there’s plenty of solid wisdom in the book to warrant giving it a careful read. The contributors insist that you can write a successful screenplay, and it’s hard not to believe them. After following the practical advice included in the book, you will not want to miss Deborah Dean Davis’ deliciously witty and inspiring final chapter on the life of a Hollywood writer.

A readable writer’s how-to that goes down smoothly.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, VOLUME 2 The Complete and Authoritative Edition

Twain, Mark Griffin, Benjamin and Smith, Elinor—Eds. Univ. of California (736 pp.) $45.00 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-520-27278-1

In which the great American author, aided by his scholarly editors, continues to spin out a great yarn covering his long life.

In the year of his birth, writes Twain, John Marshall, the noted jurist and chief justice of the Supreme Court, died. A collection was taken up among lawyers to erect a statue to him, but then “a prodigious new event of some kind or other suddenly absorbed the whole nation and drove the matter of the monument out of everybody’s mind.” The money sat in a bank account for half a century collecting interest, and suddenly, in 1883 or so, it was rediscovered and used to build the memorial that now stands in the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. The statue is a material fact, but it is Twain’s storytelling that makes it come alive. Having written despairingly of the human race, and especially of its more murderous representatives, such as Belgium’s King Leopold, he takes the rare fact of honest politicians and fiduciaries as a tonic: “It takes the bitter taste out of my mouth to recall that beautiful incident.” Twain emerges |

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INSIDE THE ROOM Writing Television with the Pros at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program

offering a loose categorization of conspiratorial styles—Enemy Outside, Enemy Within, Enemy Above, Enemy Below, Benevolent Conspiracy—Walker goes on to show how these paranoiac archetypes have played themselves out in American history. Early white settlers feared not just Native Americans, but a vast Indian conspiracy aided and abetted by the Catholic Church. Witches did the work of the devil in colonial New England. Mormons had an army of assassins and stole the bodies and souls of women. Walker also looks at the paranoid popular culture of the 1950s, with a look at the cult-classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, then it’s on to McCarthyism, AfricanAmerican unrest being the product of Muslims and Marxists and, always, the influence of “outside agitators.” Then on to 9/11, the mother lode of conspiracy theories, in which anything and everything could be be a terrorist plot, the “birthers,” and the idea of Barack as a socialist Muslim.To his credit, Walker does not attribute conspiracy theories to any particular political tendency, and he duly covers those who believe that the modern-day tea party, backed by a couple of rich brothers, plans to destroy America. Appropriately bemused by the weird things we will believe, Walker makes clear that if polarization and deep suspicion define our current political atmosphere, well, it’s nothing new.

An insightful and entertaining look at the demons and devils that haunt the American imagination. (18 b/w illustrations)

Venis, Linda—Ed. Gotham Books (272 pp.) $16.00 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-592-40811-5

A practical guide to how TV is made, from bright idea to syndication.

A raft of instructors from the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program (including director Venis) and a pool of professional TV writers whose credits include such series as Mad Men, Frasier and The Simpsons guide aspiring TV writers through the process of joining the ranks of small-screen scribes, from drafting a first script to thriving in a writers’ room to pitching an original series. The advice is clear and specific.

The contributors break down precisely how scripts are developed and shaped, explicating the culture and protocols of the TV writing community and providing a detailed account of exactly how words on a page become sexy doctors and squabbling families on the tube. There is no small amount of repetition from chapter to chapter, as the various professionals employ a similarly encouraging and humorous tone as they point out the many pitfalls and frustrations (and occasional triumphs) of the business, and much of the terminology and pointers remain constant whether one is writing a spec script for a half-hour comedy or pitching an original idea for an hourlong dramatic pilot. Savvy readers may note a conspicuous absence of real-world perspective regarding the neophyte’s chances of “making it,” which is not surprising considering the book’s origins at a writers’ program, and the ambitious auteur may despair at the insistence on formulaic approaches, but Venis corrals an accessible and useful guide for anyone with the dream and the drive who needs to know, practically, what to do.

An engaging and helpful how-to for hopeful TV writers or anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of this ephemeral art.

THE UNITED STATES OF PARANOIA A Conspiracy Theory

Walker, Jesse Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-06-213555-1 A compendium of conspiracy theories in America, both past and present, and those who embrace them.

“The fear of conspiracies,” writes Reason magazine books editor Walker (Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, 2001), “has been a potent force across the political spectrum, from the colonial era to the present, in the establishment as well as the extremes.” In fact, in the United States, “it is always a paranoid time.” After 66

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children’s & teen CITY OF THE DEAD

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Anderson, T. Neill Charlesbridge (142 pp.) $16.95 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-514-9 978-1-60734-535-0 e-book Series: Horrors of History

ALL THE TRUTH THAT’S IN ME by Julie Berry................................ 69 THE BITTER KINGDOM by Rae Carson.............................................. 71 THIN SPACE by Jody Casella............................................................... 71 FLORA & ULYSSES by Kate DiCamillo; illus. by K.G. Campbell..... 73 WHISKERS, TAILS & WINGS by Judy Goldman; illus. by Fabricio Vanden Broeck...........................................................76 HAPPY CAT by Steve Henry................................................................ 77 CROWN OF MIDNIGHT by Sarah J. Maas........................................79 RIFKA TAKES A BOW by Betty Rosenberg Perlov; illus. by Perlov Cosei Kawa................................................................. 82 MOONDAY by Adam Rex.................................................................... 86 DEE DEE AND ME by Amy Schwartz.................................................87 BUGS IN MY HAIR! by David Shannon..............................................87 THIS IS OUR HOUSE by Hyewon Yum............................................... 89 EVERYTHING GOES: STOP! GO! by Brian Biggs............................. 92 WHO’S HIDING? by Sebastien Braun..................................................93 GLOBAL BABY GIRLS by Global Fund for Children.........................97

A quick-paced novel about one of the worst disasters in American history.

The 1900 Galveston hurricane killed more than 8,000 people (about 1 in 6 residents) and destroyed more than 3,600 houses. This short novel, the first in the Horrors of History series, opens with a prologue in which a reporter watches men digging up dead bodies after the storm and finding those of nine children and a nun tied in a line with clothesline. It then follows the experiences of six characters: five based on real people and an entirely fictional one, an African-American named Charlie. Three are boys from a waterfront orphanage run by nuns. One is a doctor who usually enjoys powerful storms and whose workman, Charlie, struggles against the elements on his way home. Another, a young schoolteacher, harbors neighbors whose houses are destroyed, only to fear her apartment won’t stay standing. Character development and nuance take a back seat to dialogue and action that moves quickly from one imperiled character to another. Gruesome details abound, especially after the storm ends and survivors see the corpses and destruction. Such a high-appeal topic could draw in even reluctant readers, although they may have trouble keeping track of all the characters. Scattered black-and-white historic photographs and two maps remind readers just how real the story is.

Not for the fainthearted but likely to appeal to disaster fans. (Historical fiction. 11-14)

PEEKABOO! by Taro Gomi..................................................................97 BEN LOVES BEAR by David McPhail.............................................. 103

LITTLE BURRO

Arnosky, Jim Putnam (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-0-399-25519-9

BUTTERFLY COLORS AND COUNTING by Jerry Pallotta; illus. by Shennen Bersani................................................................... 104 YOU ARE MY BABY by Lorena Siminovich...................................... 107

Beautifully written, and illustrated in warm pastel tones, this gentle story of a little burro’s discovery of the pleasures of a Southwestern desert lake is well-suited to preschool children, who will identify with the burro’s adventure. |

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Little Burro loves her home on the hillside of the canyon, but one day, the burro band begins to leave. Not knowing what is happening, Little Burro reluctantly and fearfully follows her mother and the band of burros away from the familiar canyon and her cozy birthplace, “a soft sandy spot beside a big round rock.” Step by step, the band leaves the canyon further behind, until they arrive at a lake. When Little Burro sees it for the first time, it looks “as big as the sky and just as blue.” Little Burro finds that she loves splashing in the water, and when it is time to go home, she doesn’t want to leave. Once home again in the canyon, she dreams of the lake, her “other favorite place.” The illustrations consist of large bordered pictures alternating with smaller vignettes and one full-page spread (of the lake); they include charming details, such as a pair of hummingbirds that hover around Little Burro and roost on her ears, as well as lively lizards, fish and frogs.

A characteristically empathetic and appealing nature story from the master of the form. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-5)

THE HARDER THE FALL

Barnholdt, Lauren Aladdin (240 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4424-4247-4 Series: Girl Meets Ghost, 2

Intrepid 12-year-old ghost-whisperer Kendall returns with a new ghost and new boyfriend problems.

Kendall is happily dating her first boyfriend, Brandon, despite the fact that his deceased mother keeps returning to warn her to stay away from her son. While she’s getting her nails done in the unlikelyto-succeed new salon in town, another girl ghost shows up. Lyra is the recently dead daughter of the salon owner, but she doesn’t remember the problem that’s keeping her from moving on into the afterlife. Unsurprisingly, Lyra pops up whenever Kendall’s surrounded by her friends and can’t easily respond to her demands. Worse, Madison, an aggressive flirt with her eye on Brandon, does her best to break up Kendall’s romance. Meanwhile, Kendall’s dad wants a more formal relationship with his girlfriend, but he isn’t handling the family situation well. Barnholdt keeps up the breezy atmosphere even while she addresses some unhappy emotions for Kendall, who decides to take an extreme action at the end of the book, setting up another sequel. She balances this with comedy, which usually arises from the absurd on-the-spot explanations Kendall devises to cover her ghostly conversations and Kendall’s wry comments on everything she observes. The book’s brief discussions about the fashions Kendall chooses and middle school girl rivalries all work to keep the attention of preteen girls.

Bright, bubbly fun. (Paranormal fiction. 9-12)

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GRANDPA’S CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS COOKBOOK

Barrett, Judi Illus. by Barrett, Ron Atheneum (64 pp.) $17.99 paper | $12.99 e-book Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4424-4475-1 978-1-4424-4476-8 e-book

Old and new fans of the classic tale of food delivered three times a day by the weather can tie on an apron, sharpen their culinary skills and dig in to 25 recipes inspired by the beloved book.

The Barretts team up once again to serve kid-friendly fare— to make and eat. A letter from Grandpa to Henry and Kate opens the book, and their reply brings the spiral-bound title to a close. Within, budding chefs will find some standard kids’cookbook fare after a helpful list of “Grandpa’s Rules and Tools.”

Pancakes, fried eggs, open-faced grilled-cheese sandwiches and mashed potatoes are often given clever names but are essentially basic items on the average American menu (“Noodlehead Noodles” = mac ’n’ cheese, for instance). Each spread features a cartoonish illustration of Grandpa engaged in a silly antic related to the recipe on the facing page. Each recipe clearly states the ingredients and directions—no matter how simple— so every dish seems possible to make, especially with an adult assisting. A photo of the end result is also provided to whet the appetite. “Milky Maple Soda” looks refreshing to sip while tackling the “Toasty Bread Houses,” square meatballs, “Foggy Pea Soup” or “Strawberry Tallcake.” Other than one odd warning not to “cremate” English-muffin pizzas under the broiler, the recipes are good and easy, and kids should find many sweet and savory options to tickle their taste buds.

Keep handy for that gloomy day when a “Spaghetti Twister with a Tomato Tornado” might blow in or as an amusing how-to title to help children discover the possible satisfying results that can come when following directions.

(Cookbook. 5-8)

WISE YOUNG FOOL

Beaudoin, Sean Little, Brown (448 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-316-20379-1

Smart-mouthed rock guitarist Ritchie Sudden forms a band and spends time in a juvenile-detention facility.

Ritchie’s first-person narrative alternates between two present-tense storylines. In one, he is locked in an institution he calls Progressive Progress, where therapists push him to keep a journal and hardened fellow detainees arrange fights for other boys to bet on. In the other, which takes place before his imprisonment, Ritchie and his friend Elliot Hella, “the dude

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“Every now and then, a novel comes along with such an original voice that readers slow down to savor the poetic prose. This is such a story.” from all the truth that’s in me

too cool to know it, too weird to be popular, too hardcore to give a shit,” start a band in hopes of competing in Rock Scene 2013. The stylized narration moves quickly, littered with jokes and references, some clever, some oddly dated (“there’s the Bridge, which, yeah, is a bridge, but with no water underneath, troubled or otherwise”) and some jarringly harsh (“football is a concussion factory and cheerleaders are hot pockets of chlamydia”). Larger-than-life characters are mostly played to comic effect, often successfully: Chaos the bongo drummer (who pronounces his name “Chowus”) and El Hella himself are two standouts. Behind the music quest, sarcasm and pursuit of girls, however, lies a more complicated and often compelling story about family, grief and flawed coping mechanisms.

Hit-and-miss humor, but worth a read for budding rock stars. (Fiction. 14-18)

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Belloni, Giulia Translated by Anselmi, William Illus. by Trevisan, Marco Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-1-926973-91-3

A ruminating ruminant puts a wolf to work in service of flight.

A sheep longs to be able to look at things as the birds do, “from far away, from up close, or from somewhere in between,” so she engages a wolf friend to help build a flying machine.

Skeptical at first, he finally agrees to work on the project. Their first flight fails when the gorgeous wings of the flying machine designed by the wolf prove too fragile. Next, the sheep attaches helium balloons, but birds dive in and pop the balloons. She devises a clever solution, and together, she and the wolf take flight. Belloni’s spare and simple story, translated from the Italian, offers just enough framework for the illustrations, and it has a solemn syntax that allows the humor of the sheep’s ambition to come through. The figures of both sheep and wolf are slightly abstract and somewhat angular, set against a white background—they call to mind the woodland creatures in Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back (2011). Sophisticated yet nicely in balance with the brief text, Trevisan’s art includes patterns that suggest fabric collage, along with blocks of mathematical notation used as decoration on the endpapers and in the sweep of the hill from which the pair takes off.

Lovely bookmaking nicely complements this charming, light-as-a-feather tale of friendship and successful dreaming. (Picture book. 2-6)

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Bernard, Romily HarperTeen (320 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-06-222903-8 978-0-06-222905-2 e-book Wicket Tate kicks into high gear with her hacking skills when her little sister is threatened following another girl’s suicide.

Wick and Lily’s father is an abuser and a criminal, and it’s been up to Wick to protect the naïve Lily ever since their mother jumped to her death; well-to-do foster parents Bren and Todd have given the girls a second chance, but Wick is still in survival mode. Classmate Tessa’s death becomes personal when Wick finds a copy of Tessa’s diary on her front porch in the middle of the night. Carson, the cop who’s still looking for her dad, and Griff, an attractive fellow student, are pulled into the plot, along with Tessa’s parents and sister. It’s clear from the diary that Tessa was in an abusive relationship with an older man, but how to identify him and why there are threats against Lily remain murky. Wick’s hacking activities are integral to the plot but are not as fully fleshed out as they should be, resulting in some telling rather than showing, distancing readers. Romance blossoms between Griff and Wick despite her resistance, adding a vulnerability to Wick’s tough-cookie persona. The pace is so swift that there’s no time for readers to examine minor inconsistencies or to wonder why such a smart hacker would sometimes give up so easily.

A thriller chiller with some hot moments. (Suspense. 12-16)

ALL THE TRUTH THAT’S IN ME

Berry, Julie Viking (288 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 26, 2013 978-0-670-78615-2

Eighteen-year-old Judith Finch gradually reveals the horror of her two-year disappearance in a stunning historical murder mystery and romance.

One summer four years ago, Judith Finch and her friend Lottie Pratt disappeared. After two years, only Judith returned. Lottie’s naked body was found in the river, and Judith stumbled back on her own, her appearance shocking the town—not just because she had returned, but that her tongue had been cut out, and she can’t tell anyone what happened to her. Illiterate, maimed, cursed, doomed to be an outsider but always and forever in love with Lucas Whiting, Judith finds a way to tell her story, saying, “I don’t believe in miracles, but if the need is great, a girl might make her own miracle,” and as her story unfolds, all the truth that’s in her is revealed. Set in what seems to be early-18th-century North America, the story is told through the voice inside Judith’s head—simple and poetic, full of hurt and yearning, and almost always directed

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toward Lucas in a haunting, mute second person. Every now and then, a novel comes along with such an original voice that readers slow down to savor the poetic prose. This is such a story.

A tale of uncommon elegance, power and originality.

(Historical thriller. 12 & up)

LITTLE FISH A Memoir From a Different Kind of Year Beyer, Ramsey Illus. by Beyer, Ramsey Zest Books (272 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-936976-18-8

An autobiographical graphic pastiche recounts the author’s experience of leaving her rural hometown and going to art school in a new city.

Ramsey spent her first 18 years in the quiet town of Paw Paw, Mich., but she knew that she wanted to leave her comfort zone.

After applying to a number of art schools—which she chose based on location and relative vibrancy of their punk scenes— she selects an art institute in Baltimore. She makes friends easily and shares her experiences of freshman year: being silly, pulling all-nighters and hanging out. As the semester wanes, the group’s dynamics shift, and Ramsey finds herself about to start her summer with a new boyfriend, Daniel. Ramsey’s an obsessive list-keeper, and her recollections are liberally peppered with catalogs of things she thinks about, memories drawn as comics and snippets from her journal. Being in her head is an intensely personal experience, but readers may feel oddly disconnected from her social life and her interplay with her peers.

One of her professors tells her that she has “such a wall around [herself]”; this seems especially true in many places throughout her memoir.

Despite its split personality, her story is easy to relate to and recommended for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Laura Lee Gulledge. (Graphic memoir. 13 & up)

YOU’RE A RUDE PIG, BERTIE Boldt, Claudia Illus. by Boldt, Claudia NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-7358-4152-9

daily walk, Bertie changes his tune when he meets Ruby, “the cutest rabbit he had ever seen.” Having complimented her ears, he rushes home to plan an elaborate party for her. Devastated when no one responds to his snotty invitations, he goes to bed, dreams of being berated for rudeness by his toothbrush, and remorsefully sends out revised invitations with apologies when he wakes. Mrs. Harley doesn’t come (she “still held a grudge”), but everyone else does, and it’s all a great success. Using a pale but high-contrast palette and surface textures of crayons and thickly brushed watercolors, Boldt fashions busy pastel backdrops for a pink pig with a big red nose. He struts past the allanimal cast to, eventually, a sumptuous party scene centered on pig and bunny making goo-goo eyes as they dance together.

At best a discussion starter about rudeness, though children may be mildly amused by Bertie’s snide disses.

(Picture book. 6-8)

THE APPLE

Bruna, Dick Illus. by Bruna, Dick Tate/Abrams (28 pp.) $7.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-84976-214-4 This reissue of a 1959 title misses an opportunity to improve upon the translated text’s lackluster story but will acquaint contemporary readers with the Dutch Bruna’s modernist style.

Although smiling broadly on the cover art, the eponymous apple is sad, as it cannot walk like the beetle that crawls on its leaf and cannot see the world around it from its low vantage point. A compassionate weather-vane rooster offers to help at night. The text says that “once the sky had turned quite black,” the rooster swoops down to carry the apple up to the sky, but the background remains blue at this point, and it’s rather odd that the apple can now see a butterfly, a house and then inside the house to a plate of grapes and a table setting if the night is indeed “quite black.” Of course, apples can’t cry or talk, and weather-vane roosters can’t fly about as tour guides, either, so maybe this is just a case for artistic license and the suspension of disbelief. The cheery palette and simple forms characteristic of Bruna’s work in his better-known titles about Miffy the bunny are inviting, and the circular structure of the tale, returning the apple to its place on the ground, is satisfying.

An odd little story, but a fresh example of Bruna’s work for a contemporary audience. (Picture book. 2-4)

In this pointed outing, a pig who habitually insults everyone he meets has an epiphany after no one comes to his party. Readers after social or psychological complexity need not apply.

The plot is as simple as it is simplistic of resolution. Having left, as usual, a trail of enraged passersby—“Dreadful hair today, Mrs. Harley!” “Without your annoying husband, Mrs. Block?”

“Joseph! Your bad smell never ceases to amaze me!”—on his 70

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“Casella’s debut is a viscerally raw examination of grief, in which the universal question of adolescence—“who am I?”— becomes “who am I without you?”” from thin space

THE BITTER KINGDOM

Carson, Rae Greenwillow/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-06-202654-5 978-0-06-223918-1 e-book Series: Girl of Fire and Thorns, 3 A queen can defeat the conde who stole her throne, but it means nothing if her land is destroyed by fire-throwing invaders.

Queen Lucero-Elisa né Riqueza de Vega—Elisa to her friends—has lost her throne, her bodyguard/nurse and her beloved (The Crown of Embers, 2012). All she has left is the Godstone in her navel, and it’s brimming with more power than ever before. Slowed by the need to protect a helpless child, trained in magic by a failed sorcerer, threatened even by the weather— she’s traveled so far ice falls from the sky!—Elisa knows her first priority is to protect her country from the invading Invierno animagi. The Inviernos, tall, fair-skinned and not-quite human, believe that generations ago, Elisa’s people came to this land and destroyed their magical birthright; now they want revenge.

Despite the Godstone marking her as a once-in-a-century prophesied heroine, Elisa must save the day with her “only lasting power,” her smarts. This well-read girl spent her childhood studying warfare and international diplomacy and has the skills to lead both a war party and a country. Her foretold destiny is resolved with a marvelous and refreshing twist on literary tropes.

A smashing ending to a trilogy that began with problematic body hatred but developed into the stellar journey of a girl who would be queen. (Fantasy. 13-16)

THIN SPACE

Casella, Jody Beyond Words/Simon Pulse/ Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-58270-435-7 978-1058270-392-3 paper A creepy supernatural chiller sets up a gut-punch of desolation and loss.

For three months, high school junior Marsh Windsor has been refusing to wear shoes, ignoring schoolwork and friends, and getting into fights.

His parents and teachers—even his former girlfriend—tolerate his bizarre behavior as an inability to cope with the car wreck that seriously injured Marsh and killed his twin, Austin. Only the new girl, Maddie, knows that Marsh is seeking a “thin space,” a portal between the realms of the living and the dead; and Maddie has her own reasons for abetting his search. Casella’s debut is a viscerally raw examination of grief, in which the universal question of adolescence—“who am I?”—becomes “who am I without you?” The spare prose, wherein the bleak New England weather seems more real than the characters vaguely swirling |

across Marsh’s awareness, immerses readers in his ratcheting desperation. His first-person voice throbs with agony, guilt and anger, all felt through a foggy numbness that fails to conceal that Marsh is hiding something crucial. This very unreliability propels a gripping narrative, even though little actually happens.

Those who manage to hang on through the devastating climax will immediately turn back to the beginning to catch the clues they missed. Brutal and brilliant. (Paranormal fantasy. 14 & up)

MAUDE THE NOT-SONOTICEABLE SHRIMPTON

Child, Lauren Illus. by Krauss, Trisha Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-7636-6515-9

Maude Shrimpton’s father’s mustache is so long and twirly it harbors butterflies. Her mother wears live peacocks on her head. Maude, however, is more of a blender.

Indeed, milquetoast Maude disappears in the shadow of her flamboyant family. Her sister Constance has a voice like music: “An ‘um’ or an ‘ah’ from her could get all the birds in the trees a-twitter.” Wardo is “a laugh a minute,” Penelope is traffic-stoppingly beautiful, and Hector is “toe-tappingly mesmerizing.”

Maude is so quiet even dogs can’t hear her, and, in debut illustrator Krauss’ stylish, stylized spreads, the girl literally blends into the wallpaper, crosswalk or couch. In the end, it’s visually implied that a tiger eats the entire Shrimpton family—and it’s only Maude’s natural invisibility that keeps her safe. What does this finale say? That the meek shall inherit the Earth? Is this a revenge fantasy? Maude’s last-page smile is hard to decipher, as there are few previous hints as to her character. While the text and even typefaces attempt to be lively, the use of language is flat and familiar. David Lucas’ lovely Halibut Jackson (2010) offers a less calamitous take on a boy who blends into the background.

Up with the lowly, down with the showy! The meek prevail in this energetic but lackluster picture book by the creator of the beloved British Charlie and Lola series. (Picture book. 4-8)

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SWEET LEGACY

Childs, Tera Lynn Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-06-200185-6 978-0-06-223919-8 e-book Series: Sweet Venom, 3 Greek mythology comes to life in this action-packed third installment of the Sweet Venom series, with paranormal 16-year-old triplets fighting the ancient-but-not-dead Olympic gods and monsters in contemporary San Francisco.

Beginning in the middle of a fierce battle in the Abyssos, the realm of monsters, this story abruptly picks up where the second book left off. Triplet descendants of Medusa, each endowed with a different supernatural power, Gretchen, Greer and Grace fight their way to Mount Olympus to rescue their Gorgon aunts, Euryale and Sthenno. Once they’ve rescued their supernatural relatives, they search for the door that opens the Abyssos, which, as the Key Generation, they are destined to open lest all the monsters die. Most of the gods oppose them, but a few nicely quirky monsters help the girls, especially cute Sillus, a monkey creature with a limited vocabulary and a comic touch. Three possibly untrustworthy boys enter the mix to add the briefest touch of romance. The story is told in first person in alternating chapters dedicated to each girl, and readers will have to pay attention to the chapter headings, as all three girls speak with identical voices.

The ending leaves the door slightly open for another sequel but supplies enough satisfaction for fans.

As a whole, this series is a decent bet for teen girls graduating from Rick Riordan. (Paranormal adventure. 12 & up)

AL CAPONE DOES MY HOMEWORK

Choldenko, Gennifer Dial (224 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-0-8037-3472-2

Newbery Honoree Choldenko brings her trilogy about a boy and his unusual life on Alcatraz Island to a bittersweet end.

Now 13, Moose feels more responsible than ever for his autistic older sister, Natalie. So when a fire starts in his family’s apartment one evening while his parents are out, he’s sure it’s somehow his fault.

Did Natalie start the fire after he nodded off? Moose and the other Alcatraz kids don’t think so, but they find it’s not so easy to prove when Natalie is unable to explain herself. Meanwhile, jealous prison guard Darby Trixle keeps giving Moose’s dad a hard time for landing the job Darby believes he deserved, and mysterious wads of cash are showing up in the prison laundry.

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provides him with clues to the source of the random money and the motivation to clear Natalie’s name. Choldenko consistently excels at penning pitch-perfect dialogue and balancing a large cast of original characters, and this title is no exception. But new readers will want to start with the series opener, as this is a true concluding volume.

A satisfying finale to what has become a cornerstone series in contemporary children’s literature. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

MAYBE TONIGHT?

Clark, Bridie Roaring Brook (224 pp.) $9.99 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-59643-816-3 Series: Snap Decision, 1 Told with second-person narration, Clark’s teen debut immerses readers in a freshman scholarship student’s social dilemmas at an uber-exclusive prep school. Chapters end with classic Choose Your Own Adventure–style scenarios, allowing readers to navigate various plotlines.

Liberally sprinkled with pop-culture references (“In the immortal words of Beyonce, don’t you ever get to thinking you’re irreplaceable”), designer clothing brands (Marc Jacobs, Cartier) and slang (“chunder”), the teens’ voices are potentially appealing, if a bit caricatured. Predictably, many of the possible decisions center around potential romantic interests. “You” will often find yourself torn between your perfect crush, who happens to be your best friend/roommate’s boyfriend, a “Top Five senior stud” wannabe musician and your semi-nerdy best friend, Walter. Few readers will be surprised that choosing Walter results more consistently in happiness, though many may be dismayed that Walter frequently must first undergo a “bona fide hottie” makeover transformation. More troubling is Clark’s casual treatment of substantive issues. The real consequences of a student’s romantic entanglement with a teacher (and the student’s subsequent jealousy-fueled arson) are never addressed.

A victim of rophynol-assisted date rape does eventually seek medical treatment, but the psychological impacts of her experience merit only a few brief sentences.

Some teen readers will accept the slightly shallow plotlines and characters thanks to the (relative) novelty of the format; most will give it a miss. (Fiction. 13-17)

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“The very witty text and droll, comic-book–style black-and-white illustrations perfectly relay the all-too-hilarious adventures of Flora, Ulysses and a cast of eccentric characters who learn to believe in the impossible....” from flora & ulysses

A RADIANT SKY

Davies, Jocelyn HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-06-199069-4 978-0-06-211965-0 e-book Series: Beautiful Dark, 3 Romance trumps action even during the final battle to save the world in this trilogy closer.

At 17, Skye learned she was the daughter of two angels, one a Guardian and one a Rebel, giving her supernatural powers beyond any ever before seen. Now in conflict with both factions, she and her friends unite to try to forge a new way and keep the universe in balance. Sadly, both of her heartthrobs, former Guardian Devin and Asher, now both in the Rebel camp, oppose her, even though they all still have to attend high school together. Skye tracks down two other Rogue angels, one with a cute little daughter named Earth, and the group sets out to prepare for the epic battle and for another important event: prom. When that heroic battle occurs, Davies keeps her focus more on romance than on the action, interrupting the battle numerous times for conversations explaining the participants’ emotions, decisions and sudden romantic realizations; Asher reaches full Harlequin eloquence in his final speech to Skye. In the closing pages, Skye makes a final, major choice that indeed should fully end the trilogy. Skye, Devin and Asher come across as standard-issue romance heroes, but a few of the minor characters achieve some nice individuality, especially Earth.

For romance fans only, who should enjoy it. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

FLORA & ULYSSES The Illuminated Adventures

DiCamillo, Kate Illus. by Campbell, K.G. Candlewick (240 pp.) | $17.99 Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-7636-6724-5

When a cynical comic-book fanatic discovers her own superhero, life becomes wonderfully supercharged.

Despite the contract her mother made her sign to “turn her face away from the idiotic high jinks of comics,” 10-year-old Flora avidly follows her favorite superhero’s adventures. Flora’s mother writes romance novels and seems more in love with her books than with her lonely ex-husband or equally lonely daughter. When a neighbor accidentally vacuums a squirrel into a Ulysses 2000X vacuum cleaner, Flora resuscitates him into a “changed squirrel,” able to lift the 2000X with a single paw. Immediately assuming he’s a superhero, Flora names the squirrel “Ulysses” and believes together they will “[shed] light into the darkest corners of the universe.” Able to understand |

Flora, type, compose poetry and fly, the transformed Ulysses indeed exhibits superpowers, but he confronts his “arch-nemesis” when Flora’s mother tries to terminate him, triggering a chain of events where Ulysses becomes a real superhero. The very witty text and droll, comic-book–style black-and-white illustrations perfectly relay the all-too-hilarious adventures of Flora, Ulysses and a cast of eccentric characters who learn to believe in the impossible and have “capacious” hearts.

Original, touching and oh-so-funny tale starring an endearingly implausible superhero and a not-so-cynical girl. (Fantasy. 8-12)

CRAFTY CHLOE Dress-Up Mess-Up

DiPucchio, Kelly Illus. by Ross, Heather Atheneum (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-4424-2124-0 Series: Crafty Chloe

Chloe finds herself once again with a cliffhanger of a problem (Crafty Chloe, 2012). And it involves her two best friends. Can her creative powers get her out of this pickle?

DiPucchio’s story is filled with entertaining drama and deadpan hilarity. The Parade of Books is a costumed event at school, and Chloe is torn between the ideas of two very best but very different friends. Leo and Chloe are planning to go as Frankenstein and Dracula. But Emma, at their weekly spa day, says they should be Fairy Club fairies and is horrified at Chloe’s plan. “ ‘You’re going to be a MONSTER?’ Emma’s oatmeal mask cracked.”

Chloe begins the herculean task of finding a solution to this predicament. The text provides painful insight into the creative process, and Ross’ digitally colored pencil drawings capture this charismatic spirit. Chloe’s frustration is palpable as she dons her winter coat and hat on a beautiful sunny day, hoping a snow day might cancel the impending festivities. With pacing that mimics the first installment, the book gives Chloe a down-to-the-wire moment of inspiration; she begins fussing and fixing through the night. The last page shows Chloe’s creative genius, reflecting it in the adoration of her best friends’ eyes.

Share this lively tale of bighearted friendship and originality with young readers needing a little zest for life. A corresponding website provides crafting ideas and instructions. (Picture book. 4-8)

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DIGGER THE DINOSAUR

Dotlich, Rebecca Kai Illus. by Gynux Harper/HarperCollins (24 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-06-222222-0 978-0-06-222221-3 paper Series: I Can Read!

Dotlich’s text makes good use of assonance and internal rhymes to support new readers’ decoding skills in this story about a dinosaur who needs to clean up his bedroom before he can go outside to play ball.

Momasaur is displeased with the state of Digger’s room, and when he asks if he can go play ball with his friend, Stego, she replies sternly, “No….Your room is a mess.” Digger mistakes the word “mess” for “yes,” but Stego corrects him, and in a spirit of friendly generosity, offers to help him clean up. Digger continues to fail to attend carefully to others’ words as he confuses Stego’s helpful directions, mishearing “hook” as “book” and “bones” as “stones.” Then Stego becomes distracted and mistakes Momasaur’s final direction to put “hats” away as putting “cats” away. Digger catches the mistake as the poor cats meow from within an armoire, and then they quickly free them and tidy up the hats before going outside to play ball. Cartoonish illustrations seem like they’d be right at home in an animator’s studio, though background detail is a bit overdone and potentially distracting in a book with such a well-controlled text.

A strong new series for brand-new readers. (Early reader. 4- 6)

CONJURED

Durst, Sarah Beth Walker (304 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-8027-3458-7 Someone is killing atypical teens, and Eve is a witness, a target or an accomplice—she just can’t remember which.

Eve doesn’t know who she is or where she came from after waking up from surgery with a new name, a new face and an underdeveloped cover story provided by the agency that now supports her. She struggles to adjust to her strange new world, finding solace only in her work as a library page with Zach, who is cute, intelligent and as agenda-free as any typical teenage boy.

Everyone else—agents “Aunt” Nicki Gallo and Malcolm Harrington and a clutch of other agency-protected teens—manipulates and misleads her. Eve’s newly acquired magical abilities and resultant visions of a bizarre and brutal carnival prove vital to the agency’s work but destructive to her short-term memory. She is an unreliable and constantly confused narrator, but her pursuit of the truth and her selfless love for Zach help to 74

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transform her from a puppet into a real girl. Durst excels at describing grotesque violence and gorgeous magical transformations alike, painting a touching portrait of first love against a backdrop of Twilight Zone–type terrors.

Patient readers will respond to this slow thriller about a girl with memory loss and magical powers, and a murderer on the loose. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

SKY JUMPERS

Eddleman, Peggy Random House (288 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-307-98127-1 978-0-307-98129-5 e-book 978-0-307-98128-8 PLB Series: Sky Jumpers, 1 Following the devastation of World War III, a community struggles to survive.

The detonation of the green bombs not only destroyed life, but left behind a terrible legacy: the Bomb’s Breath. While this denser and invisible layer of air is poisonous, it also affords the town of White Rock protection and a source of power. In a world devoid of technology, inventors are at a premium, but 12-year-old Hope lacks imagination and mechanical skill. Add in her impulsivity and strong will, and it is no wonder Hope finds herself in trouble more often than not. However, her qualities might be just what the town needs when bandits attack, demanding their life-saving medicine. Hope must lead her friends on a dangerous trek that will either save the lives of many or get them all killed. Hope is a likable but bland heroine, and she faces stereotypical villains. Any real suspense is diffused by obvious plot twists and a predictable ending. This first installment in a new series draws heavily upon several familiar stories, but while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the result is often a shadow of the original.

Another post-apocalyptic copycat. (map) (Post-apocalyptic adventure. 9-13)

IF YOU COULD BE MINE

Farizan, Sara Algonquin (256 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-61620-251-4

Sahar, a teenage lesbian living in Iran, contemplates desperate measures when she learns the girl she loves is marrying a man.

Sahar has loved Nasrin since childhood. Nasrin swears she loves Sahar back, but she is rich, spoiled and unwilling to disappoint her mother, a combination that spells tragedy to readers even though Sahar remains poignantly hopeful. When Nasrin’s family announces her engagement to a

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“Sometimes the book feels like a personal bet between the writer and the illustrator: “But can you draw this?”

Young is always up to the challenge....” from fortunately, the milk

doctor, Sahar is heartsick. Through her gay cousin Ali’s underground network, Sahar meets a woman named Parveen. Upon learning that Parveen is transsexual, Sahar hatches a scheme to transition herself, certain that Nasrin would marry her if she were a man. Gentle, unintrusive exposition clues readers into Iran’s political and social realities, and the characters’ choices about how to wear head scarves or how openly to talk about same-sex attractions are refreshingly and believably diverse. So too are the members of the transgender support group Sahar attends: The group has a broad enough range of experience that readers never get the message that transition itself is a mistake, only that it is the wrong choice for Sahar. Each character and relationship is kindly and carefully drawn, from Sahar’s sad, shut-down Baba to reckless, twinkling Ali. A moving and elegant story of first love and family. (Fiction. 12-18)

THE SONG OF THE QUARKBEAST

Fforde, Jasper Harcourt (304 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-547-73848-2 Series: Chronicles of Kazam, 2

FORTUNATELY, THE MILK

Gaiman, Neil Illus. by Young, Skottie Harper/HarperCollins (128 pp.) $14.99 | $8.99 e-book | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-06-222407-1 978-0-06-222409-5 e-book Publishers used to say, “If you read only one book this year, make it this one.”

Gaiman has tried to write the only book anyone will need, ever, packing into it every adventure story written in the past 300 years.

The book seems to include every plot on TVTropes.org. There’s a time machine. There are “wumpires” and pirates. The story is simple: A father goes to the store to buy milk. The only trouble is, he’s kidnapped by aliens, and by the end of the book, he’s being threatened by dancing dwarfs. Sometimes the book feels like a personal bet between the writer and the illustrator: “But can you draw this?”

Young is always up to the challenge, no matter what gets thrown at

Fforde’s signature quirky humor and tongue-in-cheek social commentary persist in the second book of The Chronicles of Kazam trilogy (The Last

Dragonslayer, 2012).

Foundling Jennifer Strange runs Kazam, a business that finds practical uses for the Ununited Kingdom’s dwindling magic—delivering pizza by magic carpet, unclogging drains— while awaiting the return of real magic. Kazam’s competition, Industrial Magic, wants a monopoly on magic, with plans to use it for financial gain. A contest will decide the future of magic: Whichever company is faster in repairing Hereford’s medieval bridge will control all magic. The story is rife with magic spells, often humorously botched, and wonderfully imagined characters—including a new love interest for Jennifer. Fforde’s clever wordplay and social satire poke fun at everything from corporations and the monarchy to talentless boy bands and T-shirt slogans. But this impedes the episodic plot and raises the question of audience for the book, as many allusions and puns may elude American teens. Jennifer, likable in her lack of magical powers, seems older than her 16 years; her delivery of dialogue often sounds as though she is reading aloud. The storyline is less strong than that of the first book, making this seem a setup for the final installment. Indeed, the titular Quarkbeast barely makes an appearance.

For fans of Fforde and the first installment. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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him. He makes pirates look both dangerous and adorable. But once in a while, readers may wish that the author would stop throwing things. The best scene in the book is brief and quiet. The father asks a time-traveling stegosaurus where all the dinosaurs went. “The stars,” professor Steg says. “That is where we will have gone.”

Frenetic as the story is, it’s hard not to love a novel that borrows equally from Calvin and Hobbes and The Usual Suspects.

If you read only one book this year, a story with dancing dwarfs is always a wise choice. (Adventure. 8-12)

MAXIMILIAN & THE BINGO REMATCH

Garza, Xavier Illus. by Garza, Xavier Cinco Puntos (208 pp.) $19.95 | $12.95 paper | $12.95 e-book Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-935955-59-7 978-1-935955-46-7 paper 978-1-935955-47-4 e-book Maximilian, the lucha-libre–obsessed 11-year-old from Garza’s Pura Belpré Honor winner, Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel (2011), returns to tackle a new mystery—understanding girls!

Max is now in junior high, and lucha libre is still a big part of his life. He dreams of one day taking over for his favorite luchador, the Guardian Angel. However, most of this story takes place outside of the wrestling ring and in the more subtle world of relationships.

Members of Max’s family must learn to work out their differences and forgive each other for past mistakes. Max’s first girlfriend moves to another state, and as he navigates young love in a long-distance relationship, a mysterious new girl enters his life. Short chapters and the bilingual format (English text is on the left with Spanish translation on facing pages) make this book a quick read, great for reluctant readers, but it ends too quickly, before any real action begins. The sequel feels as though it is a transition book, perhaps moving toward a future series. Readers who enjoyed the first title will be pleased to continue reading about Max and his family, but this follow-up isn’t strong enough on its own to win many new fans.

Though this sequel doesn’t achieve the same victory as its predecessor, it does set the stage for more engaging rounds to come—here’s hoping. (Fiction. 9-12)

THE BAREFOOT BOOK OF JEWISH TALES Gelfand, Shoshana Boyd Illus. by Hall, Amanda Barefoot (80 pp.) $19.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1846868832

Judaism’s long tradition of teaching through storytelling is affirmed in these eight tales steeped in ethics, morality and belief.

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The fluidly told, extended narratives reflect mostly the Eastern European or Hasidic canon. Some will be familiar, as they appear in other collections or picture-book versions.

Behavior and personal choice is the theme of the parable “The Prince Who Thought He Was a Rooster,” which was also seen in Ann Redisch Stampler and Eugene Yelchin’s The Rooster Prince of Breslov (2010). “Challah in the Ark” recalls Aubrey Davis and Dusan Petricic’s tale of generosity, Bagels from Benny (2003). And Debby Waldman’s 2009 version of Clever Rachel is echoed in the story of the same title, with its message of coupling kindness with intelligent cooperation. Others, such as “The Boy Who Prayed the Alphabet” and “Elijah’s Wisdom,” will be valued for their simple messages of heartfelt belief and justice based on proper action. The folkloric narrative style often employs the familiar European motif of “three,” delivering the plots with a patient tone and rabbinical perspective. The accompanying CD presents actress Debra Messing’s readings, her calm, mellifluous voice bringing out each story’s essence. Similarly, each tale’s tenor is individually enhanced through intrinsic borders and paintings created in watercolor ink, pastel, pencil crayon and digital layering.

A lovely collection that will inspire both discussion and contemplation. (references, sources) (Folk tales. 10-14)

WHISKERS, TAILS & WINGS Animal Folktales from Mexico

Goldman, Judy Illus. by Vanden Broeck, Fabricio Charlesbridge (64 pp.) $16.95 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-372-5 978-1-60734-617-3 e-book

Five animated, traditional tales are enhanced by ethnographic information about the indigenous peoples who still tell these stories.

The author has selected tales not from the well-known Aztec or Mayan tradition, but from the Tarahumara, Seri, Huichol, Triqui and Tseltal peoples. Each short tale is followed by a description of the group’s traditional customs and their contemporary lives, including their use of cars and computers (and, in the Huichol chapter, ceremonial peyote by chosen adults). The stories attest to the ingenuity of the cricket, Señor Grillo, over the force of Señor Puma’s army and to the steadfastness of Mosni, the sea turtle, whose journey to bring sand from the ocean floor enabled Hant Caai, the Seri god of creation, to create land that humans would inhabit. The Huichol story explains why the opossum has a bare but prehensile tail. The humorous Triqui tale describes insects invented by their god of creation to make Man and Woman do some real work, and the last story recounts the scary encounter between a large buzzard and a small frog. The book is handsomely designed, with full-bleed acrylic-and-watercolor paintings on heavily textured papers starting off each story. Realistic vignettes emphasizing

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“...it is when she starts in on words, languages and language families that things really start to get fascinating.....” from chitchat

folk art and intricate clothing illustrate the informational sections. Comprehensive glossaries (with pronunciation guides) accompany each story, and a scholarly bibliography and index round out the volume.

One of the most satisfying folklore collections in recent memory. (Folk tales. 7-11)

RISKED

Haddix, Margaret Peterson Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4169-8984-4 Series: Missing, 6 The time-traveling middle schoolers are back for a trip to rescue Anastasia and Alexis Romanov from their 1918 murderers.

Thirteen-year-old Jonah and his sister, 11-year-old Katherine, take an unplanned trip back in time to the house in Russia where the Romanovs were executed.

Time-travel criminals Gary and Hodge have escaped from time prison by tricking Daniella and Gavin, the modern-day versions of Anastasia and Alexis. Friend Chip comes along for the ride.

Once they arrive in 1918, the kids learn that they have landed at the site of the Romanovs’ execution, to be carried out in the early hours of the next day. They also discover, to their horror, that their Elucidator, the device that controls their movement through time, has been modified so that it cannot take them back to the present. Fortunately it can, however, make Jonah, Katherine and Chip invisible, a function the kids immediately use after guards capture them when they arrive. The story continues with the suspense fans have come to expect in this entertaining and discreetly educational series, taking everyone into the cellar where the Romanovs were murdered and acting out several scenarios while playing with time. As always, this story has great potential to spark interest in a historical event while keeping young readers entertained and fascinated.

Plenty of fun and great for history teachers as well. (Science fiction. 8-12)

HAPPY CAT

Henry, Steve Illus. by Henry, Steve Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2659-1 Series: I Like to Read

illustrations help fill in the details. The eponymous hero is a round, yellow cat with a shy smile who starts out shivering on a cold and snowy sidewalk. Jumping into an open window, he lands in a snug cellar, where he meets a friendly rat who sends him up the stairs. The animals who live in the upper stories welcome Cat and offer gifts that reflect their interests. When “Cat [meets] Dog,” who sits in a cozy armchair surrounded by bookshelves, Cat leaves with a book tucked under his arm. Rabbit, an enthusiastic gardener, gives him a small potted plant, Bird offers a painting, and Elephant takes time out from playing the piano to provide a hot cup of tea. By the end, “Cat [is] happy,” and readers will be too.

Plenty of visual cues, lots of repetition and a clear story arc make this a perfect choice for beginning readers—and parents pressed for time will likely be happy to find such a short, sweet read-aloud. (Early reader.4-7)

CHITCHAT Celebrating the World’s Languages

Isabella, Jude Illus. by Boake, Kathy Kids Can (44 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-55453-787-7

Both fundamentals and peculiarities of language are introduced in this light-handed survey.

There are many facets to the subject, and Isabella manages to hit on a good handful of the more engaging ones. Grammar and syntax, which can be real snoozers, are treated with a measure of humor by mixing up the word order. She tackles the importance of the right vocal equipment and the still-curious role of genetics. But it is when she starts in on words, languages and language families that things really start to get fascinating: There are almost 7,000 languages and that “[n]inety percent of written English uses only 7000 words,” just a fraction of those available. Or that a good number of languages do not have a word for the color blue. It is one of the less important colors when it comes to survival, evidently. Go figure. She covers language extinction without getting too down at the mouth, and she has some fun with the dreaded legalese—“res ipsa loquitor”— as well as the creation of new words, from “kidnapping” to “bargainous.” Isabella’s writing doesn’t rush matters; she explains thoroughly but not tediously. On the other hand, Boake’s artwork—with its taxidermist’s eyes and hyperbuffed coloring— feels like it is trying too hard to be hip.

An encouraging primer that ought to spark interest for further study. (Nonfiction. 8-12) ()

This cheery entry in the I Like to Read series successfully tells a simple tale and creates a sense of community using just 20 unique words.

Short, declarative sentences describe the action. Cat enters a house, climbs up three floors and finds a cozy room just big enough to make a perfect home. Colorful, cartoon-style |

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DANCER, DAUGHTER, TRAITOR, SPY

Kiem, Elizabeth Soho Teen (288 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-61695-263-1

The disappearance of a star ballerina in Soviet Russia shatters the life of her daughter.

Bright, 17-year-old Marya is the daughter of the Bolshoi’s star ballerina and her scientist husband, and she’s a dancer herself. In the early 1980s Soviet Union, Svetlana Dukovskaya’s celebrity translates into a comfortable life for herself and her family. Indeed, she has been called a “cultural patriot of the Motherland,” and she expects Marya to follow her path. Her sudden disappearance throws Marya, and snatches of overheard conversation cause a sense of unease that is verified when Marya and her father learn Sveta has been institutionalized. Fleeing, Marya and her father settle in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa, where they attempt to get news about Sveta. Marya enrolls in high school and takes classes at Julliard and also begins a relationship with Ben, a son of Russian émigrés. Ben shares his love of music with her and becomes a source of strength, as her father and his newly arrived best friend seem caught up in intrigue. This is sophisticated storytelling with complex characterization and details that provide color and texture. The pacing is somewhat uneven, but there are enough twists to surprise and engage readers to the end.

A compelling portrait of a young woman on the verge of adulthood, caught up in the domestic secrets of her parents and the enmity of two countries. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

COZY LIGHT, COZY NIGHT

Kleven, Elisa Illus. by Kleven, Elisa Creston (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-939547-02-6

The idea of “cozy”—hyggelig in Danish and Gemütlichkeit in German but not so nuanced in English— is what drives this deliciously illustrated, rhymed seasonal tale.

The pictures are a riot of color and pattern. Readers move through the seasons, starting with autumn, with items one might not think of as cozy but that definitely are: “Cozy toes in fuzzy boots, cozy pits in purple fruits.” Several families of varying ethnicities populate these pages, and their activities display coziness: mom playing the banjo; dad at a sewing machine; everyone collecting a pumpkin in the rain. Braided loaves of bread, popcorn popping and Grandma tickling the belly of a pajama-clad toddler are all cozy. So are bugs in their flowers and keys in their pockets. Sometimes the rhyme doesn’t quite catch, and sometimes it stretches beyond, but the images of “[c]ozy matzo balls in soup” or a scoop of ice cream cozy in its cone 78

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are pretty cute. Winter opens with three children on a quilted, padded window seat, watching the snow fall, while a parent in the kitchen flips hot cakes. The children’s pajamas, the hall rug, snow falling on the rainbow-colored cityscape—all make a kaleidoscope of pattern that one can return to again and again.

Every page is like that.

It is worth noting that this title is printed and bound in the United States and that its paper is labeled “from responsible sources.” That would not help a less effective tale, but it truly enhances this 32-page delight. (Picture book.

4-7)

WARNING: DO NOT OPEN THIS BOOK!

Lehrhaupt, Adam Illus. by Forsythe, Matthew Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4424-3582-7

Debut author Lehrhaupt and New York Times Notable Children’s Book illustrator Forsythe (My Name Is Elizabeth!, 2011) team up for a laugh-out-loud romp through monkey-infested pages.

From the title and the endpapers’ warning signs (“I guess you don’t mind being mauled by mo___s”) to the opening pages’ admonishments not to venture further, the narrator repeatedly warns readers not to open this book. Those who do not heed these pleas release a troop of artistic monkeys that wreak havoc on the book itself. Nothing is safe from these wild invaders— not the art and not the text. When the narrator again urges readers to turn back, toucans join the fracas. Forsythe uses the same warm palette for the toucans as the monkeys, adding a nice continuity to an otherwise strange addition that slows down this well-paced story. Before the toucans can do much, an alligator shows up, frightening everyone. With chaos reigning supreme, the narrator turns to readers for help in laying out a plan to snare the animals inside the book. Forsythe’s digitally rendered art is hilariously expressive and laugh-worthy in its own right, and it is well-paired with Lehrhaupt’s spare comic text, successfully creating a book that is enjoyable both to read and behold.

In the tradition of humorous metafictive offerings of the past, this celebration of chaos is a veritable festival of fun. (Picture book. 3-7)

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“Livi achieves precocity without even a hint of saccharine.” from on my way to bed

HELLO, MAMA WALLAROO

between these two formidable women is a particular treasure.)

Meanwhile, Celaena unravels the mystery of Adarlan’s sudden strength, a magical subplot that intersects with Dorian’s dangerous self-exploration. Vivid Celaena, loving and brutally violent in turn, is a fully realized heroine. The ending comes at the right time—at the close of one storyline and prologue of another—to leave readers impatient for the next installment.

An epic fantasy readers will immerse themselves in and never want to leave. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

Lunde, Darrin Illus. by Wynne, Patricia J. Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $15.95 | $6.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-57091-796-7 978-1-57091-797-4 paper 978-1-60734-605-0 e-book Preschoolers may think they know about kangaroos, but have they ever heard of or seen a common wallaroo, a kind of kangaroo? In this simple informational text, they get to meet one and conduct an interview with her.

Lunde and Wynne have used this format in three previous books (Hello, Baby Beluga, 2011, etc.), and it is an effective way to convey basic facts such as: “[W]here do you live?” (Australia); “what do you eat?” (grass); and “what do you fear?” (dingoes that try to eat her). With the circle of life alluded to—and the very youngest naturalists need not worry, as Mama Wallaroo hops away when she sees dingoes—they next get to ask what is in her pouch (a baby). The questions appear in large type, with Mama’s responses set off in smaller type. Mama and her habitat are realistically depicted in pencil, ink and watercolor illustrations that have plenty of “awww” power. The last spread notes that there are “about fifty different kinds of kangaroo-like animals in Australia” and provides a few more details about joeys and male wallaroos.

Tots who have enjoyed the earlier titles with find this a satisfying introduction to an animal whose name they will also love repeating. (Informational picture book. 2-5)

CROWN OF MIDNIGHT

Maas, Sarah J. Bloomsbury (336 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-61963-062-8 Series: Throne of Glass, 2

After being named the King’s Champion in Throne of Glass (2012), Celaena Sardothien serves as the king of Adarlan’s personal assassin—at least, she pretends to—in a densely plotted sequel.

If the king catches Celaena disobeying his orders, he will execute her closest friends. However, she can’t stomach advancing his agenda, especially if it means murdering innocents in cold blood. When the king uncovers traitors in the city, the first name on his hit list is Archer Finn, a popular courtesan and Celaena’s old friend. Plotting Archer’s escape, Celaena takes the opportunity to make him her personal informant about the rebellion, which Celaena hopes will help her infer the king’s plans—plans she is thoroughly conflicted about challenging, for as much as she hates the king, she thinks opposing him would only get her killed. Secrets damage her nuanced relationships with Chaol and Nehemia. (The complex friendship |

ON MY WAY TO BED

Maizes, Sarah Illus. by Paraskevas, Michael Walker (40 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-80272-366-6

The exuberant heroine of On My Way to the Bath (2012) returns to tackle that most perilous of childhood rituals: bedtime.

Making bedtime avoidance and delay into a high art, Livi calls upon a number of strategies when her mother informs her that it is time for bed. Assuring readers that she isn’t even remotely sleepy (“Bed is for tired people,” she is quick to point out), she finds creative ways to slow the bedtime process down to a crawl. Suddenly, she’s a tightrope walker, a rocket scientist or even an octopus as the situation demands. When, at long last, an understandably frazzled mom gets her offspring under the sheets, Livi sleeps like an angel. So well, in fact, that her response to her mother’s gentle wake-up call the next morning is to become a hibernating bear. Honestly funny from start to finish, the madcap digital art isn’t afraid to, at times, relinquish the goofy for a truly lovely spread, as with the opening and closing endpapers. Livi achieves precocity without even a hint of saccharine. It’s hard to resist her final wail—“I don’t want to miss anything!”—which reveals what’s really been going on here.

Bed-based procrastination is nothing new, but Livi’s imaginative play takes the experience to an entirely superior level. (Picture book. 3-7)

THERE, THERE

McBratney, Sam Illus. by Bates, Ivan Templar/Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7636-6702-3 Fans of McBratney’s best-known work, Guess How Much I Love You (illustrated by Anita Jeram, 1994), will recognize (and embrace) the cozy tone of this charming story about how to cope with mishaps.

They’re also likely to welcome little Hansie and his parents, a cuddly, anthropomorphized bear family, with open arms.

Hansie behaves like a typical preschooler, busy mimicking

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“Six middle schoolers + mad scientists + Everglades = adventure.” from wake up missing

the world around him, digging in the dirt and playing with his friends. Each scenario, however, leads to a minor injury or moment of discomfort. Hansie bangs his knee, gets sand in his eyes and knocks his head against a low-hanging branch. In each case, his father is close by, ready to apply a bandage, advise him to “blinkety blink” to clear his vision or give his head a rub.

Each simple remedy is capped with a big hug and a comforting “There, there.” When his father comes home later in need of care, Hansie is happy to return the favor. McBratney’s plot doesn’t break any new ground, but he endows his ursine characters with distinct voices and effectively captures a young child’s endearingly imaginative play. Bates’ mixed-media illustrations, meanwhile, add even more sweetness and an old-fashioned feel, with rounded shapes, soft outlines, subdued colors and engaging details (don’t miss the ducks playing in the sand).

A pleasing portrait of a nurturing father-son relationship, McBratney’s latest should find a warm welcome. (Picture book. 4-7)

LULU AND THE CAT IN THE BAG

McKay, Hilary Illus. by Lamont, Priscilla Whitman (112 pp.) $13.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-4804-2 Series: Lulu, 3

HOOGIE IN THE MIDDLE

McLellan, Stephanie Illus. by Griffiths, Dean Pajama Press (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-927485-28-6

Even monsters feel left out when they are middle siblings.

Pumpkin is the oldest, Tweezle is the youngest, and Hoogie is stuck plumb in the middle. To make matters worse, Pumpkin has blue fur and slender horns like Mom, and Tweezle has green fur and fat, crinkly horns like Dad. Hoogie, on the other hand, has magenta-pink fur and little horn nubs. She just doesn’t fit in. Relying on common family scenarios, McLellan’s storytelling lacks a bit of luster. Pumpkin is mature and responsible; Tweezle is adorable and cuddly—all often true in a middle child’s world but predictable nonetheless. However, Hoogie imaginatively describes herself as what is missing: She feels like the hole in the middle of the doughnut. She sadly whispers, “Too big. Too small. No room for me at all.” After the inevitable explosion of frustration, Hoogie’s parents show her how special being in the middle can be. She now feels like jelly in the middle of a sandwich: oh-so-sweet.

With their tangles of brightly colored fur, tiny fangs and tiny horns, these feline-esque monsters offer different perspectives of what “middle” can mean. (Picture book. 3-6)

WAKE UP MISSING

Messner, Kate Walker (272 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-8027-2314-7

This installment in the continuing story of Lulu, her cousin and best friend, Mellie, and her growing collection of

pets delights.

Their grandmother, Nan, who is “little and snappy and quick and kind,” is staying with the girls while their parents are away on a grown-up holiday. She is not fond of animals, so this is quite brave: Lulu’s menagerie is ever-growing. When a bag full (as it turns out) of a marigold-colored cat is left on the doorstep, Nan tries mightily to keep Lulu from opening something that could be dangerous, but she does not succeed. What follows is a rollicking tale of a cat that loves flowers (and is wary of humans), terrorizes Lulu’s old dog Sam and young dog Rocko, and allows the girls to understand that not all animals can cohabit with the same family and that not all adults look upon creatures with the affection and care that Lulu does. Their neighbor Charlie, who loves making people “shriek and giggle,” makes a cameo appearance. Why the marigold cat was so large (and so wary) is explained in the end, and a satisfactory home for the marigolds three (!) is found.

The story allows for increasing complexity of situation and emotion in a way that’s utterly accepting of 7-year-old thought—and it’s very funny. (Fiction. 7-9)

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Six middle schoolers + mad scientists + Everglades = adventure.

Cat, along with five other children who have suffered head injuries, goes to what is billed as the pre-eminent neurological center in the world, the International Center for Advanced Neurology, located in the Everglades.

At first, she receives excellent care, but she soon overhears an ominous conversation that leads to her discovery of the awful truth: The terrible Dr. Ames and his colleague intend to implant the children with the DNA of long-dead scientists, including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Marie Curie and even Leonardo da Vinci. Worse, they learn that Trent, who has already received a transplant, has virtually become Thomas Edison. Trent not only has Edison’s DNA, he has Edison’s century-old memories and speech patterns. Cat and her friends seize an opportunity to escape, relying on Trent’s technical expertise and “inherited” memory to evade the bad guys. As she outlines in her author’s note, Messner follows good science in her descriptions of headinjury treatment; she also gives teachers opportunities to explore the differences between hereditary and acquired characteristics in her more fictional genetic “science.” Her characterizations are solid and age-appropriate; Trent, as young Thomas Edison still avidly working on alternating currents, supplies some laughs.

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With plenty of thrills, friendship, some humor, intrigue and an easy good-guys/bad-guys escape plot, young readers will find lots of fun here. (Science fiction. 10-14)

FREDA SAYS PLEASE

Murphy, Stuart J. Illus. by Jones, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | $6.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-474-6 978-1-58089-475-3 paper 978-1-60734-606-7 e-book Series: I See I Learn Normally very good at breaking down skills in a way that both teaches and entertains, the I See I Learn series missteps with this entry.

Freda loves playing school and being the teacher, just like Miss Cathy. But when Percy comes to join her, he points out her lack of manners: Miss Cathy “told us that it’s polite to say ‘please’ when you ask for something.” When Freda continues her bossy ways, he plays by himself, joining her when she finally asks politely.

Outside, at “recess,” the lessons on being polite continue with “thank you” and “you’re welcome,” but they are couched in a game of catch that is ridiculously polite, to the point of being unbelievable. Scrubba Dub, Carlos, publishing simultaneously, does a better job with its target behavior, teaching children the importance of good hand-washing. When Carlos fails to clean his dirty hands, Miss Cathy leads a discussion on why hand-washing is so important and shows the children the proper hand-washing technique, broken down into flowchart steps on the pages. Unfortunately, rather than use the old standard of “Happy Birthday,” Murphy has children “singing” “One scrubba dub, two scrubba dub…” all the way up to 10. Still, by the end of the book, youngsters will be familiar with both the whys and the hows of hand-washing. Both titles end with a summary and questions.

Didacticism tops the charts with Freda, but co-publishing Carlos is on the money. (Picture book. 2-5)

SIR CUMFERENCE AND THE OFF-THE-CHARTS DESSERT A Math Adventure

Neuschwander, Cindy Illus. by Geehan, Wayne Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | $7.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-57091-198-9 978-1-57091-199-6 paper 978-1-60734-613-5 e-book Series: Sir Cumference

The latest in Neuschwander’s medieval mathematical series explores bar graphs and pie charts. |

When the royal cook falls ill, Lady Di of Ameter and her husband, Sir Cumference, must not only judge the Harvest Faire sweet contest, but also find bakers to bake the confections. Luckily, their town boasts two bakers: Pia of Chartres and Bart Graf.

But their desserts are so good the royal couple cannot choose one over the other. They instruct the pair to give away free samples of their top sellers and keep track of the townspeople’s votes. After several (repetitive) attempts at keeping track of votes fail, each comes up with a recording system that works. Bart makes piles of cookie molds—one for each vote—while Pia places a different colored sweetmeat around the edges of a pie crust. In the end, the two present their findings—a bar graph and a pie chart showing a tie for first—to the rulers, along with a new dessert they concocted together, a clear winner. Geehan’s acrylic illustrations play up the stereotypical medieval clothing and setting, both he and the author eschewing accuracy for the storyline.

More contrived than other books addressing the same concept; still, the familiar characters may help readers take the lesson to heart. (Math picture book. 6-10)

THE BRAMBLE

Nordling, Lee Illus. by Zick, Bruce Carolrhoda (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-5856-5 In this heartfelt tale, a boy’s encounter with a fantasy world allows him to find acceptance in the real one.

When Cameron tries to join in a game of tag, he’s bullied and teased. The illustrations, done in a comic-book format with multiple panels, heartbreakingly display the boy’s feelings of rejection and loneliness. But when a creature from the bramble leaves an amulet behind, Cameron—like Alice with the White Rabbit—follows the creature through a dark hole. He emerges into a world where an ominous wave brings terror to all the creatures.

Despite this, they welcome and befriend him, and when the wave reappears, Cameron bravely faces it. A game of tag defeats the wave, releasing long-lost creatures back to beloved family and friends. Nordling and Zick’s metaphor becomes clear as Cameron returns to reality and finds the courage to challenge the bully to another game of tag. The wave and the bully are one and the same, striking fear into those around, overpowering—even distorting and removing—people’s kindness and friendship. But this time, Cameron is victorious, and the boy accepts him into the group. The artist’s energetic pencil illustrations skillfully create atmospheric environments and intriguing creatures. Different tints are used to indicate the two sides of the bramble, but both worlds are filled with texture and detail.

This nearly wordless tale offers much for readers to discuss and interpret, as the power of the individual to make a negative or positive impact in the world is explored. A good addition to the overcoming-bullies bookshelf. (Picture book. 3-5)

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“It is a memoir told with love and nostalgia, for it is her own story....” from rifka takes a bow

INTO THAT FOREST

Nowra, Louis Skyscape (160 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4778-1725-4 978-1-4778-6725-9 e-book In this gripping story, two young girls survive in the Tasmanian bush after Tasmanian tigers adopt them.

When Hannah O’Brien’s 6, her parents take her and her friend Becky on a river picnic, where their boat is caught in a flash flood. Hannah’s parents drown, and the girls are washed ashore and rescued by a female tiger.

Sensing the animal will not harm them, Hannah convinces Becky to follow the tiger to her cave, where her mate also accepts them.

Viewing the tigers as “gentle dogs,” Hannah quickly becomes “one of them.” Initially horrified, Becky fears she will “become like an animal and stop being human,” but eventually, she forgets language, abandons clothing, hunts at night, eats raw meat, walks on all fours and views the tigers as parents. Four years later, Becky’s father finds the feral girls, who desperately fight to remain with their tiger family. Now 76, narrator Hannah tells her remarkable story, admitting “me language is bad cos I lost it and had to learn it again.” Her plain, direct speech movingly describes their transformation from human to animal, triggering profound questions about what happens when “flesh wins over…heart.”

A shocking, disturbing, extraordinary survival story.

(Fiction. 12 & up)

NIGHTY-NIGHT, COOPER

Numeroff, Laura; Illus. by Munsinger, Lynn Houghton Mifflin (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-547-40205-5

Despite his mama’s inviting, warm pouch, Cooper, a young kangaroo, is having trouble falling asleep.

He requests a few lullabies. So his mother does some inventive thinking and comes up with a few variations on themes: There is a nice turn on “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” and another on “The Farmer in the Dell.” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” gets a modest noodling, and, strangely, perhaps the best is “Jingle Bells”: “Daddy bear, baby bear, / Dancing everywhere / They dance all day / Until it’s night / And then they brush their hair! / Oh, dance all day / Dance all night / Dance until you doze / Daddy and his baby bear / Can dance up on their toes.” As mother starts drifting into her own dreamland, young kangaroo is still firing on at least three cylinders. Finally, he succumbs, and everyone can get some sleep. The text is dear in the extreme but has enough warmth not to be saccharine, but Munsinger’s artwork lifts the work to a higher ground. She can capture a look—on the first page, Cooper looks absolutely blasted, fighting slumber like Wellington fought Napoleon—as surely as George Stubbs caught horses.

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As lullabies go, the familiar tunes with the new lyrics may just keep sleepyheads entertained enough for a few gorounds, and sleep can wait. (Picture book. 4-8)

JUST LIKE FATE

Patrick, Cat; Young, Suzanne Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4424-7271-6 1-978-4424-7273-0 e-book

When her beloved grandmother suffers a massive stroke and ends up in the hospital, high school junior Caroline Cabot’s world falls apart.

Gram was her closest friend and mentor during Caroline’s parents’ acrimonious divorce. When Gram dies, Caroline is forced to confront her grief, her alienation from her family and some difficult choices in the relationship arena. In an ambitious narrative device, the book juggles two alternating plots, following a prefatory “Before” section.

Chapters titled “Stay” are based on the premise that Caroline chooses to remain with her grandmother in the hospital and hears her dying words of love for her granddaughter; in those titled “Go,” Caroline succumbs to her friends’ pressure to go to a party, thus missing the moment when Gram dies. Throughout the book, the consequences of these decisions are revealed, and both lead to the same cathartic epilogue. Although the dual narrative feels labored at times, and the moral message is not always clear, the authenticity of Caroline’s feelings and the realworld dilemmas she faces make her story one younger teens can easily relate to.

An unusual and intriguing meditation on freedom of choice. (Fiction. 12-16)

RIFKA TAKES A BOW

Perlov, Betty Rosenberg Illus. by Kawa, Cosei Kar-Ben (32 pp.) $17.95 | $6.95 e-book | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-8127-3 978-1-4677-1648-2 e-book Rifka accidentally finds herself onstage in a Yiddish theater production and speaks her first lines as an actress: “Piff-Paff! Not to worry.”

The Yiddish theater was a vibrant part of immigrant life in New York in the first part of the 20th century. Rifka’s parents are actors who introduce her to the magical world of that theater. She is especially impressed with the way in which her parents can take on the personae of the characters they play, with just a bit of makeup, some props and costumes, and changes in body language. The surrounding elements of the city are also part of the fun. They travel on the subway with its noise and diversity. They eat at the Automat, putting in their nickels and

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taking out the food. Perlov makes it all come alive, employing a conversational syntax that speaks directly to readers. It is a memoir told with love and nostalgia, for it is her own story, told from a distance of nine decades. Kawa’s illustrations are as magical as any theater experience. She employs a variety of media to turn real places and events into fantasy landscapes from several perspectives, in dreamlike images that are somewhat reminiscent of Chagall. Look closely and there are tiny shapes and designs floating through the larger pictures.

Unusual and unabashedly charming. (afterword) (Picture book. 5-9)

THE SHADE OF THE MOON

Pfeffer, Susan Beth Harcourt (304 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-547-81337-0 978-0-547-81339-4 e-book Series: Life As We Knew It, 4 Four years ago, a meteor crashed into the moon, altering the Earth’s gravity; the world is an ever-bleaker place in this fourth of Pfeffer’s gripping series.

Seventeen-year-old Jon Evans, the younger brother of Miranda, protagonist in two of the earlier novels, lives with his stepmother and half brother in an enclave called Sexton. After countless natural disasters and proliferating disease, humanity is now plagued by rigidly cruel class stratification, in which a person is either a respected “claver” or a disdained “grub,” a system so ingrained that Jon struggles to understand whether or not he thinks it is right. Featuring a plot that delivers twist after twist, this is a vivid take on the man-as-monster theme common to the genre. While the individual relationships depicted at times stray into melodrama, there is a persistent undercurrent of dread running throughout due to the novel’s realistic portrayals of mob violence and bigotry. Short, dated excerpts from Jon’s third-person perspective lack the immediacy of the epistolary style employed in the installments narrated by Miranda, but they do a fine job of illustrating a young man in a moral quandary.

Action-packed and completely unpredictable, this latest will be widely anticipated by the series’ many fans. (Postapocalyptic adventure. 14 & up)

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PRISONER 88

Pileggi, Leah Charlesbridge (144 pp.) $16.95 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-560-6 978-1-60734-534-3 e-book A surprisingly affecting portrait of a 10-year-old boy in 1885 who is sentenced to five years for manslaughter and sent to the Idaho Territorial Penitentiary.

Inspired by a real incident reported in an Idaho newspaper on May 2, 1885, Pileggi convincingly creates a story of a resilient, not-really-aware-that-he’s-neglected, illiterate boy with a big heart. Jake struggles to comprehend and survive a harsh prison setting that was never set up to include juveniles. And yet “I was settled in just fine,” thanks in part to the kindly warden who arranges for him to work on a hog farm and take reading lessons from a fellow prisoner and to “eating a heaped-up tray of food every darned day.” Told from Jake’s point of view in the first person, this fast-paced, absorbing debut covers approximately nine months. Jake, aka “prisoner 88,” is attacked on several occasions and, during an attempted escape of two of the prisoners, does what he thinks is right, with unforeseen consequences. He takes his job tending the hogs seriously and witnesses both the birth of a litter of piglets and a slaughter. And, against all odds, he develops a community of sorts—a young guard, the farm family, several prisoners, a cat....

Mystery surrounds his own story—what happened that day in the saloon when his Pa was threatened and a gun went off, killing the owner; was an injustice done when Jake was convicted?

Young readers, including reluctant ones, will be rooting for Jake. (archival photograph, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-13)

LET’S MAKE FACES

Piven, Hanoch Illus. by Piven, Hanoch Atheneum (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-4169-1532-4

The author/artist of several books of portraits made from found objects provides a lesson in how to see and make faces using child-friendly materials found in the junk drawer and elsewhere.

While his earlier works included tips about how to make portraits from random items, in this, Piven devotes a full book to it, introducing the concept to the very youngest. The first spread shows individual items that resemble faces: a toilet-paper dispenser, a boxy fan with knobs. From there he expands, asking tots to train their eyes to find similar patterns (eyes, nose, mouth and such) in groups of objects. One spread shows scattered plastic fruits and vegetables. With a turn of the page, Piven reveals the faces he sees by masking the extraneous items. (Cleverly, the

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

D.J. MacHale

The veteran best-seller hits a home run with the first of an expected trilogy, but don’t expect him to tell you what’s what

By Gordon West It’s hard to think of the New York Times No. 1 best-selling author of the Pendragon series and co-creator/ producer of the classic Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? as an average guy, but that’s exactly how D.J. MacHale used to define himself. He was an average student and an average athlete who admittedly spent more time on the bench eyeing cheerleaders than on the field eyeing a goal. These declarations of ordinariness are transferred directly to 14-year-old Tucker Pierce, the main character of MacHale’s new adventure thriller, SYLO. “I wanted to write a guy who was really happy with being complacent,” MacHale says. “And he didn’t care if people judged him. He didn’t care if people thought he was great: ‘I’m happy in my skin.

Everything is cool.’ But then you can’t always live life that way, no matter what your circumstances are. In this case, the world starts ending, so he’s got to step up his game.”

SYLO is the study of a usually complacent teen’s reaction to extenuating, mysterious, deadly circumstances—and crushes on two starkly different girls. Tucker is happy with a B-minus.

He’s all right being benched. He’s content living on Pemberwick Island, Maine, far removed from 84

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the bustle of anything remotely metropolitan (think Amity Island minus the giant shark). His friends and contemporaries dream of escaping the sandy confines of Pemberwick, while Tucker is just fine living out his days of divine mediocrity on the sleepy island.

The calm tides of monotony shift when people on Pemberwick begin mysteriously dying, a creepy stranger appears peddling red crystals that promise bionic boosts, and the U.S. Army drops in without so much as a how-do-you-do to quarantine the entire island. Before long, Tucker joins his friends in their dreams of escape. Scratch that: He joins them in a desperate plot to escape since the Army—headed by a steely-eyed, coldhearted general—has no qualms about jailing, tasering, shooting or blowing up anyone who so much as looks at a getaway boat. With the authorities and their parents offering no solace or clarity, Tucker and his friends have to find answers and a means of escape on their own.

“When you’re a kid and something happens, what’s the first thing you do? You go to your parents,” MacHale says. “Well, I took away the parents; I made them part of the conspiracy. Then you go to the police.

‘Uh oh, the police are working with the bad guys here.’

Well, the Army must be the good guys. ‘Oh my God, the Army is shooting people.’ So, in all of my stories, I put these kids in situations where they’re always looking for someone to help them. Who do I go to?

Who’s going to get me out of this? Who’s the one who is going to save the day for me? And ultimately, what they always come up with is, the only one who’s going to help me is me.”

Kudos for self-empowerment, but if you know anything about MacHale, you know self-empowerment

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isn’t an automatic escape route. There’s still a lot of sludgy turmoil to tread before an end is in sight. And since this is the first installment in a trilogy, there’s really no detectable end goal of peace, harmony and hearty cups of New England clam chowder. Try fire, missiles, bullets, blood and even more unanswered questions instead. I ask MacHale if, in a downpour of dystopian and post-apocalyptic books on the market, he would define SYLO as pre-apocalyptic. He’s quick to agree. “So many post-apocalyptic or dystopian stories were all about ‘it hit the fan some time in the past and this is what we’re left with.’ I’m talking about the process here. As you’ll find, as the trilogy goes on, it’s not just about the practical, here-and-now process, but also the thematic process.”

He’s hesitant to say more, for fear of spoiling unforeseen plot twists. And frankly, I’m glad. I don’t want to know. Well, maybe I do just a little. I couldn’t help but look for clues and codes in character names, their genealogies and their settings. I admit one of my conspiracy theories and ask MacHale to confirm whether I’m accurate or just a loony, overly analytical zealot. He assures me I’m not loony (or, for that matter, accurate) but is thrilled that his storytelling prompted such a theory. “I love hearing conspiracy theories, because it means that I have done my job, that I have put enough out there, enough ambiguity....”

He goes on to say that “readers always want spoilers.

They always want to know what’s going on. And my answer to that is I hate spoilers because I don’t want to tell you what’s going on, and I also don’t want to tell you what’s not going on,” he explains. “It’s kind of like the classic truism of a scary story: What makes a story scary is not what happens, it’s what you think might happen. You’re walking down a corridor full of closed doors; you don’t know which one of them might suddenly open up and be a boogeyman back there. So, therefore you are terrified as you’re walking down that corridor.”

SYLO is a corridor. It’s a long, suspense-ridden, nightmare corridor with lots of shut doors. Except there’s not just one boogeyman lurking, there are many. And those boogeymen are harboring secrets, lies, macabre intentions, lethal agendas, and some of the craziest, bad-ass arsenals no one has ever seen.

I share MacHale’s disdain for spoiler alerts, but I’m going against that notion to reveal a few anyway. You’ll be ravenous for the second installment in this trilogy. |

You’ll find Tucker’s path from complacency to action hero genuine. You’ll feel like you are acquainted with Pemberwick intimately and that the world as you knew it has slammed to a whiplash halt. And you’ll totally want a steaming order of Maine lobster by Chapter 7.

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Gordon West is a writer, illustrator and, sometimes, photographer living in Brooklyn. He is admittedly addicted to horror films and French macarons.

Which Doctor “When I was growing up, books like SYLO didn’t exist for kids my age—they did but not in the numbers they do now PHP (post Harry Potter),” MacHale explains. “So I always joke and say I went from Dr. Seuss to Dr. No by Ian Fleming. And so of all the books that I’ve written, this book is probably the closest to what I grew up with—big, sprawling adventure novels with a team of people in jeopardy.”

Take a peek at our 1958 review of Fleming’s Dr. No to see just what might have enticed a young MacHale: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ ian-fleming/doctor-no/ —G.W.

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“In this collection, 35 writers encourage readers to stop obeying the voices telling them how to think, dress, act and believe.” from break these rules

outlines depict head-types of all sorts, such as peanut- or even footprint-shaped.) In this way, Piven conducts a conversation directly with his young art students; his comments are brief and appear in big, inviting type. After a few examples, Piven invites children to gather “stuff,” and, using it, he composes faces demonstrating a range of emotions: happy, goofy, scared and sleepy.

He closes with a spread containing seven more tips to get preschoolers started, the most important of which may be to “play, play, play!” This whimsical exercise is also a great lesson in reuse and recycling. (Picture book. 3-6)

THIS IS HOW I FIND HER

Polsky, Sara Whitman (262 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7877-3

A teenage girl attempts to separate her life from that of her bipolar mother in this introspective debut.

“On the fourth day of junior year, sometime between the second bell…and the time I got home from school, my mother tried to kill herself.” Sophie is left adrift after her mother is rushed to the hospital for treatment to medically regulate the bipolar disorder that caused her suicide attempt. Sophie’s constant attention to her single mother’s moods and medication has meant sacrificing friends and a social life, and now she feels completely alone. She withdraws even further when she is forced to live with her estranged aunt, uncle and cousin. But soon she begins making tenuous connections at school and with her new family, and she finds she is secretly relieved not to be just her mother’s caregiver. She enjoys having the freedom to help out at her uncle’s architectural firm after school or go on a random drive with her new friend, Natalie. But will she be able to ask for the help she needs when her mother finally comes home? Or will her feelings of guilt and shame keep her from reaching out? This quiet novel provides honest insight about the conflicting emotions felt by families struggling with bipolar disorder. Sophie’s inner journey from resignation to hopefulness is authentically portrayed and will provide great comfort to any teen contending with a parent’s affliction.

Perceptive and sincere. (Fiction. 12 & up)

MOONDAY

Rex, Adam Illus. by Rex, Adam Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4231-1920-3 The moon follows a girl home, takes up residence in her yard and stays put—keeping the sun from rising and the town stuck in a drowsy stupor. Enchanting language and a jaw-dropping premise place readers under a similar somnolent spell.

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Gentle rhymes, recurring consonance and almost subliminal rhythms make murky, dreamy paintings vivid and the surreal story sleepily spectacular. Who wouldn’t close their eyes and rock to these soothing lines, as startlingly brilliant as moonlight?

“That was when the tide came in. / It trickled in to our backyard.

The tide came in, smooth and thin, / and settled underneath our moon.” Their moon, cratered, full and luminous, hovers low just off the back porch; the girl walks its circumference and asks from upside down, “What now?” When teachers nod off and punk bands sing lullabies, the moon’s family decides to drive back up the mountain, where they first picked up their round friend, in the hope it will follow. Children familiar with soporific car trips will appreciate these commonplace scenes that frame such a fantastical story. Straightforward illustrations and traditional sepia, aerial renderings of the town make this fantastical lunar story all the more wondrous.

This mashup of the ordinary and the far-out, of a little neighborhood and a giant, glowing orb from outer space, thrills. (Picture book. 3-6)

BREAK THESE RULES 35 YA Authors On Speaking Up, Standing Out, and Being Yourself Reynolds, Luke—Ed. Chicago Review (208 pp.) $12.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-61374-784-1

Thirty-five essays encourage young readers to break the rules.

“Be tougher, be thinner, be smarter, be sexier, be funnier, be quieter, be louder, be better dressed, be more aware of what’s cool, be better at: everything.” Young people growing up awash in electronic media and the images and lifestyles they sell are often easy victims, never realizing the extent to which they are being brainwashed. Add to that, their fellow students are conforming to the same societal expectations and preying on those who are too different. Young people are in danger, as recent suicide statistics suggest. In this collection, 35 writers encourage readers to stop obeying the voices telling them how to think, dress, act and believe. In “Don’t Get Fat,” Lisa Burstein writes about leaving behind the “warped, sick, eating-disordered” frame of mind fed by a voice that is “the mayor of crazy-town.” In “Be Clean!” Gary D. Schmidt tells of rejecting the mind control of a youth pastor trying to save his soul. The best writers here couch their lessons in stories, but others lecture, and some sound like inspirational graduation speeches. After a whole volume of such essays, the mantra “Break These Rules” itself begins to sound like a rule to question.

A well-meaning but uneven collection. (about the contributors) (Essays. 12 & up)

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DEE DEE AND ME

FALLING HARD

Schwartz, Amy Illus. by Schwartz, Amy Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2524-2

Sparks, Megan Capstone Young Readers (256 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-62370-023-2 Series: Roller Girls

Schwartz examines sibling power dynamics in this humorous and ultimately empowering tale.

Hannah is an easy target for Dee Dee. She’s younger and shorter (Dee Dee says the brains are in the 5 1/2 inches of height Hannah’s missing), and she longs for her sister’s acceptance. But after one too many manipulations, Hannah learns to assert herself—and now she’s sure her brains are growing! Reflecting a genuine, multifaceted sibling relationship, Dee Dee also shows compassion, mending her sister’s beloved bear. With ease, Schwartz shows readers how to become one’s own advocate, so that all can feel respected in play. The illustrations, done in pen and ink and colored with gouache, have an energy reminiscent of Madeline, and the charmingly detailed patterns and backgrounds feel timeless. The artwork equally highlights the contentment and peace one can find in independent play and the joy and creativity found in playing together.

Bright and captivating, this new take on sibling relations is a needed tale for all. (Picture book. 3- 7)

BUGS IN MY HAIR!

Shannon, David Illus. by Shannon, David Blue Sky/Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-545-14313-4 Head lice morph into friendly fellows in this comical and necessary title.

When the intrepid narrator’s mother discovers his infestation, she immediately jumps into action.

Factoids about lice and their transmittal and treatment follow quickly. The youngster suffers from a large dose of shame as he wonders how they found him. He willingly cooperates with his ever-vigilant mother as she marches boldly into the fray, which climaxes with a visit to “a professional lice treatment place.” Alas, the lice return, and the treatment must be repeated. Never fear, the boy knows his medieval history and readies for the next joust with suitable head armor. Shannon’s trademark color palette of yellows and oranges, so wonderful in his David books, fills the spreads with explosive energy as his magnificently magnified lice leap off the pages with endearingly expressive faces, personalities and costumes. Playful lettering becomes part of the page design and demands a most expressive reading voice. Few books for young readers come with a warning. Heed the one boldly penned on the back cover: “This book will make you ITCHY!” Don’t scratch your head over this purchase: Entertainment and information are all wrapped up in one funny and disinfected package. (Picture book. 4-7) |

Roller derby and cheerleading are even farther apart than London and Liberty Heights, Ill. After the end of her parents’ marriage, Annie decides to join her father in the United States. If all she had to do in the States was banter with her goofy dad while he sets up an English-style bakery/ cafe, she’d be golden. The popular girls instantly hate her, and learning American high school slang is rough (although, oddly, the narration from Annie’s point of view mostly uses American rather than U.K. English). Her fabulous neighbor Lexie is an artist, an easy friend with an individual sense of style who represents a bright spot. But Annie also wants to join the cheerleading squad, and the social rules around high school popularity are more complicated than she expects. Can she stay friends with Lexie and be a cheerleader at the same time?

More importantly, can she cheerlead while being a roller girl?

For Annie’s discovered roller derby, and its joyful aesthetic fits in well with her own athleticism and love of punk music. The characters are lightly sketched, from the stereotypical mean cheerleaders to the friendly but undifferentiated skaters; this slim volume replaces character development with actionpacked training montages.

This fun romp of a girls’ sports story would make a highly watchable flick (and arguably already has, given its resemblance to the 2009 film Whip It). (Fiction. 11-13)

THE KNITWITS MAKE A MOVE!

Tabby, Abigail Illus. by Wildish, Lee Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4424-5342-5

A combination of the Dumb Bunnies and Amelia Bedelia, the KnitWits will surely appeal to juvenile humor. Parents? Not so much.

The KnitWit family is moving to a new home, a venture that seemingly consists of walking down the street. Magically, their boxes of belongings are already there and take no time at all to unpack. What’s left to do? Why, have a housewarming party, of course. The family of five busily goes about the house tacking up scarves and hats and sweaters, then turns to the question of treats for their guests. They “serve” a mix of salty and sweet snacks with a tennis racket and put the cake in the freezer to “ice” it. The KnitWits’ “straightening up,” “throwing open the door” for their guests and “toasty” house at the end of a satisfying party also have double meanings that will have readers shaking their heads at Tabby’s easy comedy. Erika Burling’s knit

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characters, each with his or her own personality and accessories, are plopped into Wildish’s tongue-in-cheek digital illustrations, creating a contrast between the real and the cartoon as well as between the 3-D KnitWits and their flat, illustrated neighbors.

This may get a few chuckles, but for true laughs that have stood the test of time, stick with the original literalthinker: Amelia Bedelia. (Picture book. 3-6)

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Tucholke, April Genevieve Dial (368 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-0-8037-3889-8

When their money runs out, Violet White decides to rent out the guesthouse behind her family’s aging estate, but she is not prepared for the new tenant, who is either part god or all devil.

Seventeen-year-old Violet and her twin brother, Luke, have been raised by their bohemian artist parents and their grandmother, Freddie. However, when Freddie dies and their parents leave for Europe, the teens face a long, hot, boring summer all alone. Everything changes with the arrival of River West, a mysterious boy with dark hair, a suspicious past and a strange power that even he does not fully understand. River reveals himself as a liar, a supernatural vigilante and a great kisser. Unfortunately, by the time Violet realizes the danger, she is hopelessly in love. This first installment in a new series is a rich blend of gothic horror and modern romance, studded with nods toward literary, cinematic and musical classics.

A lush setting and provocative characters elevate this debut above others in the supernatural-romance genre. However, readers willing to press through the meandering plot will still need to negotiate Violet’s moral ambiguity in the face of River’s evil actions.

A sumptuous, if soulless romance; here’s hoping for a little more heart in the sequel. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

EXPRESSIONISTA How to Express Your True Self Through (and Despite) Fashion

Walker, Jackie; McKuen, Pamela Dittmer Illus. by Laskey, Shannon Beyond Words/Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (224 pp.) $17.99 | $11.99 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-58270-429-6 978-1-58270-428-9 paper

stories, encourages readers to become Expressionistas, letting their personal appearances match their inner selves. This is achieved through Fashion Personas: “your personal identity as it relates to and is expressed through fashion, style and design.”

Walker and McKuen identify only five Fashion Personas—Classic, Natural, Romantic, Dramatic and Trend Tracker—devoting a chapter to each persona. After determining their Fashion Personas, readers can learn about accessorizing, organizing their closets and how to shop for pieces to fit their personas. An epilogue gives a final pep talk for budding Expressionistas, followed by several appendices. Although some claims strain credulity (such as a better understanding of Fashion Personas leads to improved relationships with others), the positive messages will probably resonate with the target audience.

These messages, combined with the limited but practical fashion advice, will help preteens feel prepared for their next shopping trip. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

ODDREY AND THE NEW KID

Whamond, Dave Illus. by Whamond, Dave Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 15, 2013 978-1-926973-90-6

In Whamond’s Oddrey’s return, she must contend with a little touch of competition for the limelight.

Oddrey is not so much a fruitcake as an original. She takes the path less traveled. Sometimes it feels a bit like attentionseeking behavior, though, to her credit, she seeks attention for all her friends and classmates, too. In this story, she comes up against not exactly a nemesis, but a serious rival: Maybelline.

Maybelline has lots of wild tales—she and her father traveled the four corners to find ancient artifacts in dangerous situations—to wow her classmates. She has so many wild tales that Oddrey gets suspicious, and she isn’t happy with Maybelline’s bossy ways on the playground. Then comes a school visit to the zoo, and Oddrey is able to reassert her not only strange, but now heroic character. Although Whamond’s artwork is a pleasing welter of colorful dabs and active lines, his story is achingly black and white. Readers know from the outset that poor Maybelline’s comeuppance is a done deal—she is too snooty by half—so there will be no surprises here. And Oddrey is too selfconscious about being the maverick, which doesn’t make her much of one; she is not a bohemian, she is a prima donna.

For Oddrey to remain odd, she is going to have to hear the beat of a far different drummer. (Picture book. 4-7)

For preteens confused by fashion and style, this informative guide will help introduce some basic concepts with a healthy dose of encouragement and self-discovery.

This lightweight work, filled with black-and-white illustrations, quotes from fashionable celebrities, quizzes and “real girl” 88

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“Clair comes into her own as she strategizes to survive.” from twinmaker

TWINMAKER

Williams, Sean Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-06-220321-2 978-0-06-220323-6 e-book To save her best friend, Clair must uncover a terrible conspiracy in this futuristic thriller.

A viral message offers Improvement, changing a person’s looks, intelligence or anything else by modifying their “patterns” when they use the teleportation technology called d-mat. Few believe it can work, as it circumvents d-mat safeguards. The d-mat technology solved the energy crisis, allows people to replicate material items and provides instant teleportation anywhere—it helps to maintain world peace. But Clair’s best friend, Libby, tries Improvement anyway—and claims it works. But she’s struck with terrible headaches, mood swings and erratic behavior. Worried, Clair turns to the school freak, a boy whose family abstains from technology, to see if their movement knows anything about Improvement. Before learning that the Improved end up brain damaged and committing suicide a week afterward—a fate Clair must save Libby from—Clair attempts it. Her only noticeable change is gaining a mysterious hacker/digital stalker who claims to want to help Clair, even as shady people try to kill Clair. Clair comes into her own as she strategizes to survive.

A tedious love triangle resolves mercifully quickly, but the later romantic storyline is predictable and obligatory. The dangers, casualties and well-written action scenes keep tensions high.

Williams marries accessibly explored moral ramifications of future technologies—a hallmark of mature science fiction—with a strong, capable teen heroine and heartpounding action (just flip past the romance). (author’s note) (Science fiction. 12 & up)

THIS IS THE ROPE A Story From the Great Migration

Woodson, Jacqueline Illus. by Ransome, James Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 29, 2013 978-0-399-23986-1

With great affection, a Brooklyn girl tells the story of her grandmother, mother and a rope that forms a bond across three generations.

When just a little girl in South Carolina, the grandmother finds a rope under a tree and uses it to play jump-rope. The rope becomes entwined in the family story as the grandparents, with a baby in their arms, move to Brooklyn, and that baby grows up to become mother to the narrator. Whether used for games, for tying down luggage on a car or for holding high a banner at a grand family reunion, the rope is treasured. Woodson, a |

Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor and Award winner, has crafted a warm family saga of a household united by love, pride and an uncommon heirloom. The repetition of the title in a nursery-rhyme style will resonate with young listeners.

Ransome’s vivid, full-bleed, double-page–spread oil paintings create an upbeat, welcoming vista of rural South Carolina and urban Brooklyn. The sun-infused yellows on the cover beckon readers to open the book and savor the “long-ago memory of sweet-smelling pine.”

A quiet affirmation of a strong and close-knit family that, along with so many other African-Americans, found a better life as part of the Great Migration. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

DOG LOVES COUNTING

Yates, Louise Illus. by Yates, Louise Knopf (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-857-55015-6

Yates’ lovable Dog—of Dog Loves Books (2010) and Dog Loves Drawing (2012)—is back for some counting fun.

Dog needs some help falling asleep, and when counting sheep doesn’t work, he scours his books for other creatures to count.

He finds an egg, out of which hatches a baby dodo, and begins: One. “I’ll look after you,” he says. “Together we are two. Number One, follow me—we must find Number Three.” In the following pages, they find a three-toed sloth, a four-legged camel, a fivelined skink and so on. Ultimately, 10 animals arrive at the desert, where, realizing they’ve lost One, they scamper off in all directions to search, sparking a quick countdown. Finding One counting the stars, they decide to join him, smiling up into the night. In each of the sweet watercolor illustrations, the animals are labeled with their names and numbers (No. 6 / The Fly, for instance) and with relevant body parts counted out (the fly is shown upside down with numerals printed above each spindly leg), giving the feel of an old natural-history or biology text. The prose, peppered with occasional rhyming verse, isn’t as smooth as it might be, but the illustrations more than make up for this limitation.

A worthy addition to the ranks of animal-themed counting books. (Picture book. 3-6)

THIS IS OUR HOUSE

Yum, Hyewon Illus. by Yum, Hyewon Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-374-37487-7 An ode to a place called home, related by a young girl describing photos of a brick building and the memories her family made there through three generations.

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With the feeling of a photo album, the book leads readers through the story of a simple house. “This is the house / where my grandparents arrived from far away / with just two suitcases in hand.” On the left side of the page, above the text, is a painted “photograph” of an unassuming building—there’s no color, a bare tree, no life to be seen. On the facing page, the full-bleed illustration shows a man and a woman, holding hands, stepping up to the building with two suitcases in hand. Reflective and quiet, the pages progress with the staged photographs of this young couple’s life displayed on the left, while the right side reveals more. A baby is born and learns to walk, children pose on the stairs before school, a child leaves for college.

When the perspective shifts to the narrator’s family, the pattern of the double-page spreads reverses itself in a lovely shift.

The contrast between the simplicity of the text (“This is the street / where I learned to walk, / just like my mom”) and the richness of life revealed in the watercolor illustrations shows how the building becomes alive with the history of the young girl’s family.

A lovely, unassuming paean to place and belonging. (Picture book. 3-8)

board -book roundup MY LITTLE WORLD OF HAPPY

WORLD OF HAPPY Pocket Library

Andreae, Giles Illus. by Andreae, Giles Egmont UK (48 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-4052-5963-7

Six little books in a boxed set promote an optimistic view of the world.

Each of these 3-inch-square works presents four cartoon scenes, each one on a double-page spread. The text comprises one-sentence captions expressing sentiments that have been said before and with more artistry. Friends shares these thoughts: “Let’s DANCE and be FRIENDS. / FRIENDS make you feel all WARM inside. / Friends are KIND to each other. / You are my truest FRIEND.” The other titles, which include Life, You and Me and Fun, follow a similar format. Each cartoon is speckled with hearts, flowers, stars and other upbeat symbols; various cutesy animals with human accessories dramatize the scenes in flat colors. Unfortunately, the imagery is too sophisticated for average board-book readers. The first page of Love shows a couple of bears obsessed with a variety of sophisticated high-tech gadgets, and Happiness includes an illustration of a gorilla contentedly knitting. One clever feature: The back covers of the six books fit together in two rows to create a picture of a contented hippo.

Despite the positivity, much of the sentiment and imagery will go over the heads of babies and toddlers. (Board book. 2-3)

Andreae, Giles Illus. by Andreae, Giles Egmont UK (90 pp.) $15.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-4052-6082-4

MY DAY Bathtime

This boxed set of nine minibooks explores the emotional lives of nine different animals in miniscule print.

The front cover of each book features a one-word title (Cat, Penguin, Tortoise and so forth) and a close-up, cartoon doodle of one featured critter. These plotless offerings are mostly collections of non sequiturs. So goes the text for Hippo: “I am a hippopotamus / I am wallowy and big / I love to wobble and slop / Here is my dance / Dancing feels BEAUTIFUL!” There are a couple of strange gaffes; the title of the book about a bull is called Cow, and in Shark, the protagonist says, “I say thanking you” when he probably means “I say thank you.” The art, in flat, solid colors, has a little more appeal than the text, but some of Andreae’s attempts at quirky come across as strange, particularly the pink cricket that could easily be mistaken for a shrimp.

The back covers of each roughly 2-inch-square book connect with another in the set to make a full-body portrait of one of the characters. The set comes in a box with a magnetic closure, a plastic carrying handle, and flimsy, removable partitions that separate books from each other.

While little ones may find the packaging gimmick appealing, the content inside is empty. (Board book. 2-4) 90

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Ayliffe, Alex Illus. by Ayliffe, Alex Orchard UK/Trafalgar (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-4083-1502-6 Series: Go, Baby!

A baby with mocha-colored skin enjoys a romp in the bath.

Nestled in a bright red baby bathtub, a little tyke splashes and pours and plays with boats, toys and bubbles, all while an amused puppy looks on. The art, which looks to be digital collage, is sleek and charming simultaneously, with flat blocks of color, subtle shading and round edges. Two lines of verse grace each page and capture the playful mood. The final page asks, “Where is baby?” and the Mylar mirror embedded into the last page provides the obvious answer. The companion title, My Day: Bedtime, also with a mirror in the back, features a sittingup, Caucasian baby reading aloud to and tucking in a teddy bear at bedtime. The text here does not scan quite as well, but little ones will have no problem connecting with the familiar scenes.

While parents do not appear in any of the spreads in either book, it is clear from the loving tone that they are never too far away.

Though a little on the slight side, these are cozy and familiar experiences for little ones nonetheless. (Board book.

6-18 mos.)

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“...the paintings glow on solid backgrounds of varied hues....” from e is for echidna

E IS FOR ECHIDNA My Australian Word Book

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Belle, Trixie; Caruso-Scott, Melissa Illus. by Lake, Oliver Henry Holt (26 pp.) $7.99 | May 7, 2013 978-0-8050-9791-7 Series: Les Petit Fairytales

Bancroft, Bronwyn Illus. by Bancroft, Bronwyn Little Hare/Trafalgar (24 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-921714-61-0

Like W is for Wombat (2010), this alphabet book features the ordinary and the exotic from apple and turtle, to galah and wattle.

One-word captions paired with bold paintings in the Aboriginal folk-art tradition move readers through the alphabet, one letter per page. With thick black outlines and bright patterns of dots and dashes, Bancroft demonstrates she is master of the form. While the paintings glow on solid backgrounds of varied hues, the darker color choices make the black text difficult to read. Most of the objects representing each letter are animals or plants indigenous to Australia, but some of the choices, like a net for N and a vegetable (some kind of gourd, perhaps) for V feel forced to make the book fit the alphabet structure. Parents looking for a traditional alphabet title with recognizable objects would be advised to look elsewhere.

While it’s not as strong as her first alphabet board book, it does reward the adventurous with stunning images in luminous colors. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

AWAY WE GO! A Shape-and-Seek Book Barad-Cutler, Alexis Illus. by Chapman, Jane Scholastic (20 pp.) $6.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-545-46179-5

Shaped die-cut holes adorn a wide range of vehicles.

The basic forms—square, circle and triangle—are represented here, along with the more rare diamond, oval and heart. The featured shape on each page is a key element on one vehicle, like the triangular sail of a sailboat or the circular wheel of a tractor. Each vehicle gets its own page and is accompanied by a simple caption.

Some of the shape and vehicle pairings are clever, such as the octagon doubling as the body of the cement mixer, but a few feel a little forced—in particular, the star as the front of the motorcycle, a visually baffling composition. The left-hand page of each doublepage spread asks the reader a direct question (“Do you see a rectangle?”). Floating alongside the text is a small image of the shape, but the die-cut hole always appears on the facing page. Urban often uses several shapes to create the vehicles, and the die-cut holes are layered together, so more than one shape is visible. This makes this “shape-and-seek” game a bit more challenging than many. Bold, solid backgrounds offer a clean, graphic look, but several scenes look a little sparse, since the die-cut holes force the hand of the artist in terms of placement and layout.

Despite the flaws, these colorful and shapely vehicles will appeal to the target audience. (Board book. 18 mos.-3) |

A toddler-sized version of the classic fairy tale.

With one or two words per page, this board book presents the barest bones of the princess’ story. Characters are labeled and plot points shared in brightly colored scenes. While the princess does celebrate a birthday and prick her finger on a spindle, it will seem to most toddler readers that not much happens. She takes a long nap, the prince comes and wakes her up, and everyone at the palace has a party. Three others in the series publish simultaneously and follow a similar format. Rapunzel has also had the scary bits removed, and it looks like the heroine simply gets a haircut and then takes a walk in the woods before meeting her prince. In Beauty and the Beast, the book-loving young girl befriends a purple-horned lion, a fellow bibliophile, who turns into a prince with purple hair. In The Little Mermaid, the mermaid enjoys an adventure with legs on dry land with a friendly prince. The ending is vague here, but it would appear as if the heroine returns home to her family with scales intact. This quartet, which follows the previously published Snow White and Cinderella (2012), features stylized cartoons of characters with oversized heads against brightly colored backgrounds. The cover of each offering includes tactile glitter embellishments.

Toddlers familiar with the Disney movies or with obliging parents who can help them connect the dots may get something out of these summarized versions, but, like Sleeping Beauty’s fairies, the plots are going to fly right over the heads of most board-book readers. (Board book. 2-4)

IT’S SPRING TIME!

Bennett, Elizabeth Illus. by Baccala, Gladys Tiger Tales (16 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-639-2

A rabbit family enjoys various spring activities in simple verse and double-

page scenes.

Anthropomorphized mom, dad and toddler bunny garden, clean and play in an idealized rural setting. Five lines of stiff verse with the same meter accompany nearly every page: “Birds fly by. / Birds in sky. / Chirp and peep. / Young ones sleep. / It’s nesting time.” The pastel illustrations, likely created digitally, have a deliberately hazy look and a calculatedly cute feel. Sparkling glitter is embedded into details of the art and provides a tactile emphasis on flowers, rainbows, butterflies and more.

An overly sweet confection with unnecessary frosting.

(Board book. 18 mos.-3)

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“It’s refreshing to see the nonanthropomorphic vehicles only suggesting bedtime rather than being forced to perform getting-ready-for-bed rituals.” from good night, trucks

LOOK OUT, CUB!

EVERYTHING GOES:BLUE BUS, RED BALLOON A Book of Colors

Bently, Peter National Geographic (20 pp.) $9.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-4263-1096-6 Series: National Geographic Little Kids Wild Tales A playful lion cub goes exploring in this lift-the-flap story.

After having no luck getting his dad or his sister to join in, the youngster decides to play on his own. He climbs a tree but finds getting down not quite as easy. His lioness mom comes to his rescue and suggests a safer game to try. The text, mainly composed of the lions’ dialogue, uses a large, blocky type that is arranged between photos of lions placed within painted, cartoon landscapes of sky blue and savanna browns and greens. The photos of the lions are the only attraction within these pages, and particularly droll is the image of the cub pouncing on his snarling father. The biggest problem are the flaps, which are unfinished brown cardboard on the verso, as they do not engage readers and actually impede the flow of the tale. On the page where the cub contemplates climbing the tree, the flap itself blocks the view of said tree and only reveals a bird flying off into the distance. While this offering was produced by National Geographic, the informational content presented here is slim to none.

Nothing to roar about. (Board book. 2-4)

EVERYTHING GOES: STOP! GO! A Book of Opposites

Biggs, Brian Illus. by Biggs, Brian Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (24 pp.) $7.99 | May 21, 2013 978-0-06-195814-4 Series: Everything Goes

A catalog of colorful vehicles.

A young girl gets into a yellow taxi and loses her bright red balloon. The balloon floats through the double-page spreads that follow and encounters a green van, a blue bus (in which readers see the young lady in pursuit), a purple sailboat, a white airplane and more. When the balloon encounters a black sports car, it appears to mischievously steal the hat of a passenger. In the end, the balloon floats over a circus to meet a rainbow train, flies past a clown on a unicycle (which is the book’s only wordless spread) and returns back to its original owner, who is now riding in a multicolored hot air balloon of her own. Biggs’ bright and brash cartoons, employing thick black lines, are as droll and lighthearted as ever against subtle cityscape backdrops.

The vehicles and their colors are easy to identify (although the orange helicopter is a little too yellow) and are labeled in a bold type with the color written in the featured hue.

While not as strong as the first two titles in the series (1 2 3 Beep Beep Beep!: A Counting Book and Stop! Go! A Book of Opposites, both 2013), Biggs’ playful vehicles keep this one chugging along. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

Biggs, Brian Illus. by Biggs, Brian Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (24 pp.) $7.99 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-06-195813-7 Series: Everything Goes

A delightfully playful exploration of vehicles and opposites.

The usual opposite suspects are presented in one-word captions (slow/fast; up/down), but the vehicles are the true stars here. Biggs is a master at drawing quirky cars, trains, trucks and even unicycles that will appeal to wheel-obsessed youngsters and their grown-ups alike.

The “Small / Big” page is a prime example of his humor, depicting a teeny compact car being overtaken by an enormous 18-wheeler bearing the words “MAXI Truck Lines.” The concepts are clearly presented, and art pops against bold backgrounds. The companion title, Everything Goes: 1 2 3 Beep Beep Beep!: A Counting Book, is equally energetic and enjoyable. One bus, two RVs, three fire trucks and more count their way up to 10. The endeavor ends on a page depicting a motley assortment of vehicles halted by a sole chicken crossing the road with accompanying text “1 BIG traffic jam!” While the oversize hardcover titles in the Everything Goes series also have strong toddler appeal, these board books have all of the enchantment of Biggs’ cartoons in a smaller, more accessible package.

Here’s hoping more Everything Goes board books are en route. (Board book. 18 mos.-3) 92

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EVERYTHING GOES: GOOD NIGHT, TRUCKS A Bedtime Book

Biggs, Brian Illus. by Biggs, Brian Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (24 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-06-195815-1 Series: Everything Goes

A collection of trucks call it a night.

A milk truck, a tractor trailer, a dump truck, a garbage truck, a tanker truck, a tow truck, a monster truck, a flatbed truck and more all go about their end-of-day routines as the sky goes from twilight to evening. With only one or two trucks per double-page spread, long shadows and images of workers winding down from a long day, the scenes are quiet. A fire truck backs into the station, and the driver of an ice cream truck hangs a closed sign on the outside of her vehicle. The text is minimal, consisting mainly of captions labeling the vehicles, so it is Biggs’ quirky cartoons of chunky vehicles and droll people in muted hues that tell the story. The second-to-last double-page spread shows a pajamaclad man yawning and closing the door to his motor home, and the final scene depicts four dark vehicles in a moonlit RV park as the text reads, “Shhh...good night!” It’s refreshing to see the

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nonanthropomorphic vehicles only suggesting bedtime rather than being forced to perform getting-ready-for-bed rituals.

Sweet dreams for young truck lovers. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

For lift-the-flap done right, skip this one and choose Lucy Cousins’ Maisy’s Big Flap Book (2001) or one of Karen Katz’s delightful outings, such as Where Is Baby’s Yummy Tummy? (2011) or Where Is Baby’s Puppy? (2011). (Board book. 3-4)

NOODLE LOVES THE ZOO

RAINBOW BUTTERFLIES

Billet, Marion Illus. by Billet, Marion Nosy Crow/Candlewick (10 pp.) $8.99 | Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-7636-6549-4 Series: Noodle

Boyd, Michele Illus. by Kenna, Kara Silver Dolphin (14 pp.) $6.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-60710-770-5 Series: Play-Doh

Noodle the panda takes an excursion to the zoo with his dad.

As with other titles in the series, tactile elements are embedded into each double-page spread. A zebra and a bear both sport velvety coats, and a tree has felt leaves that can be pulled down to reveal a couple of monkeys. On the giraffe spread, the touchand-feel element is a corrugated door to the giraffe house, and action-oriented youngsters may be disappointed it does not open. As in the other Noodle books, the final gimmick is a Mylar mirror that allows readers to put themselves in the story and here acts as a pond for the lions. The simple rhyming text follows the same pattern as other Noodle stories but does not scan quite as well.

Older readers may find it odd that these pandas are visitors to a zoo rather than residents, but young Noodle fans will be happy to see their hero in a new locale. (Board book. 1-3)

MAMA’S LITTLE DUCKLINGS

Boyd, Michele Illus. by Kenna, Kara Silver Dolphin (12 pp.) $6.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-60710-771-2 Series: Play-Doh

A chunky lift-the-flap board book about a little lost duckling reunited with its family.

Mama Duck has lost her littlest egg. The ladybugs haven’t seen it. Neither have the fish. The Easter Bunny, however, knows exactly where to look. After the family is reunited, they all go home for a good night’s rest. The text incorporates a lift-the-flap feature, but there does not seem to be much rhyme or reason behind this choice. Seemingly random parts of the text and illustrations are hidden under flaps, with the only rhetorically effective spread being the one featuring the flap that turns out to be hiding the little duck. The illustrations incorporate animals made of Play-Doh, lending them a distinct Claymation quality. They are very colorful but so busy as to appear crowded. Little ones might enjoy looking for the yellow eggshell containing the missing duckling on several of the pages if they are not too distracted by the unnecessary flaps. |

A chunky board book introduces kids to all the colors of the rainbow.

The book begins with a spread filled with red objects, among which children are supposed to spot the red butterfly. In a title that proclaims itself focused on teaching colors, it seems odd that children are being asked to identify shapes instead— picking out a red butterfly amid a group of red items doesn’t, after all, aid in color recognition. A small box in the bottom left corner asks children what other red items they see on the page.

To answer this question, at least the children have to distinguish the red items from the few objects of other colors on the pages.

The same pattern is followed for orange, yellow, green, blue, pink and purple. All of the objects in the illustrations appear to be made of Play-Doh, lending them a rounded, cartoonish air that some little ones will find appealing. While companion volumes Counting Bunnies and Making Shapes with Monkey do a little better with introducing concepts, they suffer from stilted verse that reads awkwardly and confusingly busy illustrations.

Pass on these new, branded offerings and choose this tried-and-true trio instead: board-book versions of Ellen Stoll Walsh’s classic Mouse Paint (1989) and Mouse Count (1991) and Stella Blackstone’s Bear in a Square (1998). (Board book. 3-5)

WHO’S HIDING?

Braun, Sebastien Illus. by Braun, Sebastien Candlewick (16 pp.) $6.99 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-7636-5932-5 Cherubic toddlers discover various creatures under flaps in a backyard setting.

The text poses simple questions (“Who’s hiding behind the gate?”), and readers answer them by opening each gate-, leaf- or flower-pot–shaped flap to find a hiding animal and a one-word caption. The last scene refreshingly breaks this pattern and features a “baby” hiding in the playhouse. One member of a multicultural cast of sitting and cruising toddlers acts as a reader stand-in on each double-page spread. Braun’s smoothly colored cartoons are clear, engaging and accessible—ideal for youngsters learning to identify the world. A tell-tale animal body part peeks out from behind the

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HELLO, CIRCULOS! Shapes in English y Español

industry-standard–strength flap to give readers a hint as to the hider. The text is appropriately simple, but it also introduces a few vocabulary-building words, such as “watering can” and “hutch.”

As with Peekaboo Baby (2012) before it, Braun has created a lift-the-flap winner. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

THE NOISY BOOK

Bravi, Soledad Illus. by Bravi, Soledad Gecko Press (116 pp.) $14.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-1-8774-6752-3

In this French import, animals, machines and various objects make their signature sounds.

Each spread presents a simple sentence on the left and bold cartoons drawn with thick, black lines of the subject in question on the right. Bravi’s selection of noisemakers runs from the typical (“The cat goes meow”) to the surprising (“The train goes takataka takataka”) to the overly abstract (“Pain goes ouch,” which is paired with an image of an upturned tack) to the delightful (“The snail does nothing but move its elegant feelers”). Most of the quirky drawings in both muted and bold colors will be easily identifiable to little ones, but some—vehicles, for example—are a little less than clear. The title appropriately quiets everything down at the end with a kiss.

With a catalog of over 50 animals and objects on 116 thinner-than-normal-but-still-sturdy pages (probably the longest board book on record), this offering gives youngsters plenty to chatter about. (Board book. 1-3)

FARM

Brown, James Illus. by Brown, James Candlewick (16 pp.) $6.99 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-7636-5931-8

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The San Antonio Museum of Art, the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and Trinity University Press team up to produce a bilingual Spanish and English ode to color and art.

Each single- or double-page spread features one shape and spotlights various works from the museum’s collection of contemporary, 20th-century, traditional and folk art from around the world. The text, in an unnecessarily small font, engages readers with simple questions about the shape and art in question. A bold, bilingual heading paired with a dotted-outline image announces the shape. Most of the art choices are really quite stunning and will engage young readers, such as a detail from the Frank Stella painting Double Scramble for the “square” page and a folk sculpture of a sun from Metepec, Mexico, as an example of a circle. Unfortunately, the layout of some spreads is overly busy and may make it hard for youngsters to appreciate the art and the shape in question. The “star” page presents some wonderful images squeezed on one page that would have been better served on two. The sister title, Colores Everywhere, has similar strengths and problems. The final spread of each title shows thumbnails of the artwork from the previous pages and lists the artists and their media. The series works better to encourage art appreciation than as an introduction to shapes and colors.

Despite the flaws in layout and design in both books, the breathtaking works of art give youngsters much to pore over. (Board book. 2-5)

HEAVEN IS FOR REAL FOR LITTLE ONES

A graphically striking introduction to farm animals.

Each right-hand page shows a bold linocut print of an animal in white and in profile against a mottled, richly hued background. The text simply labels the depicted animal—pig, sheep, dog, horse, goose or cow—in a clear, black type at the top of the page. One object, often related to the creature, rests nearby, such as a section of fence for the sheep or a bowl for the dog.

The outline of each animal is embossed to provide a subtle tactile element. The facing left-side pages use smaller images of the animal in a repeating, interlocking, tricolor pattern. The final spread reviews the six critters, each in its own square panel, as the text reads, “animals on the farm.”

Simple and beautiful. (Board book. 3 mos.-2)

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Budnick, Madeleine—Ed. Photos by Tenison, Peggy Trinity University Press (16 pp.) $7.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-59534-140-2

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Burpo, Todd; Burpo, Sonja Illus. by Davis, Jon Tommy Nelson (26 pp.) $7.99 | Apr. 8, 2013 978-1-4003-2227-5

A young boy offers a cheery vision of heaven with an evangelical aim.

Three-year-old Colton Burpo came out of an emergency appendectomy with quite a tale to tell, reporting to his parents that he had been to heaven and describing all the wonders he saw there. Colton’s father, a pastor, coauthored a popular nonfiction book for adults about Colton’s experience, which has spawned a franchise of books, DVDs and other merchandise. This board-book version of Colton’s story represents heaven as a beautiful place with rainbows, bright lights and golden streets, where “everyone who knows and loves Jesus gets to go.” In heaven, no one gets scared or sick, and children are told that Jesus will take them there one day if they

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“Wass’ highly saturated, graphic cartoons are pleasingly retro, and the monster is goofily friendly, with one fang protruding from a perpetual grin.” from monster knows numbers

believe in him. Colton’s voice comes through clearly, reminding readers that they are getting a child’s perspective. For example, when describing the wounds on Jesus’ hands, he says: “Jesus has markers on His hands. A long time ago, He had to die on the cross. But now Jesus is alive!” The illustrations feature a bearded, white Jesus with a crown, purple sash and sandals, surrounded by winged angels of all ages and ethnicities.

Unlikely to have wide appeal and far too sophisticated for actual babies and toddlers, this offering will be appreciated by Christian parents seeking titles that affirm their religious convictions, especially those already familiar with Colton’s story. (Board book. 4-8)

invited to search for the dolls behind various easy-to-open flaps, which reveal the hidden characters and other objects. The art, which looks to be digital, recreates two-dimensional images of the dolls and places them in a world that resembles a Candy Land board. The dolls, with their oversized button eyes and signature cutesy outfits, may be easy for devotees to recognize, but readers unfamiliar with the franchise will be lost as to who is who. How and why the dolls play hide-and-seek on a Ferris wheel or in the middle of the road in front of a school bus is as mystifying as the rest of the book.

For rabid Lalaloopsy fans only. (Board book. 3-5)

WHO ARE WE? An Animal Guessing Game

MONSTER KNOWS NUMBERS

Capote, Lori Illus. by Wass, Chip Capstone Young Readers (20 pp.) $7.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-4048-8038-2

Chapman, Jane Illus. by Barad-Cutler, Alex Cartwheel/Scholastic (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-545-46762-9

A one-eyed, pink-haired, multiarmed monster counts various toys and objects.

On the very first page, the young beastie introduces readers to his messy room and all monstrous things to be enumerated. He then proceeds to count one stinky basketball shoe, two jump-rope snakes, three prickly bears and so on up to 10 sunken rubber ducks in the tub. The rhymed verse is playful and scans with a couple of minor wobbles. Wass’ highly saturated, graphic cartoons are pleasingly retro, and the monster is goofily friendly, with one fang protruding from a perpetual grin. Some numbers get a double-page spread and others just one page, but all of the spreads are busily presented with text, patterned backgrounds and a swirl of objects to count. Each numeral is presented with visual elements that match or suggest the item being counted, which works in most cases, but the barbed “3” lacks clarity for those still learning to identify these symbols.

While not for mathematical rookies, this title provides a pleasingly challenging counting experience for monster lovers. (Board book. 2-4)

HERE COME THE LITTLE SISTERS!

Cecil, Lauren Illus. by Hill, Prescott Scholastic (10 pp.) $9.99 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-545-44266-4 Series: Lalaloopsy

An engaging, lift-the-flap riddle book that will keep little ones guessing.

The left side of each double-page spread offers a short, rhyming couplet describing a certain type of animal’s movement. For instance, the book begins with: “When we move, we are pretty slow. / Waddling keeps us warm in snow.” On the right side of the page is the question “Who are we?” printed atop a flap. On the edge of each flap is a tab with an arrow as well as a clue to the riddle’s answer. In this case, readers see orange, webbed feet and a white body. Simply lifting the flap reveals the word “Penguins” and three penguins who appear to be waddling across the page, but pulling on the tab in the direction indicated by the arrow reveals a hidden gatefold with another penguin scene and a fun fact: “We penguins have feathers to keep us dry and warm!” In addition to the penguins, readers see giraffes, snakes, arctic foxes and leopards. The rhyming riddles are amusing but not easy; children will need help from the clue on the tab to guess the answers.

The appealing illustrations feature frolicking animals and uncluttered, skillfully rendered landscapes.

Toddlers and young preschoolers, both independently and in groups, will enjoy both the guessing game and the simple, interesting animal facts this offering provides.

(Board book. 1-3)

NOT THAT TUTU!

A mostly incomprehensible lift-the-flap tale featuring characters from the Lalaloopsy line of rag dolls.

A few of the dolls, such as Peanut Big Top and Mittens Fluff ’n’ Stuff, enjoy a hide-and-seek session with their “little sisters.” The dolls take turns hiding in various spots, including treehouses, a Ferris wheel and a school. Readers are implicitly |

Colman, Michelle Sinclair Illus. by Nakata, Hiroe Robin Corey/Random (20 pp.) $7.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-307-97698-7 Taylor, with a recognizably preschool fashion sense, wears her tutu everywhere.

The text is a to-the-point list of some of the places Taylor sports her bright pink garment and includes, in dialogue, the

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“With sliding panels, the doors to the firehouse open and shut, the bear slides down a pole, and the elephant extinguishes the flames.” from fire rescue!

bemused comments of her long-suffering family members and friends: “Not again!” Watercolor scenes that stretch across both pages depict a lively preschool girl in said tutu as she sleds, shops, sleeps and even swims (but does little ballet). Nakata’s loose and buoyant watercolors capture Taylor’s eclectic style as she pairs the tutu with cowboy boots, snow pants and pajamas, until she finally grows tired of it and finds a substitute. While the girl’s suburban family is Caucasian, a little more diversity would have been welcome in the depiction of her friends.

Attracted by the little tulle tutu on the cover, little ones seeking a ballet-themed tale may be disappointed, but this outing will resonate with any youngster who has worn a favorite outfit to shreds. (Board book. 2-4)

FIRE RESCUE!

Davies, Benji Illus. by Davies, Benji Nosy Crow/Candlewick (8 pp.) $6.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-6518-0 Series: Bizzy Bear

with the featured letter. The “G” page, for example, features a bubbly cherub wearing bright red glasses; a clear image of the letter, also in red, floats nearby, taking up almost half the page.

The expressive babies are photographed against spare white backgrounds, but it is surprising that there is so little diversity; only four babies of the 26 are obviously not Caucasian. The sister title, Baby 123, uses similar black-and-white photos with colored objects to count, with each numeral on a double-page spread.

Taking readers up to 10, the babies play with one large exercise ball, two maracas, three chairs and so on. The final spread recaps the numbers and objects that have come before. The layout and design of both titles are clean and clear. While a couple of the accessories may be a little abstract for babies, such as the crown or the toy iron in the alphabet book, or difficult to count, like the haphazard clump of bears in the counting title, the concepts presented are more of a framing device to give babies what they want: pictures of other creatures like themselves.

A playful package that could have used more multicultural representation. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

THE BUS DRIVER

Bizzy Bear, along with a crocodile, an elephant and a dog, has an exciting, interactive adventure as a firefighter.

From the emergency call to the final rescue, readers see life on the job for bear and company. Each boldly colored, detailed scene presents one interactive element per page turn. With sliding panels, the doors to the firehouse open and shut, the bear slides down a pole, and the elephant extinguishes the flames. As in the other Bizzy Bear titles, a finger-sized hole or tab is provided to help with the manipulation. One of the most pleasing features is a spin dial that allows readers to race the fire truck through traffic. The verse, using the meter and scheme of the classic rhyme “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” fits with the action: “Bizzy Bear, Bizzy Bear, ladder and spray. / Bizzy Bear, Bizzy Bear, saves the day!” Pirate Adventure, another in the series, uses similar interactive features and the same rhyme structure. Here, there are a pirate ship to rock, sails to raise, a hole to dig, and a treasure chest to open. While most of the movable parts appear sturdy, there are features that will eventually rip and come loose, especially those on the cover.

Sure to be a crowd pleaser for nimble-fingered little ones. (Board book. 1-3)

BABY ABC

Doodler, Todd H. Illus. by Doodler, Todd H. Robin Corey/Random (22 pp.) $7.99 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-307-97907-0 This bus-shaped board book lets little ones count up to 10 and count down again as various passengers get on and off.

One bus driver starts his route, and a multicultural cast, including two girls, three firemen, four boys and five basketball players, boards his double-decker bus in turn. The number of passengers increases cumulatively, up to eight dogs (each of which is plagued by nine fleas) and 10 teachers, filling the bus to capacity at the book’s midsection. Now the passengers exit the bus in reverse order, creating a countdown. The virtually unnecessary text is written in stiff rhymes that don’t scan, but Doodler’s highly saturated, graphic cartoons are appealing. Even though he only depicts “firemen” and male basketball players, his doctors, nurses and teachers are gender-diverse. The boarding and disembarking of passengers makes for a satisfying and clear counting experience for youngsters.

While an imperfect ride, it may still entice toddlers to take a round trip. (Board book. 2-4)

Donenfeld, Deborah Photos by Donenfeld, Deborah Dial (24 pp.) $6.99 | Jan. 10, 2013 978-0-8037-3973-4

WE GO TOGETHER!

In black-and-white photos, babies cavort through the alphabet accompanied by brightly colored objects and accessories.

Each page spotlights an oversized letter in a bold hue and one pre-walking or toddling infant in diapers using a prop that starts 96

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Dunn, Todd Illus. by Sakamoto, Miki Sterling (24 pp.) $6.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-4549-0023-8

In rhyming couplets and jaunty cartoons, this celebration of maternal love depicts images of a variety of matching pairs.

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“...the text is a rallying cry in support of... [girls’] potential.” from global baby girls

The verse presents a string of similes—one line per page— and ranges from the everyday (“We go together like socks and shoes”) to the fantastical (“We go together like fire and dragon”). The meter mostly works, but there is a forced syllable or two in the mix. Sakamoto’s acrylic, gouache and pencil art grounds the text in a playful, kid-friendly world and uses a cast of multicultural people and lively animals. The last spread, featuring a Caucasian mother hugging her child of indeterminate gender opposite hearts, unfortunately steers the whole project into the cloying with the following line: “We go together, that’s what we do, because you love me and…I love you!”

While metaphor and simile are difficult for toddlers to grasp, the text is buoyant enough, and illustrations give youngsters plenty to admire and recognize. (Board book. 2-4)

THE LITTLE RECYCLER

Gerardi, Jan Illus. by Gerardi, Jan Random House (16 pp.) $6.99 | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-375-86172-7

Each critter, arriving on the scene in profile, greets the acorn on a double-page spread and asks, “Little acorn, little acorn, what will you be?” The answers that the acorn gives, in a loose rhyme scheme, vary slightly, but its response to the boar is the most creative: “Someday I’ll be a great big tree, and my bark will scratch your back.” The last few pages show the acorn growing into a tall oak and fulfilling its pledge to the animals.

Against swathes of green representing a grassy landscape, Gibbs’ creatures, which look to have been created with watercolor and ink, are comically droll and add energy to the staid subject matter. Attached to the cover are two unnecessary felt leaves, thus making the book “Not suitable for children under 3 years old,” as the very tiny fine print on the back of the book notes. As was also the case with Gibbs’ Little Bee (2012), which had fabric wings on the cover, this choking-hazard gimmick makes the book unsafe to use with the typical board-book audience of babies and toddlers and severely limits the age range with which this title can be shared.

Unfortunate and inappropriate. (Board book. 3-4)

GLOBAL BABY GIRLS

A little boy takes an active role in recycling and reusing in this lift-the-flap tale.

The boy, along with a couple of young friends, demonstrates cleaning and sorting recyclables, donating unwanted clothes and toys, and reusing other materials for various projects. While this is a noble effort, the rhyming text, which appears on the outside of and under each flap, does not scan well: “Clink, clink, clink. Into each bin– / BOTTLES, / PAPER, / PLASTIC, / TIN.” Some of the concepts above and below each flap have a clear relationship to one another: A large cardboard box is empty above the flap and reused as a toy boat below the flap. Other concepts do not connect quite as well: The plastic (above the flap) and “tin” cans (under the flap) look to be going into the same bin, but the next page shows them carefully sorted into their own separate bins. The cover may also confuse little ones, and a few grown-ups too, since it mostly shows materials to be reused (toys and clothes to be donated), not recycled. The flat, friendly and soft-hued cartoons look to be a mix of digital art over collaged backgrounds of reused materials. Other titles in the Teenie Greenies series, which are printed on recycled paper with soy ink, tackle gardening, composting and transportation alternatives with greater clarity.

A well-meant miss. (Board book. 2-3)

LITTLE ACORN GROWS UP

Gibbs, Edward Illus. by Gibbs, Edward LB Kids/Little, Brown (20 pp.) $8.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-316-12708-0

Global Fund for Children Charlesbridge (16 pp.) $7.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-439-5

In a natural follow-up to Global Babies (2006) and American Babies (2010), an empowering text and vibrant photos present baby girls from Canada, China, Guatemala, France, India, Liberia, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, the United States and more.

From the girl on the cover wearing a hijab to an American tyke wearing overalls, the girls mostly sport everyday wear in a broader range of colors than pink and purple. As girls are not always valued, the text, meted out in a few words per page, is a rallying cry in support of their potential: “Baby girls / can grow up / to change the world.” The portrait of each girl is presented on a full page or with a boldly colored border that allows for the occasional word of text. The babies mostly present happy or serious facial expressions, and a few engage in activities that illustrate girl power in subtle ways; an American baby, in her father’s arms, clutches a crayfish, and an Italian toddler looks as if she is “reading” aloud from a book.

Another baby-faced winner from the Global Fund for Children, with an important social message to boot. (Board book. 3 mos.-1)

Mouse, squirrel, bird, rabbit, boar and deer all wonder what an acorn will become, and it promises to feed and shelter these animals once it is grown. |

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PEEKABOO!

GUESS WHO? A Pop-Up Mask Book!

Gomi, Taro Illus. by Gomi, Taro Chronicle (16 pp.) $6.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-4521-0835-3 A wonderfully interactive 1990 Gomi creation that has been translated into English at last.

The board book opens wide to become nine different faces with two die-cut eyeholes that invite readers to use them as masks. This peekaboo game is played with mostly animals, such as a bear, a cat, a mouse, a penguin and a frog. The text encourages youngsters to guess what each animal is with a one-sentence clue on the upper-left corner of one page and the answer on the upper-right: “I like to eat honey. / I am a bear. // I like to chase mice. / I am a cat.” The endeavor takes a delightfully silly turn with the introduction of a robot that enjoys fixing things and a cheerful monster that likes to tickle. The last spread presents a brown-skinned child of unspecified gender who says, “I like to play peekaboo. / I am your friend.” Gomi’s flat watercolor cartoons in muted hues using simplified forms are perfect for peekaboo. Since many toddlers can be scared of masks, the small size of the book, which will only cover part of an adult face, and the friendly tone of the art, make the fun nonthreatening.

Little ones will delight in reading and playing this game again and again. (Board book. 1-3)

Ho, Jannie Illus. by Ho, Jannie Cartwheel/Scholastic (8 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-545-49331-4

With die-cut holes for eyes and handles, readers can hold this board book, in its open state, up to their faces to create a variety of costumed personas.

Among the featured creatures are a robot, a superhero and a witch in the interior and a mummy on the cover. The characters are given a couple of lines of dialogue to announce their identities and make their signature sounds or statements: “I’m a proud pirate! / Ahoy there!” Each face has one rather delicate pop-up facial feature or accessory, such as the witch’s protruding nose and the superhero’s mask, which will likely not withstand extensive, rambunctious play. Ho’s cheery, smiling cartoons in bold colors imbue the title with a lively energy. While the cover does portray a spooky spider and an orange-and-black color scheme, this title could easily stretch beyond the Halloween season.

Children old enough not to be frightened by masks should get a kick out of this. (Board book. 2-4)

THAT’S MY MOMMY!

Hodgman, Ann Illus. by Logan, Laura Tiger Tales (22 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-645-3

MOMMY! MOMMY!

Gomi, Taro Illus. by Gomi, Taro Chronicle (22 pp.) $6.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-4521-0834-6

A mama hen plays a game of hideand-seek with her two little chicks.

The hatchlings call “Mommy! Mommy!” when they can’t locate her, and she reassuringly appears with the words “Here I am!” with the turn of the page. The first time, their mama is simply in the distance, but the next time, she hides behind a wall before reappearing. This pattern alters as the chicks go on to mistake a fuchsia-colored flower poking out from behind a bush and the scraggly pink coat of a fanged monster protruding from behind some rocks for their mother’s comb. The motherand-chick reunion takes place on top of a barnyard roof while a happy sun looks on. Gomi uses spare watercolors on white backgrounds, graphically simple shapes and the subtle placement of beaks and eyes to convey lots of action and emotion.

Adults should share this title sensitively with their youngsters, since some toddlers may find the pink monster (or is it supposed to be a dog?) a little bit frightening.

It is lovely to see more and more of Gomi’s work being translated into English, but this offering proves that not all of his work has universal appeal. (Board book. 1-3)

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Various animal youngsters share what’s special about their mommies.

Hodgman’s prose describes each mother’s virtue in phrases that mix sentiment with simple descriptions. “My mommy is the most beautiful mommy in the world. / My mommy tucks me in at night.” The soft watercolor cartoons inconsistently place the critters in human or animal settings, but all of the characters wear clothes or accessories of some sort. Most of the scenes are sentimentally warm, as when the mama duck floats by while her duckling braves the water.

Others don’t work quite so well, like a difficult-to-read image of an overly made-up ostrich mom and child gazing at each other in a bathroom mirror. The companion title, That’s My Daddy!, follows the same format with animal fathers, but Logan’s illustrations seem to indulge in a little more humor here. The daddy giraffe sports a necktie, and the woodpecker papa uses his beak to hammer in a nail. In both books, the gender roles are quite traditional. The moms teach cooking and wear aprons, and the dads use tools and go camping.

While others have done the trope better, both titles are passable parent-child love stories. (Board book. 1-3)

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“From hiding in plain sight to squirting toothpaste all over the bathroom, the antics of these chubby bunnies are recognizably toddlerlike.” from rabbit pie

DOG COMES TOO

STEAMPUNK ALPHABET

Hutchins, Hazel Illus. by Mosz, Gosia Annick Press (26 pp.) $6.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-1-55451-479-3

Iwata, Nathanael Illus. by Iwata, Nathanael Cameron + Company (56 pp.) $14.95 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-937359-40-9

A little puppy faces some big challenges while out on a hike with its owner.

On each left-hand page, the little dog finds itself in a variety of outdoorsy binds and, on the facing page, escapes each dangerous or uncomfortable predicament. The text follows this same pattern and captions each page with one pithy line: “Too high / Big scramble // Too deep / Big swim.” When the puppy gets just too worn out to go any further, its owner reaches down to give it a pat and then allows it a “[b]ig rest” before setting out to make it to “the top // Together.”

Mosz’s droll paintings in rich colors playfully capture the dog’s responses, but occasional facing-page spreads depict the pup twice, which may confuse little listeners. The sister title, Cat Comes Too, follows a similar format to depicts a kitten’s adventures in the attic with its owner. Here, the layout problems are worse. Separate scenes blur together across the spreads, and the close-ups make it hard to follow the twists and turns of the action. In one scene where the text reads “Too swingy,” it is not at all clear what the kitty is dangling from.

While both pets are equally expressive, the mostly double-page spreads of the puppy’s story give the action room to breathe.

In the end, while Cat is cute enough, it’s Dog who has an interesting tale to tell. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

Letter by letter, Iwata builds a steampunk world for a story that does not exist and formats it for an audience that can’t possibly comprehend it.

This alphabet board book presents gizmos galore, each handsomely presented with puffs of steam and ornate clockwork decorations. Through the artifacts described, adult readers can begin to understand the civilization that spawned them. A is for Apple (an apple-shaped music box, that is); J is for Jar (a self-opening one); Y is for Yarn (actually, a device that unravels knitwear and re-spools the constituent yarns). Each contrivance is depicted in loving detail, colors applied with an airbrushed (or digital) polish.

A short gloss explains its origin and/or use, and it is celebrated in limping verse, as for Helmet: “With steam-powered engines in every household / A good fuel source was more precious than gold / Miners dug deep in the earth and discovered / They stood more of a chance if they kept their heads covered.” Except for the roughly 6-inch-square trim, board pages and large capital letters (presented against a too-busy background of interlocking gears), there is nothing in this book for the traditional board-book audience.

The handsome production values and sincere enthusiasm can’t be denied, but it’s hard to imagine the right audience for this book. (Board book. 13 & up)

RABBIT PIE

THANK YOU, TREES!

Ives, Penny Illus. by Ives, Penny Child’s Play (22 pp.) $6.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-84643-513-3 A bunny mama helps her six children get ready for bedtime in this British import that was originally published as a full-size picture book.

The first double-page spread summarizes the action ahead, as an ingredient list and the subsequent pages illustrate each stage of the “recipe”: “First, gather together your ingredients. / One game of hide-and-seek / One bath / Six pairs of pyjamas....”

Ives’ softly colored art, which looks to be watercolor, is the true attraction here. From hiding in plain sight to squirting toothpaste all over the bathroom, the antics of these chubby bunnies are recognizably toddlerlike. While their mother’s saintly patience is a bit unrealistic, she’s a comforting presence in her blue, polka-dot dress and pristine apron. The shrunken trim size diminishes the quality of the smaller details, but there are enough delightful images here to make it work reasonably well as a board book.

While the bedtime-as-recipe contrivance may be a little sophisticated for toddlers, the cozy charm within these pages makes for a comforting lap read. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

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Karwoski, Gail Langer; Gootman, Marilyn E. Illus. by Balouch, Kristen Kar-Ben (12 pp.) $5.95 | $5.95 e-book | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-58013-973-1 978-1-4677-0998-9 e-book An ode to trees and fruit in celebration of Tu B’Shevat, a Jewish holiday. Often occurring in the latter part of January or early February, Tu B’Shevat is also called “New Year of the Trees.”

The five double-page spreads show friends and family members planting trees, picking and eating tree fruit, and taking care of the planet as the holiday is observed in modern Israel and other parts of the world. The rhymed verse scans with a pleasing rhythm: “On Tu B’Shevat / we plant a tree. / Baskets of fruit / For you and me. // Orange, grapefruit / Peach or plum, / Lemon, mango, / Apple—yum!” The collagelike graphics in muted jewel tones are overlaid on wood grain (likely digitally simulated) with a blue or green wash. While some of the body postures and facial expressions are a bit stiff, it is refreshing to see a diverse group of children and adults engaged in the festivities. There are playful bits of humor in the art, evident in one scene in which a young boy pops out of a hole where a tree is about to be planted.

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While commemorating only a minor holiday, this book is a gentle introduction for the youngest observers. (Board book. 2-4)

WHO’S THAT JUMPING? And Other Animal Actions Kingfisher Kingfisher (14 pp.) $5.99 | Apr. 30, 2013 978-0-7534-6971-2

A catalog of animal movements and other nature facts for the youngest zoologists.

Clear, eye-catching photos on solid, bright backgrounds show various critters jumping, hopping, running and galloping. The left-hand page depicts the creature moving through its habitat. The rabbit, for example, bounds through a field as the text asks, “Who’s that hopping?” The answer, printed on a band of color, is the movement restated, with the placement and size of type mimicking the action itself. The facing page presents the animal at rest so youngsters can get a clear look. Two simple facts about the animal are shared: “I am a cheetah. I have lots of spots and very sharp claws.” One body part of each creature is labeled with a dotted line, which may encourage adults to discuss these photos with their little ones. The companion book, Who’s that...Roaring? And Other Animal Sounds, follows an identical format, but here, the noises of domestic and wild animals are at play. While the featured creatures in both books are pretty standard animal fare (horse, lion, sheep and elephant), there are some new faces here (puma, grasshopper and parrot) and some interesting new vocabulary words (antenna, whiskers and mane).

While a cleaner page layout might have served both offerings better, nonfiction is hard to come by for young children.

This accessible title rightly focuses on what is of interest to little ones. (Board book. 2-4)

AT THE ZOO

Kingfisher Kingfisher (8 pp.) $8.99 | May 21, 2013 978-0-7534-6941-5 Series: Seek and Peek This introduction to zoology features a cover of layered, bubble-shaped pages of various sizes, each with an image of a zoo animal peeking through.

Once a page is turned, bright stock photos of animals with similar characteristics or from the same genus are grouped together across the spread, united by a solid background color.

A heading introduces them (such as “Gone fishing” for seafoodeating birds and mammals), and one or two simple facts are shared. The creatures themselves provide additional and more specific information via speech bubbles. One section of each spread still retains the image that is visible from the cover and hints at what is coming next on the verso. Unfortunately, this 100

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Seek and Peek gimmick of shaped pages creates a visually confusing layout. In the “Burly bears” section, for example, all of the creatures on the page are bears (brown bear, polar bear and panda), but a maned lion and his cub do appear in their own section of the page against a different background. In the Rainforest, another in the series, featuring a variety of rain forest dwellers from around the world, also suffers from layout issues. The final page explains that some animals live high in the trees while others live on the rain forest floor, but the critters’ haphazard placement doesn’t support the point. Dinosaurs, yet another Seek and Peek book, uses photorealistic, computer-generated images of dinosaurs from various eras. Prehistoric creatures are grouped in such categories as “Scary hunters,” “Speedy” and more. The Seek and Peek format serves this topic most poorly, since some of the page sizes will confuse readers as to the size and scale of the subjects (the largest dinosaurs, brachiosaurus and diplodocus, are on the medium-sized pages at the middle of the book, which dwarf these creatures’ stature).

While the information is solid and simply presented, and the photos are eye-catching, the layout gets in the way of clarity. Stick with Kingfisher’s Baby Animals series for zoology in board-book form. (Board book. 3-4)

BABY LOVES TO ROCK!

Kirwan, Wednesday Illus. by Kirwan, Wednesday Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (28 pp.) $5.99 | Jan. 29, 2013 978-1-4424-5989-2 Various animals and one baby show off their musical talents.

With one sentence per page and puns that are a mix of the clever and the groan-worthy, the text shares the type of music each creature prefers: “The skunk loves punk. / The weasel likes to pop.”

The spreads depict the critters engaging in music-related activities and sporting appropriate clothing, accessories and instruments.

The highly saturated, slickly retro cartoons have a playful energy and truly pop against solid-color backgrounds with black panels at the bottom for the text. A double-page spread appears at three different intervals asking a variation of “But who really loves to rock?” in a graphic, bold type. On the last two pages, readers learn that “Baby loves to rock, rock, ROCK!” An exuberant infant with oversize eyes appears on a rocking horse, in a cradle and then finally “rocking out” on an electric guitar. While there are ingenious moments in the words and the visuals, all of it is going to go over the heads of babies and toddlers. This is one of those board books that is more for the grown-up readers than the children themselves.

Kirwan’s style is energetic and enjoyable, and here’s hoping she can find more developmentally appropriate material. (Board book. 1-3)

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“The first-person narration coupled with the familiar scenarios presented here will make it easy for children to relate.” from i know a lot!

I KNOW A LOT!

GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE!

Krensky, Stephen Illus. by Gillingham, Sara abramsappleseed (12 pp.) $6.95 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-1-4197-0938-8

Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by Magsamen, Sandra Cartwheel/Scholastic (12 pp.) $8.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-545-43645-8

Krensky offers an unassuming celebration of a child’s burgeoning knowledge about the big, wide world she lives in.

In easy, rhyming verse, with only one short phrase per page, a youngster proclaims the many things she knows. For instance: “I know rocks are heavy, / and flowers are light. // I know bright means day, / and dark means night.” The narrator is an African-American preschooler with big eyes, braids and a sure smile.

She is depicted tossing rocks into a river and flowers into the air, riding in a car, bouncing a ball, flying a kite, painting, brushing her teeth and playing the piano, often flanked by a group of ethnically diverse children and occasionally accompanied by her father. The first-person narration coupled with the familiar scenarios presented here will make it easy for children to relate. The charming illustrations, featuring round-eyed, rosy-cheeked youngsters frolicking about, have a vintage quality and are dominated by oranges, yellows and blues.

This appealingly illustrated, confidence-boosting board book will inspire little ones to think of—and perhaps catalog aloud—all of the important things they already know about their world. (Board book. 1-3)

CHICK PEA AND THE CHANGING TREES

Youngsters are invited to make and eat their own breakfast as they lift flaps, open gatefold pages and pull tabs.

In the sunny-colored cartoons, readers can flip an egg, juice an orange, open the refrigerator and more. One page per spread hosts the interactive features, while the facing page invites participation with a text that vacillates between rhyme and prose. The final spread includes a double-page gatefold with the text, “Now let’s eat.” Readers open the fold vertically to reveal a smiley-faced place setting with eggs for eyes and a jellydrawn mouth. The pages and the gatefold flaps, on stock that is somewhere in between typical board-book and hardcoverpaper weight, look sturdy enough, but the tabs won’t hold up to routine wear and tear and don’t offer what the text promises.

The sliding spatula does not allow for egg flipping, the juice cup has to be emptied via a pull of a tab before it can be filled, and the bread must be raised before readers can make toast. Magsamen’s simple, popular graphics have worked in other books, but her flat style does not lend itself to illustrating food.

While the cheerful, gold-foil–framed sun on the cover is inviting, the meal served inside will leave readers less than satisfied. (Board book. 2-4)

GOOD NIGHT, MY LOVE

Linda Cole Books Ltd. Illus. by Linda Cole Books Ltd. Barron’s (8 pp.) $6.99 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-7641-6593-1 In this “pull-the-tab book about the seasons,” a chick and a bluebird visit the same tree throughout the year.

Readers pull none-too-sturdy sliding panels to alter the tree’s appearance. In the four internal double-page spreads, autumn leaves fall off the tree, snow covers it, blossoms speckle it, and apples change from green to red in this before-and-after interactive feature. The graphically flat art in springtime colors is rather fussy; the striped backgrounds resembling wallpaper patterns in various muted hues are an odd choice for these outdoor scenes. The rhyming verse, with stilted line breaks, describes the birds’ reactions to the changing seasons: “Chick Pea and Sweet Pea look up and see / new leaves and flowers all over the tree! / But the flowers drop their petals. / They’re starting to fall. / And Chick Pea is trying to / catch them all.” The pull-tab also reveals an additional couplet in which an unseen narrator reassures the critters and gives hints as to what the duo will see next season. While is does not point to any choking hazards, the fine print on the back of the book states that it is “Not suitable for children under 3 years of age.”

The flimsy construction and poor art and verse make it ill-suited for older children, too. (Board book. 3-4) |

Magsamen, Sandra Illus. by Magsamen, Sandra LB Kids/Little, Brown (10 pp.) $7.99 | Jan. 2, 2013 978-0-316-17691-0

A quiet and gentle lift-the-flap book from the Sandra Magsamen design franchise.

Through the use of simple endearments, the rhymes invite youngsters to bed, “Good night, my little buttercup. / It’s off to bed for you. // Good night, my precious baby bear. / May all your dreams come true.” The right page features a friendly cartoon drawing of the endearment embodied, such as a smiling flower, an openarmed teddy bear and a playful monkey, on a large, page-covering flap. Underneath the flap, the character appears to be blissfully asleep. The facing page and the verso of each flap feature the text in a loose typeface that has a handwritten feel. The characters and a few key words in the text are outlined in dotted lines, reminiscent of stitch-work. It is odd that the fine print on the back cover states, “Recommended for ages 3 & up,” since the rounded cartoons in highly saturated colors will appeal to babies, the flaps will entice toddlers, and there are no choking hazard warnings. The tactile crescent moon, constructed of a “safe & nontoxic” polyurethane foam and covered with sparkly fabric, is a playful gimmick, but it will make spine-out shelving difficult in bookcases.

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The cozy art and tender verse will appeal to those seeking sentimental bedtime fare. (Board book. 0-18 mos.)

HUG!

Mantle, Ben; Illus. by Mantle, Ben Tiger Tales (16 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-637-8 An ode to various kinds of hugs as enacted by various animals.

The uncredited, rhymed text is mostly fluid, but the typeface changes radically from page to page and even word to word, making it difficult to scan. Each double- or single-page spread depicts a pair or group of animals engaged in a hug, some of which are more successful than others. While the mouse pair looks to be cozily hugging in Mantle’s cheerful, brightly colored cartoons, the group of birds on a wire don’t appear to be at all, and one member of the frog duo is attempting to escape the embrace of the other. Attached to the back cover are two armshaped flaps that flip around the entire book to illustrate a bear embracing its cub and simultaneously fasten the book with magnetic closures. While a pleasing gimmick, young browsers may be disappointed that it does not continue on the interior pages.

Peek-a-boo!, the companion book, uses the same type of flaps on the cover to hide a bunny’s eyes. Inside, children are invited to play the titular game as a bear, a cat and a gorilla, among others, hide behind some object in their habitat and reveal themselves on the verso. While the text is playful, the typeface is, again, all over the place, and the turn-the-page peekaboo format is less successful than the lift-the-flap variety.

While the covers of both titles suggest lots of interaction, the pages within fail to deliver the goods. (Board book.

18 mos.-3)

GOOD NIGHT!

Marchon, Benoit Illus. by Bravi, Soledad HMH Books (38 pp.) $7.99 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-547-89314-3 In this French import, a cherubic cartoon baby peeks through the die-cut hole at the center of the book to don various personae through the page turns.

On the first spread, readers meet a baby wearing footie pajamas decorated with pink hearts. On subsequent pages, the little one’s smiling face is seen as a heart, a fox and a dove, among others. The text invites grown-ups to bid their youngsters good night using endearments appropriate to the scene. A few of the richly colored, probably digitally created images are quite clever; as one page states “Good night, my pearl,” the baby’s round face appears as one bead on a necklace strand. A smattering of the 102

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other endearments and their cartoon depictions may have lost something in translation. English-speaking parents might find calling their child a “shrimp” slightly derogatory, and the appellation “sunshine” seems odd for a bedtime story. The pictures of a black fox, two amorphous brown “dumplings” and a cloudshaped “sheep” with no neck or head may confuse young children. The companion title, Spoonful!, also incorporates a die cut through almost every page and invites children to feed various animals, family members and characters. In profile this time, the cartoon face that appears through the hole sports a gaping mouth, a bulbous nose and a tuft of black hair. While an inventive idea, the shape of the hole does not allow the child truly to spoon “feed” each character, and some of the transformations via the page turn are strange. Both titles have thinner-thannormal board pages and may not hold up to all the interaction they invite.

An imaginative concept that falls down in execution.

(Board book. 6 mos.-2)

GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU: COLORS McBratney, Sam Illus. by Jeram, Anita Candlewick (14 pp.) $4.99 | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-7636-6476-3

An exploration of color from McBratney and Jeram’s nutbrown hares of Guess How Much I Love You fame.

On the left of each double-page spread, Little Nutbrown Hare encounters an animal or a plant in the featured color, such as a yellow flower, a green frog and a red ladybug. The hare greets these creatures and labels their colors with simple salutations, “Hello, yellow. // Good morning, green. // Hi there, red.” The facing pages caption, in a bold, black type, each of the colors on a slightly mottled and muted background of the shade in question. The last spread bears the text “Hello, Nutbrown!” and shows Big Nutbrown Hare hugging the little one amid the animals and plants from the previous pages. While Jeram’s watercolors are as fluid and playful as her work for the other franchise titles, two things get in the way of a solid presentation: the book’s trim size and its muted hues. The art is too dainty for the size of the pages, which are 5 inches square. The ladybug, in particular, is difficult to make out. Also, the colors are quite pale, which may confuse young learners. The objects on the “red” page look mostly pink, and some of the leaves on the “brown” page look to be a pale orange or yellow.

While this is the first title in the series aimed directly at babies and young toddlers, the small size of the art and the washed-out color values make it an imperfect concept book. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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“McPhail, in top form here, has created soft watercolors with rounded lines that adroitly capture Ben’s toddler movements.” from ben loves bear

BELLA LOVES BUNNY

SPLISH, SPLASH, SPLOSH!

McPhail, David Illus. by McPhail, David abramsappleseed (22 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-4197-0543-4

Melling, David Illus. by Melling, David Tiger Tales (22 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-643-9

A young girl enjoys the company of her stuffed rabbit from sunup to sundown.

This companion title to Ben Loves Bear (2013) follows a similar day-in-the-life format. In soft watercolor double-page spreads and smaller vignettes, Bella and Bunny do some gardening, enjoy a picnic and play the piano. McPhail uses simple, descriptive sentences to caption the art and includes bits of humor, such as Bunny’s enjoyment of a slice of carrot cake and Bella’s rough-and-tumble treatment of her friend. Probably due to issues of size and scale, some children may initially be confused as to whether Bunny is a stuffed animal or not, but Bella and Bunny’s warm relationship will draw them in regardless.

A lovely depiction of a first friendship. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

BEN LOVES BEAR

McPhail, David Illus. by McPhail, David abramsappleseed (22 pp.) $8.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-4197-0386-7

Ten ducklings brave a dip in a child’s wading pool.

“One fluffy duck goes waddling one day. / Two fluffy ducks have found a place to play!” The verse counts its way up to 10 as more and more white ducks enter stage left. When each bird arrives, it ascends a short ladder and crosses a low diving board, but the ducks never make it into the water until the last spread, where the text restates the title: “SPLISH, SPLASH, SPLOSH!” Various slapstick difficulties impede the critters’ attempts to swim, such as a tree branch that snags one duckling’s inner tube to leave the creature tantalizingly dangling over the water. While the rhyming text scans, it does not always coincide with the jaunty cartoons. The ducks do not look particularly fluffy. A couple of times the birds are said to be grinning or talking, but their bills never reflect this. One of the ducklings is called “Splosh,” but none of the others are named.

Melling’s pen-and-ink drawings in fluid lines and muted colors are a delight and have a pleasingly retro look and feel; here’s hoping he can a find (or write) another text worthy of his talents.

The charm of the illustrations cannot redeem their poor interaction with the text. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

LITTLE MISS MUFFET

A lovely, toddler-friendly tale of a little boy’s relationship with his teddy bear.

Each page uses two- or three-word sentences and quiet scenes to express Ben and Bear’s daily life and mutual affection. The inseparable duo engages in familiar activities, such as hide-and-seek, getting dressed and sandbox play. “Ben tickles Bear. Bear laughs. / Bear does tricks. Ben laughs, too.” While Bear is undoubtedly a stuffed toy, the teddy interacts with Ben as a fully realized playmate and companion.

McPhail, in top form here, has created soft watercolors with rounded lines that adroitly capture Ben’s toddler movements.

The artist’s use of full spreads and smaller visual vignettes spotlighted in hazy, round borders gives the simple, easy-reader–like text rhythm and balance.

Already a gifted artist, McPhail proves here that he intrinsically understands what the youngest readers want and need. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

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Nascimbeni, Barbara Illus. by Nascimbeni, Barbara Child’s Play (14 pp.) $5.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-84643-511-9 Series: Classic Books with Holes The famed Mother Goose arachnophobe finds her picnic pilfered by various animals in this expanded adaptation.

The tale starts off with the familiar rhyme, but the next six verses switch things up a bit with a bird pecking at her curd, a parrot crunching her carrot, a bear gobbling her pear and so forth. Each time, Miss Muffet, a curly-haired Caucasian tyke wearing blue overalls, is frightened away. On the last page, she decides to stay when each of the previously offending critters brings her a snack. One die-cut hole is added to each subsequent right-hand page to reveal the new animal’s arrival, and on the left-hand page, the holes reveal the animal’s eating noises (“Gobble! Gobble!” or “Chew! Chew!”).

While the cartoon Miss Muffet and animal visitors are playful enough against sunny-colored solid backgrounds, the art starts to look monotonous as the image of Miss Muffet fleeing the scene is repeated on each page. The new rhymes featuring poodles eating noodles and mice munching rice work well, but others in the Classic Books with Holes series are not as fortunate with their texts. In Itsy Bitsy Spider, the die-cut holes reveal additional spiders climbing on other parts of a house and yard; Itchy Nitchy scales the window box and Oochy Koochy ascends the apple tree in amateurish cartoons.

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In Hickory Dickory Dock, the page turns and die-cut holes spotlight further creatures scampering up the clock, such as a snake, a crab and a frog, as the hours grow late. The word choices in each stanza are clearly contrived to suit the scheme, and several of the creatures climbing the clock, particularly the sheep, bear and dog, are out of scale with one another and look odd in their clock-mounting attempts. In Mary Had a Little Lamb, the holes expose a total of seven lambs that follow the sheep-loving heroine around in all sorts of weather. While this book also has a few awkward rhymes, it does include some nicely diverse images. Mary’s class is multiethnic, and one member of her dance class uses a wheelchair. Music notation for each classic tune is included on the back of each book.

There are a few clever ideas in this series, but many of the added verses and the repetitive art feel forced to fit the die-cut-hole gimmick. (Board book. 2-4)

From one red Tachyris zarinda to 10 pink-tipped clearwinged satyrs, each full-page painting spotlights a different butterfly variety. The text simply labels the color and number of the butterflies using a large, serif typeface. In Bersani’s fine-brushed, detailed art, some butterflies are shown in the context of their habitat, such as the eight brown Orion butterflies alighting on yellow stalks of wheat, but most of the butterflies rest on pleasingly mottled backgrounds painted in soft hues. The butterfly names, in an inconsistent mix of scientific and common appellations, are included on the back cover in small print. While a little more information on each insect would have been a nice addition for adults and older children, they can seek out ageappropriate books if piqued.

Glowing art and simple concept presentation—just right for the target audience—may make counters and butterfly enthusiasts out of readers. (Board book. 6 mos.-3)

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL A TO Z

ALL ABOARD THE ARK

Oldham, Todd—Ed. Ammo (52 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-1-6232-6002-6

For all those toddlers who really dig indie films….

A is for Paul Thomas Anderson, director of such baby faves as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, and Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s searing and surreal meditation on AIDS at the end of the 20th century. I is for I Shot Andy Warhol; N is for Napoleon Dynamite; U is for U2 3D. Q is for Quentin Tarantino, but T is for Lily Tomlin and Stanley Tucci, demonstrating an irritating inconsistency, but hey, who cares, this book is just for babies, right? Of course not. This is a smug book for smug adults, masquerading as a book for the smallest children. Its board pages will respond to the urgings of little fingers, and the capital letters on each spread are nice and big, printed in bright colors that pop against the cream-colored backgrounds. But even as the subject matter is hopelessly beyond the ken of the book’s putative audience, the illustrations—by 27 artists, none of whom will be found in the average picture-book section—are characterized by a selfconscious, often surreal aesthetic that the developing vision of babies will find impenetrable.

D is for don’t waste your money, at least not if you’re planning on giving this to a baby. (Board book. 16 & up)

BUTTERFLY COLORS AND COUNTING

Pallotta, Jerry Illus. by Bersani, Shennen Charlesbridge (10 pp.) $5.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-57091-899-5

A lovely and simple concept book covering counting and colors for the youngest butterfly spotters.

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Pasquali, Elena Illus. by Vagnozzi, Barbara Lion/Trafalgar (10 pp.) $9.99 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-7459-6212-2

Five double-page scenes and a matter-of-fact text present the story of Noah and the flood.

While the author and illustrator wisely simplify the tale, the pacing feels rushed in this dry retelling. The cartoons, which look to be mixed-media in rich jewel tones, are playful and buoyant, though they are not particularly well-served by tactile elements embedded on each page. This “Finger Trail” feature is created by cutting out the top portion of the page to create an indentation and reveal a layer of patterned paper underneath.

Readers are encouraged to feel animal footprints, oversized raindrops and the rainbow, among others. The designs on the touch-and-feel elements don’t really connect with what they are supposed to represent. Why would animal footprints be covered with polka-dots or the flight path of the dove have stripes and spots?

All in all, a muddled effort. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

FACES FOR BABY

Peel, Yana—Ed. Templar/Candlewick (12 pp.) $21.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-6433-6 In a follow-up to the high-contrast Art for Baby (2009), this wordless, oversized board book features colorful faces from critically acclaimed visual artists.

A quote in the frontmatter from Dr. Miriam Stoppard notes that babies are “hardwired to enjoy faces” and that looking at them helps their development. Art patron Peel has “curated” this portrait gallery by artists with household names,

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“Porter’s acrylic paintings on wood of wide-eyed animals have a delightful folk-art look and feel and offer readers strong visual clues as to who is being chased.” from tails chasing tails

such as Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons, as well as lesser-known talents, such as Chris Ofili and Wang Guangyi.

The works range in style from abstract to folk art. Each piece is featured on its own page, and a couple are natural babyeye magnets. Donald Baechler’s Coney Island “II” is a perfect example—a childlike smiley face in primary colors on a green background. Chuck Close’s Emma depicts an actual baby face, and his perception-skewing approach may work quite well with newborn eyes learning to focus. Other works are too washed-out or may be missing too many important features in their abstraction to work for little ones, like the nearly noseless works of Hideaki Kawashima and Klee. The large Mylar mirror on the last page is a lovely addition.

While an uneven collection, this offering will do well as a gift book for artsy expectant parents. (Board book. 3 mos.-1)

The top half of the chaser is depicted on the left-hand page, and the right-hand side shows the tail and bottom half of the critter being chased. On the verso, the pursuer becomes the pursued.

An elephant follows a tiger, a tiger dashes after a bear, and a bear hunts a pig, until readers get to the mouse, who is chasing the elephant from the beginning. The final double-page spread reviews the chase sequence with smaller images of each creature. Porter’s acrylic paintings on wood of wide-eyed animals have a delightful folk-art look and feel and offer readers strong visual clues as to who is being chased. The text follows a simple pattern, but it includes some great vocabulary-building descriptions of each tail for wouldbe guessers. Let’s hope the title, which is close to a racy slang term, does not get in the way of adults sharing it with their little ones.

A delightful and playful romp worthy of an enthusiastic following. (Board book. 1-3)

SPARKLING PRINCESS 1 2 3

HAVE YOU SEEN BUNNY?

Perrett, Lisa Illus. by Perrett, Lisa Sterling (14 pp.) $5.95 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4027-8887-1

Count up to 10 with various fairytale characters.

Bedecked in foil of various hues with a subtle embossing, 1 frog prince, 2 glass slippers, 3 castles and 4 unicorns all make an appearance. Most of the objects are easily counted, but the “10 enchanted friends!” prove confusing; is the princess atop the unicorn an enchanted friend or is it the barely visible snail resting on a sparkly mushroom? A few of Perrett’s graphic cartoons in highly saturated jewel tones are droll, but readers may start to wonder why so many of the people and the magical beings never open their eyes. While a token few of the princesses here show some ethnic variety, the sister title, Sparkling Princess ABC (2013), does a better job with diversity and depicts a dark-skinned princess on the cover and two more on the inside. Working through the alphabet, several of the same fairy-tale characters cross over to this book and are again embellished with the same speckled foil. One-word captions label each object, which are depicted two or three to a page. At the end, both titles unnecessarily review the numbers and letters in a too-busy double-page spread with tiny images.

While the attempts at diversity should be lauded, both are shiny bits of board-book bling without much substance.

(Board book. 2-4)

TAILS CHASING TAILS

Porter, Matthew Illus. by Porter, Matthew Sasquatch (20 pp.) $9.99 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-57061-852-9

Prasadam, Smriti Illus. by Berg, Michelle Trafalgar (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-40831-499-9 Series: Go, Baby!

A lift-the-flap and touch-and-feel peekaboo experience for little ones.

On the left side of each spread, the text poses a variety of questions about Bunny’s whereabouts. One image (a bird, a mushroom, or a dragonfly) from the much busier right-hand side appears front and center. On the right, readers are encouraged to lift a relatively sturdy, shaped flap embedded in the landscape to see if Bunny is hiding underneath. Behind the first four flaps, youngsters encounter a lamb, a hedgehog, a deer and a badger in their habitats, and each creature features a small textural element. On the last page and below the final flap, Bunny nibbles on cabbages behind a garden gate. Berg’s clear, stylized cartoons in rich colors are both simple and detailed, making them easy for little ones who are learning to name their world. Unfortunately, the tactile components are really too small to be satisfying, and the textures do not always connect with their host (a smooth hedgehog and a ribbed carrot?). The sister title, Have You Seen Duck?, follows the same text and layout patterns, but this time, it’s Duck who’s on the loose. The textural elements here are better matched, but they still run on the small side. In both titles, the black text against a dark blue background on a couple pages is difficult to read.

A fine choice for lift-the-flap fans, but touch-and-feel enthusiasts should try other offerings. (Board book. 1-3)

In this circular tale (or tail?), readers are encouraged to guess which animal is being chased off the page. |

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DIG IN!

Prince, April Jones Illus. by Berg, Michelle abramsappleseed (14 pp.) $7.95 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-4197-0522-9 Mice, with construction-worker garb and gear, build and enjoy a full-size pizza.

Fluid and often clever verse narrates the action: “Crew arrives at break of day. Get to work, right away! / Put on those construction hats. Roll that mountain nice and flat.” (The mountain here is a mound of pizza dough.) Each double-page spread, except for the first, features movable parts, allowing readers to manipulate the machinery. A spin dial turns the roller of the steamroller or the barrel of a cement mixer (from which issues tomato sauce). Each sliding panel has a hole or indentation for little fingers’ ease of use and moves a loader, makes the ’dozer spread cheese, tows the pizza from the oven and removes a slice from the pie. The interactive components, while relatively easy to manipulate, are constructed of thinner-than-normal board-book page stock and may not hold up under really enthusiastic reading. In gray, orange and yellow hues and drawn in her flat, graphic cartoon-style, Berg’s friendly mice and clear depictions of vehicles are pleasing and recognizable. Little ones may not totally get the mashup of construction and pizza making, but there are enough details here to hold the interest of most truck lovers. The less successful sister title, Dive In!, follows a similar format, but here the mouse workers fill a bathtub and launch toy boats. Unfortunately, the interactive features are less satisfying and more baffling (will toddlers understand what a bath thermometer is?).

Stick with Dig In!, which young readers will enjoy sinking their teeth into. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

WHO AM I? THIS IS MY TAIL

verse here, but readers will hardly notice the forgettable lines when there are panels to slide and dials to spin. Fortunately, the interactive features in both offerings slide and spin easily and seem sturdy enough to stand up to repeated wear and tear. Rinaldo’s cheerful cartoons are done in friendly colors, the thick black lines used to draw the central creatures make them stand out, and subtle patterns within the landscapes provide some texture to the backgrounds.

While not much of a guessing game, little ones will enjoy the action of interactive elements. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

THAT’S HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU

Rudi, Julie A. Illus. by Beeke, Tiphanie Tiger Tales (20 pp.) $8.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-644-6

An unsuccessful knockoff of The Runaway Bunny and Guess How Much I Love You. A raccoon tells its cub how much it is loved in first-person rhymed verse. “I love you, I love you, above all the rest. / If you were a bird, I’d be your nest.” While Rudi’s verse is fluid, it has been done to death. Beeke’s richly colored paintings on grained and textured paper do well in the stage-setting scenes of the raccoon and cub together but fall apart in most of the forced, fanciful analogies of parental love. “If you were a squirrel, I’d be your tree” depicts a squirrel peeping out of a hole in a hollow tree; above the hole is a rudimentary happy face, complete with pink cheeks, and a twig circles round to “hug” the squirrel. Particularly cumbersome is the second-to-last spread, which depicts several pairings, such as cone and ice cream, salt and pepper, and needle and thread, but it is not at all clear who is meant to be the parent and who the child.

A derivative work in a market already oversaturated with similar titles. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

Rinaldo, Luana Illus. by Rinaldo, Luana Trafalgar (12 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-4083-1510-1 Series: Go, Baby!

HELLO SPRING!

A rabbit, a fox, a horse, a monkey and a pig need help to find their proper tails.

On the first four double-page spreads, the animals appear in their natural habitats sporting a corkscrew-shaped tail. The serviceable text tells readers something is not right here, as on the rabbit page: “I eat carrots. That’s not my fluffy tail! Who am I?” Readers can pull a panel embedded in the page to slide the correct tail into position, while the name of the creature is also revealed. The owner of the curly tail appears on the last spread, and the final interactive feature is a spin dial allowing readers to match the pig up with the proper appendage. The companion book, Who Am I? This Is My Mouth, presents a different assortment of creatures sporting a green snout and in search of the right beak or nose. The text is written in 106

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Sanrio Illus. by Hirashima, Jean abramsappleseed (14 pp.) $7.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-4197-0688-2 Series: Hello Kitty Hello Kitty, the well-known cartoon cat of Japanese origin, explores the seasons.

In typical Sanrio style, the little white kitty, often shown sporting a bright pink bow, enjoys springtime activities in double-page spreads that feature bold, black outlines and highly saturated colors. In backgrounds that stretch to the edges of the pages, she plays baseball, enjoys a picnic, strolls in the park, cavorts in rain puddles and flies a kite with several of her friends.

The text is a simple salutation that mirrors the title (“Hello flowers! / Hello butterflies!”) and appears on the upper-lefthand side of the page in a bold white font (the only exception is

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the final spread, where it appears in the upper right). The sister book, Hello Summer!, uses exactly the same format to depict a day at the beach, an ice cream social, a sailboat ride, a tennis game, a swim in a pool, bike riding and a trip to an amusement park for Hello Kitty and her buddies.

While the action is minimal, the clear, simple art lends itself to toddlers’ learning to identify and name objects.

(Board book. 18 mos.-3)

ALL THE COLORS OF BUSYTOWN!

Scarry, Richard Illus. by Scarry, Richard Barron’s (18 pp.) $7.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-7641-6601-3

Richard Scarry’s iconic characters present nine different colors.

Huckle the cat paints a picture in the featured hue on each of the double-page spreads. Accompanying Huckle are other objects of the same color, like the lettuce, peas and asparagus on the “green” page. Several Busytown characters make cameo appearances driving wacky vehicles, such as Lowly Worm in his red Applecar and Mr. Fixit operating an orange bulldozer. While many of Scarry’s dated references have been avoided, the inclusion of Wild Bill Hiccup wearing a Native American headdress and driving a brown Buffalomobile may trouble 21st-century grown-up readers. An unseen narrator captions the various objects and praises Huckle’s artistic abilities as the cat paints a yellow sun, blueberries and purple grapes. Tabbed labels at the top of the book include a nice range of colors, including pink, gray and brown. A companion title, Let’s Count with Lowly!, follows the same format, but here, numerals and dots for counting index the double-page spread for each number. Starting with the numeral 1 on the cover, Lowly invites readers, along with his friend Huckle, to count various characters, objects and vehicles. The layout in this offering is overly busy, and, unlike most of Scarry’s original titles, the smaller trim size does not give the seven marching band drummers, eight tuba players and more room to breathe.

While many will welcome concept books with Richard Scarry art, are these rehashed offerings really necessary with so many of his classics still in print? (Board book. 2-4)

MY BACKPACK!

Scholastic Inc. Illus. by Swanson, Weldon Cartwheel/Scholastic (12 pp.) $6.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-545-49749-7 A branded lift-the-flap offering featuring five Skip Hop animal backpacks.

On each double-page spread, a creature uses the Skip Hop pack that it resembles. A bee, which is somehow able to wear a backpack despite (impossibly) having no limbs at all, is paired |

with the popular bee pack, and a penguin sports a penguin bag.

On the left-hand page, the toddlerlike, cartoon animals, in subtly muted colors, are shown either on their way to school or engaged in preschool classroom activities. The facing page is a large representation of the Skip Hop backpack, the bottomhalf of which is a relatively sturdy flap. The text, with a gentle rhyme scheme, consists of a simple first-person statement made by the character in the spotlight, along with a question encouraging readers to open the flap: “I’m a little Ladybug. I love story time best! / What food is inside my backpack?” The answer to the query is on the lower half of the flap, which opens down: “Bugs! Didn’t you guess?” The last two pages inform readers that school is over and show all the backpacks, again bearing flaps, lined up in classroom cubbies. Behind the flaps, the packs contain artwork created by the animals that relate to their interests, such as the elephant with a picture of the savanna and the monkey with a drawing of a tree.

While a clever idea, as young children are often obsessed with bags and packs, parents wishing to avoid the overt marketing ploy should seek another title. (Board book.

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YOU ARE MY BABY Safari

Siminovich, Lorena Illus. by Siminovich, Lorena Chronicle (10 pp.) $8.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-4521-0642-7 Series: You Are My Baby

This split-level reading experience is a cozy delight.

Readers match animal babies pictured on each page of a smaller book (approximately 3 inches square) attached and nestled in the left-hand corner of the full-size board book, which features the corresponding parent animals. The simple text provides clues as to whose baby monkey, elephant, crocodile or elephant is whose. “You reach high for a treat,” reads the larger giraffe page. The smaller double-page spread featuring the giraffe calf answers, “You are my baby, little giraffe,” as the little one reaches for leaves held in its parent’s mouth. Siminovich, of the Petit Collage decorating line, uses her graphic, clean collage style to create appealingly simple parent-and-baby duos assembled with warmly colored and textured papers on delicately patterned backgrounds. You Are My Baby: Farm uses the same format to lovely effect with barnyard animals. Here, the vocabulary-building text includes the specific names for baby animals, such as piglet, calf, chick, lamb and foal. While grownups may want to practice manipulating the setup in advance, babies will enjoy the multiple opportunities to grab pages.

In both form and content, these two board books beautifully represent baby and grown-up bonding, whether human or animal. (Board book. 6 mos.-2)

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“The diversity of the toddlers depicted in these scenes is refreshing....” from blankies

AT THE BEACH

FARM

Spurr, Elizabeth Illus. by Oliphant, Manelle Peachtree (22 pp.) $6.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-56145-583-6 As in In the Garden and In the Woods (both 2012), a young boy enjoys life in the great outdoors.

Here, he delights in a day at the beach. One, two or three words on each page make up the rhyming text: “Sun Sky / Shore Boy // Sand Pail / Spade Toy.” The youngster makes a sand birthday cake with his shovel and pail, but an inevitable wave destroys it. His mother, nearby, comforts him with a picnic lunch and a “Lap Nap” as he dreams of the sea. Oliphant’s soft drawings, which look to be a mix of watercolor and colored pencil, capture the flow of sand and water well, though beach-going children will wonder at the pair’s solitude on this apparently perfect summer day.

While the youngster was pleasingly more self-reliant and self-assured in previous offerings, his play and his interactions with the natural world continue to ring true.

(Board book. 18 mos.-3)

BLANKIES

Thompson, Carol Illus. by Thompson, Carol Child’s Play (22 pp.) $6.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-84643-515-7

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A touch-and-feel book presents farm babies.

Photos of a flock of ducklings, a foal, a puppy, a piglet and a lamb each appear on the right-hand page of a book sporting a substantially sized swatch of fabric for little ones to explore in an appropriate texture. On the facing page over a black background, the animals list their basic characteristics. The critters then share their iconic noises via speech bubbles. “I am very woolly and frisky and I say / ‘baaa...baaa...baaa.’ ” While this offering is nothing new, and the touch-and-feel elements are not particularly varied, the photos of each creature are crystal clear and pleasingly fill the page. Pets, another title in the series, follows a nearly identical format right down to the die-cut hole on the cover, but in this title, such animals as a puppy, a parrot and a kitten are in the spotlight. With the bunny and lizard, the text calls attention to how the animals move (hopping and wriggling), which provides some nice variety from perennial animalnoise fare.

All in all, a simple and satisfying multisensory experience. (Board book. 3 mos.-2)

FIRST NUMBERS

A hymn of praise to a variety of blankies and security objects.

“Blankie big, / Blankie tiny, // Blankie knitty, knotty, / shiny!”

The rhymed verse continues in this vein, sharing a line or half a line per page. Thompson’s quick-study sketches are droll and funny, capturing the humor of blankies lost, found and at play.

The facts that she calls all loveys (including stuffed animals) blankies and that a stuffed bear somehow falls out of an airplane in flight may confuse some adult readers, but little ones will connect with the scenes immediately. The diversity of the toddlers depicted in these scenes is refreshing and reminiscent of Helen Oxenbury’s works; the child who is wearing a medical eye patch with a zebra pattern that happens to match his stuffed zebra’s coat is a particularly welcome sight. It is also rare and pleasing to find a book about blankies that does not try to make the child leave it behind.

The cozy experience of love within these pages is palpable. (Board book. 1-2)

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Tiger Tales Illus. by Tiger Tales Tiger Tales (10 pp.) $7.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-634-7 Series: My First Touch and Feel

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Tiger Tales Illus. by Tiger Tales Tiger Tales (10 pp.) $7.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-630-9 Series: My First Lift and Learn A straightforward, clear counting book for little ones.

On each page, the direct text asks readers how many of each object are pictured, starting with one cupcake and continuing up to 10 buttons. The exterior of a flap that takes up much of the page shows photographs of one cupcake, two kittens, three butterflies and so on. The inside of the flap reveals the object again, sometimes in a different configuration or color, along with a clear representation of the numeral. The dotted lines that show youngsters how to trace the written number with their fingers are nice features and give this title a longer shelf life. The die-cut handle at the top of the book is unnecessary, but it doesn’t interfere with the images on the internal pages. First Colors, a companion title in this series, explores colors using a nearly identical format. Readers are invited to name the color of an object on the outside of a flap and then peruse additional objects in this hue on the inside. While the photos are quite vivid and striking, there are a few missteps here and there. The “orange” starfish looks a little too brown, the yellow cordless phone is starting to look dated, and children still learning about the size and scale of things may be

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“The appealing black-and-white illustrations feature lots of interesting patterns sure to get little ones’ attention.” from checkers and dot on the farm

confused by a beetle that is nearly the size of a car tire. Health conscious parents may wonder about the inclusion of so many sugary foods (cupcakes, candy, chocolate and doughnuts).

While both titles utilize vibrant photos and easy-toopen flaps, First Numbers is the more successful offering of the two. (Board book. 18 mos.-3)

THINGS TO SEE

Tiger Tales Illus. by Tiger Tales Tiger Tales (12 pp.) $8.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-629-3 Series: My First Book of Colorful photos and simple captions introduce babies and toddlers to their world.

Each double-page spread presents a setting that will be recognizable to little ones, such as the park, the zoo, the beach or “...My Party.” On the left-hand page, photos appear in colored panels, and on the right, the pictures float on a white background. Tabbed pages with small images offer hints as to what each spread reveals. Most of the objects prove iconic and give parents room to talk and engage with little ones at their own pace. In the companion title, Things to Learn (2013), readers are given specific tasks. Youngsters are invited to match objects of the same colors, animals to their sounds, baby animals to their full-grown versions and more. A couple of foibles mar the presentation: The spread devoted to counting is overly busy, and one or two of the shapes are inconsistently depicted. In both books, a few of the images on the covers do not appear again on the internal pages, which may disappoint browsers.

While not flawless learning experiences, both books are useful tools to promote language development thanks to clear photos and clean layouts. (Board book. 1-3)

ABC PUZZLE AND BOOK

Tiger Tales Illus. by Tiger Tales Tiger Tales (24 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58925-632-3 Series: My First Puzzle Set

nothing new, but the photos are vibrant, and the text is engaging. The accompanying 16-inch-square jigsaw puzzle uses a selection of the same photos found in the book, with one picture per letter nicely spaced on a white background. Each photo is clearly captioned, and the entire alphabet, both upper- and lowercase letters, runs across the top and bottom of the puzzle.

The pieces may prove difficult for little ones, but children at the upper end of the age range should be able to accomplish it. For those looking for an extra challenge, the flipside of the puzzle presents the alphabet on a green background with subtle polka dots in a lighter shade.

An attractive book-and-puzzle package. (Novelty set. 3-5)

CHECKERS AND DOT ON THE FARM

Torres, J. Illus. by Lum, J. Tundra (16 pp.) $7.95 | May 14, 2013 978-1-77049-443-5 Series: Checkers and Dot

A simple black-and-white board book takes toddlers on a trip to the farm.

Checkers and Dot (named for the patterns on their clothing) take their cat Stripesy and dog Spot to the farm, where they investigate what’s inside the barn. In simple, rhyming text— only a couple of short lines per page—the little group meets a cow who “says hello with a Moo, Moo, Moo” and a horse who “eats hay with a chew, chew, chew.” After next encountering some chickens and a grouchy duck, the cat and dog are ready to leave, so Checkers and Dot say goodbye. While the text is occasionally a bit awkward and rhythmically stilted, it is simple and sparse enough for the board-book crowd, with an appropriate vocabulary as well. The appealing black-and-white illustrations feature lots of interesting patterns sure to get little ones’ attention. In a companion volume, Checkers and Dot at the Beach, the crew counts animals, from one crab to five fish. Here, too, the slightly strange story is rescued by the crisp, high-contrast illustrations, featuring large numerals in addition to patterns this time.

These Checkers and Dot adventures, while not sharealoud superstars, are nifty for leaving in baby’s reach for spontaneous exploration and play. (Board book. 3 mos.-3)

Photographs illustrate both the paperback alphabet book and 30-piece puzzle in this novelty set.

In the book, upper- and lowercase letters appear at the center of most pages, surrounded by square panels showing photos of objects, actions and feelings that start with the letter in question. The A page presents apple, asleep, ant, airplane, alligator and abacus with basic captions. The text engages readers in a simple question-and-answer format, usually in the “How many?” or “What color?” vein. Toward the end of the alphabet, some of the letters, such as U, V and X, Y, Z, share pages as initial letter sounds become scarce. As concept books go, this offering is |

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“...the riddle concept works well, and the answer, which readers of any age will be unlikely to guess, rightly encourages them to perceive the pond as not simply a backdrop, but an integral part of a thriving ecosystem.” from frog & friends

THE COUNTRYSIDE GAME

on relationships such as in, on, over and across instead of opposites. The translation (from the original Dutch) results in some awkward phrasing, but the point is always clear.

Visually appealing, this offering will provide some enjoyable practice in categorizing, sorting and identifying differences. (Board book. 3-5)

Tullet, Hervé Illus. by Tullet, Hervé Phaidon (14 pp.) $12.95 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-7148-6074-9

The king of interactive picture books (I Am Blop!, 2013, etc.) takes a sideways view of board books.

The cover holds a die-cut window giving readers a preview of what is to come. Once open, the page layout changes to a landscape orientation, and readers flip shaped pages for a wordless adventure through the sunny countryside. In Tullet’s cheerily colored, childlike cartoon style, the journey includes a visit to a small cluster of trees, an encounter with a happy couple out for stroll, a stop at a farmhouse and a view of a mountain range, ending with an ocean vista. When the book is flipped over, readers can retrace their steps, this time at night. It’s an enchanting, quietly instructive (if short) journey. It should be noted that a fine-print warning declaring it inappropriate for children under 36 months due to “small parts” (presumably mountain peaks and other die-cut elements detached by energetic use) appears on the back, but, fortunately, the construction and content of both books make them more appropriate for the over-3 set regardless.

Here’s hoping sophisticated 4- and 5-year-olds, who sometimes feel too grown-up for board books, do not dismiss it and miss out on the playful fun within. (Board book.

3-5)

BIG AND SMALL

van Genechten, Guido Illus. by van Genechten, Guido Clavis (18 pp.) $12.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-60537-149-8 Series: Odd One Out

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Close-up black-and-white photos depict babies cuddling with their loved ones.

These soft-toned images of racially diverse infants sporting a variety of facial expressions fill each right-hand page. On the left-hand page, one sentence of the light verse that comprises the book is meted out: “Smooch, baby, smooch. / Lips are made for kissing. / Hug, baby, hug. / It’s you I have been missing.” Accompanying the text are line-drawn cartoons of babies engaged in physical affection on a pastel blue background and surrounded by stars, hearts, flowers and swirls; at times, these spill over onto the photos. The choice to pair black-and-white photography with color art is an odd one, but the tender photos will draw in viewers of any age. The extreme close-ups do not work quite as well in the companion title, Move, where longer views would have served the action shots of crawling, bouncing and toddling babies better. This title mirrors the format of Cuddle in almost every way but for a pale pink color palette. The last two pages of both books provide practical tips for parents and caregivers on movement and cuddling respectively.

While there is little new or different here, babies will be drawn to the full-page images of their fellow tots. (Board book. 6-18 mos.)

FROG & FRIENDS

This large, sturdy board book offers plenty of seek-and-find fun.

Each double-page spread is covered by a group of endearing, almost-identical animals and features questions designed to prompt readers to sort them and spot their differences. The initial pages, for instance, feature 11 very similar elephants and the questions: “Who has a curly little tail? And who is ready to go to a party? Who is big and who is small?” Children will easily divide the elephants into the categories of big and small, but they will need to look more closely to find the elephant with the curly tail and the one wearing a party hat. Each spread asks readers to identify different aspects or features of the animals, but there is always a partygoer to spot. In addition to finding the partygoing animal, the page of zebras asks children to find the happy and sad zebra and, rather surprisingly, the one “who just went to the bathroom.” The companion volume, In, Out, and All Around, follows a similar format, except that it focuses 110

CUDDLE

Verdick, Elizabeth; Lisovskis, Marjorie Free Spirit (22 pp.) $6.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-57542-423-1

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Wan, Joyce Illus. by Wan, Joyce Price Stern Sloan (14 pp.) $6.99 | Jun. 27, 2013 978-0-8431-7277-5 Series: What Am I? This appealing offering presents a series of clues to a riddle with the answer revealed on a final, fold-out page.

The unnamed, first-person narrator describes, in one simple sentence per spread, an enjoyable day with friends, which include ducks, a beaver, frogs, turtles, snails, dragonflies and fireflies. The final page asks, “What am I?” and a vertical foldout reveals an answer that no one will likely guess: a pond. The simple text is appropriately large and bold, and the delightful illustrations feature thick lines, chunky, smiling critters, and a vibrant, natural color scheme. Despite the potential confusion engendered by the title—which suggests that the first-person

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narrator is a frog—the riddle concept works well, and the answer, which readers of any age will be unlikely to guess, rightly encourages them to perceive the pond as not simply a backdrop, but an integral part of a thriving ecosystem. In a companion title, Owl and Friends, a tree tells readers about all the happy times it shares with forest animals as readers try to guess its identity.

An engaging riddle book with standout illustrations, especially the final foldout, which is filled with merry creatures being regarded by a cheerful sun and a content, pigtailed little girl. (Board book. 1-4)

VICTOR HUGO’S LES MISÉRABLES

Wang, Jack; Wang; Holman—Adapts.

Illus. by Wang, Jack;Wang, Holman Simply Read (24 pp.) $9.95 | May 30, 2013 978-1-927018-21-7 Series: Cozy Classics The melodramatic French novel of sin and redemption set against various backdrops of unrest is boiled down to 12 words.

Yep: 12. Words. This board book for the nascent genius begins with “poor,” includes such stirring language as “happy” and “climb” and ends with “together.” Perfectly adorable felt dolls posed against (mostly) three-dimensional backgrounds depict the characters displaying the emotions/characteristics or engaging in the actions described. “Rich” positions a prosperous-looking Jean Valjean in a blue frock coat in front of, presumably, his factory; turn the page to see a “sad” Cosette dressed in rags and wielding a broom, looking out a window. With or without significant interpolation (like, several hundred pages’ worth) from an adult, there is absolutely no way any baby chewing and drooling on this book will make the connection between those two figures and the now-adult Cosette and graying Jean Valjean out for a merry “stroll.” But forget the gaps in narrative; how many babies have yet wrapped their heads around the concepts of “rich” and “poor”?

Publishing simultaneously, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace delivers a similarly sweetly illustrated, ludicrous truncation.

Just the ticket for the tot who’s applying early-earlyearly-early-early decision to Harvard; better hope the RAs will change diapers. (Board book. 1-3)

a close-up of an animal’s facial features, mostly using circles, rectangles and triangles. The next double-page spread shows the critter in its full, though highly minimal representation.

The bunny, for example, is created with a large white rectangle, two circles for eyes, a semicircle for a (smiling) mouth and two smaller rectangles protruding from the top to represent the ears.

The text, written in a clear, blocky type, encourages a guessing game: “UP CLOSE, I see your round snout. You are a... / PIG!” While the mention of “snout” is helpful in that example, the only verbal clue readers are given for the frog is “wide mouth,” and “little nose” is the only hint for the monkey. While the images are simple and appealing from a design standpoint, they may be lost on the babies and toddlers still learning what these creatures are. Even though they appear on a suggestive background color, all of the animals are white, which may confuse little ones who identify these creatures partially by their hues.

While older children and design students may find this artist’s work compelling, it is too graphically sophisticated for the board-book set. (Board book. 2-4)

PINWHEEL

Yoon, Salina Illus. by Yoon, Salina LB Kids/Little, Brown (16 pp.) $12.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-316-22176-4 This interactive book uses a spin dial to create dazzling visual effects.

Yoon sets up various scenes on double-page spreads, such as a field of sunflowers, sea life underwater and a sky full of hot air balloons. Readers spin the dials on the left-hand side of the page, or the right on the verso, to activate the dynamic element.

A pinwheel spins on the cover, the vent of a train turns, and fireworks explode. A lovely surprise is the appearance of a carousel horse’s head out of the top of the page as readers look down at the merry-go-round from above and the wheel turns. The dial is easy to spin, and interactive components look relatively sturdy.

Yoon’s graphic images, in carnival colors, are simultaneously bold and detailed. She wisely does not try to impose a narrative on these tableaux, so the text merely presents rhyming couplets to set the scene and inspire awe. “Sparkling, spinning, lights freewheeling. / Rainbows bursting, night pinwheeling!”

As they did with Yoon’s Kaleidoscope (2012), youngsters will enjoy giving this one a whirl. (Board book/novelty. 3-5)

UP CLOSE

Wegerif, Gay Illus. by Wegerif, Gay abramsappleseed (30 pp.) $12.95 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-4197-0391-1 Simple shapes in solid colors depict a variety of animals.

Following the same pattern throughout, Wegerif presents |

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“From the start, readers will know this app will provide some good, spooky, Vincent Price fun....” from the castle of nightmares

interactive e-books THE TERRIFYING BUILDING IN EYEVILLE

Grøndrup, Joel Illus. by Woldu, Dawid; Ruducha, Tomek Joel Grøndrup $0.99 e-book | May 10, 2013 1.0; May 10, 2013 An allegorical stab, mildly pessimistic, at explaining to the quite young the

effects of cancer.

The story moves forward, leisurely, at the tap of an arrow, with some tweeting of birds and hearts radiating out from a girl in love but no real interaction to speak of. Eyeville is a picturepretty village, with cozy houses and a general state of bonhomie.

One day, an odd, gnomelike creature appears at the door of Mr. Nice and volunteers to do a little construction work inside his house. Mr. Nice being nice, reluctantly agrees—after all, the house looked good to begin with—and the gnome, who goes by the name of Kanser, proceeds to do what cancer does: He metastasizes, taking over and ruining Mr. Nice’s home, along with his neighbors’ homes and businesses. Ultimately the town manages to dig out the disaster, but then they have to move, which seems a little rough after all the grief and surgery. Why not rebuild, which might be a more comforting message and lift the security factor?

The devastation that cancer can wreak, along with the fact that it can be excised, is charted here with honesty if not clarity and with a look to a life with a future. (iPad storybook app. 4-8)

SORCERY! The Shamutanti Hills Jackson, Steve Inkle Studios $4.99 | May 1, 2013 Series: Sorcery!, 1 1.1; May 1, 2013

Background noises, a self-adjusting narrative and stiff but elaborately detailed animated figures add extra avenues of engagement to the first episode of this four-part roleplaying game, which was originally published across the pond in print in the 1980s.

Played from an aerial viewpoint on a pinchable landscape map, the game starts “you” (a generic warrior-wizard) in Outpost Settlement, where food and a spell book can be “purchased.” Then it’s on down a series of forking roads through rough towns and with encounters with hoodlums, headhunters and other hazards on a quest to claim the Crown of Kings from the distant fortress of Mampang. Or dying suddenly, which happens early and often but can be turned into a do-over by touching “rewind” buttons. Each tap on the 112

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central figure causes a brief passage of text plus directions for swordor spell-action options to slide out from the edges. Banners at the top track remaining stamina, gold and food levels, plus a spirit animal that’s intermittently available for bailouts. Though some of the illustrations are just black-and-white line drawings, true animation is minimal, and too many of the action choices involve doing nothing or actually avoiding engagements, satisfying quantities of swordplay and spellcasting await experienced young gamers. Unlike the print versions, there is no way to skip ahead if players get stuck, however.

The many opportunities for inaction can dull the experience, but it’s a cut above Choose Your Own Adventure in both visuals and complexity of play. (iPad adventure game.

11-13)

THE CASTLE OF NIGHTMARES

Jugo, Denis Illus. by Kolaj, Sanja Pixy Interactive $4.99 | May 12, 2013 1.1; May 12, 2013

A deft combination of classic fright story and solid interactive artwork gives this nightmare tale an enjoyable creepiness.

A boy is haunted by nightmares: a castle on a foggy night, incorporeal voices calling, a big moon in the sky, ravens cawing. He brushes away the dreams until they are too insistent, and so he enters the dream and the Castle of Nightmares. From the start, readers will know this app will provide some good, spooky, Vincent Price fun—the music alone gives it away—but so does the artwork, all shadows, soft buttery light and doors hiding who-knows-what? The interactive features are great and ghoulish, too, as earwigs and spiders crawl out at readers, for this is very much a book, with lots of words to read as well as tapping to effect. The characters are a curious combination, echoing both the past and now: John, the hero, looks more like Geneviève Bujold than a strapping youth, and Eleanor, queen of nightmares, who has trapped child after child by luring them away in their dreams, is a punk Cruella De Vil. But the whole thing slips along rather nicely, with plenty of fun if derivative play on Alfred Hitchcock, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Sword in the Stone.

A scary story, minus the terror, that will make readers squirm instead of scream. (iPad storybook app. 7-11)

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LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Nosy Crow Nosy Crow $4.99 | Apr. 25, 2013 1.0.2; May 2, 2013

A retelling of the familiar fairy tale, Nosy Crow’s newest app has the appearance of a graphic novel and offers a fresh new twist in the storyline. |

Portrayed as brave and capable, Red Riding Hood heads through the forest, where readers help her navigate forks and the path. Each path leads to a different game and subsequent variation in the story. Instead of simply being distractions embedded in the app, each game is integral to the story and encourages readers to carry on through to the end, where the various items gathered prove useful in dispatching the wolf. Interactions are smooth and infused with humor. The 3-D effect and zoom capability add depth to the illustrations, and a map is provided as a shortcut to the games. Game features include tilting to pour honey and to move a spider around a maze, blowing seeds from a dandelion, readers’ own reflections in a pool and many touch-screen games. The characters, narrated superbly by child actors, speak to each other when tapped. Unfortunately, conversations get a bit out of whack if not tapped in the correct order, but eventually, all becomes clear. In “Read and Play” mode, words are highlighted as they are read out loud, and blue dots blink to help readers find interactions on each page.

Well-crafted and fun to read, this is an empowered “Red Riding Hood” not to miss. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

EXTRAORDINARY JENNY JONES PaperPlaneCo PaperPlaneCo May 15, 2013 1.0; May 15, 2013

The shapes of the world are seen very differently by an unusual girl with a common name.

Jenny Jones, who has a name shared by “possibly millions,” is like any girl except for one big difference: Wherever there are circles, she sees squares. Whether it’s a pizza, a bowl of fruit or even a Ferris wheel, Jenny sees corners and blocks where others see round shapes. She takes time picking out these shapes in panoramic pages; readers can scroll horizontally and find them in puzzle pages that reward sharp eyes. The art imagines Jenny’s world as a heightened reality in which houses look like giant slices of bread and everyone wears bright, warm colors. The narration of the story is nicely paced and distinct, page navigation is easily managed with a pull-down curtain rope, and the ending, in which her family simply accepts Jenny’s skewed view, supports the kind notion that we all see things in different ways. The story gets repetitive as it closes, but the pages themselves are lively, featuring a feline named Chairman Miao who’s there to help advance the story when readers gets stuck on puzzles.

Jenny may not be that unusual as a young lady, but the way the app brings readers into her point of view and shows other ways to see objects otherwise taken for granted certainly makes her stand out. (requires iPad 2+) (iPad storybook app. 5-12)

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MYRO AND THE JET FIGHTER

Rose, Nick Illus. by Corrina, Lucy NickRose Ltd. $3.99 | Oct. 16, 2012 1.1.1; Dec. 9, 2012

The story of Myro, the smallest plane in the world, lands squarely on the point that small can be big on character.

When showoff Jimo the jet fighter scares chipper microlight Myro out of his own airspace and then makes fun of him by calling him “lawnmower,” Myro is upset and begins to doubt himself. But when Jimo crash-lands, sending out a Mayday call, Myro saves the pilot and calls in reinforcements, showing Jimo that what matters most is character, not size. Narrated by Christopher Biggins, with “Read to Me,” “Read by Myself ” and “Record Myself ” options, the tale soars high with vivid 3-D animation, original music, adventure maps, games and fact sheets. Young airplane enthusiasts will love the pilot lingo, call signs, size and speed information, as well as detailed information on Jimo the Jet Fighter. New readers will find the phonetic alphabet game educational and enjoyable, along with the often hilarious commentary/sound effects by chickens, geckos, koalas and kookaburras, identified throughout the story by tappable blue dots. Myro even comes with his own sing-along songs.

Although the story itself teeters on the edge of melodrama at times, this aerospace twist on The Little Engine That Could is worth the time in the air. (optimized for iPad 3; compatible with iPad 2; iOS 6+ recommended) (iPad storybook app. 3-7)

MONKEY AND MOLE AT THE RIJKSMUSEUM

Spee, Gitte Illus. by Spee, Gitte The House of Books $3.99 | Apr. 12, 2013 1.0; Apr. 12, 2013

Two animal friends explore the recently renovated grand Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Digging a tunnel, Mole accidentally discovers a beautiful building and brings his friend Monkey to explore the treasures inside.

A chase ensues when a guard spots them and angrily shouts, “The museum is closed. And animals aren’t allowed in here!” As the two friends flee, they bump into an ornate 17th-century Delft vase, are helped by the little angel statue called Amor and otherwise encounter more precious works of art. Options include audio narration in English, Dutch, French and German, a choice of visible or invisible text, and automatic or manual page turns. Interactive features are minimal but suitable for young children. This storybook app works better as a charming story than an introduction to the recently renovated Rijksmuseum, though. While the colophon at

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the end provides young readers with information about each of the famous works of art, the emphasis is on the animal friends’ adventure. Spee’s illustrations capture the essence of the artwork but are impressions rather than realistic renditions, unlike Clara Button and the Magical Hat Day, by Amy de la Haye, illustrated by Emily Sutton and developed by MAPP Editions (2012), which captures readers’ interest with striking photographs of the artwork in the backmatter.

It’s a pleasant-enough story, but it’s not quite effective as a way to draw young readers into a museum experience. (iPad storybook app. 4-8)

JAZZY WORLD TOUR The Melody Book The Melody Book $4.99 | Apr. 17, 2013 1.0; Apr. 17, 2013

A mini-almanac doubles as a cumulative travel book in this survey of various countries.

The opening screen displays a world map decorated with the flags of seven countries: Brazil, Spain, Egypt, Kenya, India, Australia and the United States. When readers tap on a flag, they are transported to that location, where they are offered three options: learn, play or create.

In “learn” mode, readers can scroll through a large, colorful menu of musical instruments, animals and traditional food/clothing that are representative of that region. Tapping on an item summons a corresponding text box that explains it. Unfortunately, there’s not a narrative option for descriptions, which would make them more accessible to preschoolers. “Play” mode is a musical party of sorts, where tapping on a character prompts it to play a musical instrument or offer other cultural contributions (a bullfighter waves his cape and says, “Arriba,” for example). Finally, readers can opt for “create” mode, which is essentially a storyboard on which animal and instrument stickers can be placed. Once complete, readers can take a picture of their creations or even generate a video by moving stickers around while an “hourglass” drains. Photos and videos are automatically added to the travel book; the app also offers Facebook and Twitter integration, as well as sending creations via email or just saving them to your camera roll.

A fun first step into cultural awareness. (iPad 2+ recommended) (iPad storybook app. 2-6)

MR. SPOTS

Urueña, Hugo Illus. by Pelaez, Laura Churukogames $1.99 | Apr. 27, 2013 1.0; Apr. 27, 2013 This grammatical nightmare has a scrawny storyline, ho-hum graphics and rudimentary interaction. But the music’s kind of catchy.

If there were an award for worst language translation, this app might win the grand prize. The creators hail from Colombia, and apparently, they aren’t fluent in English. The text on the first screen reads, “Milky and Cocoa bark excited. / They want to see the puppy hide inside the box.” Unless the two dogs are actually barking the word “excited” (they aren’t) and want to watch a puppy climb into a box (it’s already hidden there, but—surprise—it’s really a cat), the sentences are ambiguous. And things get progressively worse. The rest of the story is about dogs trying to ascertain some indistinct “cat wisdom,” but it never goes anywhere meaningful (or even vaguely logical). Readers must master the “games” between chapters to move on, finding differences between cats and dogs and/or otherwise searching for hidden elements. Spanish speakers might find the app a completely different experience, but English speakers—particularly those hoping to inculcate emergent literacy in English in young children—should give it a pass.

Given how much money and sweat goes into app development, it’s absolutely astounding that these folks didn’t bring on a qualified English translator before launching. Now that would be some wisdom. (requires iOS 6+) (iPad storybook app. 2-5).

This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Connie Burns • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Lisa Dennis • Carol Edwards • Robin L. Elliott • Brooke Faulkner • Omar Gallaga • Judith Gire • Melinda Greenblatt • Linnea Hendrickson • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Joan Malewitz • Jeanne McDermott • Shelly McNerney • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • R. Moore • Kathleen Odean • Rachel G. Payne • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Kristy Raffensberger • Melissa Riddle Chalos • Katie Scherrer • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Stephanie Seales • Paula Singer • Karin Snelson • Rita Soltan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko

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indie ART OF MIND III The Evolution of a Trilogy

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Aidoo, Original Clyde Real Print for Real People (258 pp.) $9.85 paper | Mar. 3, 2013 978-0-615-69434-4

Graffiti Grandma by Jo Barney................................................ 117 THE RULES OF DREAMING by Bruce Hartman..............................120 Elysian Fields by Mark LaFlaur................................................. 121 Big Jack Is Dead by Harvey Smith.............................................. 125

BIG JACK IS DEAD

Smith, Harvey CreateSpace (284 pp.) $12.99 paper $9.99 e-book Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4825-6365-8

Poems covering love, life, heart and home.

Aidoo’s new multigenre collection of verse and images provides no introduction, instead dropping readers into the deep end of his fluid poetry. Readers don’t know what’s going to happen next, but that’s part of the fun in this lively, bursting compendium. Most of the book consists of poetry, a musical free verse that’s even better spoken aloud. The rest is respectable paintings from a variety of artists, including competent oil paintings, some of which depict scenes from Chicago. But the real draw is Aidoo’s poetry. The author has many talents, most impressive of which is his remarkable versatility. In the hands of a lesser poet, the range of topics—the joys of loving a large woman, the anticipation of waiting for a new video game, the beauty of the pop star Shakira—would feel forced or even absurd. But Aidoo seamlessly weaves these and more together in a gorgeous, unexpected tapestry. His ability to integrate pop-culture references into serious verse without seeming flip or too clever is truly impressive, calling to mind Michael Robbins’ work in Alien Vs. Predator (2004). Aidoo’s style is equally strong: Diction is conversational without being casual, easy without seeming lazy. He catches the rhythms of speech—no small feat. One of his best moments arrives in a late poem called “The Grievance”—“So the deceased can rejoice that they are forgotten for hours, days, or even weeks at a time. They’d want the flower-givers to keep on walking… and begin that work on their own headstones.”—in which he subtly evokes our odd ambivalence about death and dying, all in approachable, unpretentious language. This book is the last of a trilogy, but let’s hope Aidoo isn’t done yet.

Raw, affecting lyric from an assured poet.

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THE ABC FIELD GUIDE TO FAERIES Inspiring Reminders of Respect for Ourselves, Each Other and the Environment Alexander-Heaton, Susanne Illus. by Gabriell, Chantal Motivated by Nature (58 pp.) $19.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Sep. 25, 2009 978-0-9813048-0-9

Alexander-Heaton and Gabriell’s vividly illustrated, poetic picture book introduces children to the magic of nature.

Today’s kids will eventually inherit a planet whose natural resources and ability to sustain life will be rapidly dwindling.

Author Alexander-Heaton and designer Gabriell have set out to create a fun way to teach young children about the importance and fragility of nature, using both rhyming poetry and mixed-media illustrations. Alexander-Heaton, who grew up in rural Manitoba, had a childhood characterized by a love of the wilderness, and her debut aims to encourage a similar perspective. What sets this book apart from other eco-aware titles is Alexander-Heaton’s inclusion of an imaginary world of fairies.

Each fairy represents an aspect of nature and serves as its guardian. Quinella, for example, is “the ruler of the oceans, rivers and seas,” while Buzzalina flits among the flowers bringing happiness to all creatures. As promised, the book uses each letter of the alphabet as a prompt for both the name of the fairy (“E is for Echinops,” etc.) and for two poems, the first spoken by the narrator as a sort of short biography of the fairy and the second by the fairy him- or herself, encouraging the reader to help protect the butterflies, appreciate a rainbow, refrain from littering or find the silver lining to any cloud. While the rhymes are sometimes wrenched into a strict form, children will probably find a number of them delightful. Adults may find the poems and overall message a bit clichéd and the illustrations a tad treacly (and occasionally uncanny), but children will be drawn to the rich colors and unusual collagelike images. Overall, the work is an inspired invitation to preserve our beautiful planet.

An earnest, well-intentioned addition to the contemporary environmental movement.

TRAVELS IN ELYSIUM

Azuski, William Iridescent Publishing (540 pp.) $18.90 paper | $9.99 e-book May 1, 2013 978-3-9524015-2-1 A Greek archaeological dig holds deep secrets.

At the beginning of Azuski’s (The Rose-Tinted Menagerie, 2012) latest novel, 22-year-old Nicholas Pedrosa is fresh out of college. He’s stuck in a dead-end real estate job in England 116

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when he applies for a job on an archaeological dig on the Greek island of Santorini under the direction of the legendary archaeologist Marcus James Huxley. His interview with Huxley’s frosty Russian assistant, Svetlana Bé, goes so poorly that Pedrosa assumes he’s not getting the job—until boat tickets and travel details arrive in the mail. He travels to Greece, intrigued to learn along the way that Huxley’s expedition has uncovered mysterious 5,000-year-old hieroglyphics at the site. Curiosity turns to dread when Pedrosa arrives at Santorini only to find Huxley and his associates attending a funeral—the funeral of Huxley’s previous young assistant. Pedrosa gets a decidedly unfriendly reception from the great man, and he’s promptly confronted with two mysteries—What actually happened to his predecessor? And what happened to all the ancient inhabitants of the city that was buried in a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago on the site of Huxley’s dig? The homes and workplaces of those ancient inhabitants are perfectly preserved, but unlike other famous disaster sites, such as Pompeii, there’s no trace of any people. Azuski knits these plotlines together with considerable skill, contextualizing them within the wider philosophical background of a search for Plato’s mythical lost city of Atlantis and infusing them with plenty of memorable descriptions (“The dawn chorus woke me at five,” Pedrosa says, “Athens’ version of it, that is, cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes racing the clock, chasing the sunrise”). The imperious Huxley and his private agenda dominate the plot, and the baffled, inquisitive Pedrosa eventually becomes a hero to root for as he navigates the various personalities of Huxley’s dig team. Ongoing digressions into Santorini’s distant past jar at first but ultimately reinforce the novel’s taut, well-constructed climax.

A smart and satisfying archaeological thriller in the vein of Dan Brown.

SEMMANT

Babenko, Vadim Ergo Sum Publishing (304 pp.) $24.99 | $16.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Mar. 23, 2013 978-9-9957420-2-7 A troubled wunderkind creates an enigmatic robot.

When readers first encounter Bogdan Bodganov—the cybernetics genius in Babenko’s intriguing debut novel—he’s confined to a mental institution, a “hospital for VIPs” in Madrid. Attractive nurses care for him as he reflects on a tumultuous life. Born in a small village in the Balkans, his parents sent him to a special boarding school in Manchester, England, where he eventually studied “microphysics,” married an artist and cheated on her with identical twins in Paris (among others). He ended up in Marseille, where he met Lucco Mancini, a swindler who introduced Bogdan to the currency markets and showed him the quick fortunes that could be made by preying on the uninformed optimism of investors. Almost out of boredom, Bogdan invented stock-predicting gadgets for Mancini, but the

“Barney’s narrative nimbleness helps wrangle the storylines as they race to a satisfying conclusion.” from graffiti grandma

two parted ways, and Bogdan landed in Madrid (evocatively described by Babenko), a city he hates, where he played the market and invented Semmant, a sentient robotic computer program enabled by “neuron quanta” to self-doubt and selfcorrect (in one startling scene during Semmant’s creation, Bogdan returned to his computer to find the screen staring back at him). As Semmant continued to grow and master the stock market, Bogdan fell in love with the alluring Lidia Alvares Alvares, who excelled at making people famous and (unlike all his other paramours) had genuine curiosity about Bogdan’s various obsessions. After the two parted, Bogdan created an artificial variation of her called Adele, further complicating an enjoyably complicated plot. In a narrative thick with obfuscation, the reader can never quite be sure what’s real.

A winning satire on greed and fallibility that also doubles as a parable about finding love.

GRAFFITI GRANDMA Barney, Jo Encore Press (338 pp.) $13.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Mar. 11, 2013 978-0-615-72645-8

Ostensibly about a serial killer, Barney’s (The Solarium, 2011, etc.) novel is about much more than that. It’s also the story of people who are down but not out and a rumination on family, courage and responsibility—a book that reverberates long after the last page.

Grouchy old Ellie Miller, the “graffiti grandma,” is on a quixotic mission to scrub the graffiti off the mailboxes in her neighborhood. With solvent and rags, she does it at least once a week. One day, she encounters Sarah, a homeless teenage goth girl who offers to help. But they’re wary of each other. In the first chapter, they discover, under a pile of leaves, the body of Peter, a homeless boy who was Sarah’s friend and protector.

From there, the plot is off and running, even as it skips around.

But that’s OK, since Barney is an agile writer with an uncanny ability to tie the plot strings together. For example, the narrative doesn’t get back to the action of the first chapter until Chapter 11, after all the characters are introduced, each with his or her own back story. There’s Jeffery, another forsaken kid whose grandfather comes to rescue him from a traumatic childhood, though he may not be a real rescuer after all. There’s divorced policeman Matt Trommald and his autistic son, Collin. And there’s Ellie, who’s no saint, though she’s finally sober.

She thinks her troubled son, Danny, is long gone—and good riddance—but he might be closer than she thinks. Each chapter has its own appropriate point of view, with Ellie and Sarah in first person and Matt and Jeffrey in third. As such, it’s easy to get to know Ellie and Sarah and their wary dance around each other; Matt and Jeffrey, less so. Key to the plot is the camp in the nearby dense woods, where young runaways make up a ragtag family. But runaways are turning up dead. Who’s the killer?

Fortunately, Barney’s narrative nimbleness helps wrangle the storylines as they race to a satisfying conclusion.

A gripping book with compelling characters who don’t want your pity.

W.W. II ARMY NURSE JUNE HOUGHTON SULLIVAN A Life Story Caulfield, Gunilla CreateSpace (198 pp.) $15.00 paper | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4818-9605-4

Caulfield (Murder in Pigeon Cove, 2011, etc.) presents a biography of a U.S. Army nurse, whose English posting allowed her to witness the heroic and tragic results of some epic 20th-century battles.

The author runs through the life and career of her elderly New England friend, a typical World War II Army nurse. However, nobody’s story can be called typical on the fringes of this fierce global conflict. June Houghton Sullivan, after a chaotic, cross-country upbringing during the Depression, enrolled in a Massachusetts nursing school at 17 in 1940. In 1943, she enlisted in the Army Auxiliary Nursing Corps and shipped out aboard the Queen Mary, through U-boat– infested waters, to work in the 120th Station Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland. Her unit relocated to different countryside locales in a grievously embattled Britain, where Houghton and her fellow caregivers labored to heal wounded Allied troops and, after D-Day, German prisoners. One Luftwaffe pilot received, unbeknownst to him, a transfusion from a Jewish doctor—the only match to his rare blood type. Other detainees were Axis conscripts, innocents who wanted no part of the Third Reich. Richly illustrated by Sullivan’s photo collection (including a snapshot of young Crown Princess Elizabeth), this slim volume sometimes takes unnecessary detours, addressing such tangential topics as President John F. Kennedy’s childhood bout with scarlet fever. That said, the book is tastefully written and suitable for young-adult readers—swear words are coyly bleeped, and there’s no immersion in combat-wound gore. Older readers may appreciate the chivalry and values of a bygone era, as when June quits an early hospital job after one day because young male patients got “fresh” with her or when a maimed SS officer in custody is allowed the honor of retaining his treasured Iron Cross.

A companionable, nostalgic salute to an unsung WWII heroine.

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HAZELET’S JOURNAL A Riveting Alaska Gold Rush Saga-1898 Clark, John Old Stone Press (277 pp.) $29.95 paper | $7.99 e-book Nov. 26, 2012 978-1-938462-00-9

An introspective collection of journal entries from a traveler in the Alaskan Gold Rush.

George Cheever Hazelet was born in Senecaville, Ohio, in 1861, and when it was time for him to attend college, he, like many others at that time, migrated west, receiving his college degree in Iowa. He began a career as a schoolteacher, but eventually, he became the principal of his local school district. He was well on his way to becoming a town leader in Atkinson, Neb., but before the age of 40, he dedicated his life to a different venture: securing a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. Along with his partner, Andrew Jackson “Jack” Meals, a Nebraska farmer with no formal education, Hazelet traveled to Alaska in 1898 to attempt gold prospecting. This intriguing collection of journal entries includes small details that allow readers to get to know Hazelet more intimately: the type of dessert he’s eating on a particular night or how he’s noticed his face is puffier and older when he looks in the mirror. Editor/publisher Clark, Hazelet’s great-grandson, has successfully encapsulated his ancestor’s expedition in literary form.

The entries engagingly reflect on the hardships of a life digging for gold: “The weather has been extremely cold the past few days / Am quite sure it must be down to forty degrees below zero / The water drove us out of the shaft and we are in hopes that these cold days will freeze it down.” Readers may find Hazelet’s journal to be captivating reading, as it promises more excitement at every turn.

At one point, Hazelet provides a lucid description of encountering a glacier, a sight of nature’s beauty and bounty that he’s never seen before. At another, he describes racing down the rapids in his boat at “breakneck” speed, waves crashing into his vessel.

An engaging piece of nonfiction about one man’s prospecting adventures.

BATHSHEBA BATHED IN GRACE How 8 Scandalous Women Changed the World Cook, Carol Westbow Press (224 pp.) $33.95 | $17.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 7, 2012 978-1-4497-7267-3

A well-executed debut historical novel that melds biblical history with steamy romance, intrigue and high drama.

In this book’s introduction, Cook writes of how she researched and presented living-history characterizations of 118

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biblical women in her Scripture-study classes, which she turned into this compelling collection of eight short stories. These “scandalous women,” who, as the subtitle notes, indeed changed the course of history, include extraordinary princesses, ordinary women, and even slaves and concubines. In these stories, sisters battle one another over societal rank as viciously as their male counterparts clash over territory, and Cook’s diverse cast conveys detailed, emotional insight into a panorama of human history. Bathsheba has an affair with King David and hastily marries him. She’s a shrewd operator who gains her own degree of political power, and she gives birth to the peaceful King Solomon, author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes and builder of the protective shrine for the sacred Ark of the Covenant.

After David’s death, as Solomon’s mother, she becomes the first queen mother of Israel. Leah and Rachel each tell their side of a story that pits the two sisters against each other in a marriagebed battle over Jacob, and Abraham’s wife, Sarah, a princess, recounts how her faith journey led her to become the mother of Isaac at age 90. (Curiously, the story doesn’t include Sarah’s reaction to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac.) Cook also gives voice to the lesser-known Hagar, Sarah’s servant slave, who, under Sarah’s orders, bore Abraham’s first son, Ishmael; in a fit of anger and jealousy, Sarah banishes both Hagar and Ishmael.

The novel’s range of emotions and viewpoints make it a worthwhile read; each woman, no matter her rank or her hardship, learns the same universal lesson: Love conquers all, and mercy and forgiveness are at the heart of it. Eve, the mother of all humanity, tells her story in the book’s final chapter, a fitting closure for an exceptional narrative.

A highly readable historical novel, with enough period detail for biblical purists and enough drama and romance for secular readers.

THE END OF BLISS

Cutler, Rhonda Ringler Fairlight Press (374 pp.) $13.99 paper | $7.99 e-book Mar. 28, 2013 978-0-615-69764-2 Cutler’s debut novel explores friendship, gender roles and other issues in 1930s Long Island, N.Y. In 1929, Edith and Reuben Merkal and their children are living in Bliss—literally. “Bliss” is the name of the Long Island home that Reuben built for Edith upon their marriage. The Merkals are well-todo; Reuben owns his own construction business and sells beach bungalows to city folk who want second homes on Long Island.

The Merkals identify as Jewish, differentiating themselves from their WASP neighbors and making them victims of snide antiSemitic remarks. When the stock market crashes in 1929 and the Great Depression sets in, the Merkals become casualties of the times, losing nearly everything. They blame the market, they blame themselves—and then they blame each other.

When Edith becomes a salesgirl in a local shop (and the primary

breadwinner), the dynamics of the family shift, and each member does a great deal of soul-searching. Although some details and plotlines may require readers to suspend disbelief (such as Reuben’s best friend Adolph’s strict vegetarianism, rare in the 1930s), Cutler makes the characters the soul of her work. For example, as Edith recognizes her growing financial independence, she quickly evolves into a latter-day Emma Bovary, blatantly breaking society’s “rules” without much thought to those around her. She becomes the story’s least likable character, selfcentered and all too aware of her traditional beauty. But Reuben is the perfect foil, as he balances his self-reflection with the needs of his mother, his children and his friend. Reuben’s selfanalysis regarding his nearly abandoned religion is perhaps the finest facet of the book—his deeply personal journey highlights the universal feeling of wanting to belong. Although each member of the Merkal family may not end up where they started (or where they intended), their journeys are a delight.

A well-told tale of family, religion and the American dream.

GAY, BLACK, AFRICAN, GENDERQUEER AND PROUD Story behind the Masked Smile Ekine, Daniel I. G. CreateSpace (192 pp.) $7.99 paper | $1.99 e-book Dec. 25, 2012 978-1-4811-0744-0

Ekine’s debut, a memoir of his brutal upbringing, displays a steely self-acceptance forged as a shield against cultural and religious discrimination.

Ibifubara “Daniel” George Ekine was born the oldest of four in Lagos, Nigeria. The only male child of the family, Daniel behaved more like his sisters, wearing saris and worshiping Beyoncé. People considered him “un-African,” calling him names like “Skeliwawa” (“effeminate”) and attacking him on the street. The only familial bonding he experienced was the rampant abuse and harsh discipline doled out by his father, an officer in the Nigerian navy. At first, his mother allowed him to behave as he did, thinking it was “just a phase,” but once he acted like a fashion model on a catwalk at a school performance, she and his aunts beat him in public. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, Daniel’s family believed he was a “defect in Creation” and, when he was 12, prepared him for baptism through more physical and mental abuse. Despite such horrific formative years, Daniel knew that “God makes no mistakes.” So, he buried himself in his studies, escaped to Malaysia to study engineering on a government grant and, eventually, ended up in Westerly, R.I., where he now waits for asylum, arguing that a return to Nigeria would result in imprisonment or death. Accompanied by original “songs, quotes and poems” and 13 black-and-white “looks” that illustrate his flamboyance, the book rises above the standard coming-out tale due to Ekine’s unique perspective. “Smiling and laughing have always been my best makeup,” he writes, and this unwavering optimism transforms a series of violent and

tragic episodes into sunny lessons about self-acceptance and courage in the steep face of adversity. Despite extraneous repetitions in the narrative and overeager capitalization in the text, diamonds of wisdom shine through, such as when Ekine states, “One Atom of Love is equal to a Million Hate.”

A powerful declaration of independence against a life full of ignorance and intolerance.

CHAINSAW JANE

Fortis, Marie-Jo Liburu Press (304 pp.) $12.99 paper | $5.55 e-book | Mar. 4, 2013 978-0-615-71595-7 A gruesome murder is no match for a vodka-swilling Russian medium in Fortis’ debut mystery novel.

“Chainsaw” Jane Dzhugashvili is a character in every sense of the word.

“Small and wrinkled like a Russian bad seed,” Jane lives in the small town of Noliar, Pa., and has a proclivity for good Russian vodka, strong curse words and tarot cards. Despite her unconventional appearance and personality traits, Jane is also a medium who works with the NYPD. When New York City bookstore owner Dorothea Sishy goes missing, the police (led by Jane’s friend Julie) show up on Jane’s doorstep asking for help. Though Jane is distracted by the recent disappearance of her best friend, Cruz, she agrees to use her skills as a medium to deduce what happened to Dorothea. According to Jane and the cards, Dorothea has been the victim of a grisly murder, most likely at the hands of one of her many lovers. The cops also realize that something may link the murder and Cruz’s disappearance, meaning Cruz and even Jane are in serious danger. Julie enlists the help of her old friend Zoe, and the two manage to pack up Jane and move her to New York City, where Jane continues to pursue the murder case in hopes of saving Cruz.

The investigation carries on in both Noliar and New York City, leading to several suspenseful moments as Jane closes in on the killer. Fortis has a marvelous character in Chainsaw Jane, a complicated woman with a cryptic past. Jane’s voice, the result of countless cigarettes and an occasionally thick Russian accent, comes through loud and clear thanks to Fortis’ snappy, smart dialogue. Zoe, Julie and the various personalities of Noliar are a solid supporting cast who accept Jane, despite her eccentricities. The psychic’s abilities and her involvement in the crimes intrigue, and Fortis presents a mystery with elements of suspense, horror and humor. A simmering romantic interest who returns from Zoe’s past offers a nice secondary plotline.

A thrilling mystery with an unlikely yet endearing heroine.

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“As Hartman skillfully blurs the lines between fiction and reality, the book becomes a profound meditation on art, identity and their messy spheres of influence.” from the rules of dreaming

SPEEDING DOWN THE SPIRAL An Artful Adventure Goodman Davis, Deborah Illus. by Naess, Sophy Dgdfa (48 pp.) $15.95 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-9855568-0-8

In this delightful debut children’s picture book, a young girl’s introduction to the Guggenheim Museum turns into a wild, unexpected adventure.

On a sunny summer Sunday, Dad takes Lizzie and Ben to “see some cool art” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “This museum is awesome...it’s shaped like a spiral!” says Dad. But Lizzie, convinced the experience will be a bore, imagines how much fun it would be if only the museum would turn into a giant water slide. But Dad proceeds with his plan, and off they go, taking the elevator up to the top floor. Just as they’re about to begin their descent down the spiral, Dad is distracted by a message on his cellphone; after a long wait, Lizzie starts down the ramp without him, pushing Ben in his stroller. Startled by Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of a large, fierce dog, Lizzie throws her hands up and lets the stroller go—and her baby brother begins a long, runaway ride. The chase quickly becomes madcap as a museum guard, a painter, an art teacher and her students, and other museum patrons join the frenetic parade of rescuers, while Ben, oblivious to the danger, revels in the fun. As the group runs after the stroller, Lizzie pauses just long enough to comment on various pieces of art, and in turn, the teacher responds with a bit of interesting information about each piece. Davis includes numerous bits of humor, as when baby Ben ends up wearing the artist’s beret and when Lizzie sees Andy Warhol’s self-portrait and says, “Andy should have brushed his hair for his portrait!”

Naess’ appealing, colorful illustrations beautifully complement the reproductions of the museum’s artwork, and children are sure to enjoy this book’s clever, happy ending. The book’s “Credits” section contains helpful descriptions of each piece and additional information about each artist and medium. Davis also includes a helpful, well-written glossary of art-related terminology.

A whirling, twisting run through one of the world’s great museums that will charm young readers.

IT’S OKAY Let’s Get Real About This Thing We Call Parenting Hamilton, Teresa CreateSpace (188 pp.) $12.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Mar. 30, 2013 978-1-4783-5745-2

A funny, serious, positive and consoling collection of true stories about life with young children.

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job of being a parent. (She has four children under the age of 6.) “Why, when you leave the hospital, is there not a manual entitled, Some days everything that can go wrong, will?” she asks.

Now there is. In this encouraging book, Hamilton admits that before she had children, she had a long list of “I’ll nevers,” such as, “I’ll never yell like that at my kids” and “I’ll never let my child wear pajamas in public.” She’s since eaten her words. In 10 chapters divided into easy-to-read segments, she shares experiences about the unexpected turns that parenting offers—many her own, some from anonymous contributors. Parenting means getting messy, as she notes in the chapter titled “My Life is Nothing But Poop, Pee and Puke”; dealing with dangerous situations, as when a 2-year old locks himself in a car in “Locked Out”; and living in a sex-deprived state (as in “Mom, What Were You And Dad Doing In The Closet?”). Hamilton shares once-mortifying, now-funny parental confessions, about a baby tumbling out of a wagon and tiny kids sneaking out of the house, to rightly show that there is really “no way around being embarrassed at least a million times during parenthood.” Parents who read this book may find themselves saying, “I did that. I thought I was the only one.” As Hamilton writes, “Everyone is the perfect parent until they actually have children. There is NOT a perfect parent, or a perfect child for that matter, in the world.”

Brief, well-written anecdotes likely to make parents laugh and cry.

THE RULES OF DREAMING

Hartman, Bruce Swallow Tail Press (287 pp.) $12.95 paper | $2.99 e-book May 19, 2013 978-0-9889181-0-8 A mind-bending marriage of ambitious literary theory and classic murder mystery.

In this intricately plotted novel, Hartman (winner of the Salvo Press Mystery Novel Award for Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead, 2008) spins the familiar trappings of gothic mystery together with a fresh postmodern sensibility, producing a story that’s as rich and satisfying as it is difficult to categorize. The narrative begins with Dr. Ned Hoffmann, a new psychiatrist at a mental institution in a small town. Barely in control of his own instabilities, Dr. Hoffmann struggles with demanding bosses and baffling patients, including the schizophrenic grown children of an opera singer who died under suspicious circumstances. When one of Dr. Hoffmann’s recent patients, Nicole, an anxious literature grad student, finally finds a topic for her dissertation, she discovers that life in her town is beginning to mirror art—in some disconcerting ways. Alongside a professional blackmailer, a scrappy librarian and other assorted meddlers and madmen, Dr. Hoffmann and Nicole slowly unspool a mystery that extends all the way back to artists of the romantic era. Hartman impressively turns literary theory into something sexy and menacing, weaving the real-life works of writer E.T.A. Hoffmann and composers

“A wholly involving story with Faulkner-ian characters in a fully realized setting.” from elysian fields

Robert Schumann and Jacques Offenbach, among others, into his characters’ increasingly muddled lives. Sometimes the writing is self-conscious, as when Nicole says, “If you asked me about what’s been going on around here lately, I’d have to classify it as Post-Modern Neo-Gothic Horror.” For the most part, Hartman brings a light touch to potentially weighty material. Though the novel’s philosophical twists and turns are fascinating, the story also succeeds as an old-fashioned whodunit, and the writing is full of descriptive gems. At one point, the librarian looks at someone “over the tops of her trifocals, as if in the suspicion that none of their refractions would reveal the truth about him.” As Hartman skillfully blurs the lines between fiction and reality, the book becomes a profound meditation on art, identity and their messy spheres of influence.

An exciting, original take on the literary mystery genre.

ELYSIAN FIELDS

LaFlaur, Mark Mid-City Books (412 pp.) $14.95 paper | $7.50 e-book Mar. 6, 2013 978-0-615-72986-2 A dysfunctional family reflects the decay of New Orleans in debut author LaFlaur’s tale of brotherly love and menace.

Much like the lush, crumbling city in which it lives, the Weems family exists on the edge of decrepitude. Gasper, the deceased father whose odd demise haunts the ramshackle family home, was a cheerful but ineffectual man, and his ailing wife, Melba, and his elder son, Simpson, share his weak nature.

If Gasper had any strength, it funneled into the younger son, Bartholomew, who holds his family hostage with his gargantuan body, constant consumption and zealous antics. He is the elephant in the room, and although his mother believes that he needs psychiatric help—and a job to augment her pitiful pension—she holds no sway over him. Neither does Simpson, his 36-year-old brother; he works a dead-end job in a copy shop by day and frequents a brothel by night—until his favorite nymphet, the only person he lets through his emotional barriers, vanishes. Now all Simpson has left is his persistent dream of moving to San Francisco and becoming a poet, but his family ties bind him to his mother’s frailties and his brother’s psychotic tantrums. As Simpson wanders the “shadows of the city’s infrastructure” in the Gentilly section of town, he dreams of something else: fratricide. On those walks, LaFlaur’s descriptive talent shines. Fertile imagery drips like Spanish moss: the old buildings collapsing, “as though the humidity-sodden bricks were returning to mud,” while “cloud stacks glowed like the battlements of heaven.” Simpson’s mental landscape is equally vivid, drawn with such empathy and depth that readers will forgive his perpetual indecision and may even root for him to carry out the removal of his near-deranged brother.

A wholly involving story with Faulkner-ian characters in a fully realized setting.

BREAKING PRECEDENT Lewis, Charles B. Dog Ear Publishing (260 pp.) $14.95 paper | $9.99 e-book May 20, 2013 978-1-4575-1943-7

A fast-paced legal thriller turning on questions of sex, self-defense and murder.

At the beginning of Lewis’ lean, debut novel, trial lawyer Will Lively has just won a major court case for his employers at Austin-based Billings & Banks—a case with a multimillion-dollar payday, if the client ever agrees to settle in order to avoid a court verdict. The 30-something hotshot lawyer celebrates the victory, confident that it will prompt the firm’s executives to make him a shareholder. When his slimy boss, Dexter Billings, breaks the news that his promotion has been deferred yet again, Will is bitter. He questions the decision, especially after he’s spent the last five years working 60 hours a week, 51 weeks a year. With the help of his mentor, Buddy Cruz, and the firm’s office manager, Cindy Ellis (with whom he has an impromptu fling on his office couch shortly after he gets the bad news), Will learns that his big case is indeed paying out—and that the firm’s shareholders decided to delay promoting him so that their individual shares of the profit would be that much higher. Will confronts Dexter about this underhanded bad faith. Dexter counters by revealing that he tape-recorded Will and Cindy’s lovemaking, and the two men come to blows in Dexter’s office. When Dexter dives for the .44 Magnum he keeps in his desk, events turn deadly: Will ends up killing Dexter and standing trial himself, with the aid of the legendary defense attorney Justin Jackson (who bills at $1,800 an hour, paid by a mysterious benefactor). Lewis keeps all these complications moving at a satisfying clip, reflecting everything through Will’s approachable viewpoint. While the writing sometimes becomes clichéd (“one fell swoop,” for instance, or “rules were made to be broken”), the book’s final third, set during Will’s trial, is grippingly written, full of sharp dialogue, insider insights into the court system, and twists and well-placed revelations the reader won’t expect.

An extremely well-executed courtroom novel, with a hero readers will want to meet again.

55 GRAVES

Maroney, Robert P. Xlibris (288 pp.) $22.99 | $19.99 paper | $3.99 e-book May 1, 2012 978-1-4691-9859-0 In this debut thriller, a slain family is only the beginning for a group of killers that ultimately sets its sights on the investigating detectives.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Elliott DeLine

The transgender writer’s new novella confirms his impressive range and talent

By Jameson Fitzpatrick Like many readers, I first encountered Elliott DeLine’s brand of acerbic yet affecting wit when his essay “Stuck at the Border Between the Sexes” ran in the New York Times’ weekly Modern Love column in May of 2011. I remember being impressed by his ability to articulate the complexities of desire— particularly, in this case, for a transgender man interested in other men—without veering into either the maudlin or didactic: “For about two years,” he writes in that essay, “I’ve lived a cerebral and celibate existence. As a pathological Morrissey fan, I find it suits me. Still, living in your childhood bedroom just isn’t a sexy situation.”

I wasn’t the only one who took notice of the then-22-year-old writer’s talents. DeLine, who’d self-published his debut novel, Refuse, the month prior, says he saw a significant jump in sales after the piece ran in the Times: “The next day, definitely, more people started downloading the e-book. I had a Facebook page for Refuse and it started getting fans, people were messaging me.…I would say the response doubled.” Refuse soon developed an active online following and, in December of that year, was named a finalist in the 2011 Rainbow Awards.

But at least one part of his experience with the New York Times must have validated his decision 122

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to self-publish in the first place. He didn’t choose the title of the Modern Love essay. “That’s kind of driven me crazy,” he now acknowledges. “I don’t think I realized that until the day it came out.

“I stumbled upon a lot of criticism of that essay,” DeLine tells me, much of it objecting to the reductive title. “But similarly, a lot of people really loved the essay and looked me up.”

Those who did found their reward in Refuse, a forceful, searing and—yes—often laugh-out-loud funny coming-of-age novel in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

The fictitious memoir of Dean, a transgender college graduate once again living with his parents, Refuse tells the story (often in third person) of his near-romance with his college roommate and best friend, Colin, another transguy, amid so many misdirected affections that the term “love triangle” doesn’t begin to suffice. Dean also expresses a strong sense of dissatisfaction with other members of the transgender community, who, he complains, are affirmative at the cost of more honest and critical conversations about transgender experience.

Dean is a provocative, irreverent narrator, not afraid to criticize much of anything—whether transgender support groups, the academic discipline of queer theory or “trashy transgender autobiography.” In one moment of desperation, he quips: “Heck, I’d even look to Jesus if I weren’t so envious of his international success.” Dean, it has also been widely noted in reviews and interviews, is DeLine’s alter ego of sorts. Mark Simpson, author of Saint Morrissey, has used the portmanteau word “novoir” to describe the hybrid genre of Refuse, which blurs the line between novel and memoir. In addition to

the book’s formal elements—it is purported to be Dean’s memoir, though Dean often writes about himself as if he were a character in a novel—the parallels between DeLine and his protagonist are difficult to ignore: both are from Syracuse, N.Y., for one, not to mention their shared obsession with Morrissey.

“A lot of things in the book didn’t happen, but it was definitely inspired by my experiences,” says DeLine, who described Dean as “more me than I am” in a recent interview with Lambda Literary Review. What DeLine says he means by that cryptic line is that he sometimes has trouble saying what he’s really thinking for fear that he’ll be misinterpreted. “I felt like I was much freer with Dean because I could make him say things that could be potentially very rude; he’s bolder than I am,” he admits. “I got a lot of letters from people saying the book was really validating because it said so many things they always thought but never were able to say—which is funny, because it was that for me, too.”

DeLine’s newest work, a novella entitled I Know Very Well How I Got My Name (after the song

by Morrissey), follows Dean’s story further back— from early childhood to the agonizing throes of adolescence—and “is actually more autobiographical,” DeLine says. I Know Very Well How I Got My Name also has a distinctly different tone; here, the performative bravado of Refuse is replaced by straightforward, childlike observation.

“I really wanted to do it in the voice of someone that age,” DeLine says. “Otherwise people have a tendency, when transgender people are telling stories about growing up, to focus on things that fit the narrative—maybe you won’t remember the time you played with Barbies, only the time you played with trucks.” DeLine decided that writing in the present tense would ensure that the novella is “less likely to project tropes and stereotypes.”

The result is one of the most nuanced, wellwritten transgender origin stories on the market today, showcasing DeLine’s impressive range as a writer. I Know Very Well How I Got My Name fearlessly re-enters the pain and confusion of childhood to tell a story that’s at once specific to transgender experience and a universal exploration of how we come to form our identities, from

the playground games insisting on “boys vs. girls” to the pitfalls and perils of first love.

Though DeLine is only 24, with Refuse and I Know Very Well How I Got My Name, his is already a major contribution to queer literature. Like so many of the classic gay and lesbian novels from the earlier part of the 20th century, these works are sure, years from now, to enjoy wider readership and recognition as pioneering examples of transgender writing. Moreover, DeLine’s well-crafted storytelling and skill at cultivating voice prove that, far from being a niche genre, transgender narratives by transgender authors are a welcome and still underrepresented presence in contemporary fiction today.

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Jameson Fitzpatrick is a freelance writer and poet living in New York City, where he is the book columnist for Next Magazine and an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU.

I Know Very Well How I Got My Name DeLine, Elliott Published by Elliott DeLine (118 pp.) $12.50 paper $3.50 e-book May 10, 2013 978-1-4827-9752-7

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impeccable hunches. He attributes two murder scenes, both involving families and a surviving member, to the same killer— or is it killers? It seems that someone may be recruiting orphans for fiendish purposes. Apparently, Nick’s hunches are spot-on, as masked men brandishing AK-47s start gunning for the police.

Maroney’s novel is two stories in one: a rousing procedural and a solid action story. The former is the better of the two, with an investigation that unfolds at an unrelenting pace, featuring a dumped body that leads police to the murder site, where they find the left-alive daughter, followed by a second family killed and a break in the case. Nick, who has degrees in psychology and criminal justice, meticulously picks apart the crime scenes.

He’s a winsome character whose analytical proficiency is constantly on display, though his insistence on playing down his skills—“I’m just lucky sometimes,” he muses—borders on self-depreciation. After an ensnared criminal confirms some of Nick’s theories and answers a few lingering questions, the latter part of the novel centers on Nick finding the killers while simultaneously dodging apparent hits. Addie, a federal agent and a love interest of Nick’s, is introduced a little late in the novel, but she’s instantly likable with her sturdy demeanor and ability to take Nick’s cynicism in stride: When he suggests that she’s not his type because she’s “too butch,” Addie calmly reminds him that she’s armed. What also sets Maroney’s book apart is Nick’s investigative approach: He tries to understand the killers and their motives without condemning what they’re doing. It’s an uncommon way to scrutinize a crime scene and one that feels unspoiled by cliché.

A potboiler with flawless rhythm and a protagonist who’s practically begging for his own series.

THE CHALLENGERS AERO CLUB

Perez, Severo Script & Post Script (402 pp.) $18.95 paper | $8.95 e-book Nov. 22, 2012 978-0-9790881-0-0 Perez’s debut historical novel fictionalizes the story of three pioneering black aviators who changed the face of aeronautics.

When one thinks about America’s aviation heroes, the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart come to mind. Lesser known are Cornelius C. Coffey, John C. Robinson and Willa B. Brown, real-life AfricanAmerican historical figures who revolutionized aviation from the late 1920s through World War II. Brown was a schoolteacher in Gary, Ind., with a mind for machines, while Robinson and Coffey were working as well-regarded but underpaid auto mechanics. All had a desire to fly, and their paths crossed at a Walgreens drug store, when Willa, working temporarily as a waitress and cashier, overheard the two young men talking about a plane they had built. They insisted that she come see it, and the rest is history. Coffey and Robinson studied for and obtained pilot’s licenses (despite a stated “no colored” student 124

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policy), becoming the first black men in the United States to do so. They ran their own hangar in Robbins, Ill., eventually relocating to Chicago and founding the Coffey School of Aeronautics in 1935 with Willa Brown as director, making it the only integrated flight school at the time. With the support of powerful parties—including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt—the three continued to break Jim Crow–era boundaries, including the U.S. Army’s race barrier, by managing the first black-operated government-funded flight school during World War II. For all of their accomplishments, it’s hard to believe that more people don’t affiliate them with the history of flight. Perez, a filmmaker, paces the novel well, tackling more than a decade’s worth of change in the field of aeronautics and its place in a racially divided country. But he balances more serious matter with his characters’ joy of flying as they soar at more than 300 mph, doing barrel rolls and loop-the-loops. Although the mechanical detail can sometimes be tedious, the author keeps the story moving with ample dialogue and glimpses into his protagonists’ personal lives. Unfortunately, with so much buildup leading to World War II, relatively little literary real estate is given to the characters’ post-war years.

An engaging, thorough novel about forgotten heroes of aviation history.

STUCK IN THE DOLDRUMS A Lesson in Sharing - A Captain No Beard Story Roman, Carole P. CreateSpace (36 pp.) $9.99 paper | $1.99 e-book Mar. 20, 2013 978-1-4791-8270-1

In Roman’s (Pepper Parrot’s Problem With Patience, 2013, etc.) newest Captain No Beard adventure, the feisty captain learns that teamwork can save the day.

Life as a pirate ship captain isn’t always fun, especially when the wind dies down and the ship gets “stuck in the doldrums.”

Stranded on a desert island, Captain No Beard’s crew endeavors to entertain themselves by seeing shapes in the clouds with a telescope. The colorful illustrations and animated expressions of the characters bring life to the tropical scene populated by good friends. Unfortunately, however, there’s only one telescope. Everyone on the crew wants a turn to see the marshmallows in the clouds, but Captain No Beard claims his status as captain means he gets dibs. When the rest of the crew stomps off to find other entertainment by building a sand castle, Captain No Beard finds that telescope-gazing alone isn’t much fun.

Then, when the captain starts bossing the other pirates around and rebuilding their sand castle, his crew relocates to the other side of the beach so they can have some fun and be rid of the domineering captain. Calling it mutiny, Captain No Beard retreats to his dragon-headed ship, proclaiming, “Who needs them anyway? It’s my ship, and I can do everything myself.”

However, when a feisty squid attacks the ship in a colorful swirl of purple and blue waves, the big boss quickly learns that

“Smith’s tale is a riveting update of Southern gothic themes, told with dead-on realism and raw intensity.” from big jack is dead

he needs his crew to survive. After a moment of hesitation, his loyal team comes to the rescue despite his poor treatment of them, teaching him that it’s more important to be a good friend than a boss. Captain No Beard acknowledges the lesson, saying, “A good captain must consider everyone’s feelings, or else nobody will want to be in his crew,” to which his crew responds with hearty cheers of “Arrgh, arrgh.” His crew’s frankness in explaining how to be both a friend and boss will teach children to speak up when their friends aren’t being as considerate as they could be. Honesty and a genuine apology help heal the misunderstanding, giving way to cheerful fun and a beautiful lesson for kids.

Once again, Roman delights with whimsical pictures, clever text, important lessons and plenty of pirate lingo.

responses to situations, pressures and directives for change.

According to Shaw, by means of open communication, management can gradually reduce its employees’ penchant for fearbased reactions and align the interests of the informal employee networks more accurately with those of the formal organization. He also offers a process by which management can win greater support for its goals by working with the networks to elicit their input and create a shared vision so that ultimately, “the combined visions of the participants can be integrated into a single, comprehensive plan for the company.”

A clear-cut, convincing case for managers to appreciate and work with informal employee organizations.

BIG JACK IS DEAD

Smith, Harvey CreateSpace (284 pp.) $12.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4825-6365-8

MANAGING INFORMAL EMPLOYEE ORGANIZATIONS Shaw, Frank W. CreateSpace (222 pp.) $26.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4812-0752-2

A comprehensive analysis of the social underpinnings of workplace organizations and the best methods for channeling the resulting behavior toward

particular goals.

Whenever people spend time together, as they do in a workplace, they tend to arrange themselves in groups that greatly influence their actions. These informal employee organizations convey and maintain social status, establish behavioral standards, and support or oppose a variety of organizational norms, values and objectives. Like Robert L. Cross and Andrew Parker in The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (2004), Shaw shows how these informal networks can powerfully drive their members, even to the point of constituents voting against their own best interests. One such example, among the many Shaw offers, is of factory workers who rejected a management proposal in which “their workday would be reduced without any reduction in wages whatsoever.” Unlike the more academic Martin Kilduff and Wenpin Tsai, in Social Networks and Organizations, Shaw demonstrates his mastery of the material by delving into the nuances of human behaviors mediated by these social networks, including strategic listening, goal setting, developing shared visions, communicating openly and responding to problematic situations with an “action step” approach. Shaw goes on to provide a cogent discussion of the inevitable formation of these social networks in all business organizations. The networks are by nature emotional rather than rational, Shaw says, which allows fear—of loss, of change—to play a decisive role in determining employee responses to any management initiative. As such, Shaw gives full shrift to the power of emotion and advocates steadfast managerial attention to the subtle, perhaps even hidden issues within an organization that govern employee

A hellacious father retains his grip on his son’s psyche even after death in this darkly brilliant debut novel.

Jack Hickman Jr. has carved out a niche in affluent, anomic Sunnyvale, Calif., developing team-building software. It’s as close to real human engagement as his free-floating alienation (and violent fantasies) will allow. He’s called back to the wasteland of Lowfield, Texas, where he grew up, after his father, Big Jack, kills himself, and he weathers agonizing encounters with his mother and brother, both zoned-out drug addicts, and his stepmother, an officious woman who upbraids him for his callow misanthropy. The story of his bleak odyssey is interspersed with scenes from his even bleaker boyhood under his father’s thumb. Big Jack was a titan of runty, redneck rage, a welder who compensated for his small stature and smaller prospects with an explosive temper, caustic sarcasm and guns; he also had a knack for cruelly twisting the insecurities of anyone weaker than him, including his children, his wife and his many girlfriends. Smith uses acid-etched scenes of abuse, pervaded with menace and humiliation, to create a disturbing study of domestic terror at its most intimate. Yet Big Jack is punishingly human, a link in the great chain of threat and belittlement that is working-class masculinity; his impulses toward charity and beauty yield only baffling pain and squalor. Smith brings his magnetic characters to life with penetrating psychological insight, pitch-perfect dialogue and subtly evocative imagery, and he sets them in a sharply observed panorama of the industrial Gulf Coast, with its trashstrewn ditches, fire-ant mounds and moldy trailer courts. It’s a “concrete and salt-grass landscape under rust skies made of pipes and catwalks,” harboring a life that amounts to “a great nothingness…a hissing television on a dead station.” Smith’s tale is a riveting update of Southern gothic themes, told with deadon realism and raw intensity.

A powerful family saga by a writer with talent to burn.

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LEAVE THE CANNOLI, TAKE THE WEIGHTS Practical Guidance on Eating, Exercise and Empowerment Stein, Joseph L. CreateSpace (264 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 26, 2013 978-1-4801-5203-8

No-nonsense fitness tips from a New Jersey tough guy.

Certified personal trainer Stein isn’t afraid to call it like he sees it, and his blunt how-to manual aims to get people off the couch and into the gym. The target audience is primarily the middle-aged and older—those who have found that their onceyouthful and resilient physiques have been replaced with creaky knees and flabby arms and who are trying “to win the battle of the beltline bulge.” The content, however, is general enough to appeal to all adults. Mixing punchy prose, common-sense advice and funny asides, Stein divides fitness into eight components: strength, balance, power, speed, flexibility, endurance, motor coordination and stamina. He also discusses how to set up an affordable home gym, the rules of gym etiquette and fitness fashion, and what to look for in a personal trainer. In keeping with the book’s title, Stein peppers the text with references to sleeping with fishes and Michael and Sonny Corleone, exhorting readers to “never go against your fitness family”—your doctor, trainer, nutritionist and others you recruit to help you achieve fitness success. At the same time, he explains the importance of balancing cardio with strength training, why spending 10 minutes a day walking the dog isn’t adequate exercise and how to avoid overindulging when dining out. Some sections are unnecessary, however, including an entire chapter devoted to baseball trivia. While the guide doesn’t break any new ground—there’s little here that can’t be found in other fitness books—Stein’s personality comes through on every page, keeping the advice from becoming stale. Overall, his practical guidance and toughlove approach (“There is no crying allowed during exercise”) may deliver the kick in the rear that some people need to get in shape. But those looking for gentle words of encouragement and touchy-feely inspiration can fuhgeddaboudit.

An engaging, humorous take on a familiar topic.

part, perhaps, since they don’t know where to begin. Enter Tornow, who helps would-be writers put pen to paper. Tornow maintains that a memoir is all about documenting one’s life; whether for possible publication, chronicling a family’s legacy or simply to delve back into long-forgotten memories. She encourages her students (and readers of this book) to, quoting the author Anaïs Nin, “taste life twice,” by sharing their stories. Other writers, both renowned (Frank McCourt) and lesser known (like Tornow’s students) make their way into these pages, contributing inspiring quotes or excerpts that support brainstorming techniques, making the content feel both relatable and aspirational.

Tornow pairs her own work and anecdotes with various other practices, such as clustering, which utilizes a “nucleus word or phrase” to generate free-association inspiration—a great way to overcome writer’s block. Each chapter also contains group exercises, suggested topics to spur ideas, Internet resources, comparative reading and a weekly challenge. Some readers might find such direction a little too academic, but these tools provide a handy road map for someone seeking a way to get started. Like most homework, these assignments will only improve a writer’s craft. While the book is admittedly aimed toward those working in a group setting (and Tornow strongly advocates the collaborative process), the methods outlined work equally well for a solo diarist. Tornow also takes time to warn against the pitfalls of creative nonfiction, such as novelizing real-life events à la James Frey or “telling” rather than “showing”—a common mistake among writers so concerned with painstaking accuracy that the overburdened narrative suffers. After all, memoirs start with memories. As Tornow says, “I add these details to the scene because they bring it alive, not because the scene came to me with the precision of a digital video.”

A well-structured, efficient way for both beginners and more experienced writers to explore writing about their lives.

WRITING MEMOIR TOGETHER A Roundtable Approach Tornow, Joan CreateSpace (152 pp.) $10.95 paper | Feb. 7, 2012 978-1-4635-7398-0

Author and education consultant Tornow (Link/Age, 1997) presents a thorough guide for aspiring memoirists.

Everyone has a story, but not everyone thinks theirs is worth telling—in 126

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This Issue’s Contributors # Rachel Abramowitz • Kent Armstrong • Charles Cassady • Lisa Costantino • Lindsay Denninger • Steve Donoghue • Megan Elliott • Tom Eubanks • Renee Fountain • Laura B. Kennelly • Robert Moskowitz • Joshua T. Pederson • Stephanie Rowe • Hillary Foote Schwartz • Jerome Shea • Hannah Sheldon-Dean • Lucy Silberman • Kathy Stump • Emily Thompson

PULLING TAFFY A Year with Dementia and Other Adventures Weisblat, Tinky The Merry Lion Press (206 pp.) $17.95 paper | Jun. 23, 2013 978-0-9742741-0-2

A touching account of a daughterturned-caregiver to her dementiaafflicted mother.

Jan “Taffy” Hallett Weisblat was a fairly accomplished woman. Born in 1918, Taffy enjoyed many interesting adventures, including a less-than-cordial meeting with President Calvin Coolidge when she was a child. After she married, Taffy traveled extensively, living in India—an experience that prompted her to write and publish a book of poems— before making her foray into the antiques world. Her daughter, author Tinky Weisblat (The Pudding Hollow Cookbook, 2004), portrays Taffy as an endearing, vivacious woman. After Taffy was diagnosed as “pleasantly demented,” Weisblat and her brother set out to give Taffy the best care possible, which ultimately led to her living with Weisblat. Weisblat’s firsthand experience provides an excellent, compassionate supplement to books about Alzheimer’s. The well-written diarylike entries offer a cohesion that enables a smooth transition from one entry to the next.

The author’s account of her final year with her mother provides a candid look at an emotionally wrenching time that included laughter, tears, cooking, singing and dancing. Also included are recipes of traditional family meals or dishes that simply provided a memorable moment. Recounting her year of caretaking with honest humility, Weisblat created a forum for the author to forgive herself for her perceived shortcomings, and her book may help relieve the pressure for readers who find themselves in similar circumstances.

A poignant, heartfelt memoir that offers support and inspiration.

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