August 01, 2013: Volume LXXXI, No 15

Featuring 349 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXI, NO.

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REVIEWS CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Itsy Bitsy Spider

by Dosh Archer It's off to the ER instead of back up the waterspout when washing-out results in head injury. p. 72

INDIE

Polly Courtney

The indie writer who became a trailblazing symbol of how to do self-publishing right p. 134

Mario Alberto Zambrano The debut writer reimagines and augments MexicanAmerican culture in his novel LoterĂ­a. p. 14

NONFICTION

Command and Control

by Eric Schlosser An exhaustive, unnerving examination of the illusory safety of atomic arms p. 64

FICTION

The House of Journalists

by Tim Finch A satiric, tough and very funny debut novel about a band of refugee journalists p. 16

Anniversaries: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE

I f y o u ’ r e c o n t e m p l a t i n g w r i t i n g a s p y s t o r y set in the Cold War, there are three broad models to follow. You can go goofy, as with Get Smart and Spy vs. Spy. You can go suave, as with Ian Fleming and Trevanian, giving your hero lots of toys and femmes fatales to play with. Or you can go cynical, conveying the thought that spying, after all, is a game for thugs in the service of governments that are pretty thuggish themselves.

That last strategy was the one Joseph Conrad followed in his one foray into the spy (less Cold War) genre, The Secret Agent, published in 1907 and still readable today. It is most definitely the one John Le Carré chose for the cycle of antihero tales featuring spymaster George Smiley, who appears in the shadows in what might well be Le Carré’s best novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, released half a century ago, in September 1963.

Leamas, the principal character, has an oily name, but he’s a grimy man. “We do disagreeable things,” his control agent says to him by way of explanation for their enterprise, “so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night.” Control thinks about what he has said for a beat and then adds, “Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things.” It’s all in a day’s work for what Control blandly calls “a practitioner of the cold war.”

Indeed, and some of those wicked things include killing anyone who gets in their way, to say nothing of the ordinary business of winning trust and then betraying it. Leamas is a masterful practitioner, but the other side is no better, exemplified by a Stasi officer who “is a very distasteful man—ex Hitler Youth and all that kind of thing” and with whom Leamas will spend the novel in a deadly embrace that has surprising twists.

Leamas has given up on everything but the fight. A woman who is trying to get to know him cuts right to the chase: She pegs Leamas as a true believer who has no interest in recruiting others to the cause, a very dangerous man. He has, well, anger issues when off the job, for which he spends a little time in the pokey, but when Leamas is on the case and up against his communist foes, it is without emotion, colder than ice, even when the most decent of his foes is served up for sacrifice.

The Cold War is so called because it did not go hot—that is, did not break out into open conflict between its two principals, the United States and the Soviet Union, even if many proxies fought it out. The cold of Le Carré’s title is the lonely arena in which Leamas and his colleagues dance, one where torture is common currency and people go missing or are killed without the slightest ceremony. One that, as Le Carré’s masterwork makes clear, also allowed us to sleep in our beds at night, so long as we didn’t mind a little screaming and a few gunshots in the dark.

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This Issue’s Contributors

Elfrieda Abbe • Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Michael Autrey • Joseph Barbato • Adam benShea • Amy Boaz • Hamilton Cain • Lee E. Cart • Marnie Colton • Dave DeChristopher • Gregory F. DeLaurier • Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Tom Eubanks • Gro Flatebo • Ian Floyd • Julie Foster • Bob Garbe • David Garza • Jessie Grearson • Michael Griffith • Jonathan Hiam • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Georgia Lowe • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • Gary Presley • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • William P. Shumaker • Rosanne Simeone • Elaine Sioufi • Arthur Smith • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Matthew Tiffany • Steve Weinberg • Carol White • Chris White • Alex Zimmerman

Cover photo by Nephi Nevin

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contents fiction

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

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS.................................................................................................5 Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería reveals the Mexican worldview.....................................................................14 Mystery............................................................................................. 28 Science Fiction & Fantasy.......................................................... 37 Romance............................................................................................39

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................41 REVIEWS...............................................................................................41 My Lunches With Orson reveals Orson Welles’ greatest performance: himself.............................................56

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................71 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 72 Legendary children’s writer Gary Soto has done a little bit of everything during his career...................... 88 Halloween roundup................................................................. 114 interactive e-books.................................................................. 124

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................127

Don Brown delivers a superlative and dramatic graphic account of the Dust Bowl and its legacy. Read the review on p. 77.

REVIEWS..............................................................................................127 Polly Courtney is a trailblazing symbol of how to do self-publishing right................................................................ 134

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on the web In Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis, psychiatrist and author Christine Montross reveals the complexities of navigating the mind’s treacherous terrain. Montross’ journey spans the course of her residency and her early years as an attending physician and is shaped by a set of gripping patient encounters. Each case study presents its own line of inquiry, leading Montross to seek relevant psychiatric knowledge from diverse sources. She discovers lessons in medieval dancing plagues, in leading forensic and neurological research, and in moments from her own life. Both rigorous and meditative, Falling Into the Fire brings us inside the doctor’s mind, illuminating the grave human costs of mental illness as well as the challenges of diagnosis and treatment. Christine Montross speaks with Kirkus in August about her new book, which delves into the humanity of psychiatry and the enduring mysteries of the mind.

w w w. k i r k u s . c o m

Photo courtesy Geoff Hansen

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

Photo courtesy Miriam Berkley

Steve Yarbrough’s The Realm of Last Chances is a nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in a small town in the Northeast. When Kristin Stevens loses her administrative job in California’s university system, she and her husband, Cal, relocate to Massachusetts. Kristin takes a position at a smaller, less prestigious college outside Boston and promptly becomes entangled in its delicate, overheated politics. Cal, whose musical talent is nothing more than a consuming avocation, spends his days alone, fixing up their new home. And as they settle into their early 50s, the two seem to exist in separate spheres entirely. At the same time, their younger neighbor Matt Drinnan watches his ex-wife take up with another man in his hometown, and he has only himself to blame. Matt and Kristin, both facing an acute sense of isolation, gravitate toward each other, at first in hopes of a platonic confidant but then, inevitably, of something more. Steve Yarbrough talks to Kirkus in August about his new novel’s exploration of relationships and loneliness.

9 And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors, including best-seller Timothy Cohorst. 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.

At the heart of Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read.

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret— something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything and not just for her. Liane Moriarty talks to Kirkus writer Suzy Spencer about her upcoming novel.

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 AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Alarcón, Daniel Riverhead (400 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 31, 2013 978-1-59463-171-9

THE DECAMERON by Giovanni Boccaccio...........................................8 THE HOUSE OF JOURNALISTS by Tim Finch...................................16 ENON by Paul Harding........................................................................ 17 THE SALINGER CONTRACT by Adam Langer................................. 20 QUIET DELL by Jayne Anne Phillips....................................................22 THE PROFESSOR OF TRUTH by James Robertson.............................23 THE ASSEMBLER OF PARTS by Raoul Wientzen..............................25 LAND OF THE SILVER DRAGON by Alys Clare................................27 eva’s eye by Karin Fossum; Transalted by James Anderson............. 31 TRANSCENDENTAL by James Gunn..................................................38

ENON

Harding, Paul Random House (256 pp.) $26.00 Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4000-6943-9

A South American theater troupe revisits an anti-establishment play and generates some new drama in the latest political allegory by Alarcón (Lost City Radio, 2007).

As in Lost City Radio, this novel is concerned with the aftereffects of revolution and the surprising ways revolutionary rhetoric endures. Set in an unnamed Andean country, the story centers on Nelson, an aspiring actor who lands a role with Diciembre, a theater company that’s dusting off its best-known work, “The Idiot President,” for a revival. As the play’s title suggests, Diciembre’s work wasn’t subtle, but it was a touchstone 25 years previously, and its author, Henry, did time in a notoriously harsh prison for it. Henry and his colleague Patalarga take on Nelson for the tour, and though the three have an easy rapport, we know early something has gone wrong: The narrator is a reporter who’s quoting everybody involved except Nelson. Alarcón’s decision to frame the story as a superlong magazine story has its downsides: The novel has a tonal flatness that makes the story feel lighter than intended. But the outsider-looking-in perspective gives the narration both a sense of omniscience and intimacy, since the reporter knew the players. As the tour goes off the rails, Alarcón explores the idea of how imitation creates reality: The play’s restaging revives old revolutionary feelings; Nelson obsesses over his role with the woman he left behind; and he falls into the orbit of a family who’s bullied him to pretend to be a long-lost relative. In time, Nelson unwittingly becomes the target of a number of men, an absurd scenario that’s shot through with tragedy. Mind who you pretend to be, Alarcón suggests; the story you tell can be a surprisingly potent one. That’s true with this book, too.

Though the book is low on lyricism, Alarcón successfully merges themes of art, love and politics.

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“A humorous, well-written account of the damaging consequences of an intellectual obsession.” from any resemblance to actual persons

ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS

Allardice, Kevin Counterpoint (240 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-61902-197-6

A community college professor and aspiring writer becomes obsessed with disproving his sister’s claim that their father was responsible for the notorious Black Dahlia murder.

In his debut novel, Allardice introduces failed novelist Paul McWeeney and his journey into a maddening obsession with discrediting the claims made in his sister’s published book.

Written in the form of a letter to his sister’s publisher and in a stream-of-consciousness style (which includes nods to Marcel Proust and Hunter S. Thompson), McWeeney threatens legal action to prevent the publication of a book that claims his father killed Elizabeth “Betty” Short (aka the Black Dahlia) during a failed medical procedure. What starts as a seemingly succinct letter quickly becomes a running commentary on McWeeney’s maniacal voyage into the creation of memories; reflections about his lack of teaching abilities, unusual family and intimate relationships; and his slipping grip on reality as he falls deeper into isolation. At the center of the story is how McWeeney and his sister, Edie, offer differing recollections of their deceased parents (a mother who leaves the family for a life in Africa and a father who wrote for a Dragnet-esque television show). The irreconcilable gap between the conflicting narratives becomes a central ingredient for McWeeney’s self-destruction and marginalization. The most enjoyable portions of this book are McWeeney’s constant diatribes, bursting with academic jargon, analysis to the point of absurdity and a strict policy of discounting any notion that strays from his view of a given topic.

A humorous, well-written account of the damaging consequences of an intellectual obsession. (Author events in San Francisco)

AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS

Antoni, Robert Akashic (320 pp.) $24.95 | $15.95 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-61775-155-4 978-1-61775-156-1 paper

Antoni (Carnival, 2005, etc.) offers up a novel set in 19th-century and modern-day Trinidad.

Some believe that John Adolphus Etzler is a con artist, but the charismatic inventor asserts that his new nature-powered machine, the Satellite, will free men from all forms of labor. Although his claims may be a bit too good to be true—in fact, the machine’s public unveiling and demonstration isn’t exactly stellar—British citizens of all classes are willing to fill Etzler’s coffers and invest in 6

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his newly founded Tropical Emigration Society. Their dream: to establish a Utopian society in Trinidad using Etzler’s apparatus.

Among the emigrants is the Tucker family, including 15-year-old Willy, who narrates the story. While onboard the Rosalind, Willy contrives to spend his time with socially prominent 18-year-old Marguerite Whitechurch, who communicates through writing because she lacks vocal cords. They fall deeply in love and find creative ways to spend time together—at first furtively and then more openly as few appear to notice or care. Following the long voyage, Etzler (who spent a couple of days tied to the mast for an outrageous claim) absconds to South America and leaves the investors to travel by schooner from Port-au-Prince to Chaguabarriga, the site of their future community. To the men’s dismay, Etzler’s machine ends up stuck in the water, the schooner is damaged, and they discover that the plot they purchased is little more than swampland. The men try to salvage what they can, but more misery strikes—this time in the form of Black Vomit (yellow fever)—and Willy must wrestle with decisions that will impact the future. Although wearisome at times, the emotional influence of Willy’s narrative—his loving descriptions of the people who surround him—is profoundly effective. Some may be discouraged by the characters’ use of dialect, which initially is difficult to comprehend, but it’s a crucial element of the story. It’s the modern-day correspondence from T&T National Archives Director Miss Ramsol to writer “Robot” that provides many laugh-out-loud moments and endears Antoni (who pokes fun at himself) to the reader.

Strikes strong emotional chords.

STAY UP WITH ME

Barbash, Tom Ecco/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $22.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-06-225812-0 Romantic collapses and mismatches abound, often in all-too-familiar ways, in the debut story collection from Barbash (On Top of the World, 2003, etc.).

If Raymond Carver had lived in Manhattan, he might have delivered stories like “The Break,” in which a serious author despairs over the low-rent, bosomy waitress her college-age son hooks up with, or “Balloon Night,” in which a man tries to cover up for his estranged wife’s absence at a party celebrating the Thanksgiving Day parade. (His apartment offers a view of the parade balloons being inflated, hence the title.) The Carver-esque strokes are evident: The clipped style, the bad romantic choices, the sense that the protagonists are victims of self-delusion, a tad too dim to recognize the awfulness of their predicaments. If the approach is derivative, Barbash at least has clear empathy for the many adolescents who inhabit his stories: In “Howling at the Moon,” a teenager awkwardly adjusts to his mother’s relationship to a wealthy man, the boy calibrating his movements among his possible future stepsiblings, while the boy in “January” takes a certain glee in watching his mother’s new boyfriend

stumble. Yet each busted-love tale moves to well-worn conclusions, from the foolhardy May-December romance (“Spectator”) to the story about a man anxious about one of his students dating his son (“Her Words”). Barbash has a gift for crispness and clarity, and he can be entertaining when he busts out of the upscale dirty-realist groove, as in an epistolary story in which a tennis academy headmaster loses his grip on a star student. But Barbash’s attempts to explore class conflict lead to missteps like “Paris,” in which a reporter condescends to the poverty-stricken town he reports on, with an ending that’s less comeuppance than non sequitur.

Graceful but with few surprises. (Author appearances in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle)

GIDEON SMITH AND THE MECHANICAL GIRL

Barnett, David Tor (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-7653-3424-4

Steampunk adventure in the manner of the old penny dreadfuls, from the author of Angelglass (2007).

In an alternate 1890, the British Empire reigns supreme, with America divided, quarrelsome and the East still British. In the fishing village of Sandsend on the Yorkshire coast, Gideon Smith spends his days fishing on his father’s clockwork trawler. At night, he reads his favorite magazine, devouring the colorful but seemingly true adventures of Capt. Lucian Trigger, Hero of the Empire. One day, however, the trawler runs aground with no sign of its captain or crew. Gideon, luckily not aboard on that fateful voyage, suspects supernatural forces are at work, though

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the local police discourage Gideon from investigating. When a Russian vessel is also found abandoned, Irish writer Bram Stoker becomes convinced that a vampire is responsible. With Stoker, his only possible ally, thus obsessed, Gideon decides to seek help from his hero, Capt. Trigger. On his journey to London, Gideon liberates from a ruined mansion a remarkably humanlike mechanical girl, Maria, whose mad-scientist creator has unaccountably vanished. When Gideon finally locates Trigger, he faces further disappointment: Trigger, old and frail, admits that he merely embellishes and writes down the adventures of his partner, Dr. John Reed. And Reed went missing a year ago in Egypt. Who, then, can save the empire from this possibly existential threat? After a slow start, the narrative gets up a head of steam, and Barnett keeps the boiler hissing by throwing in other historical personages as well as iconic cultural references.

The characters, with their recognizable flaws, hold wide appeal.

But does a well-developed alternate history, enhanced by steampunk and supernatural elements, really need magic, too?

Often absorbing, though none too original and rather glum in tone. (Agent: John Jarrold)

ONWARD TOWARD WHAT WE’RE GOING TOWARD

Bartelmay, Ryan Ig Publishing (324 pp.) $16.95 paper | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-935439-77-6

Prize-winning short-fiction author Bartelmay debuts with literary fiction unraveling the fate of six snakebit souls.

The setting is Middleville, near Peoria, Ill., doubtless symbolic for American life circa 1950-2000. Chic Waldbeeser is the younger son in a dysfunctional family. Diane von Schmidt is a teacher’s daughter. In 1950, the two marry immediately after high school, honeymoon clumsily in Florida and settle down to be supported

by Chic’s employment in a pumpkin processing plant. Chic’s father, a traumatized World War I veteran, had committed suicide. Chic’s brother, Buddy, turned 18, left home and became an itinerant coin dealer. Their detached mother lurks in Florida.

Chic is emotionally stunted, unambitious, befuddled by reality and not very smart. Diane is jealous of Lijy, Buddy’s wife, an Indian woman from California, her resentment sparked by Chic’s undisguised admiration of Lijy’s sensuality. Chic and Diane produce a prodigy son, whom neither parent understands. Still a child, the son drowns. Diane falls into depression, comforted by food and Norman Vincent Peale. Sexually naïve and stymied Chic, lonely and introverted, stumbles through a life soon fractured when Lijy has an affair, becomes pregnant and asks Chic to accept responsibility, foolishly believing Buddy will be more forgiving. The narrative flits back and forth in time, weaving in the saga of Buddy and Lijy, whose marriage collapses and then reforms after they open a health-food store and massage salon. Into the Middleville mess drop Green Geneseo and Mary Norwood. Green, a retired Las Vegas bank teller, fancies 8

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himself a bookie. Mary, married multiple times, has been a pool hustler and barmaid. Both want someone to take care of them; neither can care for the other; and Chic is soon caught up in their mutual misery. Symbolism and metaphor are rife as the story unfolds, and only Buddy, Lijy and their son lurch toward happiness, while Chic remains mired in existential crisis, too ignorant to understand and too inept to overcome.

“Lives of quiet desperation”—or a literary study of hapless people living unhappy lives.

THE DECAMERON

Boccaccio, Giovanni Translated by Rebhorn, Wayne A. Norton (1264 pp.) $49.95 | Sep. 16, 2013 978-0-393-06930-3 A much-translated tale of plagues, priestly malfeasance, courtly love and the Seven Deadly Sins finds a satisfying new version in English.

The Decameron, as its Greek-derived name suggests, is a cycle of stories told over a period of 10 days

by Florentines fleeing their city for the countryside in order to escape the devastating Black Death of 1348. Perched at the very point of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of those stories, Giovanni Boccaccio, was a narrative innovator: As translator Rebhorn notes in his long, circumstantial introduction, medieval readers were fond of grab bags of stories, but “there is no precedent in Italian literature for Boccaccio’s use of a frame narrative to unify his collection.” Boccaccio borrowed liberally from previously published anthologies, but as Rebhorn also shows, he added plenty of new twists and arranged his material to form a thematic arc: Day 1, for instance, centers on characters who got out of trouble thanks to their native wit, while Day 4 centers on the character flaws that keep people from getting what they want. What so many of his characters want, it happens, are things frowned upon in polite society, as his ribald tale of the poor cuckolded owner of a conveniently large barrel so richly shows. Rebhorn’s translation of Boccaccio’s sprawling narrative, accompanied by informative endnotes, is sometimes marked by odd shifts in levels of diction, often within the same sentence (“That’s when I felt the guy was going too far...and it seemed to me that I should tell you about it so that you could see how he rewards you for that unwavering fidelity of yours”); it is otherwise clear and idiomatic, however, and Rebhorn capably represents Boccaccio’s humor and sharp intelligence.

A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.

LOLA BENSKY

Brett, Lily Counterpoint (272 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-59376-523-1 German-born, Australia-raised, New York resident Brett (You Gotta Have Balls, 2006, etc.) invests some of her own multicultural back story in her eponymous protagonist, an innocent abroad in a rock-’n’-roll world.

When we first meet Lola, she’s interviewing rising guitar hero Jimi Hendrix for Rock-Out, the Australian magazine that has sent this 19-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors to London.

While most young women would be swooning, Lola is telling Mick Jagger about her mother’s ordeal at Auschwitz or—when she crosses the Atlantic to New York—admitting to an arrogant, very stoned Jim Morrison that she doesn’t like him. Though she’s fat and constantly promising herself she will diet, Lola is too preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her traumatized parents to be intimidated by celebrities. As the story moves by fits and starts through the decades, she marries and then leaves a Former Rock Star (unnamed) for a painter and continues asking naïve but oddly effective questions of the people she interviews.

Brett’s portraits of Lola’s subjects contain nothing that isn’t already familiar to anyone who has read more than two books on the 1960s music scene, and her prose is so un-nuanced and uninflected that the entire novel sounds as if it was written by a 19-year-old. Yet palpable sincerity and a good heart have the same cumulative impact in the narrative as they do in Lola’s interviews.

Always utterly herself, she elicits genuine emotions from the stars she encounters (controlling Sonny Bono and pretentious Pete Townshend being the notable exceptions). Having observed Lola’s crippling panic attacks and her devastation over her mother’s death, readers will be relieved to see her transformation.

A curious mix of wide-eyed ingenuousness and deathhaunted anxiety, and certainly no stylistic masterpiece, but so sweet-natured it’s impossible not to like. (Author events in New York.)

of Jewish lawyers in Philadelphia. She is 33 years old pretending to be 27 and has taken the name Margie Franklin. Margot seethes with bitterness and guilt: Anne was always the favored younger sister and now her father has published Anne’s not Margot’s diary; Margot was the one carrying on a romance with Peter while hiding in the Amsterdam annex up until the moment Anne caught them just before their arrests; but she loved Anne too and feels responsible for her death; she finds Americans, especially American Jews, naïvely innocent. She tells the reader she is no longer Jewish but secretly lights a Sabbath candle every Friday night. She and Peter used to fantasize they’d start a new life together in Philadelphia after the war, and she keeps looking for him, hoping that perhaps he survived, too. Otherwise, she tries to disappear into American life. She wears long-sleeve sweaters even on hot summer days to cover the numbers on her arm. She lives alone with a cat but occasionally socializes with another secretary. Even less often, she visits her warmhearted sponsor, who loves Margot like a daughter and suspects her past. Margot finds herself falling in love with her boss, Joshua, whose domineering father, Ezra, is a partner in

Johnny’s

RIPPLE “A boy’s amazing powers stand between Earth and total destruction” KIRKUS Reviews Since the beginning of mankind there have been many who had learned to manipulate the ripples of creation. Now there are only two.

MARGOT

Cantor, Jillian Riverhead (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-59448-643-2 Children’s book author Cantor (The Life of Glass, 2010, etc.) shrinks her high concept—what if Anne Frank’s sister Margot didn’t die at Auschwitz but moved to Philadelphia under an assumed identity—to fit more predictable parameters of women’s fiction.

In 1959, when the movie version of her sister’s diary hits American theaters, Margot is working as a secretary for a firm

For more information Contact Pug Enterprises at admin@timestopper.com www.timestopper.com/books/johnnysripple

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“...melodrama at its best.” from necessary lies

the firm. Joshua is dating Penny, a stereotypical Jewish American Princess and the daughter of Ezra’s partner, but he is clearly attracted to Margot (although Cantor makes it hard to see why anyone would be attracted to her). Then an angry Holocaust survivor asks Joshua to sue her employer for job discrimination, and he enlists Margot’s help.

Cantor diminishes Margot’s spiritual identity crisis by introducing a predictable office romance plot.

NECESSARY LIES

Chamberlain, Diane St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 CD | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-250-01069-8 978-1-250-01070-4 CD An idealistic North Carolina social worker defies her employers to save impoverished children from overzealous social engineering in Chamberlain’s wellresearched page-turner.

Chamberlain’s author’s notes point out that from 1929 to 1975, North Carolina’s state-fostered Eugenics Sterilization Program sterilized thousands of women and men. Her novel, set in 1960, examines the impact of such interventions on a tiny, almost feudal enclave of tobacco farmers. Two narrators represent opposite poles of Southern society. Against the wishes of her doctor husband, Jane Forrester, a recent college graduate, has taken a job in Raleigh with the Department of Public Welfare. Ivy Hart, 15, is struggling to keep what is left of her family intact. Her father, Percy, was killed in an agricultural accident.

Davison Gardiner, who owns the farm where the white Harts, and their black neighbors, the Jordans, live and work, allows Ivy, her diabetic grandmother, and her beautiful and mentally challenged sister, Mary Ella, to continue occupying their shack rentfree. Gardiner regularly supplements their paltry wages (and welfare checks) with food donations, presumably out of guilt over Percy’s accident, although Ivy’s mother, who is institutionalized, scarred Gardiner’s wife in a fit of rage and grief. As the Harts’ newest caseworker, Jane soon finds herself in an ethical quagmire. At DPW’s instigation, Mary Ella, mother of 2-yearold William (father unknown), was involuntarily sterilized in the hospital after his birth. Ivy is sneaking out at night to meet Gardiner’s son, Henry Allen. By the time Jane realizes that Ivy is several months pregnant, she has succumbed to departmental pressure to petition for Ivy’s sterilization on the grounds of childhood epilepsy and low IQ. Once Ivy delivers her child, she will suffer the same fate as her sister, unless Jane is willing to buck the system at the expense of her career. The stakes mount to dizzying heights (even for such an isolated pocket, Gardiner’s unbridled sway over his tenants seems extreme); Chamberlain certainly knows how to escalate tension.

Socially conscious melodrama at its best.

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THE SPYMISTRESS

Chiaverini, Jennifer Dutton (368 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-525-95362-3

Serviceable biofiction based on the heroic work of Elizabeth Van Lew, Union sympathizer and spy living in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., during the Civil War. Plunging into her research-packed story in April 1861, as Virginia secedes from the Union, Chiaverini (Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, 2013, etc.) keeps up a steady pace tracing the war experiences of wealthy abolitionist Lizzie Van Lew, a confirmed spinster whose fiance died 20 years earlier. Lizzie shares the family mansion with her widowed mother, brother John, and his pro-Confederate wife, Mary. As opinions polarize and fighting begins, Lizzie decides to devote herself to helping the Yankee prisoners, bringing in food and smuggling out messages from the squalid prisons housing them. Mary’s Rebel sympathies cause a family rift, and she and John move out, leaving Lizzie freer in her activities but in greater need of political camouflage to avoid suspicion. As the long, harsh war years pass, she becomes involved with an underground network of Unionist sympathizers taking great risks to assist the Northern cause by supplying information and an escape route. Although Lizzie receives threats to herself and her property, she and her family survive the war, after which, Gen., later President, Grant rewards her with the job of postmaster of Richmond.

A capable but somewhat flavorless tribute to a brave woman.

JOE VICTIM

Cleave, Paul Atria (496 pp.) $16.00 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4516-7797-3

In his latest noir thriller, Cleave (Cemetery Lake, 2013, etc.) again stumbles into the evil environs of contemporary Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Christchurch Carver, whose tale began in Cleave’s The Cleaner, has been jailed. The Carver, posing as “Slow” Joe, worked as a police station janitor—when he wasn’t bloodletting on Christchurch’s streets. Now he calls himself Joe Victim, claiming no memory of the murders. The story unfolds with references to his rampage woven into the narrative, enough to let this episode work as a stand-alone novel. However, Cleave’s protagonist from other Christchurch thrillers, ex-cop Theo Tate, takes no part.

In fact, there’s no hero to root for here, except perhaps guiltridden, stressed-out Carl Schroder, once Tate’s partner but now himself fired from the police. Point of view shifts from Joe to Schroder and then to Melissa, whose true name is Natalie Flowers. Natalie has taken on her murdered sister’s identity because,

“There is something wrong inside of her, something terribly, terribly wrong.” Natalie/Melissa, as thoroughly bloodthirsty as Joe, plans to spring Joe from custody as he is transferred to court.

The plot is extraordinarily complex, interspersed with Joe’s manipulative ramblings to prison psychiatrists, which vacillate among reluctant admissions of sexual abuse by an aunt, his claims that he has no memory of murdering, and his fearsome interactions with other deviants, both prisoners and guards, in the prison’s segregation unit. Simultaneously, the disgraced Schroder, employed as consultant to a television psychic, attempts to manipulate Joe while also using his own frayed police connections to locate the body of another police detective. That detective, with his own corrupt history, was another victim of Natalie/Melissa and Joe. The novel is a cringe-worthy exploration of the heart’s dark recesses, with a denouement exploding into mass violence as Natalie/Melissa’s plot to free Joe goes awry amid a rally for restoration of New Zealand’s death penalty.

A little Hannibal Lector. A little Richard von KrafftEbing. A lot of gore.

GOOD AS GONE

Corleone, Douglas Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-250-01720-8 A child’s kidnapping leads a specialist in child recovery on a torrid chase across two continents.

Simon Fisk’s stint as a U.S. Marshal ended when his daughter Hailey was kidnapped. His wife, Tasha, was so distraught when she couldn’t be found that she swallowed a lethal dose of pills. Now, Simon makes his living recovering children abducted by estranged parents who’ve taken them to countries that won’t return them to the U.S. He’s just wrapping up a case in France when he’s grabbed by the local gendarmes. They press him to meet with Vince and Lori Sorkin, whose daughter Lindsay has been grabbed by somebody who’s not her parent. Showing a generally well-concealed soft side, Simon at last agrees to help. Lindsay’s trail

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takes him to Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. Along the way, he picks up sidekicks as different as Berlin private eye Kurt Ostermann and Warsaw lawyer Anastazja, but Corleone (Last Lawyer Standing, 2012, etc.) keeps the pattern reassuringly similar: Simon makes contact with criminal small fry who lead him to bigger fry; he confronts the bigger fry and demands information about Lindsay; they stonewall; bang bang bang. The most pleasing complication—everywhere in Europe Simon goes, he is himself wanted for kidnapping or related felonies—passes away when he crosses into Asia. What’s left is the deep, uncomplicated pleasure of watching a skilled professional kick major ass.

“What’s more noble than trying to rescue an imperiled child?”

Simon asks himself. Nobility is in short supply here, but this self-assessment is a lot more accurate than his reflection that “this wasn’t an action movie.”

EARLY DECISION Based on a True Frenzy

Crawford, Lacy Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-06-224061-3 A struggling young tutor tries to find her destiny among the children of privilege in this cutting peek at the vicious world of college applications.

Based largely on personal experience, Crawford’s debut novel explores the rarefied world of Anne, a bright but world-weary English major who has fallen into the unusual trade of “Application Whisperer,” helping affluent Chicago high school students tweak their personal essays and nail their college applications. Anne is also wrestling with her personal identity, unsure of her own talents, ambitions and security. The novel focuses on Anne’s students, all of whom are blandly unique in their own way. There’s a hunky young tennis player who only wants to run with the wild horses in Montana, the wealthy daughter of an Ivy League university trustee and a gay theater buff afraid to confront his aggressive father. The ringer in this exclusive club is Cristina, a Guatemalan illegal immigrant whose brilliance belies her origins. “She was helpless to reframe eighteen years of parenting and generations longer of expectations,” Crawford writes of Anne. “She was just a custodian of fate, as she pictured herself now, an orderly, shuffling alongside these kids. Perhaps offering them a bon mot. Sending them through the next set of doors, and turning back each spring to where the new kids were waiting.” And while the children are all well-characterized, their parents are portrayed with enough delicious malice to flirt with satire. To ratchet up the personal drama, Crawford tosses in Martin, a vain but ambitious young actor whose boyfriend status seems like a fleeting afterthought, and a nasty upstairs neighbor who plots to unravel Anne’s perilous residency in her building. Crawford injects a palpable sense of pathos into this absurdly complex process, but non-parents and other parties immune to the cult of the Tiger Mother may find trolling through adolescent essays a bit laborious.

Much like The Nanny Diaries—sincere and readable.

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THE BOOK OF SOMEDAY

Dixon, Dianne Sourcebooks Landmark (368 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4022-8572-1 Screenwriter Dixon’s (The Language of Secrets, 2010) second novel centers on the convergence of the lives of three women who have a mysterious connection.

Livvi is a published novelist whose lonely, abusive childhood has left her emotionally damaged and needy. Growing up with a cruel stepmother and cold father, Livvi believes her mother was a party girl who abandoned her as a baby. Now an adult, Livvi has yet to break free of her need to find love and acceptance, and her relationship with Andrew, the rich owner of a publicity firm, seems to be exactly what she’s been looking for all her life— until she discovers that Andrew’s withheld huge secrets from her. Livvi begins to see that her knight’s shining armor is somewhat tarnished, but she feels obligated to stay with Andrew for one very important reason. Across the country, famous photographer Micah is informed that she’s ill and must begin treatment immediately if she wishes to survive. But Micah’s not sure she deserves to live. Before she decides, Micah sets out to settle some debts from her past, seeking out people she once knew. However, despite her generosity to a cab driver’s family, the absolution she seeks proves elusive. Flash back to 1986.

AnnaLee is the devoted mother of a daughter whom she and her husband call “Bella.” They live in the home that once belonged to AnnaLee’s parents, a place where she always felt loved and secure, and AnnaLee is brokenhearted that she has to sell her parents’ treasures piece by piece to keep her family afloat financially. Husband Jack is a poor provider and a fragile man who leans on his wife for support, but AnnaLee hasn’t given up on him. Seemingly unconnected, these three women have one object in common: the image of a woman in a shimmering gown and pearl boots. Dixon’s narrative begins as a real page-turner but breaks down about two-thirds of the way through; by this point, some readers will put together all the pertinent information and spend the last third focusing on the minor holes in the story and the clunky dialogue.

Slightly flawed, but an OK way to spend a rainy afternoon.

AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERYTHING

Dolnick, Ben Pantheon (256 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-307-90798-1

A melancholy young man stuck in the wilderness years of his mid-20s is forced to confront a buried secret when a childhood friend disappears.

At first, it would appear that Dolnick

(You Know Who You Are, 2010, etc.) is simply going to roll out the same coming-of-age story that characterized his first two novels—and for the first hundred pages or so, he pretty much does. And then the novel loses its mind, but we’ll get to that part. Adam Sanecki is a giant mope who feels old at the ripe age of 26. He tutors obnoxious children with as little interest as possible, trolls Facebook to stalk his wispy ex-girlfriend and sleeps with one of his student’s mothers out of what seems sheer boredom. In between all this navel-gazing, we get a rather sweet story of Adam’s childhood friendship with Thomas Pell, a brilliant, awkward classmate at their exclusive prep school. They share a secret language and that unguarded bond that so often springs up between adolescents. Then Something Bad happens that marks both boys for life. Adam carries his secret by burying it, while Thomas starts to mentally unravel almost immediately.

Then things get really weird. At the behest of Thomas’ terrified parents, Adam travels to New Delhi, India, where a mentally ill Thomas has gone to ground. This takes up two-thirds of the book; the whole setup seems rather preposterous. Adam meets an enigmatic spiritual leader who says Thomas must “purify.”

Later, Thomas and Adam are forced to take responsibility for the trespass from their youth. A final reunion between the lifelong friends in a cave rings hollow, as does Adam’s admission of guilt.

Insincere characterizations and a weak central conflict detract from the novel. See instead Alex Garland’s The Beach. (Author tour to Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.)

between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables.” That chaos, in the first volume of the trilogy to which this volume belongs, swept Lina away from her ambitions toward a domesticity that seems almost arbitrary, while Elena, the very definition of a survivor, forged on. Lina, it appears, will always consider her the lesser of equals, someone who, Elena frets, “couldn’t even imagine that I might change.” Yet, as Ferrante recounts, it is late-blooming Elena whose turn it is to flourish, despite setbacks and false starts; this second book closes with her embarking on what promises to be a brilliant literary career and with the hint that true love may not be far behind.

Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.

CORR SYL

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME

THE

Ferrante, Elena Translated by Goldstein, Ann Europa Editions (480 pp.) $18.00 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-60945-134-9

WARRIOR

By Garry Rogers

On an Earth where intelligence appeared long before humans, friction flares between humans and the ancient Tsaeb civilization.

Roman à clef by the reclusive author who writes under the name Elena Ferrante (The Lost Daughter, 2008, etc.): a beautifully written portrait of a sometimes difficult friendship.

Set, as in so much of her work, in her native Naples, Italy, Ferrante’s latest is a study in the possibility of triumph over disappointment. Its narrator, Elena Greco, is the daughter of a man who has managed by dint of hard work to rise only to the lowly position of porter at the city government building.

Elena is brilliant, but less so than her friend Raffaella Cerullo, called—confusingly, for readers without Italian—Lila or Lina depending on who is talking. Both women, born in the year of liberation, 1944, are ambitious, whip-smart, as at home in the pages of Aristotle as in the hills of their still-battered city. Their native milieu is poor and barely literate, but both have emerged from it, despite the distractions afforded by the boys they like and the violence occasionally visited by those whom they don’t.

Lina has always outpaced Elena in every way, not least intellectually; as Elena recalls, “I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections

“A beautifully written YA novel that will captivate environmentalists and sci-fi fans of all ages.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Contact Garry Rogers regarding film and publication rights: (928) 925-7191 • corrsylmail@gmail.com http://garryrogers.com

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Mario Alberto Zambrano

Zambrano’s debut novel reinterprets and augments the voice of Mexican-American culture

By David Garza

Photo courtesy Nephi Nevin

The Mexican game of lotería—imagine bingo but with richly illustrated characters and riddles instead of decidedly nonmagical numbers and letters—features a universe of memorable personae, from the buxom La Sirena to the immaculately tailored and monocled El Catrin. It’s a game that reveals much about the Mexican worldview: What might it say, for example, that it features images for death, a skull, a heart (pierced by an arrow), a cactus and a crown, among many telling others?

Mario Alberto Zambrano, former ballet dancer–turnedauthor of the debut novel Lotería, not only explores new and unexpected interpretations of these figures and their value in the Mexican imagination in his debut novel, but he uses 53 of the game’s 54 imagistic cards as a structural framework for crafting a poignant tale of a 14

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girl coming of age between two cultures in the wake of a scarring family tragedy.

“I grew up playing lotería with my family,” Zambrano says. “I always thought they were like tarot cards. I’d sit down and give a reading—to no one, just to myself— because I thought they meant more than their face value. I wanted them to mean something else.”

The fascination with the characters in the deck persisted into adulthood for Zambrano. As he recounts, he was once moved to glue a series of tablas (large playing boards) onto a dining room table and varnish it. Staring at the glossy array of heroes and iconic figures, he knew he had the beginnings of an idea.

“There’s a story here,” he thought to himself. “And so I started working.”

Originally conceived as a memoir with a temporal frame loosely modeled after Mrs. Dalloway, the work eventually evolved into a punchy novel written in the voice of Luz Maria Castillo, an 11-year-old girl who is a ward of the state. Refusing to speak to her caretakers, spending her time writing in a journal and using the lotería cards as prompts, she narrates the events that led to her family’s dissolution and her uncertain future: her close relationship with her sister, Estrella, the terrifying seesaw of physical abuse and pure love she received from her father, and the mysterious wanderings of her mother.

While the narrative builds toward a heartrending climax, the most satisfying element of the novel is the protagonist’s voice. At once defensive, highly intelligent, skeptical and rebellious, the character of Luz, while attempting to navigate the difficulties of her circumstances, also represents the negotiations that many Mexican-Americans— Zambrano included—manage in the difficult place between two cultures.

“I share an identity crisis with these girls,” Zambrano says of Luz and Estrella. He mentions that, like the protagonist, he also struggled with what it meant to be Mexican when he was a child. “I didn’t want to be Mexican growing up in Texas at that time,” he acknowledges. “I was someone who would not speak Spanish to my family.”

At the age of 11 (the same age as Luz in the novel), Zambrano did something to escape the confusion and difficulties of his identity—he started dancing. Though he began studying jazz, ballet, baton and tap dancing in what he calls a “rinky-dinky studio where you go once a week,” he was soon dancing every day. “The dancing made me feel like it was a place where I could be myself.”

By the time he graduated from high school, he had been accepted into Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance company. Soon thereafter, he found himself looking toward a more European dance aesthetic. At the age of 19, he moved to the Netherlands and launched a dance career that spanned a decade and included successful stints in companies throughout Europe. During those years, the thought of writing a novel never occurred to Zambrano. Though he would eventually end up with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, literature still felt like a world unavailable to him.

“I didn’t even read as a kid. There were those prissy ballerinas at the Houston Ballet Academy who were reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf. It felt like Versace or Gucci, this brand that I didn’t have access to,” he laughs.

A decade’s worth of dancing professionally, though, combined with the alienation of living abroad at such a young age, led to a profound sense of exhaustion and depression for Zambrano. He began to feel “wounded” by the sense that his love for dance was dissipating. Even now, he struggles to find the right words to describe that loss, as one does when discussing divorce, for example, or the death of a loved one.

“I loved it so much. This is a thing that loved me back in a way that took me out of a hometown where I felt like I had nothing and no one to connect with.…It gave me everything I asked for,” he explains. “Yet that love affair fell apart. It was a devastating realization to find out I didn’t love it anymore. I was completely destroyed.”

Though Zambrano turned to writing after deciding he had to “start at the beginning” after his dance career ended, it is evident that dance has shaped his novel.

He professes a love for work and discipline that stems from his time as a dancer, and there is also his stylistic awareness that comes from dance. He speaks lovingly of

the form and structure of literature as if it were physical, as if it were the body of a dancer itself, describing the works of his favorite authors (again, Virginia Woolf comes up) as “sculptures.” Finally, the time he spent abroad also gave him a love of Mexican culture that he had never known while growing up in Texas.

“There aren’t enough voices representing Mexican culture or the diaspora of people in America, the Mexican community living in America,” he says.

The success of Zambrano’s work, then, is not just that it adds to the voice of the Mexican-American culture, but that it reinterprets and augments even its most familiar tropes. Curiously, there is no dancer in the deck of lotería cards, and there is no writer either—yet.

But somehow there is still so much of Zambrano, and of Luz Maria Castillo and of Mexican culture in general, in each intriguing card.

David Garza’s favorite lotería card is La Garza. He lives in New York City.

Lotería was reviewed in the March 15th issue of Kirkus Reviews.

Lotería Zambrano, Mario Alberto HarperCollins (288 pp.) $21.99 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-06-226854-9 |

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“...tough and very funny.” from the house of journalists

THE HOUSE OF JOURNALISTS

Finch, Tim Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-374-17318-0

This remarkable first novel imagines a center for journalists, all refugees who were forced to emigrate, its irrepressible leader, Julian Snowman, and his oppressive regime of liberal piety, and the stories of his damaged but legendary clients.

Julian created the House of Journalists; it is his baby. The residents are called “fellows”; the emphasis is on “fellowship,” and yet Julian’s attitude is paternalistic, even patronizing—after all, he is their patron.

The novel lets several “fellows” who are not all fellows tell their tales.

The testimonies of Agnes and Sonny, the wheelchair-bound Mr. Stan and the mournful Mustapha are harrowing tales of torture and rape, narrow escapes and picaresque odysseys. Sonny, scrounging discarded fast food in a first-world capital, remarks: “It tasted corporate, industrialized, first world, throwaway. One day I would throw away food like this, I promised myself.” We hear, too, from the volunteers and mentors, from a government minister and a profane, prize-winning writer.

The mysterious AA, a new arrival, is the only one to escape from the House as little-known as when he arrives. His presence unnerves the increasingly paranoid Julian, who jealously guards his fellows—whose lives are his livelihood. Finch, former director of communications for the Refugee Council, at present works for a London think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. Here, he demonstrates an instinctive grasp of the malleability of fiction.

Satiric, tough and very funny. (Agent: Caroline Dawnay)

THE KILL LIST

Forsyth, Frederick Putnam (352 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 10, 2013 978-0-399-16527-6 More than 40 years after he gave us the Jackal, Forsyth gives us the Preacher, a masked jihadi extremist whose videos are radicalizing Muslims in the U.S. and England into killing public officials, law enforcement officers and the like.

The Preacher tops a special list of enemies marked for death by a covert U.S. government agency. The man assigned the kill is decorated former Marine general Christopher “Kit” Carson, aka The Tracker, a fluent speaker of Arabic who has experience eliminating al-Qaida leaders. Carson has a personal investment in the operation: the Preacher was responsible for the death of his father. Having had his life saved by the Tracker several years ago in Afghanistan, the agency’s director, “Gray Fox,” has a special investment in him. When the government’s best computer experts are unable to penetrate the Preacher’s secret Internet protocol address, the Tracker recruits Roger Kendrick, an agoraphobic teenage computer whiz holed up 16

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in his room in Virginia. Drooling over the supersophisticated equipment he’s given, he quickly determines he is up against the Preacher’s own computer expert, dubbed the Troll, and creates a cyber alter ego to penetrate the Preacher’s fan base. From there, the kid is a few steps away from planting malware that will enable the Tracker to determine who the Preacher is and where he is based—not Pakistan, where a cohort of his operates, or Yemen, as was thought, but Somalia. Here, Forsyth is as methodical—at times as colorless—as his subjects. But he powers his plot with a clean efficiency, providing an absorbing account of the clockwork moves and split-second decisions required to close in on and dispatch the enemy. Strong descriptions of the settings add to the book’s appeal.

Inspired by an actual kill list, Forsyth’s latest thriller is, like Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, ready-made for the screen.

& SONS

Gilbert, David Random House (464 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 23, 2013 978-0-8129-9396-7 A charming, often funny, sophomore novel by Gilbert (The Normals, 2004).

Novels about novelists run the risk of being too meta on the one hand and too cute on the other, though some occasionally work—the sterling example of our time being Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Gilbert wisely places as much emphasis on the surrounding players as on paterfamilias A.N. Dyer, who has written one particularly well-received coming-of-age novel and a host of other works that have established him nicely in the oak-paneled Upper East Side literary stratosphere. Those surrounding players are, somewhat in order, the late friend whose funeral opens the novel, then offspring, his own and the deceased’s: thus the “& sons” of the title, suggesting that literature might be a family business but more pointedly, that, in a household run with distant dictatorial benevolence, as if in a company, there’s going to be trouble. So it is with Dyer’s boys, gathered as Dad feels his own mortality approaching, who are a hot mess of failure coupled with ambition (and, for the most part, willing to work to attain it); one is a former addict, another a maker of documentaries no one sees, still another, the youngest, is fully aware that he is the agent of his father's split from his older brothers' mother.. Much of the story is a (mostly) gentle sendup of the literary life and its practitioners of the fusty old school and the hipster new (“You know what would give the story extra kick,” says one of the latter, “if the other guy was Mark David Chapman.”); a highlight is a devastatingly accurate peek into a hoity-toity book party. In the main, the novel moves without a hitch, though a couple of elements don’t quite hang together, particularly the place of the narrator, at once respectful and not quite trustworthy, in the whole affair. Still, Gilbert tantalizes with a big question: Will Dad, before he kicks the bucket, share some of his fortunes in any sense other than the monetary and bring his sons into the fold?

Read on for the answer, which takes its time, most enjoyably, to unfold.

THE LAST WITNESS

Griffin, W.E.B.; Butterworth IV, William E. Putnam (352 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-399-16257-2 Mainline Philadelphia homicide detective Matt Payne battles mobsters in Griffin’s (The Vigilantes, 2010, etc.) latest book in his Badge of Honor series.

Krystal Gonzalez takes two to the head in the Society Hill townhouse of Maggie McMain. McCain’s missing, but she’s not a suspect.

It’s feared the culprit who murdered Gonzalez has kidnapped or killed McCain. McCain, who runs Mary’s House, a shelter for foster children, is the daughter of a Philadelphia mover and shaker, and Gonzalez, once a client of Mary’s House, may have become entangled in the tentacles of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel. Authorities know too that elements of the Russian mob, busy worming its way into Philadelphia politics via payoffs from Cayman Island bank accounts, are allying with the cartel. Griffin offers the usual good guys of movie-star proportions—“six feet tall, a lithely muscled 170 pounds... thick dark hair...neat and short.” Nearly everyone on the side of the angels is wealthy or connected to wealth or to each other.

There are down-to-the-bullets-in-the-magazine descriptions of weapons—the trusty Colt .45 1911A is a favorite—as well as techno-gear from throwaway cellphones to anonymous email servers. Griffin serves up enough exposition about geographical locales and amenities, exotic and prosaic, to provide useful travel guides. Much of the narrative could be a CliffNotes synopsis of the corruption of legitimate processes—EB-5 visas for moneyed immigrants, international banking, capital investment funds—by drug and prostitution profits. Rich immigrants and drug lords manipulate; naïve girls and runaway teens end up dead and disappeared into El Pozolero’s bath of sodium hydroxide lye beads; and McCain goes to ground in a posh Virgin Islands resort. All but the last few chapters are a setup for the quick but open-ended conclusion, where Payne lets bullets fly and bad guys die.

Formulaic but great good fun for genre fans.

Charlie Crosby (a descendant of the clan introduced in Tinkers) as he mourns the death of his 13-year-old daughter in an accident.

After smashing his hand against a wall in a rage, he loses his wife and develops a slow-growing addiction to painkillers and alcohol that leads him to break-ins and other foolhardy decisions.

But Harding is less concerned with plot as with what’s swimming in Charlie’s head, and themes of nature and time abound.

His narration shifts from past to present, from memories of his daughter to his nature walks in New England to his helping his father repair a clock in a home that has an orrery—a model of the solar system that symbolizes the symphonic breadth of nature and the universality of his struggle. Harding’s work owes much to his former teacher Marilynne Robinson, with whom he shares an affinity for precise, religious-tinged prose. The penultimate chapters of the book, however, display a unique hallucinatory style: As Charlie’s grief reaches its apex, he’s consumed by dark visions, and Harding’s skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he’s done.

Though the final pages bend the story safely back to a familiar redemption arc, Charlie’s experience doesn’t feel commonplace.

ENON

Harding, Paul Random House (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4000-6943-9 The author of the Pulitzer Prize– winning Tinkers (2009) returns with another striking study of family, time and mortality.

This time, though, Harding’s style is less knotty, almost Hemingway-esque, at least in its opening pages. That’s in part due to the fact that he has a clearer story to tell: This book covers a year in the life of |

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His trip to hell and back envisions a different kind of hell, and his status as “back,” just as in the real world, isn’t guaranteed.

Beautifully turned: Harding has defogged his style a bit and gained a stronger emotional impact from it.

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

Horn, Dara Norton (336 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 9, 2013 978-0-393-06489-6

Horn (All Other Nights, 2009, etc.) is nothing if not ambitious in concocting this stew of Middle East politics, computer sci-fi, Jewish philosophy and romantic melodrama about a Jewish techno-entrepreneur taken hostage in

post-Mubarak Egypt.

The wonderful title comes from the 11th-century work by Maimonides rediscovered in the 1890s by Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University, who found pages of Maimonides’ writing in an Egyptian synagogue storeroom called a genizah. Interwoven with a less than effective re-telling of Maimonides and Schechter’s history, Horn’s present-day fiction concerns the beautiful if geeky genius Josie, who borders on autistic in her lack of empathy for others. California-based Josie has invented a software program, not coincidentally called Genizah, which tracks and stores the moments a person is experiencing in order to turn them into a full memory of her/his life. Her company is thriving, and Josie is happily married to handsome Israeli Itamar. She chooses to ignore her 6-year-old daughter Tali’s worrisome emotional quirks, perhaps because her own childhood memories include being an outcast among her doltish peers, including her older sister Judith. Judith’s memories differ from Josie’s—she is haunted by her mother’s favoritism toward Josie and her inescapable role as the lesser sister. Employed by Josie’s company, she is lonely and jealous that everything comes so easily to Josie. Then Josie is kidnapped while consulting with the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

Believing Josie has been killed, Itamar and Tali depend increasingly on Judith, who blossoms into the loving person she always wanted to be. But Josie is not dead. She is busy creating a genizah so her Egyptian captor can recreate the life of his dead son. The philosophical questions raised are intriguing, if faddish: Is God omniscient? What is memory, and can it be trusted? What is the relationship between past and present? What is time dilation?

The psychological plot concerning the characters is less captivating, although Judith is a standout.

A work marked by brilliant conceits and clever plotting.

(Author tour to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco)

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THE HIVE

Hornby, Gill Little, Brown (352 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-316-23479-5 Modeled on the patterns of a bee colony, Hornby’s debut is an amusing if predictable social satire on cliquey, needy school-gate mothers, often more immature than their children.

Shaped by a school year and a sequence of fundraising events, Hornby’s novel follows a crew of English women in an unnamed town struggling with peer pressure, personal drama and their places in the pecking order. Bea Stuart is the self-appointed queen of the swarm that assembles twice a day outside St. Ambrose Church Primary. Glamorous, popular and unopposed, Bea is also self-centered and manipulative, yet many other mothers copy her style and crave her friendship. Rachel used to be Bea’s best friend but has been dropped, even though Rachel’s marriage has just fallen apart. Then there are Georgie, previously a lawyer, now a chaotic but happy earth mother; Bubba, a wealthy, out-of-touch newcomer; and Heather, who will do anything to be accepted. Hornby’s strengths are her quick wit and ear for dialogue, but her characters are caricatures, and her story is much too long, padded out further with an incomplete side tale of bullying. The year turns, the community shifts, and like the bees, one queen supplants another.

A tissue-thin saga of small-town relationships redeemed by its humor and rapid-fire exchanges.

DRAGON’S CHILD

Hume, M.K. Atria (512 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-4767-1518-6 Series: King Arthur Trilogy, 1 Hume’s second trilogy picks up where her Merlin series ended.

When last seen in Hume’s book, Merlin, who goes by the name Myrddion, had helped secret the newly born son of the evil Uther Pendragon and his beautiful wife, Ygerne, who was raped and forced to marry the cruel Briton king after he murdered her husband. The child, now known as Artorex, lives with the gentleman farmer Ector and his noble Roman wife, Livinia, at their estate. Every so often, Myrddion and two Celtic kings check on the boy’s progress. As Artorex approaches manhood, the three instruct an old warrior named Targo to educate him in the skills of fighting and horsemanship, while Ector is tasked to see to the boy’s education. Artorex must remain hidden from King Uther, who will kill the child to prevent his succession to the throne. Meanwhile, Artorex’s half sister, Morgan, is keeping Uther alive long enough to destroy almost everything the young Artorex holds dear. Artorex then journeys to see his father and undertakes a suicide mission to

“...endearing and emotionally satisfying...” from the sweetest hallelujah

prove to the Celtic people that he is the right person to rule them.

As in her previous trilogy, the author, an Arthurian academic, adds perceived authenticity to her tales by incorporating true-to-life details surrounding the difficult, hardscrabble lives of those who survived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The day-to-day living, from food to attitudes about war, politics and social station, is fascinating, and the author goes into enormous detail to describe life in Arthurian England; but in this first volume, the prose tends to wax a little too flowery on occasion. Even though the writing is less compelling and the story briefly goes off the rails early in the book with a nasty subplot concerning child abuse, the evolving narrative is worth reading.

A diverting read for fans of the Arthurian legends.

THE SWEETEST HALLELUJAH

Hussey, Elaine Harlequin MIRA (352 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jul. 30, 2013 978-0-7783-1519-3

In a desperate bid, a dying mother takes out an ad in the paper and finds protection and love for her daughter from an unexpected source.

Former jazz star Betty Jewel Hughes expected her life to be different—and longer. But after her husband, Saint, squandered their careers and landed in jail, she came home to Shakerag, Miss., where she sang in the local blues joint and soon discovered she was pregnant with her daughter, Billie. Now, 10 years later, Betty Jewel is dying of cancer and her mother, Queen, is too old to take care of Billie on her own. Racial tension is heating up in the South of the mid-1950s, so Betty Jewel would be suspicious of any white woman responding to her classified ad looking for someone to take care of Billie, but Cassie Malone is especially problematic.

After all, Cassie’s known for making trouble by questioning the status quo. At first, the part-time reporter and columnist for the local paper just wants to do an article on Betty Jewel and the ad.

But the more time Cassie spends with Betty Jewel, Queen and Billie, the more she realizes the story is complex and layered, and she becomes invested in the dying woman and her family.

However, neither community—Cassie’s nor Betty Jewel’s—is excited about a friendship between the two women, much less a proposed adoption. As secrets and unexpected connections are revealed, the women must fight for a special girl in an uncertain world. Hussey has written a lovely, poetic book about race, love, mothers, daughters and friends that navigates a spectrum of emotional minefields. With well-drawn, authentic characters and a lyrical writing style that occasionally gets in its own way, the story is sweet and hopeful, with impressive dialogue. A certain fairy-tale realism—similar to that of The Help, which this book will inevitably be compared to—makes the concept both believable and entertaining, if perhaps a little glossy given the true history of the racial tension of the time.

An endearing and emotionally satisfying exploration of race, family and friendship in trying times.

DEAD SET

Kadrey, Richard Harper Voyager (320 pp.) $22.99 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-0-06-228301-6 Known for writing quirky supernatural-themed books, Kadrey’s latest offering doesn’t stray far from the formula cherished by his readers.

Zoe’s having a bad time: Her father died and left the teen and her mom almost destitute. They’ve moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in a sketchy neighborhood, Mom’s trying to get back into the job market after many years, and Zoe isn’t crazy about her new high school, where the only person with whom she’s made friends is a girl who calls herself Absynthe. Then Zoe wanders into a store selling rare old vinyl records. Her parents were heavily involved in the early punk music scene, and she’s grown up with a huge library of LPs, but this store has something besides ordinary music in it. Zoe stumbles upon a room that holds some odd-looking records and a weird machine that the creepy and strange looking proprietor says can help her connect with her dead father. When Zoe opts in, she finds that the proprietor demands an odd sort of payment each time she visits: He instructs her to bring parts of herself ranging from a lock of hair to a tooth to blood. And while that gives her pause, she also finds that the peculiar dreams she has always had are not what they seem, and the long road to finding her dead father leads to a nightmarish place where bad things happen. While the tale’s both well-crafted and imaginative, it’s not going to be every reader’s cup of tea, although fans of zombie novels may find the author’s take on the dead unique. Zoe and her family present themselves as sympathetic and interesting, but the storyline is unsettling, and the ending seems both rushed and tacked on, like the author ran out of steam in the final third of the book and just decided to get it over with.

The writing is top-notch, but for many, the book will prove an acquired taste.

MY LIFE AS A SILENT MOVIE

Kercheval, Jesse Lee Indiana Univ. (220 pp.) $22.00 paper | Sep. 19, 2013 978-0253-01024-7

In this sharply drawn chronicle of grief, a woman reassembles her identity through her father’s art and her brother’s tenuous offer of a new life.

After her husband and 8-year-old daughter are killed in a car accident, Emma collapses. Nothing matters anymore—not her friends, not her home, not her carefully constructed life as a professor of creative writing. But then Aunt Zinnia drops another bombshell: Emma was adopted. Spontaneously, Emma catches the |

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train for New York, hoping her former nanny, Apolline, has some answers. Apolline reveals that Emma’s parents were a beautiful French communist named Sophie-Anne and the renowned Russian silent film star Ivan Mosjoukine. Doubting that Mosjoukine could really be her father (after all, he allegedly died 10 years before her birth), Emma cannot so easily dismiss the evidence in the mirror: She has his burning blue eyes. She sets off for Paris, but instead of finding her mother, she finds her twin brother, Ilya, living in a nearly forgotten, nearly impossible-tofind house. Across the street, his neighbor sits outside every day, scowling and selling drugs to overworked physicians. Delighted to see Emma (whom he remembers as Vera), Ilya has his own demons, including the father who abandoned him, the mother who gave his twin sister away, and the tragic consequences of his ex-wife’s addiction. Emma intensifies her search for their father, discovering a chameleon of a man. And as she watches Mosjoukine’s old films, she sees reflections of their family saga.

Much like a silent movie, Emma’s quest is composed of beautifully limned gestures and vividly sketched characters against the backdrops of contemporary and post–World War II Paris.

Kercheval (Brazil, 2010, etc.) delves deeply into the rawest of emotions and the most wrenching of choices, richly detailing each twist and turn with grace.

JAPANTOWN

Lancet, Barry Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4516-9169-6

Following the shooting of a visiting Japanese family on the streets of San Francisco’s Japantown, Tokyo-raised antiques dealer Jim Brodie dons his other identity—inheritor of his father’s PI firm—to investigate the killing. He discovers it may be related to the murder of his wife, Mieko.

The rare kanji, or logographic Japanese character, left at the scene of the family’s execution convinces Brodie that powerful forces were behind the deaths. Hired by a shady Tokyo communications tycoon whose married daughter was among the victims, and also working with San Francisco police, Brodie brings to the case his deep knowledge of Japanese culture—and Japanese selfdefense techniques. Tracing the killings back to Japan, he joins former associates of his father who now run the Tokyo office of Brodie Security to penetrate the ultrasecret, superpowerful Soga, a clan of assassins dating back centuries. They don’t fool around, coating gun handles and knife blades with a lethal poison and using sophisticated surveillance devices to follow their opponents’ every move. After they abduct Brodie’s 6-year-old daughter from an FBI safe house, the odds of him getting her back alive are slim. Ultimately, no one is safe, and no one can be trusted.

Lancet, who has lived in Japan for more than 25 years, many of them as editor at a Japanese publishing house, draws upon his familiarity with the terrain, local history and Japanese culture to create an East-West adventure that informs as it thrills. A key plot 20

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point involving powerful new technology that is up for grabs is underdeveloped, and the novel isn’t without its “Now I’m going to kill you” moments. But the intricate plot is skillfully developed, the action never flags and the climax is gripping.

A fresh voice in crime fiction, Lancet successfully imports yakuza fiction to San Francisco while probing its origins in Japanese lore.

THE SALINGER CONTRACT

Langer, Adam OpenRoad Integrated Media (280 pp.) $16.99 paper | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-4532-9794-0 Langer (Crossing California, 2004, etc.) skewers pretensions of writers and writing, editors and publishers—and perhaps audiences—in a literary thriller.

With his wife seeking tenure at Indiana University, the eponymous protagonist Adam Langer is a Bloomington house husband, shuffling between day care and shopping, saving a few moments to restart a stalled literary career.

Son of an absent father (he knows only the name, Sid J. Langer) and a single mother who wrote anagrams and word puzzles, Adam has written one novel, but most of his writing has involved author profiles for a New York magazine. That’s how he met Conner Joyce, writer of “honest-cop-stuck-in-a-corrupt-system tales.” Conner is reading in Bloomington; Adam drops by for a visit. Later, after a reading in Chicago, Conner calls Adam with a fantastic story. Conner has been offered $2.5 million to write a novel for a mysterious fellow named Dex Dunford. The book will be read only by Dunford and his bodyguard, Pavel, who “looked as if he might once have worked on a security detail for Vladimir Putin.” More fascinating, Dunford also owns unpublished manuscripts by J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee and other famous writers. Needing money, Conner agrees to write the novel. And that’s when the fun begins. Along the way, there’s a jewel-encrusted zip drive, a bank heist and a revelation that fractures Adam’s perception of his heritage. The denouement is great.

Marvelously intriguing.

DAYS IN THE HISTORY OF SILENCE

Lindstrøm, Merethe Translated by Bruce, Anne Other Press (224 pp.) $14.95 paper | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-59051-595-2

fortune’s favorites.

Norwegian author Lindstrøm’s somber novel, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize, centers on an aging couple who would appear to have been

He is a retired physician, she a retired teacher. Together for decades, they live in bourgeois comfort, having raised three healthy (and now grown-up) daughters. But Simon is slipping into dementia, and for now, the primary symptom is a nearly unbreachable silence that began to worsen just after the couple felt forced to dismiss the Latvian housekeeper who was the closest thing they had to a friend. In the wake of that departure, the wife, Eva, is left to grapple, in a way increasingly lonely and bereft, with her ever more remote husband and with the burdens of age. Both Eva and Simon have painful secrets, things they haven’t confided even to their daughters, but the book is less about the secrets than about the long-term repercussions of secrecy itself. If one’s survival strategy is reticence and selfprotection, what happens when age and circumstance ratchet up solitude and silence to an unbearable level? Where does one turn? How does one turn? The novel is languidly paced, nearly static, and the prose can sometimes be awkward, but there are moments of emotional intensity, as when Eva drops her husband off at elder day care and hesitates before she goes, feeling that he might disappear forever when she turns.

An often incisive but slow-paced exploration of the encroachments and isolations of age.

THE FACADES

Lundgren, Eric Overlook (272 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-1-4683-0687-3 When a mezzo-soprano star of the local opera disappears, her worrywart husband must explore the depths of a bizarre and labyrinthine city for clues to her whereabouts.

Some debut manuscripts are better left in desk drawers. That’s not to say that librarian-by-day Lundgren’s debut is without certain merits. The writer clearly has some syntactical skill, and his experiment in worldbuilding is ambitious. However, a seriously disagreeable narrator and a gloss of highbrow humor take the shine off this slice of literary absurdity quickly. Our narrator is Sven Norberg, a schlubby, smoking cubicle jockey who lives in the fictional city of Trude.

Trude is a really weird amalgam of Midwestern highways and shopping malls punctuated with bizarre European-influenced behemoths designed by a mysterious architect named Bernhard. It’s a city that has barricaded its libraries, creating a secretive underground of armed librarians, and it’s, conversely, one that is obsessed with opera and other forms of high culture. Its superstar was Norberg’s wife, Molly, who disappeared with no warning, leaving Sven to raise their teenage son, Kyle. Things happen—Sven starts sleeping with a very young girl named Plea; Kyle falls under the influence of a cultlike church; and clues to Molly’s whereabouts start appearing in coded entries in the local newspaper. Later, a woman named Cassandra indicates to Sven that she may have clues to Molly’s frame of mind. But none of it ever goes anywhere. It’s as if the author is introducing

odd situations and absurd events simply to shout at readers how terribly witty it all is. When asked for guidance from his son, Sven answers bluntly. “As I see it, the point is to endure as much shit as you can without any illusions,” he says. Add on to all of this an ambiguous, confusing denouement, and the final product is a pretentious, frustrating mess.

A hollow satire working so very hard at being clever that it forgets to deliver any emotional truth.

MY NOTORIOUS LIFE

Manning, Kate Scribner (448 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4516-9806-0

A rollicking romp through 19th-century American contraception inspired by the true story of a Manhattan midwife.

In 1860, Axie, nee Annie, is “rescued” from a New York slum along with her siblings and sent West on an orphan train. In the Illinois prairie, Axie’s younger sister Dutchie and brother Joe find homes, but the irascible 12-year old is sent back to New York along with Charlie, another street-wise urchin.

Axie reunites with her mother, but her joy is short-lived: After “Mam” delivers an infant who dies shortly after birth, Mam herself expires of childbed fever at the home of Mrs. Evans, a midwife and, some say, abortionist. Truly orphaned this time, Axie is apprenticed to Mrs. Evans and by the age of 16, is an accomplished midwife’s assistant who has picked up many helpful hints about all aspects of pregnancy, including avoiding it and ending it. After her mentor’s death, Axie, who is now married to Charlie, a would-be journalist, concocts and peddles a female medication that, often enough, has a side effect of inducing miscarriage. Aided by Charlie’s marketing smarts, Axie is soon running a thriving and lucrative business, dispensing pills, sex education, birth control advice and, when necessary to help her clients avert certain death or ruin, the occasional first trimester abortion. Her clients range from tenement dwellers to Manhattan’s upper crust, and while amassing tremendous wealth, Axie, operating as Madame DeBeausacq, sees her main mission as freeing women from the consequences of men’s unbridled lust and profligacy. However, when Manhattan’s penny tabloids, egged on by two disgruntled doctors, foment a scandal accusing “Madame X” of child murder and infant trafficking, Axie is consigned to Manhattan’s notorious Tombs jail. The ensuing events highlight controversies regarding “reproductive health” that are still raging today.

Axie’s profane Irish brogue is vividly recreated with virtually no anachronistic slips, and though a certain degree of polemical crusading is unavoidable given Axie’s proclivities, her voice never fails to entertain.

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“...Moyes is a born storyteller...” from the girl you left behind

WHISPERING BODIES

Michaels, Jesse Soft Skull Press (224 pp.) $15.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-59376-530-9

You have to be crazy to get involved in a murder.

How crazy? Roy Belkin is just this side of certifiable. He’s retreated into a world of OCD rituals so time-consuming that he rarely interacts with other people. Instead, he’s addicted to the Helping Hands website, where he leaves outrageous, offensive comments about queries posted by its deeply religious users. When Roy does venture out, it’s to visit his father, a demented cryptologist sequestered by the Feds, who pay Roy a monthly stipend as the dependent of an “employee.” His hyperorganized life is ended by a fire in his San Francisco apartment building that reveals a charred corpse complete with a bullet hole. When his luscious neighbor Pernice Balfour asks him what happened, Roy irrationally tells her that he’s a detective. Pernice, whose racy pictures have been found along with the body of Frank Relpher, and whose closet contains accelerant and a gun, is jailed on suspicion of murder. Roy’s vow to help her leads him to a man as knowledgeable as his father about Cave-Urdu dialogue, a priest who knew Pernice from her charity work and a crime scene photographer who offers clues in exchange for naked shots of Roy. Detective Morpello makes little headway on the case; worse, he mistakes Roy for a perp, or so he says, and shoots at him. Still, Roy perseveres, and after more tips from the creepy crime photographer, Bible quotations from Pernice, knowing silences from the priest and a prescient dream, he realizes how the arson was started and the bullet fired.

Michaels, best known as the front man for the band Operation Ivy, creates a unique narrative voice, but it takes a lot of magical thinking to make this surreal plot work.

THE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND

Moyes, Jojo Pamela Dorman/Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-0-670-02661-6

The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two love stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London.

In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Édouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting. Sophie’s pluck in standing up to the new German kommandant in the village draws his interest. An art lover, he also notices Édouard’s portrait of Sophie, which captures her essence (and the kommandant’s adoration). Arranging to dine regularly at Sophie’s inn with his men, he begins a cat-and-mouse 22

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courtship. She resists. But learning that Édouard is being held in a particularly harsh “reprisal” camp, she must decide what she will sacrifice for Édouard’s freedom. The rich portrayals of Sophie, her family and neighbors hauntingly capture wartime’s gray morality. Cut to 2006 and a different moral puzzle.

Thirty-two-year-old widow Liv has been struggling financially and emotionally since her husband David’s sudden death. She meets Paul in a bar after her purse is stolen. The divorced father is the first man she’s been drawn to since she was widowed. They spend a glorious night together, but after noticing Édouard’s portrait of Sophie on Liv’s wall, he rushes away with no explanation. In fact, Paul is as smitten as Liv, but his career is finding and returning stolen art to the rightful owners. Usually the artwork was confiscated by Germans during World War II, not WWI, but Édouard’s descendants recently hired him to find this very painting. Liv is not about to part with it; David bought it on their honeymoon because the portrait reminded him of Liv. In love, Liv and Paul soon find themselves on opposite sides of a legal battle.

While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.

QUIET DELL

Phillips, Jayne Anne Scribner (480 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-4391-7253-7 Phillips (Lark and Termite, 2009) fuses the established facts surrounding the 1931 trial of serial killer Harry Powers with her imagined version of the victims’ inner lives and the fictional lives of a handful of characters connected by the crimes.

Financially strapped since her husband’s death, Asta Eicher lives with her three children in a large suburban Chicago house, where she takes in boarders. Devoted to her and the children, former boarder Charles O’Boyle, who has prospered in his business, proposes to Asta while celebrating a joyful Christmas with the family in 1930. Aware he is gay, she turns him down. Instead, she assumes she will solve her problems by marrying Cornelius Pierson, with whom she’s secretly begun corresponding through the American Friendship Society (think snail-mail Match.com).

In July 1931, Asta leaves her children with a babysitter while she travels with Cornelius to set up the family’s new home. A week later, Cornelius returns alone to fetch the kids. Phillips brings the Eichers to vivid life—Asta’s guilt, 14-year-old Grethe’s innocence, 12-year-old Hart’s protectiveness, 9-year-old Annabel’s spirit—and wisely eschews the grisly details of their deaths.

Months later, the police discover the Eichers’ remains in the basement of a garage belonging to Harry Powers in Quiet Dell, W.V. Charged with the Eichers’ murders, Powers is indicted for the murder of Dorothy Lemke, whose body has also been discovered in the garage, because the circumstantial evidence in her case is stronger. The snippets of actual court testimony

and reportage included are harrowing. While digging up dirt on Powers, (fictional) Chicago Tribune reporter Emily Thornhill falls deeply in love with Asta’s (real-life) banker. She also takes in an orphaned street urchin. So in the aftermath of one family’s destruction, Emily creates a new if unconventional “family” of people she loves.

Phillips’ prose is as haunting as the questions she raises about the natures of sin, evil and grace.

WHITE FIRE

Preston, Douglas; Child, Lincoln Grand Central Publishing (384 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 12, 2013 978-1-4555-2583-6 Preston and Childs (Two Graves, 2012, etc.) bring back FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, expert in the psychology of serial killers and other criminal deviants.

Pendergast is independently wealthy, and despite his cold, logical nature, he possesses a certain compassion, explaining his support of the once-troubled, youthful Corrie Swanson as she navigates the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Corrie needs a thesis to please a chauvinist professor. She finds it after discovering a story told by Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle at a literary dinner. The tale related to no crime but rather, the 1876 killing of miners in Roaring Fork, Colo., by a grizzly bear. Her thesis: a study of perimortem trauma on human bones. The problem: Roaring Fork is now a ski resort of “oppressive wealth, entitlement, and smugness”—think Aspen—and the powers that be, land-developing descendants of silver barons who raped the mountains, deny her access to the bodies, recently exhumed because of a new construction project. Pendergast leverages permission, and Swanson begins her study, only to discover the miners were killed—and cannibalized—by humans. Shocking, certainly, but something else wicked her way comes: A modernday fiend is murdering moneyed Roaring Fork residents and incinerating their bodies by burning down their mansions. Pendergast remains one of crime fiction’s memorable protagonists— pale, silvery of eye, inscrutable of mien, always black-clad—and it’s he who discovers the old deaths bear witness to the new. The authors provide a reasonable supporting cast, including a richboy ski bum–turned–town librarian; an overwhelmed sheriff who grows into his job; Roger Kleefisch, a Baker Street Irregular, who assists Pendergast in uncovering lost Conan Doyle esoterica; and Capt. Stacy Bowdree, lone descendant of one of the dead miners.

Jaded crime fiction buffs might find the premise hyperbolic, but beneath the overwrought headlines, Pendergast solves captivating mysteries.

THE PROFESSOR OF TRUTH

Robertson, James Other Press (336 pp.) $15.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-59051-632-4 The elusiveness and meaning of truth lie at the core of this roman à clef about the Pan Am plane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

In that tragedy, Alan Tealing, a professor of literature and narrator of the story, lost his wife and young daughter, so one might conjecture that he would welcome the conviction of Khalil Khazar, the alleged perpetrator.

Yet Tealing has his doubts, doubts that come to the fore when Ted Nilsen, a mysterious CIA operative, shows up one cold winter’s day on Tealing’s doorstep. Nilsen is dying of cancer and wants to give Tealing one last opportunity to find out the truth, a philosophical stance to which Tealing is both personally and philosophically committed. The testimony that convicted Khazar came from Martin Parroulet, the cab driver who had driven him to Heathrow. Since, shortly after Khazar’s appeal was rejected, the cab driver disappeared, it was hypothesized that his testimony was tainted because it had been “bought” (for $2 million) and that he was living somewhere under a witness protection program. Toward the end of their long conversation, Nilsen hands Tealing a piece of paper with an address for Parroulet, and in the pursuit of truth, the professor leaves Scotland to find him. Parroulet has taken a new identity, Parr, and is living in Sheildston, an obscure outpost in Australia. While there, Tealing makes contact with Parr’s wife and, in the climax of the novel, has a long conversation with the reluctant Parr only due to the fact that Tealing had arrived opportunely to help save Parr’s house from raging brushfires. By the end, Tealing gets close to the truth—and has an epiphany that might be as far as anyone can get.

Robertson writes brilliantly about the quest for truth and hints at the possibility of personal redemption and transformation.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES

Rogers, Kenny with Blakely, Mike Forge (320 pp.) $24.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-7653-2385-9

The country star extends his brand by collaborating on a book that shows how to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.

Someone who loves country music from the ’70s and ’80s, Texas Hold ’em and Texas in general could probably guess what’s in this novel before reading it. Credited to Rogers (Luck or Something Like It, 2012) and regional novelist Blakely (Come Sundown, 2006, etc.), the plot involves a country singer |

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who shares some biographical particulars with Rogers (earlier rock success before a big country breakthrough, Houston-area roots, an insider’s knowledge of Nashville and the music business, and a big hit about gambling) and puts him in the middle of all sorts of complications that involve gambling, a scheme to con a con man, a television pilot, an international betting ring, the FBI and CIA, a heart transplant, a loving mama and romantic intrigue with a beautiful woman who becomes his manager. How beautiful? “You’re drop-dead gorgeous, Dorothy! The cameras would feast on you like a lion on a Watusi!”

And “you make Sophia Loren look like a second runner-up in a plain Jane pageant.” And “Brigitte Bardot would kill Raquel Welch for your looks.” Yet the plotting manages to withstand all the chicken-fried clichés, as the stakes continue to escalate beyond anything the reader and most of the characters had anticipated. As the protagonist prepares to launch his country career by appearing as featured entertainment on a televised poker tournament that hopscotches across Texas, the gambling pits seasoned professionals and ringers against amateurs who “looked as if they couldn’t tell an ace in the hole from a hole in the ground.” After a stop in San Antonio includes the obligatory visit to the Alamo (“That there is hallowed ground”), the novel reaches its climax with perhaps the wildest night ever experienced at Gilley’s, once the ultimate Texas honky-tonk.

It’s pretty easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys and to guess who will win.

A caper novel for fans of country music legend Rogers.

THE LITTLE TOKYO INFORMANT

Rosenheim, Andrew Overlook (400 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 29, 2013 978-1-4683-0073-4

Rosenheim (Fear Itself, 2012, etc.) brings back swashbuckling Special Agent Jimmy Nessheim in a noirish World War II–era thriller that’s rich in atmosphere if light on momentum.

In the weeks before Pearl Harbor, Nessheim works a tedious assignment in Hollywood, consulting on B-level movies and keeping an eye on various local communities as the country braces for the possibility of war. One of Nessheim’s informants, Billy Osaka, has vanished from Little Tokyo, an enclave teeming with immigrants and gangs and nisei, second-generation Japanese-Americans suspected of divided loyalties. As Nessheim tracks Osaka’s trail through a netherworld of illicit gambling rings, duplicitous Russian émigrés and loutish Hollywood directors, his boss back in Washington, FBI Assistant Director Harry Guttman, probes rumors that Soviet intelligence has wired $50,000 to a Japanese bank in Los Angeles. At a private meeting in Rock Creek Park, Thornton Palmer, a State Department official, reveals to Guttman that the Soviets are spying on their erstwhile American allies, scuttlebutt that Guttman is inclined to believe after Palmer is found dead hours later. Rosenheim shifts dutifully between Guttman 24

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and Nessheim, their investigations merging amid a bumper crop of blood-stained corpses, double agents and two-faced femmes fatales.

After Guttman is nearly killed by a mysterious assassin, Nessheim pursues his leads to Hawaii, dodging and weaving among criminals and military and eventually landing in the brig at Pearl Harbor, where he witnesses the audacious attack he’s surmised is imminent.

The ghosts of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler loom large here, as do the classic films Chinatown and Casablanca, lending Rosenheim’s prose a velvety texture. But the plot never escapes its own plodding rhythm, even as Rosenheim attempts to spruce up prosaic scenes with cameos from historical figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson and William Stephenson.

Genial, leisurely political suspense that fails to deliver thrills.

SWIMMING IN THE MOON

Schoenewaldt, Pamela Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-06-220223-9

A mother and daughter clash as they try to make a new life in 1900s America.

It is hard to say what this novel is trying to be: A coming-of-age story? A coming-to-America tale? A chant of justice, or a song of madness? In 1904 Naples, Italy, narrator Lucia Esposito is 14, the product of a rape that also left her mother, Teresa, sullen and prone to fits of anger. They live and work together as maids for a countess who enjoys Lucia’s reading and Teresa’s singing voice. But when the countess’ stock villain of a husband tries to correct Teresa’s difficult behavior with torturous “methods,” she and Lucia flee to America and take up residence in Cleveland. Teresa gets a job dipping chocolates to subsidize Lucia’s dream of graduating from high school, but like many immigrants of the time, they barely scrape by.

And though Teresa’s work conditions are better than those of the many garment workers in the city, her boss’s advances incite her rage to an unsustainable degree. She quits and joins a touring vaudeville act as the Naples Nightingale, hoping it will make her happier, despite the less-than-promising road life. Lucia graduates from high school and enjoys a brief stint in college, but her mother’s predictable mental health collapse forces her to return to Cleveland to be her caretaker. The most promising thread of the novel picks up here, as Lucia becomes an advocate for the ladies’ garment workers’ union and helps organize the 1911 general strike. Doing so while caring for a catatonic mother has its disadvantages, though, and Lucia struggles against this role with unfortunate results. Her frustrations are understandable, but Schoenewaldt’s brush strokes are too broad to paint Lucia in a nuanced or particularly sympathetic light. Exposition in general is clunky, and opportunities for describing the era in greater detail are frequently glossed over. A gift of a pineapple from Lucia’s love interest goes by with hardly a mention.

Whether Lucia had ever seen one before, we’ll never know.

Most successful as a primer on turn-of-the-century work conditions and union efforts.

“Fun stuff...” from the alligator man

THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL

Shacochis, Bob Atlantic Monthly (640 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-8021-1982-7 National Book Award—winning novelist Shacochis (The Immaculate Invasion, 1999, etc.) makes a long-awaited— indeed, much-anticipated—return to fiction with this stunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost.

The wait was worth it, for Shacochis has delivered a work that in its discomfiting moral complexity and philosophical density belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.

Tom Harrington is a humanitarian lawyer whose path takes him into difficult country: Haiti in the wake of dictatorship and storm, for one. He is unsettled and lonely, even as his stateside wife is one of those blessedly ignorant Americans who “pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life”—a comfortable life that would be much more attainable were Tom someone who cared about money. He is not saintly, though. Into his orbit has come a fetching, utterly mysterious journalist whom Tom has met more than once along the trail of good deeds done by sometimes not so good people. Her murder sends him reeling into a long, arcing story of discovery that becomes ever more tangled as Shacochis spins it, taking it across decades and oceans. Among the players are a tough-as-nails Delta Force combatant who surely knows that he’s being played as a pawn by the likes of an unlikable senior spook who lives for opera, cocktails and deception; even so, the soldier takes pride in his role in what he calls “Jihadi pest control,” just as the spy takes pride in what he did in all those dark corners during the Cold War. These characters are bound to one another, and to Jackie, by blood or elective affinities. Either way, Shacochis would seem to suggest, their real business is to hide themselves from the world, while the business of the world is to help them disguise their subterfuge. Everything in the landscape is secret and forbidden, potentially fatal, doomed to fail—and yet everyone persists, presses on, with what they believe their missions to be. Shacochis is a master of characterization; his story, though very long, moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written: “ ‘Cleopatra spoke nine languages,’ Jackie informed him with a distinctly peevish rise to her voice for what she obviously considered a set series of infinitely tiresome challenges to the perception of her specialness, the unfair excesses of her drop-dead good looks or intellect or courage or God knows, her very birth, as if she had somehow stolen those laudable parts of herself from someone else, an imaginary deprived person.”

An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.

THE ALLIGATOR MAN

Sheehan, James Center Street/Hachette (352 pp.) $23.00 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-4555-0864-8 Sheehan (The Law of Second Chances, 2008, etc.) weaves a father-son reconciliation melodrama into a Florida courtroom clash sparked by murder and corruption.

Kevin Wylie is the top-ranked associate in Bernie Stang’s Miami, Fla., criminal defense firm. While contemplating setting up shop for himself, he learns of a dark secret behind the high-rolling Stang’s defense of drug dealers.

With that, Stang tells Wylie the town isn’t big enough for both of them. Struggling with that threat, Kevin gets word that his long-estranged father, Tom, also an attorney, is dying of cancer. Kevin’s asked to visit Tom in the north Florida town of St. Albans. Meantime, Roy Johnson, former CEO of Dynatron, a bankrupt international energy company, has been reported killed in a deliberate hit-and-run accident near his lavish estate at Gladestown at the Everglades’ edge. Johnson profited from a $100 million buyout shortly before Dynatron went belly up, leaving employees jobless and with no insurance or pension funds. It’s no surprise Johnson’s been run down on the road, but the real shock is that Billy Fuller, a longtime friend of Tom Wylie, is accused of the murder. Despite the great premise, Sheehan’s characters are too easily slotted into neat spots on the storyboard: Kevin’s an angst-ridden, earnest Tom Cruise type, with a Matthew McConaughey type stepping in as fisherman/guide/ auxiliary sheriff/vigilante Carlisle Buchanan. Readers meet the standard judge who dislikes the brash defense attorney, enjoy the requisite father-son reconciliation, and watch as one love affair crashes and another simmers back home in St. Albans, all while Sheehan runs past three conclusions before he terminates every loose plot thread.

Fun stuff, albeit less tense and conflicted than the works of Scott Turow and John Grisham.

SPIDER IN A TREE

Stinson, Susan Small Beer Press (300 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-61873-069-5 Stinson’s (Venus of Chalk, 2004, etc.) novel about the life of 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards offers readers a heavy-handed dose of old-time religion.

Few would agree that life in the 1700s was easy. Religious tenets were important providers of structure, guidance and comfort for American colonists. Edwards, considered one of the foremost preachers of his era, is credited with inspiring the First Great Awakening, a period of time that stirred many colonists to |

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search for personal redemption and spurred numerous revivals throughout settlements in the New England area. Stinson attempts to capture the spirit of this time and its aftermath through Edwards’ writings and other documentation and tells the story of the Edwards family, including their two slaves, Leah and Saul, and the circumstances that lead to a final rift between Edwards and his flock. Edwards’ sermons initially create such powerful emotions that many worshippers, overwhelmed by divine visitation, are whipped into a frenzy of crying and swooning. But these experiences are soon replaced by suspicion, as some people associate the Northampton preacher with several unsettling events, including the death of a young girl, the suicide of Edwards’ uncle, a scandal involving the youth of the town and the irresponsible behavior of a family member. A nature lover, Edwards contemplates spiders and other spindly legged creatures and jots down observations as he perches in the branches of an elm tree, and his wife, Sarah, tries—and fails—to concoct curatives using spider webs. His credibility among the community waning, Edwards wonders why the sermons of visiting preachers seem to invigorate his flock while his words are met with snores. But a milestone sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” reinvigorates worshippers—at least for a short time. Edwards, though, is eventually terminated by the church council.

Stinson, whose impeccable research dominates the book, might have had more success presenting her documentation as a biography rather than attempting a fictionalized version of Edwards’ life: The one-dimensional characters and excerpts from his writings are no more engaging than required reading in a high school textbook.

BREATHLESS

Swärd, Anne Translated by Bragan-Turner, Deborah Viking (288 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 19, 2013 978-0-670-02654-8 Swedish novelist Swärd’s American debut chronicles the slightly off-kilter friendship between a young girl from an unconventional Swedish family and an older boy who has immigrated to Sweden from Hungary with his father.

Before her birth in 1969, Lo’s extended family moved to the more refined south from hardscrabble northern Sweden at the urging of Lo’s paternal grandfather, Björn. His son is Lo’s father, David, but the love between Lo’s parents is shadowed by the unspoken, unconsummated passion between Lo’s mother, Katarina, and Björn. Raised in a household of 13 adults—her parents, her grandparents on both sides and various aunts and uncles—Lo remains happily swathed in the family’s love and protection until she is 6, when she meets Lukas at a fire that has broken out in the village.

Already 13, Lukas seems younger since he has barely been domesticated. He lives with his father, who speaks no Swedish and beats him. After he rides her home on his bicycle, Lukas and Lo form an 26

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immediate bond. Lukas is every mother’s nightmare—too old, too wild—and Lo’s family forbids their friendship. Lo is an able if disinterested student; Lukas can barely read. But Lo remains undaunted in her loyalty. For years, she and Lukas meet regularly at the abandoned cabin in the woods. They watch Katarina’s favorite French film Breathless and swim naked in the stream. They are physically at ease with each other’s bodies, but even after Lukas reaches horny adolescence, there’s no sexual experimenting. At 15, Lo travels to Copenhagen with Lukas, now a working adult, at least on the surface. His physical desire manifests itself. But his love remains pure.

Lo’s does not. And her betrayal haunts her into adulthood. Interspersed with Lo’s recollections of her childhood are descriptions of her wandering adulthood and loveless adult sex life.

The sensual but grim story of damaged souls never rises above a simmer.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Trollope, Joanna Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-0-06-220046-4

Six best-selling modern writers were commissioned by the Austen Project to update the classic novels. Matchless chronicler of Middle England Trollope (Daughters in Law, 2011, etc.) was paired with Sense & Sensibility, which now morphs into upmarket chick-lit.

Austen fans will be familiar with the story of the Dashwood girls—sensible Elinor, beautiful Marianne, and young, spirited Margaret—who, with their mother, are cruelly cast out of the family mansion when their father dies. Trollope adds interior-design values to Austen’s preoccupations—sex, money and class—by pitting the Dashwoods’ shabby-chic taste (faded damask curtains; pretty but chipped china) against the stripped-down, inappropriately modern style of the thoughtless cousins who evict them. Taken in by another wealthy cousin with another decaying mansion, they move to a modern house on his estate—oh, the suffering. Trollope offers occasional flashes of Austen-esque wit, but more often, her writing, though immensely experienced, lacks the grace of the original. Without it, the girls and their misadventures in pursuit of romance and financial security seem less subtle and charming, more foolish and conventional. Marianne falls for a rotter instead of solid Col. Brandon; Elinor “ha[s] feelings for” nice-but-weak Ed, who seems to get engaged to someone else. Their various happy endings bring neatness but less joy than Austen’s.

A questionable remake of a classic, honorably undertaken but coarser and less comic than the original—unsurprisingly.

THE ISLE OF YOUTH

van den Berg, Laura Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $14.00 paper | Nov. 5, 2013 978-0-374-17723-2 A gifted American fiction writer tackles little slivers of crime from the points of view of young women on the verge of self-discovery.

Had these hardhearted stories of trespassers, exiles and beautiful losers come from one of the regular blokes, readers would label them noir and call it a day.

But in the hands of superlative writer van den Berg (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, 2009), these stories seem to dig a little deeper and resonate a little longer. In the opening story, “I Looked For You, I Called Your Name,” a woman on her honeymoon realizes a series of natural disasters is merely a precursor to the looming tragedy of her own marriage. “Opa-Locka” is a traditional privateeye story about two sisters playing detective, waiting to see how the story ends. Two fantastic and very different stories are the collection’s highlights. “Lessons” captures a moment in the risky lives of a gang of rural youngsters who have reimagined themselves as stickup artists. “Why didn’t they go to school and get regular jobs and get married and live in houses?” it asks. “The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible.” Meanwhile, in “Acrobat,” a woman whose husband abandons her in Paris falls in with a band of street performers who adopts her as one of their own.

In “Antarctica,” a rather uncommon housewife travels a vast distance to a remote scientific base at the South Pole to discover how her brother died. “The Greatest Escape” finds a young woman wrestling with the long-ago disappearance of her father. Finally, the title story successfully integrates all of van den Berg’s gifts for stories of mistaken identity, unresolved menace and uncomfortable insight. With prose as crisp and cool as that of Richard Lange or Patricia Highsmith, van den Berg is someone to keep track of.

A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.

COMPOUND FRACTURES

White, Stephen Dutton (384 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-0-525-95260-2

Dr. Alan Gregory’s 20th brush with crime is his last.

Ever since White announced on the publication of Line of Fire (2012) that he was wrapping up the Boulder psychologist’s caseload, it’s been clear that the series would go out with a bang rather than a whimper. Fans who read that last installment will recall that Alan’s ex-patient Michael McClelland, now doing time for murder, had sent a proxy killer to Boulder; Alan’s partner, Diane Estevez, had shot his wife, prosecutor Lauren Crowder, in the back; and Alan had traced Diane’s

husband, Raoul, a wealthy venture capitalist, to a dark, far-reaching conspiracy. All these problems are compounded by a pair of excavations. One of these is literal: A demolition worker finds a .38 caliber handgun suspended inside the chimney of a house he’s been knocking down. The other is metaphorical: Alan begins a series of sessions with inexperienced Dr. Delilah Travis, whom he’s chosen specifically because she’s one of the few therapists in the area he doesn’t know. What mainly emerges from both the investigation and the sessions that follow are the epic difficulties Alan’s had in trusting any of the most important people in his life: his late wife; his old partner; his new therapist; his longtime friend, Boulder detective Sam Purdy; and his attorney and former patient, Kirsten Lord. By the time the kitchen-sink plot has linked Lauren’s office to coverups involving everything from a 12-year-old shooting to Osama bin Laden’s nephew, readers will be convinced that every citizen in Boulder has put in hours on Alan’s couch.This entire final installment, in fact, is structured like a marathon therapy session, with all parties constantly hinting at buried revelations that are only gradually brought to light.

Fans sad to see the saga end will be enthralled by its daring crescendos; newcomers are likely to find the proceedings impenetrable.

THE ASSEMBLER OF PARTS

Wientzen, Raoul Arcade (320 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-61145-891-6

In this astonishing first novel, 7-yearold, physically disabled Jess reviews her brief, tumultuous life from heaven via films provided by The Assembler, a supreme being who, for mysterious reasons, declined to give her thumbs, several bones, a whole heart and the gift of hearing.

For all her defects, hers is a miraculous childhood. With the loving support of her Catholic family, and following several surgeries, she is able to become a vital, expressive, delightful girl. But for all the care she receives from her mother, Kate, and father, Ford—and all of the doting of Joe Cassidy, Ford’s bighearted post office co-worker, who was driven to drink by the loss of his wife and young son in an accident—she is darkly shadowed by fate. The events leading to her death are told with an exquisite attention to detail, emotional and physical. The subsequent narrative, which turns on a wrongful death suit filed by her parents against a cardiologist who failed to spot the vascular anomaly that caused Jess to stop breathing, unfolds with the tension of good detective fiction. Callously investigated for parental neglect, Ford and his pregnant wife are forced to attend parenting sessions along with child abusers and drug addicts who ridicule and assault them. They sign on with a personal injury firm in pursuit of justice, only to have the profitminded lawyers violate Jess’ memory by building a case that portrays her as helpless and pathetic. The Assembler, who has a |

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sardonic streak, keeps Jess in the dark about where these posthumous events are leading, but she isn’t afraid to call his number.

The low-key conclusion is a bit of a letdown after all that has gone before, but Virginia-based author Wientzen, a pediatrician, imparts so much about the preciousness of life and the power of forgiveness that this is a minor shortcoming.

Boasting a fearlessly self-possessed child narrator, this is one of those books you stop what you’re doing to finish, take a breath to ponder its profundities, and start again.

m ys t e r y LOOT

Alexander, Gary Five Star (264 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 18, 2013 978-1-4328-2717-5 Stand-up comic Buster Hightower, his beloved Carla and a gaggle of slapstickdriven neurotics chase after MacGuffins.

When Judith Roswell needs cash to placate the bill collectors, she brings a snazzy “family heirloom” to pawnbroker Randall Coll. Disappointed with the meager sum he offers, she snatches it back, returns home, packs up the treasures secreted in her basement and donates them to the charity Services for the Needy. The pawnbroker, however, has his wacky nephew Mad Dog follow her, a task he botches so badly that she hires a private eye to find out who’s stalking her. The shamus, black sheep Tyler Polk “Tip” Taylor III, estranged from his philandering dad and alcoholic mumsy, has recently received a diploma from the Gumshoe Online Institute of Private Detection. Judith hires Tip over the phone while she’s arranging for Carla and her Last Chance Agency to provide car insurance for his Aston Martin. The trio realize that Judith is fudging facts about her family treasures, which have now attracted the attention of reality TV developer Vance Popkirk and decrepit former Roswell housemaid Harriet, who thinks she’s entitled to some of the loot as payment for Judith’s father’s pawing her. Soon, Randall is spying on Mad Dog, who’s busy trying to strangle Harriet, shoot Judith’s brother and dragoon Popkirk into a partnership. Meanwhile, Tip tries to get into Judith’s pants, Harriet lunges for Tip’s zipper, and mumsy hires a lawyer to clean out the elder Tip in divorce proceedings.

Carla, a matchmaker to the core of her middle-aged bones, tries to get the Taylors together again while Buster ends his nightly gig at the Westside Bowling Alley and Casino with stale but funny lawyer jokes. A little nookie and a lot of car chases and clandestine house entries complete the plot, which draws its inspiration from the 1954 robbery of the Pioneer Safe Deposit Vaults.

As usual, Buster (Interlock, 2012, etc.) provides a playful workout for your sense of humor, unless, of course, you’re a lawyer.

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THE RED QUEEN DIES

Bailey, Frankie Y. Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-312-64175-7

Bailey’s Future Lite procedural leads detectives through the past in search of a killer’s motives.

In the parallel-ish world of 2019, Detective Hannah McCabe, of the Albany PD, is unlucky enough to catch the case of what seems to be serial murder. The first two victims have a telltale sign left by the killer, but McCabe suspects that the recent murder of Tony-winning actress Vivian Jessup is the latest in the series even though Vivian has a few years on the other two victims. Hannah and her partner, Mike Baxter, start to find indications that might connect Vivian to the other murders despite the fact that she evidently ran with a different crowd. But the closest thing Hannah and Mike can get to a suspect is the wealthy Ted Thornton, who’s romantically linked to the recently deceased. The only other clue the detectives have is the possibility that the murder was related to Vivian’s lifelong interest in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Hannah can rely on her erudite dad as a sounding board; her troubled relationship with her brother Adam, which still weighs heavy on her mind, is another story. It’s never clear why this tale of a serial murder investigation is set in the future or what it gains from that setting apart from a certain unwelcome opacity.

Bailey (Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave, 2011, etc.) has done better work.

DEATH CANYON

Bertsch, David Riley Scribner (384 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4516-9800-8 Are you attached to Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Its peaceful beauty is being destroyed by the evil machinations of a shadowy group.

Jake Trent used to be an East Coast attorney, a prosecutor and a member of a powerful task force. Now that he’s just a fishing guide, his old enemies are about to catch up to him. Though the summer tourists are just starting to arrive, an avalanche has already claimed one life and a bear attack, another. Jake’s overnight fishing trip turns into a nightmare when he finds a dead man hung up in the river and realizes that the authorities consider him a likely suspect. Meanwhile, park ranger Noelle Klimpton, who discovered the bear’s victims, a dead French tourist and his injured wife, feels uneasy about the attack. When she has the bear tooth she found checked out by an expert, he tells her that it hasn’t come from a living bear. Noelle and Jake, who both have the idea of interviewing the injured tourist, team up to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Although Jake’s been trying

“Titus and Luke’s second case is a fine mystery, awash in period detail, with enough suspects to make things interesting.” from dark waters

DARK WATERS

to fight the development of a local ranch, he seems to be the target of environmental activists willing to use force to achieve their aims. The entire area is racked all the while by small earthquakes that are getting stronger and more dangerous each day.

Fearing that the local police may be in the pay of whoever is causing the troubles, Jake and Noelle risk their lives in a desperate attempt to uncover the truth.

Bertsch’s debut, the first in a planned series, features an interesting premise, a stunning location, a protagonist with plenty of room for future growth, and the obligatory sex scenes, but it never cranks up to the tension found in the most thrilling thrillers.

Blake, Robin Minotaur (384 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-250-00673-8 Politics, religion and murder in Georgian England.

When Titus Cragg, lawyer and coroner, and his friend Dr. Luke Fidelis (A Dark Anatomy, 2012) are called to the scene of an apparent drowning, they little know that this is just the first in a series of dead bodies coming their way. Innkeeper Antony Egan, the uncle of Titus’ wife, was a drunk, so it comes as no surprise that he apparently slipped into the river and drowned, leaving the inn to his two daughters. Meanwhile, the Lancashire town of Preston is in turmoil over a hotly contested parliamentary election. Followers of the Whigs, who currently hold power, and the Tories, who favor the deposed Stuarts, are willing to do almost anything to get their men elected. Only a small fraction of the locals, and no Catholics, are allowed to vote. So when a wealthy farmer suddenly dies at an inn and Luke proves that he was poisoned, Titus begins to wonder if someone is killing off likely voters. Rumors are spreading that the farmer died of a plaguelike disease; the election may be disrupted if people flee. A serving maid who was turned away from Egan’s inn for loose behavior served the poisoned dish to the farmer, but Titus finds more likely suspects in a political agent and his mysterious aide. Several attempts on his life prove that his investigations have touched a nerve.

Titus and Luke’s second case is a fine mystery, awash in period detail, with enough suspects to make things interesting.

THE DYING HOURS

Billingham, Mark Atlantic Monthly (400 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-8021-2148-6 DI Tom Thorne, back in uniform after his last round of insubordination, goes even further off the rez in his attempts to prove that a series of suicides was something else.

John and Margaret Cooper didn’t leave a note when they topped themselves; the bottle of insulin they used didn’t carry a prescription label; and Margaret had removed her dentures, as if she were merely going to sleep. But those telltale signs don’t persuade DI Paul Binns or DCI Neil Hackett that the Coopers might have been murdered. Since nobody will listen to him, Thorne signs off on the official findings and then goes off on his own—first during his free time, then on manufactured sick days—to find more compelling evidence that they’re wrong. For better or worse, evidence of a sort keeps coming in. The earlier suicides of Brian Gibbs and Fiona Daniels look equally suspicious, and more victims soon follow, each of them clearly (at least to Thorne’s mind) coaxed or forced into killing themselves. The breakthrough comes when Thorne, sneaking behind the back of DS Helen Weeks, the lover he’s been more or less living with ever since he saved her life (The Demands, 2012), links all the elderly victims to a 30-year-old case.

But even when he’s satisfied himself of the killer’s motive and identity, Thorne still can’t find any evidence that changes Hackett’s mind, and the harder he tries, the more he risks getting booted off the force for good.

Too many views of the killer at work and not enough actual mystery. But no one currently working the British scene tops Billingham for mordant intensity, whether Thorne is surveying the latest scene of an apparent suicide or just trying to explain why he called in sick.

WINTER AT DEATH’S HOTEL

Cameron, Kenneth Sourcebooks Landmark (400 pp.) $14.99 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-4022-8082-5

After his recent resurrection of Jack the Ripper (The Frightened Man, 2009), Cameron crosses the ocean with Arthur Conan Doyle and his indomitable wife and finds, in 1896 New York, an equally depraved killer of women.

As the Doyles arrive at the New Britannic hotel, Louisa Doyle—“Touie” to her husband—sees a Titian-haired young woman crossing the lobby with a handsome young man. The next day, the redheaded woman is horribly dead in the Bowery, mutilated and unidentified. Recognizing her face from a newspaper sketch, Louisa tells Arthur that she’d seen the woman in their hotel.

His reaction is affectionate but dismissive: Touie must have been imagining things; she mustn’t make her husband look ridiculous by putting herself forward as “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.” When a sprained ankle maroons Louisa at the New Britannic as Arthur sets |

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off on a lecture tour, she tries to share her knowledge with other people, beginning with New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Their reactions are equally dismissive but a lot less affectionate. Given the rampant corruption among the ranks of the NYPD, Louisa’s limited mobility and her equally (and surprisingly) limited exchequer, she won’t be able to shed any light on the Bowery Butcher, whose list of victims grows apace, without some new friends. Fortunately, these include New York Express reporter A.M. Fitch, celebrity actor Henry Irving, pioneering feminist Victoria Woodhull, novelist/spiritualist Marie Corelli and Col. William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill. Though she runs rings around the police, Louisa is no great shakes as a detective; the high points in this horrific period tale are the moments when she stands up to a series of condescending males, including, in the treasurable final tableau, her famous husband.

Rated R for graphic sexual violence, official corruption and the liberal use of obscenities by figures on both sides of the law.

LAND OF THE SILVER DRAGON

Clare, Alys Severn House (240 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8276-9 Murderous attacks in England’s Fen country call for every skill an apprentice healer can conjure up.

Lassair, who has been working with her healer aunt, is preparing to return to Cambridge, where she’s studying with the wizard Gurdyman, when a series of attacks on her family members by an enormous redheaded man rock the peaceful village of Aelf Fen. Fearing for her safety, Lassair’s father escorts her to Cambridge. But when, mistakenly thinking the danger over, she decides to return for a visit home by herself, she’s kidnapped and taken to Iceland.

Although Lassair has already had visions of a Viking ship, and Gurdyman has shown her a map he is creating of the known world in the 11th century, she’s amazed to find herself in one of those faraway places. Upon her arrival, she is surprisingly welltreated, and as the leader, Thorfinn Ofnirson, gets to know her, he slowly reveals what the redheaded killer is searching for and why he believes it has been hidden by someone in her family.

Meanwhile, Lassair’s lover, Rollo, is on another spy mission for King William. From Sicily, he senses her danger but can only worry. Lassair must count on Thorfinn to take her back home to find the magical object and help end a family feud that involves her far more closely than she could have imagined.

The latest in Clare’s Aelf Fen series (The Way Between the Worlds, 2012, etc.) is one of her best, charmingly combining romance, mystery and mysticism.

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THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

Davidson, Diane Mott Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-06-134817-4

Three women formerly married to doctors had formed a support group named Amour Anonymous. Now, the past has caught up to one of them.

After her divorce, it took caterer Goldy Schulz years to recover her sense of self-worth. Now, she’s happily married to Tom, a police detective in Aspen Meadows, Colo., who hardly minds that she occasionally meddles in his cases. Goldy and her helper Julian are catering a Mexican-themed birthday party for her son Arch and his friend Drew, whose mom, Holly, has been part of the support group. The party is to be held at the home of wealthy Marla, the third member. After Drew’s father and his second wife show up uninvited, things go from nasty to tragic when Holly collapses and dies in Marla’s driveway. Goldy and Marla, determined to discover why, review all Goldy’s notes from their meetings. But the research they do on Holly’s current life is more revealing.

Holly lost her house and had to sell her expensive cars and move Drew to a cheaper school even though she was awarded child support from her well-heeled ex. Although Holly seemed to be living on the money from her artwork, even that turns out to be not quite the truth. The plot thickens with an attack on an Episcopal priest who may have been counseling Holly and the death of a Goldy wannabe who just happened to be with him. Goldy is lucky to escape violence at her own home from an attacker who’s obviously searching for something. Goldy, Marla and the police had better figure out what before more people die.

Davidson snaps back from the mediocre Crunch Time (2011) with a more tantalizing puzzle. But fans may well skim the mystery and focus on the many appended recipes and bits of cooking lore scattered throughout.

MATTERS OF DOUBT

Easley, Warren C. Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4642-0172-1 978-1-4642-0173-8 paper 978-1-4642-0173-8 Lg. Prt. A lawyer turns sleuth to help a homeless youth uncover the story behind his mother’s murder.

Attorney Cal Claxton moved to Dundee to take it easy after he retired from working for the city of Los Angeles. Though Cal anticipates that he can spend time working on his fly-fishing now that he’s deep in Oregon, his plate is soon full of the jobs you’d expect to find in a small town. When a teenager comes to Cal begging for him to investigate a case, Cal tries to explain that

investigating’s not in his job description. The kid, a rebellious Portland youth who goes by the name Picasso, wants someone to look into his mother’s death since he knows the police aren’t taking the case seriously. Picasso is convinced his mother’s former boyfriend Mitchell Conyers is the one responsible for her death, and he is ready to back up his beliefs with action. Cal tries to soothe Picasso while trying to find out if Mitchell’s sleek exterior hides more sinister motives. Meanwhile, Picasso spends his nights with other transients and his days painting a mural of hope on the exterior of a local free health clinic. These days of freedom may be over when he stumbles on a murder for which he is the prime suspect.

The motives and murders in Easley’s debut fit together like a set of nesting dolls, with each resolution leading to a new case. Cal comes across as an average guy who’s just trying to lend a hand.

THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO BERLIN

Ewan, Chris Minotaur (336 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-250-00297-6

Charlie Howard witnesses a murder, but since there’s no body, nobody believes him.

Suave British mystery writer Charlie usually indulges his burgling sideline, he explains in expansive first-person narration, only when he’s enticed, but his current challenge is unique. Shady Freddy Farmer, whose disreputable brother Nathan is well-known to Charlie, says he’s working for the British embassy in Berlin and blackmails Charlie into recovering an unnamed but valuable item that’s been stolen. Charlie is tasked with breaking into the lodging of each of the four suspects in search of said missing item. He’ll know it when he sees it, Freddy assures him. Dubious but intrigued, Charlie enlists his bantering agent, Victoria, as a reluctant accomplice and sets to work. Indeed, at the second place he breaks into, he knows immediately that he’s hit pay dirt, probably since it’s a folder marked “Top Secret.” All goes well until it doesn’t. First, two men with Russian accents and loaded guns steal the file. And, at one of the apartments, Charlie sees a woman being strangled to death but arrives too late to save (or find) her. Given Charlie’s puckish personality, it’s not surprising that everyone is skeptical at best. Charlie and Victoria are forced to team up with Freddy to steal back the invaluable file. They ultimately land smack in the middle of a delicate diplomatic situation, which naturally leads back to that strangled woman.

Charlie’s fifth romp (The Good Thief’s Guide To Venice, 2011, etc.) rests much on the charm of its hero, which can at times wear thin.

MONTANA

Florio, Gwen Permanent Press (208 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 15, 2013 978-1-57962-336-4 Journalist Florio’s story about a friend’s murder arrives crammed with atmosphere and intriguing characters.

Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks reluctantly returns from an assignment in Afghanistan, where she’s been holed up with a pool of reporters covering the conflict for so long that the dust, danger and shadowy way of life have become second nature. So when Lola ends up back in Baltimore to meet with an upstart young editor, she’s already sporting an attitude. When the editor informs her the newspaper is shutting down its overseas bureaus to concentrate on local news, Lola doesn’t take it well. A rebel and a loner, she heads for a short, preplanned visit with her close friend Mary Alice, also a former staffer at the paper. Mary Alice had taken an earlier buyout and moved to Montana, where she bought a cabin and went to work at the local paper. But when Lola arrives at the small airport, there’s no Mary Alice to greet her. Annoyed and in a hurry to return to Afghanistan, with or without the paper’s backing, Lola rents a car and drives up to her friend’s cabin deep in the woods near a tiny town called Magpie. But instead of a short reunion with Mary Alice, she finds her friend has been murdered, leaving behind her dog, a horse and a trail of clues that only someone like Lola, who knows her well, could follow. Lola plans to get out of town, but the sheriff has other ideas, and soon, she starts looking into her friend’s homicide, making friends and enemies along the way. Florio dips into her own background to make the protagonist competent and believable. Although it’s a bit difficult to buy Lola as a grizzled veteran at the tender age of 34, the author does a great job of writing a book that’s both evocative of the Montana countryside and a satisfying, hair-raising ride.

A promising debut.

EVA’S EYE

Fossum, Karin Translated by Anderson, James Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (304 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-547-73875-8 Inspector Sejer’s first case.

Egil Einarsson’s employment at a brewery and his drinking bouts with his buddies at the King’s Arms seem to have been the high points in a singularly uneventful life. When his thoroughly stabbed body washes up under the eyes of hardscrabble painter Eva Marie Magnus and her daughter Emma six months after he disappeared, Inspector Konrad Sejer can’t resist making a connection: Einarsson went out, ostensibly to show his Opel Manta to an interested buyer, |

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only three days after the smothering of prostitute Maja Durban in her room, a stone’s throw from the King’s Arms. Since Maja was an old school friend of Eva’s, and the two, after not seeing each other for 25 years, had dinner together the night before Maja died, Sejer naturally assumes that Eva is the key to both cases—especially once he satisfies himself that after she found Einarsson’s body, Eva only faked a call to let the police know.

But Eva’s not saying a thing; she’s not even admitting she didn’t place that phone call. Working as phlegmatically but effectively as ever, Sejer makes modest progress on the case. Halfway through the tale, however, Fossum switches over to a long, virtuoso flashback that reveals everything her hero has only guessed. This hoary trick shouldn’t work, but it does, gathering tremendous suspense as it builds to a shattering climax.

Originally published in Norway in 1995, this tour de force doesn’t have the remorseless wall-to-wall creepiness of Sejer’s most chilling cases (The Caller, 2012, etc.). But it’s more than a worthy introduction to one of Norway’s leading cops for newcomers and a treasure for fans.

JUST ONE EVIL ACT George, Elizabeth Dutton (736 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-525-95296-1

Inspector Lynley returns for a bout of trans-European hijinks—his first adventure outside Old Blighty.

Though an American herself, it’s taken George time to build a domestic audience for her long-running Lynley series, adapted for British television and then repatriated as an occasional Masterpiece Mystery offering. George’s hero is a nod to Dorothy Sayers, though Lynley, a discomfited lord working among the peasants of Scotland Yard, lacks most of Peter Wimsey’s affectations. For the first time in many volumes, George again pairs Lynley with tough-talking northerner Barbara Havers, who’s not always scrupulous about the letter of the law; as she tells one investigator, “I don’t care if you break laws or not....Spy on anyone you need to spy on. Go through their rubbish. Hack into their mobiles and their Internet accounts. Take over their email.” Rupert Murdoch would be proud, but Havers has a fraught mission: The daughter of a friend has been kidnapped in Italy, where her mother, estranged from that friend, has taken the child. Said friend, a Pakistani microbiologist, may not be entirely innocent—and in all events, it seems, shadowy parties want daughter and mother. Though the book is too long by a couple of hundred pages, George is a master of the wily plot and the timely tossed out red herring. She’s also not bad at the icky but effective detail: “Maggots still writhed in the man’s eyes, nose, and mouth; beetles had been feasting on his skin; mites and millipedes scurried into the open neck of his linen shirt.” Yet the book goes on long enough that some of the dramatic force is blunted; it could have benefited from some economizing. Too, George falls victim to the local-color gambit, insisting that ordinary terms be put 32

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into the other language: A cellphone is a cellphone is a cellphone, so calling it a telefonino to emphasize the fact that we’re in Italy is more than a touch precious.

George’s fans will be glad to see Havers back in action, even though, as ever, she’s quick to land in trouble. And as for Lynley—well, he’s as cool as ever, in more than one sense of the word.

PLAGUE SHIP

Goldberg, Leonard Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3837-6 A sick bird’s last-ditch attempt to save itself leads to disaster aboard a cruise ship.

The Grand Atlantic is a Titanic lookalike complete with wealthy passengers set to enjoy a Caribbean cruise. Dr. David Ballineau, who would have preferred Hawaii, gives in to his daughter Kit’s pleading and boards the Grand Atlantic along with his girlfriend, nurse Carolyn Ross, and Kit’s nanny, only to find his vacation burdened with medical duties. The ship’s doctor lacks experience, and the clinic is too scantily supplied to deal with the many passengers who suddenly fall ill with flulike symptoms. Kit’s young friend, a wannabe veterinarian, has found a sick bird, hidden it and tried to nurse it back to health, not knowing that it carries a deadly strain of avian flu. The inevitable outbreak spreads quickly. As the bodies pile up, the CDC can only airlift in some supplies and insist that the ship stay at sea to contain an outbreak that could kill millions should the Grand Atlantic make port. Several desperate passengers and crew members, concerned only about their own health, plot to take over the ship and bring her to a port where they can receive medical treatment. To deal with them, David must draw on both his medical skills and the talents he developed when he was in Special Forces to fight a dangerous battle with the mutineers.

As if ocean cruising hasn’t been scary enough recently, Goldberg (Patient One, 2012, etc.) devises another all-tooplausible medical scenario that will send chills up the spine despite a few moments readers will be glad are far-fetched.

W IS FOR WASTED

Grafton, Sue Putnam (400 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-399-15898-8

Kinsey Millhone finds yet another way to be connected to a sudden death: as the victim’s executor and sole heir.

The first contact Kinsey has with Terrence Dace is in the Santa Teresa coroner’s office after investigator Aaron Blumberg phones her to say that a homeless drunk has been

found dead with her name and phone number in his pocket.

Kinsey’s ignorance of the man is so profound, and his recent companions—Felix, Dandy and Pearl—are so closemouthed about supplying information about him, that it takes her quite a while even to track down his name. Once she does, though, things start to happen. A safe deposit box in Dace’s name reveals assets of over half a million dollars and a will that leaves it all to Kinsey, who’s also appointed his executor. Taking this unwelcome job as seriously as you’d expect, Kinsey drives out to Bakersfield to inform Dace’s son, Ethan, and his daughters, Ellen and Anna, that the father from whom they’ve long been estranged for perfectly logical reasons is dead and that he’s disinherited them all in favor of a woman they’ve never heard of.

Kinsey’s ticklish dealings with these ill-assorted mourners are deliciously fraught. But the case takes a turn toward more conventional waters as Grafton (Kinsey and Me, 2012, etc.) begins to connect it to the shooting several months back of unsavory private eye Pete Wolinsky, whose death was anything but the byproduct of a robbery that it first seemed. Throughout it all, Kinsey, practically unique among her professional cohort, is driven not by greed, lust or revenge, but by the simple desire to do the right thing.

As she approaches the end of the alphabet, Kinsey waxes ever more reflective and philosophical.

HEARTS OF SAND

Haddam, Jane Minotaur (368 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-250-01234-0

A sociopathic debutante makes headlines a generation after her earlier crime spree when she returns to her Connecticut village to get murdered.

Though she’s been AWOL for 30 years, Chapin Waring has never been far from the memory of the town of Alwych. In fact, the five bank robberies she pulled with her friend Martin Veer and the two people she killed in committing them would mark Alwych’s main claim to fame, if only it were seeking fame. The news that Chapin’s been stabbed to death in the house her sister Caroline had kept meticulously maintained gives the town another dose of unwelcome publicity. Since Marty was killed in a car crash just before Chapin ran off, presumably with $250,000 that’s never turned up, the spotlight focuses on surviving members of their tight little circle: Dr. Tim Brand, who finances and runs a pro bono clinic; his twin sister, Virginia, a Congressional representative now running for the Senate; her ex, Wall Street attorney Kyle Westervan; and part-time college teacher Hope Matlock, who’s never really fit in with this moneyed crowd. Police chief Jason Battlesea and Alwych mayor Evaline Veer, Martin’s sister, recognize that they’re out past their depth and call in retired FBI profiler Gregor Demarkian (Blood in the Water, 2012) as a consultant.

Insisting that the local authorities are so infatuated with Chapin’s 30-year-old crimes that they’re overlooking any evidence that

might help them figure out who killed her, Gregor can’t prevent another murder but winds up the convoluted case nicely.

Taken from the side of his bride, Bennis Hannaford, Gregor is muffled. The mystery is routine but expert, the characters pleasantly recognizable types whose complexities are probed only tentatively. Average for this fine series.

PEAK SEASON FOR MURDER

Lukasik, Gail Five Star (330 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 18, 2013 978-1-4328-2729-8

A theater’s summer season is plagued by murder and other problems.

Reporter Leigh Girard has garnered a reputation for crime-solving in the time she has lived in Wisconsin’s Door County, the lovely, peaceful area where she moved after she was beset by breast cancer and received an nonsupportive reaction from her husband. She’s writing a story for the Door County Gazette on the 65th anniversary of the Bayside Theater, whose checkered past includes the mysterious disappearance of an actress 23 years ago. Now, many of the same actors from that time have gathered to raise money for the failing theater, including talented stage actor Julian Finch, Hollywood hunk Nate Ryan, and Ryan’s ex-wife, Nina Cass. Leigh is also looking into the death of a recovering alcoholic Vietnam vet whose roommate in their lakeside shack is the No. 1 suspect.

In addition, she must deal with the sudden appearance of her husband with divorce papers, the tentative revival of a romance with her editor and the unwelcome advances of the theater’s jack-of-all-trades. Nate dies after a night of drug-fueled sex with Leigh’s best friend, a nurse who remains distraught over her failure to save him. The police won’t say whether it was accident or murder, but Leigh finds that both the cases she’s trying to untangle have roots deep in the past.

Leigh’s third (Death’s Door, 2009, etc.) gives her two excellent mysteries to solve and a brace of deeply realized characters to search among.

THE FINAL CURTAIN

Masters, Priscilla Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8304-9

A former child star, a lonely moor, a series of threats: Do they add up to attention-seeking or something a good deal more sinister?

After finally marrying pathologist Dr. Matthew Levin (A Velvet Scream, 2012), DI Joanna Piercy returns from her exotic honeymoon to find that her colleagues have been plagued by calls from Timony Weeks, |

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once the child star of the very popular 1960s series Butterfield Farm. Timony lives with her day companion, Diana Tong, in an isolated farmhouse, a faithful recreation of the house in the show.

She’s been complaining about being spied on and other trivial incidents, but Joanna has a feeling that there’s more to these episodes, especially when Timony’s jewels are stolen and her precious and valuable cat is killed and left hanging on her front door. The answer would seem to lie in Timony’s past, which bears little resemblance to the childhood described by her publicity releases. Her family was very poor, her father a criminal and her marriages failures, beginning with the one to the much older man who played her father on Butterfield Farm. In fact, the segments of the program Joanna watches are distinctly creepy in their echoes of Timony’s early life. Joanna, who has her hands full adjusting to married life and preparing for an unwanted new boss, continues to look into Timony’s past in her spare time until the case explodes when Timony is shot dead, leaving Joanna to use her famous nose to uncover hidden clues to solve the case.

A solid police procedural especially likely to appeal to 1960s nostalgia buffs.

THE STUDY OF MURDER

McDuffie, Susan Five Star (264 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 18, 2013 978-1-4328-2720-5

A trip to medieval Oxford is no pleasure for a Scottish sleuth.

Muirteach MacPhee (The Faerie Hills, 2011, etc.) can only obey when the Lord of the Isles orders him and his wife, Mariota, to serve as chaperones for his rowdy son Donald, who is to enroll in Balliol College in 1374. Like many more recent students, Donald, 13, is more interested in drinking and carousing with his fellows than in his studies. But Mariota is thrilled by the opportunity to advance her prowess as a healer by attending medical lectures. Because women are not invited to these events, she disguises herself as a boy against Muirteach’s wishes. Meanwhile, Muirteach has been roped into helping Undersheriff Grymbaud investigate the disappearance of a lovely tavern maid and the brutal murder of one of the Oxford masters. Although a college servant is arrested for the murder, Muirteach is not convinced of his guilt, and the arrest causes illfeeling between town and gown that leads to riots. After a second master is killed, Muirteach wonders whether a number of cryptic parchments Donald bought from the local bookseller might have something to do with the murders. When Mariota vanishes, a desperate Muirteach redoubles his efforts to find the killer.

Fans of Lord Peter Wimsey should be warned that it’s a long way from McDuffie’s Balliol to Wimsey’s. But Muirteach is a worthy forerunner of Dorothy L. Sayers’ sleuth, and the historical aspects add interest to a competent mystery.

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IN THE MOORS

Milton, Nina Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (408 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3836-9 Children’s author Milton’s adult debut creates a mystical world in which the secret to a missing child may be locked in the subconscious of a leading suspect.

When shamanic counselor and herbal healer Sabbie Dare (don’t call her Sabrina) takes on Cliff Houghton as a client, even her uncanny powers can’t tell what’s coming next. Cliff has a dark feeling about him, and as Sabbie enters his unconsciousness, her otter spirit guide, Trendle, has serious trepidations about her travels. What Sabbie finds in Cliff ’s mind runs parallel to the case of some local missing boys, and though Cliff claims not to know anything about the disappearances, he is curiously drawn to the cases. Unfortunately, local police detective sergeant Reynard Buckley is also drawing parallels between Cliff and the return of what the locals are calling the Wetland Murderer. He demands that Sabbie tell him all she knows about Cliff. Rey isn’t persuaded when she asserts Cliff ’s innocence, and Cliff ’s increasingly suspicious and inexplicable behavior doesn’t help his case. Even so, Sabbie trusts her instincts and keeps on investigating in the hope of clearing Cliff ’s name. Now, if only those instincts would kick in concerning her lover, Ivan, who may be more trouble than he’s worth.

A fast-moving thriller likely to draw in readers despite, or perhaps because of, its bizarre heroine.

ORIGINAL DEATH

Pattison, Eliot Counterpoint (352 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-58243-731-6

The French and Indian War provides a backdrop for a complex tale of clashing cultures and mass murder.

In the summer of 1760, Scotsman Duncan McCallum accompanies his Indian mate, Conawago, on a journey to reconnect with the remainder of his tribe, Christians all. A massacre they find at Bethel Church sends Conawago into deep grief. There are soldiers all around. Madame Pritchard, a Frenchwoman who feigns deafness so that the English don’t imprison her or worse, reports that the raiders took the children of the community with them.

With the help of a Mohawk named Sagatchie, they begin their slow pursuit, which is full of obstacles and hardships. A few letters they discover fill in some of the details surrounding the mass murder.

Falsely arresting Duncan for the killing of a corporal, the sadistic British Col. Cameron takes perverse pleasure in putting him into “the iron hole.” Conawago, meanwhile, is tortured by his captors.

Duncan and Conawago’s escape makes them objects of a manhunt as they try to untangle the story of the brutal crime. A pair

“...a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.” from the bride box

of quirky adventurers—Ishmael, who’s highly attuned to the spirit world, and Macauley, who’s left his regiment in disgust—enliven their party and their story. Reminiscence and conjecture among the adventurers fill the quiet moments between episodes. Hetty, a notorious witch, members of several different tribes and the discovery of a thrilling library are highlights of their odyssey.

Duncan’s third mystery (Eye of the Raven, 2010, etc.), rich in period detail, is often somber and unblinking in its portrayal of a dark period in history.

THE BRIDE BOX

Pearce, Michael Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8303-2 One young woman lost and another found are the keys to the Mamur Zapt’s latest adventure in 1913 Egypt.

A bride box serves as an Egyptian woman’s hope chest. The brightly decorated box normally contains her trousseau, the clothing and articles she’s collected in anticipation of her wedding day. What it doesn’t normally contain is the bride. So it’s distressing to find a bride box addressed to Pasha Ali Maher that doubles as a coffin for the body of Soraya, a basket weaver’s daughter whose aspirations toward a marriage above her station— perhaps with the Pasha’s slow-witted son Karim, perhaps with another member of his household—were cruelly ended by her strangulation. Luckily, Soraya’s sister Leila, whose father, Mustapha, sold her to the Sudanese slaver Abdulla Sardawi, has run away from her new owner and landed in the household of Gareth Cadwallader Owen, the Mamur Zapt who heads the Khedive’s secret police. But there’s not much the little girl can reveal about her sister’s fate, and both the Pasha and his lady suavely maintain that it has nothing to do with them. Mobilizing his usual resources—his old friend parquet prosecutor Mahmoud el Zaki and Georgiades, a Greek investigator with a positive genius for drawing petty bureaucrats into imprudent confidences—Owen connects Soraya’s death to an ominous smuggling ring and a pair of seriously dysfunctional families.

As always in this comically understated series (The Mark of the Pasha, 2008, etc.), both crime and punishment are consistently upstaged by a lovingly detailed portrait of Egypt during the Great War. The result is a bit like a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.

THE WRONG GIRL

Phillippi Ryan, Hank Forge (368 pp.) $24.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-7653-3258-5

A young woman’s murder, which orphans two children, gives a reporter a story she can’t resist.

Jane Ryland has finally settled into her role as reporter at the Register when her old co-worker Tuck approaches Jane about an off-the-clock investigation she’d like Jane to take on.

Thanks to the people at Brannigan Family and Children Services, Tuck was recently reunited with her birth mother, but some details of the reunion have made Tuck suspicious that she may in fact be the wrong girl, matched with a mother who isn’t her own. Jane’s former and potentially future flame Detective Jake Brogan is saddled with another case that involves working with the child welfare system when he’s called in to investigate a murder that leaves two children without a family. Getting wind of the case, Jane schemes to get information out of Jake, his partner, Detective DeLuca, and the staff at the Department of Family Services. Though most folks seem wise to Jane’s tricks, she’s sure she can find a weak link in the chain that will lead her to some clues to investigate. All this drama distracts Jane from Tuck’s quest but doesn’t stop some of the staff at the Brannigan from doing a bit of investigating of their own. Threads of the story are woven together in a net that threatens to ensnare Jane if she can’t unravel them first.

The complex storyline, which approaches child welfare from many different angles, provides Ryan (The Other Woman, 2012, etc.) with a plot that never allows the reader a moment of breathing room.

A CRACK IN THE WALL

Piñeiro, Claudia Translated by France, Miranda Bitter Lemon Press (230 pp.) $14.95 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-908524-08-9

A highly metaphorical crack in a wall that isn’t even his splits open the middleclass facade of a Buenos Aires architect’s life.

Nothing moves very fast at Borla and Associates, where Pablo Simó still hasn’t made associate after 20 years. The one time the firm skated close to the wind was when crabby old Nelson Jara, who lived next door to the Calle Girbone project, claimed that the construction had produced a widening crack in his interior wall.

Pablo listened to his complaint, put him off with vague promises, then showed up at the construction site to find his boss, Borla, and their secretary Marta Horvat, standing over Jara’s corpse.

An accident, insisted Borla; instead of risking the long delays that a police investigation would entail, it would be better for |

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everyone if they simply buried the body and let the unwitting cement contractors pour the foundation over the impromptu gravesite. But that was three years ago, and the only disturbances to Pablo’s humdrum work life and marriage have been his wife Laura’s occasional bad moods, his daughter Francisca’s growth into a teenager and his constant sexual fantasies about Marta. Everything changes when photography student Leonor Corell walks into the office of Borla and Associates asking to see Jara. As if in a trance, Pablo, who’s already had frequent daydreams in which he’s advised by his old school friend Tano Berletta and haunted by Jara, lets Leonor seduce him, loosening his last bonds to a perfectly ordinary life he suddenly realizes has never been his to begin with.

Piñeiro (All Yours, 2011, etc.) unfolds her story, and the social indictment behind it, as placidly as an Argentine Patricia Highsmith at her gentlest.

MAMA GETS TRASHED

Sharp, Deborah Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (360 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3615-0 The Bauer gals bicker their way through marital woes, engagement snafus and sexual innuendos.

Reluctantly accompanying her mama to the Himmarshee dump to retrieve the wedding ring she accidentally threw away, Mace Bauer discovers a diamond bracelet among the pork rinds, crab shells and empty dog food cans. The bauble, sad to say, adorns the arm of a very dead young woman bedecked in fetish garb. Mace’s fiance, Carlos the hunky homicide detective, gets the case, which is less interesting to Mama than the plight of her eldest daughter, Maddie, who insists on wearing an unbecoming yellow ensemble to her husband Kenny’s birthday do. Maddie, however, has a more serious problem: Could Kenny, newly obsessed with golf, be having an affair, and what ought she to do about her suspicions? She confides her woes to Mace, who, heading for the golf course to snoop, encounters a dishy if lascivious golf pro and a rapacious lesbian bartender, both of whom know secrets about the pseudo-folksy mayor and his cocktail-swilling wife. The trashed victim turns out to be the starchy librarian, whose twin sister arrives to settle her estate.

Mace soon discovers that Kenny loaned his hunting cabin to certain golf club members who used it for swinging sex parties.

The place is awash in champagne bottles, cigarette butts and a red thong, making Kenny suspect No. 1 in the librarian’s murder.

But Mace and Mama, after escaping car tails, threats left nailed to their house door and hostile neighbors, prove Kenny innocent, while a plot twist readers will see coming from the first mention of twins ends the sleazy tale.

The odd amalgam of porn, gossip and family values overlaid with forced humor is much less fun than Mama Sees Stars (2011).

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DEATH OVER EASY

Speed, Toby Five Star (342 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 18, 2013 978-1-4328-2722-9

A woman who’s avoided danger all her life becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

Though she’s been brought up by a family of daredevils, Emma Trace has shied away from their life of thrills, with the very minor exception of partaking in her family’s yearly birthday betting ritual. Now that her 35th birthday is almost upon her, Emma’s been given clues she must solve to find her present, and her whole family has taken bets on whether she’ll solve them before the big day. Emma’s not worried. She’s recruited her longtime friend LaRue to help make the everpressing deadline. Her strategy seems to serve just fine until LaRue calls Emma with some epically bad news: LaRue arrived at her job at Sunny Side Up to find the cook, Jennifer Hazzard, dead in her pancake batter. Not only does Detective Pete Zahn find Emma’s library card at the scene of the crime, but after Jennifer stole Emma’s boyfriend, Sam, Emma wrote a fairly incriminating note that she fears could be seen as motive. Now Emma and LaRue have to clear Emma’s name. Even more importantly, Emma must solve her birthday riddle or face Uncle Ned, a man with a license to fly and who’s not afraid to use it.

Though wholly admirable in its attempt to blend humor and mystery, Speed’s debut falls short of its mark due to a failure to craft a sufficiently solid protagonist, and there are too many bells and whistles along the way.

A QUESTION OF HONOR

Todd, Charles Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-06-223715-6 Ten years after an army officer apparently killed five people, deserted his regiment and died in Afghanistan, he’s back to bedevil nursing sister Bess Crawford, and vice versa.

Asked to accompany Lt. William Standish’s wife, Mary, home from India after the death of her 6-year-old daughter, Alice, in 1908, Lt. Thomas Wade not only agrees, but wins praise from all hands for his kindness, sensitivity and consideration. So it’s all the more shocking to hear that during his brief stay in England, he allegedly killed an entire family in Hampshire and then murdered his parents in cold blood before returning to the regiment commanded by Bess’s father, Col. Richard Crawford. What’s even more astonishing is that as the Great War limps on long after Wade’s body has been spotted deep in the Khyber Pass, Subedar Shanti Gupta tells Bess just before he dies of his wounds in France that he’s

THE MONEY BIRD

spotted Wade alive and serving in His Majesty’s troops. Bess’ mission is clear. In order to clear her father’s regiment of the stain of Wade’s desertion, she needs to find Wade under whatever false name he’s using. In order to expunge the stain of his murders, she needs to satisfy herself whether he really killed Henry and Isabella Caswell and their daughter Gwendoline. All this while Bess is still on active duty, dealing with the horrific wounds inflicted by the war. This time around, however, Todd (An Unmarked Grave, 2012, etc.) keeps the front at a greater distance than usual, passing lightly over much of Bess’ service. The war’s relation to the mystery is equally discontinuous, so that anecdotes of Bess’ nursing provide the same sort of background as the heroine’s domestic life or romantic entanglements in less-fraught whodunits.

Despite some loose threads unsatisfyingly tied up, the mystery is as strong as any Bess has confronted.

Webster Boneham, Sheila Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (336 pp.) $14.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3487-3 A photographer must rely on her loyal dog and cat companions to solve the case of a murdered colleague.

Janet MacPhail is out taking pictures of her boyfriend Tom Saunders’ black Lab, Drake, at Twisted Lake when the dog attempts to retrieve something unexpected: a bag covered in blood and containing a strange-looking feather. This is not the sort of thing Janet expects to see in her quiet Indiana town, where the biggest terror she’s faced so far is taking photographs at the local vet and getting bitten (and not by one of the animals). When Janet’s picture-snapping buddy Anderson Billings leaves her an enigmatic phone message about birds sent from Twisted Lake, Janet becomes determined to find out what’s going on. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get the chance before local officer Jo Stevens calls to tell her that Anderson has drowned.

Immediately suspecting foul play, Janet makes several trips out to the island with Jay, her own dog, to see if she can unearth any more information about what’s happened. She discovers that the island has a tie to the Treasures on Earth Spiritual Renewal Center, headed by a man Janet has dubbed Regis Moneypenny, and that some members have been pressed to act as “guardians” for parrots. Could all this be linked to the feather in the bag and to the blood?

Equal parts mystery and dog appreciation, with a dash of romance thrown in for good measure, this second case for Janet and her pals (Drop Dead on Recall, 2012) is accessible to fans of all three.

GIFT WRAPPED

Turnbull, Peter Severn House (192 pp.) $28.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8262-2 Anonymous postcards trigger an investigation reaching far beyond the York address to which they were directed.

The tale that pleasant, efficient Julia Bartlem tells detective Reginald Webster is odd enough. Four picture postcards of Scarborough have arrived at the drop-in center where she volunteers, each bearing a foreign word for “murder” and the Ordnance Survey map number for the same location. But the following days bring information that’s depressingly familiar: Skeletal remains are found at the site, and a computer-generated image is matched to a missing person. James Wenlock had been a certified accountant. His unhappy wife had reason to do him harm. So did his mistress’s angry, violent husband. And Shane Bond has a history of getting even with his wife’s lovers. Pretty soon, he’s in the frame for both the Wenlock murder and the killing of Henry Hall, who was involved with his first wife, Gloria. The trouble is that although Bond cops readily to one crime, he insists he has nothing to do with the other. More bodies turn up as the scene of the crime shifts from York to the open countryside and beyond. DCI George Hennessey (Aftermath, 2011, etc.) must rely on his team of Webster, Pharoah, Ventnor and Yellich to show their characteristic persistence in tracking a killer whose crimes are as devious as they are far-flung.

Although the Hennessey team’s personal lives remain tediously familiar, their professional skills are worth your time.

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science fiction and fantasy TWO SERPENTS RISE

Gladstone, Max Tor (352 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-0-7653-3312-4

Another highly unusual fantasy (Three Parts Dead, 2012) set in the same carefully constructed, Aztec-inspired world of gods, magic and sacrifice.

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“Gunn’s best in years...” from transcendental

Lex. Now, demons infest the Bright Mirror reservoir, so Kopil sends in Caleb Altemoc, a professional risk manager and sometime gambler, to cleanse the water for the city’s 16 million inhabitants. At Bright Mirror, Caleb comes across the stunning and elusive Mal, a cliff runner (imagine a sort of superparcours).

Meanwhile, Caleb’s father, Temoc, the last priest of the old gods, may be involved in the contamination of the water supply. Temoc makes no secret of the fact that he despises Kopil’s magic and methods and yearns to bring back sacrifices to the gods. Since the city continues to grow, its demand for water and power and materials is insatiable, so Kopil is close to a deal merging RKC with Heartstone, a company that supplies power by torturing the Twin Serpents, slumbering fire gods too fearsome ever to be permitted to wake. But when Caleb discovers that Mal is really Heartstone’s most powerful Craftsman, or wizard, he really begins to wonder what’s going on. He fears the Serpents, but neither can he permit Temoc to resurrect his monstrous, murderous dream. Against this dense, highly textured backdrop, the characters evince emotional depth and convincing motives. Yet questions persist: about how the magic works, the source of Kopil’s god-killing powers and how Temoc manages to elude him. In showing us this vast, teeming, contract-bound city buckling under pressure, Gladstone perhaps is offering a metaphor for end-stage capitalism.

Worth a try, even if it’s often more impressive than alluring. (Agent: Weronika Janczuk)

HEAVEN’S FALL

Goyer, David S.; Cassutt, Michael Ace/Berkley (432 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-441-02093-5 Final part of the alien-contact trilogy (Heaven’s War, 2012, etc.).

Previously, Keanu, a vast alien vessel built by the mysterious alien Architects using their unimaginably advanced technology, snatched up a random selection of people from space mission headquarters (in Houston and Bangalore) and deposited them inside Keanu. The snatchees found the vessel infested with deadly predators, which eventually they wiped out—but not before some escaped to Earth.

These Aggregates, collectively intelligent machinelike insects or insectlike machines (it isn’t clear which), now control most of the globe with the assistance of their cultlike human associates, the Transformational Human Evolution. Finally, the humans aboard Keanu learn how to control the ship and steer it back toward Earth, where the Aggregates and their slaves are toiling in the American Southwest to build a colossal, fortresslike structure—but to what purpose? Once triggered, the fortress will certainly release a blast of radiation powerful enough to sterilize the planet. Rachel Stewart, her teenage daughter Yahvi, alien warrior Zeds and others launch themselves in a spaceship toward Earth in the hope of learning the Aggregates’ plans and infiltrating the fortress. Back on Keanu, meanwhile, 38

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outcast Dale Scott learns how to communicate with the ancient machine intelligence that runs things. All this churns industriously without developing any real characters or sparking any narrative tension. Neither do Goyer and Cassutt make any attempt to engage with the true nature or purpose of the Aggregates—they’re just evil and destructive.

Readers will, eventually, figure out what’s going on.

But will they care? Some. Maybe. What’s really surprising is that authors with such impressive screen/scriptwriting credentials (The Dark Knight, The Twilight Zone) could labor so mightily to achieve mere mediocrity.

TRANSCENDENTAL

Gunn, James Tor (304 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-7653-3501-2

First novel in quite a while (Gift from the Stars, 2005, etc.) from writer/anthologist Gunn.

A galactic civilization, weary of centuries of war—the latest caused by upstart humans intruding on space occupied by other alien races—tries to get on with business despite the stultifying bureaucracy that seems to run things. War veteran Riley, at loose ends following the conflict, accepts a job offer from powerful and mysterious employers—who implant in his head a knowit-all artificial intelligence which he cannot remove and which has the means to force him to obey instructions. He will join beings from many different worlds aboard a ship guided by an unknown prophet who can help them achieve transcendence. Riley’s orders, however, are to kill the prophet rather than permit aliens to transcend. Deadly violence flares among the travelers, however, before the ship even departs. The captain, Hamilton Jones, with whom Riley served during the war, admits he doesn’t know their destination and periodically receives new coordinates from somebody aboard. Among Riley’s fellow travelers are Tordor, a massive, heavy-planet alien; the weasellike Xi; an intelligent plant known as 4107; and Asha, a human female who needs no sleep and has other strange capabilities. As the ship heads for the Great Gulf between the galaxy’s spiral arms, the travelers—like Riley, most, if not all, have hidden agendas—relate tales of themselves and their races. But violence is a constant threat; the tales may be simple truth, calculated disinformation or anything in between.

And why are Riley’s employers so intent on stopping the prophet?

Impeccably plotted, with absorbing human and alien characters and back stories, Gunn’s narrative expertly cranks up the tension and paranoia as, piece by piece, answers emerge.

Gunn’s best in years—quite possibly his best ever.

DELIA’S SHADOW

Moyer, Jaime Lee Tor (336 pp.) $24.99 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-7653-3182-3

Ghosts and serial killers in 1915 San Francisco, Moyer’s debut.

From a young age, Delia Martin could see and interact with ghosts. After her parents were killed in the 1906 earthquake, family friend Esther Larkin took her in. Later, the persistent ghosts drove Delia to New York. She returns in 1915, ready, she thinks, to confront the ghosts and celebrate the wedding of her closest friend, Sadie, Esther’s daughter, and visit a now terminally ill Esther. But the ghosts haven’t gone away; one determined woman, whom Delia calls Shadow, needs Delia to do—something. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Sadie’s beau, Sgt. Jack Fitzgerald of the SFPD, and his superior, Lt. Gabe Ryan, are investigating a serial killer. Thirty years ago, Gabe’s father, Matthew, tried and failed to catch what appears to have been the same killer. Shadow, it seems, was one of the killer’s victims. The crimes are characterized by an insensate sadism, a taunting of the police—first Matthew, now Gabe— and an obsession with ancient Egyptian funeral rites, practices and beliefs. Poor Delia, however, is almost overwhelmed with the sheer number and power of the ghosts she perceives, so she turns for help to psychic Isadora Bobet, who not only senses ghosts, but knows how to deal with them. But can Dora teach Delia what she needs to know before the killer catches up with all of them?

The narrative is impeccably constructed and presented, almost to the point where it seems like it’s on rails, though the characters are life-sized and blessedly free of any compulsion to do stupid things in order to further the plot.

What’s missing are sparks of originality to make it stand out. (Agent: Tamar Rydzinski)

r om a n c e HOTSHOT

Garwood, Julie Dutton (368 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-525-95301-2 When Peyton Lockhart and her sisters agree to reboot their uncle’s Florida resort, troubles arise from all quarters, putting Peyton in danger and bringing childhood protector Finn MacBain to her side.Peyton should have known that landing a job as a food critic for a major foodie magazine with

no experience was too good to be true, but she never expected she’d be harassed and threatened by her new employer.

After driving from Texas to Minnesota for the opportunity, it’s not too long before she can’t get out of there fast enough.

Not long after, their uncle offers Peyton and her sisters the opportunity to work at his resort, supervising a major renovation and planning a grand re-opening, with the possibility of taking over ownership at the end of the project. It’s an offer they can’t refuse and one Peyton is especially grateful for, given the stress of her recent employment fiasco. But when they get to the resort in Florida, it becomes clear that someone is out to get Peyton and is sabotaging the resort renovation. Could it be their greedy, self-serving cousin? Or could it be someone from the magazine, exacting revenge for her sexual harassment lawsuit? Whoever it is, Peyton is in danger, and when she runs into Finn MacBain—the boy-next-door hero who saved her life when she was a little girl and is now an FBI agent—he decides to look into the matter. Finn is larger than life and has always been too old for Peyton, but she’s all grown up now, and when they reconnect, sparks fly. She knows his interest is fleeting (he’s a no-commitment kind of guy), but she’ll take his help with gratitude and nurse her broken heart when it’s over. If she can stay alive. Legendary romance author Garwood delivers a novel that is at times clever, original and sigh-worthy, at other moments, silly and simplistic. Fans of romance and especially Garwood will find glimpses of her brilliance, but elements of the suspense, plot and characterization are sprawling, disjointed and disappointing.

Uneven and oddly framed, though true believers will find enough Garwood in here to keep them satisfied.

RUN TO YOU

Gibson, Rachel Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-06-206914-6 Stella wants nothing to do with Sadie, the sister she’s never met, but when Sadie’s sexy friend Beau tracks her down, accidentally ruins her life in Miami and offers temporary sanctuary in a road trip to Texas, she has to reconsider.

While he was alive, Stella’s father, Clive Hollowell, made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her, so she can’t generate a tear when she hears he’s died. She’s not too interested in what sexy Beau Junger has to say about her half sister Sadie either, since the legitimate daughter never spared her a thought. She’s definitely not interested in a trip to the Hollowell ranch, even when Beau tells her Sadie never knew she existed until their father died. However, after the sexy exMarine stops her boss—an angry bully with mob ties and some dangerous friends—from assaulting her, he convinces her to leave town and trek to Texas for a long-overdue family reunion.

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way forge an intense emotional connection that surprises both of them and which is complicated by scorching sexual tension combined with determined abstinence on both sides. Plagued by trust and abandonment issues, Stella is certain she neither wants nor needs a sister or a lover. So why does Sadie make her feel so special and Beau make her feel so safe? Gibson’s romance is light, funny, touching and sexy. With a fast-paced plot and characters that keep the audience engaged and connected, Gibson manages laugh-out-loud humor as well as sweet tenderness.

A few quirky elements make for some “out-of-the-box” plot points and an original take or two on hot, contemporary romance.

PERFECT FLING

Phillips, Carly Jove/Penguin (336 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jul. 30, 2013 978-0-425-25972-6 After a one-night stand with her lifelong crush, Erin Marsden finds her life complicated by an unwanted pregnancy, an unknown assailant and the unshakeable desire for a life with a man who’s convinced relationships, and Erin, are not for him.

Erin has spent her life following the rules and coloring inside the lines, content with her life as an assistant district attorney and related to half of the police force of Serendipity. But when infamous bad boy Cole Sanders comes back to town, she throws caution and her good-girl reputation to the wind when she falls in bed with him after her brother’s wedding. They’re both clear on the fact that it’s a one-time deal, but everything changes when someone takes a shot at Erin, and Cole decides to use his skills as an investigator and undercover cop to keep her safe, especially since their night together has some unintended consequences. Unwilling to leave her alone while she’s in danger, Cole moves in, and the two enter into a red-hot affair, while each tries to navigate how they feel and what they want. Life in Serendipity is complicated for Cole, who left when he was in high school after gaining notoriety as a troublemaker and whose father is determined to see the worst in him, despite Cole’s success in law enforcement. Cole is convinced he doesn’t deserve Erin and knows life as an undercover agent isn’t conducive to strong family ties. Erin is in love with Cole but knows he’s not the type to settle down. As the two work through their differences and personal insecurities, they must also maneuver hostile family members and a silent threat from an unknown enemy.

Phillips’ newest installment of the popular Serendipity series, and second in the Serendipity’s Finest, revisits the Marsden family with the same romantic elements and scorching chemistry Phillips is famous for. Fans will be thrilled with bad-boy alpha-male Cole as counterpoint to good-girl Erin, as well as the requisite and fun Serendipity cameos.

A sexy, satisfying romance, Serendipity style.

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ZANE’S BUSY BODIES

Zane—Ed. Atria (288 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-4516-8964-8 Series: Chocolate Flava, 4

The fourth installment of Zane’s anthology series based on the “Featured Erotica” section of EroticaNoir.com.

Twenty-six authors share bold and graphic details about sexual affairs and interludes in stories set in varying stages of life and disparate geographical locations, though most include African-American characters. From a recent college grad in Atlanta to a woman touring her dream house in a nameless suburb, as well as a young girl exploring a darkly mysterious sex club in Pigalle, Paris, and an abandoned wife on a Depression-era Midwestern farm, the shorts give blow-by-blow accounts of, to put it simply, lots of sex. There is also a spectrum of talent in the set and some jarring editorial choices—at least two stories ending with no true resolution. The authors are amateur writers submitting to a website, yet they generally manage to maintain cohesive storytelling and titillating—if not overly elegant—descriptions of lust and carnal connections. An audience looking for hot, varied stories with elements of secret liaisons and naughty licentiousness may find something satisfying here.

Readers who enjoyed the first three EroticaNoir.com anthologies will likely enjoy this one.

nonfiction THE CRIMINAL CONVERSATION OF MRS. NORTON Victorian England’s “Scandal of the Century” and the Fallen Socialite Who Changed Women’s Lives Forever

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM by Jeffrey Dauber............. 44 1941 by Slavko Goldstein.................................................................... 49 ANYTHING THAT MOVES by Dana Goodyear...................................50

Atkinson, Diane Chicago Review (496 pp.) $29.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-61374-880-0

LAMENT OF THE DEAD by James Hillman; Sonu Shamdasani ....... 51 BOOK OF AGES by Jill Lepore............................................................54 HANGING MAN by Barnaby Martin.................................................. 55

A British historian’s punctilious narrative about the tragic but colorful life of Caroline Norton (1808–1877), a neglected 19th-century champion of women’s rights.

In 1836, an English barrister named George Norton charged the then–prime minister, Lord Melbourne, for having had “ ‘criminal conversation’ (sexual relations)” with his beautiful writer-wife, Caroline. British courts ruled in favor of the defendants, and Melbourne was able to recover his reputation and career. However, his alleged lover’s name was permanently tarnished. Drawing on research that includes more than 1,500 of Caroline Norton’s letters, Atkinson (Elsie and Mairi Go to War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front, 2010, etc.) offers an exceptionally intimate biography of the outspoken female who transformed the more than 30 years of abuse she suffered at the hands of an unscrupulous husband into a reason to fight for a change in the legal status of wives and mothers. During that time, British laws regarded married women as little more than possessions. Husbands were free to “dispose of [them] as [they] wished,” and women had no say in what became of their children. Everything women brought into a marriage, including inheritances and all personal effects, along with any job earnings they had, also belonged to their husbands. While men could easily divorce their wives for adultery, women had to prove their husbands were unfaithful and guilty of bigamy or incest. Norton’s efforts led to groundbreaking legislation that ensured the parental, economic and legal rights of married women; yet she herself was to enjoy only a brief moment of happiness in the last few months of an otherwise stormy life. Atkinson’s work is notable for its narrative finesse and probing analysis of Caroline Norton’s relationships with her husband, Melbourne and her many associates, who included Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens. While women’s studies scholars and historians may appreciate such treatment, general readers may balk at the rigorousness of Atkinson’s presentation and the length of the book itself.

Thorough but perhaps overlavish with detail. (23 b/w photos; 11 b/w illustrations)

HOW ARCHITECTURE WORKS by Witold Rybczysnki.....................63 COMMAND AND CONTROL by Eric Schlosser................................. 64 RG3 by David Sheinin..........................................................................65 AMSTERDAM by Russell Shorto..........................................................65 PHILOMENA by Martin Sixsmith...................................................... 66 AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS by E. Fuller Torrey.....................................67 EBONY AND IVY by Craig Steven Wilder......................................... 69 ANYTHING THAT MOVES Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture

Goodyear, Dana Riverhead (336 pp.) $27.95 Nov. 14, 2013 978-1-59448-837-5

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“America’s ‘pugnacious fighting man,’ as dashingly portrayed by English historian Brumwell.” from george washington

UNBEATABLE Notre Dame’s 1988 Championship and the Last Great College Football Season

The author explains that he was drawn to the Congo because its tropical rain forests play a crucial role in preventing climate change. As the area has become more stable politically after years of civil war, the threat of deforestation is looming due to the renewed, large-scale corporate exploitation of its valuable mineral resources. This also endangers the small remaining population of bonobos, “humanity’s closest living relative alongside the chimpanzee,” whose only natural habitat is the Congolese rain forest. Establishment of more traditional national parks, which exclude local farming, is not a viable solution, since the forests have become a refuge for Congolese forced out of their homes by civil war. Béchard learned that a small NGO, Bonobo Conservation Initiative, founded by American conservationists, offers an alternative model: a partnership among the BCI villages to preserve the rain forest and protect the bonobos. Villagers agree to voluntarily restrict their farming to designated areas; in return, they are employed in various jobs—e.g., tracking the bonobos and guarding them from poachers. The BCI takes responsibility for providing medical care and primary schools, as well as access to higher education.

Graduates trained in environmental science then become part of the management. While the immediate BCI focus is to preserve the bonobo population, its broader purpose is to develop ecotourism as a viable economic alternative to corporate exploitation. The author profiles Americans and Congolese who are involved in this visionary effort to meld traditional and modern values in service of a planetary imperative.

Béchard’s adventurous travels in the Congo offer spice to this rich, complex account. (color photo insert)

Barca, Jerry St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-250-02483-1 978-1-250-02484-8 e-book

The inside account of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish’s 1988 championship team, which would “give birth to legends [and] restore the school’s stature in the game.”

Freelance journalist (and Notre Dame graduate) Barca tells the story of one of the best undefeated teams in the history of college football. Led by 5-foot-8-inch taskmaster coach Lou Holtz (“Have you challenged yourself today?...Are you the person you want to be?”), who demanded discipline, intensive workouts and teamwork—he had the names removed from the backs of the players’ jerseys to downplay individuals—the team restored the glory days of Notre Dame football in the tradition of Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen and others who garnered multiple national championships in the preceding decades. Holtz so captivated quarterback Rice’s grandmother during a recruiting visit to her apartment in a public housing project that she later remarked, “You’re going to follow that little man.” He “taught us how to win football games,” said one player, who felt renewed confidence under the coach. Drawing on interviews and research, the author serviceably captures the unusual drive and holistic approach of Holtz; the intense recruitment of players; and the on-the-field performances of such players as star quarterback Tony Rice, running back Ricky Watters, and “Three Amigos” linebackers Wes Pritchett, Michael Stonebreaker and Frank Stams. He recounts several well-remembered games, notably the landmark 31-30 upset of top-ranked rival Miami, ending their 36-game winning streak. Barca attributes the team’s successes to Holtz, who preached his faith in the university’s spirit, and to the outstanding play of the quarterback and defensive line.

A mostly pedestrian sports book that will appeal to Notre Dame’s legions of fans. (16-page color photo insert)

GEORGE WASHINGTON Gentleman Warrior

Brumwell, Stephen Quercus (512 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-62365-100-8 978-1-62365-101-5 e-book

America’s “pugnacious fighting man,” as dashingly portrayed by English historian Brumwell (Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe, 2008, etc.).

The author concentrates on Washington’s martial experience during the 1750s alongside Gen. Edward Braddock and other British fighting the French. During this time, he honed his noble reputation as a patriot leader. Denied a gentleman’s education by the untimely death of his Virginia planter father in 1743, young George applied his mathematical talents to learning the trade of land surveying for a lucrative career, as well as a chance to apply his fascination with the wilds of the North American interior. With the French encroaching into Virginia territory in the 1750s, Washington volunteered his services as emissary in the “escalating imperial rivalry,” publishing a journal of his arduous journey into Ohio Country in 1754, bringing him fame at age 22. From colonel of the Virginia Regiment to aide-de-camp for Braddock, Washington cut his

EMPTY HANDS, OPEN ARMS Bonobos, the Rainforest, and Conservation in the Heart of the Congo

Béchard, Deni Milkweed (320 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-57131-340-9 978-1-57131-849-7 e-book

Journalist Béchard (Cures for Hunger: A Memoir, 2012, etc.), a foreign correspondent familiar with war zones, probes beneath headlines describing the Congo as “a country of such inhumanity that we find it incomprehensible” and finds another, more hopeful reality.

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Comes across as a vanity project that does little credit to the storytelling process.

military teeth on the British military hierarchy, adopting an exemplary code of order and discipline that he would later apply to his ragged American recruits. Enduring French and Indian “terror tactics” and debilitating dysentery, he made a name as an intrepid and adaptive leader (for example, he clothed his men “after the Indian fashion” for one campaign), while revealing already by 1757 in his letters a sense of resentment against what he perceived as “a deliberate policy of discrimination against colonials.” The hard reality of fighting in frontier warfare dispelled notions of old-world gallantry and created the hardened soldier Washington became rather more characteristically than the gentleman farmer he fashioned himself (and was often portrayed) later on. Brumwell’s subsequent tracking of Washington through the battles of the Revolutionary War seem almost anticlimactic in comparison to the dynamic early annals of this heroic man.

The First Father waves from his high horse with this felicitous new assessment of his derring-do. (8 full-color plates)

MOB BOSS The Life of Little Al D’arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia Capeci, Jerry; Robbins, Tom Dunne/St. Martin’s (432 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-250-00686-8

Veteran New York reporters tell the story of a Mafia kingpin’s rise to power, his decision to leave the mob and his role in testifying against his former partners in crime.

Leading Mafia authority Capeci (Wiseguys Say the Darndest Things: The Quotable Mafia, 2004, etc.) and former New York Daily News reporter Robbins (Investigative Reporting/CUNY School of Journalism) use hours of interviews with Al D’Arco to recount his progression toward becoming the Lucchese crime family’s acting boss in 1990. D’Arco grew up the son of an Italian immigrant in New York’s Little Italy during the 1940s, where the Mafia was like a “forest” surrounding him. With neighbors, friends and family in the “Life,” D’Arco assumed it was just a matter of time before he joined one of New York’s five families.

After a short stint in the Army during the Korean War, D’Arco received mentorship from a cousin who was a made member of the Mafia, and he associated with a Lucchese family crew under the leadership of the notorious Paul Vario (featured in the book Wiseguys and the movie Goodfellas). Inheriting his father’s determined work ethic, D’Arco put his energy toward a successful career in the Mafia, including having his oldest son follow in his trade. D’Arco’s labors bore fruit when the Lucchese family’s boss and underboss were forced to go on the lam, making him the organization’s acting boss. As a boss, he attempted to reconcile his sense of honor with the crimes he was pushed to commit. When members of the crime family conspired to kill him, his personal code was tested further with his decision to turn to the FBI and testify against his former associates. While tension grows with D’Arco’s decision to leave the Life, the most interesting portions of the book follow the colorful cast of characters he encountered during his Mafia career.

A raw and fascinating account of one mobster’s daily activities and career. (8-page b/w photo insert)

THE MOTH

Burns, Catherine—Ed. Hyperion (432 pp.) $15.99 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4013-1111-7 Storytellers from a diverse array of backgrounds present true tales via a New York–based organization broadcasting at themoth.org.

For all its vital cultural roots, storytelling makes a strange bedfellow with the printed page. In this self-congratulatory volume—readers can plow through a preface, a foreword and an introduction before even getting to the first story—stories originally told before live audiences are transcribed and edited to no discernible purpose, considering that they are all available in their original formats on the website. The stories run the gamut from childhood memories to love and marriage to illness, crime, war and family secrets, with several epiphanies thrown in for good measure. Some are quite moving—e.g., rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels’ account of how Sarah McLachlan’s music saved him from depression and geneticist Paul Nurse’s discovery that the woman he had thought was his sister was actually his mother.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Her Way” manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking in its evocation of a friendship’s end. Others that should pack a punch, including writer Jillian Lauren’s “The Prince and I,” about her stint as a courtesan to the Sultan of Brunei, fall flat on the page. Therein lies the problem with this anthology: These stories are meant to be experienced in a live venue, where listeners can immerse themselves in each teller’s unique sense of tone and timing. Unlike personal essays, stories require give and take from an audience, which prompts the question: Why bother printing these in an age when people who couldn’t attend the original sessions can easily access live footage online? Other contributors include A.E. Hotchner, Adam Gopnik, Sebastian Junger and Nathan Englander. |

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“In the latest entry in the publisher’s Jewish Encounters series, Dauber offers a brisk biography—and, at times, celebration—of the writer who created Tevye the Dairyman, the basis for what became Fiddler on the Roof.” from the worlds of sholem aleichem

I DON’T KNOW In Praise of Admitting Ignorance and Doubt (Except When You Shouldn’t)

The author’s 2004 horseback trip from Mongolia to Hungary, 6,000 miles, was supposed to take 18 months but dragged on for three years. Cope aimed to recapture some of the magical freedom he imagined still existed for the nomads of the Mongolian steppes, descendants of Genghis Khan and his marauding empire. The author was also determined to dispel the stereotypes prevalent among Russians and others that Mongolians were barbaric and uncivilized and their existence more backward than the peoples of the neighboring societies. In a sensitive account both personal and historical, Cope delineates the nuts and bolts of such a daunting equine adventure: procuring the necessary horses (several sets of them, as Mongolian horses could not be removed from the country), and learning to ride and care for them properly, along with a great deal of research about the Mongolian empire and the life of the herding nomads (e.g., the return of the Tatars to the Crimea since their removal during World War II). The author even learned some Mongolian and Russian. Cope invited his share of hardships, which came from camping out in the wilderness, at full mercy of the elements, horse thieves and wolves, among other daily perils.

Though he (and for the first two months, his girlfriend) relied on the generosity of the nomads and their extraordinary sense of hospitality, navigating the borders set him back mightily. The author infuses his ambitious account with the stories of the people and tales of the animals who inspired the journey, rendering the book heartfelt and memorable.

An exciting, detailed account of man versus adversity.

(Three 8-page color inserts)

Cohen, Leah Hager Riverhead (112 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-1-59463-239-6

A noted author’s short but pointed meditation on the difficulty human beings have in admitting their own ignorance.

The fear of exposing our lack of knowledge is universal. Cohen (The Grief of Others, 2011, etc.) suggests that the reason for this is that doing so “could cost us the human company we desire [and] evict us from our place around the hearth.” Indeed, the inability to understand the cosmos could threaten something even more fundamental: our very existence. Drawing from a variety of scientific, linguistic, literary and philosophical sources, Cohen examines both the human urge to conceal ignorance and its ramifications. The anecdotes are both illuminating and disturbing, and they are from personal experience as well as from the many informal interviews she conducted with people from different walks of like. The stories, which deal with family, friendships, school, work, social injustice and sexuality, reveal how factors like race, class and gender play into our need to dissemble when we do not know something. Cohen recognizes that “fakery is a vital currency in our social discourse” and that it often facilitates the expression of good will. At the same time, she points out that it can lead to the moral irresponsibility and emotional inhibition that can, ironically, endanger the very human connections we seek to cultivate and preserve. True empowerment, Cohen argues, comes from being able to take the chance we fear and confessing ignorance. Doing so opens us “to receiving information, ideas and perspectives from beyond the borders of the self ” and reinforces relationships through honesty. Even more importantly, it helps us come to terms with the fact that the world can never be fully known and can only be appreciated for its “inexhaustible mysteriousness.”

Refreshingly wise and open-minded.

THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye Dauber, Jeremy Schocken (480 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-8052-4278-2 978-0-8052-4316-1 e-book

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Jewish Encounters series, Dauber (Yiddish Literature/Columbia Univ.; In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern, 2010, etc.) offers a brisk biography—and, at times, celebration—of the writer who created Tevye the Dairyman, the basis for what became Fiddler on the Roof.

The author, who has written about Jewish and Yiddish literature numerous times, brings to his new task a comprehensive knowledge not only of Sholem Aleichem’s life (1859–1916), but also of the contexts—historical and literary—in which he wrote and thrived. He begins with an explanation of his initial interest in Aleichem and then retreats, first to the writer’s funeral (as many as 200,000 turned out), then to a snapshot of his last year before returning to 1859, the year of his birth near Kiev. Dauber describes Aleichem’s early passion to write—his “graphomania”—his family relationships (his mother died early), his early

ON THE TRAIL OF GENGHIS KHAN An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads Cope, Tim Bloomsbury (496 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-60819-072-0

Call him crazy but determined: the story of Australian adventurer Cope (Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes, 2004), who jettisoned his bike for a horse to gallop across Mongolia.

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EMPTY MANSIONS The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

schooling, his first publication (1881), marriage and his first use of his now-famous pen name in 1883. Dauber also shows how financial problems hounded Aleichem throughout his life. He was poor, then inherited a lot, lost it, and struggled off and on thereafter, even in the days of his greatest celebrity when he was touring and publishing just about anything he wanted to. (He did not, of course, live long enough to profit from Fiddler.) He met the actual dairyman Tevye in the summer of 1894 and used a fictional dairyman character frequently in stories thereafter.

Dauber pauses occasionally to explore a story, novel or play in more detail, to paint the historical background (anti-Semitism, pogroms, immigration), and to describe his subject’s writing habits (he could write anywhere), his peripatetic later career and his devotion to his family.

Dauber’s prose is swift, clean and clear, and the portrait that emerges is sharply focused. (16 pages of b/w illustrations)

Dedman, Bill; Newell Jr., Paul Clark Ballantine (496 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0345534521

An investigation into the secretive life of the youngest daughter and heiress to a Gilded Age copper tycoon.

Huguette Clark (1906–2011) lived for more than a century and never once wanted for money. At her death, she was estimated to be worth—incorrectly, as it turned out—about $500 million. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Dedman stumbled onto her tale and wrote a series of stories about the Clark family, their fortune and the mystery surrounding Huguette. Here, with the assistance of Huguette’s cousin Newell, the author expands his search for information about the heiress who disappeared from public view in the 1980s—though she lived for another three decades. After an introduction to Clark’s fortune, Dedman moves his focus to her lifestyle and pursuits, always following the money. Clark was certainly eccentric, and her decisions, both financial and otherwise, definitely capture the imagination. She chose to live in seclusion after her mother’s death and then lived out the last few decades of her life in a hospital, despite being healthy. She spent money seemingly without thinking, giving away tens of millions of dollars to friends and employees, even selling off prized possessions to do so. As Clark aged, her family became concerned that her gifts were not necessarily voluntary and went looking for her. The story picks up steam with the family’s search for their wealthy relative and its aftermath. Unfortunately, this thread ends soon after the conflict is introduced, and it isn’t fleshed out as well as the rest of the book. Though her father’s fortune is central to the story—he is considered to have been one of the 50 richest Americans ever—so much focus on his exploits early on makes Huguette seem like a secondary character.

Clark is an intriguing figure with a story that will interest many, but the book misses the mark as an in-depth exposé.

THE SHINING SEA David Porter and the Epic Voyage of the U.S.S. Essex During the War of 1812

Daughan, George C. Basic (360 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-465-01962-5

A technical term–packed mini-history of the War of 1812 and biography of Capt. David Porter (1780 –1843).

Daughan (If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—From the Revolution to the War of 1812, 2008, etc.) stuffs the book so full of nautical terms that many readers will require a dictionary to search for words not included in the glossary. Porter began his career as a merchantman when he was 16, and he eventually joined the new U.S. Navy under President John Adams. He fought in the Quasi-War with France in 1798 and spent nearly 20 months in a prison in Tripoli after fighting the Barbary pirates.

The War of 1812 gave Porter his chance to advance his career.

President James Madison didn’t plan on much help from the Navy until Porter’s Essex took eight prizes and then a ship of the Royal Navy. Madison sent him out again to harass British shipping in the South Atlantic, and eventually, he “doubled the horn” (sailed around) into the Pacific, where he successfully harassed British whalers. While in the Marquesas to resupply the ship, however, Porter overdid it by claiming the islands for the United States, a decision that had lasting effects for only a month after he pulled out. Mostly, he was looking for a fight with the British, who were searching the seas for him. After so many successful encounters, his arrogance would prove his undoing.

The escapades of Porter illustrate how the men who made the U.S. Navy great succeeded against great odds and across vast oceans. Daughan is obviously well-versed in and passionate about his subject, but landlubbers will find the technical terms off-putting. (15 b/w illustrations)

THE KIDS GOT IT RIGHT How the Texas All-Stars Kicked Down Racial Walls

Dent, Jim Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-250-00785-8

Consummate sports chronicler Dent (Courage Behind the Game: The Freddie Steinmark Story, 2012, etc.) examines a transformative football event in Texas that blurred racial boundaries. |

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“A great one-volume interpretation, the equal of Rick Atkinson’s recent version and almost equivalent to much longer, older accounts by Barrie Pitt and Alan Moorehead.” from destiny in the desert

Back when sports “lacked the glitz, the megamillions, and the idolization,” one popular all-star game stole the spotlight from all other arenas: the Big 33 Football Classic. Pitting two teams of 33 high school football all-star players against each other, it was the ultimate rivalry competition. Dent begins his coverage of two pivotal incarnations of the event in 1964, as Texas bowed to Pennsylvania in a crushing 12-6 loss. The defeat enraged Texas coach Bobby Layne, a former superstar quarterback saddled with a drinking habit and relentless hubris. With the able assistance of longtime friend and former teammate Doak Walker and the approval of then-mayor John Connally, the Texas all-star team enlisted three exceptionally talented but largely ignored black players who had yet to be integrated into the Texas games: James Harris, George Dunford and Jerry “the Jet” LeVias, a beefy yet swift scholarship athlete who fought through a polio-riddled childhood to emerge a gifted athlete with the NFL. LeVias was befriended by talented white high school quarterback Bill Bradley, his “blue-eyed soul brother,” who rejected segregationist norms of the time to become LeVias’ roommate and best friend. The sold-out, media-frenzied Big 33 game in 1965 found Texas taking victorious strides in both football and racial equality. Dent includes generous sections of lively game play, personal profiles and interesting postscripts from Coach Layne, Walker, Bradley, LeVias and respected black Texas high school coach Clifton Ozen.

A passionate, well-reported history of the role Texas football played in America’s racial integration. (8-page b/w photo insert)

Wavell with Gen. Claude Auchinleck, whose November 1941 offensive overwhelmed Rommel, a dramatic victory that evaporated when Rommel unexpectedly counterattacked, routing Auchinleck’s overstretched forces. By summer, with Rommel back in Egypt, Auchinleck was gone. By the time his successor, Montgomery, attacked in November 1942, Allied control of sea and air reduced Rommel’s supplies to a trickle, and the outcome is well-known. The Desert Campaign remains the most satisfying of World War II. Civilians were scarce, so Germans could demonstrate their prowess without the usual atrocities. The British revealed their distinctive stubbornness in defense and slowness in offense, hobbled by inferior equipment and unimaginative generals.

A great one-volume interpretation, the equal of Rick Atkinson’s recent version and almost equivalent to much longer, older accounts by Barrie Pitt and Alan Moorehead.

(16 pages of b/w photos)

THEIR FATE IS OUR FATE How Birds Foretell Threats to the Health of Our World

Doherty, Peter The Experiment (240 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-61519-091-1

Like the canary in the coal mine, “[b]irds in the wild function as a roaming, natural detection system” for environmental pollution and may themselves spread potentially dangerous viruses, writes Nobel laureate Doherty (Microbiology and Immunology/Univ. of Melbourne; The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: Advice for Young Scientists, 2006, etc.).

The author makes a strong case for the need for more citizen scientists to help monitor bird migration. Much of his professional work as a microbiologist has focused on the spread of influenza viruses and the threat of potential deadly epidemics such as the one following World War I that felled more people than the combined war casualties. The author explains that “influenza is generally a relatively mild infection of the avian gastrointestinal tract (rather than respiratory tract).” A large number of wild fowl are mildly infected, but their droppings can contaminate chicken feed. If the chickens are kept in overcrowded coops, then conditions can become favorable for mutations and the transformation of the mild form of intestinal virus to a virulent one that can infect domestic animals.

Doherty suggests that bird watchers collaborating with trained ornithologists already play a critical role in helping to prevent pandemics by creating an early warning system—e.g., monitoring changes in annual migratory patterns and noting unusual deaths. More citizen scientists are needed, however, to ensure that new, dangerous viruses are identified in a timely fashion and new vaccines can be produced and public health measures put in place. Doherty gives special mention to the activity of the Audubon Society, which organizes a global network of

DESTINY IN THE DESERT The Road to El Alamein: The Battle that Turned the Tide of World War II Dimbleby, Jonathan Pegasus (560 pp.) $35.00 | Sep. 15, 2013 978-1-60598-479-7

“Before Alamein we never had a victory; after Alamein we never had a defeat”: one of many memorable Churchill-isms that do not survive the acute eye of writer and filmmaker Dimbleby in this fine account of Britain’s 1940-1942 North African campaign.

When Italy entered the war in June 1940, its North African colonies’ 250,000 soldiers vastly outnumbered 36,000 in Egypt under harried Gen. Archibald Wavell, who defended an immense area while fending off Churchill’s exhortations to attack. Aware of their dilapidated forces, Italian generals reluctantly advanced in September. After some skirmishing, Wavell attacked, advancing 500 miles and capturing 100,000 prisoners. At this point, Churchill ordered three divisions transferred to Greece to meet a coming German invasion, and Hitler sent several divisions and his favorite general, Erwin Rommel. Disobeying orders to remain on the defensive, he drove Wavell’s forces back into Egypt. Churchill replaced 46

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volunteers who monitor local bird populations and share information internationally.

The author, an enthusiastic bird-watcher, combines bird lore and cutting-edge science in an attractive mix that should inspire citizen scientists to pursue their hobby with renewed vigor and convince others to join in. (6 b/w photos)

position on his subject with the subtitle—“In Defense of a Real Education”—of this deeply felt collection of explorations and reflections on an education in the liberal arts.

The author examines the slow transformation of universities and colleges from being driven by intellectual and cultural betterment to institutions modeled on business, with a complex, and not always successful, emphasis on attracting students and making a profit. Success, Edmundson writes, isn’t as clear-cut as the bottom line or the percentage increase in applications or even in the rigor of the education being offered.

Our culture rewards the system in which the professors tend to their academic business, the students check off the various boxes, and the school support staff build newer, better amenities to ensure that the students feel they are getting the best of the best. Edmundson argues that students have an immeasurably priceless opportunity to take the beliefs that have been instilled in them throughout childhood and put them under a microscope. They have the chance to ensure that they aren’t going to simply fit in, as a square peg, to the first matching hole that comes along. “Education is about finding out what form of

WHY TEACH? In Defense of a Real Education

Edmundson, Mark Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $23.00 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-62040-107-1

Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll, 2010, etc.) dispels any ambiguity about his

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A CURIOUS INVITATION The Forty Greatest Parties in Fiction

work for you is close to being play,” writes the author—not that it should be simple and without challenge but that doing what you love (and discovering what that might be) is more important than “advancing in the direction of someone else’s dreams” and pursuing education as a means to buying your way into what you’re acculturated to think equals happiness and success.

Edmundson may have strong words about culture, education and the common reader’s quest to be entertained above all else, but he provides a bracing tonic against the decline of higher education.

Field, Suzette Perennial/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $15.99 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-06-227183-9

Events promoter Field summarizes soirees that only happen between the covers of a book—or when her Last Tuesday Society reproduces them in London.

Though it begins with Trimalchio’s first-century frolic from The Satyricon and closes with an excessive 2008 feast featuring endangered species from DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland, Field’s scattershot collection doesn’t otherwise progress in chronological order—or any other discernible kind of order.

The final few get-togethers are fairly apocalyptic: The high school prom turns bloody in Carrie; partygoers eat the dead guest of honor in Finnegan’s Wake; and Randle McMurphy’s shindig in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest results in a lobotomy for the host, though Pierre’s hero/caterer does have second thoughts about serving up a 100-year-old Galapagos tortoise in the final entry. Field does have a format for presenting the individual parties, from The Invitation through The Guest List to The Outcome and The Legacy, but it’s mostly an excuse to make reasonably amusing wisecracks about how English writers never describe the food and condescending takedowns of writers more talented than she is. Granted, it’s hard not to giggle when Field opines that if Frodo had known that the gift he got at Uncle Bilbo’s Eleventy-First Birthday Party was the Ring of Doom, he could have saved himself “all the aggro and bother it would cause him over the next thousand pages or so.” Unfortunately, too much of the humor is on the level of this: “Plato is perhaps best remembered these days in the term ‘platonic love,’ but, as we see…he didn’t rule out a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the path to enlightenment.” Still, Field’s once-over-lightly approach will probably please undemanding folks looking for a few laughs while they obtain simple takeaways on books they’ll never read: The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity’s Rainbow and The Prose Edda are among the more daunting works digested, though Hollywood Wives adds a bit of trashy fluff.

Like the chatter at a cocktail party: fun but forgettable.

IN THE HEART OF LIFE A Memoir Eldon, Kathy HarperOne (384 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-06-204862-2

A TV and film producer’s memoir of a rich life lived as an American expatriate in Britain and Kenya and of the remarkable relationship she had with her son, photojournalist Dan Eldon.

As a child, Iowa native Eldon often dreamed of “flying away and exploring the world.” She got her wish not long after graduating from college when she married an English businessman and went to live with him in late-1960s London. But it quickly became evident to her that a life of dull domesticity would not allow her to help other people. All that changed after her husband was transferred to Nairobi in 1977. Eldon embarked on a magnificent adventure in a land that not only captivated her heart but also awakened a deep inner restlessness. She educated herself about Kenya and its people, went on safaris and met extraordinary artists and intellectuals, including several members of the brilliant Leakey family. Eager to be more than just another “bored” wife, she began writing articles about everything from Kenyan food and politics to visiting celebrities like psychic Sylvia Browne, who started Eldon on a lifelong metaphysical quest for truth. She also encouraged her gifted son to express himself through art and, later, photography. Selfenlightenment brought increasing professional recognition and success but ended her marriage and nearly destroyed her. She returned to England, where she found a career mentor in distinguished film producer Geoffrey Dudman. Meanwhile, her son began his brief but brilliant career as a humanitarian and photojournalist. Eerily enough, his tragic death at age 22 fulfilled a psychic prediction that she would find her purpose in finishing the work another had begun.

A vibrant, interesting book marred by an overabundance of detail and an overreliance on cosmic signs taken for predestined wonders.

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DANCING WITH THE ENEMY My Family’s Holocaust Secret

Glaser, Paul Talese/Doubleday (336 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-385-53770-4

The nephew of a Dutch Jewish dance teacher sent to Auschwitz gradually uncovers her tale of survival and triumph.

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“A chilling personal account of the deep-seated terror and ethnic violence underpinning the puppet state of Croatia during World War II.” from 1941

taken his aunt Rosie’s wartime diary and fleshed it out for publication, adding numerous photographs and letters for an overall sense of the consummate spirit of his aunt. Having lived in Germany during her earliest years, when her father worked in a German factory, Rosie was fluent in German; the nonreligious Jewish family eventually moved to the Netherlands, where Rosie became infatuated with dancing. After her first love, a pilot, was killed on a flight in 1936, Rosie used her dance skills to make a new life for herself and ensure her self-preservation throughout the years to come. She became the wife of a dance instructor, helping him to run his thriving studio until the Nazi invaders made it increasingly difficult for Jews to work or even move around the cities. A flirtation with another man turned disastrous: Both men, the first out of jealousy, the other from venality, betrayed her to the occupiers. Yet every step of the way, from deportation to imprisonment in Auschwitz, Rosie managed to sway fate her way—or, as she states: “I quickly assessed the situation and tried to regain some semblance of control over my life.” Alternating with her first-person narrative is the journey the Catholic-raised author took toward grasping his Jewish heritage and confronting the various skittish relatives for the truth, including the aged Rosie herself.

A readable, personable study and a scathing indictment of Dutch passivity in the face of occupation, though without being able to read the actual diary, readers may wonder about the liberties taken by the nephew.

defining characteristics. He traces the history of anti-Semitism in Christian history (from the Crusades to the enduring beliefs about “Christ-killing” and the blood libel), then argues that the sympathy accorded the Jews following the Holocaust has been abating in recent years. Other major topics include the relationship between anti-Israel positions and anti-Semitism (they are inextricably linked, he says), the political and religious motives of anti-Semitism in Arab and Muslim states, and the spread of anti-Semitism to the United Nations and to NGOs. Among his most alarming sections are those devoted to the viral spread of anti-Semitism via the Internet, social and news media. Most of the illustrations he reproduces (political cartoons, quotations from politicians) are horrifying to contemplate. Repeatedly he wonders: How can so few people generate such pervasive hostility?

A frightening photograph of a mutable demon so many fail to recognize and continue to embrace.

1941 The Year that Keeps Returning

Goldstein, Slavko Translated by Gable, Michael New York Review Books (640 pp.) $32.95 | Nov. 5, 2013 978-1-59017-673-3 978-1-59017-700-6 e-book

THE DEVIL THAT NEVER DIES The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism

A chilling personal account of the deep-seated terror and ethnic violence underpinning the puppet state of Croatia during World War II. In a memoir that came to light thanks to the attention of Belgrade-born poet Charles Simic, who offers an elucidating introduction here, Croatian editor and historian Goldstein, born in 1928, not only recounts his intimate grief resulting from the murder of his father by the fascist Ustasha thugs that came to power with Croatia’s “independence” in 1941, but he encapsulates the ongoing anguish of the multiethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia that are still convulsed by sectarian hatred. With the encouragement of Hitler—who suggested to the Ustasha chief that in order for Croatia to become a stable state, “it would have to carry out a policy of ethnic intolerance for fifty years”—the Ustasha regime was bent on “cleansing” the Croatian state of Serbs as well as Jews and Gypsies. Goldstein’s father, a prosperous Jewish bookseller, had communist and intellectual connections, and thus several strikes against him in the views of the fascists, who first imprisoned him in the Danica concentration camp, then the formidable Jadovno death camp, before he was systematically executed. The author was barely 13 years old at the time, but he was shocked into adulthood quickly, especially as he witnessed the betrayal of former friends and colleagues. With his mother imprisoned and the author moved among different homes, Goldstein and the remaining family eventually joined the Croatian partisan fighters camped out in the forests. In this riveting narrative, the author often refers to the recent Croat-Serb ethnic violence in an attempt to explain how “modern Croatia

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah Little, Brown (432 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-316-09787-1

Anti-Semitism is more pervasive, dangerous and deadly than ever before, writes the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).

Former Harvard professor Goldhagen (Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, 2009), who has also written about the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holocaust (A Moral Reckoning, 2002), comes out swinging in this frontal assault on anti-Semitism and its practitioners and does not pause for breath until the final page, where he offers a feeble defense against the formidable juggernaut he describes: “People of good conscience unite….” Although his arguments and evidence are at times repetitive, they are never redundant. The author begins with the origins of anti-Semitism, then examines its singularity (it is unlike any other prejudice at large today), its omnipresence in contemporary culture (Mel Gibson makes a cameo) and even lists a number of literary all-stars who have embraced and/or furthered its foul agenda (Chaucer, Voltaire and Eliot among them). Goldhagen then describes what he calls the “antisemitic paradigm,” offering a list of |

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“Goodyear’s exploration of this engrossing and morally complex topic provides a solid footing for hearty conversations.” from anything that moves

WHEN RAIN HURTS An Adoptive Mother’s Journey with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

has not been freed from this disease, and it is only in the last few years that it has begun to be treated for it.”

A stunning work that looks frankly at the “roots of evil.”

Greene, Mary Evelyn Red Hen Press (296 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-59709-262-3

ANYTHING THAT MOVES Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture

A searingly candid chronicle of the heroic struggle of two adoptive parents to raise their multiply disabled son.

Environmental attorney Greene (contributing author: Easy to Love but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories, 2012) uses her personal experience to expose the problems that may arise in international adoptions, especially when the people involved are unscrupulous. Her account begins in 2004, when she and her husband adopted two Russian children.

The author weaves together a running narrative with journal excerpts from the time when 3-year-old Peter and 2-year old Sophie joined the family. After it had become apparent that Greene and her husband were unlikely to conceive a child, they decided to adopt, settling on a now-bankrupt adoption agency from her home state, Florida. The agency connected them with a remotely located Russian orphanage. Aware of the dangers involved in international adoptions, they had enlisted the services of an adoption pediatrician to help them evaluate the information sent them by the agency. As it turned out, however, in the case of Peter, photographs had been doctored to obscure visible evidence that he suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition much like autism that can occur when a pregnant mother consumes excessive amounts of alcohol. Despite warning signs visible on their first meeting with the children—Peter and Sophie were severely malnourished, but Sophie was lively, affectionate and mentally alert, while Peter was disoriented, aggressive and impulsive—the couple decided to go ahead with his adoption. They naïvely hoped that he would respond to love and training, but this was not to be. Not only does he suffer from FAS, but he has also been diagnosed with autism, an epileptic seizure disorder and more, and he now lives in a residential treatment setting with frequent home visits.

A useful, inspiring cautionary tale for prospective adoptive parents.

Goodyear, Dana Riverhead (336 pp.) $27.95 | Nov. 14, 2013 978-1-59448-837-5

Venturing deep into the underground foodie culture, New Yorker contributor Goodyear (The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard: Poems, 2013, etc.) plunges into the world of dedicated individuals who routinely skirt the boundaries imposed by common culinary practices and tastes.

The author is no stranger to ingesting foods many would forego. During a stint in China, she ate chicken feet and consumed a seven-course meal of dog meat. When Goodyear began hanging out with extreme foodies, the type of characters who consider insects, frog fallopian tubes and horsemeat as fair game for dinner, her food boundaries expanded. A dish composed of “slippery jellyfish in sesame-oil vinaigrette, and a raw oyster, poached quail egg, and crab guts, meant to be slurped together in one viscous spoonful” provided the author with an example of the “quiver on quiver on quiver” characterizing the “convergence of the disgusting and the sublime typical of so much foodie food.” Goodyear skillfully stitches together the philosophical, psychological and legal underpinnings of this emerging movement with the stories of those consumers who seek out the sometimes-bizarre foods. She explores bits of culinary history, how culture plays a role in what’s acceptable to eat and the ethical lines some individuals won’t cross when it comes to exotic eating. The author visited underground pop-up restaurants, which combine “the raucous dinner with random tablemates, and the self-conscious staging of an elevated social interaction,” and she spent time with the chefs who routinely traverse the outer limits of America’s new food landscape. One chef, irate at the amount of waste in the meat industry, believes meat eating mustn’t be easy but should force people to confront their food choices. Chris Cosentino, a well-known chef among adventurous eaters, “started serving the parts Americans no longer wanted to eat: spleens and blood and sperm; lungs, lips and livers.”

Goodyear’s exploration of this engrossing and morally complex topic provides a solid footing for hearty conversations.

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DAUGHTER OF EMPIRE My Life as a Mountbatten

Hicks, Pamela Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4767-3381-4

The story of Lady Hicks (India Remembered, 2007, etc.), who lived the kind of life we think of as only existing in books and movies, with nannies, governesses and all the trappings of the English elite. |

The author’s mother, Edwina Mountbatten, didn’t really take to parenting, and she often took off for extended trips around the world. She also managed to lose the name of the hotel in Budapest where she’d dropped her children and nannies for safekeeping during the Abyssinian crisis. Hicks’ father, Lord Mountbatten, accepted Edwina’s string of lovers with barely a mention. The author’s description of her years with her parents in India during its transfer to independence is entirely reminiscent of her father’s TV program; even the egocentric tone of voice is exactly like his. However, the tone and atmosphere of self-importance is not altogether surprising, given that Hicks was cousin to the queen; could trace her roots back 900 years; owned a home in London on Park Lane, at Sussex Downs and a 6,000-acre estate in Hampshire. Her family was close enough for her to be named as head bridesmaid for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding and to accompany her on the fateful world tour that was so sadly cut short. The author’s description of the new queen’s reaction to the fate suddenly thrust upon her reflects a woman who was already the regal woman we now know.

Though the first half of the book does little more than portray the pampered life of the upper-crust children who had to curtsey to grandmother, Hicks’ love of India and the description of her year with the queen’s world tour make it worth reading. Many fans of Downton Abbey will certainly enjoy it. (24 b/w photos)

place in 2010 and 2011, were originally recorded live, allowing the authors to explore Jung’s text with extemporaneous verve. The resulting conversations, drawn from Jung’s entire body of work, are lively, contemplative and insightful. This intimate and accessible series of dialogues is an exemplary complement to Red Book and also stands alone as a wonderful—if allusive—introduction to the significance of Jung’s work.

A brilliant collection, evocative of all that is wonderful and strange about Jung’s Red Book and about the human psyche itself.

SHADY CHARACTERS The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks Houston, Keith Norton (320 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-393-06442-1

A mostly amusing, informative history of punctuation.

Several years ago, Houston, a computer programmer, came down with a bad case of pilcrowinfatuation. Obsessed with the archaic glyph used to mark the beginnings of paragraphs, he laboriously traced its storied past, encompassing “the ancient Greeks, the coming of Christianity, Charlemagne, medieval writing, and England’s greatest twentieth-century typographer.” One of these things is not like the other, and readers who do not share Houston’s malady will find it difficult to understand the intensity of his interest in punctuation. Spurred on by a chance encounter with the widow of the creator of the interrobang (“a hybrid question mark/exclamation point”), the author broadened his focus. From the first visual markers denoting word boundaries in Greek and Roman texts to the development of computerized kerning and letterscaling systems (“[d]enizens of the typographic world were not amused,” fearing that automation threatened the purity of their craft), Houston explores the roles a variety of punctuation marks have played in the popular imagination. The forgotten manicule, the modest dash and the ampersand all make appearances, as do intriguing characters from millennia past: Scrolls at the library of Alexandria featured the “dotted diple”—“used to mark passages where the scholar differed with the reading of other critics.” The author also keenly laments perceived punctuational slights—e.g., the world’s longest footnote, a 165-page aside cataloging Britain’s Roman walls, “is, sadly, introduced by the letter u rather than an asterisk or dagger.” The book is often engrossing, but the author can never quite decide if he is aiming for a substantive book on the history of written expression or for a compendium of errata. Scores of prints from ancient and medieval manuscripts suggest the former; the final chapter, an exhaustive anthology of proposals for marking irony and sarcasm, many on deleted personal webpages, the latter.

An unusual triumph of the human ability to find exaltation in the mundane. (75 illustrations)

LAMENT OF THE DEAD Psychology After Jung’s Red Book

Hillman, James; Shamdasani, Sonu Norton (256 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 26, 2013 978-0-393-08894-6

This series of transcribed conversations between two eminent scholars provides nuanced and provocative context for Carl Jung’s Red Book and its influence on contemporary thinking.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history, Jung wrote and illustrated his Red Book between 1914 and 1930, but it wasn’t until 2009 that his heirs allowed the text to be published for a wide readership. A product of Jung’s cognitive methodology “active imagination,” in which one’s psyche is expressed freely as a method of understanding, Red Book is a robust source text for this enthralling collection of dialogues.

Hillman (Alchemical Psychology, 2011 etc.), who died in 2011 and spent his life immersed in Jung’s school, and Shamdasani (C.G. Jung: Biography in Books, 2012, etc.), a prominent Jungian historian, discuss a wide range of subjects, including the porous boundaries among psychology, history and literature; imagery and narrative as links to the past and to the unconscious; and how dreams and fantasies may play significant roles in waking life. In addition, a major focus is “the dead” as both a literal and metaphysical concept, as well as the imperative to provide a voice and place for the dead to enable our own living. These conversations, which took |

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“Jones’ careful, sensitive study offers a deeply intimate look into the emotional makeup of children of war.” from then they started shooting

THE SHIFT How I Finally Lost Weight and Discovered a Happier Life

conclusions about children of war. The author worked in humanitarian aid and child psychiatry in the Balkans from 1991 to 1995, through four years of war and siege in Bosnia, and returned intermittently over the subsequent years to the towns of Foca and Gorazde to re-interview her charges and record updates. The two towns were made up of various percentages of Serbs, Croats and Muslims. As the war spread, the citizens were terrorized by paramilitary groups bent on “ethnic cleansing,” forcibly expelling people, displacing families, and torturing and killing suspected rivals. The Dayton Agreement of December 1995 arranged an uneasy truce, stipulating the safe return of people to their homes despite the ethnic mishmash and suspicion and indicting some of the war criminals. Jones concentrates on eight children, between 8 and adolescence, she first met in 1998 and records their experiences of displacement, violence and terror during the war years. Curiously, few had any feelings of animosity toward the other ethnic groups before the war, living closely among them in communities, but they were often indoctrinated by adults and the ongoing strife to hate the other side and justify their ill treatment of displaced neighbors. Jones tracks the children’s progress, finding that the ones who didn’t ask too many questions were the ones who thrived.

Avoidance and distancing allowed the children to protect themselves emotionally.

Jones’ careful, sensitive study offers a deeply intimate look into the emotional makeup of children of war. (4 maps; 1 chart)

Johnson, Tory Hyperion (256 pp.) $22.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4013-2492-6

One woman’s journey of weight loss.

“I spent decades under the misperception that my weight was just another thing beyond my control,” writes Johnson in her honest narrative about her decision to lose more than 50 pounds. Fearful that her job as a contributor to Good Morning America was on the line, she decided that her work and her happiness were more important than anything.

She knew she had to lose the weight. Over the years, Johnson had tried a variety of diets but had always given up when she had not reached certain goals fast enough. Then she went right back to eating large amounts of food and felt terrible when the weight returned. What she needed was a mental shift: “I realized that what I put in my head is far more important than what I put in my mouth.” With this basic philosophy to lean on, Johnson began the slow process of learning to eat smaller portions, eating healthier, low-carb foods, and learning to say no when people tempted her with high-calorie foods. Gradually, the weight began to drop, and Johnson discovered she liked her leaner body, the way it moved and looked in the new clothes she bought for herself, and the energy and sex drive she discovered as she inched toward a smaller waistline. In straightforward prose, Johnson admits there were moments, even days, when she was tempted to splurge and did; she didn’t discover some quick fix to drop weight. Although she avoids listing her starting weight, with her new determination, Johnson dropped more than 60 pounds and is still losing. Her sincere desire is for other overweight women to learn what she has: that “the perfect moment to start is, and will always be, right now.”

Nothing groundbreaking, but a candid and inspiring true story of conquering obesity. (b/w photos throughout)

FOR DISCRIMINATION Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law

Kennedy, Randall Pantheon (304 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-307-90737-0

A noted legal scholar considers the always-contentious debate over affirmative action.

Kennedy (Harvard Law School; The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, 2011, etc.) continues his strong track record of making thorny conversations about race and the law accessible to general readers, discussing complicated issues and court cases in a lucid, forceful fashion. He begins by observing that, despite being a son of the Jim Crow South, his own productive life was certainly enhanced by affirmative action: “I have often been shown special attentiveness in competitive settings in which my blackness was perceived as a plus.” Kennedy writes powerfully about the complex development of affirmative action as a largely unanticipated outgrowth of the struggle between the civil rights movement and Jim Crow. He then examines the major Supreme Court cases dealing with affirmative action in education, noting that while the well-known Bakke decision of 1978 seemingly protected affirmative action, it produced the “regrettable misjudgment [that] remedying social discrimination is an

THEN THEY STARTED SHOOTING Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become

Jones, Lynne Bellevue Literary Press (352 pp.) $19.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-934137-66-6 978-1-934137-67-3 e-book

A British psychiatrist returning to the once-beleaguered Drina Valley within Bosnia and Herzegovina finds young war victims surprisingly adaptive and thriving.

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BEYOND THE GOD PARTICLE

inadequate justification” for such programs, a feint pursued by conservatives ever since. Kennedy produces a narrative of the subtle changes over time in public response to and perceptions of affirmative action in support of his argument that it’s more fragile than generally realized, and it’s worth continuing: “Ending it prematurely would be a major calamity.” While the author is willing to consider the various counterarguments suggesting that affirmative action is fundamentally unfair or has run its course, including a thoughtful chapter on the legal concept of “color blindness,” he repeatedly asserts that his “central concern” in considering affirmative action is “the unfinished business of rectification and integration [given] segregation is not far away historically.” Lay readers with an interest in affirmative-action controversies should find him both fair and tough-minded.

A strong synthesis of legal precedents and historical narratives.

Lederman, Leon; Hill, Christopher Prometheus Books (340 pp.) $24.95 | $12.99 e-book | Oct. 8, 2013 978-1-61614-801-0 978-1-61614-802-7 e-book

An energetic follow-up to The God Particle (1993), Nobel laureate Lederman’s fine overview of particle physics. This time, Lederman is assisted by theoretical physicist Hill; the two coauthored Quantum Physics for Poets (2011) and Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe (2004).

The Higgs field and its particle, given its glitzy name in the first book and discovered in 2012, take up only one of a dozen chapters that reveal why mass exists. Contrary to the common misconception, “mass” does not mean heaviness but simply the presence of matter, as opposed to its absence in something like a light photon. It turns out that everything in the universe—protons, electrons, atoms, human beings—would be massless if not for the Higgs field. The authors explain this with an account of the critical importance of symmetries in particle interactions and why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force. In a large portion of the book, Lederman and Hill examine questions that physicists should address in the coming years, as well as the machines they must build to do this. The European Large Hadron Collider of Higgs fame produces modest numbers of extremely energetic protons. Machines with a different output (muons, electrons) or an immense output of particles with less energy would illuminate rare interactions, fleeting particles such as neutrinos, or still-obscure phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy.

Despite the authors’ enthusiasm, chatty style, and generous use of diagrams, charts and analogy, many readers will struggle with the complexity of the subject matter.

Some concepts in physics (string theory is another) are difficult to explain to general readers, but Lederman and Hill make a noble effort, and those who obey their frequent suggestions to re-read may find it worth the effort.

THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN A Curious Account of Native People in North America King, Thomas Univ. of Minnesota (272 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8166-8976-7

“[A]ny discussion of Indians in North America is likely to conjure up a certain amount of rage,” writes King (A Short History of Indians in Canada, 2013, etc.) in this quirky history—but also “moments of irony and humour.”

Taking a deep historical look at both Canada and the United States, the author irreverently recounts the wonderful treaties that were made and frequently broken. As William Tecumseh Sherman said, “treaties were never made to be kept, but to serve a present purpose, to settling a present difficulty in the easiest manner possible…and then to be disregarded as soon as this purpose was tainted.” Though the story is hardly new, many readers likely don’t know much about Canadian Indians’ difficulties with the English and French. In fact, they were treated as badly as the natives of the Lower 48. The author’s wit and storytelling talent make the book easy to read; more importantly, his humor may keep readers from wanting to scream at the injustices. In his exploration, King roughly categorizes Indians as “dead Indians,” “legal Indians” and “live Indians.” Dead Indians are the stereotypical noble savages clad in buckskin and feathers. Live Indians are literally live and not living up to the dead Indian cliché; legal Indians are those people that the government(s) has declared are live Indians. The author has plenty to say about the white man’s treatment of the land, with environmental issues like the Alberta Tar Sands and the Keystone Pipeline at the top of his how-dumb-canyou-be list. If there are anger and sarcasm in the tales of abuse and sequestered Indian lands, you can’t really blame him.

King’s wife, reading over his shoulder, suggested he had way too many lists. She’s right, but this is still a solid book and a good look at what can be done in the future of Indian-white relations. |

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“New Yorker writer Lepore masterfully formulates the story of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister.” from book of ages

BOOK OF AGES The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

a wife, a mother, and a widow…[who] strained to form the letters of her name.” Benjamin’s references to her missives helped Lepore gain at least a partial picture of a little-educated woman who nonetheless showed a great mind capable of deep opinions.

She was also very lucky in that her brother looked after her needs, eventually giving her a house of her own and providing her with books. Women were taught to read but not to write, so spelling and punctuation are random. Since the letters quoted in this book are unedited, the narrative pace occasionally slows, but the author’s reasons become clear once she shows the result of some dastardly editing by Jared Sparks, who was famed for amassing some of the most important documents of the period relating to Franklin and George Washington. An appendix shows how Sparks’ heavy-handed pencil drastically changed the meanings of many of the letters.

Jane Franklin was an amazing woman who raised her children and grandchildren while still having the time to read and think for herself. We can only see into her mind because her correspondent was famous and because a vastly talented biographer reassembled her for us. (29 illustrations. First printing of 60,000)

Lepore, Jill Knopf (464 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-307-95834-1

New Yorker writer Lepore (History/ Harvard Univ.; The Story of America, 2012) masterfully formulates the story of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, who will be virtually unknown to many readers, using only a few of her letters and a small archive of births and deaths.

Jane Franklin Mecom (1712–1794) did not come into her own until she was widowed in 1765; at the time, widows possessed greater rights than married women. The first existing letter in her own hand was written when she was 45 years old. Of course, it helps that her letters were to her brother, one of the most significant figures of the time period. “He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman,” writes the author. “She became

THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE The Road to 1914 MacMillan, Margaret Random House (800 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-1-4000-6855-5

Award-winning academic MacMillan (International History/Oxford Univ.; Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, 2009, etc.) takes on the origins of World War I. Rather than allocating blame for the war or asking why it came about, the author asks instead, “[W]hy did the long peace not continue?...One way of getting at an answer is to see how Europe’s options had narrowed down in the decades before 1914.” She begins with the confident Europe celebrated in the Paris Exposition of 1900 and shows how national rivalries gradually eroded the comity of nations to the point where a brilliant civilization chose to tear itself to pieces. Inflexible military planning; “defensive” pacts that appeared offensive to rivals; national fears, honor and prestige; the characters and capabilities of national leaders; consideration of war as a means of suppressing internal divisions; and, finally, “mistakes, muddle or simply poor timing” all played a part in steering Europe from considering a general war unthinkable to considering it inevitable. Not everyone agreed; MacMillan turns periodically, if too briefly, to the peace movements led by Alfred Nobel, Bertha von Suttner and the Socialist International, but in the end, nationalism overwhelmed these altruistic impulses. There is much emphasis on the great men of the time, the bombastic and erratic kaiser and other leaders of the great powers, whose welldescribed personalities, prejudices and temperaments affected events in a way that is difficult to imagine today. Exhaustive in 54

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RICH PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent

its coverage of diplomatic maneuvering and the internal political considerations of the various nations, the book includes comprehensive discussions of such motivating issues as Germany’s fear of being surrounded, Austria-Hungary’s fear of falling apart and Russia’s humiliation after losing a war with Japan.

The author’s presentation is so thorough that it is often easy to lose sight of her theme. While MacMillan’s prose is mostly lively, it lacks a narrative flair that could help carry readers through this monumental work.

Martin, Isaac William Oxford Univ. (288 pp.) $29.95 | Sep. 2, 2013 978-0-19-992899-6

Martin (Sociology/Univ. of California, San Diego; The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, 2008, etc.) asks why the already powerful and influential wealthy in America would resort to outsider tactics of protests and petitions to further their economic interests and why those of lesser means would protest on their behalf.

The tea party movement, writes the author, is but “the newest expression of an old tradition,” a “peculiar mix of populist tactics and militant anti-egalitarian demands.” Since the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment—which allows for a federal tax on income—the rich and their allies have consistently fought to limit tax rates on the rich and even for the repeal of the amendment. This libertarian right turned to populist tactics when other strategies to meet such common policy challenges failed. But they had to be taught such tactics. In large part, Martin’s book is the story of these “experienced movement entrepreneurs” who developed and carried out grass-roots campaigns on behalf of the rich. Most such entrepreneurs had participated in or experienced the radical left movements of their times: James Asbury Arnold, the original organizer for the right, was a veteran of the agrarian protest of the early 20th century; Edward Aloysius Rumely, a later organizer, came from a similar radical background. Grover Norquist, today’s powerful anti-tax organizer, learned many of his tactics from the Angolan Marxist revolutionary Jonas Savimbi. The rich pursued such tactics because they worked, especially when sympathetic presidents were in power, be it Calvin Coolidge or George W. Bush. With the capture of the Republican Party by anti-tax zealots, writes Martin, more rich people’s movements, and widening inequality, can be expected. While at times lapsing into social science– speak (e.g., “logistic regression analysis”), Martin by and large tells his tale in an approachable manner.

An important contribution to understanding the contentious politics of today. (6 b/w illustrations)

HANGING MAN The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

Martin, Barnaby Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-374-16775-2

A British journalist with considerable experience in China illuminates the significance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei and his embodiment of cultural upheaval.

In a good way, this reads like an extended magazine article written for a general readership. Martin presents a profile of the artist based on illicit interviews with Weiwei following his release from 81 days of imprisonment on inscrutable charges, while providing context on the political and cultural developments that have informed his art. The plainspoken lucidity of the prose transcends the murk of so much arts criticism and political theorizing, as the author recognizes that many readers won’t be familiar with the artist’s career and the specifics of Communist Party repression in China. “I had been toying with the idea of writing a book about modern China that would use an account of Ai Weiwei’s life as its backbone,” writes Martin, employing the first-person narrative that initially seems intrusive but ultimately enhances the conversational tone. “His life and that of his father, Ai Qing, one of China’s most famous twentieth-century poets, are so intertwined with the great people and events of modern Chinese history that any biographical account would necessarily touch on the main historical events of the post-imperial epoch.” And so this book does, though it is less than a full-scale biography and more of a series of interviews, with the secret police frequently hovering, augmented by the author’s visits with other Chinese dissidents.

Weiwei emerges as not only a great disciple of Duchamp and Dada, bridging the totalitarianism of Chairman Mao and Warhol’s Mao, but also a brave activist using his art and advocacy to inspire cultural revolution: “Weiwei’s experience had given him an almost evangelical zeal: he wanted to change China by changing its ideas about art.”

A book that offers great clarity on an important subject without succumbing to oversimplification. (16 pages of fullcolor illustrations)

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Peter Biskind & Henry Jaglom

My Lunches With Orson finally reveals Orson Welles’ greatest performance: himself

By Claiborne Smith a magician, a “lapsed rabbi wandering around Europe trying to make animals in the zoo disappear.” Welles wanted to know if the rabbi succeeds. “If you want to know, you’ll have to play the part,” Jaglom responded.

“And he looked at me out of the corner of his eye and he said, ‘Can I wear a cape?’ ” A Safe Place was released in 1971, with Welles in a starring role. Starting in 1978, when they ran into each other in Hollywood, and continuing until Welles’ death in 1985, Welles and Jaglom routinely had lunch together at Ma Maison, a scene-y Hollywood restaurant where Wolfgang Puck was the chef for six years (the kind of obnoxious place so cool it didn’t even have a published phone number).

Welles and Jaglom were something of an odd couple.

Welles entertained Jaglom with his impish gossip about old Hollywood and his quite sage advice; Jaglom injected Welles with a verve and enthusiasm he needed as the stalwart old man’s filmmaking prospects steadily declined.

Welles allowed Jaglom to record their conversations as long as he couldn’t see the tape recorder, so Jaglom kept the recorder in a bag he brought to his lunches with Welles.

After Welles’ death, Jaglom’s tapes became something of a legend among in-the-know film writers and historians; many people assumed they were lost. The truth is more mundane: Jaglom, a prolific filmmaker, kept working and rebuffed several writers’ requests to listen to the tapes, all the while keeping them in a suitcase in his office.

The tapes were neglected until Peter Biskind, who had known Jaglom since 1990, published Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America in 2010. Jaglom is a fan of Star and told Biskind how much he liked it. “I don’t know if he came up with the idea of me doing the Welles book or I did,” Biskind says, but he encouraged Jaglom to get his conversations with Welles transcribed. Then they would decide if the transcripts merited a book.

Imagine it: You’re a young, first-time movie director— even though you’re a confident one—and the man standing before you as he opens the door to his room at the Plaza Hotel is the imperious, belligerent man many people think has made the greatest film in the history of cinema. What’s more, he looks like “a huge grape,” since he is rather orotund and dressed in purple silk pajamas.

“What do you want?” Orson Welles barked.

Henry Jaglom was there to ask Welles to act in his film A Safe Place, even though he knew Welles’ stipulations: He refused to act in films by first-time directors, and he wouldn’t even talk to directors who didn’t have scripts ready. Jaglom was guilty on both counts. “I’ll sit here, but I won’t listen,” Welles told Jaglom.

“I knew I had this incredibly difficult man on my hands,” Jaglom recalls. He didn’t exactly know what he wanted Welles’ role to be, just that he desperately wanted Welles in the film. Jaglom was aware that Welles had a fascination with magicians, so the part became 56

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My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles is one of the most unexpectedly moving and laugh-out-loud funny books to be published this year. Those who recall Welles as the pitchman in those old ubiquitous Paul Masson ads, promising with his faux gravitas that he would drink “no wine before its time,” are in for a revealing, and pleasant, surprise. Welles comes across as witty, barbed, impish and affectionate. He could also be mean. He revels in being ornery. He could go on at monologue length about how awful his rivals are (Welles kept a steady roster of both contemporary and old Hollywood bêtes noires) but he is also unguarded and occasionally, candidly desperate to make money.

In My Lunches with Orson, he is, in short, the contradictory person we would expect of an actor who drank in Shakespeare so consummately, though we never fully saw the complex shadings of his character in public (despite his frequent appearances on talk shows in his later years). “He put so much effort into constructing his own myths that you rarely got to see the ‘real’ Orson Welles,” Biskind says. This book fills the gap.

A raft of biographies have attempted to depict the complete Welles, but that’s a tall order. Being in conversation with Welles “was often surreal and always cryptic,” Gore Vidal is quoted saying in the introduction to My Lunches With Orson. “Either you picked up on it or you were left out.” Jaglom says even he has wondered why he and Welles got along so well. “We were both artists who were very adamant, and we weren’t that concerned with commercial success,” he offers, adding that “we made each other laugh all the time. I could get him out of his sadness, and I could offer him youthful hopefulness.”

The fact that Jaglom hid his tape recorder allowed Welles to feel less self-conscious. He only gave himself away once, Jaglom says, in 1984. “Is it on?” Welles asked.

He was talking at that moment about John Houseman, the actor who had been Welles’ great friend in the past but was his bitter rival as their lives came to a close.

Being recorded by Jaglom “was a very handy way for him to get his truth out,” Jaglom says. “He had been reviled by so many people for so many things, and he wanted to set the record straight, and this is the way I think he thought he would do it.”

Welles of Wit My Lunches With Orson reminds us how insightful and devilish Welles could be (and that he had an opinion on everything under the sun). Here’s a sampling of some of Welles’ remarks from his lunch conversations with Jaglom. A longer selection of his Wilde-an wit will appear on Kirkus’ website when this article is published there on August 7.

“I’ve always felt there are three sexes: men, women, and actors. And actors combine the worst qualities of the other two.”

“People would say, ‘So nice to see you.’ He would say, ‘So nice to see you too, but that’s enough.’ ” – Henry Jaglom On reading books about himself: “They make me wince. Either because they’re too nice, or not nice enough.”

“To my great sorrow, I’ve got to the age now where all my old minority opinions are ceasing to be minority.”

On Humphrey Bogart: “He was a brave man. He was amusing and original. Very opinionated, with very dumb opinions and not very well read and pretending to be.”

“Nobody’s written well about Central America. Well, there’s Joan Didion. She spent seven days in Central America. Wrote a best seller [Salvador]. It should be called Seven Days in Central America.”

– C.S.

My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Biskind, Peter—Ed. Metropolitan/Henry Holt (320 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 16, 2013 978-0-8050-9725-2

Claiborne Smith is the features editor at Kirkus Reviews.

My Lunches with Orson was reviewed in the May 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews. |

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CHICKENS IN THE ROAD An Adventure in Ordinary Splendor

manifestations (Facebook, Twitter et al.) and asserts that they destroy our attention spans (is the increase of ADD related, he wonders?) and keep us on the surface of experience. His solution? Reading old books very slowly with an open dictionary alongside. Virtually all the authors he examines are dead (two are alive but “retired”: Philip Roth and Alice Munro), so whiffs of antiquarianism waft up from most of the pages. Not that his arguments are unappealing. Of course we would all be better off if we read the classics and read them slowly; however, it just doesn’t seem that likely to happen. Mikics declares that he’s not advocating the “close reading” techniques described by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but rather a more leisurely journey through significant works of literature—a journey which, he soundly argues, is enhanced by a knowledge of the author’s biography and the cultural and historical contexts of the work. He then offers rules for readers, devoting a chapter to each—e.g., Be Patient, Get a Sense of Style, Use the Dictionary, Be Suspicious, Find Another Book. For each rule, Mikics offers ways to apply it to specific works. He ends with chapters on how to read various genres—with more analyses of specific works ranging from The Republic to Paradise Lost to Great Expectations.

A learned and earnest but ultimately quixotic attempt to convince us that a stagecoach is better for us than a bullet train.

McMinn, Suzanne HarperOne (320 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-06-222370-8

Romance writer McMinn’s story of how she moved her family to a slanted little house in backwoods West Virginia

following her divorce.

There, she connected with her father’s family’s 200year history in Appalachia, and they provided stability and a resource of rural knowledge for the author. Plucked from the suburbs, McMinn wanted to live where she “could find chickens in the road.” She created a blog (chickensintheroad.com) featuring step-by-step instructions for recipes, country living and crafts, all documented with stunning photography. McMinn fell in love with a local man, whom she dubs “52,” his age when they met, and together, they bought a 40-acre farm with the idea of living off the land. In hindsight, she realizes the farm was “one of the most inhospitable, inaccessible, and unmanageable pieces of land on the planet.” And yet, “I loved that cold, muddy, hard life.” The farm presents countless challenges for the author, including creeks running under her unbridged road, slow-driving neighbors, and the farm’s icy, steep driveway.

Winter also means power outages, cramped quarters and cold morning chores. McMinn balances tending goats, cows, sheep and chickens with raising her three children and dealing with an increasingly sullen partner. The book follows the arc of her romance with 52, from fluttery first kiss to the stage where McMinn knows she needs to leave him but can’t run the farm on her own. Meanwhile, readers learn how to make soap, test a cow for pregnancy and create tasty goat cheese. The book concludes with recipes for rural delicacies such as stuffed squash blossoms and summer vegetable pie and a section for making natural crafts and health products.

The book provides back story for McMinn’s blog, allowing a deeper, humorous look into the rewards and challenges of her rural life.

THE WITNESS WORE RED The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice Musser, Rebecca with Cook, M. Bridget Grand Central Publishing (352 pp.) $27.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4555-2785-4

With the assistance of Cook (Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter, 2009, etc.), Musser describes her transition from obedient daughter and wife in the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints to a key witness in court cases against church leaders, including the “Prophet” Warren Jeffs.

The author was born into the religion, where multiple marriages were the norm, girls were taught to be subservient to their fathers and husbands, and marriage was the path to salvation.

At 19, she was forced to become the 19th wife of the 85-year-old FLDS leader, Rulon Jeffs, who had more than 60 wives when he died. When Rulon’s son, Warren, followed him as leader, the abuses became rampant. More and more girls, some underage, were forced into “spiritual marriages” under the guise of God’s will, as handed down by Jeffs. On the other hand, teenage boys were routinely expelled from FLDS to fend for themselves, leaving more girls for church leaders. After her 14-year-old sister was forced into marriage and knowing that being a widow didn’t protect her from a second marriage, Musser fled. A motivational speaker, she views what happened at FLDS as nothing short of “human trafficking—both for labor as well as sex.” Though compelling, Musser’s story is buried in a detail-laden, chronological

SLOW READING IN A HURRIED AGE

Mikics, David Belknap/Harvard Univ. (352 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-674-72472-3 Mikics (English/Univ. of Houston) argues that you can’t truly enjoy literature unless you slow way down and read… well, the way he does.

Throughout the book—an odd combination of literary exegeses and self-help suggestions—Mikics sprinkles complaints about the digital age and its current 58

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“Fans of Parks and Recreation and Offerman’s brand of deadpan humor are sure to gorge themselves on the healthy portion he provides.” from paddle your own canoe

PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living

narrative. The energy picks up when she describes her role in investigations of FLDS activities. She testified 20 times, always dressed in red, a color FLDS women were forbidden to wear.

Courageous as she was, her role in seeking justice took a heavy toll on Musser, who lost all contact with family members still in FLDS. She felt the heavy weight of testifying against her “own people,” guilt for “deserting” her siblings and conflicting emotions about church teachings.

A decent addition to a growing body of work about polygamy, the book speaks to the ways isolation, fear and secrecy can shelter insidious abuses until someone has the courage to step forward as a witness.

Offerman, Nick Dutton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-525-95421-7

An actor’s comedic memoir and howto guide for enjoyable living in the modern era.

In his debut book, actor Offerman— best known for his role as the carnivorous, hypermasculine Ron Swanson on NBC’s Parks and Recreation—summons his inner Swanson when writing of his principles for “Delicious Living.”

For the author, living deliciously means dedicating more than a few pages to the wonder of meat (“If there is a God, no part of the Bible or Christian doctrine will convince me of his existence half as much as the flavor of a barbecued pork rib”), though he tackles more serious subjects as well: religion, love, friendship and the value of hard work. In a particularly prickly chapter entitled “Assholes” (in which he tackles everything from slavery to lobbyists), Offerman becomes acutely aware of his balancing act between comic and curmudgeon. “But wait, I thought this book was a lighthearted look at living one’s life deliciously?” he writes. “That’s all well and good, fat boy, but you cannot just blithely drift through life in your canoe whilst turning a blind eye to the bullshit going on around you.” Though he deems himself the “average meat, potatoes, and corn-fed human male,” his Go-West-young-man story is anything but average. From his humble roots as a pig poop–shoveling youth to his rise as a beloved actor, Offerman’s story embodies the tenets of the American dream, complete with a few more moustache jokes.

Wavering between finger-shaking admonishments toward society’s ills and songs of praise for self-reliance, Offerman offers plenty of laughs, though a few head scratches as well.

Fans of Parks and Recreation and Offerman’s brand of deadpan humor are sure to gorge themselves on the healthy portion he provides.

WRITING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT My Journey from Liberal to Conservative

Novak, Michael Image/Doubleday (336 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-385-34746-4

The political and economic education of a remarkably accomplished man.

Best known as a philosopher and theologian, Novak has also been a seminarian, professor, journalist, author, ambassador, speechwriter and all-round political handyman. Now 79 and retired from the American Enterprise Institute, he revisits each of the stages in his crowded and interesting life. On behalf of an obscure congressional candidate, Novak (All Nature is a Sacramental Fire: Moments of Beauty, Sorrow, and Joy, 2011, etc.) coined “the New Frontier,” a phrase famously adopted by John F. Kennedy. As a reporter, he covered the Second Vatican Council. He organized for Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, studied philosophy at Harvard, taught religion at Stanford, acted as a dean for an experimental college, campaigned for McGovern, worked hard for and came to love Sargent Shriver, and attempted to counsel Carter. This same man learned new economic lessons from Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes and worked closely with Jeane Kirkpatrick. On behalf of Ronald Reagan, Novak represented the country at Geneva and Bern, became friendly with Margaret Thatcher (an enthusiastic fan of his books) and shared dinners with John Paul II. Charting his slow drift from left to right, Novak explains how he came to see the guiding passions of his life—fighting poverty, advocating for human rights—as better served by an enlightened capitalism and by democratic politics that restrained the well-intentioned but too often disastrously heavy hand of the state. His conversion cost him some old friends on the left, but it seems impossible to ascribe these ruptures to Novak. Throughout this warm, chatty memoir, he comes across as the ultimate happy warrior, a thoroughly decent man interested only in truth, looking for the best in people and acknowledging it without regard to political affiliation.

A rare thing from a public intellectual: a guileless, bileless apologia.

ON MIGRATION Dangerous Journeys and the Living World

Padel, Ruth Counterpoint (272 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-61902-195-2

A poetic exploration of every aspect of migration, from the evolution of life to the migrations of birds and the patterns of human emigration.

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as the transmigration of souls. She sets the stage with a poem, “Ripples on New Grass”: “I want to see autumn swarms of monarch butterflies…calling all migrants home.” She follows with a discussion of the distinction between migratory labor and a permanent change of locale. While much of her poetry depends on natural images, her subject matter is wide-ranging—e.g., the contrast between seasonal emigration and forced moves of populations due to “invasion and colonization.” In an even greater imaginative leap, Padel compares how human populations are changed by migration to new environments with the original spread of vegetation on the planet, which created our atmosphere. With biting wit, she attacks the shibboleths of nativism by pointing out that the British Royal Oak, an “emblem of England, [is] an immigrant from Spain.” Her poems hark back to Noah and the Great Flood and the Trojan War, and she discusses how, in ancient Greece and in the Bible, “[h]elping strangers was an obligation”; she contrasts this to “hundreds of diasporas all over the world.” Padel claims that “as birds are the blueprint for migration so are the Jews for diaspora and exile” and then shifts to the biblical account of Joshua leading the Jews to the Promised Land. Padel ends by affirming the role of migration in shaping modern Britain and America.

A lyrically effective mix of prose and poetry.

were replete with omissions and inconsistencies, casting doubt on his methodology and ethics. Perry, a psychologist who first presented her research in an award-winning Australian documentary, spent several years interviewing original participants, combing through archived transcripts of the experiments, analyzing unpublished data and meeting with psychologists who worked with Milgram at that time. The result is a passionate text that humanizes the subjects and provides nuanced, provocative context to the experiments. The author asks profound questions about what truths, if any, can be elicited from analysis of human nature in a constructed environment.

It’s about time someone wrote this book.

BECOMING A LONDONER A Diary Plante, David Bloomsbury (448 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-62040-188-0

A memoir of young love and life among literary lions.

Novelist Plante (The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, 2009, etc.) excerpts from his voluminous diary, here covering his first years in London, chronicling his artistic comingof-age in the mid-1960s. The author moved in heady circles, counting such artistic luminaries as Francis Bacon, David Hockney and W.H. Auden as friends, and the young writer took in this milieu with a novelist’s attention to detail—and a literary tyro’s self-obsession. This period also marked the beginning of Plante’s long-term romantic relationship with Nikos Stangos, a politically engaged, erudite expatriate Greek—and the subject of The Pure Lover. The evolution of Plante’s relationship with Stangos and his experiences navigating the fraught social circle of London’s art scene are the focus of the narrative. The young Plante groped hungrily for an identity, accumulating political awareness, a sense of Englishness (Plante is a native of Rhode Island), artistic accomplishment, respect and community. As is perhaps inevitable in a diary, the reading experience is periodically bogged down by repetition; there are an awful lot of dinner parties and lunches to get through. But even at this stage, Plante was a crafter of limpid prose, possessed of keen insight and sympathy. He also displays a rare gift for finely wrought characterization. The poet Stephen Spender, an intimate of Plante’s, vividly emerges from these pages as a profoundly endearing sad-uncle figure, an accomplished man of letters beset by insecurity and furtively hiding his homosexuality from his forceful wife, Natasha.

A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the ’60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man.

BEHIND THE SHOCK MACHINE The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments Perry, Gina New Press (352 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-59558-921-7 978-1-59558-925-5 e-book

The famed Stanley Milgram psychology experiments shocked the world by suggesting that a majority of humans are capable of cruelty when under the orders of an authority figure. In this book, a secret history of the experiments is revealed, debunking Milgram’s most sensational claims.

The experiments, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, have long been a staple of psychology textbooks. The setup is dramatic but simple: Subject A sits in a room with a “shock machine” and is instructed to shock an unseen Subject B if he fails a simple memory test. The study was advertised as collecting data on how punishment affects learning and memory, but in reality, Milgram was not shocking Subject B, instead carefully monitoring the behavior of Subject A. The experiment’s surprising results indicated that 65 percent of the subjects administered shocks even after the actor playing Subject B screamed in pain or even complained of a heart condition. In a postwar environment still reeling from the horror of the Holocaust, the connection between the Milgram experiments and the behavior of the Nazis brought questions of human behavior and obedience into the national spotlight. However, much like the experiments themselves, Milgram’s published results 60

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“Learned, lucid and deeply sobering.” from unthinkable

UNTHINKABLE Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy

BENJAMIN BRITTEN A Life for Music Powell, Neil Henry Holt (528 pp.) $35.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-8050-9774-0

Pollack, Kenneth M. Simon & Schuster (528 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4767-3392-0

A probing inquiry into Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), one of England’s greatest modern composers, as well as a survey of mid-20th-century provincial England.

Powell (Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, 2009, etc.) embraces all that was mundane, traditional and familiar to his subject, intentionally interrogating the quotidian relationships, patterns and social norms that informed his creative development. At times, the narrative reads with the comfort of the tried-and-true English cozy, minus the murders. Nevertheless, it is precisely Powell’s focus on Britten’s daily “Englishness” that is the book’s greatest strength. While other authors have focused on Britten’s cosmopolitan contacts and his place within a larger English musical historiography, Powell’s approach allows for readers to understand Britten on his own terms first, terms informed by Britten’s familial relationships, pronounced musical tastes and loyalty to his early musical mentor, Frank Bridge. Inasmuch as Powell’s biography provides many new insights into Britten’s world, it is perhaps the detailed accounts of the relationships between Britten and other important, but underexposed composers that provides the freshest and arguably most useful information. Otherwise little-known bits about John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Thomas Beecham migrate from Britten’s diaries into Powell’s text, often accompanied by Powell’s insightful analysis. The same can be said for the author’s well-crafted discussion of Britten’s close working and personal relationship with W.H. Auden, a relationship otherwise thoroughly examined by past biographers. Although Powell’s conclusions about everything from Britten’s sexual relationships to his interest in particular musical forms occasionally overreach, they at least beg new questions. With Britten’s centennial year quickly approaching, new questions are greatly welcome.

As pleasurable as hearing Britten’s music for the first time: familiar, but new and rich enough to keep you coming back.

A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution sets out our increasingly diminished options for dealing with a country that has vexed America since the Eisenhower administration.

War-weary and disgusted with the seemingly intractable problems posed by the Middle East, Americans perhaps understandably resist thinking through the implications of Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons capability. But if we are to avoid the sort of blunders made in Iraq, Pollack (A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, 2008, etc.) argues, we must consider our policy choices carefully and prepare now to implement them. He begins with an assessment of Iran’s brutal regime and offers a best guess about the state of their nuclear program, admitting throughout that there’s much we simply don’t know. Moving to an appraisal of our current policy and the sanctions that have surely weakened the Islamic Republic, he notes that they have failed to persuade the regime to abandon its quest for a nuclear arsenal. Moreover, while the carrot-and-stick approach has not been exhausted, necessary concessions do not appear forthcoming. Nor are the prospects for regime change likely. Pollack favors playing out these last gambits to the end, but he fears that our choices are rapidly narrowing down to either declaring war to prevent Iran from going nuclear or adopting a strategy of containment, both heretofore “unthinkable.” He clearly states his preference for containment but not before thoroughly exploring the pros and cons of a military attack (including one by Israel) and not without conceding the dangers of the policy he recommends. As the Cold War demonstrated, the path of nuclear deterrence and containment is a difficult slog, but this choice, as Pollack meticulously demonstrates, is likely less bad than the alternative. Egypt and Syria dominate today’s headlines, but it’s only a matter of time before Iran again seizes our attention. When it does, policymakers would do worse than to turn here for the difficult, systematic reasoning the problem will require.

Learned, lucid and deeply sobering.

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NO BETTER TIME The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet

We’ve been misinformed, writes Ravitch (Education/New York Univ.; The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, 2010, etc.), about the state of our public schools. Test scores are higher than ever, the dropout rate is lower, and achievement gaps among races are narrowing. The only “crisis” is the one ginned up by government bureaucrats, major foundations, an odd coalition of elitists and commercial hustlers intent on privatizing education. They’ve made inflated claims about the virtues of vouchers, charter schools, virtual schools, standardized testing (and its efficacy for identifying excellent teachers) and merit pay.

With no supporting evidence, they insist poverty has no correlation to low academic achievement, that abolishing tenure and seniority will improve schools, and that overhauling the entire system along business lines is the way to go. Ravitch makes her own proposals for genuine improvement, and if they are as unsurprising as they are expensive—e.g., prenatal care for all expectant mothers, high-quality early education for all, reduced class sizes and a full, balanced curriculum, medical and social services for poor children—they at least leave responsibility for the public school system where it belongs: in the hands of our elected representatives. When it comes to education, notoriously plagued by fads, it’s always difficult to determine truth.

Ravitch, however, earns the benefit of the doubt by the supporting facts, figures, and graphs she brings to her argument, a lifetime of scholarship, and experience in and out of government. She’s as dismissive of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind as of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and as critical of former Secretary of Education William Bennett as of the current Arne Duncan.

For policymakers, parents and anyone concerned about the dismantling of one of our democracy’s great institutions. (41 graphs. First printing of 75,000. Author tour to Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C.)

Raskin, Molly Knight Da Capo/Perseus (256 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-306-82166-0

An account of the tragically brief life of mathematician Danny Lewin (1970–2001), whose innovative algorithms “[changed] the Internet forever.”

When the Denver-born former Israeli Defense Forces soldier entered MIT in 1996 to begin work on a doctorate in mathematics, the Internet was still very much a work in progress. It offered limitless possibilities as the information superhighway, but its “complex architecture” was plagued by an ever-present congestion that no one seemed to know how to alleviate. While working with Tom Leighton, the graduate adviser who would become his business partner and close friend, Lewin wrote a set of algorithms that would transform the Internet from the “World Wide Wait” into a faster, more efficient communication tool. His aim was to become an academic like his mentor, but the desire to provide a better life for his family motivated him to turn his ideas into a business.

In 1997, he and Leighton entered the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in hopes of attracting the money they needed to fund a content-delivery company they christened Akamai Technologies. Although they lost, Lewin continued to pursue their dream with a passion that caught the attention of both high-level venture capitalists and brilliant young computer scientists. By late 1999, Akamai boasted clients like Disney, Apple and Yahoo and had made Lewin and Leighton into billionaires. Lewin died—though with his military training, “not without a fight”—when his plane crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Ironically, it was his trailblazing technology that helped online news sources like CNN and MSNBC withstand the colossal worldwide demand for information about the attacks that killed him along with thousands of innocent bystanders.

Bittersweet but celebratory.

SHATTERED HOPES Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Ruebner, Josh Verso (256 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-84467-120-6

REIGN OF ERROR The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools

An official of a pro-Palestinian lobbying group finds the administration of President Barack Obama to be, like all administrations of the past 65 years, egregiously unfair to Palestinian interests.

Ruebner, advocacy director of a group called the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, presents an extensive litany of complaints against the Jewish state and its American ally, fully garnished with sententious terminology like “genocide,” “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.” Certainly, in the fractious history of the Middle East, fault may be assigned to both Israel and the various factions representing the Palestinian

Ravitch, Diane Knopf (416 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 18, 2013 978-0-385-35088-4

A noted education authority launches a stout defense of the public school system and a sharp attack on the so-called reformers out to wreck them.

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“Rybczynski is an artful conductor and learned hand who leaves much of the pleasure of architectural discoveryto readers.” from how architecture works

people. The cause of secure peace surely cannot be served by jeremiads like this, sincere and earnest as they might be, that ignore this certainty. West Bank settlements are a serious concern but so are suicide bombers and rockets deployed by Hamas and Hezbollah, entities sworn to “obliterate” their neighbor.

Ruebner finds something nefarious in Israel’s use of the Iron Dome system, designed to intercept missiles launched against civilians. The notorious Goldstone Report on the Gaza conflict was quite critical of Israel, and the author uses 16 pages to analyze the report yet neglects to mention that the author, Goldstone himself, soon disavowed his own findings, confessing that his commission did not possess all the facts. Similarly, readers of this narrative of Palestinian victimhood will not find the whole story. If the peace process is to survive, it must overcome unremitting bias. Constant threats to destroy the Jewish state won’t relieve the plight of the Palestinian population longing for nationhood and neither will unadulterated propaganda.

Beyond the reduction or elimination of American support for its ally, Ruebner offers no solutions for peace in the region.

A flawed fulmination that reports only virtue on one side and all guilt on the other.

response to a building—a Rem Koolhaas studio railing is a lovely example—and there are all the creations, borrowings, manipulation and nurturings of style, not to mention the furtive notions of taste, suitability and proportion.

Rybczynski is an artful conductor and learned hand who leaves much of the pleasure of architectural discovery to readers. (140 b/w illustrations)

THE REMARRIAGE BLUEPRINT How Remarried Couples and Their Families Succeed or Fail Scarf, Maggie Scribner (240 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-4391-6953-7

A field guide to the emotional labyrinth of remarriage.

Remarriage is the odd man out in research and family therapy; only in recent years, with divorce rates on the rise, has it begun to garner any sustained attention in scientific circles. In the 1990s, Scarf (September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years, 2009, etc.) began research into the subject, but when she began interviewing couples using a “remarriage journey” framework, the study fell apart; there was too much disparity in couples not being at the same point on the “journey.” Returning to the subject years later, the author began working with an architecture metaphor, based on an uppermost “level” of five challenges. The first is the challenge of navigating the push and pull of insider/outsider forces, the insiders being the family structure already in place and the outsider being the new wife or husband. The second challenge is the feelings, both positive and negative, of those children toward the new partner and how that affects feelings toward the now “outside” parent. The third challenge comes through the intensity of new parenting roles and how to define them and redefine them. The fourth and fifth: the challenge of uniting two disparate family cultures and the expansion of the family boundaries—new siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. Underlying these challenges are the interpersonal skills the couple is able to bring to bear on navigating those challenges and also the emotional and relational “baggage” carried over from the alltoo-often acrimonious split of the previous marriage. After laying out the strategies for navigating these challenges, the author devotes more than half the book to case studies, which drive home the strategies in genuine, relatable ways. It also helps that the study couples were people she worked with in the 1990s; the many years since serve to provide even more insight.

A compelling book that can serve anyone looking to tie the knot once more.

HOW ARCHITECTURE WORKS A Humanist’s Toolkit

Rybczysnki, Witold Farrar, Straus and Giroux (368 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-374-21174-5

The erudite and architecturally welltraveled Rybczynski (Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, 2010, etc.) offers a brimming toolkit that we should bring to “our daily experience of buildings, which is practical as well as aesthetic.”

In this robust tour of architecture—in which he offers plenty of opinions, without being overly opinionated, and a host of useful, disarming illuminations—the author delivers a conceptual framework for approaching architecture, in addition to presenting the many different intentions and theories of architects. It is also written for the man and woman on the street, the story of these settings of everyday life allowing readers into architects’ heads. Rybczynski writes with equal felicity on architecture as art—why a building touches us and speaks to us—as well as its function and realization. He moves with ease, accompanied by copious examples and illustrations, among significant moments in the architect’s work: the importance of the specificity of site; symmetries and axes, movement, orientation and disorientation; how the setting can be both embraced and set in opposition; working with a street grid, a brassy or refined environment; fashioning a small house in a cramped lot. In architecture, writes the author, the materials are the message, as in the skin of a building: tight, soft, heavy, light, ornamental, flat or backlit. There are all the details and quirks that can make or break our immediate |

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“The chilling, concise history of America’s precarious nuclear arsenal.” from command and control

COMMAND AND CONTROL Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

NOTHIN’ TO LOSE The Making of Kiss (1972-1975)

Sharp, Ken with Simmons, Gene and Stanley, Paul It Books/HarperCollins (544 pp.) $28.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-06-213172-0

Schlosser, Eric Penguin Press (640 pp.) $36.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-59420-227-8

Through scores of interviews with band members, fans, roadies, rival musicians and label executives, Sharp (Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, 2010, etc.) and KISS co-founders Stanley and Simmons have put together a complete history of the band’s rise to superstardom.

Much maligned by rock critics and radio stations of the day, especially for their emphasis on grotesque makeup and firebreathing, blood-spitting theatrics over musicianship, KISS (which also included drummer Peter Criss and lead guitarist Ace Frehley) had to fight their way to the top. The first step was conquering (or at least wowing) New York, which they accomplished by developing an overpoweringly loud and outrageous stage show that they performed atop a levitating drum set while wearing giant platform shoes that made the already tall members tower intimidatingly over the competition. Their outsize personas were meant to make them stand out from drag and glam acts of the day like David Bowie, T. Rex and local rivals The New York Dolls. The band’s raw power didn’t make them friends with outfits they opened for; they often had the plug pulled before their set was over. But when the tables were turned, the members of KISS were, by many accounts, as gracious and generous to their openers as they were to their fans. The weakest aspects of the book are the sameness of some anecdotes and triteness of language (phrases like “110 percent” and “take it to the next level” are repeated in numerous stories). The strongest is the inclusion of critics and rivals whose grudging admiration for the band comes through, despite their ability to see through the gimmicks. (Iggy Pop is one especially hilarious courtside observer.)

A rollicking oral history of the one-time “hottest band in the land.” (150 b/w photos; two 16-page color inserts)

The chilling, concise history of America’s precarious nuclear arsenal.

Investigative journalist Schlosser’s (Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, 2003, etc.) vivid and unsettling treatise spreads across a 70-year span of the development and control of nuclear weaponry. At the core of the author’s scrutiny is the suspensefully narrated back story of the Arkansas-based Titan II military missile silo. A disastrous mishap in 1980 involving an accidentally punctured fuel tank caused a near-detonation and collapse of the missile, killing a young repairman and sparking an investigation into the hazardous nature of all military nuclear armaments. Schlosser frames this incident around four decades of the Cold War, the Eisenhower and Truman administrations, the Cuban missile crisis, the bravery of servicemen like Gen. Curtis LeMay, and the eerily accurate predictions and statistical determinations of nuclear strategist Fred Iklé. Testimony from a massive list of scientists and engineers further elucidates what Schlosser considers to be the nation’s perpetual military defense conundrum: “the need for a nuclear weapon to be safe and the need for it to be reliable.” Throughout, he chillingly extrapolates the long-standing history of nuclear near-misses with the engagement of a fiction writer. He also examines the heavily endorsed anti-nuclear foreign policies proselytized by politicians and probes the operational processes of nuclear missiles and warheads, though the specter of decimation at the hands of a weapon of mass destruction looms over each chapter. With this cautionary text, Schlosser, who pinged processed food and the underground economy onto America’s cultural radar, succeeds in increasing awareness for more stringent precautions and less of the casual mismanagement of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, he respectfully memorializes those Cold War heroes (and countless others, like nuclear weapon safety lobbyist Bob Peurifoy) who’ve prevented nuclear holocausts from being written into the annals of American history.

An exhaustive, unnerving examination of the illusory safety of atomic arms.

GLORIA SWANSON The Ultimate Star

Shearer, Stephen Michael Dunne/St. Martin’s (528 pp.) $29.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-250-00155-9

A biography of Gloria Swanson (1899– 1983), who was difficult, vain, arrogant and self-deluded, as well as shrewd, stylish and magnetic. She was, by her own account, “every inch and every moment a star.”

Swanson had limited gifts in terms of looks and talents.

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“Vigorous, erudite and eminently readable.” from amsterdam

a career as an opera diva or theater actress. The Chicago-raised daughter of an itinerant Swedish-American Army officer and a Polish-American mother whose poor judgment occasionally brought unwelcome publicity, Swanson began acting in the late 1910s for the local Essanay movie company. Finding that she liked the work—especially the money it brought her, as well as the men in front of and behind the cameras—she eventually wound up in Hollywood, where she was “discovered” by Mack Sennett, in whose comedies she first gained public notice. But it was Cecil B. DeMille who made Swanson a star. More than any other actress, Swanson, with her mentor DeMille, created the image of the movie star as fashion-plated glamour queen, both on screen and off. Her high-life style attracted wealthy men and aristocrats, including a French marquis whom she married and Joseph P. Kennedy. Shearer (Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life, 2011, etc.), who relied on Swanson’s fib-telling 1981 biography, newspaper and magazine articles, and a collection of her papers at the University of Texas, warms up to his subject about halfway through, in time for the amazing story of her comeback (some might convincingly argue, the capstone of her entire career) in Sunset Boulevard. A mysteriously aloof cipher in the early chapters, she eventually comes to life as a delightfully zestful grande dame, despite numerous personal and professional failures before and after Sunset.

An uneven, rushed-through life with occasional high notes. (Two 16-page b/w photo inserts)

raising their son in a Christian, color-blind household. Yet upon RG3’s entrance onto the national stage, the young quarterback soon found himself embroiled in a racially charged maelstrom when an African-American commentator insinuated that Griffin wasn’t a true “brother.” RG3’s skillful handling of the situation further proved that he was “comfortable in the spotlight, but wasn’t one to seek it out”—a man who, while mysterious, was quite clear in his preference for heaving touchdowns rather than making headlines.

Insightful, engaging and a must-read for sports fans interested in teasing out the true RG3. (12-page color insert.

Excerpt in Washington Post)

AMSTERDAM A History of the World’s Most Liberal City Shorto, Russell Doubleday (368 pp.) $28.95 | Oct. 22, 2013 978-0-385-53457-4

The dynamic historical account of a vibrantly complex European city and the legacy of social, political and economic liberalism it bequeathed to the Western world.

Legalized prostitution, lax drug laws and a generous social welfare system have given Amsterdam a reputation for being “the most liberal place on earth.” But as cultural historian Shorto (Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason, 2008, etc.) points out, it is ultimately incorrect to say that the concept of liberalism itself, which “involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights…for everyone,” was born there. It is instead more correct to say that the ideas that inspired those thinkers who gave form to what liberalism was—John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, among others—arose from the peculiar set of geographical and cultural circumstances that attended the birth of Amsterdam. Since the Netherlands is “one vast river delta,” Dutch cities like Amsterdam came into being thanks to the development of organizations that depended on cooperation to deal with the ever-present threat of flooding. More importantly, the water-protected communities the Dutch built allowed them the freedom to also flourish as individuals. A spirit of tolerance pervaded all aspects of Dutch life. Medieval Amsterdam became home to religious dissidents. With the rise of mercantilism in the 16th century, it became headquarters of the United East India Company, “the world’s first multinational corporation.” Economic liberalism transformed Amsterdam into a rich cosmopolitan city, and wealth gave rise to a golden age in art, architecture and science. When the capitalistic excesses of the Industrial Revolution collided with socialist theory in the 19th and 20th centuries, a liberalism that honored the good of all, rather than just a privileged few, emerged. Shorto’s examination of Amsterdam’s colorful history offers important insights into the promise and possibility of enlightened liberalism.

Vigorous, erudite and eminently readable.

RG3 The Promise

Sheinin, David Blue Rider Press (352 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-399-16545-0

A spellbinding biography tracing Robert Griffin III’s meteoric rise to sport superstardom.

In his debut book, Washington Post writer Sheinin crafts an engrossing portrait of Griffin, aka RG3, the 2011 Heisman Trophy winner and the current quarterback for the Washington Redskins. However, Sheinin’s work transcends RG3’s on-field heroics, focusing instead on the psychological portrait of a man whose personality and demeanor appear at odds with the typical franchise quarterback. “In school, Griffin was that rare kid who bridged social cliques,” writes the author, “a star jock who also liked poetry, who made straight A’s, who wore silly socks and still loved his superhero figurines.” He was also a boy who loved football third (after basketball and track) and who, at the age of 12, promised his mother that if tackled, he would quit the sport altogether.

It was just the motivation he required to ensure that he wasn’t brought down, the spark that kept him pulling a tire uphill late into the evening as he transformed himself into an athlete of the highest level. Sheinin, who spent a year reporting on RG3, provides rare insight into the star’s home life by incorporating firsthand interviews with Griffin’s parents, both of whom describe |

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I GOT SCHOOLED The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap

NO ORDINARY MEN Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State

Sifton, Elisabeth; Stern, Fritz New York Review Books (160 pp.) $19.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-59017-681-8 978-1-59017-702-0 e-book

Shyamalan, M. Night Simon & Schuster (224 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4767-1645-9

Filmmaker Shyamalan makes his nonfiction debut with this engaging presentation of the results of his research into methods for closing America’s education gap.

The author begins with his visits to two Philadelphia high schools: the top-performing magnet school Masterman and its neighbor Overbrook, where only 54 percent of students got their diplomas. These differences prompted Shyamalan to begin an extensive investigation of common beliefs about the problems with American education and how they can be fixed. He interviewed experts nationwide and toured schools where leading-edge work is being done. Many believe that smaller class sizes are a key to success; others take up the cause of parental choice and vouchers. The state of Tennessee’s STAR program has been promoting smaller class sizes since the 1980s, while Milwaukee has been sponsoring voucher-paid programs, which increase parental choice about which school their children attend. Shyamalan finds evidence that the Tennessee program “has a minimal positive result,” while the biggest measured effect of the Milwaukee program has been on parental satisfaction, which Shyamalan considers “a poor proxy for improved student performance.” Two of the five keys the author found are tied to fostering the positive impact of good teachers. The author claims that those who defend the concept of tenure have the problem “completely upside down.” It is not possible to know what kind of teacher someone is going to be until they have been on the job for at least two to three years. The tenure system can therefore serve to protect the positions of bad teachers whose earlier departures would strengthen the longer-term contributions better teachers can make. The author also wants principals to be engaged directly in improving classroom quality.

A lively, provocative contribution from an outsider with his own way of addressing the problem.

A convincing argument that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his often overlooked brother-inlaw Hans von Dohnanyi “deserve to be remembered together” for their courageous resistance to Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Sifton (The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in the Times of Peace and War, 2003) and Stern (University Professor Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Five Germanys I Have Known, 2006, etc.) have unique vantage points. Stern’s parents were friends of Bonhoeffer, and he remains a friend to the children of Bonhoeffer’s sister. Sifton’s father, famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, was also a friend and colleague. Both were active opponents of Hitler from the beginning. Bonhoeffer had won an international standing working against the Aryanization of churches in the 1930s. Dohnanyi attempted to help people targeted by the regime and began to compile a chronological record, together with documentation of Nazi crimes, for use after the regime fell. While working in counterintelligence, he recruited Bonhoeffer to join with him and his sister Christine in what the authors call “their conspiracy against the state.” Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were subsequently involved in organizing the March 1943 plots against Hitler. Held for two years under appalling conditions, they were executed less than a month before the end of the war, as were other members of their extended families. Particularly powerful are the quotations from letters and communications from jail. The authors quote from a letter Christine wrote in September 1945: “I believe it is better to know for what one dies than not to know what exactly one is living for.” Sifton and Stern answer the question about whether Bonhoeffer has been remembered correctly and also discuss both men’s unsuccessful attempts to reach out to the Allies for support.

A concise yet powerful contribution to an even larger history.

PHILOMENA A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search Sixsmith, Martin Penguin (448 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-14-312472-6

A British journalist’s novelistic biography about an unwed Irish mother and the son she was forced to give up for adoption.

In the sexually repressive Ireland of the 1950s, single motherhood was a mark of shame not only for girls and women, but 66

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“An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.” from american psychosis

also for their families. So when 18-year-old Philomena Lee became pregnant in late 1952, her father sent her to a convent for fallen women. Philomena worked as a virtual slave for the nuns who ran it in exchange for room and board. She gave birth to and cared for an infant son she called Anthony, a son who would be forcibly turned over to a Catholic couple willing to offer a “donation” for the privilege of adopting. Against Philomena’s wishes, an American doctor and his wife adopted her son, along with a female playmate he adored. The couple renamed the boy Michael and took him and his “sister” Mary to live in the United States. Michael grew up a model child, but Sixsmith’s (Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, 2011, etc.) psychologically probing portrait of Philomena’s son reveals how he also suffered from a “secret certainty of his own worthlessness,” which stemmed from the pain of maternal abandonment and a growing awareness of his own homosexuality. Michael became a successful Washington, D.C., lawyer whose expertise in gerrymandering issues garnered him the attention of Republican Party elites. Yet due to the fact that Michael could not accept himself, he indulged in darker compulsions—risky sex, alcohol and drugs—that destroyed his relationships and eventually caused him to contract AIDS. His personal tragedy was compounded by the fact that he and his mother searched for each other without success. Since the secretive Catholic Church could not reveal the sordid truth behind the adoption to either Philomena or Michael, the pair “reunited” only after Sixsmith’s chance intervention—and only after it was too late.

Judi Dench, who provides the foreword, will star in the upcoming film adaptation.

A searingly poignant account of forced adoption and its consequences.

emphasize their usually painful relations to the U.S., Suarez concentrates on America’s Latino legacy from the 19th century to the present. Two themes predominate: racism and immigration. Although not as murderous as that against blacks, discrimination against Latinos has an equally long and troubled history that turns out to be no less true for white America’s fear of being overwhelmed with Hispanics pouring across our border.

True to TV documentary format, Suarez includes the story of an individual with every section. Few will be familiar, yet many should be—e.g., José Martí, the hero of Cuban independence, or Juan de Oñate, founder of the first white settlement in the Southwest. Matters improve greatly as the author approaches the present day and points with pride to famous Latinos from Desi Arnez to Albert Pujols.

More journalistic guide than history, the book provides a satisfying antidote to average readers’ disturbing ignorance of America’s Hispanic heritage.

AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System

Torrey, E. Fuller Oxford Univ. (240 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 22, 2013 978-0-19-998871-6

Psychiatrist Torrey (The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens, 2008, etc.) returns to the battleground of reform with another book about the inability of government agencies and private institutions to care well for the severely mentally ill.

The author names individuals who, in his opinion, are responsible for the disaster of mental health care across the United States. Here, Torrey focuses more on the historical reasons for the sad situation, with special emphasis on the family of President John F. Kennedy. Since Kennedy’s sister Rosemary was developmentally disabled and increasingly unstable as she aged, the new president had a high awareness of hidden mental illness problems. But his push for federal mental illness legislation, however well-intended, dismantled the state-based mental hospital system without sensible alternatives in place. As a result, Torrey explains, what became known as “deinstitutionalization” placed tens of thousands of severely mentally ill patients in communities entirely unprepared to care for them. Torrey excoriates the leadership at the National Institute for Mental Health for their inability to anticipate the disaster and subsequent failure to admit their mistakes and take corrective action. After devoting about two-thirds of the text to the historical record, Torrey offers a chapter titled “Dimensions of the Present Disaster, 20002013,” in which he lucidly explains how community jails and state prisons have become the new centers for warehousing severely mentally ill individuals. The final chapter is filled with sensible recommendations that could be funded by current misguided

LATINO AMERICANS The 500-Year Legacy that Shaped a Nation Suarez, Ray Celebra/Penguin (272 pp.) $18.00 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-451-23814-6

An earnest, informative companion to the PBS series on the largest and fastest-growing minority in the United States: Latinos, now numbering more than 50 million.

Journalist and PBS commentator Suarez (The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, 2006) notes that, among nations, only Mexico contains more Hispanics than the U.S. “At some point in the 2040s,” writes the author, “a slim majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to people who arrived in this country from someplace other than Europe.” Beginning in the 17th century, Suarez reminds readers that when Englishmen arrived at Massachusetts and Virginia to settle or look for riches while despoiling and killing Indians, Spaniards and colonists from Mexico had been doing the same for 50 years in Florida and the Southwest. After a review of Spanish New World exploration and capsule histories of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico that |

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MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET COOKING A Memoir of Food and Longing

expenditures that Torrey estimates at about $140 billion annually.

The author makes clear that the solutions will require not only vast funding, but also a long-term commitment by trained caregivers, plus family members who insist that their mentally ill relatives be committed to institutions when dangerous to themselves and innocent bystanders.

An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.

von Bremzen, Anya Crown (320 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-307-88681-1

Travel + Leisure contributing editor and three-time James Beard Award–winning cookbook author von Bremzen’s (The New Spanish Table, 2005, etc.) nostalgia for a prickly Soviet childhood brings memories of food both delectable and biting.

Toska, “that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul,” periodically stalks the author and her mother, Larisa Frumkin, who emigrated together from the Soviet Union to Philadelphia in 1974, when the author was 10. Although daily existence back in the Soviet Union had been harsh—anti-Semitic harassment, little support from a philandering father, and rough living conditions, including a lack of privacy, food shortages and lines for basic items—mother and daughter have found in food and cooking a way to capture their essential “Soviet homeland,” even if it’s more the idea of it than the way it ever really was. The author and her fervently dissident mother have re-created, in their tiny kitchen, certain foods that seem emblematic of each decade of the Soviet saga, from the pre-revolution time through the Stalinist era, World War II deprivations, Cold War classics and the “mature Socialist” period of the author’s upbringing.

For example, the impossibly decadent czarist fish pastry Kulebiaka delineated so seductively by Chekhov and Gogol marks the 1910s; Gefilte fish is the “poisoned Madeleine” of Larisa’s childhood in Odessa, encapsulating a time of anti-religious fervor and familial bitterness; a Georgian dish called Chanakhi celebrates Stalin’s death and the era touted for its “totalitarian joy”; the ersatz ingredients fondly remembered in the 1970s converge happily in the Salat Olivier, smothered with the ubiquitous Soviet mayonnaise Provansal. With anecdotes, history and recipes, the author delivers a lively, precisely detailed cultural chronicle.

With a wink and a grimace, von Bremzen vividly characterizes the “Homo sovieticus.”

WHAT JEFFERSON READ, IKE WATCHED, AND OBAMA TWEETED 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House

Troy, Tevi Regnery History (416 pp.) $18.95 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-62157-039-4

From reading Cicero to watching I Love Lucy, a history of American presidents’ interactions with popular culture.

Can a president show that he has the gravitas to govern the nation and still reveal that he knows who Snooki is? The question animates this fresh view of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama and their efforts to find the right distance for the leader of a republic to keep between himself and the people. Against the rise of American popular culture over the past 200 years, Hudson Institute senior fellow Troy (Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians?, 2002) shows how presidents’ cultural pursuits have shaped them and the nation. The pursuits are many: Jefferson read the classics and philosophical works (“From candlelight to early bedtime I read”), as did John Adams, in an era when Common Sense sold as briskly as Peyton Place; Andrew Jackson thrilled audiences on his visits to the theater; Franklin Roosevelt mastered the radio; and Reagan made expert use of TV, which he also enjoyed viewing for consolation. While Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln worked hard to balance book smarts and popular appeal, presidents had other cultural distractions to deal with in ensuing years, which brought the Montgomery Ward catalog, the phonograph, radio, TV (Clinton was a “savvy manipulator,” George W. Bush rarely watched), and the Internet. Troy shows how these leaders used and projected their own images through emerging media, from Nixon sizing up the competition on TV to Obama’s preference for dark and edgy TV shows like The Wire. He wonders how the U.S. will continue to produce good leaders in a culture of the outrageous and the vulgar.

Light, entertaining and informative.

THE WORLD IN THE CURL An Unconventional History of Surfing

Westwick, Peter; Neushul, Peter Crown (416 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 23, 2013 978-0-307-71948-5

An encyclopedic history of riding the waves.

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for surfing, Westwick (History/Univ. of Southern California) and Neushul (History/Univ. of Southern California, Santa Barbara) present a tidal wave of surfing history and analysis. Looking at more than a century’s worth of data from a mainly sociohistorical perspective, the authors present the compelling case that surfing offers a tantalizing stew of contradictions, at once an activity pairing “subversive social rebellion” with the “middle-class mainstream” and juxtaposing lifestyle with sport, “modern society” with the “natural world.” Today’s multibillion-dollar surfing industry traces its roots to the popular pastime of Hawaiian natives, who rode 100-pound redwood planks through the roiling Waikiki surf. While early-19th-century missionaries helped spawn surfing’s “cool” image by deeming it slightly immoral, the authors argue their greater effect on surfing stemmed not from their conservative views so much as the disease these Westerners brought with them, causing the Hawaiian population to drop from an estimated 800,000 to 40,000 in the 1890s. Despite that gross literal decline in those able to surf, the sport caught on in California, thanks in part to writers like Richard Henry Dana and Jack London, whose late-19thand early-20th-century accounts of surfing helped bring it to the mainstream. Those for whom surfing represents the apotheosis of countercultural living may be shocked to learn that some of the most radical innovations in surfing technology came from the American aeronautical industry, which helped introduce polyurethane foam for boards, and the Navy, whose combination of neoprene with nylon in the early 1950s resulted in the modern wetsuit.

The authors leave no aspect of surfing unexplored—as rewarding for those addicted to pursuing the “stoke” as for others merely smitten by surfing’s idyllic island allure.

point that will become unstoppable perhaps as soon as 10 years from now, despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

White was hooked on the story and joined with the team over the next five years as they checked on the glaciers over a three-week period at the end of each August and beginning of September. He chronicles the GPS-assisted precision of their annual measurements and the computer models on which their extrapolations of the rate of melt are based.

“The accelerating loss of ice in Montana also informs us of what’s to come in the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalaya,” writes White. As such, these conditions are harbingers of the impending crisis of major floods and the forced exodus of masses of people internationally.

Despite the grim reality being documented, White, an avid mountain climber in his youth, conveys the joy he experienced in the glorious scenery and the physical challenge of climbing mountain peaks and traversing potentially treacherous glaciers. (8-page b/w photo insert)

EBONY AND IVY Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

Wilder, Craig Steven Bloomsbury (432 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-59691-681-4

An eye-opening examination of how America’s colonial-era colleges were rooted in slave economies and “stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

Wilder (History/MIT; In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City, 2002, etc.) establishes the interrelationship between slavecultivated plantations and the academic institutions that lived off the rents gathered through endowments, leases, mortgage debts and other instruments of feudal-style bondage. At first, land holdings were acquired through conquest of native populations, followed by successive phases of clearance and resettlement. “The Indians-for-African trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts,” writes Wilder, “and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production.” The slave trade developed in complexity as it grew in scale. Universities and colleges not only required their own endowments of land as sources of income and supplies, but also served to educate the leaders and administrators of the colonial settlements, who often became apologists for slavery. Wilder provides an excellent exploration of the role of the College of New Jersey and the Rev. John Witherspoon in the education of the leaders (James Madison and Patrick Henry, among many others) and their successors (John Marshall and James Monroe), who formulated the Indian Removal Act of 1830. His detailed elaboration of how Northern colleges

THE MELTING WORLD A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers

White, Christopher St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-312-54628-1 978-1-250-02885-3 e-book

Journalist White (Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen, 2009, etc.), who has written extensively on maritime history, overfishing and the Chesapeake Bay, turns his attention to Montana’s Glacier National Park.

The author’s project began as a profile of Dan Fagre, “the leading glacier expert in the country,” but his concern mounted as he learned that due to global warming “mountain glaciers are on a fast track to oblivion.” They are melting at a faster pace than the polar ice and more quickly than scientists had predicted. In 2008, White joined a team of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, led by Fagre, who were tracking the alarming rate of glacial shrinkage at the park.

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“Another winning book from a historian whose passion for his subjects saturates his works.” from the men who united the states

spread the slave system into colonies like South Carolina and Georgia is equally thorough, and he also documents how race science took root in American academia.

A groundbreaking history that will no doubt contribute to a reappraisal of some deep-rooted founding myths. (b/w illustrations)

THE MEN WHO UNITED THE STATES America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

Winchester, Simon Harper/HarperCollins (512 pp.) $29.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-06-207960-2

Using a nifty structure around the five classic elements of wood, earth, water, fire and metal, Winchester (Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, 2010, etc.) celebrates the brains and brawn that forged America’s Manifest Destiny.

The author tells the story of the tremendous movement East to West of pioneers, explorers, miners, mappers and inventors whose collective labors made the U.S. truly e pluribus unum. Men take most of the spotlight here. Lewis and Clark’s Native American guide Sacagawea is one of the only females singled out by the author, who writes that she was “the key that opened the gates of the West and allowed the white men through.” Nonetheless, Winchester can tell a good yarn with evident relish, enlisting the element in question to aid in delineating his big themes: Thomas Hutchins’ visionary survey system of 1785 became the model for parceling up the vast expanse of the American West, township by township; William Maclure made the first truly detailed geological map of the U.S. in 1809; the discovery of the “fall line” in many American rivers suddenly rendering them impassable prompted the brilliant use of the canal system as employed by Loammi Baldwin; the building of the interstate road system, beginning with the very first in Cumberland, Md., constructed by John McAdam’s new crushed-rock method in 1812; and finally, the advent of the ubiquitous telegraph wires across the country by 1860, carrying information and spelling the beginning of the new age and the end of the old. In between these milestones are a myriad other stories of American ingenuity, which Winchester recounts with enormous gusto and verve.

Another winning book from a historian whose passion for his subjects saturates his works.

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children’s & teen These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

ITSY BITSY SPIDER by Dosh Archer...................................................72

TOILET by David Macaulay; Sheila Keenan.......................................97

FOX FORGETS by Suzanne Bloom.......................................................76

PETE WON’T EAT by Emily Arnold McCully................................... 99

ELITE INFANTRY by Carl Bowen; illus. by Wilson Tortosa................76

WELCOME TO MAMOKO by Aleksandra Mizielinska; Daniel Mizielinski..........................................................................................100

THE GREAT AMERICAN DUST BOWL by Don Brown..................... 77 YEAR OF THE JUNGLE by Suzanne Collins; illus. by James Proimos......................................................................... 80

LILY AND TAYLOR by Elise Moser.....................................................101 ROOFTOPPERS by Katherine Rundell; illus. by Terry Fan............. 104

THE BOY ON THE PORCH by Sharon Creech.................................... 80

THE DIGGERS ARE COMING! by Susan Steggall............................. 107

DON’T SPILL THE MILK! by Stephen Davies; illus. by Christopher Corr.....................................................................81

THE DREAM THIEVES by Maggie Stiefvater................................... 107

THE OUTCAST ORACLE by Laury A. Egan...................................... 82 NEVER EVER by Jo Empson.................................................................83 ME TOO! by Valeri Gorbachev............................................................ 86 THE SILVER BUTTON by Bob Graham...............................................87 PRINCESS POSEY AND THE CHRISTMAS MAGIC

by Stephanie Greene; illus. by Stephanie Roth Sisson..........................87 WORDS WITH WINGS by Nikki Grimes.......................................... 90

SUPER SCHNOZ AND THE GATES OF SMELL by Gary Urey; illus. by Ethan Long............................................................................110 SUPERHERO JOE AND THE CREATURE NEXT DOOR

by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman; illus. by Ron Barrett........................ 112 SPOOKY FRIENDS by Jane Feder...................................................... 118 OL’ CLIP-CLOP by Patricia C. McKissack; illus. by Eric Velasquez........................................................................120 ROTTEN PUMPKIN by David M.Schwartz; photos by Dwight Kuhn.....................................................................122

A MOOSE THAT SAYS MOO by Jennifer Hamburg; illus. by Sue Truesdell........................................................................... 90

THE DREAM THIEVES Stiefvater, Maggie Scholastic (448 pp.) $18.99 Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-545-42494-3

THE ABOMINABLES by Eva Ibbotson; illus. by Fiona Robinson...... 92 LITTLE RED LIES by Julie Johnston.....................................................93 THE KING OF LITTLE THINGS by Bil Lepp; illus. by David T. Wenzel..................................................................... 96 THE BOY ON THE WOODEN BOX by Leon Leyson; Marilyn J.Harran; Elisabeth B. Leyson............................................................. 96 THE BIG WET BALLOON by Liniers.................................................. 96

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“Although the approach is humorous, this clever effort is a concise, stepby-step description of the procedure of getting stitches at the hospital, an experience common to many families with young children.” from itsy bitsy spider

THINGS THAT FLOAT AND THINGS THAT DON’T

narration, realistic characters and occasional line-drawing “doodles” will keep pages turning. Young readers will easily see themselves in Danny and his compatriots.

Sequels are planned, so Danny’s newly won fans will have something to look forward to. (Fiction. 6-8)

Adler, David A. Illus. by Raff, Anna Holiday House (32 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2862-5

A boy, a girl and a dog demonstrate that things float in water when they are less dense than the water around them.

Adler, who has demystified math for young readers for years in titles ranging from Roman Numerals (1977) to Millions, Billions, and Trillions (2013), turns his attention to physics with this simple but effective explanation of principles of flotation and density. His clear, logical text invites readers to experiment with different objects, to shape boats, and to make both ice and salt water mixtures. Raff ’s illustrations take this invitation further, showing a pair of children using toy boats, plastic bottles, pennies, aluminum foil, clay and ice to discover what things float and why. These digitally combined ink washes and drawings add interest and some humor, supporting and enriching the text, except on one page. There, a line showing the water level of a bottle to which salt has been added seems to show that the water level has risen though the author makes clear that the level should not change. Curiously, the series of experiments stops at that point rather than continuing with the denser salt water, as good teachers would encourage children to do.

This appealing introduction can serve as a springboard for further investigations. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

THE JELLY BEAN EXPERIMENT

Adler, David A. Illus. by Adler, David A. Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (112 pp.) $4.99 paper | Oct. 3, 2013 978-1-4022-8721-3 Series: Danny’s Doodles, 1

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Who wouldn’t smile at a day of picnic fun?

“Nat the Cat jumped out of bed / with a smile spread halfway around her head. / She packed a picnic snack to share / with her friends Billy Goat and Hugo Hare.” However, when she knocks on Hugo’s door, he’s feeling gray to match the clouds. Sunny Nat is fine with that; she pats his head and goes on her way. At Billy Goat’s house, she knocks again, but he’s got a case of the grumpies. Nat pats his head too and continues on. Unbeknownst to Nat, her smiles and pats have cheered Hugo’s grays away and banished Billy’s grumpies. Unfortunately, Nat starts to feel down; what fun is a picnic alone? And the sky does look a bit gray. Then her two friends surprise her by showing up for the snack. They sing a song (music included) and have a grand game of Frisbee. Prolific British storybook author/illustrator/musician Alborough gives Nat a blue guitar, which she carries slung on her back in the big, bright, friendly gouache illustrations. Listeners will identify with Nat and friends and respond with tapping toes to the rhyme and the song. The song can be heard and downloaded via a provided URL; Billy and Hugo books (with songs) will follow.

Nat’s sunny smile is hard to resist. (Picture book. 3-7)

ITSY BITSY SPIDER

Being the new kid is never easy... sometimes, neither is being the new kid’s new best friend.

Fourth-grader Danny Cohen likes Calvin Waffle, the new kid at school, well enough, but Calvin is a little odd. After just two weeks of friendship, Calvin starts using Danny as the subject of an experiment—and he won’t tell Danny what the weeklong study is. It involves statistics, observing Danny from afar and pockets full of jelly beans. Meanwhile, Danny tries to figure out if Calvin’s absent father really is a spy or if that’s just a story Calvin tells. Danny’s also trying to help Calvin make new friends...and both of them are trying to not run afoul of Mrs. Cakel, their tough teacher, who’s armed with a huge list of “NO”s. Award-winning nonfiction author and creator of Cam Jansen, Adler starts a new series of gently humorous stories aimed at those just starting chapter books. The first-person 72

NAT THE CAT’S SUNNY SMILE

Alborough, Jez Illus. by Alborough, Jez Kane/Miller (32 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-61067-177-4

Archer, Dosh Illus. by Archer, Dosh Whitman (48 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-8358-6 Series: Urgency Emergency!

This delightful early reader is one of the first entries in the irresistibly named Urgency Emergency! series that combines nursery-rhyme characters, a medical setting and deadpan humor.

Dr. Glenda the dog and Nurse Percy the rooster are on duty at City Hospital when Miss Muffet (a cat) arrives, escorting an injured spider to the emergency room for treatment of a head injury. Poor Itsy Bitsy “was just climbing up the waterspout” when a flood of rainwater knocked her down. Each step of Itsy’s treatment is carefully and simply described, from evaluation of

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her cognitive status to the stitching of her wound and arrangements for further care from Miss Muffet. Dr. Glenda is calm and in control, and Nurse Percy is compassionate and kind, holding “all of Itsy’s hands.” Although the approach is humorous, this clever effort is a concise, step-by-step description of the procedure of getting stitches at the hospital, an experience common to many families with young children. Appealing cartoon-style illustrations on yellow backgrounds clearly illustrate the medical procedures and add to the characters’ personalities with expressive faces for all the animals, even Itsy Bitsy. The gender-role defiance exemplified by Dr. Glenda and Nurse Percy’s relationship is an added bonus.

Top-notch medical care in an equally terrific early reader that will appeal to preschoolers, new readers of all ages and anyone else who appreciates droll humor and an inventive plot. (Early reader. 5-8)

BIG BAD WOLF

Archer, Dosh Illus. by Archer, Dosh Whitman (48 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-8352-4 Series: Urgency Emergency!

Dr. Glenda (a dog) and Nurse Percy (a rooster) deal with a familiar fairy-tale villain while on duty at the hospital in this humorous Urgency Emergency! series

entry for new readers.

As the story opens, Nurse Percy is comforting a little lamb in a red coat who can’t find her grandma. An ambulance arrives with a patient who can’t breathe; it’s a distressed wolf who seems to have choked on a foreign object. Dr. Glenda determines that it might “not be something stuck in his throat—it may be someone.” With the help of the nurse, the doctor repeatedly squeezes the wolf around the middle until the grandma pops out, “a bit chewed around the edges, but otherwise OK.” The observant nurse identifies grandma-gobbling as illegal activity and calls the police, who quickly arrive to take the culprit away.

The grandma sheep and the little lamb in the red coat leave for home together, but the origins of the characters are left for readers to infer themselves. The wolf is suitably wild and toothy, though not overly scary, and the other characters are earnestly entertaining in the cartoon-style illustrations set against cheerful yellow backgrounds.

Not quite as hilarious as the other initial offering in the series, Itsy Bitsy Spider, which publishes simultaneously, but an amusing take on an old story and a fast-reading, funny choice for new readers. (Early reader. 5-8)

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A QUESTION OF MAGIC

Baker, E.D. Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-59990-855-7

Set in the days of yore in Eastern Europe, this charming tale features Serafina—intelligent and good-hearted third-born daughter—who unwillingly but gamely takes on the burden of an unexpected, unusual inheritance while also working to extricate herself and instead marry her childhood sweetheart.

“Welcome! You are the new Baba Yaga and the mistress of this house.” These words appear in an enchanted book that Serafina finds when her family sends her to visit Great-Aunt Sylanna’s cottage—replete with chicken legs and a talking cat—in Mala Kapusta. Serafina soon discovers her primary duty: Whenever a person visits her, they may ask one question, which she answers truthfully in an unsolicited, ancient voice, with knowledge channeled from magical wisdom. The book’s strength lies in its showing how Serafina uses her accumulating knowledge to effect positive changes in her own and others’ lives. There is an unconvincing thread about how she doesn’t think she will be able to convince her parents that magic exists; after all, scores of people line up for her sorcery daily. The book slyly combines fairy-tale tropes, such as a happy ending, with modern sensibilities, such as the advantages of literacy and the ravages of war.

Overall, the humor and relationships created by Baker are happily reminiscent of such classics as Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (1986), which is pretty good company to keep. (Fantasy. 8-14)

MY OCTOPUS ARMS

Baker, Keith Illus. by Baker, Keith Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4424-5843-7 978-1-4424-5844-4 e-book Who hasn’t occasionally wished for more than two hands (or arms) in order to simultaneously accomplish all that one needs to?

In a rhyming response to Little Crab’s query, the colorful, friendly octopus star of this picture book demonstrates that he can manage to pull off quite a few impressive feats with his numerous appendages—though here, our cephalopod friend is usually shown performing only one task at a time, using each arm merely to enhance or speed up what he’s doing. Think how he could multitask. Not surprisingly, the octopus engages in all sorts of humanlike activities, including cooking, writing, making music, playing games, getting dressed—and, most important for conveying the point of the story, hugging a forlorn octopus

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child. Sharp-eyed youngsters will notice that Little Crab (in actuality, prey for an octopus) effects a happy ending of its own by astutely noticing what’s troubling the toddler and devising a solution. Still, the real, intended warm message drifts home: All arms are made to reach out and draw someone in for a loving embrace. The story is sweet, though unoriginal, with verses that don’t stand out. The watercolor paintings are colorful and full of lively energy.

Though a little on the bland side, this effort should reassure little ones resting in the human arms of favorite story readers. (Picture book. 2-5)

HELEN KELLER’S BEST FRIEND BELLE

Barry, Holly M. Illus. by Thermes, Jennifer Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-3198-3

Helen Keller’s life is summarized for younger children in this attractively illustrated biography that uses Keller’s love for dogs as a unifying thematic thread.

The story focuses on Keller’s childhood, summarizing her early life in rural Alabama and the arrival in 1887 of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Keller’s favorite dog, an Irish setter named Belle, is beside Keller as she learns from her teacher how to communicate with finger spelling. Teacher and student travel to Boston together, where Keller begins to learn how to speak, and she is able to call her dog to her when they return home to Alabama.

This portion of the book is structured in a traditional picturebook format, using limited text and large-format illustrations that will work well for reading aloud to young children. The final few pages shift to more complex text describing additional dogs owned by Keller throughout her life as well as a summary of her college education, lecture tours and philanthropic work in her later years. This dual structure makes the book suitable both for young children and for older children looking for biographical information for school reports.

While Helen Keller’s love of dogs isn’t an integral part of her personal biography, it’s an interesting hook to draw children into the story of this fascinating, inspirational woman. (Picture book/biography. 4-10)

THE NAZI HUNTERS How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi

Bascomb, Neal Levine/Scholastic (256 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Sep. 13, 2013 978-0-545-43099-9 978-0-545-56239-3 e-book

Adolf Eichmann was among the Gestapo war criminals who managed to escape from Europe and establish new lives in Argentina. The search for him involved an international group of Nazi hunters who left no stone unturned to determine where and how he had fled, find him and bring him to justice.

The trail of the man, an exacting scheduler who oversaw the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps, went cold until one small clue led to another. He was finally traced to Argentina, captured and secretly removed to Israel for a public trial. Meticulously detailed plans with timing down to the minute involving several Israeli secret services, intelligence networks, other civilian and governmental agencies, and dedicated individuals brought him to justice. Drawing on a wealth of sources that include original interviews, Bascomb swiftly establishes background, introduces readers to the key players and takes them through the search. At any moment in the hunt something might have gone wrong, with those involved being captured as spies and allowing Eichmann to escape. Tension rises from the pages, thanks to Bascomb’s command of pacing, judicious use of quoted material, inclusion of archival photographs and strong descriptions.

It’s nonfiction as thriller in its recounting of the actions of a midlevel, monstrous clerk and the work of a few dedicated people in delivering him to justice. (author’s note, bibliography, notes, index [not seen]) (Nonfiction. 12 & up)

ROSIE REVERE, ENGINEER

Beaty, Andrea Illus. by Roberts, David Abrams (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4197-0845-9

Rhymed couplets convey the story of a girl who likes to build things but is shy about it. Neither the poetry nor Rosie’s projects always work well.

Rosie picks up trash and oddments where she finds them, stashing them in her attic room to work on at night. Once, she made a hat for her favorite zookeeper uncle to keep pythons away, and he laughed so hard that she never made anything publicly again. But when her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit and reminds Rosie of her own past building airplanes, she expresses her regret that she still has not had the chance to fly.

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“Parker’s digitally colored pencil illustrations complement the spirit of fun and fantasy, depicting a seemingly normal setting with the addition of some delightfully goofy details.” from the girl who wouldn't brush her hair

the iconic, red-bandanna–wearing poster woman from World War II. Rosie decides to build a flying machine and does so (it’s a heli-o-cheese-copter), but it fails. She’s just about to swear off making stuff forever when Aunt Rose congratulates her on her failure; now she can go on to try again. Rosie wears her hair swooped over one eye (just like great-great-aunt Rose), and other figures have exaggerated hairdos, tiny feet and elongated or greatly rounded bodies. The detritus of Rosie’s collections is fascinating, from broken dolls and stuffed animals to nails, tools, pencils, old lamps and possibly an erector set. And cheddar-cheese spray.

Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the right place. (historical note) (Picture book. 5-7)

SHOWTIME!

Berk, Sheryl Bloomsbury (160 pp.) $15.99 | $5.99 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-61963-182-3 978-1-61963-181-6 paper Series: Dance Divas, 1 Dance competition is fierce for four preteens and one little sister.

This series opener introduces four girls from New Jersey who belong to the Dance Divas studio and take part in individual and group contests. Scarlett has talent, divorced parents and a little sister who is whiny but acrobatic. Liberty has an over-the-top stage mother and is a snob. Rochelle hates toe shoes and loves hip-hop. Bria has a family of Chinese heritage that values educational excellence. The focus of the story is on costumes and routines that will give them an edge in the judges’ ratings. After coming in second at a competition, their drive to win accelerates, spurring intrigue. The coach and choreographer of that winning team used to dance in a ballet company with the Dance Divas’ coach, and they have not spoken in years, so the four girls use the Internet and a fake email account to uncover the cause of the feud.

The little sister is sent into a studio to spy on the competition; they’ve brought in a ringer, an older girl. While not surprising, the tactics are certainly questionable. Berk’s writing is actiondriven, stereotyped and predictable.

For those who dance to win—all others can skip the show. (Fiction. 8-12)

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THE GIRL WHO WOULDN’T BRUSH HER HAIR

Bernheimer, Kate Illus. by Palmer, Jake Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-375-86878-8 978-0-375-96878-5 PLB When an imaginative, stubborn little girl refuses to brush her hair, strange consequences ensue.

The unnamed girl has beautiful, long wavy hair and prefers it tangled and wild. To her parents, she repeatedly states, “It’s just my way.” Soon, one mouse, then a second, and then more and more take up residence in the mess that is her hair. They tell her jokes, she shares her lunch with them, and they turn her hair into a mouse palace. All of these activities are shared by her doll, Baby, her constant companion. While she mostly enjoys the situation, she finally begins to understand that things have gotten out of control. The mice have convinced her to stop bathing because they can’t swim, resulting in offensive odors and loss of friends at school. Bernheimer employs a chatty narration that directly engages her audience. The tale is structured on a base of “what ifs…,” building upon absurdities that include parents who are barely there and amazingly tolerant while maintaining a sense of reality that allows young readers to believe, just a little, that it could happen. And of course, there’s a satisfying and reassuring conclusion. Parker’s digitally colored pencil illustrations complement the spirit of fun and fantasy, depicting a seemingly normal setting with the addition of some delightfully goofy details.

Imaginative fun for all. (Picture book. 4-8)

RELATIVITY

Bishara, Cristin Walker (304 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-8027-3468-6 In Bishara’s debut novel, a portal to parallel universes offers a tempting escape to a teenager unhappy with a recent family move.

Ruby has been miserable ever since her father’s sudden remarriage swept her away from the life she loved in Northern California and dumped her in rural Ohio. But small-town Ennis has its share of surprises, as Ruby soon discovers that an ancient oak tree behind her new home conceals a wormhole. Each turn of the steering wheel inside the tree (it glows purple) transports her to alternate realities—worlds where her long-dead mother is alive and her best friend, George, is her lover. Alas, the superficiality of Bishara’s worldbuilding mutes the resonance of Ruby’s emotional journey as she learns what could have been.

Parallel universes are theoretically infinite, but Ruby’s tree conveniently limits her to a mere 10. A genius scientist hides his secrets behind a childishly simple substitution cipher. Ruby, a

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“It’s breathtaking to the word, and Bowen brings readers there without hysterics but with a clipped language and smoky pungency that allows them to taste the events.” from elite infantry

science geek, has the Einstein tensor equation tattooed on her neck and a tendency to pepper her first-person, present-tense narration with scientific terminology—but she can’t solve that basic cipher until the plot provides her with the key.

This tidy “what if?” adventure isn’t clever enough to go to the head of the debut class. (Science fiction. 14-18)

FOX FORGETS

Bloom, Suzanne Illus. by Bloom, Suzanne Boyds Mills (32 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-59078-996-4

the little girl appear—until the last frame, in which readers see a small boy in a blue shirt, with a pencil, chuckling to himself. Has he made all the line drawings? Or only the menacing ones and perhaps the rescue teddy bear? Is the girl in control of her activity and imagination, or has the boy been managing all this mischief? What seemed to start as a lively and empowering sketch of imaginative play devolves into a distressingly manipulative scenario.

Though the art has its charms, the story, wordless as it is, unsettles. (Picture book. 4-7)

ELITE INFANTRY

In this typically spare outing, Bear worries when little Fox neglects to tell him that Goose’s absence is only temporary. Happily, the three splendid friends are reunited at the end.

Goose has to run an errand, but rather than letting Bear know that, Fox, distracted by an evidently bottomless satchel of toys, only wants to play. Fretting about Goose’s whereabouts, Bear is likewise distracted—until Fox, with an adorably guilty look, delivers the message at last. The single, short bits of dialogue on each spread are practically superfluous, as the characters’ placement in the minimally detailed scenes and Bear’s body language clearly reveal both plot and emotional arc. Bear greets Goose’s return with an exuberant embrace, and in the final scene, all three are piled in a group cuddle that both signals forgiveness for Fox and conveys mutual affection so intense that it spills out from the page to draw in young viewers.

Bear looks more than ever like a huggable bundle of shag in this gentle reminder that failures to communicate happen and are not of necessity punishable offenses. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE LINE

Bossio, Paula Illus. by Bossio, Paula Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-894786-84-3

Bowen, Carl Illus. by Tortosa, Wilson Capstone Young Readers (224 pp.) $8.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-6237-0032-4 Series: Shadow Squadron A taut collection of adventures about a superelite strike force.

This sharp group of five stories centers on an elite American fighting unit, the Shadow Squadron. With members drawn from such rarefied groups as the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, they are tasked with contending with the most outlandish terrorist acts, doing so with a minimum of casualties all around. Bowen infuses their heroics with a soupçon of internal tension and rivalry within the specialoperations unit, but for the most part, he keeps the members of the team wholly committed to one another and their routinely mind-boggling missions. Each operation, in a nutshell, is like a short course in foreign relations, introducing readers to Somali pirates and submarines piloted by drug runners, but then running into more complex issues, such as when a Cuban oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, operated by the Chinese, is overrun by American mercenaries. As the men ready for their missions, there is almost a superhero aspect to the proceedings, but one look at the newspaper will make readers realize that such acts are happening even now in the real world. It’s breathtaking to the word, and Bowen brings readers there without hysterics but with a clipped language and smoky pungency that allows them to taste the events.

Top-drawer renderings of secret military missions around the globe, without jingoistic ballyhoo. (Adventure. 9-13)

CODE NAME 711

A wordless tale with a trick ending.

The art is designed to look childlike: A small girl with a carrotshaped nose and a red dress colored outside its contours finds a line and picks it up. She shakes it into squiggles, a slide, then into a hoop that she rolls herself in. She blows bubbles with it and even turns it into an audience while she performs upside down. But then the audience morphs into a beast that threatens her, and a tear appears on her cheek. However, another creature made from that line appears behind her and chases off the beast. Her rescuer turns out to be a teddy bear, and the girl is emboldened to stick her tongue out at the departing beastie. All this plays out on smudged grayish white paper on which only the line in its many transformations and 76

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Bradley, F.T. Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $16.99 | $8.99 e-book | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-06-210440-3 978-0-06-210442-7 e-book Series: Double Vision, 2 Amateur secret operative Linc Baker is once again tapped for service.

After proving himself as more than just a double for junior secret agent |

Benjamin Green, espionage agency Pandora once again calls on Linc, part-time amateur spy and full-time smart aleck, for help (Double Vision, 2012). This time, the stakes are even higher.

Following a series of internal threats against the president and her family, Pandora springs into action, determined to flush out the mole and find the newest Dangerous Double—that of George Washington’s coat. (Improbably, Dangerous Doubles are duplicates of real-world items endowed with special properties.) With the assistance of the president’s daughter, Amy, Linc begins investigating the Culper Ring, a group of Revolutionary War spies that continues into the present day. In the end, however, Linc’s success can be attributed more to his radical skateboarding and his unorthodox style than his secretagent skills. Improbable plot twists are partially remedied by the sometimes-irreverent and always-enthusiastic Linc. Pacing often lags as the plot is sidelined for a lesson on American history or a walking tour of Washington, D.C. Much like the first installment, this adventure suffers from a lack of originality. However, also as in the previous book, Linc manages to shine, making this worth the read.

Marginally better than the first. (Adventure. 8-12)

JANE, THE FOX, AND ME

Britt, Fanny Illus. by Arsenault, Isabelle Groundwood (104 pp.) $19.95 | $16.95 e-book | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-55498-360-5 978-1-55498-361-2 e-book

Lonely young Hélène begins to get out from under her body-image issue with help from a new friend—and Jane Eyre.

Weighed down by cruel graffiti (“Hélène weighs 216!”—a figure belied, later, by the “88” on a doctor’s scale but not before the damage is done) as well as looks and snickers from her former circle, Hélène walks slump-shouldered and isolated through a dreary world rendered in sepia wash. A class trip to nature camp brings no relief, as it entails a painful expedition to buy a swimsuit (“I’m a sausage”) and then exile to the “outcasts’ tent.” Only following Jane Eyre’s growth into a woman “clever, slender and wise” lightens her spirit. Then a brief encounter with a fox and the arrival of Géraldine, an extroverted fellow camper, signal at last the beginnings of a brighter outlook.

Hand-lettered but easily legible, her sparely told narrative suits the swiftly drawn look of the art. Ably capturing Hélène’s emotional tides, Arsenault portrays her (as a child of plainly average build) in dark sequential panels that give way when she’s reading or dreaming to full spreads, usually in subdued tones of orange and blue. Those colors and others show up as highlights in closing scenes that are capped by a final glimpse of the bright fox amid burgeoning greenery.

A sensitive and possibly reassuring take on a psychological vulnerability that is all too common and not easily defended. (Graphic novel. 10-13)

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THE GREAT AMERICAN DUST BOWL

Brown, Don Illus. by Brown, Don Houghton Mifflin (80 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-547-81550-3

A graphic-novel account of the science and history that first created and then, theoretically, destroyed the terrifying Dust Bowl storms that raged in the United States during the “dirty thirties.”

“A speck of dust is a tiny thing. Five of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.” This white-lettered opening is set against a roiling mass of dark clouds that spills from verso to recto as a cartoon farmer and scores of wildlife flee for their lives. The dialogue balloon for the farmer—“Oh my God! Here it comes!”—is the first of many quotations (most of them more informative) from transcripts of eyewitnesses.

These factual accounts are interspersed with eloquently simple explanations of the geology of the Great Plains, the mistake of replacing bison with cattle and other lead-ups to the devastations of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The comic-book–style characters create relief from the relentlessly grim stories of hardship and loss, set in frames appropriately backgrounded in grays and browns. Although readers learn of how the U.S. government finally intervened to help out, the text does not spare them from accounts of crippling droughts even in the current decade.

From its enticing, dramatic cover to its brown endpapers to a comical Grant Wood–esque final image, this is a worthy contribution to the nonfiction shelves. (bibliography, source notes, photographs) (Graphic nonfiction. 10 & up)

SOMETIMES I FORGET YOU’RE A ROBOT

Brown, Sam Illus. by Brown, Sam Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 17, 2013 978-0-8037-3825-6

A little boy, endearingly rendered as a stick figure, wishes for a robot to land in his backyard.

Well, what kid wouldn’t, even if the kid didn’t have a head the shape and brightness of a full moon, a postage stamp for a body, sticks for limbs and a goofy smile a yard long? Every time he sees a jet in the sky or a shooting star, he hopes it is bringing him a robot, “going ‘beep, beep, beep’ as he takes me on an adventure.” One appears, of course, adding more cubic yardage to the boy’s smile. The robot is physically impressive—gargantuan in that robotic way, painted a red so saturated it feels wet— but short on the grand-adventure front. He can’t fly or swim, though he can go “beep,” and he can help the little moonhead build his treehouse. Together, they hammer and paint, and the

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robot is strong, holding up support beams as well as his new friend—wherein lies the point: You don’t have to be with a superhero to have a magical time. Brown sends the message easily, not hammering it home like one of the treehouse’s boards but allowing it to be organic to the story. And his artwork, with its chalky lines brokenly etched in the planes of big color, calls up that sense of surprise.

A smart take on the strangeness of friendship. (Picture book. 3-5)

MUSK OX COUNTS

Cabatingan, Erin Illus. by Myers, Matthew Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-59643-798-2 More crazy hijinks from the irrepressible musk ox and his sidekick control-freak zebra will engender belly laughs in Cabatingan and Myers’ highly original sequel to the wild and wacky alphabet book A Is for Musk Ox (2012).

Zebra’s efforts to establish traditional counting-book order are foiled right from the first page as the musk ox is seen disappearing from his prescribed position as “1 musk ox.” Things only gets more zany on 2, where he is pictured consorting with two fetching female yaks, thereby ruining the concept of 2 by inserting himself as a third animal. By 4, he is again hijacking poor zebra’s concept, scaring away the 4 birds and replacing them with the less-attractive 4 stomachs (“just like cows”). More ridiculous scenarios bedevil the animals’ futile attempt to complete the counting series.

Six snails have been eaten by the four birds that the musk ox scared away; 10 dogs run away, leaving zebra and musk ox using their eight legs plus two heads to make up the number.

This approach is deliberately challenging and will only work for children who are already completely comfortable with counting; those who are not will likely find this terminally confusing.

Those kids ready to wrap their heads around musk ox’s anarchic approach, though, will likely find their (singular) stomachs sore from laughing. (Picture book. 5-8)

FIRST DATE

Carlson, Melody Revell (224 pp.) $12.99 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-8007-2131-2 Series: Dating Games, 1

Devon has just joined longtime best friend Emma at her mostly Christian private high school. The Northwood Academy faculty isn’t sure that students should date at all, although the school does not expressly forbid it. Aggressive Devon, used to a far more raucous public school and a bit boy crazy, enlists her new friends in a secret effort they name the Dating Games club. Once it’s launched, things begin to percolate. Cassidy follows her Christian faith and tries not to judge Devon, whom she initially dislikes. Meanwhile, Emma gets a makeover, and Abby deals with her too-strict father, while beautiful Bryn uses her charms to shake things up. Several characters wonder whether dating might be dangerous, and in fact, a cautionary plot twist indicates that it can be. The narrative continually refers to Christian ideals, churchgoing, prayer and Christian counseling. Not all characters are religious, but all love and respect their parents and sincerely try to form real friendships even when jealousy strikes. It’s all completely innocent and will be a welcome book for those uncomfortable with more frank fiction for teens.

Perfect for young Christian readers and fine for others too. (Christian chick lit. 12 & up)

TWO LIES AND A SPY

Carlton, Kat Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4424-8172-5

A spy caper spiced up with teen romance.

Unlike most high school juniors, when Kari Andrews gets a text from her dad to pick up milk after school, she kicks into high gear, recognizing it as a Code Black situation: a family emergency. For Kari, the Code Black text sets in motion a series of choreographed events including making a skillful escape out of a school window, ditching her prep school uniform for a goth-girl disguise, picking up her whip-smart 7-year-old brother, Charlie, and hiding out in a local hotel while they wait for their parents, who are U.S. spies, to arrive. Kari’s parents don’t show, though, so she must attempt to locate them, relying on the help of her friends, who have talents ranging from makeup artist to judo master and parents with high-level government positions. Although the plot is highly reminiscent of the movie Spy Kids, Kari’s narration of events and her feelings, especially those related to her crush, Luke, give the text a fresh and believable tone, facilitating a suspension of disbelief as this band of teens takes on the CIA. Although a setup for future volumes, the novel can stand alone, with a complete story arc and fully fleshed-out characters.

Goes down as easy as popcorn. (Thriller. 13-16)

Five very different high school juniors team up to get a date to the prom in this series opener slanted toward the Christian audience but accessible to all.

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“Cocca-Leffler once again demonstrates her understanding of small children and the complexities of their emotions.” from theo's mood

A SINGLE PEBBLE A Story of the Silk Road

Christensen, Bonnie Illus. by Christensen, Bonnie Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-59643-715-9

As a pebble that is “cool like the stream where I found it” travels the length of the Silk Road from China to Italy, exquisite, expressive artwork counterbalances a timeworn plot.

Mei, a young girl living in China in the ninth century, would like to travel the Silk Road. Instead, she must content herself with persuading her silk-merchant father to start her chosen gift of a pebble on a trip beyond his stretch of travel to “a child at the end of the road.” Tommaso, whose father is a kindly pirate, is the eventual recipient of the pebble and other gifts accumulated from, among others, a monk and a thief during the pebble’s journey. Preschoolers will enjoy the repetition of the phrase that concludes each transfer of the pebble, variations on “a gift from a girl…in the land where the sun rises.” There is gentle reciprocity in the piece of glass that Mei receives from Italy, but why, after a mere two years, does the story end with Mei’s father inexplicably deciding that Mei might, after all, make that dangerous journey next time? The richly detailed, lavishly colored watercolors authentically introduce diversity and history, but the first and final pages read rather like a nod-to-feminism afterthought. Facts embedded in the text are supplemented by a generous addendum.

Luminous artwork is the highlight of this child’s introduction to the Silk Road. (maps, author’s note, bibliography) (Picture book. 3-6)

IF ONLY

Citra, Becky Orca (240 pp.) $12.95 paper | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4598-0286-5 In 1968, 15-year-old twins Pam and Danny have difficulty coping when both blame themselves after they’re attacked on their way home from school.

Fortunately, the attacker does no serious harm to Pam, but he threatens Danny into inaction. When Danny tells what happened, their dad blames him for not helping his sister. Meanwhile, Pam stays home from school and worries about how the students at their high school will treat her when they find out about the attack; she’s sure she’s to blame, since she was wearing a miniskirt. Formerly bold Pam hides in her room and in despair, cuts off her long hair; once-quiet Danny indulges in minor vandalism. Both twins focus on what might have been if only each had done one thing differently. Citra writes in alternating chapters focusing on how the siblings try to cope emotionally with the attack and how each learns some strength from the experience. Although |

this easily could be a contemporary story, and the historical setting plays little part in the central drama, she sets it in 1968, lending a bit of nostalgia to the narrative, describing Martin Luther King’s assassination, hippies and pot smoking. It’s a sensitive tale, offering emotional insight into the two adolescents, their friends and family.

An engaging portrait of siblings caught in the blame game. (Historical fiction. 12-16)

THEO’S MOOD A Book of Feelings

Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Illus. by Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Whitman (24 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7778-3 “It was Mood Monday and Theo was the first to share his mood news. ‘Are you in a good mood or a bad mood?’ asked Miss Cady. ‘I don’t know,’ said Theo.” So begins the complicated task of naming Theo’s mood after he’s just met his new baby sister.

Miss Cady’s classroom begins to explore all types of feelings that Theo might be having about being a big brother. Each child takes a turn giving clear examples of many emotions. “Maybe you feel AFRAID like me,” says Ameen. “I got lost in the mall.” Both the text and the bright, expressive illustrations focus squarely on Theo and his friends, with a developmentally appropriate, low priority on the baby. When it is Theo’s turn to speak, he states that he is HAPPY. But he is also jealous and mad and even sad.

Cocca-Leffler once again demonstrates her understanding of small children and the complexities of their emotions. Her illustrations depict a convincingly ethnically mixed classroom, with children holding vocabulary-word placards; torn-paper frames against chalkboard-black backgrounds depict their imagined scenarios. “How can you feel all those feelings at the same time?” ask Theo’s classmates. “Because,” he replies, “I FEEL LIKE A BIG BROTHER!” That truly honest conclusion will resonate with older siblings while portraying classmates and teachers as a source of comfort during this transitional time.

Doesn’t it make Mood Monday sound like a good idea?

(Picture book. 4-7)

SEÑOR PANCHO HAD A RANCHO

Colato Laínez, René Illus. by Smith, Elwood Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 15, 2013 978-0-8234-2632-4

Colato Laínez (The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez, 2010) presents a bicultural rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” one of the most widely known and loved children’s songs.

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“A deeply felt story sparely written in lyrical prose, this book stands out as a quiet contemplation on the connection that is the wellspring of love.” from the boy on the porch

This book introduces readers to the various animals on two separate farms. On the first page of each spread is Old MacDonald and a traditional verse of the song in English. The next page presents Señor Pancho, whose rancho is also filled with animals whose Spanish names and sounds are blended into the English text. The opening pages prepare readers who may not be familiar with Spanish by providing a glossary of terms and a pronunciation guide to the Spanish sounds. Finally, the animals from the two farms meet, and everyone joins in dancing and singing, mixing all of the sounds and names together. The lively illustrations are imbued with movement and humor, significantly contributing to the overall joy of the book. Subtle nuances, such as in landscape and textile patterns, are used to distinguish Old MacDonald and Señor Pancho. For some readers, the repetition of each verse might lack sufficient action to keep them engaged. Others, however, will enjoy learning the names of the animals in both English and Spanish and comparing the onomatopoeia in each language.

Chock-full of bicultural fun on the farm. (glossary, pronunciation guide, author’s note) (Picture book. 3-7)

YEAR OF THE JUNGLE Collins, Suzanne Illus. by Proimos, James Scholastic (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-545-42516-2

First-grader Suzy’s father is in the jungles of Vietnam for a year.

Through a tightly controlled child’s point of view, readers live the year with little Suzy in the sheltered world her parents have built for her. She understands little at first, imagining romps in the jungle with elephants and apes. Her father sends her postcards every so often with cheery scenes of the tropics.

Eventually, the postcards stop coming. She misses her dad, especially when her brother takes over some of her father’s duties, like reading the comics or Ogden Nash’s poems to her. One day, the wall of protection is broken by the television, with frightening visions of explosions, helicopters, guns and dead soldiers.

Her mother whisks her away, too late. Proimos’ ink-and-digital art, in his signature cartoon style, adds needed humor to a frankly scary story that honors Suzy’s experience and respects those who share it. Occasional full-page wordless spreads allow readers to see into Suzy’s mind, beginning with her flying through the jungle and leading up to her post-epiphany anxiety about tanks and helicopters and rifles.

With a notable lack of patriotic rhetoric or clichés about bravery and honor, Collins holds firm to her childhood memories, creating a universal story for any child whose life is disrupted by war. Important and necessary.

(Picture book. 4-10)

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THE BOY ON THE PORCH

Creech, Sharon Harper/HarperCollins (160 pp.) $16.99 | $8.99 e-book | $17.89 PLB Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-06-189235-6 978-0-06-220777-7 e-book 978-0-06-189237-0 PLB In a book world crowded with overwrought shock-fluff stories, this quiet

novel sings.

Needing none of the gratuitous drama and exaggeration of voice so common in books for children and teens these days, Newbery Medalist Creech’s latest novel is allegorical in feel as it quietly gets to the heart of the matter—which is, of course, the heart. When John and Marta, a contentedly childless young couple, find a boy sleeping on their porch, they are mystified.

The boy, introduced to them only by a crude, misspelled note as Jacob, doesn’t speak. But he does tap and paint and play music, and as John and Marta indulge his creative passions, they grow to love him. When Jacob’s father, a rough man, turns up, the young couple must let Jacob go, but they are heartbroken and even go so far as to look for him afterward. In the end, their searching reveals an outlet for the love that Jacob has awoken in them. A deeply felt story sparely written in lyrical prose, this book stands out as a quiet contemplation on the connection that is the wellspring of love.

A graceful, profound story for all ages that speaks well beyond its intended audience. (Fiction. 8 & up)

AMBER BROWN IS ON THE MOVE

Danziger, Paula; Coville, Bruce; Levy, Elizabeth Illus. by Lewis, Anthony Putnam (176 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-0-399-16169-8

Amber Brown is facing two tough challenges: her recently blended family is in the midst of moving to a new home, and she can’t seem to focus on pending high-pressure standardized tests at school.

Even though her mom is now remarried, Amber doesn’t want to leave the home she and her parents shared. She has always been a person who lets her imagination wander, exploring new tracks; it’s a charming and positive characteristic, but it stands in the way of solving complicated word problems on state-mandated tests. Of course, the coming move and her inability to focus are related. She now has to attend Saturday Academy to prepare for those scary tests. That’s time she usually gets to spend with her dad, but he’s just started dating the new dance teacher at her school, Miss Isobel, yet another

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complication—and distraction—for Amber. “Miss Isobel is just a little too sparkly for comfort. She makes me want to turn off a light somewhere,” Amber thinks. As in previous outings, Amber aptly, capably and satisfyingly explores issues common to kids her age. The challenges she faces are just hard enough to sustain interest, while permitting an anxiety-relieving resolution for her audience.

Even though filtered through numerous works and new authors, Amber’s voice remains fresh, funny and achingly honest—traits readers love about her. (Fiction. 7-11)

LAIKA Astronaut Dog

Davey, Owen Illus. by Davey, Owen Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-7636-6822-8

boat. She admonishes herself not to spill a drop, telling herself, “Don’t shiver, don’t quiver, don’t fall in the river, girl.” That’s why it’s so sad when a final accident of fate upsets her plans for a successful end to her task, but her wise father has a different perspective. In an author’s note, Davies explains that he has visited the region where the book is set from his home in Burkina Faso.

He has worked with the artist in the past and wanted to give him an opportunity to picture the area’s diverse geography. The intensity of the colors used in these gouache paintings will keep eyes riveted to the pages. The naïve, flattened style emphasizes the colorful clothing, and a double-page spread in which Penda walks through a mass dance is quite striking.

A satisfying story, perfect for reading aloud, set in a part of Africa that is rarely shown in children’s books. (Picture book. 4-7)

THE CONTAGIOUS COLORS OF MUMPLEY MIDDLE SCHOOL

DeWitt, Fowler Illus. by Montalvo, Rodolfo Atheneum (288 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4424-7829-9

Laika, the Russian space dog, gets

uneven handling.

Back when the Cold War was going strong and Nikita Khrushchev wanted to give JFK the yips, the Russians plucked a stray dog off the streets of Moscow—figuring the stray would be well-versed in survival tactics—and shot the dog into space in Sputnik 2. The spacecraft failed; the dog died. This last part is background information supplied in an author’s note. In the main narrative, Davey rewrites this part, sweeping Laika aboard a flying saucer and whisking her to a planet of people with red hair and blue skin. Otherwise, he stays close to the known history but with clunky prose for so romantic a story. “She trained very hard and had to pass many tests until finally... / Laika was ready to go into space. She climbed aboard her spaceship and waited.” It all comes up daisies in the end for Laika and Davey, the whole soft-pedaling given amplified sweetness by the artwork, a highly stylized gathering of strong color and shadow, loopy lines and angles, and for much of the book, the illustrations speak for themselves.

Half-cooked, with superior artwork trumping a drab, cowardly narrative. (Picture book. 5-8)

DON’T SPILL THE MILK!

Davies, Stephen Illus. by Corr, Christopher Andersen Press USA (32 pp.) $16.95 | $12.95 e-book | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-4677-2028-1 978-1-4677-2034-2 e-book Penda, a young Fulani girl from Niger, takes a long journey by herself to bring her shepherd father a nourishing bowl of milk.

She travels through sand dunes, crosses a river, walks through the plains and treks up a mountain. She sees camels, desert jinns (are they imaginary?), masked dancers and the unusual pale giraffes of West Africa. She endures a smelly fishing |

A modern version of the Black Death finds brightly colored Mumpley Middle School students sniffling and sneezing, tumbling and leaping uncontrollably.

Sixth-grader Wilmer Dooley hopes that finding the cause of his classmates’ colorful colds will help him win the Sixth-Grade Science Medal as well as the attention of the glorious Roxie McGhee. Alternating Wilmer’s unconvincing journal entries with a third-person narration and writing under a pseudonym, author Allan Woodrow has taken a promising premise to exaggerated extremes. Vomit and snot plus clueless adults provide much of the humor. A gross but believable lunch conversation about the permissible ingredients in peanut butter (“[r]at hairs and cockroach parts”) is followed by a far-fetched Dooley dinner of Soupy Shoe Surprise, the ingredients of which range from lemons and pickles to a comb and a wrench. Food matters in this story. Wilmer’s scientist father, who made a small fortune with the invention of a snack-food ingredient called SugarBUZZZZ!, is working on a new food that will make vegetables taste like candy. Wilmer likes vegetables already. Unlike his classmates, who eat sugary treats, he eats spinach for lunch.

And only Wilmer and conniving Claudius Dill, who’s allergic to SugarBUZZZZ!, are unaffected by the plague.

Readers would have to be even more befuddled than Principal Shropshire not to solve this mediocre mystery themselves. (Fiction. 8-11)

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HOW TO MAKE A UNIVERSE WITH 92 INGREDIENTS An Electrifying Guide to the Elements Dingle, Adrian Owlkids Books (96 pp.) $18.95 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-77147-008-7

A high school chemistry teacher takes a quick spin past the periodic table of elements, but he’s not going to entice many passengers to come along for the ride.

Not to say he doesn’t try. With the same insouciance that lit up his text for Basher’s Periodic Table: Elements with Style!

(2010)—but also covering some of the same territory—Dingle highlights the central roles elements play in nature (“I’m Gonna Make You a Star”), technology (“Fun with Fireworks!”) and our daily lives (“The Chemistry of Fizz-ics”). After opening with the full table and an explanation of its organization, though, he goes on to cover only a select few elements in any detail in the following single-topic spreads. Furthermore, teenage readers will likely find the breezy tone and loud colors babyish, but younger ones will bog down in the author’s relatively knotty explanations of molecular structure and bonding, formulas describing chemical changes, and specialized terminology that is briefly defined in context but not included in either the glossary or index. Moreover, he plays fast and loose with his facts—pine cones are not “tree seeds,” magnetic compasses do not point “due north,” carbon dioxide is not found just in certain layers of the atmosphere, and stridently claiming that glass is not a liquid isn’t the same as proving it.

The author’s evident enthusiasm for his subject provides plenty of revs, but the road’s so rocky that his audience(s) will bail. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 11-14)

WHERE THE STARS STILL SHINE

Doller, Trish Bloomsbury (310 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-61963-144-1

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A CURIOUS ROBOT ON MARS!

Duffett-Smith, James Illus. by Straker, Bethany Sky Pony Press (32 pp.) $14.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-62087-994-8

Left to wander on Mars after mission’s end, the lonely Curiosity rover makes some bizarre friends.

“Mission Control, don’t leave me here! There’s more to do….

Hello?...Can you hear me?” Poor Curiosity, abandoned, has nothing to do but continue rolling over the sere landscape. Until, that is, he (explicitly gendered) falls into a crevasse, lands on a soft pile of leaves (!) and at last does find life on Mars—namely Sputnik (“Beeeeeep! Beeeep!”) and Laika the space dog (“Rufff!

Ruff!”). Even readers obliging enough to roll with the story’s surreal elements (and unfamiliar with the real Laika’s ugly fate) will be left spinning their wheels by the garishly colored cartoon art.

The rover, looking like a tearful mechanical turtle with clinical depression, may draw sympathy, but Sputnik resembles a spider with heavy, retro-style eyeglasses, and Laika is portrayed as a slobbery pooch in a space helmet with big, creepy, staring eyes.

In the last scene, dog and satellite are seen playing Twister as their new playmate contentedly sits by, letting his radio batteries run down.

Ghastly. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-7)

THE OUTCAST ORACLE

Kidnapped and dragged across the country by her mentally ill mother, Callie’s never been to school or had a friend; then a routine stop for a vehicle infraction changes everything.

With her mother in jail, Greg, Callie’s architect father, brings her home to Tarpon Springs, Fla. It’s not an easy adjustment. Greg is overjoyed, but his wife is reluctant to trust Callie, 17, with their two small sons. Callie’s loving, rambunctious, Greek-American extended family does mostly embrace her, especially her cousin, Kat. The girls are the same age but years apart in life experience. With a long sexual history, Callie quickly acts on her attraction to Alex, a sponge diver. Having a real family, real friends feels good—but also like a betrayal of 82

her mother. Without sugarcoating the impact of abuse, Doller offsets it through the abundance of what Callie’s new life offers her—if she can just accept it. In teen fiction, heroines burdened with a serious problem or handicap tend to be extraordinarily gifted in other respects, as if in compensation. Callie’s exceptionally exceptional: beautiful, smart, loved, welcomed by a family with the resources to supply what she needs. Realistic or not, though, knowing what she’s been through, readers will root for her all the way.

A moving story told with compassion and insight. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)

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Egan, Laury A. Humanist Press (205 pp.) $10.99 paper | $7.99 e-book Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-931779-36-7 978-0-931779-37-4 e-book

In this brilliantly written novel, a girl who lives with her con-artist grandfather after her parents have gone wandering hopes to lead a more honest life but must scheme to get by when he dies suddenly.

Charlie looks much older than her 14 years when she dresses up and puts on makeup, enough to fool a social worker who comes to call. Charlie and Grandpa run a moonshine business

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“Gorgeous secondary and tertiary colors, often watery and splashing, make a vibrant mix of saturation and pallor.

Motion-filled lines create energy.” from never ever

and the Glory Alleluia Chapel to make ends meet, and Grandpa has started a small pyramid scheme that helps Charlie stay afloat after he dies. Between that and insurance fraud, he’s buried money all over his large wooded property. Hoping to avoid an orphanage, Charlie hides Grandpa’s body and stashes the cash. A 30-ish cowboy type, Blake, turns up after an affair with Charlie’s absent mother; he clearly knows about the buried money and uses that knowledge as leverage. As much a grifter as Grandpa ever was, he builds up the family religion business by passing off Charlie as a miracle worker. Can Charlie escape him too and pursue her own dreams of becoming a writer? Egan tells the story in Charlie’s first-person countrified style, but with True Grit–style lofty grammar and sentence structure, in keeping with Charlie’s abundant talent. It’s this highly literary, easily accessible writing that lifts this story to the very top of the heap.

Simply delicious fun from start to finish. (Fiction. 12 & up)

WILD CARDS

Elkeles, Simone Walker (292 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-8027-3437-2 Series: Wild Cards, 1 Romance Lite in a new series from the author of Perfect Chemistry (2009).

When Derek gets kicked out of prep school in California for playing a prank, he has no choice but to move to suburban Chicago with his young stepmother, Brandi. There, he meets Brandi’s sister, Ashtyn, who’s just been voted captain of the football team, to the chagrin of the star quarterback, her boyfriend, Landon. Ashtyn takes an immediate dislike to Derek, although she’s charmed by his Southern drawl. Derek, a former quarterback himself, is impressed by Ashtyn’s unlikely combination of hot femininity and prowess on the gridiron. A thin plot, weak characterizations and poorly realized setting are beside the point in this fast-moving story. There’s plenty of sexually charged tension between Derek and Ashtyn as they go from beach parties and breakups to road trips and football camp.

Alternating first-person chapters reveal the personal struggles of each as they fight the inevitability of falling in love. Unfortunately, the feminism implicit in Ashtyn’s being a football player is undermined by her apparently unironic conclusion that real power comes from squeezing into a cocktail dress and stilettos and imagining herself a princess.

Still, Elkeles’ ability to write deliciously steamy love scenes for those in the early stages of their own sexual journeys will keep her fans coming back for more. (Fiction. 14­& up)

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NEVER EVER

Empson, Jo Illus. by Empson, Jo Child’s Play (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-84643-552-2 Who says closing your eyes hinders adventure?

“Nothing exciting ever happens to me! Never, ever! Humph,” grumbles a girl with coiled-spring red legs and scribbly-straight ginger hair. Holding her floppy stuffed rabbit, she closes her eyes and sets off on a stroll. They pass an orchard of innocent pigs, one of which sprouts wings and follows, aloft. In a field of wind-bent reeds, a purple gorilla stands; from a mass of shining yellow flowers, up pops a lion. The girl’s eyes stay resolutely closed, even when the lion’s gusting roar blows her hair and dress like a stiff breeze. “[N]ever, ever, ever, evereverevereverevereverever,” she repeats, as animals emerge from the abstract, ever-changing landscape. Gorgeous secondary and tertiary colors, often watery and splashing, make a vibrant mix of saturation and pallor. Motion-filled lines create energy. Surprise and hilarity escalate, all rising from the girl’s closed eyes, but is she really entirely ignorant? Perhaps not: The gorilla inquires “Ever?” and she answers; plus, her eyes do open at a certain critical point, yet afterward, even as she cleans grime off her bunny, she insists, “See? Told you! Nothing exciting EVER happens to me!” Her eyes-shut expression holds subtle amusement and defiance; this girl may know more than she admits.

Eye-catching pictures and splendid forward momentum add up to a giggle-inducing tale with subtlety underneath. (Picture book. 3-6)

ME FIRST!

Escoffier, Michaël Illus. by Di Giacomo, Kris Translated by Bedrick, Claudia Zoe Enchanted Lion Books (24 pp.) $14.00 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-59270-136-0 A pushy young duck receives a sobering comeuppance in this humorous cautionary tale from France.

When the duck parent (clad in a red turtleneck sweater) suggests the family plays outside on a beautiful sunny day, one little duck shoves past the others, shouting the titular cry: “Me first!

Me first!” It’s the same when the parent duck suggests fishing, and at “bath time,” the overeager fowl grabs the only inflatable water toy and thoughtlessly splashes the family. When an off-page speech bubble indicates that it’s “Time for lunch!” (in an ornate, scriptlike type that is very different from parent duck’s printing), it’s “Me first! Me first!” again—until the duckling arrives at the table just in time to learn that the menu consists of “Duck!” Tail tucked as far between the legs as a duck tail can be, the suddenly reformed offender slinks off in vocal camouflage: “Meow Meow.”

Even children who do not recognize themselves in the little duck’s behavior may well have seen it played out on a local duck

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“Almost photographic in their detail, hyper-realistic close-up illustrations, created in blurred watercolor layers, accompany an informal introduction to the seven-spotted ladybug….” from bug life

pond; this exaggerated look at typical duck—and human—family dynamics will ring true. Di Giacomo’s spare, textured cartoons are deceptively childlike; their sophistication emerges in telling details: The parent duck’s eyebrows betray increasing exasperation at the behavior of the wayward duckling; the little ducks are “fishing” for carnival-style rubber duckies.

A sly reminder that being first is not always best. (Picture book. 3-6)

BUG LIFE

Evans, Lynette Illus. by D’Ottavi, Francesca Insight Editions (32 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-60887-199-5 Striking illustrations, done from an insect’s perspective, are the background for this conversational description of a ladybug’s life.

Almost photographic in their detail, hyper-realistic close-up illustrations, created in blurred watercolor layers, accompany an informal introduction to the seven-spotted ladybug, the most common form in Europe and the state insect for several U.S. states, though it is an introduced species here. One spread shows the beetle’s “paper-thin back wings” and raised “fieryred front wings, ready for takeoff.” In another, she chomps on “sugary aphid bugs.” In the foreground, more aphids wait on a thorny stem. Occasional factoids appear on the spreads in ladybug-egg–shaped sidebars. The text covers the insect’s behavior, its feeding habits, its armor, wing structure and foul flavor, its defenses, usefulness and winter dormancy. Several pages show egg laying, larva and pupa development and the emergence of golden new ladybugs (the red color and spots develop later).

Their one-year lifespan is mentioned only in a sidebar. First published in England as a companion to the author and illustrator’s Bee Life (2013, not reviewed), this title, like many European imports, includes no sources for its facts and no suggestions for further reading. But the presentation is impressive.

Combining relaxed storytelling and larger-than-life images, this is an appealing natural history read-aloud.

(Informational picture book. 4-7)

THE MAGICIAN’S BIRD

Fairlie, Emily Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $9.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-06-211895-0 978-0-06-211895-0 e-book Series: Tuckernuck Mystery, 2

After saving their school by finding the solution to a puzzle left behind by eccentric founder Maria Tutweiler (The Lost Treasure of Tuckernuck, 2012), Laurie and Bud, rising seventhgraders, are at school laying out the next hunt when they find a secret room kept by Maria Tutweiler. They have grand ideas about how to use it, but if villain Walker LeFranco has his way, they never will. He is still trying to shut down Tuckernuck Hall, this time by accusing Maria Tutweiler of having murdered Marchetti the Magician decades ago. Organized crime and an assumed identity come to light, but the young sleuths, aided by quirky Misti and former rival Calliope, will not be able to clear Maria Tutweiler’s name unless they can make a little bird sing.

Really: Marchetti left a mechanical bird in the room that can reveal the truth—if they can figure out how it works. Readers who have not met the characters before may find them a bit two-dimensional here, but their sassy repartee is spot-on and comical, providing the real magic in the story. As before, lists, notes, emails and articles add depth.

Fans of the first book will be glad to rejoin this unlikely team of detectives. (Mystery. 8-12)

UNTIL TODAY

Fluttert, Pam Second Story Press (200 pp.) $12.95 paper | Sep. 13, 2013 978-1-927583-16-6 The realities of child sexual abuse, told from the victim’s point of view.

Kat has been living with a terrible secret since she was a small child. For most of her life, Greg, her dad’s lifelong best friend and law partner, has been abusing her and manipulating her emotionally to keep the crime quiet. Now in high school, Kat tries to stay away from Greg, but she’s worried that her 6-year-old sister, Sarah, may become his next victim. Yet she can see no way to stop the abuse, and Greg has kept her terrified and silent. When she meets a small girl who clearly has been beaten by her father, a popular school principal, she learns that her best option indeed is to report the abuse, but Greg is ready with a scenario that finds her to blame.

Emotionally estranged from her own parents, she doesn’t know where to turn. Fluttert is not graphic with descriptions of the abuse, though readers will be able to guess at much. She keeps Kat’s trauma and her reluctance to speak at the center of her tale. The character of the abuser, Greg, always in control, stands out as highly realistic.

A solid cautionary tale. (Fiction. 12 & up)

In this easy, breezy mystery, Laurie and Bud spend their summer planning a scavenger hunt, discovering a secret room and solving a missing person case.

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OLIVE AND THE BAD MOOD

Freeman, Tor Illus. by Freeman, Tor Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-7636-6657-6

Olive the (anthropomorphic) orange cat is back—and she’s still oblivious to the impact of her actions (Olive and the Big Secret, 2012).

The drama starts immediately as Olive trips on an untied shoelace, skids along under the copyright data and lands in an irritated heap on the title page. She then takes out her temper by making rude remarks to everyone she meets. From bunny best friend Molly, who innocently inquires whether Olive would like to play, to Lola the giraffe, who just wants to say hi, Olive belittles, insults and ignores her friends. Not surprisingly, each of them winds up in a bad mood too. Freeman keeps the text simple and conversational though not always convincingly childlike. Her mixed-media illustrations are crisp, and her animal characters, with round bodies, large heads, and comically small arms and legs, caper across white space that is mostly uncluttered by background details. Olive’s pronounced pout expresses her negative feelings, while her friends’ transitions from cheery to cranky are shown in serial portraits that also convey motion and activity. After annoying everyone, Olive soothes herself with sweets, shares them freely—and then sinks back into the doldrums when the candy runs out.

Unfortunately, the realistically petty temper tantrum and unhealthy coping mechanism overshadow the slight humor and seem likely to leave young listeners and their parents even less enchanted with Olive than her friends are. (Picture book. 4-7)

PLAY IT AGAIN, MALLORY

Friedman, Laurie Illus. by Kalis, Jennifer Darby Creek (160 pp.) $15.95 | $11.95 e-book | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-6075-9 978-1-4677-1621-5 e-book Series: Mallory, 20 Like most of the kids in grades four through six in her school, Mallory’s thrilled to hear they’re going to have six weeks of arts electives— until she is assigned the tuba. What’s a girl to do?

Mallory and her classmates can choose among orchestra, drama, ballet or band—Mallory’s third choice. When the dreaded day arrives, Ms. Anderson inexplicably assigns Mallory to play tuba, in spite of her very strong desire to play anything else—not the best way to inspire enthusiasm for musical instruments! Mallory hates it from the first and is caught up in envy of her friends who got their top-choice electives and in embarrassment for the terrible sounds emerging from the tuba. It’s all made worse by her distaste for practice. Naturally, things eventually all work out for the best. Many |

readers of early chapter books will already be familiar with Mallory since this is the 20th in the series. Slightly stylized but nonetheless evocative black-and-white illustrations accompany the relatively simple text. Mallory’s first-person narration offers an amusing take on her difficult situation but lacks the spirited depth of voices such as Amber Brown’s and Clementine’s. Perhaps due to Mallory’s primarily female audience, all of the dance participants are “ballerinas”; how odd to eliminate the male students from this choice.

Readers of the series will probably eagerly scoop up another somewhat vanilla-flavored entry. (Fiction. 8-11)

ZERO TOLERANCE

Fry, Michael Illus. by Fry, Michael Disney Hyperion (224 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4231-7099-0 Series: Odd Squad, 2 Fry (Bully Bait, 2013) hits his stride in this second hilarious exploration of the hazards and histrionics of middle school, as seen through the eyes of Nick, the shortest seventh-grader ever.

Having shut down bullying at Emily Dickinson Middle School, the Odd Squad has little of importance to do. Molly’s growing friendship with a new girl at school makes Nick jealously seek attention. Wanting to prove that the ghost of the school’s poet is real and realizing that Emily appears only when someone is bullied, Nick bullies himself. Wrapped in toilet paper and stuffed into a trash can that hurtles down a staircase, Nick embarks on a series of disastrous yet funny choices that bring Zero Tolerance for Intolerance to the school. Abetted by his quirky grandmother, Memaw, Nick crashes the class field trip to King Potatamus’s Egyptopolis (and Water Park) in a wacky adventure that brings a flirtatious encounter between Mr. Dupree, the Shakespeare-quoting school janitor and Safety Patrol adviser, and Memaw, who, in Nick’s estimation, “could make a mime scream.” Amid the laugh-out-loud humor and abundant cartoon-style illustrations is an important message: While all kids may want to be normal, it’s OK to be oneself. Or as Memaw says, “Sweetie, normal is overrated.”

Nick ably joins Greg Heffley and Big Nate in comically maneuvering the minefield of middle school life. (Graphic/ fiction hybrid. 8-12)

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READ ME A STORY, STELLA

the cave wall to make what he sees in his imagination plain to his family, readers may discover that they see pictures of their own within these layered illustrations.

Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists. (author’s note) (Picture book. 2-6)

Gay, Marie-Louise Illus. by Gay, Marie-Louise Groundwood (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-55498-216-5

This daylong idyll depicts the sweetest of sibling relationships, with big sister Stella indulging and guiding little brother Sam in child-sized flights of fancy.

When Sam hauls a wagon loaded with sticks and scrap lumber onto the page and announces he’s building a doghouse for Fred, she doesn’t rain on his parade, she just settles down to read while he gets to work. “Does your book tell you how to build a doghouse?” he asks after a bit. “No,” she says. “But I can help you.” Throughout a day that includes a picnic by the pond, kite flying, tending the garden and gazing at the clouds, Stella reads and talks to Sam about her books. But despite Stella’s invitations, he’s not interested in being read to till nighttime, when “Fred can’t sleep” and needs a story. Stella is happy to oblige. Her low-pressure approach to sharing her evident love of books is wisely intuitive, allowing Sam the space to come to it on his own. Gay’s watercolor, pencil, pastel and collage illustrations fill each scene with a riot of details for children to pore over again and again. On one page, a bunny reads Stella’s book while she helps Sam with the doghouse; on another, two birds and a caterpillar share space on a makeshift clothesline with Stella’s wet socks. Stella’s wild, red mop of curls seems to have enough energy to power several states.

A perfect summer’s day bound in 32 pages. (Picture book.

3-5)

THE FIRST DRAWING

Gerstein, Mordicai Illus. by Gerstein, Mordicai Little, Brown (40 pp.) $17.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-316-20478-1

Who made the world’s first drawing— and why?

Caldecott Medalist Gerstein gives his own imagined answer to this question in a polished tale of a boy living 30,000 years ago with his pet wolf and his very extended family. Using narrative direct address (“Imagine… / you were born before the invention of drawing”) to effectively bridge the gap between prehistoric times and the present, the story follows the boy on his fanciful discoveries of wooly mammoths in clouds, bears in stones and horses galloping on cave walls. The boy tries to show his family what he sees, but they see only a cloud, a rock and a cave. Gerstein’s acrylic, pen-and-ink and colored-pencil mixed-media illustrations create depth and a sense of the past, as well as imparting liveliness and possibility to what could easily have become simply flat drawings. Like the boy in the story who finally, in frustration, picks up a charred stick and draws on 86

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LOLA GOES TO WORK A Nine-to-Five Therapy Dog Goldman, Marcia Photos by Goldman, Marcia Creston (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-939547-00-2

Not all working dogs are big and powerful, like police or rescue dogs.

Some are tiny and gentle, like little Lola, a 5-pound Yorkshire terrier from California certified as a therapy dog. Lola narrates her own story with just one sentence per page, accompanied by a high-quality photograph of the adorable dog at home, in training sessions or on visits to schoolchildren and “friends who are not feeling well.” The simple story describes Lola’s challenges in her training to be a therapy dog, which are then echoed in her compassionate assistance to others who are facing different life challenges. The story and appealing photos will draw in preschoolers and children learning to read, including older new readers. Lola is definitely an endearing little character, with charming expressions captured in the illustrations and a tempting cover photo of Lola in her therapy-dog bandanna sitting next to her red plaid lunchbox (almost as big as she is). An author’s note explains a little about therapy-dog training, and a page for teachers offers discussion questions relating to “empathy studies,” as well as suggested activities. There are only a couple of children’s books in print about therapy dogs, and this one has the broadest appeal to different age groups.

Tiny and gentle, but powerful just the same. (Informational picture book. 3-10)

ME TOO!

Gorbachev, Valeri Illus. by Gorbachev, Valeri Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2744-4 Series: I Like to Read Bear and Chipmunk enjoy a day together in the snow.

Bear wants to do something, and Chipmunk replies with an agreeable, “Me, too!” no matter the activity. These two friends dig out the walkway from their house, build a snowman, go ice-skating, fall down, ski, fall down again and remember the day. Predictable text allows new readers to feel

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“A book to bathe in, reminding readers that something magical is happening every instant.” from the silver button

confident, while lively ink-and-watercolor illustrations extend the text. Sharp-eyed readers will notice the snow toys (in two sizes) lined up on the first spread, ready for the day. And, after the two friends go to sleep, the heavy snow in the moonlight suggests that tomorrow will be just as much fun. Chipmunk’s tiny green outfit, especially when juxtaposed with the sheer size of Bear, will amuse readers as they explore the simple story. Each page is filled with details that will encourage new readers or lap listeners to slow down and find the big and little objects (right down to their bedside glasses!) that belong to these two critters.

From their adventures in the snow to a warm snuggle in their tiny and huge beds, Bear and Chipmunk are friends that new readers will want to turn to again and again.

Here’s hoping there will be more. (Picture book. 2-7)

THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU & ME

Grace, Amanda Flux (230 pp.) $9.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3624-2

An honor-roll teen falls for her community college professor in this mawkish romance.

Madelyn Hawkins, 16, is enrolled in a program that allows high school students to take college courses. The first day of biology 101, she becomes besotted with her young professor, Bennett Cartwright. At first, it seems destined never to be more than a crush, but then the two run into each other while hiking the hills of their Seattle suburb. From that point on, a romantic yet chaste relationship blossoms, as Bennett believes Madelyn is 18 and wants to wait until the course is over before he even kisses her. After many platonic dates, they consummate their perfect love only to have it fall apart when Bennett discovers Madelyn’s true age. The story is written in awkward second person as a letter from Madelyn to Bennett after the end of the affair and includes details the character couldn’t possibly remember like, “…a long tangled strand of my wavy dark-blond hair slid forward….For a split second, your eyes followed it down before you looked back at your computer.” But despite the paper-thin characterizations and unimaginative dialogue, the topic and short length may be attractive to some reluctant readers.

For more complex examinations of student-teacher affairs, readers should be directed to Barry Lyga’s Boy Toy (2007) or R.A. Nelson’s Teach Me (2005). (Fiction. 14 & up)

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THE SILVER BUTTON

Graham, Bob Illus. by Graham, Bob Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-7636-6437-4

Graham captures a moment in time, and like many moments, it is full to the brim.

A little girl draws a duck. Before she can ink in the final silver button of the duck’s morning coat, her brother takes his first walking steps. In the kitchen, her mother plays the pennywhistle. A pigeon builds a nest on a cornice; a jogger shuffles by. A loaf of bread is bought; a soldier says goodbye to his mother. Birds head south; the city wakes; a baby is born; a blackbird (clearly the early bird) eats a worm. This is an elegant piece of living theater, something into which readers can nestle and observe. The natty artwork is a fine combination of ink, colors lighter than air and colors as rich as the inside of a bonbon. There are bird’s-eye perspectives reminiscent of Mitsumasa Anno and the sweet, almost dreamlike broken linework of John Burningham, but the illustrations are handsome and inviting on their very own. This is not an easy book, even with its scant text. This apparent slice of the everyday moves quietly into the existential.

A book to bathe in, reminding readers that something magical is happening every instant. (Picture book. 4-6)

PRINCESS POSEY AND THE CHRISTMAS MAGIC

Greene, Stephanie Illus. by Sisson, Stephanie Roth Putnam (96 pp.) $13.99 | $4.99 paper | Oct. 17, 2013 978-0-399-16363-0 978-0-14-242734-7 paper Series: Princess Posey, 7 All Posey wants from Santa is a real magic wand.

Posey and her classmates are excited about the upcoming winter holidays, and Posey sure is ready. She has written her letter and knows that Santa will understand that she needs a wand that can really perform magic. But when Posey accidentally hurts her toddler brother, she does not tell her mother the truth and is haunted by the fact that Santa will know that she was bad, for goodness’ sake! Posey is a delightfully imperfect little first-grader, and others will empathize with her plight.

A subplot about Gramps and his new love interest, neighbor Mrs. Romero, adds much to the story, making it more than just a story about a little girl. When Mrs. Romero shares a childhood picture of Barbara, her little girl who died years ago, the twist is revealed with calm, believable emotion. And later, when Posey creates a gift picturing Barbara with angel wings, it is a powerful moment that is free of any emotional manipulation.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Gary Soto

The legendary children’s writer has done a little bit of everything during his career

By Jessie Grearson

Photo courtesy Carolyn Soto

Award-winning poet and celebrated children’s author Gary Soto didn’t really intend to write a memoir. In fact, he doesn’t actually recall the specific occasion when he began writing the short essays that comprise What Poets Are Like: Up and Down with the Writing Life. “One day, I started looking at little anecdotal moments in my life. I wrote one piece, ‘Fishing for a Poem,’ and thought that maybe I could do other similar quick-flash essays that would define—or say something—about my writing life,” he says. Other essays followed, also about poetry and writing. Soto explains, “It all became thematically interesting to answer the questions, ‘Who is Gary Soto? How did he become this person?’ ” 88

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Soto says he usually wrote one of these short, vivid essays a day, usually in one sitting. “The process was straightforward: I would wake, look at the wall, look at my hands, look, look and then strangely, a subject would arrive, a subject about writing. I’d then write the piece in a couple of hours, and I was free for the day.”

Soto shared each piece with his favorite reader, his wife, Carolyn Soto, who would make suggestions. “I’m not a sloppy writer, but she will look at my writing. We’ve been married for 38 years and together for 40. Carolyn is my first reader.”

These pieces offer glimpses of his life that are both pleasing (the memory of first meeting his wife, of meeting a loyal fan who named her dog after him) and poignant (the pang of facing empty chairs at a book reading). The essays move back and forth in time, addressing bittersweet topics that include aging, the problematic nature of success and the demise of the publishing world as Soto once knew it. Taken together, they “become something of a commentary on being a poet,” Soto says. “I began writing poetry 41 years ago as a college student, and to this day, I remain a poet. In some ways, What Poets Are Like is a reflection about this career choice—or is ‘career’ the wrong word?” He notes the small sales and scanty attention garnered by most poets but says, “I chose to become a poet early on and knowing it would be a tough sell. There may not be many financial rewards, but it’s something that has to be done. No one shows up! At poetry readings, even our wives drift off to the magazine rack,” he notes ruefully.

“But you still give it the best you can for yourself and [the] nation as a whole. I know so many excellent poets who share the same dilemma.”

Poetry has anchored his creative life, but Soto has written for a wide audience and in a variety of genres; he’s

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written more than 35 books for younger readers. “I’ve done a bit of everything,” he laughs. In fact, some of the “ups” in Soto’s writing life come from such experiments.

“I published Baseball in April in 1990—it was a fresh book; people began to notice,” he recalls. “There was an oddity to the stories that shook people up—something about the short story form, Mexican-American kids. I didn’t make the characters perfect. I got letters from teachers, students, literacy advocates. I’d get 50 letters a week—as a poet, there was no response like that.”

Asked to choose a favorite book from all that he’s written for this younger audience, Soto is decisive.

“Jesse is my best YA novel, period. It evokes a tone that I was never able to capture again….It’s close to my heart because I’m Jesse—to some degree. It’s about farm working and the United Farm Workers of America and about two brothers who are doing what they believe is right: getting an education even if means starting off at a community college and doing any odd job to make it happen. It describes a lot of community college students these days. We tell them (especially first-generation Latinos), ‘Get an education.’ I pray that we’re not fooling them.”

Just a few weeks ago, Soto received a call from the Children’s Literature Association informing him that Jesse will receive the Phoenix Award—an award that he says “recognizes a book 20 years after its publication that never got the attention that it deserved.” First, I thought, ‘Twenty years. Has it been that long?’ This is pleasant news from an organization that counts.”

Soto also speaks with pride of another recent literary effort for younger audiences, though it is “not on a shelf, as it never saw book publication”: a play about undocumented youth called In and Out of Shadows that ran for three weekends this year in San Francisco to sellout crowds. Soto says that he worked many months on this piece, using 200 pages of interviews with undocumented youth, and “came up with a tidy musical that moved a lot of people.” Soto says he was “teary eyed at almost every performance and honored to be trusted to write their stories.”

At times in his literary career, Soto says that he found moving from writing for children to writing poetry challenging, as though the genres were jealous of each other and he had to run back and forth between them, trying to satisfy both. “When I was writing children’s and young-adult literature—and poetry and essay—I would do one project, say a chapter novel, and once that |

was finished, I would think, poetry! I need to do poetry.

I’d write a batch and then think, young-adult novel! I was trying to do everything.”

Right now, Soto is focusing just on poetry and essays and finds the two very similar. “An essay is really a poem but with relaxed language,” he says. “An essay has slightly larger freedoms. Poets must make every word, every syllable count.” Soto enjoys working on these “smallish” essays, which he describes as “light but fun and occasionally the stuff of reflection,” and he’s currently at work on another collection.

An added bonus? “Neither genre is jealous of the other,” he insists. “These short essays and poetry are buddies!”

Jessie C. Grearson is a freelance writer and writing teacher living in Falmouth, Maine. She is a graduate of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

WHAT POETS ARE LIKE: Up and Down with the Writing Life Soto, Gary Sasquatch (208 pp.) $15.00 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-57061-874-1

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“Hamburg’s debut picture book scans and rhymes in the best read-aloud fashion.” from a moose that says moo

Telling this story with simple vocabulary, in oversized font and 10 very short chapters, Greene makes this rich tale accessible to the earliest readers. Showing no signs of flagging in this seventh series entry, she continues to develop winning characters in realistic situations.

No wand needed—pure magic for emerging readers.

(Fiction. 5-8)

WORDS WITH WINGS

Grimes, Nikki Wordsong/Boyds Mills (96 pp.) $15.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-59078-985-8 In this delightfully spare narrative in verse, Coretta Scott King Award–winning Grimes examines a marriage’s end from the perspective of a child.

Set mostly in the wake of her father’s departure, only-child Gabby reveals with moving clarity in these short first-person poems the hardship she faces relocating with her mother and negotiating the further loss of a good friend while trying to adjust to a new school.

Gabby has always been something of a dreamer, but when she begins study in her new class, she finds her thoughts straying even more. She admits: “Some words / sit still on the page / holding a story steady. / … / But other words have wings / that wake my daydreams. / They … / tickle my imagination, / and carry my thoughts away.” To illustrate Gabby’s inner wanderings, Grimes’ narrative breaks from the present into episodic bursts of vivid poetic reminiscence. Luckily, Gabby’s new teacher recognizes this inability to focus to be a coping mechanism and devises a daily activity designed to harness daydreaming’s creativity with a remarkably positive result for both Gabby and the entire class.

Throughout this finely wrought narrative, Grimes’ free verse is tight, with perfect breaks of line and effortless shifts from reality to dream states and back.

An inspirational exploration of caring among parent, teacher and child—one of Grimes’ best. (Poetry. 8-12)

RECLAIMED

Guillory, Sarah Spencer Hill Press (296 pp.) $9.95 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-937053-88-8 A small-town girl can’t choose between two twin brothers in this psychological romance.

Jenna feels stifled in the little town of Solitude, Ark., where she’s lived all her life with her mother. Jenna dreams only of leaving home and living in the wider world when 17-year-old twin boys and their mom buy Jenna’s recently deceased grandfather’s house. First she meets Ian, a straight-A student who has 90

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been trying to reclaim his memories, mostly lost three months ago after a traumatic event. Then she meets Luke, who insists he’s the bad twin, always in trouble. However, Jenna can’t help being more attracted to Luke, although she knows she’s going behind Ian’s back to meet him. Complicating matters is Jenna’s mom, who suffers from the family tendency to drink and for whom Jenna feels responsible. Just when Jenna firmly decides she loves Luke, Luke tells her what really happened the night Ian lost his memory, a secret that changes everything. Guillory writes the entire novel through the shifting though identical first-person viewpoints of the three adolescents—readers will have to pay strict attention to chapter subheadings. Frequent nature-inspired metaphors (“the shadows [of the woods] swallowed me”) add depth. If the psychology gets a bit too convoluted toward the end, much of the story remains believable.

Lengthy but ultimately intriguing. (Psychological romance.

12-16)

A MOOSE THAT SAYS MOO

Hamburg, Jennifer Illus. by Truesdell, Sue Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-374-35058-1 A little girl with her nose in a book and toys scattered about conjures up a zoo filled with zaniness and mixed-up mayhem.

She is sitting on the grass in her backyard with her beagle close by. Delightedly, the two watch as an assortment of animals moves in. Her moose moos, her skunks jump rope, and her sheep “take baths full of bubbles and soap.” A zebra and ape dance on a picnic table, and pigs perform a tap-dance show.

Spillage and breakage abound. Noisily oinking otters and chirping chipmunks cavort. Fish scribble with crayons as they swim, and groundhogs march with picket signs held high. Sharp-eyed readers will find visual clues to upcoming hijinks. At last, one pooped girl puts everything to rights—or does she? Hamburg’s debut picture book scans and rhymes in the best read-aloud fashion. Truesdell’s pen-and-ink and watercolor art, as always, presents an amusing and lively panoply of animals in high mischief mode. One double-page spread, set at nighttime, features some bears sprawled comfortably asleep on toy cars while sheep engage in a pillow fight with flitting and floating feathers that can “wake up a sound-asleep goat.”

Infectious good fun. (Picture book 3-8)

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WHEN LIONS ROAR

“Sammy Feral = dude supreme!” he crows at the end.

Forcibly engineered as his ultimate triumph is, he merits a few howls of appreciation for staying so resolutely on task.

(Adventure. 9-11)

Harris, Robie H. Illus. by Raschka, Chris Orchard/Scholastic (32 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-545-11283-3

WOLF

What to do when sudden or loud

noises bring “the scary.”

Here, Harris works the same theme as Ed Emberley’s classic Go Away Big Green Monster (1993) but in a less abstract way.

She catalogs upsetting sounds—from “When thunder booms! / When sirens blare!” to “When daddies yell! / When mommies holler!”—then suggests a remedy: shutting one’s eyes and ordering “Scary! Go away” until “the quiet is back” and the world again becomes a sunny, peaceful place. The big, short lines of text are printed in various colors; Raschka uses the same palette to depict, with his typically free-looking brushwork, an anxious child of indeterminate sex suspended, with minimal background figures and details, on broad white pages. Except perhaps for a dog’s bark, none of the noises are directly aimed at the child narrator.

The level of “scary” is further reduced by showing Mommy hollering at a parking meter (or someone beyond it) and Daddy at something off the edge of the page rather than at each other.

A tried-and-true strategy, though the fright fades with unrealistic speed in this iteration. (Picture book. 3-6)

SAMMY FERAL’S DIARIES OF WEIRD

Hawkin, Eleanor Illus. by Kelly, John Quercus (256 pp.) $15.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-62365-032-2

Readers afflicted only with pesky sibs should count their blessings: 12-yearold Sammy comes home one day to find his whole family (dog included) turned into a pack of ravening werewolves.

Sammy is saved from being bitten himself, or maybe torn apart, by the timely arrival of Donny, a leather-clad cryptozoologist who shoots tranquilizer darts from a silver blowpipe and explains that the werewolves will revert to (more or less, as it happens) human once the full moon has passed. Fortunately, Sammy’s parents own a public zoo with behind-thescenes transit cages that can hold the feral Ferals temporarily.

Unfortunately, even back in human form, Sammy’s little sister, Natty, retains a taste for raw sausage and live hamster. Can Sammy devise a cure for the Were Virus before the next full moon—while also fending off professor Pickitt, a rival cryptozoologist scheming to turn the Feral Zoo into a display of freaky creatures? Sammy chronicles his plunge into “wackoville” in diarylike entries punctuated with bulleted lists, shocked exclamations of “rewind!” and simple line drawings of the cast and selected scenes. |

Hobbs, Valerie Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (128 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-374-31575-7 In the sequel to Sheep (2006), Hobbs revisits border collie Jack and his owner, Luke, on Olaf and Katrin’s ranch.

The tale is told in the third person alternately from the perspectives of Jack, remarkably clever even for a border collie, and, in italics, that of a lonely wolf that is bitten by a large rabid rodent and then begins menacing both sheep and sheepdogs. Given this setup, there’s plenty of action to sustain interest. After the wolf kills a sheep and then one of the dogs, and another dog goes missing, Luke is determined to track and shoot the animal. Jack, his constant companion, comes along of course, though he’s torn between protecting the sheep and the other dogs, concerned about impetuous Luke and fearing that he’s losing his strength to old age. A scene depicting Jack’s performance—and loss to a younger dog—in a county-fair sheepherding trial is poignant and affecting. While the italicized sections portraying the wolf ’s point of view are sympathetic to his plight, the complex struggle between sheep farmers and predators is only hinted at and then somewhat minimized by using a rabid animal to represent the predator. Jack, as in his first outing, is an attractive, very likable main character, offering lots of appeal for pet lovers.

Dog owners all know how smart their pets are; readers will lap up Jack’s tale and beg for more. (Fiction. 8-12)

ELEGY

Hocking, Amanda St. Martin’s Griffin (560 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-250-00567-0 Series: Watersong, 4 What’s the best news about the fourth and final installment of the Watersong series? It’s finally over.

Even readers who have slogged their way through the first three novels with the hope of a climactic—or at least satisfying—finish will likely find themselves longing to reclaim the hours of their lives they’ve lost in pursuit of this convoluted and disappointing conclusion. Once again, the bulk of the novel centers around 16-year-old siren Gemma and her sister Harper’s quest to break the curse that holds Gemma hostage before her evil siren sister

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Penn can find a suitable replacement and kill the troublesome Fisher sisters once and for all. Unfortunately, what should be a thrilling race against the clock is just a frustrating, meandering journey that’s cluttered with unnecessary characters of both the human and supernatural varieties. While Penn’s lust for Harper’s boyfriend and a volatile and power-hungry new siren add moments of interest, they offer little relief for readers trying to make sense of all the book’s disparate, moving parts. Characters such as the girls’ mother, Nathalie, archaeology professor Kipling Pine and the muse Thalia are oft referred to but rarely seen, and their presence winds up being just another frustration in the already difficult-to-navigate siren sea.

Readers won’t have to work to resist the lure of this siren song. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

THE ART OF FLYING

Hoffman, Judy Illus. by Graegin, Stephanie Disney Hyperion (320 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-1-4231-5815-8 Having accidentally transformed three birds into humans, sibling witches must coerce a practical girl to help them reverse the spell, but she proves an unreliable cohort.

The Baldwin sisters keep a low profile in “poky old Wheatfield,” where no one knows they are really witches. By turning an owl and two fledgling sparrows into a man and two boys, the sisters have breached the strict witch code forbidding human transformation and have five days to reverse the spell or the change becomes permanent. Worse, they then lose the ex-owl and one of the ex-sparrows. When the sisters lure 11-year-old Fortuna Dalliance to their suitably spooky house to see if she’s got the right stuff to help them, she’s terrified, but she’s also been itching for excitement. Soon becoming attached to bird-boy Martin, Fortuna hides him so he’ll remain human. Threatened by the local coven and aided by the bird community, the sisters are desperate to find the three missing bird-humans, but Fortuna can’t decide what to do. Like the crones in Dahl’s The Witches, the Baldwin sisters supply sinister humor, while conflicted heroine Fortuna must decide whether to let her friend fly free. Black-and-white spot art adds charm to this contemporary debut fantasy.

Silly witches, transformed birds and a plucky heroine equal “real, live adventure.” (Fantasy. 8-12)

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ICK! YUCK! EEW! Our Gross American History

Huey, Lois Miner Millbrook/Lerner (48 pp.) $21.95 e-book | $26.60 PLB | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4677-1710-6 978-0-7613-9091-6 PLB Huey, an archaeologist, explains just why time travel is not for the weak of stomach.

Ah, the pleasures of a quick trip back to the 18th century— when people emptied chamber pots out of windows, freeroaming animals dumped poop on city streets, clothes were seemingly designed to be uncomfortable, and baths were rare (but infestations of lice, bedbugs, flies and intestinal parasites were not). Images of bugs scuttling over period illustrations and photos of pests and artifacts add vividly evocative notes to this rousingly unappetizing survey of the time’s fashions, living conditions and (lack of) sanitary practices. The author limits her purview to North American residents of European and African descent in, by and large, urban locales and doesn’t always get her facts straight (yes, there are mosquito species native to Europe).

She strews her already sensational narrative with superfluous, boldface insertions of “Eew!” and “Gross!” Still, aside from one photo of a smallpox sufferer that may cross over, she ably walks the line that separates deliciously disgusting from genuinely disturbing.

Riveting as well as enlightening, this is built on a largely sturdy historical base. (endnotes, annotated reading and website lists, places to visit, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)

THE ABOMINABLES

Ibbotson, Eva Illus. by Robinson, Fiona Amulet/Abrams (272 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4197-0789-6

Two children shepherd a family of yetis from the Himalayas to England in this Candide-like odyssey, left unfinished at Ibbotson’s death in 2010 but buffed up

by her son and editor.

Impelled by the threat of imminent exposure and the hope of refuge in a certain British stately home, five yetis reluctantly leave their idyllic hidden valley. Guided by Con and Ellen, two young staff members from a recently opened tourist hotel, they board a sympathetic driver’s refrigerated lorry for the long drive across the Middle East and Europe. Being thoroughly vegetarian and so gentle that they apologize to grass and fruit before they eat it, they’re in for a series of nasty shocks. Not least among these is the discovery that their safe haven has been taken over by a hunters’ club and thickly decorated with animal trophies.

When the yetis are drugged by the hunters and shipped off to Antarctica for a private slaughter, it’s left up to Con and Ellen to effect a rescue. Sprinkling her descriptions with words like “vile”

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“The seeming surfeit of subplots is believably explained and sensitively written, succeeding largely due to Rachel’s spunky though almost pathetically naïve first-person voice, which rings fully true.” froms little red lies

and “filthy,” Ibbotson really lets animal abusers and killers have it here—in sharp contrast to the yetis, who are outfitted with a winning mix of naïveté, noble-heartedness and amusing foibles such as backward-facing feet (which make them very hard to track). Robinson gives them the look of hairy, oversized Palmer Cox brownies in the frequent illustrations.

A satiric farewell from a favorite author. (most illustrations not seen) (Fantasy. 10-13)

SWEET DREAMS

Jewel Illus. by Bates, Amy Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 17, 2013 978-1-4424-8931-8 978-1-4424-8932-5 e-book Lyrics to a song from the album “Lullaby” are adapted by the composer/lyricist as a tender expression of maternal love.

Mother evokes everything that is lovely and ethereal to demonstrate her joy at having this baby in her life. There are moonbeams, twinkling stars and “endless blue skies.” All of this is to wish that only sweet dreams follow the child forever.

There are some lovely images, and the emotions are heartfelt, but there is a major problem with construction and syntax in this adaptation. If the lyrics are to be read as poetry, they lack structure and consistency of rhyme and rhythm. “Like a dream I am falling into silver threads lined with dew” and “Each breath that you breathe is a brushstroke that leads me to you” are awkwardly worded and essentially meaningless statements. Bates’ chalk and gouache illustrations on chalkboard-painted paper are greatly appealing. Backgrounds of deep, dark night skies highlighted with bright yellow stars and constellations are filled with clever details that come as close as possible to conveying literal meaning to the vagaries of the text. Rather than reading aloud, adults might want to preview the song on the included CD and perhaps play the song and sing along while showing the pictures to their little ones.

Well intentioned, but this song doesn’t work in picturebook format. (Picture book. 1-4)

LITTLE RED LIES

Johnston, Julie Tundra (272 pp.) $19.95 | $10.99 e-book | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-77049-313-1 978-1-77049-314-8 e-book Rachel, after donning an inappropriately bright lipstick called “Little Red Lies,” welcomes her beloved elder brother, James, back from World War II. Unfortunately, lies aren’t confined to the lipstick. James, deeply altered by the war, glosses over his disturbing experiences |

to his family, although letters he continues to write to Rachel— but has never sent—contain the truth of the brutality. Tragically, once safely home, he develops leukemia, a lethal illness in 1947.

Rachel lies to him to convince him to visit a faith healer, whom she then recognizes as a fraud. Then she lies to her parents (and herself) about the intentions of a handsome but predatory teacher who’s playing up to her as well as other girls. After her mom conceives an unplanned baby, it’s concealed from both Rachel and James. When they discover, embarrassingly late, the cause of her weight gain, James feels convinced the baby is intended as a replacement for him. The seeming surfeit of subplots is believably explained and sensitively written, succeeding largely due to Rachel’s spunky though almost pathetically naïve first-person voice, which rings fully true. At one point, the whole town believes James has the clap, largely because Rachel overheard then repeated a conversation she didn’t understand.

Filled with bumbling characters who achingly love each other, this coming-of-age tale rises above a crowded field to take readers on a moving journey of discovery. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

THE DEEPEST BLUE

Justesen, Kim Williams Tanglewood Press (275 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-933718-90-3 The only thing worse than having your father die unexpectedly is having your mother claim custody of you, or so it feels to Mike.

Michael, almost 16, lives happily with his divorced father in a coastal North Carolina town, running a successful charter fishing business and sharing an easy give-and-take as they work side by side.

Mike is pleased when Dad announces his plan to marry longtime girlfriend Maggie. But on the way back from buying a ring, Dad is killed by a drunk driver, and suddenly, Mike finds himself dealing with profound grief, the agonizing steps of planning a funeral and the terrifying prospect that his long-estranged mother might try to take him away from Maggie. Justesen hits the emotional points perfectly, using first-person narration to reveal Mike’s impressive powers of observation and his puzzlement over his own unfamiliar behavior. The novel takes place over the course of about a week, from ring to accident to custody hearing, with solemn pacing and little action until the gripping courtroom scenes. (The cartoonish depictions of Mike’s mentally ill mother and her sweaty lawyer are the book’s weak spots.) A scene in which Mike gets naked (but doesn’t have sex) with his girlfriend is touching rather than spicy.

Teens with a little patience will be drawn into Mike’s struggle to keep going after death has changed everything.

(Fiction. 12-16)

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“…Melonhead’s final act of kindness will endear him to readers.” from melonhead and the we -fix-it company

MELONHEAD AND THE WEFIX-IT COMPANY

or labels depicted in the illustration to help young library customers with the “where to find it” part.) Kirk’s familiar gouache illustrations maintain a mouse perspective filled with library details. This clever presentation of world housing types has three pages of backmatter that describe each style and its location. Not only is the story amusing, but the information will be useful in classrooms.

The familiar characters make this architectural adventure feel downright homey. (Picture book. 5-9)

Kelly, Katy Illus. by Johnson, Gillian Delacorte (240 pp.) $14.99 | $17.99 PLB | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-385-74165-1 978-0-375-99016-8 PLB Series: Melonhead, 5

Melonhead, always brimming with good intentions, once again successfully enchants.

In this, his fifth adventure, Melonhead and his best friend, Sam, still cannot keep themselves out of trouble. Melonhead’s aunt gives them a challenge: If they can go 30 days without getting into a “situation,” she will reward them by taking them to an amusement park. Hoping to meet the challenge, Melonhead finds himself trading in the term “situation” for “snafu.” (Aunt Traci didn’t say anything about snafus, after all.) After a snafu involving a silver teapot, the boys must find a way to earn money.

They are hilariously ill-equipped to run their We-Fix-It Company: Sneakers become glued to fingers, and hedge trimming turns into an exercise in abstract design, among other mishaps.

But triumph awaits. Utilizing everything they’ve learned, the boys convert their mistakes into a brilliant creation, and Melonhead’s final act of kindness will endear him to readers. Breezy sketches accompany the buoyant repartee—“You’re wrong, King Kong”—and overall silliness that includes copper-cleaning supersonic vomit.

In this lively and light entertainment for middle graders, Melonhead and his friends inhabit a world without sarcasm or texting, where inventiveness and camaraderie reign supreme. (Fiction. 8-12)

LIBRARY MOUSE Home Sweet Home

Kirk, Daniel Illus. by Kirk, Daniel Abrams (40 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4197-0544-1

Sam the mouse and his friend Sarah are back in a new, fifth adventure, and this time, it’s centered on the renovations to their library home.

Needing temporary residences, they move to the attic to build them. Of course, they need architecture books to determine which type suits them. Sam, the storyteller and dreamer, builds his with formal columns, while Sarah, the explorer, makes a yurt. But neither seems cozy enough for a home, so they keep trying, building a castle, an igloo, a bungalow and more. Finally, Sarah comes up with the perfect solution: She uses an atlas to form an A-frame they can share. When the renovation is completed and the students return to the library, they find each of Sam’s and Sarah’s houses sitting on the shelves with a sign that says: “Home and where to find it.” (It’s too bad there’s no map 94

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VILLAINS RISING

Kraatz, Jeramey Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-06-209550-3 978-0-06-209552-7 e-book Series: Cloak Society, 2 Fugitive young superheroes and former supervillains inch toward an uneasy bond following the opener’s climactic disaster (The Cloak Society, 2012).

Huddling in a secret hideout, former dastard-in-training Alex and his motley group of junior Rangers of Justice allies work toward rescuing the adult members of the Rangers, who have been trapped in the other dimensional Gloom by the shadowy Cloak Society to which Alex’s villainous parents belong.

That work is hindered by Alex’s nagging fears (justified, as it turns out) that not all of his teen and preteen associates are on the up and up. To a cast already well-stocked with costumed good and bad guys wielding flashy superpowers and high-tech gear, Kraatz adds new characters endowed with prehensile hair and the ability to control insects. But this episode lags. Though he also trots in a trio of fiendishly clever assassins to provide the episode with a few stylized, indecisive fight scenes and real, or seeming, betrayals, not only does the overarching plotline barely budge, but Alex’s continual doubts and frets make for glacial pacing and much waiting around for the action to start.

Loyalty issues fuel an emotionally turbulent but slowmoving middle volume. (Fantasy. 11-13)

NO ORDINARY FAMILY

Krause, Ute Illus. by Krause, Ute Translated by Miller, Nicholas NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7358-4149-9

In this “coping with divorce” tale, a split family becomes an extended one—of robbers, royals and dragons.

“I have a really big family,” announces the matter-of-fact young narrator. “There are about 9 to 22 of us…depending on the day.” At first, seven robber sibs don’t mind shuttling back and forth between their robber parents, who split up because “they

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just weren’t getting along,” until a princess and her six “prim and prissy little princes and princesses” move in with Dad. So sad is he when his children drive the interlopers away, though, that the younger robbers track them down, rescue them and troop back. In consequence, it’s then not so much of a shock when the robbers’ mom announces that she’s taken up with a dragon father and his six offspring. For easy visual ID, Krause dresses all the robbers in black trench coats with very tall, skinny hats and the princesses in pink gowns and crowns teetering atop equally tall hairdos (the princelings get crowns and sailor suits).

Her small figures march about or play in groups in the sketchily detailed cartoon illustrations—gathering in the final scene for general cavorting around a picnic blanket on which the four adults sit and chat amicably.

Very slightly disguised bibliotherapy, applied with a light touch and capped with a tidy but not unbelievable resolution. (Picture book. 6-8)

WITCHSTRUCK

Lamb, Victoria Harlequin Teen (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-373-21097-8 Series: Tudor Witch Trilogy, 1 Witchcraft and intrigue dominate the life of a 16th-century girl serving the Lady Elizabeth Tudor, imprisoned in Oxfordshire by her sister Queen Mary in this series opener.

Fifteen-year-old Meg is a witch—a real one. She and her aunt Jane try to see the future at Elizabeth’s request, but in 1554, witchcraft is a hanging offense. Looming over all Meg’s activities are Marcus Dent, the area’s professional witchfinder, who wants to marry her, and Alejandro de Castillo, a priest-intraining sent by Queen Mary to watch over Elizabeth’s Catholicism. Complicating matters further, Meg’s family wants to foment rebellion against the crown by dragging Elizabeth into their plans, an action that could get Elizabeth killed. An established romance novelist, Lamb sticks closely to the genre conventions for this book. Meg’s volatile emotions command her actions entirely, usually leading her into serious mistakes that provide much of the novel’s tension. Meg’s hang-fire romance is with the character most impossible for her, and the book’s villain is over-the-top evil. Full of cliffhanger moments, impossible escapes, dastardly villainy and even a few chase scenes, the story has enough suspense and unrestrained emotion to satisfy romance fans and enough witchy activity for paranormal fans.

The mostly accurate history is something of a lagniappe.

Great for romance fans, probably too shallow for history fans. (Paranormal historical romance. 12 & up)

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DEAD ENDS

Lange, Erin Jade Bloomsbury (336 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-61963-080-2 Dane’s anger management issues (he blows off steam beating up the rich kids who taunt him at his Columbia, Mo., high school) have caught up with him; to avoid expulsion and exile to the alternative school, he agrees to mentor Billy D., a student with Down syndrome.

Both are outsiders, sons of financially challenged, single mothers. Billy is obsessed with finding his dad, but Dane tells himself he has no interest in finding his. Billy manipulates Dane into helping, saying his dad planted clues to his whereabouts in Billy’s atlas. Soon Seely, a pretty skateboarder, joins the quest.

Dane agrees to teach Billy to fight, but Billy’s efforts to find his father go nowhere. Billy’s exceptionally high-functioning, but he’s selfish; Dane’s adult intelligence and self-knowledge work against him. As he’s not confused about what pushes his buttons, his violent episodes appear coldly deliberate. Far-fetched plot elements abound. Dane’s mother barely supports them teaching yoga and Pilates yet won’t cash in thousands of dollars in lottery winnings, instead turning the tickets into wall art. Despite ample evidence that Billy’s less than truthful, Dane repeatedly jeopardizes his own future to accommodate Billy’s peculiar demands and assertions without first confirming them.

Lange’s skillful writing holds readers’ interest for most of the novel, but it can’t rescue the flat ending.

There’s less here than meets the eye. (Fiction. 12 & up)

TOO MUCH GLUE

Lefebvre, Jason Illus. by Retz, Zac Flashlight Press (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-9362612-7-7 Can there be too much glue? Matty’s about to find out.

Matty’s art teacher warns him that too much glue will never dry, but Matty (and his dad) loves glue; they play with it constantly. So Matty finds the “fullest” bottle in the art room and squirts it all over his project. Then he flops down in the middle of the mess…and gets stuck. He’s “a blucky stucky mess!” His friends try to lasso him with yarn and haul him out, but the yarn breaks and gets stuck; now, he’s “a clingy stringy, blucky stucky mess.” A Lego tow truck snaps apart in another rescue attempt, making him a “click-brick, clingy stringy, blucky stucky mess!”

When the bell rings, the glue’s dry, and dad must peel gluey Matty off the table. At home, he’s divested of his glue suit, and Dad puts a magnet on it and sticks it to the fridge. After dinner, the family explores the fun of duct tape. Despite the busy plot and superabundance of exclamation marks, Lefebvre’s debut

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never rises to the level of mayhem or fun it aspires to. The cumulative portion of the tale loses rhyme, rhythm and logic six pages before it ends. Retz’s Photoshop paintings are bright, wide-eyed and goofy, but they can’t add enough fun to compensate for the lackluster text.

Great gobs of glue should be more fun than this. (Picture book. 4-7)

THE KING OF LITTLE THINGS

Lepp, Bil Illus. by Wenzel, David T. Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-56145-708-3 Don’t underestimate the power and importance of small things.

Trouble is brewing: Insatiably greedy King Normous wants to be king of the whole world. His giant army ruthlessly conquers every other kingdom and empire. He is happy until he learns of the existence of his polar opposite, “His Miniscule Majesty…the King of Little Things.” Now he won’t rest until he has conquered that realm as well. The little king is content among his small things, such as insects, coins and buttons, and he is not as weak as Normous believes. He involves all his very loyal subjects, those little things, to help repel the invasion, and King Normous’ little things mutiny to join them. Naturally, there is a happy ending for everyone, except King Normous, of course, who is plagued by small things forever. Rich, imagefilled language, including several rhythmic lists—“He raided realms. He squashed sovereignties. He eradicated empires”— emphasizes the two characters’ opposing life views and highlights their battles. The tale moves briskly, with high drama and gentle humor, and allows readers to find the moral naturally.

Wenzel’s watercolor illustrations are in perfect harmony with the text, in both detail and tone. Endpapers depict an assortment of small things that can be found within the illustrations, encouraging further examination.

Adults and children who read this delightful and imaginative book together will find lots to talk about.

(Picture book. 4-9)

THE BOY ON THE WOODEN BOX How the Impossible Became Possible...on Schindler’s List

Leyson, Leon with Harran, Marilyn J. and Leyson, Elisabeth B. Atheneum (240 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4424-9781-8

Completed before his death in January 2013, Leyson’s narrative opens with glowing but not falsely idyllic childhood memories of growing up surrounded by friends and relatives in the Polish village of Narewka and then the less intimate but still, to him, marvelous city of Kraków. The Nazi occupation brought waves of persecution and forced removals to first a ghetto and then a labor camp—but since his father, a machinist, worked at the enamelware factory that Schindler opportunistically bought, 14-year-old “Leib” (who was so short he had to stand on the titular box to work), his mother and two of his four older siblings were eventually brought into the fold. Along with harrowing but not lurid accounts of extreme privation and casual brutality, the author recalls encounters with the quietly kind and heroic Schindler on the way to the war’s end, years spent at a displacedpersons facility in Germany and, at last, emigration to the United States. Leyson tacks just a quick sketch of his adult life and career onto the end and closes by explaining how he came to break his long silence about his experiences. Family photos (and a picture of the famous list with the author’s name highlighted) add further personal touches to this vivid, dramatic account.

Significant historical acts and events are here put into unique perspective by a participant. (Memoir. 11-14)

THE BIG WET BALLOON

Liniers Illus. by Liniers TOON/Candlewick (32 pp.) $12.95 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-935179-32-0

There are so many things to do when it rains!

Hooray! It’s Saturday. But wait—it’s raining. What are two sisters to do?

Older sibling Matilda is absolutely full of ideas and ready to lead younger Clemmie on a grand adventure. What will they do first? It all begins with rain boots and entails a very special red balloon, a wink to the classic book and film. Celebrated Argentine cartoonist Liniers offers a warm visual welcome to early readers in this graphic novel; lively watercolors in comic format provide plenty of memorable images and details to examine and savor. The gentle humor and mild suspense will quickly draw readers in, while brief sentences and appropriately challenging vocabulary, flawlessly interwoven with pictures that provide visual cues, leave room for readers to decipher, consider and comprehend. Natural repetition allows for practice. Overall, this satisfying tale captures the camaraderie of two sisters and shows how the oldest doesn’t always have the answers. Now, what will the girls do on Sunday? Achoo! Uh-oh….

An excellent example of how well comics can work for early readers, this warm and accessible story is sure to be a favorite. (Early reader. 4-7)

A posthumous Holocaust memoir from the youngest person on Oskar Schindler’s list.

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“Even readers who received fastidious toilet training and admonitions against potty humor will let down their guard and find this book both informative and entertaining.” from toilet

INHERITANCE

Lo, Malinda Little, Brown (480 pp.) $18.00 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-316-19800-4 The second part of Lo’s sciencefiction duology picks up right where the first volume (Adaptation, 2012) ended.

Reese and David nearly died in the June Disaster, until the Imrians saved them by adapting them with alien DNA so that they can hear thoughts and heal faster. Now the secret is out, but things aren’t any clearer. Reese is with David, but she still has feelings for Imrian Amber; the teens escaped government imprisonment in Blue Base, but now, altered soldiers working for a shadowy behind-the-government agency have been spotted; on top of everything else, Reese and David are targeted by protesters for and against the alien “invasion.” As in the first book, dialogue rings true, and the characters are appealing—even too-perfect David comes off as a bit more human. The alien and political machinations provide menace, a brisk page-turning plot and lots of fun. Sadly, it’s not all science fiction: Didactic conversations betray an authorial message, and the love triangle turns into an unlikely polyamorous relationship, although these are minor blips in a generally satisfying, sometimes-thoughtful aliens-on-Earth story for today’s teens.

Start with Book 1, and prepare for a lot of pages, but there’s plenty to keep readers engaged. (Science fiction. 13 & up)

WHEN EDGAR MET CECIL

Luthardt, Kevin Illus. by Luthardt, Kevin Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-56145-706-9

Making friends can be really hard, especially for a little robot who’s the new kid in a school populated by extraterrestrials.

Edgar enjoys playing ball, watching scary movies and building stuff with his best friend, Quincy, but when his parents move to a new town, Edgar’s lonely and uncomfortable. At his new school, Edgar thinks the kids look “weird,” and their clothes, food and music seem “funny,” “bizarre” and “strange.” Missing Quincy, Edgar plays alone at recess until a “big weird kid” who’s been watching him comes over, introduces himself as Cecil and admits Edgar scares him. However, once they get to know one another, Edgar and Cecil become pals. What the simple text neglects to mention, but stylized, acrylic illustrations boldly reveal in flamboyant, florescent hues, is Edgar’s a sleek, silver metal robot while Cecil and his classmates at Snorgblatt Elementary are outrageously multicolored, multishaped extraterrestrials who |

really are quite funny and bizarre in a totally nonthreatening way.

And when Edgar and his parents moved to a different town, they really headed off in a spaceship to a completely different planet, taking moving away to a whole other dimension.

This far-out lesson in making friends understands that to the new kid in school, everyone is going to seem scary and weird. (Picture book. 4-8)

TOILET How It Works

Macaulay, David with Keenan, Sheila Illus. by Macaulay, David David Macaulay Studio/Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $15.99 | $3.99 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-59643-779-1 978-1-59643-780-7 paper A perfect blend of humor and clarity—in text and in artwork—explains the anatomy of human waste, the mechanics of a flush toilet and the subsequent treatment of waste in septic and sewer systems.

Cartoony images of three toilet bowls—one being used by a thirsty, shaggy dog, one surrounded by a somber family with a dead pet goldfish, and one heaped with flowers, shown outside a home—adorn the first page of the book, along with this opening sentence: “Everybody knows what a toilet is for.” Genius Macaulay, with Keenan’s (unspecified) assistance, continues this tongue-in-cheek romp with clever drawings as he also carefully discusses such scientific facts as the function of bacteria in breaking down waste; the physics behind the tank, the bowl and the siphon; and the role of wastewater treatment plants in the overall water cycle. Cutaway views aid in showing exactly how various systems work, while unique visual angles of everything from human organs topped with eyeglasses to a bird’s-eye view of a bustling city encourage viewers to venture beyond reading literacy to art appreciation.

Even readers who received fastidious toilet training and admonitions against potty humor will let down their guard and find this book both informative and entertaining. (glossary, resources, index, author’s notes) (Informational early reader. 7 & up)

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“[MacLeod's] vivid descriptions of the filthy turmoil of 1553 London, when even the nobility often had lice, should open some eyes.” from namesake

NAMESAKE

MacLeod, Sue Pajama Press (232 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-927485-29-3 A modern-day Canadian girl named Jane Grey travels back in time to meet the Lady Jane Grey, imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1553.

Bookish Jane is doing research for a paper about her namesake Lady Jane Grey, the 15-year-old who was queen of England for nine days and later executed by Queen Mary. Finding an old prayer book, she reads a prayer out loud and is transported to the Tower of London, where only Lady Jane, who calls her “Namesake,” can see her. Using the prayer book to time travel at will, she becomes friends with Lady Jane and tries to think of a way to save the brilliant and innocent teenager. Meanwhile, in the present, Jane tries to escape her alcoholic mother’s increasingly aggressive and bizarre behavior. When the two stories collide just before Lady Jane’s scheduled execution, Jane struggles to save herself and her friend. MacLeod writes the modern sections in a heightened style that almost feels more like poetry than prose.

She writes Lady Jane’s dialogue in Tudor English, modifying it only slightly for modern readers. Her vivid descriptions of the filthy turmoil of 1553 London, when even the nobility often had lice, should open some eyes. Most importantly, she strives to get the history right.

Suspenseful, emotional and powerful. (Time-travel fantasy/historical fiction. 12-16)

SUNNY SWEET IS SO NOT SORRY

Mann, Jennifer Ann Illus. by Mann, Jennifer Ann Bloomsbury (208 pp.) $15.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-59990-977-6 Series: Sunny Sweet, 1

Anyone with a difficult-to-appreciate sibling will feel sorry for fifth-grader Masha, older sister of precocious, gifted

Sunny Sweet.

Everywhere she turns, Masha is confronted by her inquisitive, brilliant, irrepressible first-grade sister. Everyone but rulefollowing Masha seems to find Sunny adorable and cute, even when she concocts a new adhesive and glues a bunch of plastic flowers to Masha’s head. This time, Masha knows Sunny has gone too far. But even that tonsorial disaster is not enough to take their mother’s doting attention away from the little genius.

Unfortunately, this promising setup falls prey to numerous problems with believability. While readers might be able to understand that the jealous older sister might indulge in hyperbole to bolster her case, it’s hard to accept the over-the-top 98

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exaggeration in the plot. When the sisters end up in the hospital via a neighbor’s ambulance ride, the plot twists strain credulity. The nurses treat both girls without parental permission; Masha ends up getting a shot of a painkiller and being put in a cast when she is mistaken for another patient; the staff loses both girls and a patient with whooping cough. Both girls have cellphones, but they do not have their mother’s work number entered in. Secondary characters, like the oddly absent father, are left undeveloped, while Sunny threatens to take over.

This debut kicks off a series; here’s hoping the plots are more believable in the future. (Fiction. 7-11)

JESSICA DARLING’S IT LIST #1 The (totally not) Guaranteed Guide to Popularity, Prettiness & Perfection McCafferty, Megan Poppy/Little, Brown (240 pp.) $17.00 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-316-24499-2 978-0-316-24497-8 e-book Series: Jessica Darling’s It List, 1

Starting with Sloppy Firsts (2001), McCafferty explored the later teen and early 20s years of angstridden Jessica Darling in a five-book series. In this start to a new series, Jessica comes back for younger readers as an angst-ridden (of course) seventh-grader.

Jessica’s older sister, Bethany, took junior high by storm, so popular, well-dressed and successful (in her own eyes) as to become co-captain of the vaunted junior high CHEER TEAM!!! Now she’s offering somewhat terse advice to guide Jessica along her path—perhaps not an altogether desirable one, since Bethany is a bit shallow. Jessica was counting on lots of help from Bridget, but her BFF’s star is rising as rapidly as Jessica’s is setting. Some potential new friends turn out to be less than supportive as well. Jessica, after abject failure at CHEER TEAM!!! tryouts, is chosen to be the anonymous costumed school mascot, a sea gull, a role she clumsily fills all too well. Brief characterizations of teachers and students are often humorously spot-on, and rules, such as those for cutting lines, fully capture the junior high social scene in all its often distressing ignominy.

Jessica’s take on junior high may be superficial, but she brings readers on a funny ride, even if many—perhaps even most—of her problems are not resolved by the end, setting up the next in the series, as expected. (Fiction. 11-14)

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PETE WON’T EAT

delicious kitchen antics and, from Karas, cartoon illustrations rich in both visual gags (“Napping House” reads the sign outside Old Man Spider’s home) and small but clear cues to the mutual regard lurking under the (four-limbed, but never mind) insect friends’ moods.

Sure to give recent Henry & Mudge grads a happy buzz.

(Early reader. 6-8)

McCully, Emily Arnold Illus. by McCully, Emily Arnold Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2853-3 Series: I Like to Read This charmer of an early reader presents an ironic twist on the tried-and-true picky-eater character by casting him as a pig.

Mom has prepared a treat for her four piglets: green slop.

Dot, Rose and Gus dig in and head outside to play, but as the title heralds, “Pete won’t eat.” A battle of wills ensues between Mom and Pete as she insists that he try the slop, but he refuses.

“You will stay until you eat,” Mom declares, but then the facing page shows her ambivalence about the hard line she’s holding as she sits at her home computer and says forlornly, “I hope he tries it.” Alas, Pete is one stubborn little pig, and spot illustrations show him determinedly refusing to eat even as his siblings and friends implore him to do so and come out to play.

Meanwhile, Mom second guesses herself to the point of tears.

“I am a mean mom!” she exclaims in a bit of text that is both humorous and wonderfully humanizing for the maternal sow.

When she offers to make Pete a sandwich, he caves and eats up his slop with gusto, proving that the standoff was about power more than it was the slop itself. Throughout, McCully’s watercolors are comically expressive and engaging.

New readers will eat this up. (Early reader. 5-7)

ANT AND HONEY BEE A Pair of Friends in Winter McDonald, Megan Illus. by Karas, G. Brian Candlewick (64 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-7636-5712-3

Winter’s arrival leaves sleepy Honey Bee in no mood to entertain her stillantsy friend.

Having quickly run through all the possibilities for solitary activities, Ant ignores her bigger buddy’s “bee-mail” brushoff and heads out into the “rainy and complain-y” weather to pay a call. Grumpy reception notwithstanding (“Honey Bee sure had her stinger out today”), Ant’s relentless persistence ultimately pays off in a cooperatively assembled “peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich”—actually a bowl of milk with some chips in it—enhanced, “Stone Soup” style, with raisins, maple syrup, goldfish crackers, gummy worms, squeeze cheese, ketchup and even storedaway honey. “It’s very antsome,” admits Honey Bee. And the towering result makes a perfect final snack before cuddling down on a shared couch for a long winter’s nap. McDonald’s three-chapter tale offers an entertaining mix of wordplay and amusing back-and-forth conversation—not to mention |

NOT A DROP TO DRINK

McGinnis, Mindy Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 9, 2013 978-0-06-219850-1 978-0-06-219852-5 e-book While defending her resources in a lawless world where water is a rare commodity, Lynn learns about life and humanity.

Ever since Lynn was a small child, she’s known the hard truths of the world—chiefly that anyone who approaches her mother’s pond leaves thirsty or dies, by Lynn’s gun if necessary.

Besides her mother and a single neighbor, visible only at a distance, Lynn has more experience with the coyotes than with other people. Two bands of strangers appear near their land; one group, armed, encroaches on Lynn’s land, so she must be ready to protect her beloved home and water source from attacks that could come at any time, providing urgency and tension. After a tragedy forces her to team up with her neighbor, Lynn learns that the other group is just a trio of refugees who have no idea how to survive in the wilderness and will surely die without help.

Despite her mother’s hard-nosed teachings, Lynn finds herself with growing compassion for them. The third-person, pasttense narration gives the story a gritty tone, and the only break from the realism comes in the form of characters who can successfully dowse for water. The epilogue jumps to a future that fulfills Lynn’s character growth.

A high-quality survivalist story for readers who enjoy internal story arcs as well as external dangers. (Speculative fiction. 13 & up)

DRAW OUT THE STORY Ten Secrets to Creating Your Own Comics McLachlan, Brian Illus. by McLachlan, Brian Owlkids Books (144 pp.) $18.95 | $9.95 paper | Sep. 15, 2013 978-1-926973-83-8 978-1-77147-003-2 paper

People are always asking writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” This book actually answers the question.

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Everyone knows that the best way to get a child to do something is to say it’s forbidden. McLachlan has given this book the subtitle “Ten Secrets to Creating Your Own Comics,” so that readers think they’re gaining forbidden knowledge.

Some of the information isn’t much of a secret. The first tip is: “Comics marry pictures and words….” But the author’s really talking about much bigger ideas, like the different ways that words and pictures show the passage of time. He talks about the way a word or a picture can inspire readers, telling them that “the comic panels invite the reader to imagine what has happened between them.” None of this is hidden knowledge (Scott McCloud discussed most of the same topics in Understanding Comics, 1994), but it’s valuable information. The sections about generating ideas give very practical advice, especially the pages on “brainstorm doodles.” The sample comics that appear throughout the book aren’t quite so impressive (ROBIN HOOD: “Marian, would you like to join us in our forest?” MARIAN: “Sure wood!”), but the techniques they demonstrate are worth learning.

Advanced cartoonists may prefer a longer book, like McCloud’s, but this book has all the secrets beginners might need. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

EXILE

Messenger, Shannon Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (576 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4424-4596-3 Series: Keeper of the Lost Cities, 2 Full-blown middle-volume-itis leaves this continuation of the tale of a teenage elf who has been genetically modified for so-far undisclosed purposes dead in the water.

As the page count burgeons, significant plot developments slow to a trickle. Thirteen-year-old Sophie manifests yet more magical powers while going head-to-head with hostile members of the Lost Cities Council and her own adoptive elvin father, Grady, over whether the clandestine Black Swan cabal, her apparent creators and (in the previous episode) kidnappers, are allies or enemies. Messenger tries to lighten the tone by dressing Sophie and her classmates at the Hogwarts-ian Foxfire Academy as mastodons for a silly opening ceremony and by having her care for an alicorn—a winged unicorn so magnificent that even its poop sparkles. It’s not enough; two sad memorial services, a trip to a dreary underground prison, a rash of adult characters succumbing to mental breakdowns and a frequently weepy protagonist who is increasingly shunned as “the girl who was taken” give the tale a soggy texture. Also, despite several cryptic clues and a late attack by hooded figures, neither the identity nor the agenda of the Black Swan comes closer to being revealed.

However tried and true, the Harry Potter–esque elements and set pieces don’t keep this cumbersome comingof-age tale afloat, much less under way. (Fantasy 10-12) 100

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BEAUTY’S DAUGHTER The Story of Hermione and Helen of Troy Meyer, Carolyn Harcourt (352 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-544-10862-2

A retelling of the Trojan War from a minor character’s perspective.

Though Hermione—the plain but resourceful daughter of Menelaus and the beautiful Helen (of Troy)—claims to tell her own tale, she instead delivers a montage of Greek mythology, a steady drone of historical details and repetitive observations of Helen’s vanity. After Paris and Helen escape to Troy, Hermione follows her father and cousins into a long war filled with interfering gods, sexual abuse and gory violence. For the next 10 years, former friends become enemies or slaves, and Hermione tries to console captive brides without becoming one. When the war ends, Troy is destroyed, Helen is reclaimed, and Hermione is a woman and a wife, pledged to the cruel Pyrrhus rather than her childhood love, Orestes. Hermione’s subsequent journey to find love and political security provides more room for development but similarly suffers from an abundance of impersonal details. Great retellings take readers behind the scenes of major events and humanize iconic figures. Meyer, however, offers a minimal plotline and underdeveloped characters overshadowed by dozens of other myths, yet such is the power of the story of Troy that readers may still root for Hermione to survive the war as well as her personal battles.

More history than fiction, an unmemorable tale from the “unspectacular daughter” of the famous Helen of Troy.

(Historical fiction. 14 & up)

WELCOME TO MAMOKO

Mizielinska, Aleksandra; Mizielinski, Daniel Illus. by Mizielinska, Aleksandra; Mizielinski, Daniel Big Picture/Candlewick (16 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-7636-6891-4

This Polish import will undoubtedly be compared to Candlewick’s search-and-find Waldo series, but the Mizielinskis have created a unique world that children will enter on its own merits.

Twenty-four animals and one alien are introduced on the opening pages, along with related elements to discover and the overall admonition to “Use your eyes and follow the adventures of each of these characters in every scene.” A family of five rabbits is on its way to the climactic carnival, but a delay ensues when the youngest goes missing. Readers glimpse only the sock and shoe of “shady” Clyde Snatchit until the last scene, when his theft (and identity) is revealed. This is a bustling, but not

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“This no-holds-barred, suspenseful examination of domestic abuse serves as a powerful warning.” from lily and taylor

overwhelming, cluster of wordless scenes. From the golden morning in the neighborhood to the blue light of the evening fair, each spread has a different background palette, allowing a new array of the digital characters to stand out slightly with each turn. Whether on a piazza or at the waterfront, the diverse creatures behave in ways that children will find interesting; they encounter problems, help each other find solutions and exhibit a range of emotions.

Brimming with the dramas of everyday life and placed in a setting of swirling curves and diagonal lines, this is a book that children will pick up frequently, following the directions and enjoying the detours. (Picture book. 5-8)

THE 100

Morgan, Kass Little, Brown (288 pp.) $18.00 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-316-23447-4 978-0-316-23451-1 e-book Series: The 100, 1 One hundred teen convicts may be the only hope of the human race.

Three hundred years after the Cataclysm made Earth uninhabitable, the remnant of humanity lives in an aging space station. Strict population-control laws help conserve the dwindling resources, and adults convicted of crimes are summarily executed. Criminal teens held in Confinement are given a retrial at 18, and some go free. Fearing the colony has few years left, the Chancellor decides to send 100 of these teens to Earth with monitoring bracelets to see if the planet’s surface is survivable. The story concentrates on four of them. Wells commits a crime in order to accompany his girlfriend; Bellamy breaks into the dropship to go with his sister; in hopes of reuniting with her boyfriend, Glass escapes the dropship to return to her privileged mother. And Clarke, the object of Wells’ affection, struggles with demons and hormones. Will they survive? Morgan’s debut, which has already been optioned for a CW series, has a promising premise as long as readers don’t apply too many brain cells.

(Why convicts? Why not give them communication devices?

Isn’t there birth control in the future?) However, it slowly devolves into a thrill-free teen romance. Lengthy flashbacks flatten the action in nearly every chapter. The characters do little to distinguish themselves from their run-of-the-mill dystopian brethren. Steer teens in search of science fiction to Beth Revis, Robison Wells and Veronica Roth.

Perhaps the television incarnation will have some life.

(Dystopian adventure. 15 & up)

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LILY AND TAYLOR

Moser, Elise Groundwood (224 pp.) $16.95 | $9.95 e-book | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-55498-334-6 978-1-55498-336-0 e-book This no-holds-barred, suspenseful examination of domestic abuse serves as a powerful warning.

High schooler Taylor stoically identifies her older sister’s body and witnesses the end of her autopsy after her boyfriend finally beats her to death. The girl takes charge of her 6-year-old nephew, Mason, and moves away to live with her overworked grandparents. But Taylor herself is involved with a violent boyfriend. It’s a textbook abusive relationship: Devon calls her constantly and threatens to beat her, imagining that she might be involved with another boy, and although fearful, Taylor believes she loves Devon and thinks she can control him with sex. She finally makes a real friend, Lily, who falls victim with Taylor when Devon and his friend Conor raise the stakes. The boys take the girls to a remote cabin with no heat, where they hold them hostage. Rather like Devon, Moser pulls no punches in describing a realistic situation of domestic violence, presenting an alternative to Taylor’s submission in feisty Lily. The narrative frankly describes several sexual acts as the only power Taylor has over Devon. It touches on Devon’s own experience of domestic abuse at the hands of his father, demonstrating the cycle of abuse. The characterizations come across as completely believable, and the prose is absolutely gripping.

An excellent and absorbing cautionary tale. (Fiction. 14 & up)

BRILLIANT! Shining a Light on Sustainable Energy

Mulder, Michelle Orca (48 pp.) $19.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4598-0221-6 Series: Orca Footprints

Mulder offers an upbeat exploration of the often-curious world of alternative energy.

Mulder has been around the world, and in so doing, she has been exposed to a wide variety of things that produce energy.

Sure, there is the internal combustion engine, but there are also feet and bicycles and draft animals. There is coal, but there is also a whole family of vegetable oils, as well as poop, both animal and human. There is natural gas, but there is also pond scum. She generates her own energetic enthusiasm as she explains that most energy, at one point or another, comes from the sun. She comfortably introduces the role of carbon and photosynthesis, then the creation of fossil fuels. She delineates the drawbacks of fossil fuels, from carbon dioxide byproducts

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“Channeled by a talented, millennial author, these age-old conundrums of good and evil, fate and free will feel fresh and urgent.” from the paradox of vertical flight

to sustainability, but she is also sensitive to the human urge to make life a tad easier: In terms of sheer effort, the horseless buggy looked pretty good compared to the horse, coal to splitting wood. By the time she gets to wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave energy, they seem positively industrial compared to the small-scale, local productions on display—and utterly feasible. The book is peppered with exotic photographs, as well as quick-shooting boxed items, to catch the attention of busy eyes.

A smart, welcoming introduction to alternative fuels, one that puts the greater world in readers’ hands. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

WILD BORN

Mull, Brandon Scholastic (208 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-545-52243-4 978-0-545-52255-7 e-book Series: Spirit Animals, 1 The appearance of the Four Fallen Great Beasts in Erdas signals the re-emergence of an evil power long forgotten.

In the tradition of Erdas, four 11-yearolds are given Nectar, a substance designed to help them call their spirit animals. Conor, an indentured servant, calls Briggan the wolf.

Uraza the leopard answers the call of the young warrior, Abeke. Jhi the panda comes to Meilin, the daughter of a Zhongese general.

Rollan, a poor street urchin, calls Essix the falcon. With the assistance of the Greencloaks, a powerful but secretive order, the four must learn to bond with their spirit animals, drawing strength and wisdom from their gifts. Their mission is to retrieve the talismans from the other Great Beasts before the Devourer can regain power and destroy the world. Constructed in the tradition of The 39 Clues, this fast-paced new series will be penned by various well-known authors. Unfortunately, flat characters and a predictable plot are evidence that this first installment lacks Mull’s usual creativity and humor. A companion website promising a multimedia experience invites readers to be paired with their own spirit animals.

Should satisfy readers hungry for a new fantasy series.

(Fantasy. 8-12)

THE KITE THAT BRIDGED TWO NATIONS Homan Walsh and the First Niagara Suspension Bridge

ONeill, Alexis Illus. by Widener, Terry Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (40 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-59078-938-4

A young kite enthusiast lends his skill to an engineering feat—the construction of the first suspension bridge downstream from Niagara Falls.

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O’Neill’s narrator (16-year-old Homan Walsh in 1847, from the author’s note) recounts in free verse his entry in the kiteflying contest posed by the bridge’s engineer. The winner must anchor a line 240 feet across an 800-foot chasm between the United States and Canada above Whirlpool Rapids. Though his father is unimpressed by his passion for kite-flying, for the boy: “This is what I studied— / reading the wind, / calculating lift, / gauging line length....” He launches his carefully made kite from the Canadian side, knowing how the winds would work.

As the wind drops at midnight, there’s “suddenly, a sag, a jerk. / The heavy line went slack! / It snapped on ice below.” The young hero waits (“Kind folks in Elgin sheltered me”) for ice to clear so he can return home to mend his rescued, broken kite for a second, successful attempt. Widener’s acrylic paintings capture the determination of the boy, the frozen, deeply chilly landscape, and the danger and power of the falls. In a later scene, the completed bridge imposes order on the wild waters below. Backmatter includes a timeline, source list and more complete story of what is actually known or surmised for the story’s telling.

Memorable and dramatic. (Fiction. 7-11)

THE PARADOX OF VERTICAL FLIGHT

Ostrovski, Emil Greenwillow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-06-223852-8 978-0-06-223854-2 e-book

Alone and angst-ridden in his boarding school dorm on his 18th birthday, Jack is contemplating suicide by painkiller when he learns his ex-girlfriend is

giving birth.

Though she listed the father as “unknown,” Jess, 20, invites Jack to meet his son before relinquishing him to adoptive parents. Overwhelmed, Jack scoops the baby up and runs, naming him Socrates. Vehicularly challenged, Jack persuades his best friend to drive them. Stopping for Jess, they embark on an eccentric road trip from Bangor, Maine, to upstate New York.

Along the way—when not shopping for formula, changing diapers, arguing over trivia with Tommy and bickering with Jess—Jack conducts a funny, heartfelt imaginary dialogue on the meaning of life with little Socrates. These amiable meanderings through ancient Greek philosophy are the novel’s heart and soul. Channeled by a talented, millennial author, these age-old conundrums of good and evil, fate and free will feel fresh and urgent. Readers seeking to decode the generational genome will find plenty to ponder here. Bromance trumps romance; Jess is more scold than soul mate. Socrates is a remarkably obliging newborn. (Margaret Bechard’s Hanging on to Max, 2001, and Angela Johnson’s First Part Last, 2003, present far more realistic views of teen fatherhood.)

Inconsistent temporal markers (dates aren’t specified) are briefly distracting, but Jack’s quest for meaning holds reader attention all the way. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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TREASURE HUNTERS

Realistic and complicated characters give the familiar story of the pioneer’s journey fresh life. A rushed and confusing ending is only a minor misstep. Cameos by famous figures such as Touch the Clouds and Sitting Bull give authenticity to the O’Tooles’ journey.

A suspenseful adventure with heart. (Adventure. 8-12)

Patterson, James; Grabenstein, Chris Illus. by Neufeld, Juliana Little, Brown (480 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 16, 2013 978-0-316-20756-0 The disappearance of their parents inspires four children to take over the family business: treasure hunting.

Raised on board a ship and schooled in sailing, navigation, scuba and karate, Tommy, Storm, Bick and Beck are no strangers to adventure.

When their father, professor Tom Kidd, is washed overboard in a storm, it is up to the four young fortune hunters to follow the clues and try to rescue their missing mother. But it is hard to know whom to trust when your allies are shady black-market dealers and spies and your enemies are ruthless pirates and dangerous surfer dudes. Luckily, the Kidd kids’ assets include Storm’s photographic memory, Tommy’s calm disposition, Beck’s hard-nosed negotiation skills and narrator Bick’s optimism. But even the most sea-hearty adventurers might flounder when facing the Pirate King. Wacky hijinks, a can’t-miss setting and quirky characters keep this breezy story afloat. A fast-moving plot, copious illustrations and short chapters will encourage even reluctant readers to test the waters. This new series promises it all: ruthless pirates, CIA spies, terrorists, stolen works of art and priceless treasure. More important, it delivers.

A high-seas adventure that will entice even the most confirmed of landlubbers. (Adventure. 8-12)

THE LAST RIDE OF CALEB O’TOOLE

Pierpoint, Eric Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (288 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4022-8171-6 After a cholera epidemic in 1877 claims the lives of their parents, the three O’Toole children must travel through the dangerous Western frontier

to their new home.

A night of murder and arson ravages the disease-riddled town of Great Bend, Kan., leaving 12-year-old Caleb and his 6-year-old sister, Tilly, witnesses to a brutal killing. Luckily, Henderson, a Civil War hero and ex-convict, intervenes, temporarily saving them from the dangerous Blackstone Gang. Unfortunately, the murderous brothers are only one of the many dangers awaiting the O’Tooles as they travel along the Oregon Trail to their aunt’s ranch in the Bitterroot. Sioux raiding parties, rattlesnakes and kidnappers all lie in wait for the siblings.

The O’Toole children are quick studies, picking up equestrian, medical and gun-slinging skills as easily as they do friends. The fast-paced adventure serves up a hearty history lesson with side dishes of political, social and environmental commentary. |

MRS. NOODLEKUGEL AND FOUR BLIND MICE

Pinkwater, Daniel Illus. by Stower, Adam Candlewick (96 pp.) $14.99 | $14.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-7636-5054-4 978-0-7636-6718-4 e-book Series: Mrs. Noodlekugel, 2 The archetypal babysitter introduced in Mrs. Noodlekugel (2012) takes a quartet of farsighted mice to the oculist for an exam in this equally offbeat second chapter.

As Pinkwater fans know to expect, the plot zigzags from one wild twist to the next. On the bus, Mrs. Noodlekugel and her loquacious cat, Mr. Fuzzface, regale enthralled young human charges Nick and Maxine with exploits from her previous career as a railroad engineer. Rising to the challenge of testing four mice who can’t read, the doctor cheerfully whips out a unique eye chart. Then, new eyeglasses merit a celebratory stop at Dirty Sally’s Lunchroom, where the waiter is a monkey and the sugar rush caused by the cheesecake touches off a chase that culminates in an astonishing family reunion. Printed in short, well-spaced lines of easily visible type with much room for spot art (finished illustrations not seen), the outing offers plenty of action, easy yuks and characters—from the visually challenged mice to Mrs. Noodlekugel herself, who plainly carries literary DNA from Mary Poppins, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and perhaps Pippi Longstocking too—who will seem familiar to young audiences.

A savory episode for noodle—er, newly independent or struggling readers. (Fantasy. 8-10)

THE THUNDERBOLT EXPRESS

Porter, Matthew Illus. by Porter, Matthew Sasquatch (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-57061-877-2 Series: Monkey World

Monkeys who met previously in MonkeyWorld ABC (2012) get names as well and occupations on a thrill-a-minute train ride.

At the Station Master’s “All aboard!” passengers from Mayday the detective and Oscar the magician to Jango Jenkins and his Dixieland Band climb into the Thunderbolt Express, bound for Miggleswick station. They are all rendered as stylized,

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nattily attired monkeys in Porter’s cleanly drawn, brightly colored cartoon illustrations. Any expectations of a quiet journey are quickly dispelled as a mystery featuring a vanished pet is followed by a brake failure, a missing bridge, a wild flying leap over a crocodile-infested river and a full-speed trip right through a circus tent. Whew! All agree, at the end, that the ride was well worth having to chuck out their luggage, instruments and, for some, clothes along the way. The adventure is narrated in a dry, matter-of-fact present tense that folds in some nifty vocabulary as well as conveying these monkeys’ personalities: “Jango Jenkins and his band are really swinging. Only Mono the inventor refuses to jive. / Meanwhile, back in the compartment, a mystery is unfurling.”

A hoot for younger children fond of monkeys (not to mention, in one scene, monkeys in underpants!). (Picture book. 4-6)

SQUIRRELS ON SKIS

Ray, J. Hamilton Illus. by Lemaitre, Pascal Random House (64 pp.) $8.99 | $11.99 PLB | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-449-81081-1 978-0-375-97152-5 PLB An odd story about a plucky reporter, an entrepreneurial rabbit and, yes, skiing squirrels stumbles a bit but doesn’t completely crash and burn.

Engaging cover art from Lemaitre highlights the book’s humorous, cartoonish flair as its strongest attribute. Pictures evoke movement and comic reactions to outlandish scenarios, positioning Lemaitre as an illustrator to watch. Ray’s text, however, falters in its rhyme and rhythm and in its unwieldy plot revelation. Though a story about squirrels, it’s impossible to put it in a nutshell, but here goes: Skiing squirrels descend on a town, upsetting the citizens and creating no small amount of chaos. Where are they coming from? Who’s given them skis?

What to do? The aforementioned plucky reporter, Sally Sue Breeze, sets out to investigate, hoping to save them from the sad fate suggested by the evil Mr. Powers, who would like to obliterate the squirrels with a vacuumlike contraption. She discovers that a rabbit has been selling the squirrels Popsicle-stick skis and toothpick ski poles in exchange for all of their acorns, and Sally convinces him to return some of the food to the starving squirrels. She also manages to set up a ski area at the erstwhile ski and ski pole factory, while convincing the squirrels to ski only there and not through the town.

A strange story saved by silly art. (Early reader. 5-8)

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UNTOLD

Rees Brennan, Sarah Random House (368 pp.) $18.99 | $10.99 e-book | $21.99 PLB Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-375-87042-2 978-0-375-97995-8 e-book 978-0-375-97042-9 PLB Series: Lynburn Legacy, 2 Middle-book syndrome strikes hard in this nouveau-gothic paranormal sequel.

Intrepid girl reporter Kami Glass and her allies expect power-hungry sorcerer Rob Lynburn to take revenge after his murderous schemes are thwarted. When a brilliantly creepy Halloween attack is followed by demands for a midwinter human sacrifice, they are left with only weeks to muster their defenses. It’s a promising setup, but the story provides only perfunctory glimpses of intensive historical research, martial arts practice and magical training, devoting chapters instead to relationship angst: friendships tested by unrequited crushes and families riven by lies and divided loyalties. Kami in particular anguishes over both her romantic triangle with the nearidentical Lynburn cousins and the magical link with her that both covet. Shifting viewpoints start plot threads that simply disappear, and while the snarky banter is as witty as ever, it sits oddly amid all the interpersonal melodrama and looming danger. The (mostly offstage) villains finally return in a bloody confrontation, with disastrous results only surpassed by the macabre slaughter the supposed good guys inflict on their own side. Everything leads to a gruesome cliffhanger contrived to leave readers desperate for the final volume.

A hot mess of a book but weirdly compelling; buy where the first has eager fans. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

ROOFTOPPERS

Rundell, Katherine Illus. by Fan, Terry Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4424-9058-1 “Never ignore a possible.” Sophie takes her beloved guardian’s words to heart and never gives up on finding her long-lost mother.

One-year-old Sophie is found floating in a cello case in the English Channel by Charles Maxim, a fellow passenger on the freshly sunk Queen Mary: “He noticed that it was a girl, with hair the color of lightning, and the smile of a shy person.” He decides to keep her. The bookish pair lives a harmonious, gloriously unorthodox life together—she prefers trousers to skirts, knows the collective noun for toads and uses atlases as plates. The National Childcare Agency does not approve, so when a clue in Sophie’s cello case links her mother to Paris, Charles and Sophie decide to skip town after

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“From Tabby’s suspicious looks to chubby Zeke diving for the ball to the baseball field filled with elderly, enthusiastic athletes, Howard and Rylant allow young readers to enjoy the game….” from mr . putter & tabby drop the ball

her 12th birthday. Once ensconced in her Parisian attic hideaway, Sophie gets a skylight visit from a teenage “rooftopper” named Matteo, who eats pigeons and never, ever descends to street level. Sophie—anxious to help Charles find her mother— secretly joins the boy atop Paris night after night, listening for her cello-playing. Vivid descriptions of fierce kids in survival mode and death-defying rooftop scrambles are breathlessly exciting, as is the bubbling suspense of Sophie’s impassioned search for the possible.

Brava! This witty, inventively poetic, fairy-tale–like adventure shimmers with love, magic and music. (Adventure. 9-12)

MR. PUTTER & TABBY DROP THE BALL

Rylant, Cynthia Illus. by Howard, Arthur Harcourt (44 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-15-205072-6 Series: Mr. Putter & Tabby

Batter up, Mr. Putter and Tabby!

With over 20 titles in this venerable series, Rylant and Howard are still able to find ideas that bring not only a chuckle, but a side of confidence to new readers. This time, Mr. Putter realizes that he and Tabby have been napping too much. Though Tabby’s frisky days are over, Mr. Putter still has some energy. Is Mr. Putter too old to play baseball? Heck, no. He finds his mitt, calls up his buddy Mrs. Teaberry and joins a coed team of senior citizens called the Yankee Doodle Dandies. It’s clear from the illustrations that Mr. Putter is not too old for this team! Though he is clad in his trademark blue plaid shirt and straw hat, the others are in their uniforms, plump and unathletic, with oversized ears and beer bellies. Mrs. Teaberry’s dog, Zeke, insists on fielding the ball…and holding it, which allows the opposing team an advantage. From Tabby’s suspicious looks to chubby Zeke diving for the ball to the baseball field filled with elderly, enthusiastic athletes, Howard and Rylant allow young readers to enjoy the game—they’ll wish they had grandfathers just like Mr. Putter.

A home run. (Early reader. 4-8)

LIFETIME The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives Schaefer, Lola M. Illus. by Neal, Christopher Silas Chronicle (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4521-0714-1

An original concept that begins simply and ends up surprisingly—and somewhat confusingly—complex.

Award winner Schaefer and illustrator Neal team up to |

create a picture book about the number of times particular events occur in the lifetimes of 11 different animals. Neal’s illustrations—appealingly retro in their understated style and muted color scheme—accurately portray the numeric facts presented: “In one lifetime, this female red kangaroo will birth 50 joeys”—and voilà, there’s a double-page spread of 50 baby kangaroos. Readers (or listeners) will enjoy counting the joeys, sea horses, alligator eggs or spots on the giraffe. It’s all fun and games until the backmatter arrives. Then, facts about each animal (Latin name, habitat, lifespan) and convoluted mathematical explanations of how Schaefer arrived at each of her numbers are presented. A more child-friendly explanation of averages and how to calculate them follows. Readers are invited to use this newly acquired knowledge to ponder two math word problems given at the end of the book. Is this book about the natural world? Counting? Statistics? Solving math word problems? It’s hard to say. A great deal of information is presented, for a range of ages.

Kudos for not dumbing it down, however. A more cohesive theme would make for a more understandable overall presentation, but readers will get their money’s worth.

(Informational picture book. 4-8)

FROSTING AND FRIENDSHIP

Schroeder, Lisa Aladdin (224 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4424-7396-6

An impetuous decision to improve her meager baking skills leads to culinary mishaps and friendship woes for middle school musician Lily.

Having recently formed a band with two friends, Lily is ready for her role as lead singer. An upcoming audition for a chance to perform at her school increases Lily’s determination to make their fledgling band a success. However, a request to co-host a surprise birthday party for a mutual friend poses a distraction. In this engaging addition to the series (Sprinkles and Secrets, 2011), Schroeder addresses friendship dilemmas familiar to preteen readers as Lily struggles to reconcile her yearning to fit in with the need to be herself. For Lily, agreeing to help Isabel with Sophie’s 13th birthday party represents an opportunity to demonstrate her BFF potential to Sophie. But in her eagerness to belong, Lily feigns an interest and aptitude in baking she does not possess. When the party preparations—including her comically calamitous baking endeavors—interfere with her band, Lily must decide what is more important: pretending to be just like someone else or proudly pursuing her dreams.

Ultimately, Lily’s choice to celebrate her unique abilities and interests affirms readers’ rights to do the same.

(Fiction. 9-13)

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“Selfors’ second…adds depth to both the characters and setting of this fun and slightly suspenseful series that has more hijinks than horror.” from the lonely lake monster

THE LONELY LAKE MONSTER

Selfors, Suzanne Illus. by Santat, Dan Little, Brown (208 pp.) $16.00 | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-316-22567-0 Series: Imaginary Veterinary, 2

Lake monster lonely? Leprechaun sniffly? Only Dr. Woo, Veterinarian for Imaginary Creatures, can help.

Ten-year-old Pearl Petal, one of the few kids remaining in Buttonville after the button factory’s closure, has a reputation as a troublemaker. She’s just curious, creative...and bored, so she’s glad to have a new friend in Ben Silverstein and an apprenticeship at Dr. Woo’s clinic, which everyone in town thinks is a worm hospital. After successfully ditching nosy Mrs. Mulberry, who wants her awful daughter Victoria to apprentice too (just so they can nose around inside), Pearl and Ben start their first day of apprenticing by clipping the toenails of a Sasquatch. Things get more complicated fast.

Pearl’s curiosity gets the better of her, and Ben ends up the prisoner of a gigantic (and thankfully gentle) lake monster.

Can Pearl save him without alerting Dr. Woo and her snooty assistant, the odd Mr. Tabby? Selfors’ second is Pearl’s tale (the first was Ben’s), and this adds depth to both the characters and setting of this fun and slightly suspenseful series that has more hijinks than horror. Santat’s occasional black-and-white illustrations are an added bonus, as are the creature info with writing and art prompts, the science lesson on buoyancy and the mirror-making instructions in the backmatter. Readers could start here, but they should start with the first to get the whole story.

Nothing imaginary about the fun (and sneaky learning). (Fantasy. 7-11)

TURKEY TOT

Shannon, George Illus. by Mann, Jennifer K. Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2379-8 A determined turkey gets the sweet, juicy, high-hanging berries.

Turkey Tot is wandering about the bucolic farmstead—the reader winningly transported there via Mann’s easy-handed, dark-lined, watercolor-washed artwork— where he lives with his friends Chick, Pig and Hen, in search of something to eat. Blackberries beckon, but they are too high to reach. So Turkey Tot looks about for some way to access the berries. His friends think all his ideas are cockamamie—and repeatedly so in Shannon’s polyphonic refrain: “You’re talking silly talk.”

“We can’t reach the berries, and that is that.” “He’s been different since the day he hatched.” They decide to take a nap by the pond.

But Turkey Tot will not be discouraged. Perhaps his first few ideas are a little off note—one has him finding a ball of string to which, 106

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he figures, he will tie a balloon and float Pig up to berryland—but he finally manages to wire all his different schemes together and snag the berries. Then he shares them with his uninspired comrades, which is more than the Little Red Hen would have done.

Good for Turkey Tot: freethinking, resolved, generous.

Let’s hope that when November rolls around, Turkey Tot has become the farm’s mascot, not its dinner. (Picture book. 3-6)

ANUBIS SPEAKS! A Guide to the Afterlife by the Egyptian God of the Dead Shecter, Vicky Alvear Illus. by Revoy, Antoine Boyds Mills (128 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-59078-995-7 Series: Secrets of the Ancient Gods

The jackal-headed god dares readers to come along on the sun god Ra’s nightly journey through Duat, the Egyptian afterworld, to rebirth.

Schecter (Cleopatra Rules!, 2010) properly notes at the outset that Egyptian beliefs were not monolithic, so her canine co-conspirator has chosen elements that convey the “gist.”

The god himself steps up to promise with indecent relish that there will be “blood. And snakes. And decapitations. And monsters who like to gobble up hearts and squeeze heads until they pop.” Anubis begins by describing how Ra created the world and the major gods by (as he puts it) “hocking a giant lougie” but ultimately left Earth in disgust to take up residence in the heavens. He delivers an hour-by-hour travelogue of Ra’s passage through the “dark lands” and accounts of gory battles that repeatedly leave the evil giant snake Apophis chopped into sushi. Anubis goes on to deliver introductions to ancient Egyptian culture and myths, major pharaohs, mummification (with particular emphasis on the gross bits) and burial practices—since, as he perceptively points out, Ra’s voyage also served as symbol and metaphor for the human passage through life and the afterlife.

Staid, dispensable illustrations aside, an informative and unusually lively look at the Egyptian way of death. (cast list, glossary, bibliography, index) (Mythology. 10-13)

WHEN I FEEL WORRIED

Spelman, Cornelia Maude Illus. by Parkinson, Kathy Whitman (24 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-8893-2 Series: Way I Feel

Spelman and Parkinson continue their sensitive exploration of childhood emotions with this latest entry in their The Way I Feel series.

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An unnamed little guinea pig narrates, describing in just one sentence per page different situations that make her feel worried. She is worried when she isn’t sure what is happening or when people argue or when she has to try something new. The charming illustrations extend the text by creating a believable setting for each sort of worry, using a variety of endearing animal characters. Though it isn’t spelled out in the text, the reader can see that the little guinea pig is nervous about going to the doctor, afraid to get in the swimming pool and worried about the consequences of coloring on the wall of her bedroom. And she is very worried about going to school, sensitively handled with several pages of adult characters helping her get over her fears. The satisfying conclusion shows a more confident guinea-pig girl who understands her feelings and knows how to handle them.

This amusing but satisfying story will ease the worries of a nervous child or help more confident children to be more empathetic to the needs of a worried friend. (author’s note) (Picture book. 2-5)

THE DIGGERS ARE COMING!

Steggall, Susan Illus. by Steggall, Susan Frances Lincoln (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-84780-288-0 All kinds of bruising vehicles have a part in creating a new housing development in this muscular import from the U.K. First comes the big red wrecker, its ball swinging to bash the old buildings to the ground. Then the planners come, to measure and mark, followed by the bulldozers, who “shave and shift and shove all day.” The type goes across the page in various directions and routes, sometimes bold and even bolder, from tiny to enormous. Diggers and tippers (dump trucks) are next, to finish the job of preparing the ground, then cement mixers, to lay the concrete foundation. Then sturdy trucks show up with cement blocks and other building materials. Busy builders go to work with hard hats and hammers and hods, and the buildings start to rise. Some materials need a crane. Steamrollers help smooth out all the bumpy bits. Before long, the trucks coming to the site are moving vans, full of furniture and the other belongings of all the families that will be moving into these immaculate new homes. Steggall’s use of color makes stars of her machines; the buildings and ground, with scant greenery, are in earth tones, while gleaming bright vehicles—in orange and bold yellow and blue—really pop in her textured collages.

Her text has lots of phonic and onomatopoeic crunch as well.

Perfect for the very young truck fanatic. (Picture book. 4- 7)

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TOYS GALORE

Stein, Peter Illus. by Staake, Bob Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-7636-6254-7 A fizzy yet revealing romp through the toy world.

Though of standard picture-book size, Stein and illustrator Staake’s latest collaboration (Bugs Galore, 2012, etc.) presents a sweeping compendium of diversions for the young.

From fairies and gnomes, race cars and jacks, tin cans and socks, to pots ’n’ pans and a cardboard box, Stein combs the toy kingdom for equally thrilling sources of fun. These light, tightly rhymed quatrains focus nicely on the functions characterizing various objects, such as “Floaty, bubbly, / while-youwash toys” or “Sharing-secrets- / with-tin-cans toys,” rather than flatly stating their names. Such ambiguity at once offers Staake free artistic rein to depict copious items capable of performing those tasks and provides pre-readers ample freedom to draw from the experiences of their own toy chests as they scan Staake’s vibrant spreads brimming with chunky, digitally rendered objects and children at play. The sense of community and sharing suggested by most of the spreads contributes well to Stein’s ultimate theme, which he frames by asking: “But which toy is / the best toy ever? / The one most fun? / Most cool and clever?” Faced with three concluding pages filled with all sorts of indoor and outside toys to choose from, youngsters may be shocked to learn, on turning to the final spread, that the greatest one of all—“a toy SENSATION!”—proves to be “[y]our very own / imagination.”

Clever verse coupled with bold primary-colored images is sure to attract and hone the attention of fun-seeking children everywhere. (Picture book. 4-7)

THE DREAM THIEVES

Stiefvater, Maggie Scholastic (448 pp.) $18.99 | $18.99 e-book | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-545-42494-3 978-0-545-57717-5 e-book Series: Raven Cycle, 2 The second installment of Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle is as mind-blowingly spectacular as the first.

Now that the ley line near Henrietta, Va., has been woken, strange currents race through the town.

There’s too much electricity—or none at all. The four Raven Boys—Gansey, Adam, long-dead Noah and Ronan—continue to search for the grave of the Welsh king Glendower, but now Ronan is starting to pull objects out of his dreams. Small ones, like the keys to Gansey’s Camaro, and larger, lethal nightmare creatures. But his greatest nightmare can’t be grasped—how do you hold onto home? Not-quite-psychic Blue Sargent realizes

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that Gansey might really be her true love—and if she kisses him, he’ll die—and meanwhile, her wholly psychic mother is dating the hit man come to steal Ronan. Stiefvater’s careful exploration of class and wealth and their limitations and opportunities astounds with its sensitivity and sophistication. The pace is electric, the prose marvelously sure-footed and strong, but it’s the complicated characters—particularly Ronan, violent, drunk, tender and tough—that meld magic and reality into an engrossing, believable whole. Remember this: Ronan never lies.

How long until Book 3? (Fantasy. 12 & up)

WHAT’S BUGGING NURSE PENNY? A Story about Lice

Stier, Catherine Illus. by Beaky, Suzanne Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-8803-1

What is wrong with Nurse Penny?

Nurse Penny is a fantastic school nurse. She makes student patients feel better with a fist pump and a “Eureka!…We’ll banish this trouble in no time!” One day, however, when Max, Tessa and Van are awaiting treatment, they notice Nurse Penny’s usual smile has deserted her. They cheer her up, and that cheer gives her an idea that leads to a surprise all-school assembly about… lice. Nurse Penny lectures the whole school on lice: What they are, where they come from and how to get rid of them. She emphasizes that getting lice is not a sign of a dirty lifestyle and that anyone can get them…even a school nurse! She leaves to treat her problem, and on her return, Max and the other students have an artistic surprise for Nurse Penny. Though not nearly as ebullient as David Shannon’s Bugs in My Hair! (2013), Stier’s informational picture book is entertaining without being glib or foolish; it is an interesting-enough story as well as good instruction for prevention or bibliotherapy for those infected.

Beaky’s expressive and bright cartoon illustrations, mostly fullbleed, feature a multicultural cast and complement the text nicely. A page of lice facts follows the story.

Might incite some sympathy scratching but worth inclusion in most collections. (Picture book. 4-7)

ON LINDEN SQUARE

Sullivan, Kate Illus. by Sullivan, Kate Sleeping Bear Press (40 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-58536-832-7 Stella Mae loves to sit at her apartmenthouse window and watch her neighbors.

They are all colorful characters that are easily identifiable. One sings karaoke badly, and one, named Miss Arpeggio, plays the piano. One has two cats named 108

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Pianissimo and Fortissimo and is named Mr. Rubenstein (for the piano virtuoso Arthur?). There’s a couple who dress fancily and a couple who wear Mexican hats. Not one of these folk has any community spirit until a great snowfall blankets the town square. With Stella Mae in the lead, they join together to build a snowman, all providing their individual touches. Have they sculpted a dancer or a jazz musician or an Indian elephantheaded god or Babar? It is Stella Mae who devises the most inclusive name, “Ferdinand Ganesh, the Jazzy Dancing Baba Feng Shui Elephant-Mouse!” Community togetherness! They eat latkes and tacos, drink cider and dance to tango music from a trombone. Sullivan is a musician and undoubtedly intended her use of musical terminology along with multicultural touches to be a learning experience. Unfortunately, there is no lesson to be learned without textual support or visual clues. The watercolor art is so loose it becomes lost on the mostly white backgrounds. (glossary) Pleasant but inconsequential. (Picture book. 4-7)

RAZIA’S RAY OF HOPE One Girl’s Dream of an Education

Suneby, Elizabeth Illus. by Verelst, Suana Kids Can (32 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-55453-816-4 Series: CitizenKid

The United States is still involved in Afghanistan, and interest in girls’ education in that war-torn country is a strong topic of concern.

Young Razia wants to attend the new girls’ school that is being built in her village, but her grandfather is her only ally.

Her older brothers, uneducated themselves, don’t want her to attend. Little do they know that she has already taught herself to read and that she is independent enough to ask the head of the school to convince her family. It is difficult to understand why Aziz, her eldest brother, wields such power in the family, but teacher Razia Jan, modeled after a real Afghani-American who has returned to her country to spread the hope of education, knows she has to persuade him.

(Confusingly, the teacher shares the protagonist’s name.)

However, it is young Razia herself who proves to Aziz that education can be useful when she uses her secret literacy to give him the correct dose of medicine when he falls ill. Using collage techniques that employ photography, traditional fabrics and realistic pencil sketches, Verelst creates a striking complement to this realistic story of contemporary life. The explanatory material at the end and the classroom activities are useful for educational settings.

Purposeful in a positive way, this imaginatively illustrated book should open readers’ eyes to issues facing children who live in very different circumstances. (Picture book. 8-11)

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“In its two alternating viewpoints, three worlds and four distinct magical systems are all masterfully delineated through delicate prose and subtle characterization.” from the burning sky

SCALY SPOTTED FEATHERED FRILLED How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Really Looked Like?

Thimmesh, Catherine Houghton Mifflin (64 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-547-99134-4

Thimmesh (Lucy Long Ago, 2009) again explores the border between science and speculation in this thoughtful look at how paleontologists and, in particular, “paleoartists” reconstruct prehistoric creatures from fossil evidence.

It’s “guesswork,” admits one artist. “But it’s guesswork based on science.” The author explains how surviving evidence— including fossilized bone fragments, plant matter, bits of skin and, recently, feathers, prehistoric “trackways” (preserved pathways of dino footprints) and similar physical features in modern animals—is assembled and interpreted by scientists. She also traces the evolution of dino art, from Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ fanciful reconstructions of heavy-bodied giant lizards to today’s images of quick, deft, graceful creatures. In support, examples of Hawkins’ approximations and the once-authoritative dinosaur paintings of Charles R. Knight from the first half of the 20th century contrast sharply with more detailed and dramatic scenes, often of the same dinosaurs, by Greg Paul and other currently active artists the author has interviewed. Sketch pages, alternative color patterns on the same model dino, and facing images of a Deinonychus before and after the discovery of fossilized feathers provide further insight into paleoart’s methods, challenges and rewards.

Required reading for serious dinophiles. (biographical appendix, source list, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 11-13)

THE BURNING SKY

Thomas, Sherry Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-06-220729-6 978-0-06-220731-9 e-book Series: Elemental, 1 An award-winning adult romance author’s debut for teens bids fair to be the next big epic fantasy success.

Iolanthe Seabourne’s quiet life as an elemental mage of middling power explodes when she summons lightning from the sky. Suddenly the 16-year-old is on the run from villainous Inquisitors. That same lightning bolt galvanizes the carefully nurtured schemes of Titus, the teenage figurehead prince, to free his realm from domination by Atlantis.

The only problem is that the great mage whom seers foretold Titus will sacrifice his life to protect was supposed to be a boy….

Multiple tropes—of heroic quest, gaslamp fantasy, fractured fairy tale, school story and doomed romance—are gracefully |

braided into a hefty but ravishing narrative. In its two alternating viewpoints, three worlds and four distinct magical systems are all masterfully delineated through delicate prose and subtle characterization. Iolanthe may be excessively perfect—beautiful and powerful and brilliant—but her prickly independence and wry self-awareness give her depth; Titus’ status, talent and stunning magnificence is less compelling than his boyish vulnerability and tortured determination. Too often in fantasy, when prophecies are both accurate and specific, characters can seem mere puppets of fate. Here, the conflagrant climax is true to their choices, with a satisfying happy-for-now resolution that whets delicious anticipation for inevitable sequels.

It caters to very specific tastes, but teens and adults in the target audience will devour it. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

IS THIS PANAMA? A Migration Story

Thornhill, Jan Illus. by Kim, Soyeon Owlkids Books (40 pp.) $16.95 | $16.95 e-book | Sep. 15, 2013 978-1-926973-88-3 978-1-77147-038-4 e-book

Sammy the young Wilson’s warbler’s freezing toes tell him it’s time to migrate, but how will he find his way from his home in the Arctic Circle to Panama when all the other birds have already left?

After several fruitless attempts to solve this problem by questioning other birds and animals, he sets off, hitching a ride on a sandhill crane and following the shoreline with a flock of darner dragonflies. Other warblers show him how to navigate by the stars, but the confusion of city lights leads to a painful encounter with a skyscraper window. Challenged by the ubermigrant Hudsonian godwit, Sammy sets out over the ocean, island hopping all the way to Mexico. The instincts of the tiny bird are true, and they lead him to his final destination. Thornhill’s authoritative yet friendly and accessible text, coupled with Kim’s decorative pen-and-wash collaged illustrations, make this an appealing book for children who appreciate realism and authentic detail in a picture book. The endpapers depict realistic sketches of a few of the vast variety of warblers, and a map of bird migration routes completes this charming and unusual nature storybook. A brief introduction to the other animals and birds mentioned in the story is also included. Possibilities for use in the classroom are endless.

An unusual and attractive take on a perennially absorbing topic. (Picture book. 6-10)

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“Illustrations highlight how outlandishly oversized Andy’s nose is and back up visual gags.” from super schnoz and the gates of smell

THE BIG HAIRY SECRET

Troupe, Thomas Kingsley Illus. by Gilpin, Stephen Capstone Young Readers (128 pp.) $8.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-62370-033-1 Series: Furry and Flo, 1 The Corman Towers apartment building has a creepy outside; wait till Flo sees the inside!

Fourth-grader-to-be Florence (but don’t call her that) has moved around each year since her father died; her mom has to go where the work is. This year’s building, Corman Towers, is in the city and doesn’t look promising.

The apartment has cracked windows and stains, and there’s a kid in his underwear running through the hallway. Weird.

Ferdinand—“Furry”—is no less weird when Flo actually meets him, but at least he puts some shorts on. Then her groceries are attacked and her Popsicles stolen. Flo thinks some dog may have done it, but no pets are allowed. Flo goes in search of Furry, who’s doing laundry, and he shows her a crack in the basement floor that goes blue. Weird. Late that night, she catches Furry (in his underwear again) running with her Popsicles…and when she chases him to the roof, he’s turned into a werewolf! Before that can settle, they’re attacked by a giant spider. Can the new friends escape a rampaging momma spider? Troupe’s series kickoff is a slightly spooky and little-bit-goofy tale for those just starting chapter books. Gilpin’s occasional black-and-white, pen-and-ink cartoon illustrations are a nice match. Glossary, questions and prompts at the close provide some educational backbone to the entertainment.

Chapter-book readers should latch onto it. (Fantasy. 6-8)

OUTFOXED

Twohy, Mike Illus. by Twohy, Mike Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $15.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4424-7392-8 978-1-4424-7393-5 e-book Cartoonist Twohy delivers lackluster laughs in this tale of a clever duck and not-too-bright fox.

The story opens with confusingly scriptlike narration (without the benefit of a stage/screen setup) as a cloaked fox breaks into a chicken coop. Without looking, Fox grabs a hen and runs (strangely, on all fours, despite wearing a trench coat and sneakers on his find feet). Readers may be confused as to why Fox is on the run, but a page turn reveals the guard dogs on his tail. The thick-lined, comic book–esque illustrations depict Fox making a narrow escape and arriving home to discover he mistakenly bagged a duck. But Duck is not resigned to be dinner and goes about attempting to convince Fox that she is a dog in a protracted pantomime. Unsure, Fox tries to trick Duck into 110

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revealing her true nature and fails, returning Duck to her home the following day. Just as Fox returns to his den and begins to regret having given up a potential pet, he discovers his mistake.

While this book may elicit laughs, the choppy pacing, grammatical shortcuts and confusing lack of direction as to what should be read first on a given page (the narration or the speech/ thought bubbles?) will make for difficult read-alouds.

A goose egg. (Picture book. 5-8)

SUPER SCHNOZ AND THE GATES OF SMELL

Urey, Gary Illus. by Long, Ethan Whitman (166 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7555-0

A prenatal pharmaceutical mix-up landed Andy with a “humongous honker” that makes him an object of ridicule at school but also gives him a “super-power worthy” sense of smell.

Bullies at his new school laugh at Andy’s nose until it gives early warning of imminent principal presence, earning Andy respect and friendship from his former tormentors. Peaceful existence is short-lived: A sudden, terrible smell fills the school, canceling classes. The kids would celebrate, except missed days will be made up during summer vacation, unless Environmental Clean Up, Inc. fixes the mess quickly. But Andy overhears a conversation that reveals all may not be on the up and up with ECU. His friends decide that he must use his nose to investigate— they design a superhero costume to turn him into crime-fighter Super Schnoz (they are sidekicks the Not-Right Brothers and Vivian). Experimenting, the team finds ingenious applications for Andy’s nose, such as the power of flight (through inflating his nostrils) and cayenne-pepper attack sneezes. Every power’s needed, as ECU’s nefarious plan will ruin much more than summer break if Super Schnoz can’t save the day. Illustrations highlight how outlandishly oversized Andy’s nose is and back up visual gags. The writing, stylistically, has enough action and danger to keep it on the right side of parody, as well as a sense of humor that deftly mixes the absurd with gross-out jokes and clever wordplay.

Super Schnoz smells like a winner, especially for reluctant readers. (Adventure. 8-12)

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THE SNOWMAN’S WISH

Brianna and Austin, whose chemistry is intense despite Austin’s having been both a god and an enemy.

Light on worldbuilding but full of steamy romance.

(Fantasy. 14-18)

van Straaten, Harmen Illus. by van Straaten, Harmen NorthSouth (32 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7358-4144-4

On a snowy, wintry night, the toys in a woodland cottage each boast that they are the most wonderful; all except a lonely snowman in a globe, long forgotten.

On this night, the snowman hears a voice singing to him, inviting him to dance. Suddenly, he is free to walk about (and has the feet to do it). From on top of the mantel, an angel on a clock tells him that his wish has been fulfilled; his globe is open—but only for one hour. Quickly, the snowman follows the music and encounters a beautiful ballerina in a pink tutu who is turning round and round. In the few minutes left before the hour expires, they dance, but then he must return to his globe. The other toys mock him as he yearns to be free and in the arms of the ballerina. Happily, the ballerina wishes to join him, and fortunately, the same angel can grant her wish. The snowman and the ballerina can now dance together in eternal bliss. Van Straaten, a Dutch author/illustrator, has borrowed freely from popular European fairy-tale motifs, but his story lacks charm and warmth. The watercolor illustrations are pleasant but not distinguished.

The magic is missing. (Picture book. 3-6)

GOLD

Vance, Talia Flux (408 pp.) $9.99 paper | Sep. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3471-2 Series: Bandia, 2 After the climactic battles that ended Silver (2012), teen bandia Brianna Paxton heads to rural Ireland but finds she can escape neither her destiny nor her many pursuers.

There are a variety of supernatural orders and creatures involved in what becomes a push toward a new fight. Most— Sons of Killian, giolla, gods, Milesians, bandia—were introduced in the previous volume, but with few reminders as to what each group wants and what their powers may be, readers have a lot of work to do keeping track. The central figures here are Brianna, who narrates, and Austin, the god Brianna banished to the underworld at the end of the previous volume. Brianna is staying in Austin’s castle home to hide from the Sons of Killian when Austin mysteriously returns as a mortal. With the additions of some time travel, a dangerous god, a new bandia and the discovery that both Austin and Brianna are losing their powers, the story moves forward dramatically, even if the rules of magic and time travel aren’t entirely clear. Where the book shines is in the smoldering will-they-won’t-they exchanges between |

STICK DOG WANTS A HOT DOG

Watson, Tom Illus. by Long, Ethan Harper/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $12.99 | $8.99 e-book | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-06-211080-0 978-0-06-211081-7 e-book Series: Stick Dog, 2 Stick Dog’s back and on the hunt for a snack.

Stick Dog and his buddies Mutt, Poo-Poo, Stripes and Karen fondly remember that day in Picasso Park when they got some delicious hamburgers from a family grilling out—they’d like some more, please. After a pleasant game of BARK! at Stick Dog’s house (all the dogs stand around and bark at anything that moves, and barking first scores more points), Stick Dog realizes he is hungry. The rumbling in his belly causes his friends’ bellies to rumble, but over the rumble they hear something else: a bell.

After deciding it’s not Santa, a giant cuckoo clock or miniature bell-ringing humans, they discover it is Peter and his frankfurter cart. Each pooch comes up with an outlandish plan to steal the franks, but Stick Dog finds them all flawed. When they agree to his plan, Karen complicates it by becoming trapped in a strange human’s house. Will they ever get those delicious frankfurters?

Though Watson’s second Stick Dog romp may appear to be for reluctant or very young readers due to its ample white space and simple illustrations, its vocabulary may frustrate them at times. An expansion of Watson’s self-published Stick Dog Wants a Frankfurter with new illustrations by Long, this features the same foolishness and narrative style as Stick Dog’s first, eponymous outing.

A silly, simple read for middle graders who love dogs, be they hot- or stick-. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)

ROSE

Webb, Holly Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (272 pp.) $6.99 paper | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-4022-8581-3 Series: Rose, 1 In this orphan-makes-good mystery/ thriller with a magical twist, Rose and her compatriots—an apprentice magician, a spoiled 7-year-old and a shapeshifting talking cat—work together to figure out who has been kidnapping local children and come up with a plan to rescue them.

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At the tender age of 10, Rose, who has lived an impoverished and cloistered life in an orphanage, goes into service as the second housemaid at the home of renowned and wealthy magician and alchemist Mr. Aloysius Fountain. Rose, who had barely been outside the orphanage gates, slowly adjusts to her new circumstances, which are luxurious to her modest eyes.

Rose’s growing knowledge of the world outside the orphanage, her own burgeoning and increasingly emphatic magical power, and her relationships with other members of the household turn out to be more engaging and suspenseful than the story’s mystery. The climactic battle, which features the power of hope, is talky, still explaining at a time readers should be enveloped in action. Still, Rose is sympathetic and a pleasure to root for, the secondary characters have room to grow, and the ending can be read as a new beginning, leaving plenty of room for a sequel.

Character and the day-to-day workings of a wealthy household overshadow magic and plot in this engaging tale of an orphan servant-girl. (Fantasy. 9-12)

SUPERHERO JOE AND THE CREATURE NEXT DOOR

Weitzman, Jacqueline Preiss Illus. by Barrett, Ronald Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-4424-1268-2 Joe marshals superhero skills and gadgets inspired by his comic books to combat the titular creature next door.

When the sweet next-door neighbors move to Florida, Joe realizes that his dream of mastering the scary ladder to their treehouse is leaving with them. Someone new and unknown is moving into his territory, and this oversized person seems able to climb the rope ladder with ease. Joe’s imagination goes into overdrive as he watches the creature, scenes from his comic books racing through his head. The creature might come from a haunted castle or outer space; he might want to steal Joe’s toys and comics; he might even be a giant. When Joe finally makes his way over to meet the new family, he is pleasantly surprised.

What lifts this comic tale above the ordinary new-kid-on-theblock offering is its sense of humor and detailed, throwback comic-book art. Crosshatching and tiny vertical lines add drama and depth to each spread, and the use of gray, blue and purple perfectly accents Joe’s overactive imagination. The visual playfulness (including a riff on The Cat in the Hat) and dramatic comic-book language (invincibility, lair, radiance, infiltrate) make this one to reread. When he imagines the new kid calling him a shrimp, Joe is drawn as an actual sea critter!

For anyone who has an interior superhero. (Picture book. 4-8)

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THE BEASTS OF UPTON PUDDLE

West-Bulford, Simon Medallion Press (487 pp.) $9.99 paper | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1605425-20-7

A secret veterinary hospital for mythical creatures and a hidden island run by dragons and seraphim form stages on which the author shovels heaps of unrelated, undeveloped story ideas.

During the week, 12-year-old Joe Copper, who lives with his widowed mom and her friend “Aunt” Rose, is viciously bullied at school. On Sundays, he finds himself delivering shipments of kitty litter and hard liquor to Merrynether Mansion, a clinic run by ancient Veronica Merrynether and her hulking associate Heinrich for patients ranging from a fire-breathing wyvern with hiccups to a wee alcohol-loving cluricaun with a thick Irish accent and a gift for invective.

Meanwhile a huge, hairy beast is sighted haunting surrounding Ringwood Forest, which evil tycoon Argoyle Redwar is leveling for an industrial park. The villain is also seeking to extort from Veronica the location of Pyronesia, the island from which her patients come. Furthermore, Gnauserous, the dragon queen of Pyronesia, is a hair away from leading her armies out to (by unspecified means) exterminate humanity. West-Bulford wedges in further elements, from silly food (Flubbage, aka “Flatulensia Stenchorendous”) to flying, all-seeing, slime-throwing eyeballs called furdlewumps, for comic relief, then gathers his cast for a climactic battle that leaves the island littered with corpses and sown with land mines.

A mare’s nest of storylines, unencumbered by internal logic or any signs of credible resolution. (Fantasy. 11-13)

SHADOWS

Weston, Paula Tundra (400 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-77049-547-0 978-1-77049-549-4 e-book Series: Rephaim, 1 Mysterious Rafa arrives, putting everything and everyone 18-year-old Gaby knows at risk.

Following a brutal car accident and the death of her twin brother, Jude, Gaby settles in a small beachside town in Australia, hoping to recuperate. Unfortunately, sleep brings brutal dreams, filled with death, hell-beasts and a mysterious guy with green eyes and a wicked sword.

When the stranger shows up in the real world claiming to know details about Gaby and Jude that she cannot remember, she is both intrigued and furious. Rafa is hardly trustworthy, but when other strangers arrive and abduct Gaby’s roommate, he may be her only ally. While they plan a rescue, Rafa tells stories of

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“Piggie teaches her pachyderm pal to pretend. Considering that this is their 20th outing, Elephant seems a little slow on the uptake, but he sees the light eventually.” from i'm a frog

fallen angels and their offspring, the Rephaim. He claims there are nearly 200 half-angels, among them himself, Gaby and Jude.

This familiar story of otherworldly creatures walking unnoticed among humans is at best frustrating and at worst ghastly. Some gravitas is attempted by including quotes from ancient JudeoChristian texts, but any spiritual or historical value is quickly lost in the avalanche of profanity, sex and gore. The inclusion of graphic torture scenes might make even the most ardent paranormal-romance fan think twice.

Generic and grisly. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

THE CHAOS OF STARS

White, Kiersten HarperTeen (288 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 9, 2013 978-0-06-213592-6

The relationship between a teen and her parents is complicated—especially if that family is full of Egyptian gods.

Despite the promising premise, this latest from White achieves only demigod status at best.

Isadora is the daughter of Isis and Osiris, who are unusual parents, and she’s not your typical teen either. Her days are an odd combination of interior design and god worship. But although her parents are immortal Egyptian gods, they will let her die instead of keeping her with them forever. This discovery launches Isadora on a petulant, stubborn journey. When Isis gets pregnant ahead of the normal schedule, Isadora won’t tell her mother about her dark prophetic dreams. Sent to San Diego to stay with her older brother, Isadora tries to get some distance from her mother while struggling with her feelings for the beautiful, much-too-perfect Ry, a boy who writes epic poetry. Meanwhile, Isadora doesn’t pay attention to the signs that someone is after her, not until it’s nearly too late and her mother is in danger.

It’s never clear just who Isadora is; her voice never fully jells into her own, neither modern girl nor ancient child of the gods. Supporting characters such as Ry are flat and two-dimensional, and the danger to Isis is not compelling enough to catch readers up.

This novel won’t gain the Egyptian gods many new worshippers. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

STARRY NIGHTS

Whitney, Daisy Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-61963-133-5

Famous paintings, fantasy and wishfulfillment romance blend in contemporary Paris.

French teen Julien feels merely adequate, but his privileges and abilities are improbably golden. As his mother runs |

the Musée d’Orsay and wants to bribe the art-loving Julien into getting better grades, this 17-year-old has unrestricted access to the world-famous museum, even after hours. Despite the present-day setting (iPods; texting), museum security is presented as (as Julien explains) “a myth,” with no electronic or technological surveillance to inhibit his night roaming. He’s first to see when a “peach falls out of a Cézanne” and a girl “dance[s] her way right out of a Degas.” He perceives Renoirs inexplicably losing their color before anyone else does. Soon, at the Louvre, paintings are flooding and burning themselves.

From a long-lost Renoir springs a girl to share heady romance with Julien. She’s Clio, an Eternal Muse. Julien’s sure special, from his authority over the Louvre’s assistant curator to his unique status as human muse, the only human an Eternal Muse has ever loved and the only being who can fix the fading Renoirs. To readers unbothered by preposterous premises, implausible explanations and some overblown prose (“She was a revolution and she staged a coup d’état in my heart”), Whitney offers Muse dust, delightful sartorial quirks and the ghost of Renoir.

An oh-so-slight flight of fancy. (author’s note) (Fantasy/ romance. 12 & up)

I’M A FROG

Willems, Mo Illus. by Willems, Mo Hyperion (64 pp.) $8.99 | Oct. 15, 2013 978-1-4231-8305-1 Series: Elephant & Piggie Piggie teaches her pachyderm pal to pretend. Considering that this is their 20th outing, Elephant seems a little slow on the uptake, but he sees the light eventually.

Hopping around her bewildered buddy with many a “Ribbet!” Piggie explains, “I was a pig. Now I am a frog.” Gerald the elephant panics, thinking that he too might be transformed at any moment; there’s all that hopping, and as for eating flies—!

Piggie goes on to explain just what “pretending” is all about.

Stunned—“And you can just do that?!” —and assured that even grown-ups pretend, Elephant resists Piggie’s invitation to join her in the game. A characteristically hilarious spread depicts the two in heated debate, Piggie’s seven pink speech balloons (“Yes you can!”) tangling with Elephant’s eight gray ones (“No, I can’t!”). But he’s got the last laugh, going on to let out a mighty “MOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Cue the animal concert. As ever, Willems gives figures drawn with elemental simplicity and broadly expressed reactions just a few, but often very large, dialogue words to tell the tale.

Children aren’t likely to need the instruction, but the validation may be helpful to counter imagination-repressing parents or older sibs. (Early reader. 4-8)

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“The strong, etched black-and-white style of illustration recalls Dürer or Daumier, bringing every detail into sharp relief.” from ten birds meet a monster

THE BIRTHDAY QUEEN

Wood, Audrey Illus. by Wood, Don Blue Sky/Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-545-41474-6

The Birthday Queen does everything possible to make sure birthday celebra-

tions are perfect.

It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Invitations need to be written and sent. Clowns must be carefully screened.

And of course, every single birthday game must be tried and approved. But when it comes to readers’ birthdays? The Birthday Queen steps it up a notch. She whips up a celebration at a moment’s notice, complete with cake to exact specifications, beautifully wrapped presents and balloons that fly into place as soon as the guests arrive. Just who is the Birthday Queen?

If “you” look closely—the narration is in the second person— beneath the jeweled crown and past the bright rainbow dress, readers just may recognize someone special in their own family (so long as their mothers are white and present). In a wild frenzy reminiscent of a Candy Land board explosion, colors burst forth from every page. The Birthday Queen herself is not pretty in pink; she is a brightly rouged, belly-laughing, apple-cheeked blonde. Kids will get swept up in the birthday excitement, while adult readers will recognize the small moments of manic preparation—which always “magically” turn out in the end. It’s just too bad, given the seemingly inclusive direct address, that this queen-cum-mom is ethnically specific, leaving kids whose moms are not white out in the cold.

A sly, though problematic, nod of appreciation to mothers, hidden behind streamers, confetti and a mouthful of cake. (Picture book. 3-6)

TEN BIRDS MEET A MONSTER

Young, Cybèle Illus. by Young, Cybèle Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-55453-955-0

The 10 birds of the original counting book (Ten Birds, 2011) reappear, this time trying to scare a monster.

Talented paper artist and illustrator Young creates a surreal world in which 10 birds see a frightening shadow and vie with one another to construct fanciful sculptures out of a closet full of clothing, shoes and accessories, using only their ability to pull, pile and tie. The birds flutter and fuss amid the clothing to create outlandish creatures with Potter-esque names: a “Frightening Vipper-Snapper” and a “Bristling Fang-Mangler,” to name just two. The monster they are all reacting to sits in its corner and never responds to their efforts, however; in fact, its threatening shadow never changes shape. The puzzle is solved when the 10th bird, “always easily distracted,” goes wandering 114

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and accidentally discovers the mundane origin of the terrifying shadow. The strong, etched black-and-white style of illustration recalls Dürer or Daumier, bringing every detail into sharp relief. Kids will have fun spotting and counting the tiny birds peeking out from the wildly patterned multiplicity of garments that form the “monsters” they have created. This book is a testament to childlike creativity, as well as a playful debunking of monsters in general, as the last page reveals.

Young’s skill and control in her use of black-and-white line and her humorous inventiveness will appeal to young and old alike. (Picture book. 4-8)

halloween roundup FLY GUY AND THE FRANKENFLY

Arnold, Tedd Illus. by Arnold, Tedd Cartwheel/Scholastic (32 pp.) $6.99 | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-545-49328-4 Series: Fly Guy, 13 “It was a dark and stormy night” as series fans find Fly Guy and Buzz hard at work in their 13th adventure.

Buzz and his insect buddy are playing. After an evening of making puzzles, trying on creepy costumes and admiring a drawing Buzz created featuring them both in their frighteningly fun garb, Buzz’s eyes get heavy and he climbs into bed. But Fly Guy is up to something—he is “BIZZY!” Buzz drops off into dreamland…or does he? A couple of page turns reveal Fly Guy on the verge of bringing a gigantic monster to life. A flip of an electrical switch sets the nightmare in motion. “Buzz cried, ‘It’s Frankenfly!’ ” The enormous, green creature responds to Buzz’s shout and shambles over to him. No surprise that Fly Guy comes to Buzz’s rescue just as the monster, more silly than menacing, picks him up. Morning comes with a fall out of bed to reveal the result of the project Fly Guy was determined to finish the previous night. Giggles and grape juice bring this latest installment to a satisfying close. All the while, Arnold’s deftly drawn cartoon expressions comically show the range of emotions as Buzz and Fly Guy experience fear, shock, bewilderment, determination and pride.

The theme of friendship and loyalty endures in this enjoyable mock-horror tale for new readers. (Easy reader. 5-7)

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VAMPIRE BABY

forever in line for anything? In the end, only a fellow Crankenstein can jolt him back to normalcy. Perhaps such extreme behavior is truly funny when spotted in another.

Get ready to read this aloud a lot. (Picture book. 3-7)

Bennett, Kelly Illus. by Meisel, Paul Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7636-4691-2

Baby Tootie seems like a typically cute baby until her older brother notices an alarming change in her behavior when she gets two suspiciously sharp front teeth.

“We should have known right then,” states the brother when the doctor observes that two new teeth are “[c]anines….Most unusual,” but the boy struggles to convince his parents that Tootie is far from normal, since she’s always sinking her fangs into him. Her widow’s peak, appetite for “blood red” food and late-night habits all appear to prove the brother’s point. But his parents think the teething is “[n]othing to worry about.” Fed up, he hatches a plan. During a trip to the store, the brother goes to the costume section and dresses up Tootie “in a Dracula cape” and equips her carriage with a sign advertising for a “good home for Vampire Baby.” They meet a likely family in aisle 13, but the young boy (is he a real vampire, or just dressed like one?) gets too close. When Tootie chomps his nose, he scolds her: “AAARGH! YOW! OW! BAD BABY!” Readers can guess how this spurs Tootie’s brother into action to defend her. Meisel’s illustrations, executed in acrylic, watercolor, collage, pencil, ink and pastel, are full of details that add light, humorous touches to the tale, lending just the right touch of charm.

Casting Tootie as a potential vampire gives the wellworn new-baby theme a fresh, comic twist. (Picture book. 4-6)

CRANKENSTEIN

Berger, Samantha Illus. by Santat, Dan Little, Brown (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-316-12656-4 Whoa. Be prepared for the intense frustrations, the moody outbursts and the green scowls of Crankenstein.

Berger, who must be writing from direct experience with such a fellow, wryly informs readers what to expect. When offered a huge stack of pancakes with only the last small drop of syrup, Crankenstein’s reply is an angry “MEHHRRRR!!” A similar response comes when it is “time for school” or “when it’s WAY too hot for Popsicles” or “when…it’s bedtime.” Santat brilliantly utilizes Adobe Photoshop to zoom in on every extreme facial expression and clenched fist that conveys the barely contained anger and leads to the eventual unleashing of Crankenstein’s fury. Each setting reveals sly comic elements that both kids and their grown-ups will appreciate.

Readers will laugh out loud at the monster’s seemingly overthe-top reactions and relate to the many tantrum-provoking situations. Being forced to swallow gross cough syrup? Waiting |

ME AND MY DRAGON Scared of Halloween

Biedrzycki, David Illus. by Biedrzycki, David Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-658-0 978-1-58089-659-7 paper 978-1-60734-608-1 e-book Biedrzycki returns with a follow-up story of these two friends (Me and My Dragon, 2011), with a focus on Dragon’s fear of Halloween.

A boy and his oversized, bright red dragon enjoy many of the same things: birthday parties, parades and fireworks. But when the end of October nears, Dragon is not enthused. “He’s scared of werewolves. Zombies give him the creeps. And he hides whenever he sees a mummy.” The boy tries explaining that these creatures “aren’t real,” but Dragon is still scared.

Thus begins a quest to make Dragon a costume so he can better understand and experience “what Halloween is all about.” As the boy and his dragon try out various dress-up ideas, readers will be mildly entertained by the humor infusing the digitally rendered illustrations. Dragon is first unsuccessfully wrapped in a mess of toilet paper as a mummy, then he’s unable to see where he is going in his Robodragon get-up, freaks out at his reflection in the mirror as a zombie and is utterly uncomfortable in a ballerina tutu. Of course, all ends well. Children coping with their own anxieties about Halloween as well as kids stumped for a costume to choose for trick-or-treating will appreciate the determination these two characters display. Although the book has its merits, though, the language is ploddingly pedestrian and concludes predictably.

Not a must-have. (Picture book. 3-6)

FIVE LITTLE MONKEYS TRICKOR-TREAT

Christelow, Eileen Illus. by Christelow, Eileen Clarion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-547-85893-7

Christelow’s rambunctious monkeys are decked out in their costumes and ready to play an elaborate trick that may end up jeopardizing any treats they might receive.

Mama makes sure her little ones are ready when Lulu the babysitter arrives to take them out on Halloween night. Their costumes: banana, alien, ghost, goblin and princess. “Don’t lose

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the rascals!” Mama cautions. All goes well until one monkey decides to switch costumes with a friend. Now that monkey is a blue bunny instead of an alien. The other monkeys think this is “SO funny” and follow suit. Though Lulu notices, like all great babysitters, she does not spoil the fun—at first. But the look in her eye foreshadows a comeuppance for her young charges.

Suddenly Lulu announces that it is time for the new banana, ghost, goblin, alien and princess to go. “We have to get home for a big Halloween treat!” Suddenly, the disguised monkeys worry that they are going to miss something special and quickly follow Lulu and their friends to the house. Crafty Lulu and wise Mama soon sort out the confusion, and the mischievous bunch is quickly forgiven as they sample some tricky treats of eyeball cookies and worm juice.

Fans of the author’s previous monkey titles will welcome this silly new tale, but adults wishing for a safety message warning against similar copycat antics will be disappointed. (recipes) (Picture book. 4-7)

WHIZZ! POP! GRANNY, STOP!

Corderoy, Tracey Illus. by Berger, Joe Nosy Crow/Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-7636-6551-7

Granny sure knows how to cast a spell, but her granddaughter, who narrates, just wants to spend time getting ready for her upcoming birthday party without using the special “Helping Kit.” Readers may think it would be cool to have a grandmother who is a witch, but Granny’s magic tricks frequently yield unexpected and somewhat disastrous results: A bad-hair-day fix leaves the granddaughter with a hot pink bouffant do, for instance. So Granny agrees to help bake a cake from scratch and sew together a new dress from some “found…strips of red.”

Kids will snicker at the ramshackle results, but the granddaughter could not be happier with the less-than-perfect preparations since all has been “made with tons of love.” The guests arrive, and everyone has fun. But afterward, Granny and her granddaughter are left with a colossal mess. Granny comes to the rescue with a “Whizz! Pop!” that thoroughly cleans everything up just in time for one last birthday gift. The final spread dramatically differs from the dominant pastel pinks, blues and grays that have come before to show a fireworks “Happy Birthday” message brightly popping against the black night sky.

Corderoy and Berger have concocted a splendid followup (Hubble, Bubble, Granny Trouble, 2012) full of gentle humor spotlighting the special relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters. (Picture book. 4-7)

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CLICK, CLACK, BOO! A Tricky Treat

Cronin, Doreen Illus. by Lewin, Betsy Atheneum (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-4424-6553-4

The barnyard animals love Halloween. Farmer Brown does not. Sounds like the perfect time for tricks and treats!

Since Farmer Brown wants nothing to do with the scary holiday, “he leaves a bowl of candy on the porch…draws the shades and locks the door.” Out in the barn, though, the party is just getting started. Saturated watercolors show Cow dressed as a skeleton, the chickens looking quite ghostly and the sheep donning witch hats. As field mice and cats arrive, creepy sounds begin. The “crunch, crunch, crunching” and the “creak, creak, creaking” lead to a “tap, tap, tapping.” Hearing them, Farmer Brown peeks out his window to investigate. Readers will chuckle and easily recognize “the dark creature standing beneath the trees.” The farmer, however, runs to his bedroom to pull the covers up over his head. Now the sounds repeat, as the figure comes closer. This time, though, the tapping is followed by a “quack, quack, quackle.” Wait—“Quackle??” Farmer Brown goes out to the porch to find the candy bowl gone and a note on the door announcing, “Halloween Party at the barn!”

The chorus of onomatopoeic phrases throughout the briskly paced text guarantees an interactive read-aloud, though fans of Duck’s earlier outings will miss their satiric bite.

Sweet and silly—good enough for Halloween. (Picture book. 3-6)

ZOMBELINA

Crow, Kristyn Illus. by Idle, Molly Walker (32 pp.) $14.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-8027-2803-6 Get ready to applaud the pluck of a young zombie with a passion for ballet.

Zombelina loves dancing: “I moonwalk with mummies and boogie with bats. / I wiggle with werewolves and rock out with rats. / I spin like a specter and glide like a ghost. / But I love to dance for my family the most.” With a vampire baby brother, a mother who is a witch and a mad scientist for a dad, this sure-footed protagonist comes from an eccentric clan supportive of her dream to be a ballerina. So on Saturday nights, she attends class with Madame Maladroit. Although her teacher is impressed with her talent, Zombelina’s classmates cringe and say she’s “taking [her] talents too far.” Here, Idle contrasts the studio’s ballerina-pink palette with the lime green presence of Zombelina, who has detached her leg from her hip socket in order to better execute a leg extension. The illustrations add fun and ably complement

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“Veteran Cuyler keeps the text flowing and sets a just-right pace for reading aloud.” from skeleton for dinner

Crow’s rollicking, rhyming text. Some pages provide lush spreads, including some that are aglow in red hues during the night of Zombelina’s debut. Others feature vignettes showing her dedicated practice of pliés and pirouettes, popping against the white background.

Budding ballerinas will surely appreciate this tale, but also share with any child who may need an example of what determination and practice can accomplish when applied to what one loves. (Picture book. 4-7)

SKELETON FOR DINNER

Cuyler, Margery Illus. by Terry, Will Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7398-3

Mother and daughter witch want to have skeleton for dinner. Is he on the menu or intended to be a guest?

Big Witch and Little Witch are proud of their yummy stew full of delightfully disgusting ingredients, such as “shark fins and snake skins, spider silk and centaur’s milk, catfish whiskers and banshee blisters.” Little Witch makes a list of the friends she wants to invite for dinner. She writes “Dinner” at the top, with Ghost, Ghoul and Skeleton below it and tacks it to a tree. When Skeleton reads it, he flies into a panic. Veteran Cuyler keeps the text flowing and sets a just-right pace for reading aloud. Poor Skeleton “rat-a-bat-tat[s] down the hill… / and jingle-jangle[s]” off to warn first Ghost and then Ghoul about what he fears the witches are planning. Terry chooses deep blue-greens and dark craggy trees to create the nightscape. Skeleton’s cool white and Ghost’s translucent wash of white make them glow on the page, whereas the warmer tones used for Ghoul and the bright green of Little Witch provide refreshing contrast. When Little Witch fails to find her friends to tell them about the dinner party, her despair sends Crow flying to the rescue.

A poison-ivy bouquet, full bowls of stew and happy friends bring the story to a satisfying close. Make sure to tuck in to this delicious tale. (Picture book. 3-6)

YOUR SKELETON IS SHOWING Rhymes of Blunder From Six Feet Under Cyrus, Kurt Illus. by Scrambly, Crab Disney Hyperion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 23, 2013 978-1-4231-3846-4

Cyrus pens a collection sure to make the most poetry-averse at least smile if

absurd, ludicrous or revolting. Whether the rhyming verse describes a skeleton obsessed with flossing his every bone or chants about Freddie, who picked his nose so much he died, Scrambly cleverly illustrates each unfortunate specter with a style reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s. The backgrounds have a textured look and set off what looks like pen-and-ink drawings with mostly white fill. In the case of “McBuck Buck,” the blue-gray wash of color represents “a pool of community drool.”

Even a familiar childhood rhyme provides inspiration: “Hoofprints. Feathers. Piles of dung! / Who is laid below? / Mysterious letters mark the stone: / EIEIO.” As the two wander, it is clear that the ghost pup and narrator are not terribly compatible. Eventually, they come across ghostly Ophelia Heft, who beckons to her dog from the clouds. By the book’s conclusion, though, the boy finds a new canine companion, orphaned when venal Mrs. McBride passed on.

The author’s sly humor coupled with the illustrator’s whimsically dark details will surely have primary-grade readers cackling. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)

MONSTER NEEDS A COSTUME

Czajak, Paul Illus. by Grieb, Wendy Scarletta Press (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-938063-09-1 Series: Monster & Me

What to wear for trick-or-treating? The perennial dilemma stumps Monster, who takes costume suggestions from a helpful boy, who narrates this rhyming tale.

Czajack tells the story in rollicking verse that propels readers through a trial-and-error process. Grieb’s Monster is an oversized fellow with yellow striped horns, a significant underbite and a generous tuft of purplish hair. Accommodating such a figure, with his big feet and long tail, is a challenge. The boy throws out many ideas. “I said to Monster, ‘Do you know what kind you’d want to wear?’ / An astronaut? A fireman? / A giant Bartlett pear?” But Monster changes his mind quite a bit, first wanting to be a cowboy, then a ballerina and then a ninja. When Monster imagines what he will look like in these costumes, the illustrator switches to black-and-white images. Kids will grin at the huge 20-gallon hat, the exhausting dance moves and Monster’s complete incompetence at stealth. Disheartened, Monster mopes and then has a brilliant idea moments before the pals set off to go trick-or-treating. The mash-up of the previous costumes recalls a solution many a young reader would make and results in a most successful Halloween night.

Given the jaunty flow of the story and the humorous details on every page, put this at the top of the list for unscary options come October. (Picture book. 3-6)

not laugh out loud.

A redheaded boy walks through a graveyard pondering the stories of those whose gravestones he passes. A lost ghost dog accompanies him. Each droll poem has an element of the |

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“Feder masterfully employs repetition of the more challenging words throughout the perfectly paced text, while Downing charmingly captures every mercurial emotion….” from spooky friends

LITTLE GHOST PARTY

Duquennoy, Jacques Illus. by Duquennoy, Jacques Abrams (8 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 20, 2013 978-1-4197-0985-2

Duquennoy, known best for his charming story The Ghost’s Dinner (1994), creates a book that readers must tilt, spin and jiggle in order to truly experience.

The text issues an invitation on the very first page: “Join the dance circle and…watch Little Ghost shake it!” A die-cut circle reveals a partially drawn ghost with a bright red hat, eyes and a smiling mouth; a loose metal chain outlines the shape of the specter on each side. Over this is a clear window of plastic so that the chains are enclosed and protected from overeager hands that may want to pull at them. Around the large center circle are six figures illustrating possible ways the chains can move to create different dances. The first are directional—“up high, down low, to the left”—but the last ones provoke smiles with names like “Thriller” and “Freestyle.” With only four such spreads in the book, the same conceit is further explored with worms arching and curling their backs, a cat whirling his tail clockwise and counterclockwise, and finally, Little Ghost in a purple hat showing off possible new hair styles. (This is the trickiest one, since the five small chains of hair need to be manipulated to fall in opposite directions.) And that’s pretty much it.

Although most kids may enjoy the challenge at first, the excitement is short-lived. (Novelty. 4-6)

SPOOKY FRIENDS

Feder, Jane Illus. by Downing, Julie Scholastic (40 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-545-47815-1 978-0-545-47816-8 paper Vampire Scarlet and mummy Igor are very good friends. “The trouble was, they could never agree on anything.”

In the first chapter, the two friends’ interests rarely mesh. “If Igor wanted to read, Scarlet wanted to sing. If Scarlet wanted to nap, Igor wanted to dance. / When Igor made a tall tower, Scarlet made it short.” It comes as no surprise that they want different kinds of sandwiches when it’s time for a snack. Alternating shouts for “gooseberry jelly” and “chestnut butter” grow increasingly louder until the friends hit upon the obvious solution. The second chapter finds them heatedly debating what name would be perfect for their pet cat’s new kitten. When they discover a litter of eight, all the names they have come up with are put to good use. The final chapter is one of artistic differences. After an art duel that produces colorful shapes and a “tree with branches,” they arrange their separate pieces to form a lovely display that has one last blank 118

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spot. Readers will cheer when they see how the two buddies have filled it. Feder masterfully employs repetition of the more challenging words throughout the perfectly paced text, while Downing charmingly captures every mercurial emotion in the detailed ballpoint pen, watercolor and digital illustrations.

Move over, Frog and Toad, to make room for this delightful new title. (Early reader. 5-8)

THE SPOOKY BOX

Gonyea, Mark Illus. by Gonyea, Mark Henry Holt (32 pp.) $14.99 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-8050-8813-7

A sophisticated attempt to build suspense and awaken the imagination may ultimately fail to deliver a satisfying conclusion for most readers.

A loud knock at the door alerts the narrator that a box has come. It is black; it is “a spooky box.” The narrator wonders, “what’s inside?” A graphic adventure follows as the text invites readers to speculate on just what might be in the mysterious box. “It could be full of bats! / Or filled with rats!”—or spiders, bones, snakes or a cake. Utilizing a limited palette of starkly contrasting black, white and yellowy orange, Gonyea imagines vivid dark shapes that emerge from the box with creepy intensity. Serpents with white-triangle eyes zigzag across one spread, while a squid unfurls itself from the black square’s confines.

Then there is a thump that heightens the anticipation. It cannot be candy, but maybe it’s a “ton of toads” or a robot “with laser eyes and a kung-fu claw!” If readers are brave enough, they will discover a vertical flap that opens to reveal…“two more spooky boxes!” And so it goes on for another two spreads, never revealing what’s in the boxes but asking readers to speculate some more—and disappointing many, who will justifiably feel they’ve been left hanging.

For those pleasantly surprised and inspired by the title’s open-endedness, though, possibilities abound for creative writing or art activities. (Picture book. 4-7)

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! WHO’S THERE?

Goossens, Philippe Illus. by Goossens, Philippe NorthSouth (32 pp.) $15.95 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-0-7358-4122-2

In this guess-who’s-knocking title, the clues are either too vague or too easy, the story is slight, and the illustrations are a tad pedestrian.

Set in a wintry clime at night, some things knock four separate times on Bear’s door. They each beckon to him. The first calls, “Boo!” A turn of the page reveals what Bear guesses is outside. On those pages, the illustration does not entirely fill the

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page but has the rounded border of a thought balloon. A ghost, an ogre, the “big bad wolf ” and a “wicked witch” each demand to be let in. Readers witness poor Bear becoming increasingly frightened as the mysterious voices persist. Is his imagination getting the best of him, or is he right to be so cautious? The last rapping on the door, however, results in Bear declaring, “Go away! I do not open the door to strangers.” To his relief it is not a stranger but his tiny friend, Archibald. Bear is so happy to see his pal, he wipes the sweat off his brow and smiles. But then Archibald announces a surprise for Bear. He has brought the exact same scary creatures Bear was worrying about to dinner.

Though Goossens attempts to create an interactive guessing game for readers and perhaps deliver a message of caution to not trust strangers, it fails to coalesce into an engaging read.

Pass. (Picture book. 4-6)

MONSTERS ON THE LOOSE!

Hale, Bruce Illus. by Garbot, Dave Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $7.99 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-06-223706-4 Series: Seek and Solve Mysteries

A thief has stolen all the candy, and Frankenstein’s monster must solve the case in order to save Halloween.

In the manner of their previous Seek and Solve Mystery (Santa on the Loose, 2012), Hale and Garbot invite readers to help them figure out who is guilty of grabbing the treats. The opening spread shows portraits of the suspects with their possessions, including Vampire Bob, Joey Bones, Igor, Willy the Werewolf, Rowan the Witch and mummy Nefertiti. Readers must then try to spot Frankie in crowded cartoon settings, such as the cemetery, a haunted house, the pumpkin patch and a corn maze. Frankie’s pea green complexion matches those of witches, ghouls and various plants, making the search for him a bit of a challenge. When found, Frankie has a clue in his hand. As the objects accumulate, savvy readers will deduce who is the culprit.

For younger searchers, all the items are presented on a concluding spread to help them guess who has made off with the sweets.

Garbot packs the pages with silly details that many children will enjoy poring over. For those seeking a further challenge, a “Bonus Search” encourages another flip through the book.

Ultimately, this average effort fails to engage and challenge like the I Spy series, but it does offer a holidaythemed activity to do when all of the candy is eaten and the costumes are put away. (Picture book. 5-8)

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BLACK AND BITTERN WAS NIGHT

Heidbreder, Robert Illus. by Martz, John Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-55453-302-2

Halloween night brings an epic battle between hordes of “SKUL-A-MUGMUGS” (skeletons) and the “tyke-tots” (children) who want to go out trick-or-treating.

Heidbreder crafts his tale in rhyming nonsensical text, while Martz illustrates in a cartoon style with a strict palette of black, grays, white, yellow, orange and reds. Set against the dark night, the menacing skeletons boast how they will “brain-frizz tall-bigs. / Halloween they’ll deep nix. / They’ll shup-clup inside / nasty Noras and Nicks!” But the costumed kids rally—they are not “splooked-out” like their parents. On a vibrantly red double-page spread, the two forces splendidly clash on a neighborhood street: “The scare-fest crish-crashed, / up-over-round under… // …but strong-sure tyke-tots / out movvered SKUL thunder.” Soon the skeletons disappear, adults shake off their fears, and the children resume their Halloween quest for candy.

All ends well on a high fueled by the exciting victory and the profusion of “sweet-treats.” Some readers will enjoy puzzling out the meanings of the many made-up words or simply relish how the language sounds when read aloud. But others may not be up to the task of so much decoding, even if the impeccably detailed pictures help provide much-needed clues to the action.

This Dylan Thomas–Dr. Seuss–Lewis Carroll love child has the power to enrapture, with lots of practice. (Picture book. 5-8)

THE MONSTORE

Lazar, Tara Illus. by Burks, James Aladdin (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4424-2017-5

If only monsters could be purchased to help out with everyday challenges such as gobbling up icky casseroles, providing the perfect amount of glow when it is dark or “frighten[ing] pesky little sisters.”

This is a story of such a place—a monstore—that is difficult to find and has a very strict refund policy: “No returns.

No exchanges.” Zach is fed up with his younger sister Gracie’s intrusions into his bedroom. At the Monstore, he purchases a fearsome, red, three-eyed creature named Manfred to keep Gracie out of his space. Instead, Manfred shows Gracie his hiding place, and then they both scare Zach. Exasperated with Manfred’s performance, he tries to take him back. The Monstore manager holds firm to his policy but suggests he add another. “Monsters make bigger scares in pairs.” And so

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things go with Mookie and Mojo and more, until the house is full of ineffectual creatures. Zach decides to move to the basement, but soon Gracie comes to him for help with a particularly scary, “glitzy, glittery thing.” The siblings’ relationship mended, Gracie comes up with a plan to deal with the outof-control monster overflow. Appealing though the premise is, the joke is dragged out a few monsters too many, and though Burks’ illustrations have a pleasant, Pixar-esque feel, the story just isn’t terribly memorable.

No need to invest in this “store.” (Picture book. 4-7)

TRICK-OR-TREAT A Happy Haunter’s Halloween

Leppanen, Debbie Illus. by Carpenter, Tad Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-4424-3398-4 978-1-4424-3399-1 e-book

Overall, Leppanen’s collection of 15 poems—some clever, some funny, some creepy and some ho-hum—should get kids in a Halloween frame of mind.

On October 31st, just about anything can happen, as these selections prove. Readers can consider what they would do if their shadows stopped following them or how they would cope with a wickedly grinning monster that they notice only when brushing their teeth before bed (it’s perched on this child’s head). Some poems allow kids to ponder how different life might be if it was always populated with such creepy creatures.

If their mothers were mummies, would they serve “worms on toast” for breakfast or pack “spider eggs for lunch”? Do pingpong-playing skeletons get the shivers, since they are nothing but bones? Is it ever a good idea to invite a ravenously hungry ghoul into the house? Does it make sense that witches ride mops instead of broomsticks when it rains? Carpenter digitally illustrates each poem with a double-page spread saturated with bright colors against the relatively darker backgrounds of nighttime. His cartoon characters comically display the slight frights they experience.

But nothing is new or truly exciting here, leaving this average effort lacking in tricks or treats. (Picture book/poetry.

5-8)

MADELINE AND THE OLD HOUSE IN PARIS

Marciano, John Bemelmans Illus. by Marciano, John Bemelmans Viking (48 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 8, 2013 978-0-670-78485-1

Much-beloved and as spirited as ever, Madeline is back in Paris to help out a 120

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miserable ghost and create a scare of her own intended for the school’s headmaster.

Marciano (Madeline at the White House, 2011) continues his series of sequels to his grandfather’s original works. With gouache, pen and ink, he closely duplicates the style of the classic titles and even includes a number of pages executed in black on yellow. The rhythm of the rhyming text is also reminiscent, as when the action begins with an unexpected visitor: “One afternoon at a quarter past five, / a long black car pulled into the drive.” It’s Lord Cucuface, who conducts an inspection of the premises and discovers a “most / splendid telescope,” which he promptly takes with him. But in the middle of that night, Madeline hears moaning and groaning. It’s the ghost of an astronomer, who needs the telescope back in time to observe a comet he’s been waiting 221 years to see so that he can rest in peace.

The kids help Madeline and Pepito pull off a clever trick that involves a convincing costume and a bit of dramatic theater. Of course Lord Cucuface is scared silly, so that by the final page, “a girl and a boy and a ghost were peeping / at a rare and brilliant sight, / a comet streaking through the night.”

Encore, Madeline! (Picture book. 4-8)

OL’ CLIP-CLOP A Ghost Story

McKissack, Patricia C. Illus. by Velasquez, Eric Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2265-4

Storyteller McKissack crafts a spinetingling tale set during colonial times about a greedy man who just may get the scare of his life.

The author captivates from the start. John Leep “had a mean streak in him that ran the length of his long, thin body.

Wasn’t poverty that made him hard. He had plenty of money.

But John Leep had a stingy heart.” So he sets off on his horse to evict the widow Mayes. As they travel, the horse’s hooves make a steady “clip-clop.” Periodically, Leep pauses, believing he hears another horse and rider following him. Velasquez wisely keeps the focus on John Leep’s face. As John goes further away from town, the scenes begin to envelop him in shadow. His arrogant countenance slowly transforms, first showing annoyance, then worry and then fear. He plays a trick to cheat the widow, but something is listening. On his ride home, he goes faster and faster, and the sounds of the mysterious rider keep pace, frenzied, onomatopoeic hoofbeats punctuating the text: “Clippitycloppityclippitycloppity….” He makes it home, but he is never seen again. Some say “Ol’ Clip-Clop… / …SWALLOWED HIM WHOLE!!!!!!!” And on the last page the illustrator paints a most horrifying specter poised to do just that.

This splendid “jump story” is not for the faint of heart, but readers who relish edge-of-the-seat suspense done impeccably will be well-satisfied. (Picture book. 6-10)

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“The title poses a tantalizing question that leads gracefully from the real to the surreal.” from how big could your pumpkin grow?

HOW BIG COULD YOUR PUMPKIN GROW?

Minor, Wendell Illus. by Minor, Wendell Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-0-399-24684-5

Minor focuses his attention on the symbolic gourd of fall, juxtaposing national landmarks or record-setting structures with visions of impossibly enormous pumpkins or jack-o’-lanterns.

The title poses a tantalizing question that leads gracefully from the real to the surreal. What follows in each full-bleed spread is a famous site—man-made or natural—painted with watercolor and gouache that majestically captures the impressiveness of the place. He includes in these illustrations an image of a wildly oversized pumpkin. It’s a quirky notion, and it kind of works. Few children would seek out a book on important places to see across the United States. A better bet is a title like this one, which imparts that information while also making them laugh at the sheer humor in the pictures. One image shows the highest roller coaster feeding into the open mouth of a fierce-looking jack-o’-lantern. Another pumpkin innocently stops traffic when it is placed in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet another smiles up close as a rocket takes off from Cape Canaveral. From Connecticut to California, 14 places are featured. More information about them is provided at the end of the book.

Playing with scale and prompting readers to think big ensures a quick and entertaining tour to awesome sights.

(Picture book. 4-8)

LULU GOES TO WITCH SCHOOL

O’Connor, Jane Illus. by Sinclair, Bella Harper/HarperCollins (48 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Jul. 1, 2013 978-0-06-223351-6 978-0-06-223350-9 paper Series: I Can Read!

Lulu Witch is excited to begin witch school—that is, until a know-it-all classmate spoils the experience. Will the two witches ever get along?

This reissue of O’Connor’s 1990 title features updated illustrations from Sinclair. Her pictures have a retro appeal that gives this quaint tale for beginning readers a classic touch. When children are not busy practicing their reading skills, they will have fun spotting the bugs, mouse, lizard or scorpion in each of the spot illustrations. The author deftly utilizes repetition and familiar sight words to create a story about a situation most kids will recognize. Lulu is ready to learn and make new friends, but Sandy Witch boasts about what she has and what she already knows how to do. (She may be a bit jealous of Lulu’s skill on the |

broom or the compliment Lulu receives from the teacher about her new dress.) Sandy makes fun of Lulu and continually tries to outdo her. When Lulu wakes up with lizard pox and cannot go to school, she’s at first glad to be away from Sandy Witch but then quickly gets bored. While Lulu walks to school on her first day back, she decides to not let Sandy Witch’s comments about her spots unnerve her. But when Sandy Witch comes to class with her own set of spots, the two girls finally begin to mend their relationship.

While new readers will giggle at details such as the teacher’s name (Miss Slime) or the rat-liver sandwich Lulu eats for lunch, mostly they will appreciate the story, which resonates with their own experience. (Early reader. 5-8)

FILBERT The Good Little Fiend Oram, Hiawyn Illus. by Liao, Jimmy Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7636-5870-0

An adorable little fiend that looks a bit like a Wild Thing is—disappointingly—anything but.

Mommy and Daddy Fiend have great expectations for their little one. They want him to be fierce, ferocious, “gruesome and ghastly,” just like them. But Filbert has a different nature. Instead, he is helpful, prefers nice stories and dreams about flowers. His parents send him off for the first day of school decked out in “his fiery red coat, horrifying horns, and monstrous mittens” and the hope that he will “be a proper little fiend.” But quiet Filbert refuses to participate in the monstrous activities and is banished to “the grassy Good Spot” (which might as well be a cork tree). Filbert’s happy reverie is interrupted when a little angel crash-lands. They soon discover their similar predicaments: Florinda is a not-very-good angel who has been banished from Angel School. They hatch a plan to exchange clothes, go back to their respective schools and really freak out their peers, ultimately leading to their respective acceptances. Liao ably paints the contrasting settings in watercolor and gouache and lends further charm to Oram’s appealing characters.

For fans of Ferdinand and anyone who wants to share the message of celebrating or at least respecting differences.

(Picture book. 4-6)

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“Readers learn more than just how slugs, flies, worms and sow bugs feast on the former jack-o’-lantern.

Time and weather play their parts, too.” from rotten pumpkin

GHOST IN THE HOUSE

introduced in the text, and a page devoted to “Classroom Investigations” suggests ways to engage in the scientific method and conduct experiments with pumpkins.

An ecology lesson, an inspiration for readers’ theater— or a compelling read all on its own. (Nonfiction. 5-12)

Paquette, Ammi-Joan Illus. by Record, Adam Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7636-5529-7

Counting to five and back provides the underlying structure of Paquette’s innocuous ghost tale that challenges the preschool set to guess what spooky creature makes each sound.

A friendly ghost in pale blue reveals himself after shouting “Boo!” At first he believes he is all alone until “he goes slip-slide / with a swoop and a glide / Until he hears… / A GROAN!” On the far right side of the facing page is a glimpse of the eyes of a figure and his bandaged hand. Astute readers will not have too much of a challenge guessing the mummy, monster, skeleton and witch from the visual hints that follow. Once the five creepy buddies are together, they get a bit of a shock when “a sudden FLASH / Makes them topple and crash, / And suddenly they hear… / ‘WHO’S THERE?’ ” In an amusing though not original twist, the spooks are the ones frightened away and run from the innocuous little boy: “Five, four, three, two, one…!” Record creates the benign characters digitally, and the spreads all appear to have the textured yet uncluttered look of collage.

Although not particularly memorable, this slip of a story offers mild entertainment for the youngest readers.

(Picture book. 2-6)

ROTTEN PUMPKIN

Schwartz, David M. Photos by Kuhn, Dwight Creston (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-1-939547-03-3

Carving a pumpkin for Halloween is a beloved tradition, but all too soon, that gourd falls prey to a host of scary, gross and unbelievably fascinating creatures.

Leave it to Schwartz and Kuhn (What in the Wild: Mysteries of Nature Concealed and Revealed, 2010) to combine their considerable talents again to create a page-turning title on decomposition. The author boldly chooses to give voice to the various decomposers that visit old Jack. Readers hear from animals, mold, fungi, rot, bacteria and, periodically, from the pumpkin itself. The photographs zoom in for closeups of the characters in this slightly horrific performance.

Fuzzy Penicillium, slime mold and spore cases “that look like tiny red balloons” all gruesomely impress. Readers learn more than just how slugs, flies, worms and sow bugs feast on the former jack-o’-lantern. Time and weather play their parts, too. One seed waits as “the animals came, the molds grew, the pumpkin collapsed into a heap of goo….” When the spring rains come, it begins “pushing roots downward and stem upward. If all goes well, my flowers will form fruit.”

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SPLAT THE CAT What Was That?

Scotton, Rob Illus. by Scotton, Rob HarperFestival (16 pp.) $6.99 paper | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-06-197863-0 Only the most avid fans of Splat the Cat will cheer for this lift-the-flap Halloween story.

Cats Splat and Spike and their mouse friend, Seymour, have finished trick-or-treating except for one last house. Splat thinks it looks too scary, and Spike may have agreed, but Seymour runs right up to the seemingly haunted place. Every page of this book except for the first has a flap that opens either right, left, up or down. Such interactive features usually add an entertaining, interactive element to a story. Unfortunately, these flaps seem arbitrary rather than carefully planned to present a surprise; they are also not easily designed for young hands to intuitively manipulate. The story, though slim, consists of the two cats’ search for Seymour. As they go through the house, ghosts flit about, a spider casts a menacing shadow on the wall, and they come to a secret room full of vampire ducks. Odd sounds that gurgle, grumble, groan and “ker-klunk” add to the creepy gloom and grow increasingly louder. The reveal, however, is as anticlimactic as the flaps.

Given Splat’s popularity and the potential of a haunted house, this lackluster effort is a real disappointment. (Picture book. 3-6)

A VERY WITCHY SPELLING BEE

Shannon, George Illus. by Fearing, Mark Harcourt (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-15-206696-3 When young witch Cordelia enters a spelling bee, not only does she need to rely on her skills as an accomplished speller, but she must also use her wits to foil the competition…in the nicest way possible.

Cordelia really loves spelling and is quite good at it, but Mama thinks she may be too young to enter the Witches’ Double Spelling Bee. The contest is held only once every 10 years, and Cordelia wants to try. “I’ve studied. I’ve practiced.

I’m ready to win!” Little does Cordelia know that the most recent winner, mean-spirited Beulah Divine, intends to keep her 130-year-long winning streak going. The night of the bee

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arrives, and the rules are clear. When called, the contestant selects a letter from a bowl, then must “choose something onstage and spell it. Using the letter…picked, cast a spell that transforms what you choose into something new. Spell the new word.” Cordelia impresses the crowd by using the “R” she selected to transform a “S-H-O-E into a H-O-R-S-E.” At the end, it’s down to sweet Cordelia and vicious Beulah.

Other witches might be cowed, but Cordelia believes in herself. She pulls out an “R” to zap Beulah, who is a F-I-E-N-D, and change her into a F-R-I-E-N-D. Shannon and Fearing combine their considerable talents to create a most bewitching tale of self-confidence and perseverance. (Picture book. 4-8)

HEDGEHUG’S HALLOWEEN

Sutton, Benn Illus. by Pinto, Dan Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-06-196104-5

An adorable hedgehog forgets about the upcoming Halloween party. Now the day is here, and he has no costume to wear. Thank goodness he’s got a determined and creative trio of friends to help him out.

Pinto and Sutton (Hedgehug: A Sharp Lesson in Love, 2011) tackle a topic that is all too familiar—what to wear? Hannah the armadillo is the first on the scene to help her friend.

When he “slip[s] his costume carefully over his head” and yells, “Boooooo!” a terrible rip turns Hedgehug the ghost into a wedge of Swiss cheese. Edie the owl uses purple balloons and a few leaves to turn Hedgehug into a bunch of grapes…before they all pop. Doris the rabbit snips and clips fabric for a mummy costume, but he trips when he tries to walk. With his hopes of attending the party unraveling, he begins to return home. But on his way, he notices that “something [is] following him.” He nervously turns to the shadowy figure only to find out it is his friends who have thought up “the perfect costume”—a cactus! The vividly hued illustrations, created in part by textured collage, nicely complement the urgent dialogue propelling the story, while the spunky earnestness that shines through the simple features of the characters and the energy captured in their silhouettes are endearing.

A Halloween story that’s more cozy than creepy. (Picture book. 3-7)

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SCAREDY SQUIRREL PREPARES FOR HALLOWEEN A Safety Guide for Scaredies

Watt, Mélanie Illus. by Watt, Mélanie Kids Can (64 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-894786-87-4

Popular Scaredy Squirrel sports fangs as he beams from the cover of this “Safety Guide for Scaredies.”

Following the format of his previous safety guide (Scaredy Squirrel Prepares for Christmas, 2012), a preface warns that “Halloween is creeping up quickly, and it’s time to gather the courage to face the ghoulish festivities!”

Eight brief chapters follow, offering over-the-top advice on decorations, costumes, trick-or-treating, candy and party planning. Of course, “if all else fails…play dead.” The mix of diagrams (how to make it through a haunted house as quickly as possible), charts (scariness factor of costumes), lists (“unscary black items to decorate with” include Black Forest cakes and bowling balls) and step-by-step instructions (how to carve a friendly-faced pumpkin) offer kids new ways of reading information. Good tips (inspecting candy before eating it) and comically bad (play gloomy organ music to slow the tempo of a party) intermingle and are delivered with the same earnest tone by the always-cautious, comically overprepared and endearing squirrel. Watt certainly has hit on a formula that provides readers with a familiar but guaranteed-to-be-hilarious experience.

Although fans of Scaredy’s hypercontrolled world will eagerly devour each page, this may not be the best title to introduce a child to the series; start them with one of his stories instead. (Picture book. 5-8)

LITERALLY DISTURBED Tales to Keep You Up at Night

Winters, Ben H. Illus. by Watkins, Adam F. Price Stern Sloan (64 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 15, 2013 978-0-8431-7194-5

Novelist Winters (The Mystery of the Missing Everything, 2011) applies his pen to create 30 rhyming, slightly shivery poems.

The subtitle claims this poetry aims to “keep you up at night.” And if it does not, surely most of Watkins’ wonderfully creepy illustrations will, often hinting at dreadful outcomes not indicated in the text. In “How I Check for Monsters Before I Go to Sleep,” the verse visits each place the narrator thinks a monster may be hiding. “I turn on the lights in the bathroom, / and once all the shadows are gone / I check that there’s no growling fiends / in the tub or on the john.” The tone is light, but the accompanying illustration

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reveals something more sinister—waiting in the closet is something with a sinuous tail and muscled forearm leading to a hand with ultralong, black fingernails. And so it is with the rest of the book, with uneasy experiences taking place in “The Attic,” “The Deep End” and while “Hiking.” The breezy, witty voice on display does not seem to entirely jibe with the illustrations, which alone could be the cause of a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

That said, the quality of the poetry is quite worthy of sharing around a campfire or at a slumber party; in the classroom, use it to demonstrate the wide range of forms creative verse can take. (Poetry. 7-12)

ROMPING MONSTERS, STOMPING MONSTERS

Yolen, Jane Illus. by Murphy, Kelly Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-7636-5727-7

The menagerie of monsters from Yolen and Murphy’s previous pairing (Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters, 2011) returns for an adventure at the playground.

All sorts and sizes of monsters gather at Creepy Commons to have some fun. The author uses two- or three-word phrases to build a steady rhyming text describing the full range of activities taking place. “Monsters stretch. / Monsters twirl. // Monsters catch. / Monsters hurl. // Monsters tumble, / Run, and lope. / Monsters jump / A monster rope.”

The cadence will be soothing to young ears, leaving the eyes of toddlers and preschoolers to discover the playful details found throughout the soft-hued illustrations painted in oil, acrylic and gel. This diverse bunch is cute and cuddly without coming across as overly sweet. Some have four eyeballs, and some have only one. Pointy horns and handlike hair sprout from curious places on this happily rambunctious crew. Big and small, young and old—all cavort on slides and swings.

Occasionally, there is a mishap—“Monsters in / Three-legged races / Fall upon / Their Monster faces”—but it is nothing a “monster-sicle” treat cannot fix.

Young ones will want to join in on this monster romp again and again, since it is all so silly, comforting and familiar. (Picture book. 2-4)

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interactive e-books A PALE BLUE DOT

Bova, Ben Digital Book Production $1.99 | Apr. 26, 2013 1.0; Apr. 26, 2013

A rather lifeless search for life in the great beyond.

In a story inspired by the discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Burnell, who was doing grunge work at an observatory for Cambridge University in 1967 when she identified the first one, Bova presents 15-year-old Tom Daniels, spending the summer with his father and searching the heavens for the next “pale blue dot”—an Earthmate. Tom is also doing grunge work, and so for his birthday, he decides to steal a late-night visit to the control center to see what he might see. The language of the text can be a bit too striving—when Tom lights up the big telescope, he sees “Stars and more stars, big groady clouds of glowing gas hanging out there in deep space. Better than cool. Radical”—and the accompanying electronic music may pall. The only active interaction with the story is via an invitation to join a Twitter discussion. There is, however, one very tender and meaningful story element: Tom’s father asks if he would like to author a paper with him about a planet that Tom has seen during his nighttime raid on the control center. He also explains to Tom the truth that science rarely proceeds by great discoveries but by the gradual accrual of knowledge, like a cathedral being built a brick at a time.

A bit of science in a very minor key. (Science fiction/iPad app. 8-12)

NOISY BUG SING-A-LONG

Himmelman, John Illus. by Himmelman, John Dawn Publications $4.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 1.0; Jun. 4, 2013

Tree crickets ring like telephones high in the trees, and mole crickets call “dirt, dirt” from their tunnels in the ground, taking animal sounds far from the familiar moo and meow.

Accurately recorded insect sounds accompany the detailed illustrations and reveal the critters behind many familiar noises of summer. Where the 2013 printed book of the same name that this was taken from simply provided onomatopoeic spellings of each sound—“chirp,” “reeeeeeeeeee,” “squeaka”—this app gives kids the sonic specifics they hunger for, providing a value-added experience. Readers will enjoy identifying these bug songs in their

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“This simple yet substantive story gives toddlers a valuable primer on color and music.” from cat doorman’s little red wagon

own backyards. Kid-friendly, additional information about each species appears in a section called “Bug Sounds.” What budding lepidopterist won’t be excited to learn that tiger moths make ultrasonic squeaks to scare bats away or that insects use their bodies rather than vocal cords to make sounds? There’s one screen per bug, and on each one, there is a very cool, interactive sound wave graph and an explanation of each sound’s purpose. Given the high quality of the insect recordings, though, it’s too bad the narrator sounds like he recorded his track in a cave.

Though not exactly a traditional singalong, readers will nevertheless find themselves ch-ch-ch-ing like a katydid and perhaps even joining in with the “Concert of Sound” when all the bugs sing together. (iPad informational app. 3-8)

THE LONELY BEAST ABC

Judge, Chris Illus. by Judge, Chris James Kelleher $2.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 2.0; Jun. 1, 2013

Blinking its yellow eyes, the eponymous Beast (The Lonely Beast, 2011) squires diapered digerati through the ABCs in this simple but (largely) satisfying app.

Though a black, hairy and (except for those eyes) featureless silhouette, the Beast comes off as an agreeable tour guide in Judge’s cleanly drawn and brightly colored scenes.

On each screen, a large single letter (shown in upper- and lowercase) starts a declarative sentence (“Y is for yo-yo”) that is read—repeatedly, with taps—by the author. With further taps and, usually, help from familiar animals or other figures, the Beast rows by in a Boat as fish flit out of sight, pounds away on Drums, emits a raspberry through an attached Elephant trunk, models a series of Hats and Kicks balls belonging to a variety of sports as off-screen crowds cheer. Children can also pop bubbles for a Crab, place various foods atop a Fork, consume Ice- Cream and an Orange, and play a Xylophone on the way to a noisy Zoo. The design is somewhat inflexible, as there is no way to skip around aside from swiping back or forth one screen at a time, and restarts require either closing the app or reaching a “Start Over” button at the end. Nevertheless, the touch-activated effects offer some compensation with a range of pleasing, often surprising sounds and animations.

Pleasantly unprepossessing from A to Z. (iPad alphabet app. 2-4)

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RED IN BED

On, Josh daniel logeman $0.99 | Feb. 13, 2013 1.0.2; May 31, 2013 This simple yet substantive story gives toddlers a valuable primer on color and music.

The story begins with seven little characters—they look like peas—snuggled in bed. Each one represents both a color in the rainbow and a note on the heptatonic scale. Tapping each colorful sphere produces a cheery note, with the exception of Red, who honks instead of dinging, as it’s feeling under the weather. “Don’t worry Red / we will color for you,” says Orange, as all of the other colors tumble out the door. Each subsequent screen finds the beadlike characters hard at work to color things that correspond to their particular hues. But each one also picks up the slack for Red, who is home sick. Blue colors the sea and the sky, for example, but it also tints a fire truck—blue. Little fingers help bring the colors to life by tapping on the named elements; each one dings except the incorrectly colored item, which produces a noise that might be what a question mark sounds like. When Red starts feeling better, it learns that all of its items are the wrong color. Tapping the miscolored items returns them to their proper color, and as night approaches, the dots head back to bed. Available in English (with either American or British spellings), French, Spanish and Hungarian.

A solid and satisfying offering on all fronts. (requires iPad 2 & above) (iPad storybook app. 1-5)

KING RA RA COWBOY

Seamons, Kieron Sandman Animation Studio $0.00 | Feb. 28, 2013 Series: King Ra Ra 1.2; Mar. 13, 2013

In a frantic frolic lit up by bright colors and raw physical comedy, an African king’s eager-to-please subjects oblige when he decides to play “cowboy.”

Looking like an orange tribble attached to a pipe-stem body, King Ra Ra enthusiastically dons boots, Stetson and carrot “guns” to become “probably the first Cowboy ever, in Africa.” Following his sudden collision with a tree after an ill-fated attempt to lasso a buffalo, his chortling animal subjects—a pink elephant, a purple giraffe and others with similarly unlikely hues—don silly cow costumes to give him safer targets. This they come to regret after King Ra Ra consults the Cowboy Handbook and learns about “branding,” but after seeing him shoot a derisive insect and fall on his own hot branding iron, all gather around in a final scene to fill a cooling vat with milk from their udders. “Everyone was happy in the jungle!!” The general ridiculousness of all this is

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enhanced by many tap-activated wriggles, giggles and growls in the cartoon scenes, as well as a particularly animated (optional) narrator who frequently departs from the printed text to deliver warnings or exclamations in a broad Swahili accent.

But along with a spindly plot, the high level of cartoon pseudo-violence and the generic African setting only cause this to bite the dust. (iPad storybook app. 6-8)

JACK THE WOLF

Yabra Yabra $1.99 | May 23, 2013 1.1; Jun. 27, 2013

A saccharine forest-friendship tale chock-full of cute little bugs, frogs, spiders and other wildlife ready to pulse and giggle with a tap.

The story is cast (and also read by the optional narrator) in an earnest tone despite an oxymoronic opening: “One day a young wolf cub named Jack sat in a forest clearing and stared at the night sky.” It pairs Jack with a fallen star that needs help from a spider and an owl to get back to the sky and reattached to its celestial home. Notwithstanding Jack’s “Oh, I feel so lonely sitting here by all by myself,” his cluttered house and each moonlit, elaborately finished, cartoon-style woodland scene is positively festooned with large-eyed small animals. They leap, croak, flit away, wake up, fall down or otherwise respond to taps while background music tinkles away. And just to add some confusion to the sugar rush, a shadowy, wolf-shaped figure lurks in the bushes in two scenes before slinking away entirely. What’s that about? Readers who (rightly) judge the story worth no more than a quick run-through will find as diversions five coloring pages and five jigsaw puzzles. These are, happily, accessible from any screen.

Pretty at first glance, but unlikely to engage children more than superficially. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)

Errata: It has come to our attention that incorrect ISBNs appeared with two books reviewed in our July 1, 2013, issue. The correct information appears below.

Flora & Ulysses DiCamillo, Kate Illus. by Campbell, K.G. Candlewick (240 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 24, 2013 978-0-7636-6040-6 The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales Gelfand, Shoshana Boyd Illus. by Hall, Amanda Barefoot (80 pp.) $19.99 | Sep. 1, 2013 978-1-84686-884-9

This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Louise Brueggemann • Connie Burns • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Lisa Dennis • Robin L. Elliott • Laurie Flynn • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Ruth I. Gordon • Melinda Greenblatt • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Joy Kim • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Susan Dove Lempke • Peter Lewis • Wendy Lukehart • Lauren Maggio • Joan Malewitz • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • Lisa Moore • R. Moore • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Erika Rohrbach • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mindy Schanback • Katie Scherrer • Stephanie Seales • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Karin Snelson • Bette Wendell-Branco • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko •

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indie Muriel Spark Time in Her Fiction Her Sixth Sense

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: Radium Baby by St. John Karp....................................................... 132

Arthurton Bruno, Linette CreateSpace (108 pp.) $12.95 paper | Mar. 23, 2013 978-1-4827-8829-7

Saving Baby by Jo Anne Normile; Lawrence Lindner.................. 136

Radium Baby

Karp, St. John Remora House (246 pp.) $9.99 paper $3.99 e-book Apr. 25, 2013 978-0-9892630-0-9

An informed yet dry scholarly essay examining the significance of time in Muriel Spark’s fiction.

Author of 22 novels, award-winning Scottish writer Dame Muriel Spark is perhaps most famous for her work The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). In this extended essay, Bruno focuses on this and four other novels—Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) and The Driver’s Seat (1970)—as a way of exploring Spark’s fragmented and cyclical approach to time in her fiction.

Bruno begins by examining how Spark’s life is mirrored in her fiction, addressing the role of war, religion, thrift and economy, and she then goes on to critically investigate the books themselves. The theme of time is carefully intertwined with that of memory; the manner in which Spark disrupts chronology in her fiction is tackled with aplomb. Bruno also emphasizes Spark’s interest in natural cycles, such as the passing of the seasons, as well as her use of complex time shifts intended to imitate violent disruptions in life. The reluctance to examine Spark’s entire body of work makes for a rather stunted study, although the author succeeds in working methodically through each of the chosen novels, drawing out relevant strands and providing sharp textual analysis. An awkward turn of phrase can sometimes discredit Bruno’s argument, however: “A pattern also exists in the confusion of the modern world. It is for the individual to search for it.” The result is a style both tangled and stuffy. Throughout, the essay can sometimes come across as a reworked graduate dissertation, particularly with regard to its repetitious statements of intent. The dissertation style might not engage a nonacademic readership, although it will certainly appeal to Spark’s dedicated fan base.

With the tenor of a thoroughly researched student essay, this insightful book will appeal to fans eager to learn more about a talented author.

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11 Stories

Cander, Chris Rubber Tree Press (234 pp.) $14.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Apr. 10, 2013 978-0-9889465-0-7 The superintendent of an 11-story apartment building in Chicago falls from the roof, remembering stories of the tenants on his way down.

As a teenage trumpet prodigy, Roscoe lost a finger in the gate of his apartment building’s elevator. His trumpet dream shattered, he became superintendent of that same building, where he’s lived all his life. Now living in a Spartan basement apartment, he sees to the needs of the building’s tenants. But Roscoe never gave up on the trumpet, and on a fateful autumn evening, he ascends to the roof of the building to play his trumpet for all the world to hear. The people down on the sidewalk are entranced.

Roscoe finishes and modestly bows—but loses his balance and begins his fatal plunge. Then the frame story launches: Time slows as Roscoe descends 11 floors, remembering a story about someone who lived on each floor he passes. Sylvia Freeman, a hoarder, lived on 10.

On seven lived exiled Joaquin Rojas, whose Cuban friend sent him books stolen from Castro’s library. David and Bill, the gay couple who lived on the sixth floor, split up over a stupid misunderstanding.

Mrs. Delpy lived on five, where her psychotic son Martin crawled out on the ledge, followed by Roscoe. Finally, on the second floor lived Roscoe’s only lifelong love, Iris Montgomery, with their illicit love consummated just once. Cander’s book isn’t quite Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), though. Some stories, like the perennially clogged toilet on eight, are playful anecdotes. Yet many of the tenants show heartbreaking spiritual damage; some of them are admirable, some not so much. Quiet, diffident Roscoe, who’s spent half a century supporting them all in one way or another, just as admirably supports these stories.

A wonderfully clever compilation.

Tani’s Search for the Heart

Egawa, Keith; Egawa, Chenoa Keith T.A. Egawa (40 pp.) $14.99 paper | May 27, 2013 978-0-615-76911-0 In this debut children’s picture book from siblings Keith (Madchild Running, 1999) and Chenoa Egawa, a young Native American girl sets out on a journey to discover the heart of the world.

Young Tani learns her tribe’s traditional stories while living with her grandmother in a Pacific Northwest Native American village.

Her grandmother dies shortly after logging trucks arrive in their community, and Tani goes to live with other relatives. But she soon leaves to complete a mission her grandmother assigned to her: to walk to the coast and discover the heart of the world. Several talking 128

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animals help her along the way, and she’s guided by the mystical presence of the Stick Indian, a forest creature who often appeared in her grandmother’s stories. The authors enhance the narrative with eyecatching illustrations, some in black charcoal and some in full color, that give readers a clear idea of each character. Tani wears jeans and her cousin, Droopy Drawers, wears a disposable diaper, establishing the book’s present-day setting, but the text has a largely timeless feel, much like the grandmother’s legends. The book contains more text than the average picture book, but it’s likely to appeal to picturebook readers ready for a more challenging read. The biographical information identifies the authors as Native American, specifically of Lummi and S’Klallam ancestry; although Tani’s tribe is never specified, it’s clearly part of the same Pacific Northwest culture as the authors’, which adds authenticity and credibility to their portrayal.

Although the lesson Tani learns about the heart of the world is a wellused theme in children’s literature, the authors’ unique voice makes the book a worthwhile addition to any child’s bookshelf.

Vibrant illustrations and a rare perspective bring life to this questing tale.

The Accidental Public Servant

El-Rufai, Nasir Ahmad CreateSpace (704 pp.) $24.95 paper | $24.95 e-book Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-4819-6740-2 A detailed firsthand account of failed leadership and corruption in the Nigerian government.

The most populous nation on the continent, Nigeria is known as the Giant of Africa. But despite its oil reserves and other natural resources, its economy has been more of a dwarf. “We are...the disappointment of Africa,” laments El-Rufai in his stimulating but somewhat heavy-going account of eight years as a minister in Nigeria’s government (1999–2007), serving in the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo. “I have just one motive in mind—to tell the story of my public service years to prepare the younger generation for the sorts of challenges they may face,” he says. The son of a bureaucrat, the author built a successful career as a quantity surveyor on construction projects. After “a series of accidents,” he was appointed to the government agency responsible for privatizing Nigeria’s public enterprises. In some of the book’s most compelling passages, he recalls encounters with the country’s endemic corruption and graft, including bid-rigging and kickback schemes. “I am here voluntarily to work, not to collect bribes,” he tells a deputy director of the privatization agency after being offered a “gift” of $250,000. Public servants in Nigeria, according to ElRufai, have two choices—“to join the dysfunctional and corrupt system” or “to want to change the system for the better in a way that benefits the many rather than the few.” In 2003, El-Rufai got the high-profile job of minister for the federal capital territory of Abuja after refusing to pay bribes to get his confirmation through the Nigerian Senate. Instructed by Obasanjo to “clean up this city and make it work,” he presided over a real estate boom, but by the end of the

“[A] powerful template for any organization seeking to make a difference.” from twenty-seven dollars and a dream

FLIRTING WITH THE UNINTERESTED Innovating in a “Sold, Not Bought” Category

president’s second term, he had antagonized other members of the political elite and, fearing for his life, went into exile in the United States. El-Rufai, preoccupied with bureaucratic minutiae of interest only to policy wonks, doesn’t bring Nigeria, its people and its culture alive. But in highlighting the failures of its political leadership, he has performed another public service.

The author’s eight years in government provide him with valuable insights into Nigeria’s “dysfunctional” political system.

Twenty-Seven Dollars and a Dream How Muhammad Yunus Changed the World and What It Cost Him Esty, Katharine Katharine Esty Company (312 pp.) $21.22 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-615-79993-3

An admiring portrait of a charismatic economist and entrepreneur who found his calling as Bangladesh’s “banker to the poor.”

Bankers aren’t often thought of as heroes, but Muhammad Yunus comes across as one in this flattering biography. Esty (Workplace Diversity, 1997, etc.) traces the unlikely career of Yunus, who jointly won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the Grameen Bank for battling poverty in his native Bangladesh. The “Twenty-Seven Dollars” in the book’s title refers to how Yunus stumbled onto his life mission in 1976 while a young college professor. He loaned $27 to a group of 42 villagers, allowing them to break free from the bonded labor that trapped many rural Bangladeshis. Yunus went on to found the Grameen Bank, specializing in microfinance— small, uncollateralized, easy-to-repay loans to poor residents, especially women. Esty chronicles the growth of the Grameen Bank, as well as Yunus’ later focus on “social businesses,” designed to address a social problem while making a profit. Microfinance as a policy tool has its critics, but Esty makes a compelling case that Yunus and his colleagues aided countless impoverished Bangladeshis while empowering women in a Muslim nation where they traditionally enjoyed few freedoms. Inspired by the author’s own interactions with Yunus, the fast-paced book holds lessons not only for social activists, but entrepreneurs as well. Yunus has founded more than 25 companies in industries ranging from telecommunications to renewable energy. Esty isn’t a detached biographer. She admits Yunus is her “hero” and that she aims to spread his story to a wider audience. As she sees it, Yunus is an iconoclastic visionary able to spur others to action yet ambitious enough to make powerful enemies. In 2011, he was ousted from the Grameen Bank in what the author believes was a politically motivated vendetta. Esty draws on her own background as a social psychologist and consultant to extract seven “patterns of action” she says underlie Yunus’ success. The result is a powerful template for any organization seeking to make a difference.

Relentless and inspiring, the life of Muhammad Yunus shows how capitalism and conscience need not be at odds.

Ferrante-Schepis, Maria; Maddock, G. Michael Advantage Media Group (195 pp.) $25.99 | $9.99 paper | Nov. 15, 2012 978-1-59932-369-5

Ferrante-Schepis and Maddock’s provocatively titled debut looks at the need for innovation in the deeply conservative insurance industry.

Insurance, as the authors put it, is a product “sold, not bought.” It’s not something people want, it’s something they grudgingly buy after a major life change or when a sales agent pitches them hard enough.

Worse, the people who really want insurance are precisely the ones to whom the insurance companies don’t want to sell. The first part of this book explains how the insurance industry has gotten itself into this situation, while the rest of the book describes how it can dig itself out.

Part 2 explores ways the industry can begin to entice consumers rather than having to hunt new customers down. Part 3 explores the use of language, transparency and social dynamics in connecting to potential customers, especially Gen Y customers, while Part 4 lays out a road map for creating and nurturing innovation. Finally, Part 5 toys with some ways that cultural icons, such as Mark Zuckerberg, American Express and the Occupy Wall Street movement could take over the insurance industry. Insurance executives have a well-earned reputation for being traditional and rules-oriented, which doesn’t exactly make them inclined toward major innovation. Yet, this book predicts that, eventually, some bright spark will come up with a new way of meeting today’s insurance needs—and the old-model insurance industry will go the way of the dodo. The authors make a compelling argument for the need for innovation and tell how to go about it, sprinkling the book with what-if scenarios designed to get the reader thinking. The suggestion of an innovation portfolio to diversify the associated risks is a particularly clever idea that will appeal to those counting the costs of creative thinking.

A strong case for innovation, with supporting methodology that will appeal to executives in the risk-averse, regulation-bound industry.

New New York 3000 Years Later Gajjar, Irina FriesenPress (328 pp.) $23.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Apr. 26, 2012 978-1-4602-0931-8

In Gajjar’s (The Gita, 2007, etc.) sci-fi novel, set thousands of years in the future, political turmoil and religious extremism threaten the happiness, and existence, of everyone on Earth.

Liera (nicknamed “Ira”) is the Chief of the Bureau of Education, one of the government departments that upholds the “One |

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Spirit! One World! One Word!” doctrine that unites Mother Earth’s inhabitants. The doctrine took hold thousands of years earlier, after the Descent of the Revealer Varish!, an otherworldly being who sought to bring an end to the “Divisiveness and Faithlessness” that caused trouble and anguish on the planet. Several millennia later, humans have reverted to their old ways, and two impassioned groups (Nedlogs and New Agers) clash over the doctrine’s true meaning. Ira has a brief “dalliance” with one of his secretaries but refuses to breed with her; apparently, there’s little room for romance in this world. Bella, his spurned lover, files spurious but serious allegations against him in an attempt to sabotage his life. A pair of wizards help save Ira’s reputation and send him on an intergalactic mission to prove that life exists on other planets and to find out how this information impacts the Revealer Varish!’s doctrine. However, despite the extraterrestrial kidnapping, sex and spiritual enlightenment that follows, there isn’t much drama in this sci-fi tale. It may be difficult for readers to believe that things might not work out OK in a story with so many well-meaning characters. Even the Democratic Oligarch Theocracy, a global government with its own futuristic Guantanamo Bay, apologizes when it makes a mistake. However, as in most great science fiction, there’s a strong and valuable message here warning of the perils of extremism, willful ignorance and the “inability to separate our beliefs from the way we govern ourselves.” That’s a message worth reading.

A fine sci-fi debut that offers a glimpse of humankind’s future and a sprawling view of our physical and spiritual universe.

Chasing Demons

Garcia, Melissa M. CreateSpace (256 pp.) $14.95 paper | $5.99 e-book Nov. 12, 2012 978-1-4802-5811-2 As his past comes back, peeling away the layers of protection he’s constructed to restart his life, investigative reporter Luc Actar becomes ensnared in a web of consequences stemming from malpractice within the mental health system of Los Angeles.

Luc returns for his second starring role in Garcia’s (Falling Angels, 2006, etc.) latest page-turner. Born into poverty and raised by an abusive, alcoholic father, Luc learned early on how to fend for himself on the streets of LA. After several run-ins with the law and a career as a car thief, he blossomed into a star journalist for Crime Reporter, with a specialty in uncovering police corruption in Southern California.

Now, he’s living with Mattie Hardwin, ex-wife of his best friend, in her Malibu home, he drives a Porsche of questionable provenance and has determinedly been putting his past behind him. But when the police come to tell him that his estranged father has died, Luc becomes inexorably drawn into the investigation of mental health records stolen by the elder Actar, and he soon finds himself in the center of a string of murders that threaten everyone and everything that’s important to him. Garcia is a skillful novelist, and she makes good use of Luc’s 130

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first-person narrative to plumb the depths of the fears and self-deprecation that lie beneath his combative, trouble-prone exterior. Readers get only glimpses into the character development of the large supporting cast—even Mattie, the pivotal motivator in Luc’s life, is a bit of a cipher—but this is Luc’s story, after all, and readers will find themselves hoping he can skirt the edges of what seems like an inevitable decline into an abyss of self-destruction. Some interesting plot twists liven up the story, and the appearance of Chris Actar, a young teenager who may or may not be Luc’s half brother, adds even more complexity to a man still trying to define himself.

An engaging sequel that will leave readers hoping Luc returns yet again.

Hell’s Belle

Greco, Karen Manuscript (429 pp.)

Jun. 17, 2013 Another action-packed, supernatural crime-fighting offering from Greco (Bloody Boulevard, 2013).

Half-human, half-vampire Nina Martinez and her partner, Frankie, are members of the supersecret Blood Ops division—a governmental agency that specializes in supernatural crimes. After taking down a vampire nest in Newark, N.J., Nina returns to Providence, R.I., to partner up with Aunt Babe in the family bar. A highly trained fighter, Nina and her skills come in handy when Marcello, a centuries-old vampire, suddenly appears in the bar, bent on destroying her. After putting up a formidable fight, Marcello succeeds in slitting Nina’s throat, though she survives. Not only is her quick vampire healing on the fritz, but Max, the cute surfer guy she was just flirting with, turns out to be an FBI agent tracking a serial killer.

As the body count rises, Nina begins experiencing strange new abilities. Even more shocking, she finds herself falling for Max—at least until she becomes his prime suspect for the murders. Knowing that Marcello won’t stop until he finishes the job, Aunt Babe shares family secrets that leave Nina reeling. Unsure of who or what she is, Nina must reveal all to Max in an effort to convince him of her innocence and hopefully unite them on the same side.

With plenty of action and wit, readers are lured into the dangerous world of supernatural crime fighters. What could have easily been just another vampire hunter story is fleshed out with creative storytelling that puts Nina and her team on the same level of those they seek to eradicate. Eschewing the usual lore, Greco impressively navigates a high-energy, contemporary story of vampires and witches. Her straightforward style keeps the pace moving as she deftly unfurls a story that avoids the pitfalls of the paranormal formula and successfully incorporates interesting new twists that fit organically into the plotline. The well-rendered, relatable characters easily hold their own in this captivating read.

A refreshing addition to the well-stocked vampire genre.

Immolation Finale

Grilliot, Stephen A. CreateSpace (378 pp.) $18.49 paper | $4.99 e-book Mar. 21, 2013 978-1-4827-7894-6 A dark, magical tale of murder and suspense in the mysterious city of New Orleans.

Grilliot’s debut novel takes readers deep into the shadowy corners of New Orleans, where a string of murders has been ravaging the town. Known as the Red Lake Murders, these crimes, committed mostly in the woods, smack of something supernatural and are suspected to be the result of voodoo. This draws Michael “Dirk” Geist to the scene; he’s a demonologist who lures in clients seemingly through magic, as if he were a “fool being guarded by some magical force and good luck.”

Though he’s initially reluctant, doubting that his psychic powers could actually benefit an official police investigation, he eventually has a moment of clairvoyance that convinces him to seek answers. As Dirk teams up with friend and police officer Susan to solve the case, his dreams become nightmares, and something inside of him warns him that danger lurks in every corner.

He combs through the town, seeing voodoo priests, fortunetellers and frightful creatures along the way. Dirk’s own safety becomes compromised when he inches closer to the truth, and the supernatural world lurking behind New Orleans’ facade throws shadows over the people Dirk thinks he can trust. The case grows even more complicated when his beautiful old flame Sabrina returns to town. Grilliot expertly weaves a tale of horror that plays upon fantasy, intermingled with terrifying images and mysterious, magical characters. Set against the murky backdrop of a paranormal underworld, this thrilling murder mystery takes steps beyond being a plot-driven nail-biter to comment on the roles of good and evil in the world. New Orleans becomes a character itself, and the story pulsates with action and tension.

Fans of the occult will enjoy the vanishing line drawn between reality and the supernatural.

A highly original, intriguing story of murder, betrayal and deception.

The Davenport Dilemma

Groezinger, Betty Kerss AbbottPress (278 pp.) $35.99 | $17.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Jan. 29, 2013 978-1-4582-0734-0 A brisk political thriller from a firsttime author who mixes international espionage with escalating domestic paranoia.

Jennie Davenport Scott’s pleasantly boring middle-aged and middle-class life in suburban Dallas collapses following her sudden, unexpected contact with her beloved former husband, Josh Davenport.

Trouble is, Josh, an adman and professor, died of an aneurism half a dozen years ago, and Jennie has recently remarried after a suitable period of mourning. But was it just a dream? And is Josh alive, or is Jennie suffering from PTSD—or worse? Enlisting the help of her two grown daughters and current (creepy, possibly bigamous) husband, Nathan, plus a friendly cop and a couple of Josh’s former buddies, Jennie begins her search for the truth—blithely raising red flags in high places, from Washington, D.C., to the secret European headquarters of the Illuminati and their villainous Bilderberg-ish puppet masters, the Brotherhood. Josh’s brief Cold War–era career in the shadowy G-2, a U.S. Army covert ops division, comes back to haunt everyone involved as almost all traces of his life and death—his military records and death certificate, even his gravestone—disappear.

It’s The Osterman Weekend but with the sexy 1970s subtext sublimated into full-blown 1980s shopping orgies at Harrods and such, with some mildly Hitchcock-ian red herrings tossed hither and yon. Much like that of the initially clueless heroines in Reginald Hill’s brilliant novels Death of a Dormouse and The Spy’s Wife, Jennie’s growing self-awareness and determination to find the truth are mostly believable and ultimately gratifying— despite a too-easy setup for the inevitable sequel (which will, one hopes, prove to be as well-written and entertaining as the author’s debut).

Not recommended for those planning lengthy trips in planes, trains or helicopters—or anyone who isn’t dead certain what his or her spouse actually does for a living.

THE BANKS OF CERTAIN RIVERS

Harrison, Jon Amazon Digital Services (331 pp.) $2.99 e-book | Mar. 19, 2013 Harrison’s moving novel follows an introspective teacher and coach.

On the surface, high school science teacher and cross-country running coach Neil Kazenzakis has recovered well from the tragic accident that happened years ago and left his wife in a vegetative state and him to raise their now-teenage son. But high school politics, parenting and caring for his ailing mother-in-law, who lives next door, (not to mention the burden of making sure his two-year relationship with his mother-in-law’s nurse remains a secret) all take their toll on his fragile psychological equilibrium. Harrison’s debut is a slow, thoughtful work driven by Neil’s interactions with others: his students; co-workers; neighbors; his girlfriend, Lauren, who’s starting to lose patience with their state of romantic limbo; and, especially, his son, Chris. Though these circumstances are, in their own right, rife with tension, the novel is a bit expositionheavy, and it’s well into the story before the plot’s central conflicts—an accusation of inappropriate conduct at school paired with a new and sudden pressure to reveal his relationship with Lauren—are set into motion. That said, Harrison’s characters are compelling, and his prose is lucid; the emails Neil begins sending |

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“Karp’s madcap imagination keeps readers hungering for the final outcome, and his prose sparkles with his flair for the absurd.” from radium baby

to a Gmail account he created in his wife’s name, a device Harrison employs throughout, are affecting and often tender. Neil’s vividly detailed life is sure to appeal to fans of emotionally involving fiction, while more cynical readers might be skeptical of Neil’s relentlessly moral conscience and the somewhat one-note representation of Chris’ adolescent angst. Harrison’s characters frequently suffer misfortune and, occasionally, the consequences of their own questionable decisions, but he transforms a story that could easily be somber into a hopeful one, recognizing both the difficulty and importance of letting go and moving on.

Confident, clearsighted and poignant.

Finding Fat Lady’s Shoe A Memoir of Growing up in Hong Kong and Malaysia Hung, James Y. Self (390 pp.)

978-0-615-75819-0

In this memoir, a young Chinese boy in exile faces a difficult adolescence in Hong Kong and Malaysia.

In the spring of 1949, as the Communists under Mao Zedong were consolidating their victory over Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang government for control over China, the Hung family made the difficult decision to leave the country and live in exile in Hong Kong. The father had worked for the Kuomintang and feared reprisal from the Communists. Along with Mother and Father Hung and their five children was their youngest child, Yum Tuen (later James).

However, life in Hong Kong and, subsequently, in Malaysia was much different than the prosperous existence they had known in China. Short on money and unable to find employment, the family crumbled. Constantly stalked by hunger and living in grinding poverty, they bounced from one wretched dwelling to another, as the depressed father and overwhelmed mother ceded control of the family to a psychotic “Big Sister,” who thought nothing of fighting her siblings with a razor blade concealed in her fist. Things eventually improved, however, and the book ends with the author as a young man—now a doctor— going to school in Hawaii; a second book detailing the author’s later life is planned. Though a bit long, Hung’s book is a harrowing example of a historically familiar event: people on the losing side of war being forced to leave behind their lives for an uncertain existence elsewhere. The author draws a vivid picture of how miserable life often was, sparing no one from scrutiny, especially his parents, who can’t seem to understand the concept of saving for a rainy day despite how often it storms.

Fortunately, Hung’s memoir isn’t just a list of events. In despair, he frequently questions the role of God, essentially asking the age-old question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

There’s also humor, as in the title, which amusingly refers to the author’s attempts to learn English.

An intensely reflective tale of a family uprooted by war, cast adrift onto a sea of uncertainty.

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Radium Baby

Karp, St. John Remora House (246 pp.) $9.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Apr. 25, 2013 978-0-9892630-0-9 In Karp’s debut YA novel, three preteens compete to prove their connection to famous scientists who died more than a decade ago.

In 1927, 13-year-old Sam Ticky lives in Claremore, Okla., also known as “Radium Town,” because the chemical element bubbles freely from the ground, like oil. He works at the radium baths, where people soak in an effort to cure themselves of ailments such as barnacles and gout—despite the fact it might possibly be dangerous. According to Sam’s adoptive father, Sam is the biological son of the well-known late scientists Alexander and Valerie Pepperpot; as a result, science is his heritage. Meanwhile, in New York, Clive Chapman ponders the fate of his Sun Studios Radio Corporation. Ratings are falling, even on his most popular shows, and he needs something brilliant to turn his business around. When the U.S. government asks for his help in finding the Pepperpots’ missing child, he dreams up a contest. Soon, Sam is competing against two other finalists who share his birthday, Gloria Noakes and Hadrian Sands. The prize: the Pepperpots’ estate. The contestants must solve a series of puzzles staged in China, Egypt and Boston as they try to provide proof of the identity of the real “Radium Baby.” Throughout this adventure novel, Karp’s madcap imagination keeps readers hungering for the final outcome, and his prose sparkles with his flair for the absurd: For example, the Pepperpots “invented the hamster wheel, the hamster cage and the hamster feeder, then rounded off their list of achievements by inventing the hamster.” The contest’s puzzles, which involve such diverse elements as hornets’ honey and the Eye of Tutankhamen, have surprise twists, but Karp isn’t merely a showman. He’s also capable of dreamily evocative scene-setting (“Everything hit [Sam] at once...the temples with roofs like dogeared paper, [and the] fine statues and filigree metalwork tracing spider webs across the walls and ceilings”) and manages to end his tale on a truly profound note.

A devilishly rich, satisfying scientific confection.

Ca’d’Zan

Kersh, Jack CreateSpace (306 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 2, 2013 978-1-4827-1449-4 A coming-of-age tale about an unusual boy and an extraordinary dog who share the tribulations of a Brazilian plantation’s indentured laborers.

This novel opens with the boy, Lano, telling Ca’d’Zan, the wild dog he named after the plantation, a story which kicks off a long tale

of heroism. As Lano and the dog grow up, other characters are introduced: John One, the insane founder of the Ca’d’Zan plantation; John Two, his son; Angelina Bonita, a woman as mysterious and beautiful as an angel; and Lano’s father, Raimundo.

Kersh describes the workers’ daily drudgery and the cruelty of their bosses but infuses the story with ephemeral mysticism.

For example, Raimundo builds a shadow-play “magic lantern,” and Ca’d’Zan rescues a Native American princess whose presence is announced by butterflies; this earns the dog the title of “Much Dog” and makes Lano a member of the princess’s “people.” Eventually, the two Johns and other powerful interests want more land, leading to a confrontation with Native Americans and environmentalists and a battle between natives and loggers. Lano proves himself a warrior during these fights, despite his choice not to shoot enemies on either side. Later, after two tragic deaths, the plantation falls apart, and Lano finds his place with the native people and takes part in more pitched battles. Kersh’s beautifully rendered language sounds slightly foreign, slightly mystical: “ ‘Close your eyes and fly away, Lano,’ Mother whispered in the near dark, her arms bright beautiful wings to fly me. ‘Lose your body to glide on my words over the whole dark earth.’ ” His style is reminiscent of magical realism, but here, the enchantment isn’t an integral part of the narrative; it simply glows at the edges.

An elegant dream in marvelous prose, fully accessible to general readers, but a perfect fit for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende and Franz Kafka.

The Chimera Collusion Knedgen, D. J. CreateSpace (250 pp.) $9.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Mar. 23, 2013 978-1-4826-3475-4

An action-packed political thriller that rotates between multiple characters and their dark, dangerous worlds.

In Knedgen’s debut novel, U.S. politics are a means to achieve world domination by any means necessary. This includes drugging a young woman named Kim into wooing high-level politicians into bed, where she ultimately kills them. The goal is to eliminate the competition so that the power-hungry overlords win the presidential election and commence their reign of control through the media, in wars, regulations and more. However, the drugs’ effects start to wear off, and memories of Kim’s victims begin to haunt her. The impact of these flashbacks debilitates Kim and causes her to question everything. If it weren’t for Street and Angie, who help her put the pieces of the puzzle together, Kim would be lost for good. These intriguing, well-developed characters have a surprising number of layers to them. In particular, Street, who spends his days hustling on the street corner, works hard to maintain his tough facade, but his soft underbelly reveals itself when it comes to his Grandma Mae. After listening to Street’s conversation with his grandma over the phone,

Angie and Kim “saw him in a new light. Kim couldn’t resist.”

“Keep that to yourself,” Street says. “Can’t have my image being ruined.” However, the depth of conspiracy in the political turmoil can be hard to digest since there are an implausible number of bad guys with corrupt agendas. In addition, the story is at times unnecessarily violent. In the first chapter, for example, a brutal scene of a woman being attacked is foisted upon the reader. While the blunt impact of this opening was perhaps meant to act as a lure, it ultimately feels more like an assault on the senses.

An intriguing ride through the bumpy landscape of U.S. politics, with a healthy dose of deception and corruption.

THE SOFTWARE SOCIETY Cultural and Economic Impact

Meisel, William Trafford (276 pp.) $27.48 | $17.48 paper | $3.99 e-book Jan. 31, 2013 978-1-4669-7413-5 An entrepreneur and voice-technology expert reflects on growing human-computer connections and the implications for cultural evolution, the economy and what it means to be human.

Using the first person and addressing a general audience, Meisel (Speech in the User Interface: Lessons From Experience, 2010, etc.)—a former University of Southern California professor and technology industry analyst—lays out the current state of software development, the trends and his analysis of how these changes affect society. The book begins with a definition of software and a review of its trends and follows with an analysis of the interactions and relationships between people and computers. Meisel outlines these relationships in the realm of culture, discussing privacy and security, education, software patents and war. Turning to economics, the work explores the relationships between software and hardware, software and jobs, computers and the workplace, technology and a fragmented society, technological advances and job loss, and further technological innovation and job creation. The author proposes that the combination of software and mobile devices has led to an ongoing “always-there” presence of technology that can form the basis for further development in the following areas: supplementing human capabilities, bolstering access to education, assisting workers with disabilities and creating new types of human-computer automation. Fittingly, software advances have made it possible for this book to acquire its own “always-there” presence and become a “living” document through the creation of a website (www.TheSoftwareSociety.com), which includes a blog that will carry on the work of the book and provide both a section for comments on trends and issues and an interface for author and reader interactions.

A useful analysis of developments in human-technology relationships, combining research and personal reflections.

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Interviews and Profiles

Polly Courtney

The indie writer, who’s also been published by a big house, became a trailblazing symbol of how to do self-publishing right

By Tom Eubanks

Photo courtesy Hannah Palmer

Talented, tenacious and brave enough to bid farewell to the battered establishment we now refer to as “traditional publishing,” Polly Courtney is a new breed of writer. Unhappy with the way her three-book deal with HarperCollins imprint Avon UK transpired, Courtney returned to selfpublishing with her latest novel, Feral Youth. After all, bucking convention is how she got what she initially perceived as her “golden ticket.”

Her self-published 2006 debut, Golden Handcuffs, is a fictional exposé of the London financial world where she once made her living—and honed her business acumen. A slick comedy of manners that follows a group of “hair-swishing 20-somethings” and “slick city bankers” as they work long hours, make small fortunes and drink a lot, the book earned enough attention for her to sign a contract with one of the last big publishers.

After self-publishing a second book, Poles Apart, in 2008, she delivered her first manuscript, The Day I Died, to Avon UK. Although Courtney says it was well134

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received by the publisher, she admits making mistakes from the start.

Avon UK “really wasn’t right for my writing,” which is something, she says, “I should have realized when I had the early conversations with the editorial team.”

They wanted books that were “women-centric, light, soft, free, fluffy—all those things. And I wanted to be able to cover tough issues like homelessness.”

Courtney knew she “didn’t quite fit in that box,” yet she clung to the hope that the old business model was still the best one because, she admits, “it was the closest box I could find.”

She felt convinced she had made the wrong decision when they showed her the cover design of The Day I Died. She recalls thinking, “Oh my, that’s not right!” While it “wasn’t the most offensive cover,” she says, “it was very, very unrepresentative of what was inside. So, we were compromising from the start.”

As someone who has navigated her way through international finance and self-published two wellreceived books, Courtney didn’t compromise as easily as some other writers might—much to the chagrin of her new publisher. On her own, she recruited “a whole load of target-reader types—women readers, mostly,” showed them the cover and asked, “What do you think this book is about?”

She received about 30 responses, “all very wrong,” she explains. Based on the book’s cover and packaging, the women she polled asked her, “Oh, is it a story like The Lovely Bones?” (It’s not.)

“I felt they were confusing the readership,” she continues. “I said to the publisher, ‘Look. People think it’s this when it’s that.’ They basically said, ‘Well, thanks very much, but we’re going to ignore you and carry on.’ ”

When the same thing happened with their second book together, The Fame Factor, Courtney began to prepare an exit strategy. She was “desperately done with being rammed into a mold,” and the brand she was trying to build up was becoming “a real mess,” she says. After her third book with Avon UK, It’s a Man’s World, in 2011, Courtney had had enough. “I didn’t need to prove a point to any individuals, and I really didn’t want it to feel like it was a personal thing, walking out on a publisher,” she says. “Everyone involved was just doing their job, really.”

“Although it seemed like a really big fit I was throwing at the time,” the author says of her wellpublicized decision to walk away, “it was the result of three years of frustration.” It was also a conscious business decision to save her “brand” as a writer, she explains from a studio in London, where she's helping arrange the recording for the audio book of her new self-published book, Feral Youth. The audio book features the voice of the young actress who appears as the 15-year-old narrator, Alesha, in a video the author also produced to promote the book.

The problem, Courtney says, is “risk aversion in the industry.” She laments the “genre-izing of books” and publishers’ fear of taking risks. “I think the system is wrong, and the industry is flawed, and their model has kind of been broken.”

And she’s not alone. “When I did make a bit of a fuss and got some press over it, a lot of authors contacted me, saying, ‘You know what? This exact thing happened to me, and I’m glad you’re exposing it.’

It definitely seems to be an issue.”

Her answer? Do it yourself. Which isn’t to say one needs to be a control freak. “I’m definitely up for collaborating,” Courtney says. “It wasn’t as though I wanted to do everything myself”—or could. It’s due to the fact that Courtney knows the importance of collaboration that she succeeds in self-publishing.

It’s become a trope to say a successful independent author needs to have a business sense on par with his or her ability to craft solid novels. “I know I’ve got an entrepreneurial streak in me,” Courtney confirms.

“I’m willing to takes risks.”

In fact, because she took the risk, she enjoyed writing her latest book more than any other. She no longer felt as if she were writing for hire. Selfpublishing, she says, “gave me the liberty of doing what I wanted right from the start. I was in control again.”

For her latest venture, Courtney tracked down

Sinem Erkas, a cover designer whose work she admired. “I could tell in an instant she got what I was all about,” says Courtney. “Working together was a really nice process.”

She hired an expert editor but also crowd-sourced “12 or 14” friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter to read and give notes on the initial drafts of her manuscript. She recruited a talented film student to direct the book’s trailer and, through a chance encounter at a book fair, set up a 50/50 deal for an audio version she had never even imagined. Plans for a film are very much in her sights.

She notes how far self-publishing has come since her first foray seven years ago. “It’s as though it’s easier to do some things but harder to get noticed,” she observes.

“The barriers are lower, but because the barriers are lower, the floodgates are open and everyone’s doing it.” Promoting a book, she says, has become even more important since readers have become “more fragmented; it’s harder to make that big hit.”

The process still requires diligence and teamwork— the very things she found lacking at her old publisher.

“The problem with self-publishing is that it’s very easy to do badly. Too many authors miss important steps like editing, cover design and promotion, which gives self-publishing a bad name.”

Tom Eubanks, a freelance writer, editor and consultant, has worked in magazine and book publishing for 25 years. He lives in New York City.

Feral Youth Courtney, Polly Trailblazing Books (304 pp.) $9.39 | Jun. 24, 2013 978-1-78-306058-0

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“[A]ction and emotion equally drive this compelling tale that will bring on the waterworks for any animal lover.” from saving baby

Dialogues with the Abyss Mulhern, Scott FriesenPress (104 pp.) $27.99 | $11.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 21, 2013 978-1-77097-890-4 978-1-77097-891-1 paper

A brief but emotionally weighty collection of imaginary dialogues inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Ira Progoff, who, in the 1960s, popularized therapeutic journaling as a means of self-discovery.

Many readers may have a vague notion of what a Socratic dialogue is: a prose literary form in which characters discuss moral and philosophical problems. French philosopher Denis Diderot and writers Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and Aldous Huxley all produced fine examples that predate the self-help industry’s generally dolorous take, and there have been stellar contemporary versions by Canadian poet Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, 1998) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning A.R. Gurney (Love Letters, 1989). In this intensely personal collection, Mulhern (Seventeen Steps to the Edge, 2011) stages a series of chats with various archetypes (Death, his Future Self, Time) about metaphysics and overcrowding; with possibly real people (Abe the Auschwitz survivor, two suicide hotline callers) who discuss love, regret, hope, despair and other topics; and with some tricky personifications (Addiction, Obsession/ Compulsion, Silence) who ponder pretty much everything else.

The author sets all of these dialogues in the void name-checked in the book’s title; “In fact,” he clarifies in the introduction, “it seems to me that the abyss is that which lies just beyond the borders of our sanity, our longings and the familiar illusions we think of as our lives.” While such Twilight Zone–inflected intellectual musings may not appeal to some readers, the author’s charming sincerity and surprisingly light touch keep it all from becoming impenetrable, whether his characters discuss the Holocaust or the intricate origins of a man’s foot fetish. The best debates offer up truths with a dash of sly, vaudeville humor, like a mashup of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett as declaimed by Abbott and Costello; for example, witness the author’s double act with Time: “SM: Is there time after we die? / Time: There is no such thing before you die. Everything exists at once. / SM: What happens to all the atoms in the universe when it finally dies? / Time: They apply for unemployment. / SM: Seriously?”

Recommended for adventurous book clubs and lovers of reader’s theater.

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Saving Baby How One Woman’s Love for a Racehorse Led to Her Redemption

Normile, Jo Anne; Lindner, Lawrence Powder Point Publishing (272 pp.) $15.00 paper | $7.99 e-book Apr. 16, 2013 978-0-9888780-0-6 In horse lover and activist Normile’s memoir (co-authored with seasoned writer Lindner), she fights for the humane treatment of ex-racehorses.

Compelled by the idea of owning a thoroughbred, Normile acquires “Baby” from an ailing breeder, with the stipulation that she races him. Driven by a competitive spirit rather than financial gain, her main priority is ensuring her new horse’s well-being. Normile becomes indoctrinated in the early 1990s subculture of Detroit horse racing—and the corner-cutting and corruption that lurk in the unregulated sport. Her tender love for Baby compares to a mother’s love for her child who’s all the more vulnerable due to his inability to express himself.

Baby shows promise as a winner, but due to a series of unsavory experiences, he never reaches his potential. He eventually meets a tragic, untimely end resulting from negligence on the track. This heart-wrenching loss launches Normile into a fight to protect other horses from the same fate. She’s motivated further when she learns some dark truths behind the industry, like the legal practice that has retired racehorses being slaughtered and sold for meat. Ultimately, she helms a nonprofit rescue that matches retired thoroughbreds with new owners. Like many tireless and committed activists, she sacrifices her family relationships and personal well-being for her cause. With the help of Lindner’s first class storytelling, action and emotion equally drive this compelling tale that will bring on the waterworks for any animal lover. The horses Normile loves are portrayed as dynamically as human beings, with imagined dialogue Normile gleans from their body language. Early in the book, she describes Baby’s departure from his mother and siblings: “There were cries and whinnies from the other horses as the trailers left. ‘Where are you going? We thought you were home to stay,’ ” the others horses are imagined saying. “Baby himself didn’t appear to be nervous. ‘I’ll be back,’ he whinnied confidently. ‘Just gone for a bit—have to make my mark.’ ” A touching narrative that transcends its subject.

The Mothership

Renneberg, Stephen Self (592 pp.) $21.95 paper | $8.99 e-book Jun. 17, 2013 978-0-9874347-3-9 In Australian author Renneberg’s (The Siren Project, 2012) blockbuster science-fiction thriller, humanity comes in contact with a vastly advanced alien race.

When an apparent meteor falls in a remote area of Australia’s Northern Territory, a diverse group of people heads off to investigate the site, including a zoologist who ran a research station that had all of its metal removed by an unidentified flying object; a band of beer-swilling hunters; an Aborigine hunter; and an elite military team that specializes in dealing with extraterrestrials.

The fallen object turns out not to be a meteorite at all, but a massive alien mother ship that has inexplicably crash-landed. It soon becomes apparent that the aliens have begun to mine the area with drones and seem to be building a breathtakingly large defensive bridgehead. Some of the humans want to study the aliens and attempt to communicate with the crash survivors, while others want to simply nuke them off the face of the Earth.

But two questions remain: What do these aliens want, and why are they here? Renneberg seamlessly and brilliantly intertwines his storylines (and includes a vivid and fascinating description of the aliens’ back story) while also examining humankind’s myriad shortcomings. First-contact stories are common in science fiction, but Renneberg’s highly original novel successfully avoids clichés while also providing a highly readable, breakneck-paced story. Readers will likely enjoy its bombshell plot twists and its fitting (and mind-blowing) conclusion.

A compelling, visionary must-read for literary sci-fi fans that recalls genre classics by Frederik Pohl and Arthur C. Clarke.

The Nostradamus Society Shaw, J. Douglas Amazon Digital Services (946 pp.) $2.99 e-book | May 8, 2013

The discovery of a long-lost prophetic manuscript triggers a series of increasingly catastrophic events in this promising debut thriller.

A Boston electrician discovers the book in a mysterious box in his grandfather’s attic. Curious about whether it was truly authored by Nostradamus, he calls his brother-in-law, who owns a used bookstore. Unbeknownst to them, someone else is listening to their conversation: An ex-KGB hacker who sells stolen data to anyone who can pay his exorbitant fees. One of his clients is a shadowy terrorist group that is willing to give nearly anything to obtain Nostradamus’ text and the powerful

secret it may hold—the location of the Ark of the Covenant.

When the hacker lets his contact know that the book may have been discovered, events are set into motion that threaten not only the individual characters’ lives and families but international stability as well. Each chapter covers the point of view of one of the many characters, telling his or her story gradually until they begin to intersect. A highly-skilled assassin, an undercover Iranian agent in a Jewish monastery, an up-and-coming computer genius, a history professor with a secret past, a jaded former Army colonel, an inexperienced American president, his chief of staff, and others come together as the plot gains steam.

Parts of this novel are too wordy, with excessive description and long character back stories that slow the story’s momentum; at more than 900 pages, this book is far longer than most others of the genre. However, the action scenes are suspenseful, and most chapters end on a tension-filled cliffhanger that compels the reader to keep turning pages. The overlapping story threads are ably balanced and offer genuine surprises. With the multitude of characters in play, no one is truly safe, and that unpredictability serves the book well.

This is an imperfect but intriguing novel from a new writer with real potential.

The Impiety of Ahasuerus Percy Shelley’s Wandering Jew Tinker, Tamara BookSurge Publishing (174 pp.) $11.00 paper | $7.99 e-book Dec. 10, 2009 978-1-4392-6953-4

An exploration of the figure of the Wandering Jew in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first and last mature poetic works.

Tinker, in her debut, traces the Wandering Jew character from his origins to his role in Shelley’s Romantic poetry. The character comes up throughout medieval Christian folklore as a man who taunted Jesus and was then made to wander the world until Christ’s return. The book’s first section focuses in part on the character’s specific incarnation as a man named Ahasuerus, who first emerged in a 1602 German work called Kurtze Beschreibung. Tinker carefully traces the lines of Ahasuerus’ influence, from a religious parable to the work of later writers, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christian Schubart. From these influences, Tinker proceeds directly to Shelley’s use of Ahasuerus, first in the 1813 poem “Queen Mab” and later in his 1822 verse drama Hellas. This structure allows her to follow Ahasuerus’ evolution very closely—from his portrayal as a Lutheran convert to his depiction as a heretic and healer. In her conclusion, she writes that “Ahasuerus is not a real man. He is a fiction, and not one, but many, recreated by many authors....Ahasuerus is merely a name, a form in whose shelter writers have reared virtual men who find salvation through knowledge and experience.” Tinker’s analysis will appeal strongly to readers interested in the intersections among religion, folklore and literature, and |

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“Those who think of Scouting as little more than songs around a campfire will have much to learn from this intelligent, thorough discussion.” from world scouting

between European Christianity and Judaism from the medieval to the Romantic ages. The author makes no revelatory assertions but writes clearly and competently and delivers a valuable introduction to her subject. She also provides an extensive bibliography for readers who wish to undertake further research.

A concise, readable introduction to a literary archetype.

Wifey

Ugokwe, Fey Pink Purse International (154 pp.) $7.99 paper | $2.99 e-book | Mar. 15, 2013 978-0-615-76490-0 Ugokwe’s debut novella adds a mystical touch to the story of a destructive, dysfunctional marriage.

Pallavi Victoria, known to her friends and family as P.V., came to Los Angeles to find freedom from her rich, conservative Trinidadian family in Miami. Instead, she fell in love with a handsome player named Rodney and, at the age of 22, got married. To Rodney’s “twelve grinning and good-times-ready groomsmen,” P.V.’s a figure of fun, referred to as Boozhe P, short for bourgeoisie princess. To her face, Rodney calls her Wifey—when he’s not demeaning her with other epithets. Despite bruises and scars and her mother’s warning—“dat young man can’t love you!”— P.V. tries to make the best of their new, downsized life in Texas, a move imposed upon her by Rodney. As he falls into drink and drugs, she makes friends with Juanita and Georgina, who, with their caring husbands and numerous children, demonstrate a better way of life. With their encouragement, P.V. pursues her love of cooking by throwing regular dinner parties while her husband is out carousing with his friends. When Rodney returns one night and finds P.V. a little too close to a handsome guest, their frayed relationship enters into a final showdown.

Ugokwe’s existential tale of a woman reduced to a “thingified concept” in a marriage mired in machismo begins promisingly, and its themes of materialism running amok, misogyny and racial tensions are timely. The writing is bold and unconventional. Characters are well-defined through dialect and dialogue as the narrator switches from Rodney’s California vernacular to the pidgin English P.V.’s mother speaks over the phone to the g-dropping drawl of the Dallas suburbs. Despite this, P.V. never seems to come to life. She wants freedom but never strives for it.

As conflict rages around her, she reacts passively, as when confronted in dreams by her deceased “Nani,” whose “antiquated deference and quiet defiance” she never quite shakes.

A powerfully written exploration of the rites of power.

World Scouting Educating for Global Citizenship

Vallory, Eduard Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $90.00 | $29.00 paper | $85.00 e-book Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-230-34068-8 A historical analysis of Scouting as the world’s largest youth educational movement, with special attention paid to its global role in citizenship education.

In this well-researched work, Vallory examines the history of Scouting from its beginnings in 1907, when Robert BadenPowell wrote Scouting for Boys, and how it evolved, quickly including Girl Scouts (or Guides) and spreading to 172 countries or territories by 2011. Very little literature exists on the subject, as Joseph P. Farrell, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, explains in a useful introduction. This book addresses that gap. Vallory first provides a history of world Scouting and goes on to describe Scouting’s core characteristics, including its definition, purpose, methods, organization and means of differentiation. Finally, Vallory discusses “glocal” citizenship education and the tensions among local, national and global commitments. Extensive notes and a bibliography serve as additional resources. U.S. readers will be especially interested in how the American system differs from that of other countries, with the ideology of sponsoring organizations, such as the YMCA and the Mormon church, conditioning the Scout association.

“The controversial manner in which [Boy Scouts of America] executives have dealt with issues concerning homosexuality and atheism is not dissociated from its very unique model of operation,” writes Vallory. (The BSA’s decision to allow gay members, though not leaders, is too recent to be included here.) Via the work’s focus on history, readers can better understand Scouting’s relationship with progressive education. The author makes an excellent case for the importance of Scouting as an education in global citizenship, pointing out, for example, that “individual young scouts in Arab countries were very active [in 2011] around the so-called Arab Spring in Tunisia or Egypt, claiming their role as real citizens, despite the institutional relations their scout associations enjoy with the status quo.” Those who think of Scouting as little more than songs around a campfire will have much to learn from this intelligent, thorough discussion.

A valuable, readable contribution to the history of Scouting.

This Issue’s Contributors # Paul Allen • LD Beghtol • Darren Carlaw • Stephanie Cerra • Wendy Connick • Simon Creek • Mary Elizabeth • Tom Eubanks • Joe Ferguson • Jameson Fitzpatrick • Renee Fountain • Matthew Heller • Justin Hickey • Isaac Larson • Carey London • Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell • Julie Nilson Chyna • Margueya Novick • Sarah Rettger • Russ Roberts • Jessica Skwire Routhier • Benjamin Samuel • Jerome Shea •

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The Bicycle Garden

Williams, Walter Fernwood & Hedges Books (40 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 23, 2013 978-0-9890698-0-9 Lively, colorful illustrations enhance this family bedtime story about bicycles

and magic.

What kid doesn’t want a shiny new bike? Siblings Timka and Dasha are lucky enough to be able to grow one in their backyard with the help of some magic seeds. It works great at first, but then the bicycle continues to grow until it reaches the sky.

The brother and sister, distraught that the bike has become unusable, plant more seeds and grow more bikes, all of which grow and grow until the backyard is a jungle of gigantic tires and metal. The author’s colored-pencil illustrations are the book’s standout feature, with vibrant primary hues and simplified, exuberant figures that seem influenced by Henri Matisse’s work. Each illustration clearly supports its corresponding page of text—no more than one sentence per page—and takes liberties with space, perspective and form in a way that children may find delightfully silly and adults, appealingly modernist. As such, they recall the work of author/illustrators such as Patrick McDonnell and Dahlov Ipcar. One page, in which the children go riding through a jumbled, joyful city, is particularly well-done, as are illustrations that show their tiny house, seen through vast frameworks of brightly colored metal. Bicycles and gardens are almost universal objects of fascination for young children, who will likely see themselves in the inventively named young protagonists. Parents may be tempted to read a larger message into the story—is it a cautionary tale about economic growth and development?—but younger readers will simply enjoy its fantastical theme and its happy, satisfying ending.

A charming picture book, full of visual appeal, which may become a family favorite.

his history to the achievements of specific individuals instead of concentrating on broader trends. He highlights such notables as trader William Jardine, who rose to prominence when the East India Company lost its monopoly on the tea trade; Thomas Sutherland, founder of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank; and missionaries Robert Morrison and Dugald Christie.

The book isn’t a critique of British imperialism, so the Scottish influence on China is largely celebrated, save for the Scots’ role in the opium trade. The book focuses primarily on Scots, but some Chinese figures also make appearances; some, such as student Huang Kuan, took advantage of Scotland’s higher education system, which, in the 19th century, offered more opportunities for outsiders than England’s Oxford or Cambridge did.

Although Wotherspoon’s emphasis is largely historical, he also includes information on the current China-Scotland relationship; for example, Scotland is now home to more than 16,000 people of Chinese descent. Despite its brevity, the book manages to encompass a broad historical scope and includes numerous footnotes and citations. Readers may notice occasional, minor typographical errors (“King George 111”), but they do little to hamper the overall narrative.

An effective introduction to a lesser-known portion of the British Empire’s global history.

K i rk us M e di a L L C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N

The Scots and China 1750–2000 Issues Ideas and Identities

Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny

Wotherspoon, Ian CreateSpace (130 pp.) $7.25 paper | $1.50 e-book | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-4810-2550-8

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A brief history of the influence that the Scots and the Chinese have had upon each other’s countries and cultures.

Scots have been among the most influential Westerners in China since the early days of Britain’s Asian mercantile presence in the 18th century. This short but comprehensive overview introduces readers to the Scots missionaries, educators and merchants who helped shape the two cultures’ relationship. Wotherspoon makes an effort to avoid generalizations about either ethnic group—as he notes explicitly in the book’s opening pages—by largely confining

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