Featuring 330 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen
KIRKUS VOL. LXXXI, NO.
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REVIEWS
CHILDREN'S & TEEN
Will & Whit
Also In This Issue Meg Wolitzer is at the top of her game p. 14 Meg Medina names a monster p. 90 The Pyle Brothers: World Conquerers, Self-Publishers p. 130
Marie Arana
Bolívar: American Liberator An epic new bio of Simón Bolívar p. 56
Photo by Clay Blackmore
by Laura Lee Gulledge Artistic orphan Willhemena and a summer storm named Whitney make for a quirkily refreshing read from this up-and-coming graphic novelist. p. 84
NONFICTION
Robert Oppenheimer
by Ray Monk A top-notch biography of the man who ushered in the Atomic Age and played a leading role in putting American science on the map p. 63
FICTION
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
by Anton DiSclafani The author examines a teen's life in an unusually accomplished and nuanced coming-of-age drama. p. 9
Robert Frank’s The Americans B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE
I t ’s a c o m m o n p l a c e o f a n t h r o p o l o g y that it often takes an outsider to show a group of insiders what it’s up to. One of the best books I know concerning Catholic pilgrimage in Europe, for instance, was written by a Jewish scholar from Brooklyn. One of the most compelling books ever written about the Arab world was written by a shy young man from the minor Irish nobility. An Italian Jesuit penetrated the mysteries of early modern China. And so on, all pointing to the fact that sometimes we need the Other to show us just how otherly we are. So it was when the photographer Robert Frank arrived in the United States in 1947. Born in Zurich to a German Jewish father and Swiss mother, Frank moved to New York, then, as now, the true capital of the world, in his early 20s. He found work as a fashion photographer, but that wasn’t quite his calling, and he soon took to the road, traveling around the world and then returning to his adopted country and securing a Guggenheim Foundation grant to document its highways and byways. In 1955 and 1956, he undertook a Kerouac-ean journey across a wide swath of the heartland, culminating when, on his return to New York with a portfolio in hand, he ran into Jack Kerouac himself, who took a look and offered to write an accompanying text. The result was the book The Americans (Steidl, $35), first published in France in 1958 and in this country in 1959 and reprinted many times since. It was not the image many Americans wanted to see of their country, far from triumphalist, far from proclaiming the superiority of the American way of life in those Cold War years. The heavily accented Frank had had unhappy encounters on his journey. In Arkansas, he had been jailed for no reason other than that he looked like a threat to homeland security; in Mississippi, he was waylaid by white teenagers who accused him of looking like a Communist and told him, “Why don’t you go to the other side of town and watch the n—s play?” And so Frank did, returning with black-and-white photographs of black and white Americans who looked suspiciously, and often angrily, across the color line at one another. Indeed, about the only subject in his portfolio who does not look vexed is lying dead. Using a 35 mm camera and highgrain film, often shooting in dim light and surreptitiously, Frank recorded a nation very nearly at war with itself, worried sick and spoiling for a fight, a place where hardly anyone smiled—producing, in the end, what Kerouac called “a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” The 55 years that have followed Frank’s poem—and so it is—would seem to have brought no more cheer to this corner of the world. An enterprising shooter could do worse than undertake a re-photographic project in Frank’s footsteps, recording a nation that seems poised to tip into civil war, still suspicious, still angry. The Americans remains an essential portrait from the outside in.
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contents fiction Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS.................................................................................................5 Meg Wolitzer is at the top of her game..............................14
The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.
Mystery.............................................................................................. 31 Science Fiction & Fantasy..........................................................38 Romance........................................................................................... 40
nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................41 REVIEWS...............................................................................................41 Marie Arana’s epic new life of Simón Bolívar.................56
children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................73 REVIEWS...............................................................................................73 Meg Medina names a monster.................................................90 interactive e-books...................................................................117 Continuing series...................................................................... 122
indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................123 REVIEWS..............................................................................................123 The Pyle Brothers: World Conquerers, Self-Publishers.............................................................................130
Curtis Sittenfeld, one of commercial fiction’s smartest, most perceptive practitioners, paints a rich portrait of intricate relationships within and among families. See the starred review on p. 27. |
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on the web Jean Thompson is the New York Times bestselling writer of The Year We Left Home, but Kirkus has starred her new novel, The Humanity Project, calling it “a rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.” After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn’t quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art’s neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund. Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Fosters’ handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: His father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers. As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price? Kirkus writer Stacey Mickelbart talks to Thompson about the new novel.
w w w. k i r k u s . c o m Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9 Alexandra Aldrich, a direct descendant of the famous Astor dynasty, grew up in the servants’ quarters of Rokeby, the 43-room Hudson Valley mansion built by her ancestors. Her childhood was one of bohemian neglect and real privation. But it was fairly stable until the summer of her 10th year, when her father took up with an alluring interloper, Giselle. Alexandra idolized her father, Rokeby’s charismatic lord of misrule, who had attended elite private schools as a child but inherited only landed property, not money. To him, she says, “poverty was amusing, a delightful challenge.” All of the family’s resources—emotional and financial—went to the maintenance of the Astor house and legacy. If the family had sold the house and its 450 acres, they all would have been able to live comfortably. Instead, Alexandra and her parents lived precariously in the grand house, scavenging for the next meal. Our reviewer called The Astor Orphan “vividly gothic family romance” in a starred review; Kirkus writer Cindy Widner will interview Aldrich about her life and new book on the Kirkus site.
For the latest new releases every day, go online to Kirkus.com. It’s where our editors and contributing blog partners bring you the best in science fiction, mysteries and thrillers, literary fiction and nonfiction, teen books and children’s books, Indie publishing and more. And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors, including Eriq La Salle and Nita Whitaker. Each week, we feature authors’ exclusive personal essays on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.
A 17-year-old girl pieces together the mystery of her mother’s life and death among the bars and bedrooms of Los Angeles in Anna Stothard’s debut novel The Pink Hotel. A raucous, drugfueled party has taken over a boutique hotel on Venice Beach—it’s a memorial for Lily, the nowdeceased, free-spirited proprietress of the place. Little do the attendees know that Lily’s estranged daughter—and the nameless narrator of the novel—is among them, and she has just walked off with a suitcase of Lily’s belongings. Abandoned by Lily many years ago, she has come a long way to learn about her mother, and the stolen suitcase—stuffed with clothes, letters and photographs—contains not only a history of her mother’s love life, but perhaps also the key to her own identity. We interview Stothard about her new novel.
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fiction AMERICANAH
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi Knopf (496 pp.) $26.95 | May 17, 2013 978-0-307-27108-2
THE YONAHLOSSEE RIDING CAMP FOR GIRLS by Anton DiSclafani.............................................................................. 9 DIRTY LOVE by Andre Dubus III.......................................................10 THE CARP CASTLE by MacDonald Harris........................................12 I'LL BE SEEING YOU by Suzanne Hayes; Loretta Nyhan..................16 BURIAL RITES by Hannah Kent..........................................................18 TRANSATLANTIC by Colum McCann............................................... 20 SOMEONE by Alice McDermott..........................................................21 THE RETURNED by Jason Mott...........................................................22 THE OTHER TYPIST by Suzanne Rindell........................................... 24 SILKEN PREY by John Sandford..........................................................25 DOMINION by C.J. Sansom................................................................ 26 THE EXECUTION OF NOA P. SINGLETON by Elizabeth L. Silver.......................................................................... 26 SISTERLAND by Curtis Sittenfeld.......................................................27 THE CENTER OF THE WORLD by Thomas Van Essen...................... 28 THE EXTINCTION CLUB by Jeffrey Moore.........................................34 HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN by Louise Penny.......................................36 WISP OF A THING by Alex Bledsoe.....................................................38 DEEP SPACE by Ian Douglas...............................................................39
A sensitive portrayal of distant love, broken affinities and culture clash by Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus, 2003, etc.). Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it’s said—but as often it makes the heart grow forgetful. Ifemelu, beautiful and naturally aristocratic, has the good fortune to escape Nigeria during a time of military dictatorship. It is a place and a society where, as a vivacious “aunty” remarks, “[t]he problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass.” Ifemelu’s high school sweetheart, Obinze, is too proud for any of that; smart and scholarly, he has been denied a visa to enter post-9/11 America (says his mother, “[t]he Americans are now averse to foreign young men”), and now he is living illegally in London, delivering refrigerators and looking for a way to find his beloved. The years pass, and the world changes: In the America where Ifemelu is increasingly at home, “postracial” is a fond hope, but everyone seems just a little bewildered at how to get there, and meanwhile, Ifemelu has to leave the safe, sheltered confines of Princeton to go to Trenton if she’s to get her hair done properly. The years pass, and Ifemelu is involved in the usual entanglements, making a reunion with Obinze all the more complicated. Will true love win out? Can things be fixed and contempt disarmed? All that remains to be seen, but for the moment, think of Adichie’s elegantly written, emotionally believable novel as a kind of update of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. Soap-operatic in spots, but a fine adult love story with locations both exotic and familiar. (Author tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.)
THE GOLIATH STONE by Larry Niven; Matthew Joseph Harrington................................................................39
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TIME OF MY LIFE
Ahern, Cecelia Morrow/HarperCollins (512 pp.) $14.99 paper | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-06-224860-2 Lucy Silchester has spent the last two years and 11 months ruining her life. Actually, she’s spent most of her life ruining her life. Now her life wants to meet with her. Ahern deftly turns this potentially contrived premise into a hilarious quest for true happiness— and perhaps true love. Lucy learned early to never let on that everything is anything but perfect. Her family is, of course, perfect: Her mother wears Chanel suits to lunch, her father is an impossible-to-please high court judge. So, when her relationship with Perfect Boyfriend Blake ended, and when she lost her job the same day, it seemed like a good idea to tell a few lies. Nearly three years later, the lies have built walls between Lucy and her family and friends. Even Mr. Pan, her hermaphroditic cat, is a secret. Reluctantly, Lucy meets with her life, who turns out to be a disheveled man with bloodshot eyes, bad breath and a wrinkled suit. Life insists that Lucy stop telling lies and start paying attention to, well, her life. Soon, he’s following her around and arranging truth-telling opportunities. He begins to grow on her. Meanwhile, life’s receptionist gives Lucy the number for a carpet cleaning service, and as her call is forwarded, she ends up talking to the quite charming Don Lockwood. Surprisingly, she tells Don the truth, and their calls continue. Maybe she could fall for Don, but she’s still pining for Blake, and life has a lot more lies for her to confront. Highly addictive, fast-paced and chock-full of both quirky characters and clever banter. This book is a delight.
THE SQUARE OF REVENGE
Aspe, Pieter Translated by Doyle, Brian Pegasus Crime (336 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 12, 2013 978-1-60598-446-9
Belgian crime-fiction veteran Aspe’s English-language debut thriller, originally published in Europe in 1995, introduces readers to chain-smoking, perpetually out-of-sorts DI Pieter Van In. With a quirky character that is equal parts Simenon and Tati, this lighthearted novel has a decidedly European sensibility, but why it has taken so long for the series to reach U.S. shores is a mystery. In this installment, Van In investigates an odd jewelry store break-in in atmospheric Bruges. The gems were not stolen, but left melted down in acid. The wealthy and politically influential owner, Degroof, is less concerned about solving the case than preventing word about the crime from getting out. Van In quickly determines it was an act of revenge for something that happened years ago. 6
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Uneasily teamed with the beautiful prosecutor Hannelore Martins, who is charmed by his quirks and impressed by his deductive talents, Van In must cut through bureaucratic resistance to learn why one of Degroof’s daughters has been institutionalized and another is in a nunnery—and why the jeweler’s grandson has been kidnapped. Solving the crimes involves deciphering Latin word squares that are left with family members. While the breezy bantering of Van In and Hannelore, and their slowly developing romantic attraction, carry the book, Aspe satisfies the demands of a good mystery with his clever plotting and brisk pacing. The book is stocked with lively characters on both sides of the law, including a bad guy forced to impersonate a priest. For those who discovered the Belgian city depicted here in the 2008 film In Bruges, this book will be a welcome return—with plenty more to come via translations of more Van In books, one hopes.
THE PARIS ARCHITECT
Belfoure, Charles Sourcebooks Landmark (384 pp.) $25.99 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4022-8431-1 During the Nazi occupation of Paris, an architect devises ingenious hiding places for Jews. In architect Belfoure’s fiction debut, the architectural and historical details are closely rendered, while the characters are mostly sketchy stereotypes. Depraved Gestapo colonel Schlegal and his torturer lackeys and thuggish henchmen see their main goal as tracking down every last Jew in Paris who has not already been deported to a concentration camp. Meanwhile, Lucien, an opportunistic architect whose opportunities have evaporated since 1940, when the Germans marched into Paris, is desperate for a job—so desperate that when industrialist Manet calls upon him to devise a hiding place for a wealthy Jewish friend, he accepts, since Manet can also offer him a commission to design a factory. While performing his factory assignment (the facility will turn out armaments for the Reich), Lucien meets kindred spirit Herzog, a Wehrmacht officer with a keen appreciation of architectural engineering, who views capturing Jews as an ill-advised distraction from winning the war for Germany. The friendship makes Lucien’s collaboration with the German war effort almost palatable—the money isn’t that good. Bigger payouts come as Manet persuades a reluctant Lucien to keep designing hideouts. His inventive cubbyholes— a seamless door in an ornamental column, a staircase section with an undetectable opening, even a kitchen floor drain—all help Jews evade the ever-tightening net of Schlegal and his crew. However, the pressure on Lucien is mounting. A seemingly foolproof fireplace contained a disastrous fatal flaw. His closest associates—apprentice Alain and mistress Adele—prove to have connections to the Gestapo, and, at Manet’s urging, Lucien has adopted a Jewish orphan, Pierre. The Resistance has taken him for short drives to warn him about the postwar consequences of
collaboration, and his wife, Celeste, has left in disgust. Belfoure wastes no time prettying up his strictly workmanlike prose. As the tension increases, the most salient virtue of this effort—the expertly structured plot—emerges. A satisfyingly streamlined World War II thriller.
THE DOGS OF CHRISTMAS
Cameron, W. Bruce Forge (224 pp.) $15.99 paper | Oct. 22, 2013 978-0-7653-3055-0
Cameron’s latest demonstrates how the unconditional love received from dogs can make all the difference in human lives. Josh Michaels, who lives in the Colorado mountains, is tricked by a dishonest neighbor into taking on the short-term care of a dog named Lucy. Josh never owned a
dog, so everything about this new responsibility is initially daunting. For Josh, loss has been a fact of life ever since his mother and sister left when he was 17. His father remarried and moved to England, too far for much visitation. His live-in girlfriend left him for another man, so as this enchanting novel opens, he lives alone and pays the mortgage on what was once the family home by doing website design, until a project supervisor who doesn’t like him takes him off the team, leaving him to look for work during an economic downturn. He is lonely and vulnerable, so it doesn’t take long for the affectionate Lucy to win him over. His heart is broken when Lucy gives birth to a litter of stillborn pups. Then someone dumps a box with five newborn puppies in his truck, and Lucy nurses them. Along the way, our hero meets Kerri, who’s affiliated with a local animal shelter, and turns to her for advice on handling his new responsibilities. Kerri and Josh have their romantic ups and downs, mostly since Josh can never quite figure out what to say or how to say it. Cute descriptions of the dogs’ behaviors will make readers want to find a pup to cuddle. A book about dog lovers by an author who understands the canine soul.
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“Contemporary crime noir at its best....” from cemetery lake
CEMETERY LAKE
Cleave, Paul Atria (416 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4516-7783-6 Thriller author Cleave (The Laughter House, 2012, etc.) opens the door on the haunted history of his disgraced detective Theo Tate. In this dark mystery, originally published in New Zealand in 2008, Cleave presents Tate’s earlier narrative to North American readers. Once with Christchurch police, Tate is now a private detective. He’s a man eaten up with grief, a man battling anger, depression and guilt with alcohol and self-isolation. Tate’s daughter died in a car-pedestrian accident, and his wife rests in a convalescent center, catatonic from a brain injury suffered during that tragedy. After the accident, Tate “fell into the abyss,” with this novel a first-person narrative of his ongoing battle with existential despair. The novel opens with Tate being hired to look into a death he ignored while a police detective. Henry Martins is two years dead, but his daughter always believed he was murdered. Since Martins’ widow, remarried, has had another husband die, Tate has secured an exhumation order so that Martins’ corpse may be autopsied. But Martins’ body isn’t in his coffin. It’s among several grave robbed and tossed into a nearby lake, all to find spaces for a serial killer’s victims. Cleave is a powerful writer, conjuring a malevolent atmosphere, creating a relentless momentum propelling Tate deeper into a moral swamp. However, given Cleave’s psychological insight, it’s ironic the narrative catalysts—a priest and the serial killer—are the two least-defined among the story’s characters. Others among the attending cast are magnificently drawn, including the retired cemetery caretaker, a malignant drunk with dark secrets and a discredited television reporter willing to manipulate sound bites in a vendetta against Tate. Contemporary crime noir at its best, mined from the dark pit of the human psyche.
THREE LIVES OF TOMOMI ISHIKAWA
Constable, Benjamin Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4516-6726-4
A debut novel from Paris-based author Constable. Tomomi, or Butterfly as she is nicknamed, and Benjamin like to hang out together in Paris and talk about their lives. They love each other but not sexually. Butterfly has episodes of anger fueled by frustration and depression but wraps them up with apologies and gets back to the love. One day, Benjamin receives a 8
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letter in which Butterfly tells him that by the time he reads it, she will have killed herself. He cannot believe she is really dead. Then he starts receiving emails from an unknown sender. The messages are said to be letters left by Butterfly in which he finds clues in a treasure hunt revealing more of Butterfly’s writings and describing some shocking things. Butterfly wants Benjamin to write a book about her life and death. The clues left in the ongoing treasure hunt take him from Paris to New York, where he meets Beatrice, who presents another mystery to be solved. Psychological, political and philosophical themes are suggested along the way, including the right of individuals facing long, painful deaths to hasten that ending on their own terms with dignity. A haunting book as much about the creative process as it is about the characters.
MRS. POE
Cullen, Lynn Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-4767-0291-9 Edgar Allen Poe, master of the gothic tale, becomes shrouded in even more gloom in Cullen’s (Reign of Madness, 2011, etc.) insipid historical novel about his relationship with fellow author Frances Sargent Locke Osgood. In the winter of 1845, Osgood finds herself relying on friends Russell and Eliza Bartlett for food and lodging while her philandering husband, portrait artist Samuel, is off with his latest romantic conquest. Although she’s had some success with her writing—Puss in Boots and her poetry—Osgood worries about supporting her two young daughters. At a gathering of New York elite, she meets Poe, who admires her talent. Following widespread publication of “The Raven,” Poe has become the most famous and feted writer in America. He’s also despised by many for his scathing reviews of their literary efforts and his air of superiority. The fact that he married his first cousin, Virginia, when she was only 13 supplies fodder for the gossip mills and, eventually, so does the relationship that develops between Osgood and Poe. Although they try to mask their attraction, they spend time together with his mother-in-law/aunt and Mrs. Poe, who is desperately ill and annoyingly childish. Osgood is commissioned to write a piece about the Poes’ lives, but the plans fall through; however, it doesn’t end her relationship with the Poe family. Even though she’s uncomfortable with her situation, and suspects that Mrs. Poe’s need to compete with her for Poe’s attention is more ominous than mere jealousy suggests, Osgood is unable to break away. The pair continues to communicate in the form of published poems, during arranged outings and at social events, but their love is further complicated by public disapproval, Mrs. Poe’s decline, Samuel’s brief reappearance, a life-altering decision and harrowing near-death experiences. Although Cullen attempts to portray Osgood and Poe
as sympathetic characters, it’s difficult to identify with either as they teeter back and forth between feelings of guilt, anguish, fear and defiance. The narrative might have been more interesting had the author focused on the relationship between the title character and her husband.
DUPLEX
Davis, Kathryn Graywolf (208 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-1-55597-653-8 Literate science fiction, its deadpan tone controlled, which examines life in a future that may or may not be dystopian. Davis’ (The Thin Place, 2006, etc.) seventh novel is hard to summarize. A terrible catastrophe has occurred, but perhaps it's so long ago that it no longer means much to those alive in the now that the book inhabits. The story begins on a suburban street. Ships called “scows” are visible overhead. We meet Miss Vicks, Mary, Eddie, a sorcerer named Walter (aka “Body-without-Soul”) and a snarky teenage sibyl named Janice— but does she know the past or predict the future? Fortunately, in this future present, people have not lost their sense of humor; they still have irony. The point of view assumes that this strange world—time seems to pass, space seems to have extension— where the quotidian and the menacing mix, where some grow old and die while others, the robots, do not, is consistent. It has an identifiable narrative arc, following the characters who grow up and age, bear real or raise artificial children, and die. As in conventional realist fiction, not all details are essential, either to the story or the characters, but are present only for the sake of verisimilitude. Fiction can consider diverse objects and registers of experience—My Pretty Pony, robots the size of pins, trading cards stored in cigar boxes stashed in a cluttered closet, myths—submerge all in a uniform tone and so create equivalence: a world that is not our world but that is recognizable, consistent and strange. More fiction than science fiction, admirably written but not for the average reader of the genre, this book will please and surprise.
Thea arrives at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, expanded years earlier to a year-round school, in the summer of 1930. She has been sent away from her home in central Florida for an initially mysterious offense, and she bitterly regrets her exile from the isolated rural paradise she roamed freely with her twin brother, Sam. Though she frequently tells us she has rarely spent time with anyone other than relatives, Thea is a self-assured newcomer who quickly assumes a favored spot in the girls’ pecking order, partly because she’s taken up by popular Sissy, partly because she’s an excellent horsewoman, but mostly because this stunned survivor of family ostracism seems to her peers a cool, detached observer indifferent to their approval. In elegant prose that evokes the cadences of a vanished epoch, DiSclafani unfolds at a leisurely pace the twin narratives of Thea’s odyssey at school and the charged relationship with her cousin Georgie that led to a confrontation with Sam and disgrace. Sympathetic new friends, like the school’s headmaster, Mr. Holmes, help her see that her parents unfairly chose to punish her and protect Sam, but as Thea and Holmes move into an affair, she acknowledges the fierce, unabashed sexuality
THE YONAHLOSSEE RIDING CAMP FOR GIRLS
DiSclafani, Anton Riverhead (400 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-59448-640-1
DiSclafani’s debut chronicles a teenager’s life-changing year at an elite boarding school in the North Carolina mountains. |
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“First-rate fiction from a dazzling talent.” from dirty love
that frightened her family and means she will never be the sort of proper young lady Yonahlossee was designed to cultivate. Times are changing, even in this privileged enclave; several girls have to leave when their ruined fathers can no longer pay the bills, and Thea’s family is forced to sell the home she yearns for. DiSclafani writes with equal intelligence and precision about female desire and a rider’s kinship with her horse; her perfectly judged denouement allows Thea to simultaneously sacrifice herself for a friend and defiantly affirm that she will only be “a right girl” on her own terms. An unusually accomplished and nuanced coming-ofage drama.
DIRTY LOVE
Dubus III, Andre Norton (320 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 7, 2013 978-0-393-06465-0 Dubus anatomizes personal—especially sexual—relationships brilliantly in these loosely concatenated novellas. At the center of the characters’ world are the small, economically depressed towns in Massachusetts where waiters, waitresses, bartenders and bankers live and move and have their being. To Dubus’ credit, he doesn’t feel he has to solve their personal problems and the intricate twists of their relationships. Instead, he chronicles what’s going on with sympathy but without any sense that he needs to rescue them. In the first narrative, we meet hapless Mark Welch, who’s recently found out his wife, Laura, is having an affair with a banker. Although occasionally picking up and hefting a piece of lead pipe, Mark ultimately finds himself powerless to change the circumstances of his life. In the second story we follow Marla, a physically unprepossessing bank teller (yes, she works at the same bank as Laura’s lover) who feels her life slipping away from her. She begins a desultory affair with a 37-year-old engineer whose passions tend toward video games and keeping his house pathologically clean. The next story introduces us to Robert Doucette, bartender and poet manqué, who marries Althea, a sweet but reticent upholsterer. In the final months of Althea’s pregnancy, Robert has hot sex with Jackie, a waitress at the restaurant, and Althea finds this out and simultaneously goes into labor. The final narrative focuses on Devon, an 18-year-old waitress at the tavern where Robert works. To get away from an abusive father, she lives with a considerate great uncle (who harbors his own secrets), but she has to deal with the unintended consequences of an untoward sexual act that was disseminated through social media. First-rate fiction by a dazzling talent.
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BIG GIRL PANTIES
Evanovich, Stephanie Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | $14.99 e-book | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-06-222484-2 978-0-06-225369-9 e-book A trainer accidentally plays the role of Pygmalion when he transforms a client into a love interest. The main thing for which people recognize witty, sparkly Holly Brennan is her need for more than one airline seat. Though she’s always been a little fuller figured, Holly has been eating to fill an emotional void since the recent medical diagnosis and subsequent death of her husband, Bruce. When she’s seated next to Logan Montgomery on a plane back home to Englewood, N.J., Holly imagines a silent ride alongside the handsome hunk. But before she knows it, the two are engaged in casual banter. Logan tells Holly about his personal training business and, breaking his usual rule of working only with athletes, suggests taking Holly on as a client. Holly takes to her training like an ugly duckling to water, transforming before Logan’s eyes. Much to their surprise, both Logan and Holly start to see the friendship as something more. Now Holly needs to figure out whether she’s more than just a project for Logan, and Logan has to determine if Holly will ever live up to the hard bodies he usually dates. Can these two put aside their fears long enough to face what’s right in front of them? A good start by Evanovich, who presents both sides of the story in a romance with imperfect heroes.
GRAVELAND
Glynn, Alan Picador (400 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 28, 2013 978-0-312-62129-2 Glynn (Bloodland, 2012, etc.) peers once more beneath the surface of the Big Apple’s financial sector and finds enough vermin to keep an army of exterminators busy. Extermination, in fact, seems to be the order of the day. Hours after investment banker Jeff Gale is shot to death while jogging alone in Central Park, hedge fund manager Bob Holland is executed outside his apartment building under the eyes of his wife and a dozen other horrified witnesses. Has someone declared open season on the city’s financial elite? Freelance investigative reporter Ellen Dorsey soon finds evidence that, yes, indeed, someone has. Convinced that the third target is Scott Lebrecht, of Black Vine Partners, she’s torn between running to the cops and hanging onto a story she’ll lose control of as soon as it’s out in the public domain. At the same time, James Vaughan, the indomitable chairman of Oberon Capital Group, suddenly feeling his age of 84, is withdrawing from Oberon, leaving
Chief Operating Officer Craig Howley to fend for himself in a pit of vipers; Frank Bishop, who first lost his position as an architect and then his infinitely lower-tier job managing an electronics store in a dying mall, worries because his beloved daughter Lizzie isn’t returning his calls; and the regional media market is transfixed by the trial of Connie Carillo, a senator’s daughter and a mob boss’ ex, for the stabbing of her husband, Howard Meeker, a subplot that casts a shadow as long as any Thomas Pynchon conspiracy over the whole tale without any of its leading players ever appearing outside television screens. Since Howard was an investment banker too, could his killer be behind the current vendetta, or is the connection more subtle and insidious? Glynn couldn’t hit all his marks without a brisk, no-nonsense style that keeps the pot boiling vigorously till the midpoint, when the pressure abruptly drops till the whole sad carnival comes down at the end with an oddly muted crash.
THE MORELS
Hacker, Christopher Soho (368 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 30, 2013 978-1-61695-243-3 The line between art and sanity blurs to oblivion when a delusional novelist composes what he believes to be his greatest work of art. The question of just what constitutes art is at the center of debut novelist Hacker’s densely constructed puzzle of a story, but, boy, does he make you work for it. Our Everyman narrator doesn’t have much of a story himself: Chris is a film editor who is just barely muddling his way through mid-1990s Manhattan. But he’s absorbed by another’s tale when he accidentally reunites with Arthur Morel, a schoolmate. Both were child prodigies at a prestigious music academy, which Chris remembers with awe as the site where Arthur gave a command performance, followed
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“The action is inspired and written in undeniably gorgeous prose.” from the carp castle
by a literal defecation in front of his fans. These days, though, Arthur is a writer, married to a high-end bakery chef named Penelope and odd father to a son, Will. What makes Arthur so odd is his nearly fanatical devotion to the concept of writing as performance. In fact, his new novel is called The Morels and is religiously faithful to his life, with one exception. The novel’s denouement features a graphic sexual trespass against his son. “[I]t’s not a mystery,” Arthur tells Chris. “It’s not a romance, or what have you. This is—excuse the pretentiousness of saying it—literature. I’m looking for good, for true, for dangerous. This is my mandate, my only mandate. There is no formula. It’s a direction, the vaguest sort of destination, a kind of compass that, if I know how to use it, will show me the way.” As events unfold, Arthur’s elaborate defenses start to crumble. Hacker is a fine writer with a promising head start, but the narrative’s dizzying construction and meta-on-meta layers of obfuscation and posturing do start to get wearying by novel’s end. The air of talent lingers on this debut, but it’s far more interested in self-reverie than being interesting.
A FAR PIECE TO CANAAN
Halpern, Sam Perennial/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $14.99 paper | May 28, 2013 978-0-06-223316-5 Country roads lead a grieving grandfather a long way home in this emotional rural gothic by, of all people, one of Twitter’s most popular celebrities. Debut author Halpern, a retired professor of nuclear medicine, is best known as the humorous crank who inspired son Justin’s infamous twitter feed “Shit My Dad Says,” a book of the same name and a short-lived CBS sitcom. Halpern’s first novel is an affectionate, sometimes frightening and eerily effective drama about coming of age in bluegrass country. Halpern’s protagonist is Samuel Zelinsky, a retired Jewish professor who is in mourning after the death of his wife. At her request, Samuel returns home to face the ghosts of his past. Most of the book is a flashback to Samuel’s childhood with best friend Fred Mulligan and assorted other denizens of this backwoods village. In a long, sometimes elegant story that includes murderous hillbillies, mysterious pools, broken promises and terrible trespasses, Halpern captures life in the postwar South. Sam gains a protector in Ben Begley, a local who saves him from his own stupidity. The elder Samuel often reflects on how these events changed him. “There was something special in Ben and Dad’s way of preparing me to be a man,” he says. “I developed a sense of self that prevailed throughout my life. In some of my darkest moments, their views, taught so long ago, allowed me to persevere, to think my own thoughts and stick to them until I was proven wrong.” The novel captures a unique time, as characters speak in perplexing native vernacular, children carry shotguns, and sins can be washed away by mumbling, “Just foolin’.” A superfluous coda in which Samuel reconnects with an old friend is poignant nonetheless. 12
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Shades of Homer Hickham and Pat Conroy appear in this surprising debut from a dad who inspired a Twitter frenzy.
THE CARP CASTLE
Harris, MacDonald Overlook (304 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 12, 2013 978-1-4683-0694-1
Harris, a pseudonym for novelist Donald Heiney, weaves a magical web of words in his narrative of mysticism, séances and a dirigible named The League of Nations. At the core of the novel is the exotic Moira, who casts a metaphorical spell over her entourage by connecting them to the Astral Plane and “the mysteries of the invisible.” Two who come under this spell are Romer, who’s recently completed a doctorate in philosophy by writing his dissertation on angels, and Eliza. The novel opens with a vivid scene of Romer’s priapic indulgence with Eliza as he chases her across a sylvan landscape—well, sylvan except for the wasp stings they get in intimate places. This encounter leads to a flashback to their initial meeting, under the wing of Moira and her attendants. In fact, Harris’ narrative technique largely involves introducing characters (for example, Georg von Plautus, captain of The League of Nations) and then taking us back to the time when they first came under Moira’s sway. And what a cast of characters they are, ranging from the eternally hovering (no pun intended) Madge Foxthorn to Joan Esterel, whose sexuality is polymorphous since “she felt herself capable of copulating with a dog, a cloud, a zebra, with the idea of God.” The novel could be loosely defined as a quest novel, and the object of the quest of these members of the “Guild of Love” is the Land of Gioconda, the idealized realm where the Astral Body is transfigured. Unfortunately, the zeppelin gets derailed, as it were, over Antarctica. The action is inspired and written in undeniably gorgeous prose.
THE WATCH TOWER
Harrower, Elizabeth Text Classics (353 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-921922-42-8 Originally published in 1966 in Australia, Harrower’s (The Catherine Wheel, 1960, etc.) narrative penetrates the intimate lives of an abuser and his enablers in 1940s Australia. Laura and Clare are emotionally unprepared to fend for themselves, and their father’s sudden death and self-indulgent mother’s abandonment mark the beginning of a lifetime of permitting others to define their lives.
Yanked from boarding school, where Laura had secret aspirations of becoming a physician like her father or a professional singer, Laura’s mother enrolls her in business school in Sydney. She and Clare spend hours before and after classes catering to their mother and accepting their lot as their mother’s keepers. When Laura graduates at the top of her class, her mother insists she find work near their home, so Laura becomes a typist in a box factory. But soon after, her mother decides to return to England and leave the girls in Australia. That’s when 44-yearold factory owner Felix Shaw steps in and offers to marry Laura and care for Clare. Life doesn’t drastically change for the sisters: They go from a life of servitude in their mother’s home to a life of servitude and abuse in Felix’s new mansion. Felix desperately wants to be seen as a mover and a shaker and, just as he’s ensnared Laura and Clare, he allows shady business associates to take advantage of him. Felix drinks, and the more he drinks, the more abusive he becomes. While Laura and Clare slowly suffocate and fade into invisibility, each believes in the unimportance of her existence. In fact, Clare’s astounded to discover that a coworker actually has thought about her when she wasn’t around. Although the introduction of a new character brings new hope to Clare, reading Harrower’s psychological narrative can be as emotionally draining as the lives she describes. Her haunting and delicate writing provides stark contrast to the reality of her characters’ situations. Readers who missed this book the first time around will want to read the reprint.
paths. In unsettling scenes, thuggish Windy City police thwart and threaten, determined to keep the kids off the case. But what really propels the narrative are the tense dynamics among its three protagonists. Why is aggressive, sometimes violent Havens so obsessed with the case? What message comes in a letter a lawyer hands to shy Joyce in a prologue? Will Joyce and Gold kindle an affair? Or is she already involved with Havens? In a wily and surprising wrap-up, Harvey links both plotlines, leaving only one question unanswered: Is this the first of a spinoff series? At fade-out, narrator Joyce says the case was “...the beginning of whatever was to come.” Do the math. Not as tricky and gritty as Harvey’s Kelly cases, but the appealing kids at the book’s center pick up the slack and leave us wanting more. (Author tour to Boston/New England, Chicago and Seattle)
THE INNOCENCE GAME
Harvey, Michael Knopf (256 pp.) $24.95 | May 9, 2013 978-0-307-96125-9
The pursuers nearly upstage the pursued in this thriller about the brutal serial killings of young boys. Although series protagonist PI Michael Kelly does a cameo in this latest from Chicago noir scribe Harvey, the author turns his attention to three eager journalism grad students—and the reader readily follows along. The trio—Ian Joyce (narrator), Sarah Gold and Jake Havens—enroll at Medill School of Journalism in a seminar devoted to wrongful convictions, a class that has led to the release of many unjustly imprisoned persons. The students tackle the tough case of James Harrison, convicted 14 years ago for the brutal killing of Skyler Wingate, a 10-year-old boy. Testing of blood on the convicted man’s jeans perfectly matched the victim’s DNA. Harrison went to prison, where he was murdered. Now, at Havens’ door, someone drops a note bearing the original case number and one sentence: “I KILT THE BOY.” Then, near the scene of the original crime, the students find the body of another youth, the gruesome details of his killing echoing Wingate’s murder. However well-worn, the serial-killer plot works here, first since Harvey keeps throwing tough obstacles in the investigative journalists’ |
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Meg Wolitzer
A Big, Full Book By Claiborne Smith eye. Jules (as she comes to be known) and her friends are unfailingly loyal to one another until a crisis erupts that they are unable to contain and solve within the group. (In fact, the New York tabloids temporarily glom onto the scandal, and the New York district attorney pursues the culprit.) For some time now, Wolitzer has been a writer critics and readers respect. Her novel The Ten-Year Nap (2008), which Kirkus starred (as we did The Interestings), was a New York Times best-seller and a popular book club choice, focusing as it does on the question of women who must navigate raising a family and having a career. But Wolitzer should be better-known. She is a generous, compassionate, piercing comedic writer who tackles issues readers actually care about. She’s firing on all pistons in The Interestings, which feels complete and assertive, a flag planted in the Earth staking out a new ambition. I asked her about being typecast as a “women’s fiction” writer and how her past influences her new novel.
PHOTO © NINA SUBIN
The Interestings, in Meg Wolitzer’s inviting, ambitious novel of the same name, are a clique of highly self-selected 15-year-olds who meet in 1974 at a summer camp in the Northeast run by aging Socialists. The Interestings are beautiful, privileged, hyperintellectual New Yorkers and the coolest people Julie Jacobson, who is embarrassed about growing up in the New York suburbs, has ever met. One becomes enormously wealthy from the cartoon he first develops at the camp, while another, the son of a famous folk singer, has to emerge from the AIDS crisis unharmed. Everyone seems convinced that these six little gods are imbued with their own talents, though whether they are—and what it means if they aren’t—becomes the target of Wolitzer’s observant, funny
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Q: A year ago, you published an article in the New York Times where you wrote that, “Yet if, on the other hand, a woman writes a doorstop filled with free associations about life and love and childbirth and war, and jokes and recipes and maybe even a novel-within-a-novel, and anything else that will fit inside an endlessly elastic membrane, she risks being labeled undisciplined and self-indulgent.” It feels to me like The Interestings is an answer to the questions you posed in that article, like maybe you were setting yourself the goal of writing an ambitious novel that can’t be typecast as specifically men’s or women’s fiction. Does it feel that way to you? A: It’s complicated. As I was writing that essay, I was thinking very much about these things. It’s hard to say which exactly came first. There’s a genesis of a long time thinking about these issues and men and women in fiction, and somewhere in the middle of that, I started writing this novel. I think sometimes you have to let yourself go more when you’re writing, and writing this essay did let me do
that, to not let me feel that I had to do some things that I might have consciously or unconsciously done in the past, which is the fetish of the good sentence as opposed to looking at the whole entity. It was really important to me when I first started (as it still is to a large extent) that the writing be strong. But you don’t want the writing to be good at the expense of the whole project, and I think I started thinking of this as a bigger project than maybe I had some of my other books. When I was writing that essay, I was speaking to myself, absolutely. But to address the question about men’s and women’s fiction…my dream book is a sort of big, full book that doesn’t feel like it’s propelled by male arrogance. Many big, full books by men don’t feel that way, but some do, and it was important to me that the women characters be fully realized. I think it’s a more coed book than I’ve written before. It’s more that I think of it as coed rather than neither male nor female.
on the floor of their living room, and I was quivering with excitement, because suddenly things were about us and not about our parents.
Q: You write in the novel about 1975 as “one more year in a
Claiborne Smith is the features editor at Kirkus Reviews.
sequence of shameful years”—why did you want to set the novel, or the foundation of it, at that time?
A: You made close friends at the camp? Q: My closest friend, she was great to talk to about
this novel, about our differing or similar senses of that experience, but what interests me most about it is time passing. I really wanted to do that in this book. What happens to talent over time? There are so many people when you’re young who you think they’re going to go so far, they’re brilliant, and it doesn’t always turn out; you don’t hear about them again. I got very excited with this novel that I didn’t necessarily have to zoom in and stay there and have it be an extended meditation on one thing. I wanted to linger in a lot of places.
A: I’m exactly the same age as my characters. My math
is horrible, but above and beyond that, I really wanted to look at experiences from that time through a lens similar to the one that I had. This story is not autobiographical except that I did go to a summer camp in that summer [of 1974] that was very much like this, and it meant everything to me. But the way that it springboarded from there was very different from anything in the book. What I remember so vividly from that era—and so many things that have disappeared—I wanted to put in this book. Thinking about the Vietnam War, the endless POW-MIA bracelets the girls in my school wore; a sense of being too young to understand the prevailing political culture but having an ear out for it in the rhythms of what your parents were talking about; a desire to enter the world, but feeling that the world was corrupt….Starting at age 15 in 1974 was the right way to wind up the toy.
A: So you went to a camp as a teenager like the one in the novel? Q: It was in Stockbridge, Mass., in the Berkshires. It was
this brief moment; I grew up in the suburbs like Jules, but I grew up in a very different kind of home. My mother [Hilma Wolitzer] is a writer, so I grew up in a more sophisticated home than Jules did, however I didn’t know kids who lived in the city, and I met them for the first time that summer, and I was excited by them. I didn’t really know what it felt like to live in the city, but I would go visit them, and we would see foreign films. I would sleep
The Interestings Wolitzer, Meg Riverhead (480 pp.) $27.95 Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-594488-39-9 |
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I’LL BE SEEING YOU
Hayes, Suzanne; Nyhan, Loretta Harlequin MIRA (400 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 28, 2013 978-0-7783-1495-0 Two World War II soldiers’ wives begin a pen-pal correspondence and help each other through the emotional upheaval of war. Rita is a middle-aged professor’s wife in Iowa, and Glory is a young mother in Massachusetts. Through a pen-pal program, the two become fast friends in 1943 and share their fears, temptations, trials and triumphs as they move through the war years. Rita’s husband and son are both in uniform, her husband in Europe and her son on a ship in the South Pacific. Glory’s husband is overseas, too, but her life is complicated by the shadow of a past romance with her husband’s best friend, who is medically unable to serve in the war. Glory has two children under 5, and Rita’s son is apparently in love with the least acceptable girl in town; Rita is a German-American married to a second-generation Italian, while Glory hails from New England money. The two establish a solid friendship that grows ever more devoted, and through their letters and the occasional correspondence to and from secondary characters, we get a powerful, fascinating look at the war years and at the interesting choices and tragic consequences of a nation enduring an overseas war. Engaging, charming and moving, a beautifully rendered exploration of WWII on the homefront and the type of friendship that helps us survive all manner of battles.
EMILY & HERMAN
Healey, John J. Arcade (256 pp.) $21.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-61145-830-5
Healey takes poetic license in his debut novel about a “forgotten” manuscript—supposedly found among his deceased grandfather’s belongings—that tells the story of a romantic relationship between two of American’s most well-
known early writers. Autobiographies and historical documents about the lives of long-dead prominent figures sometimes pique the imagination of novelists who then seize the opportunity to flesh out the subjects’ lives. Healey’s narrative, about a journey undertaken by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and siblings Austin and Emily Dickinson, endeavors to humanize the three authors along with a young Walt Whitman. It’s the summer of 1851, and Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, is heavy with their second child when Hawthorne convinces Melville to travel with him. The two men show up at the Dickinson home in Amherst and invite Emily, barely 20, and her older brother to join them as 16
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they travel to Boston and New York. The foursome sets sail to New York from Fall River, and Emily is thrilled with the excitement of this new experience. She’s also drawn to Melville, who’s more than a decade her senior. The two end up on deck during the late hours of the night and share a kiss. Hawthorne, the staunchly conservative eldest of the group, is angry when he learns of Melville’s attraction to Emily, and he parts ways with them. Reduced to a threesome, the travelers meet Whitman, attend a dinner party and go to an oyster restaurant. Melville and Emily decide to take a different route home via the Long Island Railroad, but Austin decides to travel home via Boston because he has to attend to some personal business. Whitman (who’s involved in the Underground Railroad) accompanies the couple on the train as he helps a runaway slave to escape to the North and to freedom. Throughout the narrative, key characters expound upon religion, slavery, the fears that drive men, love, sexual orientation and societal institutions. Readers who know a bit about these authors’ lives will not be shocked by Whitman’s dalliances or Melville’s exploits. Despite the fact that Healey tries to deliver an entertaining romance, some readers may feel uncomfortable with the liberties he takes with these literary icons.
DEATH OF AN EMPIRE
Hume, M.K. Atria (512 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 21, 2013 978-1-4767-1514-8 Series: Merlin Prophecy, 2
A mannered lecture of a novel borrowing from—and liberally interpreting—the Arthurian Cycle. Readers of Hume’s previous books (Battle of Kings, 2013, etc.) have met Myrddion Merlinus, aka Merlin, who has made a name for himself throughout Cymru by thwarting the designs of the very bad High King named Vortigern and avoiding the eager blades of the very bad Saxons. So what’s an aspiring sorcerer to do? Myrddion betakes himself, Bilbo Baggins–like, out of the Shire (beg pardon, Segontium) and thence to Dubris and thence to the wine-dark Middle Sea, Cymru being an inhospitable place: “This wind would freeze off a witch’s tits,” saith one Dark Ages dweeb, in the first of many hoary clichés that the reader will meet on this long road. If things are busily mayhem-beset in Romano-Celtic Britain, off in the Roman lands proper they are more so, and Myrddion and company land themselves right in the middle of a smack down with none other than Attila the Hun. Saith a helpful Roman, “[t]he legionaries, together with Merovech and Childeric, will nullify Attila’s force on the center of the plain while Thorismund and King Theodoric control the high ground and engage the Hun forces.” Ha, Visigoths! If the reader at this point feels like taking notes on a swarming cast of characters, it will take his (or perhaps her) mind off the studied lack of meaningful action, compounded by the usual tritenesses (“He was a little
frightened by how close death had come to him”) and anachronisms (“A Roman general called Flavius Aetius has pissed them off by returning their gift to its original donor”). Dry, drab and drowsy. T.H. White it ain’t.
ANONYMOUS SOURCES
Kelly, Mary Louise Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4767-1554-4 Kelly, a former NPR reporter, presents Boston-based newspaper reporter Alexandra James, who stumbles upon a complicated terrorist plot while chasing a trans-Atlantic story. Thomas Carlyle, only son of the president’s personal attorney and a smart young man of privilege, has returned to Boston from
a year studying at Cambridge. When he arrives home, he grabs a couple of bottles of brew and heads over to Harvard University to use a key copied during his student days and ascend a bell tower. But instead of relaxing and watching the action below, he is pushed to his death. When the Chronicle’s staff catches wind of the dead body on Harvard’s campus, Alex is the closest reporter. She reluctantly trots over to the crime scene and manages to worm her way into a front row seat to the action. Following the last few days of Carlyle’s life, Alex traces him back to Cambridge, where she interviews some of his friends and the aloof, self-important girl with whom Carlyle fell in love. Soon, she finds herself in bed with a handsome Englishman and on the trail of a Pakistani scientist with access to the materials critical to making a nuclear device. But when Alex returns to U.S. soil, her story becomes a cat-and-mouse game with very high stakes, and she finds herself deep in the weeds with some pretty scary characters, all of whom wish her anything but well. Kelly uses her own Harvard/Cambridge background to bring authenticity to her tale and writes clear, unadorned prose. In Alex she creates a stereotypical thriller heroine: beautiful, brilliant, plucky and haunted by the events of her past.
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“A magical exercise in artful literary fiction.” from burial rites
A by-the-numbers spy thriller. The tale isn’t terribly original but perfect for plane rides, vacations and to read while sitting in waiting rooms.
KERRIGAN IN COPENHAGEN
Kennedy, Thomas E. Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-62040-109-5
A sui generis work, the third in the author’s Copenhagen Quartet, following In the Company of Angels (2010) and Falling Sideways (2011); these stand-alone novels have nothing in common save their Copenhagen setting. Though the viewpoint character Kerrigan is not Kennedy’s alter ego, they overlap. Both are Irish-American expatriate writers, long resident in the Danish capital. Kerrigan’s current commissioned project is to sample Copenhagen’s bars (there are over 1,500) and write up the best 100; for the research, he has an associate, a woman in her late 50s, like himself. The bars they visit are itemized in boldface, guidebook style. It’s a hopefully never-ending project for Kerrigan, a serious drinker and a lover of Copenhagen (the novel is subtitled “a love story”). That love expands to pay tribute to the city’s history and its literary giants (Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen). Coiled in this thicket of names, among the dates he rattles off like an auctioneer, is the story of Kerrigan’s devastating loss. He was lecturing at the university on verisimilitude, the writer’s creation of illusion, when a student transfixed him. Blonde, blue-eyed Licia was 20 years his junior but appeared equally attracted. They married, had a baby. Then, pregnant again, Licia disappeared with their daughter. Divorce papers followed. That was three years ago; the wound is still raw. What festers most is her accusation: “You are so blind.” Kerrigan is haunted by the irony that he, an authority on illusion, had been blinded by the illusion of love. All this he confesses to his associate, after bedding her; but, still in turmoil, he takes a quick trip to Dublin, meditating on Joyce. This attempt “to clothe himself in history and literature” doesn’t work, and a solo pub-crawl back in Copenhagen almost does him in. It’s 1999, fin de siècle, and maybe fin de Kerrigan, for the doctor has discovered clotting in both lungs. Kerrigan’s unresolved angst is the artificial heart of this real, joyous celebration of Copenhagen. (Author tour to Boston, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.)
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BURIAL RITES
Kent, Hannah Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-316-24391-9 With language flickering, sparkling and flashing like the northern lights, Kent debuts with a study of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, an Icelandic servant convicted of an 1828 murder. The murder was horrific: two men bludgeoned, stabbed and burnt. Agnes and two others were convicted, but sentences—Agnes was to be beheaded—require confirmation by Denmark’s royal government. Kent opens her powerful narrative with Agnes, underfed and unwashed, being moved from district capital imprisonment to Kornsá, a valley farmstead. Stoic, dutiful Jón and his tubercular wife, Margrét, are forced by circumstance to accept her charge. Reflecting intimate research, the story unfolds against the fearsome backdrop of 19th-century Icelandic life. It’s a primitive world where subsistence farmers live in crofts—dirt-floored, turf-roofed hovels—and life unfolds in badstofa, communal living/sleeping rooms. Beautiful are Kent’s descriptions of the interminable summer light, the ever-present snow and ice and cold of winter’s gloomy darkness, the mountains, sea and valleys where sustenance is blood-rung from sheep. Assistant Rev. Thorvardur has been assigned to “direct this murderess to the way of truth and repentance,” but he is more callow youth than counselor. His sessions with Agnes come and go, and he becomes enamored of Agnes and obsessed by her life’s struggles. Kent deftly reveals the mysterious relationship between Agnes, a servant girl whom valley folk believe a “[b]astard pauper with a conniving spirit,” and now-dead Natan Ketilsson, a healer, some say a sorcerer, for whom she worked as a housekeeper. Kent writes movingly of Natan’s seduction of the emotionally stunted Agnes—“When the smell of him, of sulphur and crushed herbs, and horse-sweat and the smoke from his forge, made me dizzy with pleasure”—his heartless manipulation and his cruel rejection. The narrative is revealed in third person, interspersed with Agnes’ compelling first-person accounts. The saga plays out in a community sometimes revenge-minded and sometimes sympathetic, with Margrét moving from angry rejection to near love, Agnes ever stoic and fearful, before the novel reaches an inevitable, realistic and demanding culmination. A magical exercise in artful literary fiction.
SANDSTORM
Lee, Alan L. Forge (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-7653-3494-7 No slouch with bloodletting, Lee’s debut action-adventure novel scatters bodies across Maryland, Italy, Russia and Israel before a quarter of the narrative has expired. CIA station chief Erica Janway was linked to a sexual harassment scandal and brought to Langley. Assigned as a desk jockey until things are resolved, she’s shot through the heart by a man in a wet suit. Simultaneously, her protégé, Nora Mossa, is attacked in Rome. Nora knows there’s a conspiracy afoot, and she goes underground and flees to the Virgin Islands. There, she pleads for help from her former lover and ex-CIA agent, Alex Kove. Doubtless Lee hopes to hang a thriller series on Kove, his intellectual, multilingual superagent recruited to the Company after a sterling NFL career. While cinematic jump-cuts common to action thrillers and blockbuster films move the story, the dialogue is neither literate nor layered. That said, Lee can render a good line, “The pair fell in unison, as if synchronized dying were a sporting event.” Dwelling little on settings other than the mention of landmarks, Lee sends the narrative flying through D.C., Brussels, Kuwait, Crete, Georgia and into Iran. However, Lee’s here-and-there-and-everywhere settings and double handfuls of characters sometimes overwhelm action with information. Grab a cheat sheet to track the plethora of players: Alex’s cohort, Duncan Anderson, enters the narrative with no history or biography other than, “One black man reporting for duty;” then there’s the head of the National Clandestine Service; an ambitious and corrupt U.S. senator; his son, an incompetent CIA agent; a German magnate whose sideline is clandestine arms; and an amoral billionaire intent on altering world history. The plot hinges on nukes for Iran, with U.S. and Israeli schemers conspiring to trick the ayatollahs for geopolitical gain or personal profit. Kove’s nemesis from his agency days, Dmitri Nevsky, a former Russian secret agent, also shows up. Conventional action-adventure fare.
takes an old trunk full of clothing on consignment and, while going through the items, finds a journal, started in 1907 by a woman named Olive, sewn inside a muff. These two women are separated by a century but have a lot in common. Olive is rebelling against the 19th-century concept of a woman’s “place” in society, and Amanda feels herself caught between two historic eras. Olive’s mother died in childbirth, and she was raised by an upper-class, loving but conservative father. His fortune was lost in the stock market, and when he died, she became poor. The author presents compelling, often shocking historical details about the treatment of working women in the early years of the century. Meanwhile, Amanda, in contemporary Manhattan, is considering extricating herself from an affair with a man she dearly loves. Along the way, she visits a hypnotist. The tape she receives after her session introduces questions that bring her closer to Olive. The author combines an impressive knowledge of history, sociology and psychology to create an intellectually and emotionally rewarding story.
ASTOR PLACE VINTAGE
Lehmann, Stephanie Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-4516-8205-2 The past meets the present in Lehmann’s work of feminist literary fiction. In 2007, 39-year-old Amanda indulges her interest in history by running a vintage clothing business in New York City. She is contacted by Jane Kelly, who, at 98, is getting rid of a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff, selling whatever she can for whatever she can get. Amanda |
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“A beautifully written novel, an experience to savor.” from transatlantic
THE BOOKMAN’S TALE
Lovett, Charlie Viking (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 3, 2013 978-0-670-02647-0
A pleasurably escapist trans-Atlantic mystery is intricately layered with plots, murders, feuds, romances, forgeries— and antiquarian book dealing. Lovett’s engagingly traditional debut offers flavors of notable British antecedents—Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Noel Coward— while spinning tales in several different eras, all centered on the book that supposedly inspired Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale. The novel’s hero is insecure, grieving, widowed bookseller Peter Byerly, whose scholarship to Ridgefield University in North Carolina introduced him to his twin passions: his future wife, Amanda, and old books. Peter’s wooing and winning of Amanda is one of the novel’s three concurrent plot strands, the others (both set in the U.K.) being a here-and-now hunt and chase and a through-the-ages tracing of a volume of Pandosto, a play by Robert Greene which came to be annotated by Shakespeare and, if found and exposed in modern times, would answer an earth-shattering (to some) question of scholarship: Did Shakespeare really write his plays or not? Peter’s discovery, in a bookshop, of a Victorian watercolor portrait seemingly of his dead wife sets this sizable ball rolling and leads through new female friendships, murder scenes and tombs to a pleasing-if-predictable country-house denouement. A cheerily old-fashioned entertainment.
THE GUEST HOUSE
Marks, Erika New American Library (400 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-451-41885-2 Three generations of women navigate love, loyalty and class issues in a Cape Cod resort town. In 1966, hometown girl Edie is an unwelcome member of a building crew working on a guesthouse for the Moss family, owners of the biggest summer cottage in Harrisport. When she catches the eye of Tucker Moss, her life takes a different turn, creating a romantic dilemma for Edie, who ultimately winds up with her colleague Hank Wright in a long-lasting, happy marriage. As a teen, Edie’s daughter Lexi falls in love with Tucker’s son, Hudson, who dumps her unceremoniously when his parents offer him an ultimatum and he’s unwilling to stand up to them. Now, years later, Lexi’s back, a professional photographer, and Hudson’s brother Cooper, a successful writer, wants her to photograph the estate in support of an application for historical designation. As the two spend time together, it’s clear there’s something that might be worth exploring between 20
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them. Meanwhile, Edie is hired to coordinate renovations on the guesthouse. Hank and Tucker are both gone, so there’s no reason not to take the job, and rekindling a friendship with Jim Masterson, Tucker’s best friend, is an unexpected bonus. Unfortunately, Edie’s son Owen is resistant to either his mother or his sister being on the property. He’d like nothing more than to be done with wealthy summer visitors, one of whom stole his wife and is making life with his teenage daughter more complicated. But the Moss estate guards mysteries and memories that will resurface, offering answers, surprises and new beginnings. Marks’ third novel is a textured story about the interwoven relationships of two families on Cape Cod in three different time periods. With its smoothly written, languid style, the book explores young love, social strata and releasing the bonds of the past. A satisfying read that evokes the leisurely warmth of long summer days and true connection.
TRANSATLANTIC
McCann, Colum Random House (320 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4000-6959-0 A masterful and profoundly moving novel that employs exquisite language to explore the limits of language and the tricks of memory. It hardly seems possible that this novel, epic in ambition, is comparatively compact or that one so audacious in format (hopscotching back and forth across an ocean, centuries, generations) should sustain such narrative momentum. The award-winning McCann (Let the Great World Spin, 2009, etc.) interweaves historical and fictional truth as he connects the visit to Ireland in 1845 by Frederick Douglass, whose emancipation appeals on behalf of all his fellow slaves inspire a young Irish maid to seek her destiny in America, to the first trans-Atlantic flight almost 65 years later, carrying a mysterious letter that will ultimately (though perhaps anticlimactically) tie the various strands of the plot together. The novel’s primary bloodline begins with Lily Duggan, the Irish maid inspired by Douglass, and her four generations of descendants, mainly women whose struggle for rights and search for identity parallels that of the slave whose hunger for freedom fed her own. Ultimately, as the last living descendant observes, “[t]he tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.” The novel’s narrative strategy runs deeper than literary gamesmanship, as the blurring of distinctions between past and present, and between one side of the ocean and the other, with the history of struggle, war and emancipation as a backdrop, represents the thematic thread that connects it all: “We prefigure our futures by imagining our pasts. To go back and forth. Across the waters. The past, the present, the elusive future. A nation. Everything constantly shifted by the present. The taut elastic of time.”
A beautifully written novel, an experience to savor. (Author tour to: Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Kansas City, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles)
SOMEONE
McDermott, Alice Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 3, 2013 978-0-374-28109-0 McDermott’s brief seventh novel (Child of My Heart, 2002, etc.) follows seven decades of a Brooklyn woman’s modest life to create one of the author’s most trenchant explorations into the heart and soul of the 20th-century Irish-American family. Sitting on the stoop of her apartment building, 7-year-old Marie watches her 1920s Brooklyn neighborhood through the
thick glasses she already wears—her ability to see or missee those around her is one of the novel’s overriding metaphors. She revels in the stories of her neighbors, from the tragedy of Billy Corrigan, blinded in the war, to the great romance of the Chebabs’ Syrian-Irish marriage. Affectionately nicknamed the “little pagan” in contrast to her studious, spiritual older brother Gabe, Marie feels secure and loved within her own family despite her occasional battles of will against her mother. Cozy in their narrow apartment, her parents are proud that Marie’s father has a white-collar job as a clerk, and they have great hopes for Gabe, who is soon off to seminary to study for the priesthood. Marie’s Edenic childhood shatters when her adored father dies. In fact, death is never far from the surface of these lives, particularly since Maries works as a young woman with the local undertaker, a job that affords many more glimpses into her neighbors and more storytelling. By then, Gabe has left the priesthood, claiming it didn’t suit him and that his widowed mother needs him at home. Is he a failure or a quiet saint? After her heart is broken by a local boy who dumps her for a richer girl, Marie marries one of Gabe’s former parishioners, has children and eventually
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“Promising but repetitive.” from the sea of tranquility
moves away from the neighborhood. Gabe remains. Marie’s straightforward narration is interrupted with occasional jumps back and forward in time that create both a sense of foreboding and continuity as well as a meditation on the nature of sorrow. There is no high drama here, but Marie and Gabe are compelling in their basic goodness, as is McDermott’s elegy to a vanished world.
THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY
Millay, Katja Atria (448 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4767-3094-3
A debut novel that opens on a scene of dark clouds between past and future storms. The alternating voices of two young adults, a boy and girl, comprise the book. Their tragic histories are hinted at and slowly revealed amid the daily scenes of social awkwardness in high school halls, classrooms and schoolyard. Nastya Kashnikov (an alias) is a newcomer at the school. She was a child piano prodigy who felt like she had lost her identity when her hand was crushed and she could no longer play the Hayden, Bach and Mozart pieces she excelled at during a precocious childhood. The story of an assault that nearly killed her is her secret. At first, she couldn’t remember the details of what happened, couldn’t answer the questions from the police detective or the trauma therapist, and then, when it all came back, she refused to speak about any of it. Josh Bennett is the tragic young man who lost his family before his 18th birthday. While he longs for the ghosts of his family to visit him, he lacks interest in the living people who want to reach out to him. The book takes the reader on a slow journey with a lot of twists and turns. Along the way, Josh and Nastya form relationships with others that will help pass the time, but these are no match for the support the two will eventually offer each other. Promising but repetitive. Too many scenes convey the same basic feelings and do not move the story along.
KISS ME FIRST
Moggach, Lottie Doubleday (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-385-53747-6 Moggach’s debut draws the reader into a series of events that bring together three very disparate individuals and puts them into a bizarre game of chance and deceit. Leila’s father left before she was born, and her mother died when she had barely reached young adulthood. Sheltered, socially inept and almost friendless, she secures a job testing software out of the home Leila bought herself: a run-down apartment over an Indian 22
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restaurant in Rotherhithe, in Southeast London. But things all change when Leila joins a philosophical discussion group on a website known as Red Pill and is befriended by the site’s owner, an American named Adrian. Leila is elevated to one of the site’s most trusted commenters, and soon, Adrian approaches Leila with a proposition. Would she pretend to be someone else online for about six months in order to cover up the woman’s pending suicide? The woman in question is a dark-haired, hypnotic gamine who entrances men and has many friends, basically the opposite of Leila. Tess, as she is known, has some emotional issues and doesn’t want anyone else to realize she’s gone off and killed herself, so she plans to do the deed someplace where her body won’t easily be found. Leila agrees and begins to correspond with Tess, learning her friends, habits, speech patterns, likes and dislikes, and history. But then things happen that Leila not only hasn’t counted upon, but also isn’t prepared to handle, and everything starts to tilt, changing the way Leila views what she’s doing and the people who are important to both women’s lives. In Leila, Moggach has drawn a young woman who is convincingly naïve in the ways of the world and incapable of making good decisions. The story crackles with tension until the end, when it inexplicably runs out of steam. An interesting first book that manages to incorporate technology into a sexy psychological thriller that holds the reader’s attention until it reaches the oddly tame ending.
THE RETURNED
Mott, Jason Harlequin MIRA (400 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-7783-1533-9 The world, a community and an elderly couple are confused and disconcerted when people who have died inexplicably come back, including the couple’s 8-year-old son, whom they lost nearly 50 years ago. No one understands why people who died are coming back. There’s no rhyme or reason, just a sudden reappearance of a massive population who were dead and are now alive, nearly exactly as they were the minute before they died. Some died a hundred years ago, some died 50 years ago; some are young children, some are senile old women and men. Considered by some the work of the devil, by others a miracle, the confounding reality is that an already struggling planet must abruptly support a staggering influx of beings who have typical human needs: food, water, shelter, sanitation. Globally, the cataclysmic event of their return brings about a spectrum of responses that reflects many facets of faith, spirituality, and the best and worst of human nature. Individually, many of the living must decide whether or not to accommodate the people they loved as they return to a world that has left them behind. Written mainly from the perspective of Lucille and Harold Hargrave— an elderly couple whose 8-year-old son, Jacob, returns to them decades after he died—and taking place in a small Southern
town that becomes a regional coordination center for handling those who come back, this book offers a beautifully written and emotionally astute look at our world gone awry. At the center is a startling and disturbing idea, especially given how many of us wish we could have one more chance to see the ones we’ve loved and lost to death: What if many of them came back, all at once? Poet and debut author Mott has written a breathtaking novel that navigates emotional minefields with realism and grace.
ALL THE DEAD YALE MEN
Nova, Craig Counterpoint (352 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-58243-828-3
A complex melodrama, set in Boston, about a third-generation attorney who must come to terms with the tawdry legacy of a manipulative father manipulated by his own father and a willful daughter who falls for the wrong guy. This is a sequel to Nova’s (The Constant Heart, 2012, etc.) acclaimed The Good Son, which appeared in 1982. Frank MacKinnon is his father’s son, a not-yet-dead Yale man. Frank’s father, Chip, is a hard-drinking type with uncertain but nefarious employment who has wasted the assets of his own cold, calculating (and longdead) father, Pop. Money was squandered, and, worse yet, twothirds of Pop’s ample property in Delaware was sold off to the Girl Scouts. Frank turns to the journals of Pop’s deceased wife, Catherine, for help in sorting out the financial mess, the emotional turmoil, the bad genes. Frank, a prosecutor, is a mess himself, blowing a case that eats at what remains of his conscience and struggling to steer his beloved, bright, attractive daughter away from Aurlon Miller, a charismatic but unkempt ne’er-do-well. When Frank’s wife gets invited to Rome, Frank goes to great lengths to thwart Miller. Frank’s passionate but principled ex, Pauline, appears and plays a small but crucial part. Pauline is an irresistible type, the incorruptible criminal. A troublesome black bear roams the Delaware property, fatted with symbolism. Nova is a gifted writer of quotidian violence: car wrecks, suicides, animal poisonings, murder. The macabre steadies his prose. Connoisseurs of this sort of not-quite hard-boiled fiction will find much to admire here.
THE DOUBLE
Pelecanos, George Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown (304 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-316-07839-9 978-0-316-25591-2 e-book The second in a series featuring a new investigator represents an update for the veteran mystery novelist. Pelecanos (The Cut, 2011, etc.) has long rotated protagonists rather than settling on a signature hero. His latest is Spero Lucas, who differs from his predecessors in terms of generation, experience and bloodline. And perhaps code of morality as well. A young veteran from the Iraq War, he has become a defense attorney’s special investigator at least partly for “a replication of what he’d experienced there every day: a sense of purpose and heightened sensation.” He’s also a digital native who knows that “the secret most investigators keep is that the bulk of their modern day
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“An obvious choice for fans of Dracula and Frankenstein....” from stoker's manuscript
work is done via computer programs.” He comes by his Greek name via adoption, as part of a loving, mixed-race (but dysfunctional) family, and he tends to associate the music that Pelecanos and his previous protagonists favor with his late father. What remains constant throughout the work of the novelist is the deep knowledge of local Washington, D.C. (where this and most of his novels are set), popular culture (from music to sports to literature and beyond) and the human heart. Here, the murder Lucas begins to investigate soon seems like an afterthought, and the romance with which he becomes obsessed seems more like fantasy (though revelatory of his character) than reality. The title (fittingly enough) has a double meaning, referring both to a stolen painting Lucas tries to recover and the adversary he finds himself facing (one of them insists that the two of them are very much alike). He seems to scoff at the very notion of “literary fiction, whatever that was,” while praising “a good story told with clean, efficient writing, a plot involving a problem to be solved or surmounted, and everyday characters the reader could relate to.” A few more loose ends than usual, but this is a novel Spero Lucas would appreciate. Cult favorite Pelecanos deserves an even wider readership.
THE IRON BRIDGE Stories Of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers
Piatigorsky, Anton Steerforth (272 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jul. 9, 2013 978-1-58642-218-9
A debut collection of short fiction that takes documentary day-in-the-life snapshots from the lives of six evil exemplars. American-born Piatigorsky makes his home in Toronto. His libretto for the chamber opera, Airline Icarus, won the Italian Primo Fedora Award. A playwright, he has won the Dora Mavor Moore Award twice. His success in the theater has not translated to his debut fiction. In “Tea is Better Than Pepsi,” we meet Idi Amin. He is a cook for British and Ugandan soldiers. Amin dreams big; his dream comes true. Sâr, who grows up to be Pol Pot, seems naïve, amorous and conflicted in “A Plaything For the King’s Superfluous Wives.” In “The Consummation,” young Mao Tse-Tung is defiant and abashed, unable to do the deed to consummate his arranged marriage. We meet Stalin before he is Stalin, already insisting on his nickname Koba, during his tenure as a conniving and vengeful seminarian in Tiflis. Rafael Trujillo, called chipita or bottle cap, is an obsessive-compulsive dandy. Hitler is grandiose, obsessed with Wagner, the malevolence of whores and his father’s abuse. Without our knowledge of their futures, these young men appear unremarkable. But this collection does not do more than that; it does not tell us anything we don’t already know about the vagaries and surprises of maturation. That some men grow up to be dictators is a truism Piatigorsky fails to make compelling. 24
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The concept cannot overcome the weakness of the execution.
STOKER’S MANUSCRIPT
Prouty, Royce Putnam (352 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 13, 2013 978-0-399-15855-1
California resident Prouty’s debut novel will stoke the interest of Dracula lovers everywhere. Joseph Barkeley seems like an ordinary guy leading an uneventful life. He owns a used bookstore in Chicago and is an expert in authenticating manuscripts. One day, he is offered a great deal of money to locate missing parts of Bram Stoker’s original Dracula manuscript, an assignment that takes him to Romania, where he and his brother had been orphaned. The yoke of communism has been lifted, and underneath remains a countryside that is still fearful of vampires and the undead. Although Barkeley knows Stoker’s novel is fiction, it turns out to be more factual than he might have expected. Soon, a vampire is out to get him. Barkeley, a Christian, wears a crucifix, but that may not be enough to save him. Prouty offers vivid descriptions of ancient castles and graveyards. The prose is prim and never off-color, sprinkled with Romanian phrases to add exotic flavor to the conversations. Expect some violence—what’s a vampire novel without a few impaled bodies?—but it’s not especially graphic. And forget about sex, except for brief mention of a marital coupling in the privacy of a crypt. As for Barkeley, he blushes at the thought of a pretty woman being attracted to him. In all, a fun read, well-plotted but with no stunning revelations. An obvious choice for fans of Dracula and Frankenstein and for anyone whose reading tastes extend into the realm of superstition.
THE OTHER TYPIST
Rindell, Suzanne Amy Einhorn/Putnam (368 pp.) $25.95 | May 7, 2013 978-0-399-16146-9 Take a dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith, throw in some Great Gatsby flourishes, and the result is Rindell’s debut, a pitch-black comedy about a police stenographer accused of murder in 1920s Manhattan. Typing criminals’ confessions, Rose admires the precinct’s conservative, mustachioed middle-aged sergeant while she is critical of his superior, the lieutenant detective Frank, who is closer to her in age and a clean-shaven dandy in his white spats. An orphan raised by nuns, Rose lives in a boardinghouse and leads a prim spinster life far removed from the flappers and
increasingly liberated women of the “Roaring Twenties.” She seems destined to a life of routine solitude until a new typist is hired. Odalie wears her hair bobbed, dresses with panache and lives in a posh hotel. Rose voices disapproval at first, but she is clearly drawn to Odalie, even obsessed with her. When Odalie invites her to share her hotel rooms, Rose moves right in. Soon, Rose is accompanying Odalie on her adventures, which include bootlegging, among other vices. Sometimes Rose borrows Odalie’s clothes, sometimes she runs errands for Odalie. But who is Odalie? Where does her money come from? And if she has money, why does she work as a police stenographer? At a house party on Long Island, a young man from Newport thinks he recognizes Odalie as the debutante once engaged to his cousin, but she denies knowing him. By the time he turns up dead, Rose has been sucked into Odalie’s world so deeply that their identities have merged. Who is using whom? Recalling her recent life, revealing only what she wants to reveal in bits and pieces, Rose begins her narration archly with off-putting curlicues she gradually discards. She is tart, judgmental, self-righteous and self-justifying. She is also viciously astute. Whether she’s telling the truth is another matter. A deliciously addictive, cinematically influenced pageturner, both comic and provocative, about the nature of guilt and innocence within the context of social class in a rapidly changing culture.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Roby, Kimberla Lawson Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $24.99 | May 7, 2013 978-1-455-52606-2 The Black family is ecstatic: Son Matthew and his girlfriend, Racquel, are about to deliver the very first grandchild. But squabbling between the two grandmothers threatens to irrevocably divide the family. The 10th in Roby’s (The Reverend’s Wife, 2012, etc.) series following the adventures of Rev. Curtis Black (a potentially reformed adulterous minister) focuses on his third wife. Unfortunately, Charlotte is an egocentric, paranoid, mean-spirited woman, which makes for an unpleasant reading experience. Jealous of Racquel’s mother, Vanessa, and her access to the baby even before it is born, Charlotte is determined to get her fair share of face time. She wants Curtis to baptize the child, even though Matthew and Racquel have decided upon Pastor Collins; she wants the child called Matthew the Second, even though Matthew and Racquel have chosen Matthew Jr.; she wants to plan his resume, even though Matthew and Racquel plan to give him a loving, accepting extended family. Vanessa tries to block Charlotte, bristling not only at her domineering behavior, but also at her husband’s obvious attraction to Charlotte. The two grandmothers’ animosity erupts into an altercation at the baby shower, which sends Racquel into premature labor and Vanessa into taking even higher-security measures. Charlotte responds
by plotting vengeance. The baby does deserve a better mother, right? Meanwhile, Curtis has troubles of his own as mysterious, threatening messages arrive. Who’s trying to blackmail him? Who’s trying to destroy his financially lucrative Deliverance Outreach church? Burdened with stiff exposition—summarizing both Charlotte’s and Curtis’ many transgressions—and flat dialogue, Roby’s tale plods along, punctuated with occasional outbursts of excitement. A soap opera filled with people indulging in bad behavior. Fans of the Black family’s misplaced haloes will love this latest installment. (Author tour to Rockford, Ill., Cleveland, Houston, Richmond, Augusta, Ga., and Little Rock, Ark.)
SILKEN PREY
Sandford, John Putnam (416 pp.) $27.95 | May 7, 2013 978-0-399-15931-2 Dirty political tricksters give Lucas Davenport his most satisfying case in years. Even though he’s a conservative Republican, Sen. Porter Smalls is widely known to be a lot more liberal in his sexual ethics. But not so liberal that you’d expect child pornography to pop up on his personal office computer. The horrified staffer who accidentally finds it there calls her father, and he calls 911. Minnesota governor Elmer Henderson, a Democrat, is no friend of Smalls, but he’s impressed by his claims of innocence, and he doesn’t want any blowback if the kiddie porn turns out to have been planted. So he calls Lucas Davenport, asking him to investigate but keep everything confidential. The hush-hush first phase of the case ends when Lucas finds evidence linking the porn stash to Bob Tubbs, a political jack-of-all-trades who’s disappeared and hasn’t used his credit cards for days. Given the cover of a homicide investigation, Lucas’ Bureau of Criminal Apprehension takes the case public, solving one problem—how can Lucas talk to anybody if he’s sworn to secrecy?—but raising another. For the trail leads to some very awkward spots: the Minneapolis Police Department, from which it’s pretty clear the damning pictures came, and the campaign of Taryn Grant, the wealthy, well-connected heiress who wants Smalls’ Senate seat. With the election less than a week away, Lucas is under intense pressure to get results without stepping on the feet of Grant, who Sandford (Stolen Prey, 2012, etc.) indicates early on is indeed in this mess up to her eyeballs. Meanwhile, another Sandford veteran to whom Lucas turns for help hatches a plot to steal Grant’s jewels from the safe in her home. Complications ensue. Sandford keeps every stage of the investigation clear, compelling and suspenseful while peeling back layer after layer of a world in which “everybody was hot, everybody was rich.”
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“Silver has written a darkly witty, acerbic jigsaw puzzle of a first novel....” from the execution of noa p. singleton
DOMINION
Sansom, C.J. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (450 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-316-25491-5 What did you do in the war, Pater— eh, Vater? Let’s suppose, as Sansom does in this long, engaging bit of speculative fiction, that the Nazis had won the war. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they had stared the British down, won concessions from Lloyd George (who had “spent the thirties idolizing Hitler, calling him Germany’s George Washington”) and effectively made the United Kingdom a satellite of the Third Reich. Winston Churchill, pressed to join the Quisling government, instead spearheads a vee-for-victory resistance movement, while German racial purity laws gradually come into effect on the streets of London, with most residents only too glad to be rid of the Jews; meanwhile, critics of the regime, such as W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster, have been silenced. To judge by his name and appearance, David Fitzgerald should have no trouble in the new Britain, but his bloodline tells a different tale: “He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews”—even half-Jews, even Irish Jews. His wife, for her part, is content at first to keep her head down and her mouth shut until the Final Solution comes to the sceptered isle. If there is hope, it will come from America, where, as one dour Brit remarks, “they love their superweapons, the Americans. Almost as bad as the Germans.” Sansom’s scenario is all too real, and it has sparked a modest controversy among it-couldn’t-happenhere readers across the water. More important than the scenario is his careful unfolding of the vast character study that fascism affords, his portraits of those who resist and those who collaborate and why. That scenario, after all, is not new; Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and Philip Roth have explored it, too. What matters is what is done with it, and Sansom has done admirably. A rich and densely plotted story that will make Winston Churchill buffs admire the man even more.
THE CELESTIALS
Shepard, Karen Tin House (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-935639-55-8 Shepard’s (An Empire of Women, 2000, etc.) latest novel is based on a true piece of labor history: In 1870, Calvin Sampson, who owned a shoe factory in North Adams, Mass., broke a strike by importing 75 Chinese immigrants who worked at reduced rates. Shepard’s story is less about labor issues than the psychological effect that these new faces and this exotic culture had on the 26
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locals, who still pictured China as the “Celestial Empire” and the new arrivals as the Celestials. Though Sampson was real, most of the characters are fictional. Shepard’s most vivid creation is foreman Charlie Sing, who is the one Celestial to fully assimilate: He buries one of the immigrants in a Christian grave and keeps his loyalties divided when resolving issues between immigrants and management. More notably, he has a love affair with Sampson’s wife, Julia, who tries unsuccessfully to deny that her newborn child is of mixed heritage. Everyone else in the story has their lives changed by the Celestials’ arrival, including union organizer Alfred Robinson and his sister Lucy, who has survived a sexual assault. Teenage Ida Wilburn is initially hiding a passion for her best friend Lucy, but she too finds herself in love with Charlie. The narration plays with time throughout the book, flashing forward to the characters’ eventual destinies. Shepard maintains an effective air of mystery throughout, hinting at the transformation that the Celestials’ arrival had on the community. Balancing cultural history with soap opera isn’t easy, but Shepard manages to succeed on both counts.
THE EXECUTION OF NOA P. SINGLETON
Silver, Elizabeth L. Crown (320 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-385-34743-3
Trained as a lawyer, Silver has written a darkly witty, acerbic jigsaw puzzle of a first novel about legal versus moral culpability. No one, including the title character, disputes that 25-year-old college dropout Noa shot Sarah Dixon, her former classmate at Penn, in her Philadelphia apartment. She was found guilty and sentenced to be executed for the capital crime of murdering both Sarah and the unborn child she was carrying, her apparent motive excessive envy that Sarah’s lover was Noa’s long-estranged father, Caleb. After 10 years in prison, Noa has only six months left before what she calls X-Day when Sarah’s mother visits. A successful lawyer herself, Marlene fought for Noa to receive the death sentence but claims she has recently had a change of heart. Having founded Mothers Against Death, Marlene plans to file a clemency appeal for Noa. Ollie, the idealist young lawyer Marlene has employed as her assistant, asks Noa to tell him about herself, supposedly to build a sympathetic case. Noa suspects Marlene’s motives but slowly opens up to attractive, sympathetic Ollie. Parceling bits of her history, Noa comes across as prickly and defensive, the kind of defendant that jurors (and readers) automatically distrust. Meanwhile, Marlene writes letters to her dead daughter that show her as a dominating, judgmental woman who bears her own share of guilt for interfering in Sarah’s life out of obsessive maternal love—although Caleb, a creepy, aging ex-con with a violent past, would be every mother’s nightmare. In stark contrast to Sarah, Noa was raised by an inattentive, single mother in California and did not meet Caleb until her early 20s when he was already involved with Sarah, a
wildly inappropriate affair explicable only as Sarah’s rebellion against Marlene. As Noa, Marlene and, by extension, Caleb duel to justify their actions, no one comes out unscathed. Like Suzanne Rendell in the novel The Other Typist (2013), Silver explores convolutions of guilt and innocence beyond the law’s narrow scope with a sharpness and attention to detail that can be unnerving but demands attention.
SISTERLAND
Sittenfeld, Curtis Random House (416 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-4000-6831-9 Her psychic sister’s prediction of a major earthquake unsettles a St. Louis woman’s life in the latest from best-selling Sittenfeld (American Wife, 2008, etc.). Although identical twins Violet and Daisy Shramm as girls both had “the senses,” Daisy suppressed her abilities as part of her transformation into ordinary Kate Tucker, wife to Washington University professor Jeremy and mother to toddler Rosie and baby Owen. She’s mortified by being related to a professional psychic and appalled when Vi publicly contradicts seismologist Courtney Wheeling, who says a small quake that rattles St. Louis in September 2009 is not necessarily a prelude to a bigger one. Courtney is Jeremy’s colleague, and her husband, Hank, also a stay-at-home parent, is close with Kate’s. Vi is oblivious to the messy reality of life with small children, and we frequently see her imposing on her overwhelmed sister while condemning Kate (not without justification) as uptight and controlling; it’s a skillful way for Sittenfeld to spotlight the differences that make the twins’ interactions so fraught. The present-day narrative, moving toward the date Vi set for the big quake, intertwines with Kate’s memories of childhood and adolescence to explain why she felt so threatened by her powers—and to reveal a marriage as fraught in its own ways as Kate’s bond with Vi. Jeremy is exasperated by his wife’s anxieties, which sometimes threaten to dominate their lives; she feels inferior to her better educated, more relaxed spouse. The novel has some structural problems; scenes from the twins’ past take up more pages than their intrinsic interest merits and sometimes annoyingly interrupt the compelling main story. These flaws are insignificant compared with the powerful denouement: a shocking yet completely plausible act by Kate and its grim consequences for her marriage. The quiet closing pages remind us that damaged bonds can be repaired. A rich portrait of intricate relationships within and among families by one of commercial fiction’s smartest, most perceptive practitioners. (Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Kansas City, Wichita, Iowa City and St. Louis)
ISLAND GIRLS
Thayer, Nancy Ballantine (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-345-52873-5 A story of family from Thayer (Summer Breeze, 2012, etc.). Thrice-married Rory Randall dies and in his will leaves his expensive home in Nantucket to his three daughters on the condition that they all live in it together for a summer. Arden and Meg are half sisters. Jenny is the daughter of Rory’s third wife, Justine, whom Rory legally adopted when Justine claimed not to know who Jenny’s father was. While Arden and Meg lived with their respective moms, they spent a couple of summers with Rory, Justine and Jenny in the Nantucket home. Then Arden, the oldest, went through that snotty, hostile phase that some troubled teens go through, and Justine responded by putting an end to those visits. The three girls, now in their 30s, meet again at Rory’s funeral and the reading of the will, then embark upon the requisite summer together. After a rocky start, the reunion results in a life-changing summer for all, as they challenge each other to reach their full potentials, stop fearing relationships with the men who love them, share secrets and make discoveries. In this touching summer read, forgiveness benefits both the person bestowing it and the recipient. (Agent: Meg Ruley)
LOVE AND LAMENT
Thompson, John Milliken Other Press (400 pp.) $17.95 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-59051-587-7 A North Carolina girl is the unlikely survivor of a host of tribulations between the Civil War and World War I. Mary Bet, the no-nonsense hero of the second historical novel by Thompson (The Reservoir, 2011), is the youngest of nine children raised by a rural store owner and his wife. If that seems like a lot of characters for a novelist to juggle, Thompson dispatches them with chilling efficiency: pneumonia, accidents and other misfortunes kill off the clan one by one, until by the turn of the century, the only Hartsoes remaining are Mary Bet and her father, R.C., who soon lands in an asylum. So this is Mary Bet’s story alone, but she’s stalked by a lifelong feeling she’s been cursed, from her fear of the devil as a girl to the boy who got away as an adolescent to her adult sense that she wasn’t told everything about the death of her favorite brother. The early chapters of this book are somewhat plodding, as Thompson introduces family members only to eradicate most of them, with digressions into moonshining, religion and quixotic research into perpetual motion. But once the story is firmly Mary Bet’s, it picks up speed, grace and a touch of dark humor. |
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When the town sheriff enlists during WWI, she’s quickly promoted to the county’s first female sheriff (albeit a temporary one), and it’s clear that the ghosts of all those family members have toughened her up enough to face bootleggers and thieves. The changing South looms over the narrative, as the economy shifts from agrarian to industrial and racism warps the civic character. But Thompson has taken pains not to let history intrude too much: This is a more intimate narrative, a study of one woman’s reward for stubborn persistence. Though slow to start, an appealing historical novel that blends gothic and plainly romantic themes.
IN THE BLOOD
Unger, Lisa Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4516-9117-7 The Hollows is once again a poor choice for someone trying to keep a secret in this latest thriller from best-selling author Unger (Heartbroken, 2012, etc.). This time, it’s Sacred Heart College in the upstate New York town that attracts an unhappy outsider seeking refuge. Lana Granger remains haunted by her mother’s murder; her father, still on death row for the crime, keeps trying to make contact with her. You might wonder, given Lana’s memories of her “appalling” childhood behavior and its role in the violent dysfunction of her parents’ marriage, why she would take a job baby sitting for 11-year-old Luke, who attends a nearby school for disturbed kids and is exactly the sort of manipulative, “callous-unemotional” deemed most likely to become a full-blown psychopath by experts like Lana’s psychology professor, Langdon Hewes. But Lana feels a strange bond with Luke, and Unger skillfully ratchets up the tension as we begin to realize the boy knows far more about Lana’s past than he should, while diary entries interspersed with the main narrative document horrifying behavior by a malicious child we assume is Luke. It soon becomes clear that neither Lana nor the diary entries are what they seem, and it seems frighteningly likely that our troubled protagonist had something to do with her best friend Beck’s disappearance. But Unger pulls off a bravura feat of misdirection with Lana’s guilty secret and a terrific aha! moment with the revelation of the first of several villains, each fingered with clues carefully planted throughout the text. The book’s emotional logic isn’t as impeccable as its plotting: We’re asked to believe that one dangerously unstable child can grow up and learn to love with the help of therapy and lots of meds, while another with virtually identical issues will always be a monster. Few readers will dwell on this inconsistency as they savor the pleasure of being guided by Unger’s sure hand along a deliciously twisted narrative path. Another scary winner from an accomplished pro.
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THE VISIONIST
Urquhart, Rachel Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-316-22811-4 A historical novel set in 1840s Massachusetts intertwines the stories of a Shaker community, a world-weary fire inspector and a beleaguered farm family. Silas, a depraved drunken wastrel, has ruined the prosperous family farm once owned by his late father-in-law, who died suddenly and mysteriously. He wants to sell the land but must first get wife May out of the way. He makes the mistake of revealing his intent to teenage daughter Polly, whom he has been sexually abusing. Fearing for their lives, May, Polly and younger brother Ben (whom Silas had tried to drown in infancy) escape by night but not before Polly drops a lamp on the floor near the bed where her father lies in a stupor. Flames consume the farmhouse, but Polly thinks she sees Silas running into the yard as they flee. Miles away, May indentures her children to be raised by the Shakers, a celibate Christian community, and disappears. Simon, a private detective in the employ of (and, due to a tragic childhood incident, lifelong thrall to) Hurlbut, a wealthy bully, is sent to sift through the ashes. Suspecting foul play after he finds Silas’ body some distance from the charred ruins, Simon reports the conflagration as accidental because a lengthy inquest would thwart Hurlbut’s speedy acquisition of the property. Racked with guilt over her role in the fire, and cut off from Ben by the Shakers’ strict segregation of the sexes, Polly finds comfort in the Shakers’ carefully ordered, self-sustaining way of life and a form of kinship with her roommate, Sister Charity. When Polly, in a trance, summons imaginary angel companions, the community reveres her as a mystic or “Visionist.” As Urquhart explores the various enslavements that bind all of the characters, Simon’s investigation becomes a high-stakes race against time. The plot is burdened by too many narrators and too much Shaker minutia. Nevertheless, Urquhart’s fine craftsmanship covers a multitude of sins. An impressive debut.
THE CENTER OF THE WORLD
Van Essen, Thomas Other Press (384 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-590-51549-5 A terrific debut novel about the mystical and erotic power of art. At the center of the center, as it were, is a hypothetical painting by the 19th-century artist J.M.W. Turner, one in which he brings all his genius to bear. The title of this painting is “The Center of the World,” and it features an astonishingly
“A grim and gritty novel....” from magnificent joe
sensual portrait of Helen of Troy and Paris, with whom Helen eloped. The picture is so scandalous to 19th-century mores that it’s hidden away and believed to have been burned, but it turns up in 2003, of all places in a barn in the Adirondacks. It’s a testament to Van Essen’s control that he makes this scenario plausible, for it turns out that Cornelius Rhinebeck, the owner of a neighboring estate, was a rich captain of industry who, in the early-20th century, amassed a collection of European art, some of it acquired through questionable channels. Henry Leiden, who finds the painting, desultorily heads a small foundation and feels his life, and especially his relationship with his wife, is at an impasse, but the painting exerts an almost otherworldly influence on him. Van Essen creates a complicated narrative structure involving Leiden, Charles Grant (who posed for Paris when Turner was engaged in the painting at Petworth, the estate of the Third Earl of Egremont), Mrs. Spencer (Egremont’s mistress and the model for Helen) and the mysterious Mr. Bryce, head of a firm that arranges art sales and an aesthete who desperately wants to track down the elusive Turner painting. Actually, this masterpiece winds up turning everyone who comes in contact with it into an aesthete—and it also seems to have an almost miraculous power as an aphrodisiac. Van Essen writes gracefully and makes accessible the issue of art as transcendence.
THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI
Wecker, Helene Harper/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $27.99 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-06-211083-1
Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide. In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbiwithout-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally— and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for
Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land. Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp. (Agent: Sam Stoloff)
MAGNIFICENT JOE
Wheatley, James Oneworld Publications (272 pp.) $14.95 paper | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-85168-966-8 Joe’s the only magnificent one in this novel about working-class life in northern England, for his simple-mindedness protects him from the despair and hopelessness of his friends. Jim is the main character and occasional narrator of the story, which moves from 1990, when he accidentally kills a man, to 2005. After serving six years in prison, he gets out and resumes his life, if one can call a dead-end job and almost constant drunkenness a “life.” His mates, Geoff and Barry, are much the same as Jim. They work desultorily at various constructions jobs—Jim’s a hod carrier—and spend most evenings in the pub. The only redemption in Jim’s life is his friendship with Joe, a sweet but mentally challenged man, and his mother, Mrs. Joe. Wheatley introduces some sexual tension into the novel when Jim loses his virginity to Laura, a prostitute, the day he gets out of prison, and later we learn that Geoff has left his wife for Laura, though he’s kept in the dark about Jim’s earlier connection to her. Eventually, Barry develops a scheme to rip off a construction site—though to his credit Jim wants nothing to do with this—and Geoff wins the lottery and runs off to Thailand, in the process stealing his friends’ money because they had pooled their resources for a ticket. Barry reveals the true extent of his criminality when he orchestrates a campaign against Joe, persuading people that he’s a pedophile. The dialogue throughout is earthy, with the f-word appearing dozens of times on every page and in every conceivable syntactic variation. A grim and gritty novel, with a slight ray of hope at the end.
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THE TIME BETWEEN
White, Karen New American Library (352 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-451-23986-0 Fourteen years after an accident left her sister Eve paralyzed and herself guilt-ridden, Eleanor Murray struggles to atone—not only for the accident, but also for falling in love with her brotherin-law, Glen. The accident fractured the family, dashing Eve’s future as a beauty pageant contestant. And after their father dies, Eleanor’s dreams of playing piano at Juilliard dissolve. Their mother holds Eleanor responsible for keeping together the family she broke apart. Eve knows she should forgive Eleanor, but she can’t quite let go of her anger. Glen, too, is torn between his commitment to Eve and his attraction to Eleanor. Balancing her work at a law office with caring for her mother, sister and brother-in-law, Eleanor too often finds that neither time nor money will stretch far enough. So she arrives late or leaves early, grateful that her boss, Finn Beaufain—the handsome, gray-eyed, divorced father of an adorable yet fragile daughter—tolerates her erratic schedule. She gets dinner on the table, bathes her sister, placates her arthritic mother and occasionally slips on a slinky red dress to play piano at a local dive, hoping someone might offer her solace in his unfamiliar arms. Finding her at the bar one night, Finn gives her a chance: a chance to recover her lost self and perhaps a chance at love. Finn gives her a job caring for his aunt Helena on Edisto Island, where Eleanor grew up. White (After the Rain, 2012, etc.) once again crafts characters who transcend their romantic roles through their frailties and weaknesses. An appealing romance with intergenerational resonance.
THE BEST OF CONNIE WILLIS Award-Winning Stories
Willis, Connie Del Rey/Ballantine (496 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-345-54064-5
Ten award-winning stories, 1982-2007, plus three equally well-regarded award acceptance speeches, from the much-celebrated author (All Clear, 2011, etc.). Hard to say which of these stories is the most famous; probably “Fire Watch” (Hugo winner), in which a time traveler helps save St. Paul’s cathedral from incendiaries in 1940. Not far behind would be “The Last of the Winnebagos” (Hugo and Nebula winner), depicting a future in which dogs are extinct, and the Humane Society, mutated into a crypto-fascist police organization, is liable to shoot you for accidentally running over a coyote; or the wrenching post-apocalyptic “A Letter from the Clearys” (Nebula winner). Returning to the “Fire Watch” theme, “The Winds of Marble Arch” (Hugo) 30
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explores a London Underground haunted by the ghosts of the Blitz. And in “Death on the Nile” (Hugo), the protagonists are dead but don’t know it—an idea that Willis would explore in more depth in her brilliant novel Passage. The remaining tales show off Willis’ gift for comedy. Who else, for instance, could write about menstruation (“Even the Queen,” Hugo and Nebula) and make it screamingly funny? In “All Seated on the Ground” (Hugo), weird alien visitors do nothing but stand around and glare disapprovingly. Who better than Emily Dickenson (“The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” Hugo) to save Earth from Wellsian Martian invaders or arch-skeptic H. L. Mencken (“Inside Job,” Hugo) to debunk a fake psychic? Finally, in “At the Rialto” (Nebula), attendees of a quantum physics conference at a Hollywood hotel stumble into delightfully probabilistic chaos. Ranging from the hilarious to the profound, these stories show the full range of Willis’ talent for taut, dazzling plots, real science, memorable characters, penetrating dialogue and blistering drama—and may guide inquisitive readers toward her equally accomplished and acclaimed novels.
GLORIA
Young, Kerry Bloomsbury (400 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-62040-075-3 The hoodlum and the whore: Those labels are accurate but inadequate for the title characters of Young’s debut Pao (2011) and this lively companion piece; both are set in mid-20th-century Jamaica. The girl swings the tree limb, again and again, until the man on the ground stops moving. Sixteenyear-old Gloria has just saved her kid sister from being raped. Her assailant, a mentally troubled coal man who lives in a shack in the country, has already had his fun with Gloria. Now he’s dead. Take-charge Gloria and sister Marcia leave for Kingston, the capital. (Her narration is dusted with an easily understandable patois.) It’s 1938. Gloria is a gorgeous African-Jamaican, and the guys come swarming. She is rescued from the city streets by Henry Wong in his horse and buggy; the unhappily married Chinese-Jamaican supermarket owner will prove her most loyal friend. Before long, she moves in with two welcoming prostitutes, Sybil and Beryl, and becomes one herself. Sybil, smart and articulate, puts a feminist spin on their situation: Slaves may be free, but women are not. Clients pay late; some are hostile. Things look up when Gloria arranges a loan-sharking business with Henry, and Pao’s boys provide protection, Pao being the young racketeer who controls Chinatown. He and Gloria fall in love. We never see the tough enforcer, only the gentle lover; though he marries Henry’s daughter for the status, his love for Gloria persists. The storyline is busy-busy, to use Jamaican argot. Not quite a love story and not quite a feminist bouquet, but a well-seasoned hybrid.
m ys t e r y THE BROKEN PLACES
Atkins, Ace Putnam (352 pp.) $26.95 | May 30, 2013 978-0-399-16178-0
A small-town Mississippi sheriff fights criminals and corruption. Former Army Ranger Quinn Colson returned to Tibbehah County and took over the sheriff ’s job from crooked Johnny Stagg. Now his sister, a former wild child who recently returned home to reclaim her son and her life, is dating Jamey Dixon, who’s been pardoned for murdering his wife. Claiming that he found Jesus in prison, Jamey’s returned home to run a ministry out of an old barn. Things get a whole lot worse when two escaped convicts show up looking for Jamey, who they think has the money from an armored car robbery they never got the chance to collect before being caught. Jamey claims that Stagg kept most of the money after using the rest to bribe the governor to pardon Jamey. The cons don’t care who has the money. They’ve already killed two federal agents and are willing to do whatever it takes to retrieve it. In addition to conducting a manhunt for the killers, Quinn is continuing a secret affair with the high school sweetheart who married another man. His sister believes in Jamey, but it’s hard for Quinn to tell whether Stagg or Jamey is telling the truth about the stolen money. Then his hometown is struck by a tornado. Amid the devastation, Quinn digs deep into dark and dirty secrets and does what he must to protect his family. The third in Atkins’ acclaimed series (The Lost Ones, 2012, etc.) is a high-tension thriller with a hero to rival Jack Reacher.
CARE HOMES ARE MURDER
Befeler, Mike Five Star (268 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 19, 2013 978-1-4328-2692-5
An older man continues his sleuthing streak. Octogenarian Paul Jacobson is recently remarried—not that he always knows that, for although he has a photographic memory during the day, he forgets everything each night. His wife, Marion, has him write down, at bedtime, everything that happened and leave himself a note to read it in the morning. Although Paul’s forgotten all the murder cases he’s helped solve (Cruising In Your Eighties Is Murder, 2012, etc.), a new one arrives when he sees a body floating in the harbor near his hotel soon after his return
to Hawaii with Marion and his son Denny, daughter-in-law Allison and granddaughter Jennifer. Paul and family have gone to visit his old friends Meyer Ohana and Henry Palmer, who are currently living in a care home. When Paul finds the corpse of Louise Kincaid, one of the home’s nurses, the police, who know Paul from a former case in Hawaii, have difficulty believing that his discovery is a coincidence. The family, intent on enjoying all that Hawaii has to offer, is suddenly plagued with incidents of vandalism to their hired SUV; get temporarily held by drug dealers when their helicopter trip goes wrong; and are roped into helping plan the wedding of the diminutive Henry to an Amazon of a woman he met on the Internet. Despite the fact that Paul remembers very little, someone thinks he knows too much. It will take family, friends and a lot of luck to keep him alive. Often amusing in a way very, very familiar from Paul’s earlier cases. And enough with the geezer jokes already.
AT THE END OF A DULL DAY
Carlotto, Massimo Europa Editions (192 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 7, 2013 978-1-60945-114-1
Giorgio Pellegrini’s 11 years of playing it straight (The Goodbye Kiss, 2006) come to an shrieking halt when he finds out that his lawyer, a rising political star, has bilked him out of £2 million. Giorgio’s years as a terrorist, fugitive and prisoner may not have served him well as the owner of the fashionable restaurant La Nena, but they provide the perfect credentials for the wholesale revenge he plans against Sante Brianese, who pocketed Giorgio’s enormous stake and then had the nerve to pretend it went south in a bad investment. The trouble is that Brianese is too clever and well-connected to succumb to half-baked schemes. To Giorgio’s initial move—trashing his house and beating his housekeeper to a pulp—he responds by setting three members of the Calabrian Mafia on La Nena while he makes the rounds of the talk shows expressing solicitude for the housekeeper and promising to pay her medical expenses. So, Giorgio steps up his campaign. His new, higher-octane plan is nothing special; what makes him fascinating is his full-bore abuse of everyone else who crosses his path, from Martina, the wife he bullies, to her friend Gemma, whom he forces to give up smoking as a condition of his seducing her, to Isabel, the prostitute he kills since he can’t frame someone for murder without providing a corpse. Even though Giorgio tells his own story, he never comes across as sympathetic. His brutal bad-boy appeal is as shocking as it is undeniable. Carlotto (Bandit Love, 2010, etc.) provides a machinegun pace, a jaundiced eye for political corruption and a refreshing absence of anything approaching a moral vision.
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“...will keep you awake till the last page and maybe even afterward.” from the piper
THE HERO POSE
Ebisch, Glen Five Star (230 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 19, 2013 978-1-4328-2680-2
A former MP who generally keeps to herself is thrust into, then away from, investigating the disappearance of a town’s beloved doctor. Alison Randall doesn’t make it a practice to get involved in the lives of the students at her yoga studio. When Lauren Malcolm beseeches Ali for help after a class, however, she can’t say no. Lauren’s boyfriend, Dr. Jim Schianno, has gone missing, and Lauren thinks that Ali’s past as a military MP in Iraq might qualify her to search for Lauren’s beau. The situation is complicated by the fact that Dr. Jim had gotten romantically involved with Lauren before divorcing his wife. As Ali digs into Dr. Jim’s past, she finds that Lauren is only the latest in the good doctor’s string of affairs. He has a long history of taking the hero’s role with patients in trouble, and Ali is concerned that someone might have taken advantage of this vulnerability. Though she’s willing to delve deeper into Dr. Jim’s life, Lauren abruptly halts the investigation, insisting that Ali forget everything she has learned. But Ali’s military career has taught her the value of perseverance, and she’s not the type to be dissuaded. So, like it or not, she’s determined to see her amateur investigation through. Ebisch has done better with comedy (Breaking the Rules, 2012, etc.) than with this melodrama, especially since Ali’s a little brusque to be a sympathetic protagonist.
THE PIPER
Hightower, Lynn Severn House (256 pp.) $28.95 | May 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8251-6 A mother with a troubled family past flees her ruined marriage to a peripatetic manager only to realize that you can’t go home again, especially if you’re sharing your home with a truly malignant ghost. Christopher James has been dead for nine weeks, but that doesn’t stop him from phoning his sister Olivia and warning her: “I had to pay the piper....Don’t let him… after you.” Olivia knows instantly that the piper is the nameless malefactor who carried off her sister Emily 25 years ago. Does Chris’ call indicate that he fell victim to the same predator and that Olivia may be next? Now that she’s moved herself and her 8-year-old daughter, Teddy, from LA back to her family home in Knoxville, she certainly has put herself in the piper’s way. Teddy gets texts and hears menacing predictions from a voice she reluctantly identifies as that of Duncan Lee, aka Decan Lude, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After Chris’ widow, Charlotte, begs Olivia to move out of a house she’s convinced is haunted, 32
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a blowup between the two women leaves Olivia feeling acutely isolated. It does no good to reach out for help, since anyone who tries to reassure her or stand between her and the piper ends up dead. When Teddy vanishes as suddenly and completely as Emily, Olivia is forced to decide what value she places on her child’s life and whether she’s willing to pay the piper to bring her back safely. Hightower takes a break from her three series characters (Fortunes of the Dead, 2003, etc.) for a stand-alone nightmare that will keep you awake till the last page and maybe even afterward.
ETERNALLY 21
Hull, Linda Joffe Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (360 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jun. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3489-7 Murder at a local mall disrupts the already harried routine of the wife of a local TV star and author of a savings blog. Maddie Michaels, known to the world as the Mrs. to Mr. Frank Finance, feels buried under her husband’s secret. Frank, who plays a financial guru on TV, has lost all the family’s savings in a Ponzi scheme. So now Maddie is moonlighting as Mrs. Frugalicious, the author of a bargaining blog. Although Mrs. Frugalicious is loud and proud about her extreme couponing, Maddie has to keep her identity secret, even from her family. Things get all the more awkward when Maddie is mistakenly picked up for shoplifting by malcontent manager Laila DeSimone while bargain-hunting at the trendy teenage store Eternally 21. When Maddie returns for her sale items, Laila shockingly dies right on the sales floor. When she hears that she’s on the suspect list for what the police assume is murder—so much for keeping a low profile—Maddie is highly motivated to team up with Griff, the mall cop, to find out who could be behind Laila’s death. Since she knows she’s not the culprit, Maddie figures it must be one of the mall regulars, all of whom seem to have their reasons for wanting Laila dead and gone, even though they do tend to blend together in her mind. Sprinkling her tale with true, if variably useful tips concerning deals and steals, Hull offers a mystery for the 40-something set with all the drama of the 20-something crowd.
THE ACCOUNTING
Lashner, William Thomas & Mercer (506 pp.) $14.95 paper | $9.99 e-book May 14, 2013 978-1-611099355 978-1-611091670 e-book Twenty-five years after three teenagers swiped over $1 million from their neighborhood drug dealer, it’s suddenly payback time. Jonathon Willing hasn’t been close to his friends Augie and Ben for a long time. But the three phone each other every Tuesday, mostly to make sure they’re all still alive. One Tuesday, Augie doesn’t answer his phone, and Jon flies out to Vegas to find out why not. It’s the best of all possible reasons, of course, and it would probably spell imminent danger even if Jon weren’t dumb enough to answer Augie’s telephone while he’s standing over the corpse. From that moment on, the life Jon’s constructed for himself—his business as a lately unemployed mortgage broker, his upscale tract house in a Virginia suburb, his nodding acquaintance with his wife, Caitlin, and his children Shelby and Eric— is over, and he’s a man on the run. The precautions Jon takes to prevent Clevenger, the man who killed Augie, from tracing him back home prove pitifully inadequate, and his 1,000-mile lead over his dogged pursuer keeps getting slimmer and slimmer. This is exciting stuff, but it would be even more exciting if this stand-alone from the creator of Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl (A Killer’s Kiss, 2007, etc.) didn’t feel the need to provide a long flashback reviewing the six years that led up to Augie, Ben and Jon’s initial harebrained scheme and if everyone Jon asked for help, from Jon’s ex-girlfriend to the grandfather from whom he’s long been estranged to the neighborhood kid whose scary brother the trio first ripped off, weren’t so eager to tell the story of his or her life. Just in case you miss the point on your own, Jon caps his wild tale with a homily about how the whole country is living on borrowed money, just like him, and the reckoning looms for us all. Makes you think.
HER ENEMY
Lehtolainen, Leena Translated by Witesman, Owen F. AmazonCrossing (280 pp.) $14.95 paper | $9.99 e-book May 14, 2013 978-1-611099645 978-1-611091939 e-book Maria Kallio may have taken herself out of the Helsinki police, but she finds when she’s confronted with another murder that she can’t take the detective out of herself. No longer an officer with the Violent Crime Unit but not quite a lawyer yet either, Maria has moved in with math student
Antti Sarkela while he works on his dissertation in the Tapiola region of Espoo. The setting may be idyllic, but the people aren’t. When Antti brings Maria to a party given by the family his sister has married into, the vibe is awkward since the Hänninens are still mourning their daughter and sister Sanna, who drowned last spring shortly after downing serious quantities of alcohol and prescription drugs. Sanna’s brother Kimmo has gotten engaged to Armi Mäenpää, a chatty nurse with boundary issues. So Maria isn’t looking forward to having a heart-to-heart with her the day after the party. She’s got nothing to worry about, though, because by that afternoon Armi is dead, strangled, presumably by someone who was worried about her big mouth. Ignoring the fact that she’s no longer with the police, Maria makes the rounds of the obligatory suspects—mostly members of Kimmo’s family—from Kimmo’s father, Henrik, a businessman who’s distant in more ways than one, to his much older half brother Risto, an engineer whose marriage won’t bear close scrutiny. There’ll be a trip to an S&M club Kimmo frequented and a climactic confrontation in which even the killer can’t resist pointing out that Maria’s no longer wearing a badge or carrying a gun. A routine whodunit in the mold of Christie and Sayers, both of whom are cited. Only Maria, outspoken and matter-of-fact, stands out from the crowd.
DEATH IN THE VINES
Longworth, M.L. Penguin (304 pp.) $15.00 paper | May 28, 2013 978-0-14-312244-9 Aix and the Provence countryside provide a variety of vexations for examining magistrate Antoine Verlaque (Death at the Chateau Bremont, 2011, etc.). First it was the wine at Domaine Beauclaire. Owner Olivier Bonnard reports dozens of bottles have disappeared, some very rare and valuable. Then Gilles d’Arras reports that when he arrived home at 12:30, his wife Pauline was missing—missing!—after having met him for lunch every day for 42 years. Between a trip to Paris to consult retired wine thief Hippolyte Thébaud and a delay caused by a suicide on the TGV line, there’s hardly time to investigate the rape and beating of bank clerk Suzanne Montmory. When Suzanne dies of her injuries, Verlaque and police commissioner Bruno Paulik interview her co-workers at the Bank of Provence in Éguilles. Still, their investigation stalls despite the best efforts of their bright young colleagues, Alain Flamant and Jules Schoelcher. Verlaque is so overwhelmed that he doesn’t even notice that his partner, law professor Marine Bonnet, has grown detached and pensive. It takes a visit to the missing Pauline’s sister Clothide in a cloister near Narbonne to force Verlaque to confront the ghosts of his past that cast shadows on his relationship with Marine. And it takes a second and even a third death to prompt Verlaque and Paulik to close the book on Aix’s crime spree. Longworth loses some of her focus in her tangled third, whose plot twists as capriciously as Bonnard’s vines. |
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HIS MAJESTY’S HOPE
MacNeal, Susan Elia Bantam (352 pp.) $15.00 paper | May 21, 2013 978-0-345-53673-0
A dangerous trip to Berlin becomes a life-altering experience for a British spy. Maggie Hope is a Brit raised by an aunt in America who returned to London, where she learned many things about the supposedly dead parents she barely knew. Her father is a scientist working to break German codes, her mother a Nazi agent whom Maggie outwitted in her last adventure (Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, 2012). Now she has undergone rigorous training to be sent to Germany, where her quick wits and excellent German just may let her pull off a dangerous mission. She is parachuted into Germany, where she is posing as the girlfriend of Gottlieb Lerner, a Nazi who is really a devout Catholic involved with local priests working to thwart Nazi plans. Her job: deliver radio crystals and plant a microphone in the home office of her mother, Clara Hess. Maggie meets her half sister Elise, a nurse who has recently discovered that the government is busily carrying out their secret plan of race purification by killing children and others whom they consider defective in any way. Elise is boldly hiding a British pilot and the Jewish husband of a fellow nurse in her mother’s attic while working to find proof of the mass killings. When Maggie gets a chance to work for a Nazi involved in the program, a horrified Lerner tries to get her to return to Britain, but Maggie is determined to get proof that the program exists. Maggie continues her winning ways with more thrills and romantic problems, but this time, the horrors of her experiences add depth to the already pleasing adventures.
FAITH ON THE ROCKS
Malik, Liesa Five Star (296 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 19, 2013 978-1-4328-2713-7
A Colorado widow with dreams of a writing career finds that sleuthing just might be her métier. Ever since she retired early from her job as a special education teacher in Littleton, Daisy Arthur’s been looking for something to occupy her time. Although she’s joined a group of writers, some published, some wannabes, the relentless criticism of her romance novel is getting her down. When one of the group is found dead in a nearby river, the whole group becomes suspect as the last to see him alive. Daisy’s embarrassed to admit she never knew that good-looking, flirtatious Rico was a Catholic priest with a checkered past. Gabe Caerphilly, the officer in charge of the investigation, is the father of one of her former students. Daisy’s strongly attracted to him, and he seems 34
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interested in her, but his sergeant is a beautiful, jealous woman who seems bent on targeting Daisy as the No. 1 suspect. Daisy’s bumbling efforts at investigation only get her in more trouble when a second member of the group is murdered shortly after she saw him—naturally, after anyone else did. Partnering not with Gabe but with her next-door neighbor’s German shepherd, Daisy finally stumbles upon enough information to put her next on the killer’s list. Malik’s debut mystery offers some interesting characters along with enough motives to make everyone in Littleton look suspicious. But Daisy’s lifestyle choices, especially her decisions about detective work, can be so annoying that you just want to shake her.
THE EXTINCTION CLUB
Moore, Jeffrey Arcade (384 pp.) $23.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-61145-837-4
Animals don’t have rights, and they don’t torture beings for fun. So why do we call people civilized? Nile Nightingale is off the sauce, off the chemicals and eluding an APB that would send him to jail for DWI, assault and battery, and for kidnapping his daughter Brooklyn while his ex–gal pal tries to wrest his fortune from him. Actually, he only took Brook to the zoo, and she skedaddled home, but try convincing a vengeful mother that she’s wrong. Nile winds up in the hinterlands of Montreal at the abandoned Church of St. Davnetdes-Monts just as a lumpy parcel is tossed from a truck. The package turns out to cloak the knife-split form of 14-year-old Céleste Jonquères, whom Nile takes back to his rented cabin and sutures up. While she heals, the pair verbally spar over who they really are, what they’ve been doing and whether they can trust each other. Nile, who supports their isolated lifestyle by motoring to redneck stores, where he drops $20 bills for provisions, rifling his neighbor’s deserted home and helping himself to his forest ranger ID, gear and weaponry, soon wrests Céleste’s tale from her: She’s an orphan home-schooled by a grand-maman who trained her to defy Laurentian poachers and loathe the historical marauders who tortured black bears and caused the extinction of sea cows, great auks, Eskimo curlews and Eastern cougars. It’s moot whether the poachers killed grand-maman or whether Céleste helped the cancer-riddled woman to her exit, but whatever the reason, the anti-animal brigade is after Céleste and the man sheltering her, resulting in a skating-pond confrontation that will leave readers swiping at tears. Nile and Céleste’s relationship—at times bantering, at times lovingly hectoring—will give enthralled readers the stamina to deal with the stomach-turning descriptions Moore (The Memory Artists, 2004, etc.) provides of past and present animal cruelty.
“A victim turns vigilante in a cat-and-mouse tale of a child predator and his former prey.” from the edge of normal
LITTLE GREEN
Mosley, Walter Doubleday (304 pp.) $25.95 | May 14, 2013 978-0-385-53598-4 The 1967 Watts riots seem to have slowed down time for Easy Rawlins, who returns only a few weeks after his apparent death at the end of Blonde Faith (2007). That climactic car crash didn’t kill Easy, but it left him weak as a kitten and prone to disturbing dreams of past and future. Only repeated drafts of Gator’s Blood, the home brew cooked up by healer Mama Jo, allow Easy to escape the ministrations of martinet nurse Antigone Fowler and take to the streets again. As usual, his mission is straightforward—to find Evander Noon, whose mother, Timbale, is a friend of Easy’s dangerous best bud Mouse Alexander—but his path is winding. His information takes him to Lula Success’ brothel, where Evander dallied before leaving in the company of Maurice Potter. Coco, a prostitute born Helen Ray, leads Easy to Evander, who’s been kidnapped by three gangsters and tied to a tree, and the pair, acting swiftly, free Evander and bring him home to his mother. But the conflicts that made those thugs snatch Evander obviously haven’t been resolved by his rescue. In order to protect the wayward young man, Easy will have to find the links between insurance giant Proxy Nine, oil company TexOk, and the likes of sneak thief Charles Rumor and all-around nasty operator Haman Rose. Mosley is much more interested in bringing these characters and the social forces they represent to life than in connecting the dots. The result works better as anthropology than mystery, with barely a teaspoon of plot to a monstrous deal of aphorism Whether it’s the lingering effects of his near-fatal accident or the infusions of Gator’s Blood, Easy sounds less like Watts’ signature private eye than one of the visionaries from Mosley’s Crosstown to Oblivion novellas (Stepping Stone/The Love Machine, 2013, etc.). (Author tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia)
MURDER IN PARIS
Nelson, D-L Five Star (298 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 19, 2013 978-1-4328-2693-2
A chance for a short-term job on an archaeological dig in Paris breaks up a relationship and threatens much worse damage. Multilingual American Annie Young’s work as a part-time technical writer brings in enough money to finance her passion for history the rest of the year. Since she considers herself her own boss, Annie
returns French police chief Roger Perret’s engagement ring when he forbids her to go to Paris for a few weeks to work on an old boyfriend’s dig. Luca Martinelli, who has only a short period of time to explore an old building found when a site is excavated for a new structure, gets most of his help from unpaid students. Luca is separated from his wife, who’s grown tired of his endless short-term relationships. His latest, with Amelie, a dig volunteer, ends only when she’s shot to death at the site. Annie’s decision to share an absent friend’s apartment with Luca only increases Roger’s jealousy and makes it harder for his teenage daughter to get the couple back together. Although Amelie was not well-liked, no one seemed to hate her enough to kill her, and the Paris police are starved for suspects. Arriving in Paris, Roger is furious when he sees a barely clothed Luca and Annie fresh from the shower. So when Luca is found shot as well, Roger first becomes a suspect and then an investigator, though Annie holds the key to finding the killer. Alternating chapters present the story of the site, a low 14th-century tavern where a Cistercian scholar is tempted to forsake his calling for a woman. Nelson’s fourth Third-Culture Kid mystery (Murder In Geneva, 2012, etc.) provides a slight mystery, a charming heroine enjoying life in present-day France and just a tad too much historical back story.
THE EDGE OF NORMAL
Norton, Carla Minotaur (320 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 10, 2013 978-1-250-03104-4
A victim turns vigilante in a cat-andmouse tale of a child predator and his former prey. Once known as Regina, Reeve LeClaire changed her name and her life when she was rescued from a man who abducted her and robbed her of her childhood years before. Though the press baptized her “Edgy Reggie” because of her cantankerous attitude, Reeve’s been keeping a low profile lately, opting out of most worldly interactions. When her longtime therapist and child abduction specialist Dr. Ezra Lerner approaches her about helping recently rescued abductee Tilly Cavanaugh readjust to her family and return to something like normal life, Reeve agrees reluctantly, making the trek from San Francisco to Jefferson City to be with the Cavanaughs. Tilly bonds with Reeve, treating her like a sister in sorrow and disclosing details about her captor that she’s been afraid to tell the police. Though she’s spent most of her life avoiding involvement with others, Reeve’s vigilante instincts are piqued, and she finds herself intent on identifying the man who attacked and imprisoned the young Tilly. Norton alternates between Reeve’s search for the child predator and the point of view of the guilty party, who’s planned for the inevitable investigation miles ahead of any police progress. Reeve must understand the logic of a sick mind in order to stop a coverup in its tracks. |
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Norton (Perfect Victim, 1988) skillfully develops her tricky subject, gradually shifting from an emphasis on its tabloid aspects to a close identification with the victim/ heroine in a story of justice served by the one who deserves it most.
NIGHT TERRORS
Palumbo, Dennis Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. May 7, 2013 978-1-4642-0129-5 978-1-4642-0131-8 paper 978-1-4642-0130-1 Lg. Prt. Pittsburgh clinical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi (Fever Dream, 2011, etc.) finds to his sorrow that even serial killers have fans. Now that Wesley Currim has confessed to killing wealthy Wheeling coal-mine executive Edward Meachem and led Chief Avery Block and Detective Sgt. Harve Randall to the headless corpse, you’d think the case would be closed. But Wes’ mother, Maggie, swears he’s innocent and provides him with a cast-iron alibi he’s determined to repudiate. Do Block and Randall have the right man in custody? Dr. Rinaldi, who went along with them since Wes had refused to talk unless he was called in, can’t say. And he has no time to yield to Maggie’s pleas and break Wes’ confession because he’s been snatched off the street by FBI agent Neal Alcott and plunged into a different nightmare. Even though John Jessup, convicted of killing four prostitutes, has been beaten to death during a riot in an Ohio prison, the pen pal calling himself “Your Biggest Fan” is determined to avenge him by carrying on in his tradition. In short order, the prison guard who killed Jessup, the judge who sentenced him to four life sentences and the Cleveland ADA who prosecuted him are shot. Not surprisingly, Lyle Barnes, the retired FBI profiler who helped nail Jessup, is having night terrors, and Alcott wants Rinaldi to meet with him and calm him down. For his part, Rinaldi wants to be left alone to consummate his stymied romance with Detective Eleanor Lowrey of the Pittsburgh PD. How likely is that when the entire tri-state region is full of serial killers and killers-in-training? Some thrillers are beach reads. Palumbo’s are strictly for late at night and for readers who have no pressing engagements early the next day.
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THE PATH OF THE WICKED
Peacock, Caro Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-78029-041-6
A private investigator takes up a seemingly hopeless case. It is 1840, and Liberty Lane has just turned down a job offered by Benjamin Disraeli spying on the more revolutionary elements of society with which she has great sympathy. Instead, she takes herself off to the home of Mr. Godwit, a magistrate who feels that a young man he and his two fellow magistrates have sent up for trial may be innocent of murdering the governess of a local family in the Cheltonham area. It is true that Jack Picton, a trade unionist, is probably guilty of something, just not murder. Picton has not helped his cause with his arrogant attitude and refusal to say where he was the night of Mary Marsh’s death. Liberty and her maid/sleuthing partner, Tabby, have no trouble digging up local scandals, including a broken engagement between Mary Marsh’s charge, Barbara Kemble, and Peter Paley, who recently vanished after his wealthy father refused to pay his mountainous debts. England’s class-driven society makes it difficult for Liberty to even suggest another candidate for the murder, but she plans on doing all she can to keep the unsympathetic Picton from the gallows. The sixth in this highly enjoyable series (Keeping Bad Company, 2012, etc.) adds social commentary to a rich broth of historical tidbits and an excellent mystery.
HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
Penny, Louise Minotaur (416 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 27, 2013 978-0-312-65547-1
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is pushed toward retirement. It’s a great relief for Inspector Gamache to get out of the office and head for Three Pines to help therapist-turned-bookseller Myrna find out why her friend Constance Pineault didn’t turn up for Christmas. Except for Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s staff has been gutted by Chief Superintendent Francoeur. Gamache’s decisions have been mostly ignored and bets placed on how soon he’ll admit redundancy and retire. Even worse, a recent tragedy (The Beautiful Mystery, 2012, etc.) has led his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to transfer out of Gamache’s department, fall sway to prescription drugs and hold his former boss in contempt. En route to Three Pines, Gamache happens upon a fatality at the Champlain Bridge and agrees to handle the details. But this case takes a back seat to the disappearance of Constance when she
turns up dead in her home. Myrna confides Constance’s secret: As the last surviving Ouellet quintuplet, she’d spent her adult years craving privacy after the national publicity surrounding the birth of the five sisters had turned them into daily newspaper fodder. Why would anyone want to murder this reclusive woman of 79? The answer is developed through clues worthy of Agatha Christie that Gamache interprets while dealing with the dismemberment of his homicide department by Francoeur, who’s been plotting a major insult to Canadian government for 30 years. Matters come to a head when Gamache and the one Sûreté chief still loyal to him and her husband, a computer whiz, are tracked to Three Pines, where Beauvoir awaits, gun in hand. Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the real-life Dionne family debacle of the 1940s. But it’s Three Pines, with its quirky tenants, resident duck and luminous insights into trust and friendship, that will hook readers and keep them hooked.
SIDNEY CHAMBERS AND THE PERILS OF THE NIGHT
Runcie, James Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 21, 2013 978-1-60819-951-8
Six loosely connected stories featuring that mid-20th-century Cambridge sleuth Canon Chambers. Still uncertain if he’s ready for marriage, Cambridge canon Sidney Chambers enjoys his weekly backgammon games at the pub with Inspector Keating, his daily walks with his faithful Labrador Dickens, his frequent luncheons with wealthy, beautiful Amanda Kendall when she’s down from London, his jaunts to Germany to moon over his soul mate, widow Hildegard Staunton, and his hobby, deducing whodunit and why when others are stumped. A don’s misstep off the roof of King’s College in “The Perils of the Night” makes him wonder why anyone would murder a man who was going to die anyway. “Love and Arson” reminds him that people sometimes burn places down to get rid of dead bodies. “Unholy Week” finds him scrutinizing salacious magazines for clues to a bathtub fatality. Racism comes to the fore in “The Hat Trick,” which will be mostly incomprehensible to those readers not conversant with the game of cricket. The bachelor vicar dispenses matrimonial advice to a bigamist in “The Uncertainty Principle.” A spy passes a message to him in “Appointment in Berlin,” in which he’s incarcerated by the Stasi before finally committing to a life together with Hildegard. Less engaging than Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012), but still a sharp portrait of scholarly rivalries that makes room for a riff on jazz in a Mozart score and a grim reminder of East and West Germany as the wall was going up.
BOARD STIFF
Viets, Elaine Obsidian (288 pp.) $23.95 | May 7, 2013 978-0-451-23985-3 Florida private eye Helen Hawthorne (Final Sail, 2012, etc.) helps a small businessman fight city hall. Everyone wants a piece of Sunny Jim Sundusky. Bill Bantry, owner of Bill’s Boards, wants his customers. Cyrus Reed Horton, owner of Cy’s on the Pier, wants the tiny piece of land on Riggs Beach where Sunny Jim rents out his standup paddleboards; at $10 an hour, Cy can make a pretty penny parking cars on that beachfront plot. Riggs Beach mayor Eustice Timmons, Commissioner Charlie Wyman and Commissioner Frank “the Fixer” Gordon all want Sunny Jim out of the way in order to strike a lucrative deal with either Bill or Cy. So Sundusky hires Helen and her husband, Phil Sagemont, to find out who’s been vandalizing his boards. The ante gets upped big time when novice Ceci Odell takes a board out against Jim’s advice at high tide and drowns. Before the city fathers can pull Jim’s ticket, the medical examiner notices that Ceci was stabbed. Suspicion naturally falls on Ceci’s husband, Daniel, who harassed his pudgy wife mercilessly. Then waitress Joan Right tells Helen about seeing a diver lurking under the pier about the time Ceci drowned. It’s a slender lead, but it just might be the break Coronado Investigations needs to keep Sunny Jim from being chased off Riggs Beach. Viets’ 12th proves that moving Helen from dead-end jobs into full-time employment does nothing to stifle her quirky good humor.
MURDER ON OLYMPUS
Warren, Robert B. Dragonfairy Press (376 pp.) $16.95 paper | Apr. 11, 2013 978-0-9850230-6-5
When the gods of Olympus need a discreet private eye, they call Plato Jones. Rancher Nicolas Parker would like to hire Plato, whose world is modern but ruled by the gods of Olympus, to track down the rustler who has stolen one of his finest gorgons (bad-tempered livestock). On a self-imposed hiatus after some unspecified trouble while working for Zeus and his family, Plato is very picky about which cases he’ll take. And gorgons are nasty. So, he turns Parker down. Similarly, he rejects Hermes’ request to probe the death of an unnamed goddess. Instead, Plato does uncomfortable stakeouts for disgruntled spouses. His personal life is likewise unrewarding. His ex-wife, Alexis, has called with the surprisingly devastating news that she’s getting remarried, and his mother, who calls him PJ, wants him to cart away his stuff to make room for her new |
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lover, James. And Plato makes the mistake of crossing the line with Bellanca, an attractive female client. So he may be feeling particularly vulnerable when Hermes returns with another request concerning Hephaestus, “The Smith God,” who’s been found murdered at his estate. This time, Plato accepts the challenge and is plunged into all the outrageous family dysfunction that he, perhaps wisely, had previously escaped. In his debut novel, Warren’s prose is appropriately cheeky. But his many clever conventions and inventions consistently overshadow the awkwardly structured plot. Here’s hoping he can improve on his puzzles while Plato and his quirkily mashed-up world continue to delight us.
science fiction and fantasy NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASE 2013
Asaro, Catherine—Ed. Pyr/Prometheus Books (380 pp.) $18.00 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-61614-783-9
Despite being dated 2013, this edition of the Nebula Awards Showcase presents the winning and nominated stories as voted by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America for the year 2011. Better late than never. Ken Liu deservedly won the short story award for “The Paper Menagerie,” a delicately wrought magic-realist tale of a Chinese girl purchased and brought to America as a bride, which packs enough emotional power to melt a heart of stone. Best novella winner Kij Johnson offers an engagingly populated and artfully rendered story of an engineer bridging a most peculiar and dangerous river. “What We Found,” by Geoff Ryman (best novelette), takes a single scientific principle and integrates it, perfectly and tellingly, into real life. Connie Willis was presented with a Grand Master Award, and her story of political correctness run amok, “Ado,” illustrates the comic brilliance found in much of her work. For the other winners, there are excerpts from Jo Walton’s best novel, Among Others, and Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze (Andre Norton Award), with poetry (Rhysling Awards) represented by C.S.E. Cooney (long) and Amal El-Mohtar (short), and an essay from Solstice Award winner John Clute. Elsewhere, E. Lily Yu’s smart, predatory wasps draw intricate, exact maps and enslave anarchist bees; Carolyn Ives Gilman writes of genocide, education, and mothers and daughters; Ferrett Steinmetz describes life in wartime aboard a space station; Nancy Fulda writes of a “cure” for autism; David Goldman offers a multiple-choice story that both is and isn’t; 38
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Brad R. Torgersen describes how compelling our memories of sunlight can be; and Katherine Sparrow weighs in with a sort of futuristic They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Essential fare for short story aficionados, even though some of the contents have appeared in other collections.
WISP OF A THING
Bledsoe, Alex Tor (320 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-7653-3413-8
Another tale of Cloud County, Tenn., and its eldritch inhabitants: the darkhaired, dark-skinned Tufa (The Hum and the Shiver, 2011). When musician Rob Quillen made it to the final stages of a network talent show, the producers insisted on flying in his girlfriend, Anna, but she was killed when her plane crashed, leaving Rob devastated. Then a mysterious stranger advised him to look in Tufa country for a song carved in stone to ease his desolation. With his Hispanic heritage, Rob looks like one of the Tufa, although he has not a drop of Tufa blood. Still, one of the locals invites him to an evening of Tufa music, where he’s astounded at the skill and power of their playing. Later, he tries to strike up a conversation with one of the players, Rockhouse Hicks, a supremely malevolent old man who occupies a chair outside the post office, and nearly gets beaten to a pulp for his pains. He’s rescued from further assault by Bliss Overbay, a Tufa First Daughter and EMT technician. To Bliss’ astonishment, after his head injury, Rob can now see the graveyards of the Tufa, which only Tufa should be able to do, and even read the inscriptions on the tombstones. Rob begins to grasp that there are undercurrents here beyond his comprehension—especially when he hears the eerie cries of a feral girl running in the woods. The girl, Curnen, has been cursed: When the last leaf falls from the Widow’s Tree, she will lose the last of her humanity. Bliss is faced with a terrible dilemma: By Tufa law, she may disclose nothing to outsiders, yet clearly Rob was brought here for a purpose. This beautifully handled drama of Appalachian music and magic once again comes complete with fascinating characters, a persuasive setting and intriguing complications. Bledsoe’s on a roll.
“As immersive as it is impressive.” from deep space
DEEP SPACE
under his dominion. Quaeryt is content to serve Bhayar, since a peaceful, united continent would nurture his own dream of establishing a collegium where imagers and scholars, shielded from the hostility and skepticism of the general population, can develop their skills and knowledge in safety. But to win Khel over, Quaeryt must persuade the Pharsi High Council to become a client state. Since women occupy most positions of power among the Pharsi, Quaeryt’s co-ambassador will be his pregnant wife, Vaelora, who is also Bhayar’s sister. But to persuade the Pharsi to even consider Bhayar’s proposals, Quaeryt must pass a rigorous test of magic arranged by a mysterious and powerful order of wizards—one of whom Quaeryt, with his dark skin, white hair and remarkable imaging abilities, might be himself. And even if he passes the test, the Pharsi councilors make it clear they will not submit to Bhayar unless he first quells Khel’s belligerent southern neighbor, Antiago, with its powerful navy, strong imagers and fearsome chemical weapons. Modesitt offers a subtle blend of politics, strategy, machination, action and rivalries, where the protagonist stands forth as the very model of an upright man: honest, loyal, capable and dutybound to serve no matter what the personal cost. Series fans will snap it up.
Douglas, Ian Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Apr. 30, 2013 978-0-06-218380-4 Series: Star Carrier, 4 An addition to Douglas’ mediumfuture alien-warfare series (Singularity, 2012, etc.). To get newcomers up to speed quickly and efficiently, and refresh the memories of series regulars, Douglas opens with a briefing paper from the Agletch, aliens willing to trade information for metals. The belligerent alien Sh’daar and their myriad client races, of whom the Agletch are one, have technology superior to Earth’s and seemingly intend to prevent human technology from progressing beyond the point the Sh’daar consider threatening. Now, a human research vessel has been destroyed under suspicious circumstances, and the Earth Confederation has sent a fleet to combat the presumed invaders. On Earth, meanwhile, former space Navy commander Alexander Koenig, now the newly re-elected president of North America, ponders how to implement his mandate—independence from the increasingly authoritarian and incompetent Earth Confederation. But as the space fleet engages the powerful Slan, another Sh’daar client race, the Confederation’s European faction launches a pre-emptive strike against North America and its most powerful ally, Konstantin, an artificial intelligence buried beneath a crater on the far side of the moon. As regulars might hope and expect, the action is full-blooded and almost nonstop, yet the well-developed background is surprisingly rich and logical. The Slan, for instance, far more than boilerplate weirdos with a few extra tentacles and eyestalks, are heavy-planet beings with radically different senses, motivations and psychology. Neither are the characters mere stock villains or heroes, but personalities with doubts and fears and hopes. Still, tension and excitement drive the narrative, and Douglas supplies them convincingly and relentlessly. As immersive as it is impressive. (Agent: Ethan Ellenberg)
THE GOLIATH STONE
Niven, Larry; Harrington, Matthew Joseph Tor (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-7653-3323-0
New collaboration about nanotechnology from Harrington (author of several stories set in universes created by Niven) and the vastly influential creator of the Ringworld series, etc. Dr. Toby Glyer cured AIDS using nanotechnology. But his vision, and that of his genius partner, William Connors, ironically plagued by ill health and confined to a wheelchair, extended much farther. Twenty-five years ago, planning to mine wealth from asteroids, they launched a spaceship loaded with nanites that was to rendezvous with an asteroid and steer it back into Earth’s orbit. But when the probe lost contact shortly after reaching its target, the U.S. government succumbed to the “gray goo” hypothesis—that nanites would inevitably run out of control and consume the planet—and shut Toby down. Now, the target asteroid has reappeared, heading for Earth on schedule. Unfortunately, it’s 10 times the size of the original and evidently won’t only take up Earth’s orbit, but smack into it. The asteroid, Forge, is now inhabited—by intelligent nanites. The government’s only hope is to grab Toby, but thanks to a mysterious series of events, he teams up with rocket scientist May Wyndham and disappears. They soon realize they’re infected with nanites and now have perfect health, among other advantages. How? Why? Then, at the Olympics, a certain Mycroft Yellowhorse, representing the Joint Negotiating Alliance of Indian Tribes, wins the marathon in just over an hour and a
ANTIAGON FIRE
Modesitt Jr., L.E. Tor (464 pp.) $27.99 | May 28, 2013 978-0-7653-3457-2 Series: Imager Portfolio, 7 Fourth installment of the prequel fantasy series (Imager’s Battalion, 2013, etc.). Having nearly single-handedly annihilated the vast armies of Bovaria, and nearly dying in the process, scholar, imager and now soldier Quaeryt receives a promotion from Lord Bhayar of Telaryn—and a new mission. Bovaria is subdued, if not entirely pacified, and Bhayar next intends to bring Khel |
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quarter. Toby and May finally grasp who Mycroft must really be, what he has accomplished and what he still intends to achieve. Leaping from concept to concept at the speed of thought, the book is bulging with jokes, puns and witticisms and is plotted so cleverly you don’t even notice there is a plot. A brilliantly crafted yarn that also manages to be an edge-of-the-seat thriller. And funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. What are you waiting for?
r om a n c e TRUE LOVE
Deveraux, Jude Ballantine (464 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-345-54179-6 Series: Nantucket Brides, 1 A novel about star-crossed love, life, death and reincarnation. This is the first in the author’s planned Nantucket Brides trilogy. The book opens with the renowned architect Jared Montgomery Kingsley having a conversation with the ghost of his ancestor Caleb, who died 200 years earlier. Jared has been able to see and hear him since he was a child. Jared’s aunt Addy, recently deceased, has left him the old family mansion on Nantucket, with the condition that a young woman named Alix be allowed to live there for one year. Alix is the daughter of a couple who visited Addy before they divorced and helped Jared when he lost his parents as a teenager. The father, Ken, was an architect who, noticing Jared’s talent for designing and building things, directed him away from potential delinquency and into what became a great career. The mother, Victoria, was a popular novelist who published many best-sellers and was able to pay for Jared’s education. Victoria often returned to the house in Nantucket to read the old journals she found there, which proved helpful in plotting her novels. Alix, who followed in her father’s footsteps and studied architecture in college, knew about the great Jared Montgomery and was awed, even a bit enamored of him, so she is both excited and frightened by the prospect of meeting him in Nantucket. As the plot develops, we discover that Ken and Victoria had other connections to Jared’s family. By the end, several star-crossed couples find each other again in new lives. A romantic story of love so deep it survives centuries. (Agent: Robin Rue)
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THE REPEAT YEAR
Lochen, Andrea Berkley (400 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 7, 2013 978-0-425-26313-6 After living one of the worst years of her life, nurse Olive Watson goes to sleep on New Year’s Eve 2011...and wakes up on New Year’s Day 2011, with the chance to make different choices. 2011 was not a good year for Olive. She suffered heartbreaking losses at her job as an intensive care nurse; lost her boyfriend, Phil, after cheating on him; alienated her best friend in the messy aftermath of the breakup; and handled her widowed mother’s new love affair poorly. So when she goes to bed, alone and lonely, on Dec. 31, 2011, and wakes up, miraculously, in Phil’s bed on Jan. 1, 2011, she realizes immediately it’s a gift from the universe, a chance to right the wrongs of the past. Finding an acquaintance who has experienced the same time oddity at first makes her feel reassured, until she understands that the woman has her own issues and not much good advice. Moving forward, Olive realizes that even if no one else remembers the past year, she does, and making choices as if she hadn’t betrayed Phil, disappointed Kerrigan or made a vast ocean of mistakes doesn’t take away the guilt or self-loathing from those actions. And sometimes, making different choices allows other people to make different choices too, with surprising and stressful consequences. An intriguing premise and some surprising twists make this an engaging, satisfying read that explores friendship, love and who we really are when it truly matters. A debut novel that offers a fascinating glimpse into one woman’s opportunity to rewrite her past and change her future.
nonfiction FAIRYLAND A Memoir of My Father
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Abbott, Alysia Norton (272 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 3, 2013 978-0-393-08252-4
REVOLUTIONARY SUMMER by Joseph J. Ellis................................. 49 GETTYSBURG by Allen C. Guelzo.......................................................52 UNREMARRIED WIDOW by Artis Henderson....................................54
A writer and former WNYC radio producer’s lovingly crafted memoir about growing up with her gay poet dad in San Francisco during the 1970s and ’80s. Abbott, her mother, Barbara, and her father, Steve, lived an unconventional but happy life in Atlanta until the night when Barbara was killed in a car accident. The author, 3, was inconsolable, and her bisexual father was “so distraught over [Barbara’s] death that he turned gay” and never had a relationship with another woman again. With nothing left in Atlanta, Steve took his daughter to San Francisco to begin a new life. The pair moved into the bohemian, gay-friendly Haight-Ashbury district. In between doing odd jobs to support himself and his daughter and falling in and out of love with the wrong men, Steve became editor at the influential poetry journal, Poetry Flash. He also turned to Zen Buddhism to help him recover from drug and alcohol dependence. Meanwhile, the increasingly self-conscious author struggled to come to terms with being the child of a gay parent whose queerness “became my weakness, my Achilles heel.” Then, just as Steve began to find recognition as a poet and peace in the troubled relationship he had with his now-collegiate daughter, he developed AIDS. Deeply conflicted, Abbott returned to San Francisco from New York to take care of her father, who died a year later. What makes this story especially successful is the meticulous way the author uses letters and her father’s cartoons and journals to reconstruct the world she and her father inhabited. As she depicts the dynamics of a unique, occasionally fraught, gay parent–straight child relationship, Abbott offers unforgettable glimpses into a community that has since left an indelible mark on both the literary and social histories of one of America’s most colorful cities. A sympathetic and deeply moving story. (10 illustrations)
THE FOUNDING CONSERVATIVES by David Lefer........................ 60 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by John Lukacs......................................................................................62 ROBERT OPPENHEIMER by Ray Monk.............................................63 STONEHENGE—A NEW UNDERSTANDING by Mike Parker Pearson........................................................................65 THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit...................................... 68 GETTYSBURG: The Last Invasion
Guelzo, Allen C. Knopf (688 pp.) $35.00 May 15, 2013 978-0-307-59408-2
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“A wild ride for foodies and those captivated by sagas of recovery.” from nine lives
ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART My Life and Music
work, discipline and determination. Not so for 28-year-old Baltzley. By 9, he was working alongside his single mother in her cafe in the back of a gay bar in Jacksonville, Fla. “Most people aren’t lucky enough to know before they’re nine years old what they want to do with their lives,” he writes. “But for me, it was never really a question—my fate was sealed in the back of the Whistlestop Café, chopping corn at my mother’s counter.” Baltzley left high school to concentrate on improving his cooking skills and playing music with a heavy metal band. In Savannah, he scored a job with Paula Deen at The Lady & Sons. After that, he roamed through restaurants from Maine to Pittsburgh, continuing his experimentation with food, cooking techniques and menus. Meanwhile, his escalating drug use ruined relationships with employers, co-workers and girlfriends (he fathered a child with one of them). His talents continued to land him gigs in prestigious restaurants, but his substance abuse finally culminated in a revolving-door year in and out of four top Chicago restaurants, including Alinea. At the pinnacle of his tumultuous career, named executive chef at Simon Lamb’s trendy Tribute, the author entered rehab. “Normalcy was something I never thought I could obtain, but I realized that that’s what I wanted, even more than sobriety,” he writes. Now married and sober, with his first solo restaurant, TMIP, in the works in rural Indiana, he seems poised for a new life. His unrelentingly candid memoir delivers in-your-face details about his missteps, larded with juicy peeks into the restaurant world, cutting-edge culinary practices and supersized personalities. A wild ride for foodies and those captivated by sagas of recovery.
Bacharach, Burt with Greenfield, Robert Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $27.99 | May 7, 2013 978-0-06-220606-0
Reminiscences of a master songwriter. Compiled from interviews conducted by journalist Greenfield (The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun, 2011, etc.) with Bacharach and his associates, this oral memoir provides a congenial overview of a life devoted to music. Bacharach began reluctantly taking piano lessons as a child, then became smitten with classical and jazz compositions; they would later inspire him to bring a sophisticated palette to his own songs. After a few unspectacular years at the Brill Building, he hit the jackpot with lyricist Hal David; the two went on to create such iconic hits as “Baby, It’s You” for the Shirelles, “The Look of Love” for Dusty Springfield and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” for B.J. Thomas. Bacharach candidly details his transformation into a household name, his perfectionism in the recording studio and his sometimes-contentious relationships with David and the indomitable Dionne Warwick. The chanteuse acted as a muse for the pair and was aggrieved when they broke up their songwriting partnership after the colossal failure of their score for the 1973 box office bomb Lost Horizon. For decades, breaking up relationships was a specialty of Bacharach’s; many of the women in his life, including his first three wives, describe him as exuding a combination of ambition, ambivalence and arrogance. The most moving recollections come from Marlene Dietrich, who highly valued Bacharach as her conductor and accompanist on the road, and from ex-wife Angie Dickinson, who laments Bacharach’s decision to institutionalize their autistic daughter, Nikki. The specter of Nikki (who committed suicide in 2007) casts a shadow over the memoir. Whether Greenfield has purposely arranged the book this way or not, intertwining Dickinson’s interviews with Bacharach’s commentary paints a darker picture of the man whom most people identify with catchy love songs and cameo appearances in the Austin Powers films. Illuminating and gritty, though Bacharach’s remarks are occasionally self-serving. (16-page color photo insert)
STUMBLING GIANT The Threats to China’s Future
Beardson, Timothy Yale Univ. (512 pp.) $35.00 | May 21, 2013 978-0-300-16542-5
A Hong Kong–based executive suggests that the dreaded Chinese juggernaut has a few cracks in its armor. Some doubting Thomases of late have begun to wonder if China really has the stuff to run the world, and Beardson thinks they may have a point. He constructs a concise, readable, albeit finance-heavy roundup of Chinese successes and failures in order to assess its future potential. One important point he emphasizes is China’s habit of reverting to old models. From the Ming dynasty to Mao Zedong, he notes, rulers have responded to outside pressures by turning inward rather than opening to new currents, and any stress prompts reversion to the top-down method of control, extending to the most local level. Beardson examines the Chinese political, financial and social structures, backing up his determinations of their good and bad aspects with impressive research and analysis. The rapid growth of the Chinese economy over the last 30 years, he finds, has been dogged by such systemic problems as unemployment, currency snags, massive
NINE LIVES A Chef’s Journey from Chaos to Control Baltzley, Brandon Gotham Books (288 pp.) $26.00 | May 2, 2013 978-1-59240-791-0
A chef as well known for his turbulent life as his dishes chronicles his quick rise, spectacular fall and reinvention. Success in the competitive world of professional cooking generally comes after years of grueling 42
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HUMBOLDT Life on America’s Marijuana Frontier
environmental degradation and an inability to sustain the old cheap-export/fixed-investment model. While a new, innovative model is urgently needed, bureaucratic inertia and lack of integrity inhibit Chinese institutions in nearly every field, most notably science, education and research. Plagiarism, corruption, a vulnerable financial system, income inequality, gender disparities, organized crime, military aggression against its neighbors and cyberaggression against the U.S. all undermine Chinese stability. The nation needs to step up responsibly to its world role and defuse the instinct among many wary countries to “check” it, but ultimately, Beardson concludes, “China is weak where it should be strong and strong where it should be weak.” A thoughtful reconsideration of China’s actual place in the new world order, based on reality rather than fanciful speculation.
Brady, Emily Grand Central Publishing (304 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4555-0676-7
Straightforward overview of Northern California’s “Emerald Triangle,” the rural region renowned for producing America’s best cannabis. Brady spent a year among participants in the marijuana trade, earning their trust while observing their lifestyles. Although her narrative demonstrates that every resident is affected by this enormous illicit industry, she focuses on a few individuals, including a beleaguered sheriff ’s deputy, an itinerant manager of isolated cannabis “grows” and a young woman whose undergraduate research suggested that growing up amid pervasive illegality creates dangerous consequences for the
NINE YEARS UNDER Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home
Booker, Sheri Gotham Books (272 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 3, 2013 978-1-592-40712-5
A young woman makes a life out of working with death. Working for an undertaker doesn’t seem like it would be a popular choice for a summer job, but 15-year-old Booker (I Am the Poem, 2011, etc.), a writer, poet and photographer, figured if she were going to learn how to cope with the recent death of her beloved aunt, a funeral home might be the best place to do it. So began Booker’s nine-year employment in the office of Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. During her time there, Booker greeted hundreds of grieving inner-city families at the door and witnessed the strange and familiar faces of death. Some of them were her peers, gunned down in the tragic street violence plaguing that part of the country. Others were AIDS patients, suicide victims or elders in the church; the only discernible pattern that surfaced in the Wylie clientele was a desire for closure. Booker writes that she felt as though she “had already died a hundred deaths” by the time she was done working at the funeral home. By including plenty of less-heavy details about family life at the home and insights into an industry that most outsiders never consider until they have to, Booker’s memoir remains mostly lighthearted and true to a teenage girl’s perspective. With death as a backdrop, she fell in love with the funeral director’s son, crashed the hearse and struggled with the illness of her mother. Despite the rich material, however, the writing reaches neither a moving depth nor comic height and feels at times as stiff and cold as the bodies in the embalming room. An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-thescenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary society in inner-city Baltimore.
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region’s youngsters. Brady notes that since the “Back-to-theLand” movement of the early 1970s, Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties have become a strange synthesis of redneck and hippie perspectives, fueled by the development of a secretive yet widespread cannabis-cultivation industry. The financial rewards of “marijuana moonshining” only strengthened the residents’ libertarian outlook: “This was a community that had paid a price for their decades long rebellion,” including raids by the U.S. Army. Brady ably captures the social complexities of life in a region where dependence on cannabis (and the artificially high prices created by prohibition) is universally understood yet kept concealed: For instance, the deputy profiled by Brady theorizes that “many growers became members of local fire departments out of guilt over how they earn their living.” As a narrative framework, the author uses the failed 2010 ballot proposal to legalize all uses of cannabis statewide, noting that many area growers actively opposed it, putting financial self-interest ahead of idealism. She thus captures a community torn between the unknown future of cannabis legalization and a present in which prison terms, violent rip-offs and destructive police raids remain commonplace. Though more a work of journalistic observation than social argument, Brady still demonstrates that the war on drugs makes “normal” life impossible in communities like those in the Emerald Triangle. A relaxed yet disturbing look at an alternative lifestyle, its heady profits and its hidden costs.
18 and heading to London to work in construction, it’s hard to understand why he didn’t see living and working in England as compromising his principles. Once in London, he obtained a fake birth certificate and signed up for the dole; the highlight of his stay was hitting on the girlfriend of a dangerous gang bigwig and getting roughed up, which sent him back to Ireland fearing for his life. Broderick’s rite-of-passage rebelliousness hardly inspires the sympathy evoked by Brendan Behan’s prison autobiography, Borstal Boy (1958) or Frank McCourt’s account of his hard-knock life, Angela’s Ashes (1996). Surprisingly dreary, given the turbulent backdrop; Orangutan, Broderick’s scathing memoir of alcoholism, had more drama.
OBSESSED The Fight Against America’s (and My Own) Food Addiction
Brzezinski, Mika with Smith, Diane Weinstein Books (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 7, 2013 978-1-60286-176-3
The co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe parlays her lifelong preoccupation with food into re-educating an increasingly corpulent nation about smarter eating practices. Best-selling author and mother of two, Brzezinski (Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, 2011, etc.) honestly discusses her history of food addiction, from teenage years indulging an insatiable urge for junk food in a family of overachievers to early days in her entertainment career binging on the fat and sugar in “hyperprocessed” fare. It’s no surprise to her, she writes, when people immediately draw eye-rolling conclusions based on her outward appearance, dubbing her a “privileged skinny bitch with food issues.” In fact, her past has been one torturous battle after another with food and a lifelong “determination to be thin,” yet it seems the struggle to control her weight and increase her vitality has kept the author surprisingly grounded. Longtime best friend, award-winning news anchor and co-author Smith joins with Brzezinski to share their dietary failures and triumphs in knowledgeable, accessible parlance. The pair also enlists notable media personalities and celebrities to offer their own observations on weight, diet and the obesity epidemic. Among those sharing experiences and fresh perspectives are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Gayle King, Jennifer Hudson and the late author/director Nora Ephron, plus numerous dieting experts and clinical researchers. An additional section advises on how to address food and nutritional balance gracefully and tactfully with children. Brzezinski and Smith’s timely message of healthy harmony makes a smart, personalized complement to the brilliant journalistic advocacy of Michael Moss’ Salt Sugar Fat (2013). A motivational, inspirational addition to the everexpanding library of total-health guidebooks.
THAT’S THAT A Memoir
Broderick, Colin Broadway (368 pp.) $15.00 paper | May 7, 2013 978-0-307-71633-0
Growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Although he was born in England, Broderick (Orangutan, 2009) spent his formative years in Northern Ireland, where battles between the British Army and the Irish Republican Army echoed the more general strife of Protestant loyalists and anti-crown Catholics. Broderick’s father was a hardworking Irishman who kept the family in fairly comfortable lower-middleclass circumstances, while his mother was a stereotypically strict Catholic matriarch. Although Broderick intersperses snippets of nightly newscasts detailing the latest atrocities committed in the name of either Protestantism or Catholicism, this ongoing war rarely touched his immediate family directly, apart from the occasional harassment by British soldiers at border checkpoints. Most of the memoir offers more typical material about a kid discovering drink, sex and drugs in the way most adolescents do. Nevertheless, Broderick developed a deep hatred for the British and Protestant loyalists, falling into the cycle of blind prejudice that had been getting people of both faiths senselessly killed for years. Broderick’s anti-English fervor and Irish patriotism are believable enough at first. But when he casually describes turning 44
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IT’S TIME! My 360-Degree View of the UFC
Collins (The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars, 2012, etc.) ably brings New York to life; this would be a great reference book for authors looking for site descriptions. The author’s New York is a fascinating place, one that only covered the southern tip of Manhattan and still had no potable water. The Manhattan Company was commissioned to build a pipeline, and those involved in it were major players on both sides of the crime: the murder of a Quaker woman, Elma Sands. There are many characters in the book, and it takes some time before we can identify the victim and suspect. The defense attorneys, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Henry Brockholst Livingston, don’t appear until halfway through the book. The question of how the plaintiff, a mere carpenter, could afford such a dream team may have something to do with the suspect’s builder brother, who happened to hold past-due notes from Burr and Hamilton. Once the trial begins, the narrative truly takes off, as Collins reveals the immense talents of the three attorneys. The story is an interesting view of the new nation struggling to establish its own judicial system, but
Buffer, Bruce Crown Archetype (288 pp.) $25.00 | May 14, 2013 978-0-307-95391-9
The veteran Ultimate Fighting Championship announcer shares his life story. The central portion of Buffer’s memoir chronicles his recent knee injury (sustained, ironically, while announcing at a UFC event) and his commitment to making a complete recovery. However, it is his account of life outside of the UFC that provides key insights into the very full personality behind the “Voice of the Octagon.” Growing up in Malibu with a hard-charging father, a former Marine–turned-novelist, Buffer had an adventure-filled childhood. He achieved financial success working at a series of telemarketing companies and went on to do well in the high-stakes world of competitive poker. After discovering as an adult that boxing announcer Michael Buffer was his long-lost brother, Bruce formed a business partnership with his famous sibling and was involved in the lucrative decision to trademark Michael’s catchphrase, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Their relationship sparked Bruce’s desire to become an announcer himself for the then-new sport of mixed martial arts, which has gained significant popularity in recent years. Interspersed throughout the book are “Bufferisms” drawn from the lessons he learned on his tumultuous life’s journey; they offer inspirational, though often pedantic, words of wisdom about how to achieve success in business and personal relations. Of course, Buffer also includes plenty of behind-the-scenes stories about partying and fighting alongside some of the biggest names in MMA, including BJ Penn, Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz. Outsized personalities from Hollywood and the world of competitive poker make cameo appearances as well. An amalgam of entertaining vignettes written in an informal, rambling style.
DUEL WITH THE DEVIL The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery Collins, Paul Crown (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-307-95645-3
Ostensibly the tale of a dramatic murder trial with three famous defense attorneys, “the first fully recorded murder trial in U.S. history,” but actually more of an intriguing exploration of Manhattan in 1799. |
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“A well-researched treatment of two interesting figures in one of the most eventful times in world history. Though a bit plodding at first, it’s well worth sticking with it.” from american phoenix
AMERICAN PHOENIX John Quincy and Louisa Adams, the War of 1812, and the Exile that Saved American Independence
there’s too much extraneous information, such as the life stories of peripheral characters and criminal backgrounds of those who shared the jail with the accused. A rousing tale of the longest murder trial to that date in Manhattan, and the author’s conjecture as to the true villain is spot-on—but he should have focused more on the trial.
Cook, Jane Hampton Thomas Nelson (496 pp.) $26.99 | $26.99 e-book | May 7, 2013 978-1-59555-541-0 978-1-59555-542-7 e-book
SOUTHERN LEAGUE A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race
John Quincy Adams spent several years as the American diplomatic representative in Russia, at the height of the Napoleonic wars. Here’s the story. Cook (The Faith of American’s First Ladies, 2006, etc.) gives as much space to Louisa, Adams’ English-born wife, as to the future president. Adams, a compulsively honest and frugal man, was hard-pressed to keep up with the extravagant lifestyles expected of the diplomatic corps in St. Petersburg. The situation was complicated by the Napoleonic wars, in which American interests seemed distant and trivial to the European powers, especially England and France, both of which set up trade barriers against American merchants. Adams’ job was to work out an agreement with the Russians, giving the fledgling country at least one large trading partner in Europe. Luckily, Czar Alexander took a liking to the Adamses and helped smooth their way in the tricky maze of high Russian society. Adams’ ordeal included horrible traveling conditions, stubborn bureaucrats, a hostile French ambassador and a chronic shortage of money. But Louisa, one of the few diplomatic wives in Russia, had far worse to deal with—not just separation from their two young sons, but two miscarriages and the death of her 1-year-old daughter. Eventually, as the War of 1812 broke out, the czar offered his services to mediate between England and America, an offer declined by the British. Eventually, Adams was called to Ghent, where he helped negotiate the treaty that ended the war. Louisa, after a year waiting behind in Russia, undertook a harrowing journey to rejoin him in Paris. Cook, drawing on the journals of both the Adamses, gives a detailed if sometimes overwrought account of their experiences. Interestingly, the book is set in the same time and place as War and Peace and sheds considerable light on the background of that novel. A well-researched treatment of two interesting figures in one of the most eventful times in world history. Though a bit plodding at first, it’s well worth sticking with it.
Colton, Larry Grand Central Publishing (304 pp.) $27.99 | May 14, 2013 978-1-4555-1188-4
Former professional baseball player and current sports journalist Colton (No Ordinary Joes: The Extraordinary True Story of Four Submariners in War and Love and Life, 2010, etc.) returns with an account of the 1964 season of the racially integrated Birmingham Barons of the Southern League. The author focuses on the fortunes not just of the team, but some key individuals: Barons’ owner Albert Belcher, manager Haywood Sullivan, pitchers Paul Lindblad and John Blue Moon Odom, players Hoss Bowlin and Tommie Reynolds. Numerous others pop up, as well—e.g., Bert Campaneris and, most notably, Charlie Finley, eccentric owner of the parent team, the Kansas City Athletics, a man whom some in the Birmingham organization came to despise. (He called up Odom, Campaneris and others—key losses for the Barons.) Colton also keeps track of the explosive racial issues occurring that summer. Birmingham had a nasty racial history (the church bombing that killed four girls had occurred just the year before), and the black players on the team had to endure taunts and humiliations of all sorts—not so much in Birmingham, but on the road. Colton describes the personal lives of his principals, too—their girlfriends, wives and medical issues (Bowlin was recovering from cancer). The team was in a tight pennant race that was not decided until the penultimate day of the season. Oddly, the author offers no endnotes or bibliography (he explains he’s writing a “nonacademic narration”), so readers may well wonder about the sources and fidelity of the many direct quotations and the specific thoughts of specific players. Still, he captures well the personalities of his characters; we see Campaneris’ fiery temper, Lindblad’s quiet humanity and humility, and Belcher’s worries about potential violence. A competent but light-hitting account of a pivotal summer.
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PERMANENT PRESENT TENSE The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M.
useful and colorful context about the litigants, lawyers, politics and legal precedent. She’s especially good on the maneuvering of various special interest groups to identify, frame and shepherd particular cases through the legal system, all with a hopeful eye toward eventual Supreme Court review. These ingredients come together most successfully in her smooth discussion of the right to bear arms at issue in Heller, the most important Second Amendment case ever, her handling of two cases emerging from the racial diversity plans of school boards in Louisville and Seattle, and her treatment of the widely controversial Citizens United, where free speech and campaign finance law collided. Perhaps the court’s recent momentous ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act accounts for the deficiencies of this least-satisfying chapter. There’s a richer story to tell, and Coyle doesn’t appear to have all the goods. Otherwise, this is the best popular account so far of the Roberts-led court, about the varied backgrounds and clashing philosophies of the justices, the careful crafting of arguments to secure five votes, the court’s continually shifting center of gravity and the peculiar burden that rests with the chief justice. Coyle clearly disapproves of the court’s conservative bent, but she gives all sides a fair, respectful hearing and demonstrates her own reverence for the institution. A careful, informed analysis of the origins, progress and disposition of the complex, high-stakes legal disputes that find their way to the court. (16-page b/w insert)
Corkin, Suzanne Basic (384 pp.) $28.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-465-03159-7
Neuroscientist Corkin writes of her unique relationship with amnesiac Henry Gustav Molaison, or H.M., as he was referred to in a mountain of scientific papers, and of his invaluable contribution to the scientific understanding of memory. For nearly five decades, Corkin (Emeritus, Behavioral Neuroscience/MIT; co-editor: The Neurobiology of Alzheimer’s Disease, 1996, etc.) talked with and tested Molaison, who, at age 27 in 1953, had undergone experimental surgery to cure his epilepsy and, as a result of removal of parts of his brain, had lost the ability to store long-term memories. For the rest of his life, Molaison lived in the present tense. His severe impairment brought him to the attention of the scientific community, eager to understand how memory works. Corkin shows Molaison, whose identity was kept secret during his lifetime, to have been an amiable, intelligent man who cooperated willingly with the neuroscientists, performing countless tests for them and undergoing numerous CT and MRI scans of his brain. For him, every experience was a first-time one; he could not remember an event or person for more than a few seconds. Though he could never recall who she or her co-workers were, the author came to know him well and admire him. Corkin gives the specifics of the many behavioral tasks she asked him to perform, and she relates in clear language the significance of what they revealed about the mechanisms of memory. Molaison’s story does not end with his death in 2008, for his brain has been preserved and will continue to be analyzed. Both a compassionate biography and a lucid account of the advances in neuroscience made possible through one man’s personal tragedy. (30 b/w illustrations)
VIRUS HUNT The Search for the Origin of HIV Crawford, Dorothy H. Oxford Univ. (256 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-0-19-964114-7
A meticulous unfolding of how, when, where and why HIV took off. Make that HIV-1, group M, as one thing Crawford (Medicine/Univ. of Edinburgh; The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses, 2003, etc.) makes clear is that the world of simian and human immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs and HIVs) is rich, complex and constantly changing due to high mutation rates. By 1983, it was known that a virus was the cause of AIDS. Researchers quickly established that the “gay disease” in America was the same as the heterosexual “slim disease” in central Africa, both caused by a retrovirus of the lentivirus, or slow virus family, socalled because of the long lag time between infection and the end stages of disease. The canny observation of a similar disease in Asian macaques at the U.S. National Primate Centers spurred a focus on primates in Africa; there was reason to believe that the macaques had picked up an SIV from African primates there. How the simian virus jumped to humans is a tangled tale whose unraveling involved international collaborations among epidemiologists, demographers, virologists and evolutionary molecular biologists. The researchers eventually pinned down the origins of HIV-1 to chimpanzees in Cameroon, and the less aggressive
THE ROBERTS COURT The Struggle for the Constitution Coyle, Marcia Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $28.00 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4516-2751-0
In her first book, the National Law Journal’s longtime chief Washington correspondent examines the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, seven years after the appointment of the youngest chief justice since John Marshall. Along with her credentials as a lawyer, Coyle brings 25 years of reporting on the high court to this careful unpacking of select, enormously consequential, 5-4 decisions, supplying |
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“A longtime critic of American gun culture aims again at targets he holds responsible for the carnage.” from the last gun
ANTARCTICA A Biography
HIV-2 disease to West African sooty mangabeys. Getting to that point meant digging into stored blood and tissue samples in Europe and Africa, testing captive primates, and developing techniques for extracting HIV antibodies and viral DNA from urine and fecal samples from primates in the wild. The current consensus is that HIV-1 cases date back to the 1900s and were amplified in the 1920s by mass vaccinations and unsterilized needles. AIDS became a pandemic in recent decades thanks to warfare, global travel, changing mores, movements to cities, the growth of commercial sex workers and the market for bush meat, to name only the most prominent in a vast array of factors. A wonderful source book for professionals and a highly informative, often engrossing tale for lay readers willing to apply due diligence.
Day, David Oxford Univ. (624 pp.) $34.95 | Jun. 3, 2013 978-0-19-986145-3
Day (Research Fellow/La Trobe Univ., Melbourne; Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, 2008, etc.) examines the strange history of Antarctica, “a continent of many claimants and no owners.” In the 18th century, much of the South Pacific was still unexplored. French, Russian and Americans vied to discover a supposed temperate continent, known as “the Great South Land,” falsely noted on maps. The expectation was that this would prove to be a habitable, resource-rich landmass suitable for colonization. This hope was dispelled when British explorer James Cook circled the South Pole and, in 1777, published a popular account A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World. In his book, Cook noted the existence of massive icebergs in the region of the South Pole. In a follow-up expedition, a Russian naval officer reported that the glaciers were attached to a landmass. By the 1830s, America, Britain and France launched rival expeditions to discover whether there was a continent worth claiming at the South Pole, but the major enterprise was harvesting the abundant whale and seal populations. Because Antarctica was uninhabited, laying claim to the continent would not occur through conquest, and planting a flag on the coast to establish sovereignty was an empty gesture. The legend of the continent increased with the victorious race to the South Pole in 1912 by Norway’s Roald Amundsen and British contender Robert Scott. By 1929, while Britain, Norway, Australia and Argentina all made claims to Antarctica and its potential resources, America moved pre-emptively. Richard Byrd’s daring flight over the South Pole allowed him to map and photograph the entire continent. Following World War II, strategic Cold War considerations also came into play. The United States, Soviet Union and others recognized Antarctica’s scientific importance and established bases there. Day’s wellresearched history covers all these stories and more. An intriguing addition to a centurieslong geopolitical adventure story. (35 b/w halftones)
THE LAST PILGRIMAGE My Mother’s Life and Our Journey to Saying Goodbye Daly, Linda Counterpoint (288 pp.) $26.00 | May 14, 2013 978-1-61902-117-4
Philanthropist and environmental activist Daly writes about her spiritual search as she shared her mother’s courageous 4-year battle with the ravages of
pancreatic cancer. Before her diagnosis in 2006, the author’s mother, Nancy Daly—former first lady of Los Angeles during her husband Dick Riordan’s eight years as mayor—was a charismatic celebrity in her own right. She was a larger-than-life figure who was chair of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a prominent activist on behalf of abused children. In her early 60s, she was “at the top of her game…a beautiful, happy, selfless and extremely well dressed woman, busy doing exciting things.” Though her mother took the diagnosis in stride, for the author, it was terrifying. After surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer went into remission, and Nancy gamely resumed her normal schedule of activities despite a regimen of medications. In 2007, the cancer metastasized, and her health deteriorated rapidly. Nonetheless, she maintained an upbeat attitude, resuming chemotherapy and palliative treatment. Daly writes of her own struggle to master her fear and pain as she faced the reality of her mother’s worsening condition and the need to overcome her continued psychological dependency on her. When it became clear that the cancer was spreading throughout her body, Nancy turned to alternative medicine and a Brazilian faith healer, John of God, in hopes of a cure. In a last-ditch effort, mother and daughter traveled across the country to meet the faith healer. Nancy died peacefully in the back seat of an RV during the journey back to Los Angeles. The author, a convert to Judaism with a profound connection to nature, writes movingly of her spiritual journey as she faced the need to establish an independent identity. A daughter’s tender tribute to a remarkable mother.
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THE LAST GUN Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What it Will Take to Stop It Diaz, Tom New Press (224 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 26, 2013 978-1-59558-830-2 978-1-59558-841-8 e-book
A longtime critic of American gun culture aims again at targets he holds responsible for the carnage. |
“Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Ellis writes book after book on the American Revolutionary period. Practice makes perfect.” from revolutionary summer
Diaz (Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, 1999, etc.) pushed for responsible gun control legislation and regulation while employed at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. This new book, obviously timely in the wake of recent mass murders around the country, updates and expands his advocacy. In the first three chapters, the author documents the extraordinary level of gun violence in the United States compared to other nations and explains the impact of such violence on individuals and families, cities and rural areas, states and the entire democratic experience. Then, Diaz focuses on gun manufacturers and policy lobbyists, especially the National Rifle Association, that, in Diaz’s view, are more concerned with their profit-and-loss statements than with the emotional losses suffered when guns kill or maim. The author attempts to prove that the NRA and its allies are not too powerful to resist successfully in the institutions that have previously enabled them, from state legislatures and Congress to the White House and the courts. Although Diaz is an advocate, he is not shrill; he gathers evidence through careful reporting and marshals his arguments well. Many of the case studies are horrifying and instructive but little known, in part because local media coverage is rarely picked up outside its tight geographic radius. Diaz is on firm ground when he claims that gun violence is actually underreported in the United States, which makes the incidents in the headlines all the more frightening. His suggested reforms, while not original, are well-presented at a time when similar proposals are being debated in state legislatures and Congress. May not alter opinions among true believers on either side of the gun control debate but will hopefully influence the thinking of people with open minds.
the Gaza Strip, began to take its toll on her. She suffered from insomnia, anxiety and despair, and a romantic relationship with a fellow aid worker slowly fell apart. Worse still, Elliott began questioning whether her tireless work was genuinely helping anyone. Desperate to regain her balance, she turned to yoga, a practice that helped her come to terms with the personal limits she had ignored in her zeal to make a difference in the world. Elliott describes her experiences with an open-heartedness that is admirable, but her memoir tells more than it shows and often reads more like an interesting field report than a fully realized book. An earnest but fairly unskilled rendering of a humanitarian worker’s trials and tribulations in Afghanistan.
REVOLUTIONARY SUMMER The Birth of American Independence Ellis, Joseph J. Knopf (240 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-307-70122-0
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Ellis (First Family: Abigail and John Adams, 2010, etc.) writes book after book on the American Revolutionary period. Practice makes perfect. The author’s latest alternates between 1776 colonial politics during which the Continental Congress, dominated by John Adams, finally put aside efforts at compromise and opted for independence and the fighting, where George Washington’s army marched from triumph in the siege of Boston to catastrophe in New York. Ellis delivers few surprises and no cheerleading but much astute commentary. He points out with no small irony that the Continental Congress was at its best in 1776 when thoughtful men debated the benefits of liberty versus the consequences of war with the world’s most powerful nation and came to the right decision. Only in the following years, faced with governing the colonies and supplying the army, did it reveal its incompetence. When British forces withdrew from Boston in March, colonial rebels declared a great victory, but Washington worried. Sieges and fighting behind fortifications (i.e., Bunker Hill) were simple compared with standard 18th-century warfare, which required soldiers to maneuver under fire and remain calm amid scenes of horrific carnage. He suspected that his largely untrained militia army would do badly under these circumstances, and events in New York proved him right. Luckily, British Gen. William Howe, despite vastly superior forces, refused to deliver a knockout blow. He would never get another chance. Kevin Phillips’ 2012 tour de force, 1775, delivered a massive argument for that year as the key to American independence. A traditionalist, Ellis sticks to 1776 and writes an insightful history of its critical, if often painful, events.
ZEN UNDER FIRE How I Found Peace in the Midst of War
Elliott, Marianne Sourcebooks (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-4022-8111-2
An activist’s candid account of the hardships she endured working as a human rights officer for the United Nations. In 2006, Elliott arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, thinking she had finally gotten her “dream job.” But Herat proved every bit as challenging as Kabul, the city where she had been stationed before. Just one month after her arrival, she was called upon to defuse an explosive situation between two feuding tribes that erupted after the leader of one tribe was assassinated. Elliott was soon mired in the thorny politics of both her job and the region. U.N. bureaucracy on one side and the machinations of desperate Afghan officials on the other made the task of getting humanitarian aid to people in need extremely difficult. For a while, Elliott seemed to thrive on the excitement created by coping with challenges that “seemed well beyond [her].” But soon, the accumulated weight of years working in war zones, including |
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1913 In Search of the World Before the Great War
years to come. Branching out from his usual wheelhouse jokes involving subjects like bacon or McDonald’s hamburgers, the author’s G-rated sense of humor expands into new parental/ responsible adult territory. Topics include his wife’s obvious love of pregnancy, the cringe-worthy question of circumcision, the demented universe of children’s literature and the challenging adventures of raising kids in the city. He gets much mileage out of the sort of exaggerated mock cruelty that comedian Louis C.K. revels in, only Gaffigan is a bit less mean-spirited. His prose style resembles that of most comedians who write books: The sentences are simple, short and punchy, with much the same rhythms of delivery as their stand-up counterparts. But as the book progresses, the rapid-fire assault of jokes and punch lines can seem strained, and Gaffigan sometimes misses his targets and pulls up lame, much like a heavyweight boxer who comes out of his corner scoring points early but punches himself out halfway through the fight. Later in the book, when he compares a 3-year-old with insomnia to a heroin addict going through withdrawal, you know you’re beginning to witness a once-effective formula running itself into the ground. Hardly groundbreaking comedy material, but the book will appeal to Gaffigan’s fans. Others can stick to his usually funny Twitter feed. (50 b/w photos)
Emmerson, Charles PublicAffairs (544 pp.) $30.00 | May 28, 2013 978-1-61039-256-3
Most books about the year 1913 deal with the run-up to World War I. Emmerson (The Future History of the Arctic, 2010), fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, casts his net more widely, depicting life in two dozen great cities on the eve of the event that either ushered in the modern world or didn’t (historians still debate this). The author has little new to say but says it well, and the further he travels from Europe, the more he illuminates areas unfamiliar to even educated readers. Parallels between eras a century apart are not in short supply. Observers in 1913 were already extolling a globalized planet, knit together by dazzling advances in technology. Democracy and capitalism seemed the wave of the future despite the disturbing spread of terrorist movements. The reigning superpower, Britain, was in relative decline, with Asia re-awakening and other rising powers flexing their muscles. In five chapters, Emmerson examines European capitals on a continent that took for granted that it was the center of the world, barely aware that the United States (four particular cities) was poised to take over that role. The hinterlands (Buenos Aires, Tehran, Jerusalem and others), colonies (Winnipeg, Bombay, Algiers and others) and Asian metropolises complete Emmerson’s world tour. Although ostensibly about cities, the author also describes the countries involved, often emphasizing a major figure—e.g., Woodrow Wilson in Washington, Gandhi in Durban, South Africa. Emmerson largely confines himself to history and national concerns with only a passing look at international politics on the verge of the Great War, but this is an intelligent picture of our world exactly 100 years ago. (b/w photos throughout)
DRINKING AND TWEETING And Other Brandi Blunders Glanville, Brandi with Bruce, Leslie Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-4767-0762-4
The reality TV star’s account of her ex-husband’s philandering, the effects of their divorce and custody battle on their two young sons, and her rocky path to dating and newfound fame and confidence. Noted for her hilarious zingers and cat fights on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the show’s crassest, most unfiltered star hasn’t qualified as an actual housewife since her 2010 divorce. At the end of a 13-year relationship with TV actor Eddie Cibrian, who’s appeared on shows including CSI: Miami, Glanville discovered her husband was cheating on her with multiple women. He wed one, country singer LeAnn Rimes, in 2011, and Glanville has struggled to come to terms with their romance and to co-parent with a man who’s refused to give her his phone number. Due to Rimes’ fame, as well as the fact that she, too, was married at the time of the affair, messy details surrounding Glanville and Cibrian’s split provided endless tabloid fodder, as did Glanville’s unrestrained comments to reporters and angry behavior that led to, among other actions, her slashing the tires of Cibrian’s motorcycles. Glanville insists that the dissolution of her marriage was her decision, not Cibrian’s, and she airs all of his dirty laundry and lies. A former model, Glanville is certainly no writer—she was assisted by Hollywood Reporter contributor Bruce—but her effervescent voice and often shocking candor
DAD IS FAT
Gaffigan, Jim Crown Archetype (288 pp.) $25.00 | May 7, 2013 978-0-385-34905-5 Comedian Gaffigan delivers zany stories from the front lines of urban parenting. Living in a two-bedroom New York City apartment with five kids and an amazingly “fertile” wife, frumpy funnyman Gaffigan may have found, in a sense, the perfect domestic situation for a comedian trolling for new material. His chaotic family life serves as the basis for this nonfiction debut, and readers can assume that he’ll reap an endless supply of comedic material from this situation for 50
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“The world is all chaos, Gray wants us to know, but he has a good time delivering the message.” from the silence of animals
THE TURK WHO LOVED APPLES And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World
help make her stories at least entertaining. In the notoriously superficial Hollywood social scene, Glanville stands out for her willingness to be vulnerable and even to look bad; she admits to plastic surgery and a DUI arrest and looks back at her mistakes with regret. She offers no apology for who she is, and her personality, love it or hate it, comes across as authentic. Frothy, straightforward and surprisingly addictive.
Gross, Matt Da Capo/Perseus (272 pp.) $15.99 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-306-82115-8
THE SILENCE OF ANIMALS On Progress and Other Modern Myths
A travelogue from a restless journalistic globe-trotter who has freelanced his way across the world. For much of his adult life, BonAppetit.com editor Gross has been roaming around more than 50 countries on a budget and recording his meals and meanderings in the New York Times “Frugal Traveler” column from 2006 to 2010. In these previously unpublished essays, Gross chronicles his far-flung travels, beginning with a postgraduate sojourn to Vietnam in 1996, a reference point for many more spontaneous and memorable trips to follow. Disillusioned by robotic copy editing jobs that dampened his hopes of ever becoming “a real writer, whose words might outlive him,” Gross became a fearless travel author striving to be “the ultimate blank slate on which the world would leave its mark.” Jetting to Istanbul, Rome, Jamaica, Barcelona, Hong Kong and everywhere in between became simpler with Internet tip sites. Along the way, he met a wide swath of diverse strangers, including a Cambodian prostitute, resilient refugees and a barefoot French millionaire. The downsides included inconvenient parasitic infections in India and Kenya and the moments when Gross found himself unprepared for third-world poverty and the loneliness of solitary waywardness. His writings roll out in a disorderly, nonlinear fashion, and each piece contains further jerky time jumps. While fascinating, the rapid-fire references to movie reviewing for the Viet Nam News and the hundreds of Times assignments, combined with stories of his youth and vacations with wife and family, can be disorienting. A tamer version of Anthony Bourdain, Gross enthusiastically juggles food, wanderlust and a passion for foreign culture. A vicariously entertaining whirlwind of scrapbook memories from an author who can’t sit still.
Gray, John Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-374-22917-7
Another bucket of cold water splashed in the face of idealism by Gray (European Thought/London School of Economics; Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 2007, etc.), this time focused on humankind’s stubbornly feral nature. The author opens with a series of stories about human atrocity, drawn from both fiction (Koestler, Conrad) and fact (Europe in the world wars), as if to shock readers into recognizing that the notion of human progress is bunk. “There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized,” he writes. “There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.” It’s a persuasive argument, though Gray doesn’t attack it with the rigor of a philosopher so much as with the breadth of a well-traveled literary scholar, drawing from John Ashbery and Sigmund Freud as much as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. He connects the idea that mankind is progressively becoming more civilized with other long-lived religious myths (indeed, he describes it as largely a function of Christianity), but this is not another entry in the “angry atheist” literature, and he’s not interested in proofs for or against God. In recognizing that our lives are constructed on fictions, he writes, we acquire a degree of freedom not provided by baseless optimism. He points to the case of British author Llewelyn Powys, gravely ill for much of his adult life, who threw off his sexual and religious shackles and determined to live happily and free of delusions. Gray doesn’t bother with the moral complications of such hedonism; he seeks only to demolish moral certainties, not to reckon with their replacements. However cold his perspective, though, the author brings a liveliness to his prose, augmented by the top-shelf authors he quotes. The world is all chaos, Gray wants us to know, but he has a good time delivering the message.
PARENTING WITHOUT BORDERS Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us
Gross-Loh, Christine Avery (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 2, 2013 978-1-58333-455-3
An intriguing look at parenting paradigms in countries where children are deemed to be the best adjusted. Gross-Loh (The Diaper-Free Baby, 2007, etc.), a first generation Korean-American with a doctorate from Harvard, spent five |
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“Robust, memorable reading that will appeal to Civil War buffs, professional historians and general readers alike.” from gettysburg
years raising four kids in Japan. This experience challenged her assumptions about child-rearing and inspired her to investigate whether or not the ideas about parenting held by Americans—or at least, those who are middle-class to affluent, raising collegebound children—are empirically based realities or cultural norms. Most readers can guess the answer, as well as the conclusion that there is a lot wrong with how American youth are prepared for adulthood, especially as compared to their Scandinavian, Western European and East Asian counterparts. But Gross-Loh’s patient, grounded explication and engaging personal anecdotes make this a much more positive, culturally expansive contribution to the discussion than most parenting books. This is not to say that readers won’t occasionally become frustrated by the repetitive idealization of certain overseas child-rearing practices. Gross-Loh acknowledges and identifies with the challenge of modeling approaches like France’s two-hour, fresh, multicourse school lunch; Japan’s first-graders running family errands as a means of developing self-reliance and judgment; or Finland’s individualized education plan for each student, executed by highly qualified teachers and trained professional specialists. The book would be stronger if the author delved further into practical strategies that frazzled American families in isolated suburbs could use immediately, short of enrolling their children in a Swedish forest school. Nonetheless, this is a strong survey of such wellchosen topics as where babies sleep, materialism, eating habits, self-esteem, unstructured time, kindness, chores, education and independence. Gross-Loh’s recurring theme is that American parents, who experience more angst and judgment than those abroad, inculcate their children with plenty of individualism and tolerance but not enough empathy or autonomy. Current alarm over U.S. student global rankings will help give this persuasive book the consideration it deserves.
even insubordination—keeping James Longstreet from attacking, J.E.B. Stuart from arriving on the battlefield in time, and the much-disliked George Pickett from enjoying a better fate than being cannon fodder. And what fodder: If there is a leitmotif in Guelzo’s book, it is the image of brains being distributed on the grass and the shirts of fellow soldiers, of limbs disappearing and soldiers on both sides disintegrating in a scene of “muskets, swords, haversacks, human flesh and bones flying and dangling in the air or bouncing above the earth.” The author ably, even vividly, captures the hell of the battlefield while constantly keeping the larger scope of Gettysburg in the reader’s mind: It was, he argues, the one central struggle over one plank of the Civil War, namely the preservation of the Union, that nearly wholly excluded the other one, the abolition of slavery. Robust, memorable reading that will appeal to Civil War buffs, professional historians and general readers alike. (44 maps; 8 pages of photos. First printing of 60,000)
CAPTAIN PHIL HARRIS The Legendary Crab Fisherman, Our Hero, Our Dad
Harris, Josh; Harris, Jake with Springer, Steve and Chavez, Blake Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-1-4516-6604-5
A candid narrative deconstructs the turbulent personal and professional life of the late Deadliest Catch star Phil Harris. Told by Harris’ sons and written with the help of journalists Springer and Chavez (co-authors: Hard Luck: The Triumph and Tragedy of “Irish” Jerry Quarry, 2011), this biography of the reality TV star captures the gritty details of his high-speed life, declining health and death. Harris surely personified the prologue’s statement that, “Pound for pound, crabbers are the toughest bastards on earth.” With a history of fishing in his family, Harris, who as a high school kid was voted least likely to succeed, became a living legend in this dangerous job undertaken in one of the world’s harshest environments, the Bering Sea. Revered as a skilled seamen, Harris’ onshore behavior was notorious. Numerous escapades fueled by alcohol and copious amounts of various drugs, combined with womanizing and a bizarre family life meant Harris was pegged as “a rock star even before he was a TV star.” A turbulent marriage produced two sons and plenty of pain. Alcohol took a toll on his relationship and his work. A second marriage proved more disastrous, especially for Harris’ two sons. In 2005, the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch debuted, and Harris was on the road to becoming a reality TV celebrity. In 2008, he was at the height of his TV fame, but his bad habits began taking a toll, and his health deteriorated. In 2010, Harris suffered a massive stroke. With his consent, Harris’ last hours were filmed by the show’s producers, with 8.5 million viewers tuning in to watch. An unflinching portrait that will surely satisfy Harris’ fans.
GETTYSBURG The Last Invasion Guelzo, Allen C. Knopf (688 pp.) $35.00 | May 15, 2013 978-0-307-59408-2
A stirring account of the “greatest and most violent collision the North American continent [has] ever seen,” just in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Though the battle site was not inevitable, the actual battle was: The giant armies of North and South were destined to lumber into one another in a time when, as Guelzo (Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 2012, etc.) cites a Confederate officer as observing, they “knew no more about the topography of the country than they did about Central Africa.” What is certain is that Robert E. Lee’s arrival in Pennsylvania sent “Yankeedom,” to quote another Confederate officer, “in a great fright.” The Union had reason to be concerned, but, as Guelzo documents, their foe was scattered and divided, with rivalries and miscommunication—and perhaps 52
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IT’S ONLY SLOW FOOD UNTIL YOU TRY TO EAT IT Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter Gatherer
hoped to travel and become a writer. A chance meeting at a bar led to an immediate attraction, and soon they were commuting back and forth on weekends between her Florida apartment and his, near Fort Rucker. He was politically conservative and a regular churchgoer who joined the military after 9/11. The author describes herself as a vehement opponent of the Iraq War, a young liberal “more New Age-light than Biblical.” When Miles was reassigned to Fort Bragg, they decided to live together. The author describes the difficulties of her life, as he was frequently reassigned, and she could only find minimumwage jobs and felt little in common with the Army wives she met. Despite this and his frequent absence on deployment, the growing bond between the two was deepening. She called her mother for help, describing her frustration and posing the question of whether she was wasting her education. When her mother asked, “Do you love him?” her reply said it all: “I love him more than anything.” They married in March 2006, and he deployed to Iraq in July. Henderson writes movingly of his poignant, last letter to her, to be delivered should he be killed. She recounts how he urged her to pursue her dreams and relates her struggle to do so, despite her grief. Henderson, who graduated from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and now works as a journalist, first shared her story in the New York Times “Modern Love” column. A beautiful debut from an exciting new voice.
Heavey, Bill Atlantic Monthly (256 pp.) $25.00 | May 1, 2013 978-0-8021-1955-1
In which an inside-the-Beltway type goes all Euell Gibbons on us—and doesn’t starve to death and even finds true love in the bargain. Granted, Heavey isn’t your typical D.C. commuter: A freelance writer, he hunts, fishes and contributes columns and pieces to magazines such as Field & Stream, Outside, and Men’s Journal on hook-and-bullet subjects—though, as he describes it, he is blessed with more enthusiasm than art. Here, he describes, as both literary project and life hacking, his efforts to live closer to the land, lessening his reliance on grocery stores and big carbon footprints in favor of heading out into the world to gather baskets full of goodies. His travels, sad to say, require big carbon footprints, as he jets off to the Arctic and the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. What he brings back, apart from mushrooms, serviceberries and wild rice, are stories of how people of all sorts have gone back to the land, some out of necessity and custom, others by choice. One neighbor, for instance, is a combat veteran who has mastered the flora of the region, a solid candidate for survival come the apocalypse. (And apocalypse, meltdown and the end of civilization are never far from some of these back-to-the-landers’ thoughts.) Heavey describes himself as “not the most likely guy to write a book about food,” a matter he skirts around by writing about many things other than food. However, he does provide some useful recipes for dishes such as boiled ground squirrel, fried perch and sautéed dandelion greens (to be found in lawns and parks, with the proviso, “What you’re trying to do is avoid herbicides”). Really an overblown magazine article, lightly and pleasantly enough written, though without the depth of likeminded projects by Bill Bryson, Jim Harrison and others.
SURVIVAL LESSONS
Hoffman, Alice Algonquin (120 pp.) $15.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-61620-314-6 978-1-61620-345-0 e-book
A how-to guide to facing death and living life by the popular novelist and cancer survivor. When Hoffman (The Dovekeepers, 2011, etc.) received the diagnosis about her lump, her immediate response was denial: “I was busy after all, the mother of two young sons, caring for my ill mother, involved in my writing. My most recent novel, Here on Earth, had been chosen as an Oprah Book Club Choice; an earlier novel, Practical Magic, was being filmed in California with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. I didn’t have time to be ill.” Once she came to terms with the fact that disease doesn’t necessarily strike at our convenience, she was able to deal directly with her situation, put her life in perspective and get her priorities in order. She was one of the lucky ones—15 years later, she remains very much alive and productive, capable of writing the book that might have helped her when the shock of cancer blindsided her. “In many ways I wrote Survival Lessons for myself to remind myself of the beauty of life, something that’s all too easy to overlook during the crisis of illness or loss,” she writes. Though Hoffman has earned renown as a talented writer, this isn’t really a writerly book, but more like conversational advice from a close friend. Most of the advice is common sense, yet the element of choice is crucial
UNREMARRIED WIDOW A Memoir Henderson, Artis Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4516-4928-4
Journalist Henderson chronicles her passionate but unlikely romance and marriage to Miles, a fighter pilot who fit the stereotype, “American by birth, Texan by the grace of God.” In 2006, Miles’ helicopter crashed in bad weather, and there were no survivors. They had met three years earlier in Tallahassee, when he was still in training. A recent college graduate, she |
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“An acclaimed poet proves his versatility in his gut-busting memoir on jokes..” from the joker
THE JOKER A Memoir
when faced with a fate that seems beyond your control. You can choose how to respond and put your crisis in perspective: “Good fortune and bad luck are always tied together with invisible, unbreakable thread.” Hoffman ends with words of wisdom from her oncologist, who advised that, “cancer didn’t have to be my entire novel. It was just a chapter.” In other words, this too shall pass. A lightweight but heartening book.
Hudgins, Andrew Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $25.00 | June 11, 2013 978-1-4767-1271-0
An acclaimed poet proves his versatility in his gut-busting memoir on jokes. In his debut memoir, Hudgins (English/Ohio State Univ.; American Rendering, 2010, etc.) admits his Achilles’ heel for clowning. “Since junior high, I’ve been a joker, a punster, a laugher,” he writes, “someone who will say almost anything for a laugh.” In his memoir, he also proves that he will write anything for a laugh as well. No terrain proves too taboo for Hudgins, who dispenses racial jokes, misogynistic jokes and jokes in which Jesus and dead babies make appearances in the punch lines. Yet his often-bawdy material probes depths far beneath the jokes themselves, providing opportunities to examine his life through a humorous lens. Hudgins recounts his evolution from grade school clown to college-age clown to married (and later divorced) clown, but he’s at his best when moving beyond himself and providing the historical context for his punch lines. While tightrope walking along the perilous subject of racial jokes, Hudgins’ true contribution comes from his commentary on growing up in the segregated South. His discussion on jokes as a regional defense mechanism—one that exposes the fears and biases of the time—prompts new thinking on a subject often overlooked: i.e., the attempt to shroud America’s past lunacy in laughter. “Jokes are often—some would say always—intricately wound up with power,” he writes, a claim all the more powerful given his Southern upbringing. As Hudgins proves, jokes provide various other functions as well, including a test of the teller’s ability to read his audience. As the author has learned, humor is no universal language, though thankfully, he possesses the skills to prompt readers to examine their own complex relationships with chuckles, guffaws and groans. A humorous, cerebral and daringly written memoir.
ON WHEELS
Holroyd, Michael Farrar, Straus and Giroux (112 pp.) $20.00 | May 14, 2013 978-0-374-22657-2 Prodigious British biographer and memoirist Holroyd (A Book of Secrets, 2011, etc.) tells of memorable automobiles in his life and in the lives of those about whom he has written. Do not mistake this neat little book for your kid’s chapter book, though it features a large font, heavily leaded; generous margins; innocent illustrations; and just over 100 pages. It is entertainment for grown-up readers, especially of the Anglophilic sort. Holroyd has become aware that, somehow, his many books, including the biographies, have often featured automotive transportation. This text is about the automobiles of his oft-married parents and his own coming-of-age with cars. The author grew up in the congenial company of his grandparents’ permanently parked Ford, but he didn’t learn to drive until he was 30. Holroyd’s story concerns the cars he drove, the cars his biographical subjects drove and how they were all driven. The telling is as full of wit as it is fraught with harmless collisions and idiosyncratic journeys. There’s a comic ride on an emblematic double-decker. Holroyd examines the Royal Automobile Club early in the 20th century, a time when it was dubious whether the gentle members of the distaff side were suited to take the wheel. He pays tribute to the memory of his first car and recalls his years in the Army as a driving instructor who had no driver’s license. Throughout is the evocative nomenclature of vehicles, unsung or famous, of the past. The cavalcade includes Vauxhalls, Biancas, Lanchesters, Rolls-Royces, Fords, Zodiacs and Zephyrs. (The author favors Honda Accords). An entertaining personal essay, short and sweet, about the cars in the life of Holroyd.
WALDEN ON WHEELS On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
Ilgunas, Ken Amazon/New Harvest (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-0-544-02883-8
A recent college grad discovers how to live life and pay off his student loans at the same time. After graduating from college with $32,000 in student loans and no lucrative job offers, Ilgunas decided to take an unconventional approach to paying off his debt. He embarked on an epic road trip, including stops in Alaska to clean rooms in a tourist camp and in post-Katrina 54
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Mississippi, where he worked clearing debris. With his room and board paid for and few distractions, Ilgunas was able to pay off his loans in under three years. He then decided to attend graduate school. To avoid incurring more debt, he knew he had to keep his living expenses to an extreme minimum. A Ford Econoline van solved that problem, and Ilgunas managed to live in a campus parking lot for two years. Ilgunas’ story gained traction when it appeared as an article in Salon; the novelty of his lifestyle may appeal to a generation of overly indebted and underemployed college grads. On his journeys, he met a diverse cast of characters, yet, despite a brief relationship with a young woman, his was a lonely life; socializing was just too expensive. Ilgunas has some interesting stories to tell, but his writing style is clichéd at best and more often clunky and rambling. The pacing is further weakened by loosely researched generalizations about the problems with “society”—e.g., comments like, “while I worried that my parents might get laid off, I couldn’t have cared less about this ‘Great Recession’ ” exhibit an annoying self-absorption that sets the tone for much of this memoir. And while Ilgunas tries to reference Thoreau—imagining his “vandwelling” life as a kind of transcendental experience—his story is really about the crises facing American higher education. That a student can’t get a degree without sacrificing basic human rights like food, clothing, shelter and love makes this story a tragic one. A middling memoir of a young man’s attempts to live as a modern-day ascetic.
and personal-care manufacturer that sponsors SitOrSquat, the clean-bathroom–locating app. Joel shows how what he calls linear and circular data can be combined to help create successful marketing opportunities. Individuals, however, will require the proper education, and they will need to be able to find their own voices, to write, and to present themselves and what they want to do effectively through the new media, as well as in person. Joel provides a useful guide to communication over web-based media, how to set up a blog and where, and what to do to build up a following. He promotes self-employment and independent action as solutions to problems like unemployment. Lively tips and practical advice pinned to a presentation of emerging digital technologies.
THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN A Father, a Son, and the CIA Johnson, Scott C. Norton (320 pp.) $26.95 | May 20, 2013 978-0-393-23980-5
A former Newsweek foreign correspondent reviews his often perplexing experiences as the son of a CIA operative. Now a freelance journalist, Johnson begins in 1973, his birth year, with a story about a snake charmer in India, where his father was stationed. The snake charmer proves an apt metaphor for the mysterious elder Johnson, a sophisticated persuader whose ability to charm was his deadliest arrow as he sought to flip other agents and foreign nationals. The author does not obey a strict chronology. After 10 chapters that deliver us to 2001, Johnson returns to Mexico City in 1968, wondering if or how his father was involved in the deadly violence that occurred there just before the Olympics. Rendering the question even more wrenching is his realization that Johnson père could have been involved in the arrest of the father of a woman Johnson fils was dating. About halfway through, the narrative arrives near the present with a summary of the author’s sometimes-harrowing experiences covering the war in Iraq; he survived an IED explosion while riding in a Marine vehicle and had other brushes with death. We also hear about Sarajevo in 2004 and, in later chapters, about visits with his uneasily retired father in Spokane. They took some road trips, and en route, we learn about some of the missions and adventures of Johnson père, though he says he resents interrogations. Nonetheless, the author kept pushing him to impart as much family and professional history as possible, trying to understand a man with such a deadly past who nonetheless both professes and demonstrates a profound love for his son. Gripping, emotional depictions of the conflicts that rage in the interior and exterior worlds of a spy—and of a journalist.
CTRL ALT DELETE Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
Joel, Mitch Business Plus/Grand Central (288 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 21, 2013 978-1-4555-4548-3
Information Technology and marketing guru Joel (Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone, 2010) lays out his vision for how businesses and individuals must re-organize themselves to make it in the upcoming upgrade of the digital world. For businesses, writes the author, the key word will be “utility”; for individuals, “entrepreneur.” Joel believes that “[i]n a world where many people are looking for jobs, it’s time for all of us to start thinking like entrepreneurs. Individuals working in this interconnected world will need to know how to present and market themselves successfully, as will businesses, which also must reorient to establish more personalized types of digitalized, information-based relations with their customers. He presents many examples, including individuals like Marco Arment, who quit Tumblr, the company he founded, when they wouldn’t let him do what he wanted and built another, worth millions, on his own from his apartment; and more traditional corporations like Procter and Gamble, the household-products |
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Marie Arana
A Long, Epic Latin American Shadow By David Garza by an insatiable lust for glory. “He had a tremendous democratic impulse,” Arana says. “He understood very basic things about human rights very deeply. This is very present in the Latin American personality. He also had tremendous hubris, sometimes overconfidence, and an instinct to look back instead of forward.” Arana, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States as a child, has written two novels and a memoir, as well as formerly editing the Washington Post Book World. She sees this monumental work of historical biography as a natural progression, though it’s hard to imagine her selecting a more daunting task. As she points out, there are more than 2,500 books about Bolívar in the Library of Congress, and it took a full six years to complete the biography—the first three of which were spent entirely on research alone. The pull of Bolívar’s life story, though, was too strong to pass up. “I wanted to write about someone who really represented the personality of Latin Americans and Hispanic Americans,” she says, “but someone whose life story explicates why we are different.” This premise of studying Bolívar as a prototype for the Latin American character becomes tantalizing in Arana’s biography. She depicts the Liberator as a natural at the art of the epic, cinematic gesture. During his 1805 travels in Europe, the 22-year-old Bolívar met Pope Pius VII and caused a minor scandal when he flouted Vatican protocol by refusing to kiss the cross on the pontiff ’s sandals. During the same trip, he surveyed Roman ruins, climbed Monte Sacro with two travel companions and had the historical epiphany that would guide the rest of his life. Falling to his knees at the top of the hill, he vowed to free his country from Spanish rule: “I will not rest until I have rid it of every last one of those bastards!”
Simón Bolívar, renowned as the “Liberator” of Latin America, holds a place in his culture’s history and identity that is both colossal and strangely elusive. A currency and two countries bear his name (Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela), presidents and soldiers invoke his legacy to this day, and his dream of a unified Latin America remains a seductive ideal to millions. Yet he remains easier to imagine as a statue or as a Napoleonic figure in an oil portrait, preserved in a stance of pride and defiance, than as an actual man. The narrative of that life and of his personality, though, explored in stunning detail and sweep by Marie Arana in her biography Bolívar: American Liberator, is a story that continues to shape the fate of Latin America two centuries later. Bolívar was born in 1783 to a wealthy Venezuelan family during the turmoil of the Spanish Empire and was steeped in Enlightenment ideals and driven 56
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“He began to despair,”Arana says. “The overwhelming task of governing made the whole future bleak for him. There was sickness. The utter negativity.” There were also assassination plots, including a nearly successful 1828 attempt on his life in Bogotá devised by a conspiracy that at one point included 150 individuals. That horrific experience, which he only escaped thanks to quick action by his infamous lover Manuela Sáenz (an iconoclastic and thoroughly enchanting figure who deserves her own biography in the U.S.), became an emotional blow from which he never fully recovered. “For all the bitterness we had in Peru,” Arana remarks, “at least we never tried to kill him.” When death did come from illness for Bolívar in 1830, he was penniless, unable to walk and in torturous pain. He was unwanted by the people he freed and had doubts about the struggle to which he dedicated his life. “I’ve even come, at this late stage, to deplore the (insurrection) we mounted against Spain…I don’t see much good coming for our country,” he wrote in a letter. Despite the divisions and dictators that would follow Bolívar throughout Latin American history, and despite the legacy of bizarre appropriations of his persona (most recently and colorfully by Hugo Chávez, for example), Arana believes that the culture today is making giant leaps toward realizing Bolívar’s dream of unification and progress. “There is a tremendous spirit of energy and growth,” she says. “A whole new class is emerging; you have people being pulled out of poverty in one generation. There is tremendous hope.”
Arana recounts the next several years of Bolívar’s life pursuit in brutal and dramatic prose. From Bolívar’s first attempts at recruiting funding and troops to the unending march over more than 75,000 miles of ranges and rivers, Arana revels in the details of his everyday existence. There are his physical maladies, from hemorrhoids to tuberculosis and malnutrition, the shifting allegiances among generals and would-be war heroes, and Bolívar’s insatiable appetite for young women, who seemed to be presented as prizes at the conquest of every new village (he became a widower at a very young age). “He was a womanizer, but very principled,” Arana says. Above all, during those years of bitter and unspeakably gruesome war against the Spaniards, Bolívar maintained an unshakable optimism in his destiny. During one particularly vivid episode, Bolívar and 20,000 citizens were forced to retreat in exodus from Caracas as the Spanish “Legions of Hell” were waging a campaign of beheadings and assassinations. What follows was human disaster on an unspeakable scale: Bolívar’s compatriots starved to death, drowned, succumbed to disease, got devoured by wild animals. Despite the stench of death around him, he could “admit no pessimism.” As grueling as the yearslong campaign for independence would be, Arana places a clear focus on this optimism and refusal to accept even the idea of defeat. Arana also explores his complexities and contradictions: He ordered the freedom of slaves decades before the U.S. government issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and he championed ideals of equality and progress throughout his campaign. Yet his plans for post-independence rule included a “president for life” and other tactics that were viewed with mild horror from potential allies he courted in the United States and in Europe. “He was a visionary,” Arana explains, “but a very poor governor. He was a brilliant general, brilliant liberator, brilliant strategist. But he was singularly unprepared for the task of governing…his instinct as a warrior is lethal as a governor.” It was here, in the impossible struggle to rule a post-independence area comprised of modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, that his legacy became yet more complex. He was accused of scheming to become a king. He was betrayed by his generals and ended up losing his grip on Peru, where he still remains a sore subject.
David Garza lives in New York City. Bolívar: American Liberator Arana, Marie Simon & Schuster (624 pp.) $35.00 Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-4391-1019-5
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THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights
neuropsychologists and advocates of evolutionary psychology such as Steven Pinker, addressing the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Taking issue with those who would lump human and animal social behavior together, the author distinguishes between moral behavior such as altruism and the social behavior of bees, birds, monkeys, apes and other animals. In his view, conflating them prevents us from the “understanding of the human moral sense.” Kagan also derides the idea that human behavior is guided by hidden genetic imperatives to reproduce, slyly asking how this would explain the use of contraception. The author cites the misguided notion that poor mothering is the cause of autism in order to debunk attachment theory (the notion that closeness of mother/child bonding is the crucial determinant of emotional development). He takes on the nature vs. nurture debate, pointing out that genetic proclivities are actually expressed and developed through life experience, with social class playing an important role. While agreeing that children who are born with an identifiable genetic predisposition to low reactivity makes them more likely to be risk takers, he notes that unconventional behavior can take many forms. Scientists and high school dropouts may share the same genetic disposition to unconventional behavior, but birth order is also a factor, with firstborns tending to be more rule-oriented. “Rather than assume that cultures are a defining feature of our species under the control of genes that contribute to fitness,” he writes, “it remains possible that cultures might be by-products of the genes responsible for our large frontal lobe and the resulting abilities to infer the thoughts of others, possess a moral sense, be conscious of our traits, and identify with individuals with whom distinctive features are shared.” An intriguing overview of many of the underlying assumptions guiding modern psychology. (26 b/w illustrations)
Jones, William P. Norton (288 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 29, 2013 978-0-393-08285-2
An account of the American civil rights movement leading up to the infamous 1963 March on Washington, which “aimed not just to end racial segregation and discrimination in the South but also to ensure that Americans of all races had access to quality education, affordable housing, and jobs that paid a living wage.” In his latest book, Jones (History/Univ. of Wisconsin; The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South, 2005) examines the little-known history of the people and events that spurred the March on Washington. Much of the book focuses on A. Philip Randolph, an African-American trade unionist who dedicated his life to leveraging his organizations’ massive membership rolls for gains in civil rights. In 1941, Randolph organized the first March on Washington—a precursor to the 1963 march—though the march was called off when Randolph achieved his aim: pressuring President Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order ensuring that there would be no discriminatory hiring practices within “vocational and training programs for defense production.” The world took note—Randolph realized the importance of power in numbers—and the threat of marching thousands within the nation’s capitol would be repeated 22 years later. While Jones’ book claims to employ the 1963 march as a focal point, the author does not particularly address that march until two-thirds into his work. Jones’ overreliance on historical context allows the story to stray. Perhaps most disappointing, however, is that a book whose subtitle promises to examine the “Forgotten History of Civil Rights” devotes so many pages rehashing well-known information, leaving precious little space for examination of the 1963 March on Washington, as the title and preface implies. A broad, less-than-enlightening look at an important historical moment in America that historians have been “too eager to dismiss.” (8 pages of photos)
COUNTERCLOCKWISE My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate, and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging
Kessler, Lauren Rodale (256 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-60961-347-1
THE HUMAN SPARK The Science of Human Development
One woman’s quest to halt the aging process. In today’s society, old age is equated with being “weak, sickly, sexless, boring, crabby,” writes Kessler (Graduate Program, Multimedia Narrative Journalism/Univ. of Oregon; My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, a Daughter, a Journey Through the Thicket of Adolescence, 2010, etc.). To be young, by contrast, is to be “healthy, vibrant, sexy, creative, adventurous.” Wanting to forestall the effects of aging for as long as possible, the author used herself as a guinea pig to explore the myriad ways this can be done…to a certain extent. What she uncovered was possibly more than she
Kagan, Jerome Basic (352 pp.) $28.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-465-02982-2
Kagan (Emeritus, Psychology/ Harvard Univ.; Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, 2012, etc.) takes up the cudgels against 58
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“A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it.” from the african
bargained for, as she navigated plastic surgery, hormone replacement therapy, fad and extremely low-calorie diets, colonics and cleansings. By studying her own aging process at the cellular level, Kessler gained a better understanding of how she was moving through life. Her extensive research on the thousands of approaches being used to slow a natural process reveal that staying physically fit through aerobic and weight-bearing exercises, eating healthy foods and getting sufficient sleep top the list of effective anti-aging methods. Kessler uses humor to help readers digest the information and develop their own strategies to combat the inevitable physical decline of advancing age while maintaining a high quality of life. Growing older is part of the process of life, she reminds us; the goal is not looking younger, but feeling younger—to have, as she writes, “an abundance of energy—physical, intellectual, and creative…continuing to feel in the thick of things.” In her view, it’s all about “choosing to do something with this prolonged health span, about making use of a fit body and an agile mind.” An entertaining and informative investigation into growing old.
fiscally conservative with cuts in Medicare and Social Security.” Illuminating economic history and sometimes eyeopening about the current situation—however, this version of leftist economics will likely be taken as an ideological counterpoint to rightist free market doctrines, rather than a political solution capable of bringing representatives of different interests together in common purpose.
THE AFRICAN
Le Clézio, J.M.G. Godine (128 pp.) $22.95 | Apr. 30, 2013 978-1-56792-460-2 A slim yet resonant autobiographical entry from the Nobel laureate’s early years in West Africa. Le Clézio’s (Desert, 2009, etc.) memoir of his African youth is thin in length yet rich in detail as he reconciles his experience being spontaneously relocated at 8 with his mother and brother from World War II–era Nice, France, to remote Nigeria. As the only whites in a villages of natives, he describes family life crammed into a rustic homestead with paneless windows and mosquito netting—the best the French government could provide to his father, a military doctor. Even without schooling or sports, the author’s cultural enlightenment becomes an explosion of sensations, from the sun-induced bouts of prickly heat to the naked culture’s immodest “supremacy of the body.” Le Clézio writes of liberating his pent-up frustration from being raised fatherless in dreary, wartime Europe on the African savannah, yet his father, the man he’d reunited with in 1948, emerges as the memoir’s beating heart. Restless after medical school, he’d fled Europe for a two-year medical post in Guyana and two decades in West Africa. The author paints his father as pessimistic, lonely, overly authoritative and staunchly repulsed by colonial power, yet happily married. Sadly defeated by time and circumstance, he’d become a stranger and, once relocated back to France, “an old man out of his element, exiled from his life and his passion for medicine, a survivor.” Only in his lyrically articulated hindsight does the author truly appreciate his father’s good work and a unique, memorable childhood. A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it.
DEBTORS’ PRISON The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility Kuttner, Robert Knopf (352 pp.) $26.95 | May 2, 2013 978-0-307-95980-5
American Prospect co-founder and -editor Kuttner (A Presidency In Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power and the Struggle to Control Our Economic Future, 2010, etc.) critiques the Obama administration’s embrace of debt-driven austerity policies and calls for the resumption of postponed financial reforms. “Only the Republican refusal to entertain any tax increases under any circumstances saved the Democrats from even worse policies—at least so far,” writes the author, who insists that austerity is no match for a deflationary depression in progress. Historical background provides him precedents for such ideas as writing down unpayable debts, like mortgages, and reorganizing insolvent issuing institutions. These approaches were part of America’s legacy in the past but are not included in today’s policy discussions and are “far outside the political mainstream.” Kuttner believes that public policy must find ways to give relief to private debts that are “depressing demand and holding back recovery.” He asserts that the Federal Reserve has the power to play a direct role in this effort, and he also provides a discussion of the European financial crisis. Framed by intriguing discussions of the development of bankruptcy law from 18th-century English precedents and 19th-century political conflicts between independent farmers and corporate middlemen over credit and money creation, the author’s focus on Obama is unsparing: “on the issue of spending cuts, Obama had already given away the game...it was all too clear that the eventual bargain would be |
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THE PRICE OF JUSTICE A True Story of Two Lawyers’ Epic Battle Against Corruption and Greed in Coal Country
Lefer (Innovation and Technology/New York University Polytechnic Institute; co-author, They Made America, 2004) does not claim to be writing an all-encompassing history. He focuses on such early conservatives as Robert Morris, who almost single-handedly bankrolled the revolutionary army, and Silas Deane, who, with help from playwright Pierre Beaumarchais, secretly secured lifesaving aid from the French government. Among the others given credit for saving the American Revolution from its excesses are John Dickinson, a voice of calm in the rush to independence and an author of the Articles of Confederation, and John and Edward Rutledge, leading advocates for the South’s particular concerns. The conservatives did their best to delay armed conflict with Great Britain, knowing it was premature; the colonies were not united and had no foreign allies. In this book, the glorious war for independence of elementary school textbooks is more disastrous than glorious. In Lefer’s retelling, no one was in charge, there was no money, price regulation was destroying the social fabric, and American cities were essentially ruled by mobs. Moving through the desperate days of war to peace and the writing of the Constitution, Lefer reminds us that, while James Madison authored the initial draft, conservatives Dickinson, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris finished the document. The author acknowledges that many of the remarkable men who gave their energy, intelligence and wealth to the young nation did not retain power; clinging to their elitist ways, they ignored the key lesson of the Revolution: adapt to change or risk irrelevance. Also, somewhat ironically, several of these staunch supporters of market capitalism suffered severe financial losses. Groundbreaking history not to be missed—a book to quote and to keep, as the material is rich enough to merit rereading.
Leamer, Laurence Times/Henry Holt (448 pp.) $28.00 | May 7, 2013 978-0-8050-9471-8
A well-constructed nonfiction legal thriller from prizewinning journalist Leamer (Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach, 2009, etc.). In 1998, Harman Coal Company, owned by Hugh Caperton, was destroyed in what was proven through the court system to have been a fraudulent declaration of “force majeure” by Donald Blankenship, then chairman of the massive coal company Massey Energy, one of the largest employers in West Virginia. Leamer uses the more than 14 years of court battles, organized by Dave Fawcett and Bruce Stanley, Caperton’s Pittsburgh lawyers, as the scaffold on which he unfolds this amazing account of contemporary political corruption, skulduggery and mayhem, a situation compared by the New York Times to John Grisham’s courtroom drama The Appeal. When, in 2002, Blankenship was defeated and Caperton awarded $50 million in damages, the coal king proceeded to buy his way through West Virginia’s elected Supreme Court of Appeals to overthrow the verdict. According to Leamer, Blankenship gave “more money, by far [$3 million plus], than any other group or individual in any one judicial contest.” The refusal of a corrupt judge to recuse himself was successfully pursued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared that “a fair trial in a fair tribunal is a fundamental constitutional right.” This, however, was not enough to secure financial redress for Caperton, whose appeals in West Virginia were rejected for a third time in 2009. The vote, his lawyers believed, “was not just a defeat but also an insult and attempt to silence them.” The case proceeded against a background of blackmail, negligence and mining disasters, which eventually combined to precipitate Blankenship’s ouster. An eye-opening story about the relations among politics, business and justice.
DR. FEELGOOD The Shocking Story of the Doctor Who May Have Changed History by Treating and Drugging JFK, Marilyn, Elvis, and Other Prominent Figures Lertzman, Richard A.; Birnes, William J. Skyhorse Publishing (204 pp.) $24.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-62087-589-6
THE FOUNDING CONSERVATIVES How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution
JFK, his rogue doctor and the conspiracy to kill a methaddicted president. Lertzman and Birnes (The Everything UFO Book, 2012, etc.) attempt an exposé about Dr. Max Jacobson, aka Dr. Feelgood, who treated a host of famous patients from JFK to Truman Capote. His treatments, or “vitamin shots,” were primarily made up of amphetamines with the addition of often experimental ingredients like animal hormones. The authors focus on the relationship between JFK and Jacobson, claiming that Jacobson traveled regularly with the president, was often summoned to the White House and was even asked by Kennedy to move in. Using
Lefer, David Sentinel (416 pp.) $29.95 | Jun. 13, 2013 978-1-59523-069-0
Offering a corrective to traditional accounts depicting united American revolutionaries, this valuable revisionist assessment profiles the men who struggled against the nascent nation’s more radical elements. 60
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“A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler’s murderers.” from hitler’s furies
personal interviews with several people once close to the doctor and his patients, as well as quoting from previous books on the subject, the authors spin a tale of widespread drug addiction at the hands of Jacobson. They describe some notable incidents that occurred while Kennedy was in a meth-induced state, including his debate with Nixon, his meeting Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in 1961 and, eventually, an overdose at the Carlyle Hotel during which the president had to be subdued. The book strays at times from the Kennedy story to describe Jacobson’s treatment of patients like Marilyn Monroe, actor Robert Cummings and Cecil B. DeMille, with whom Jacobson traveled extensively. As the authors admit, there have been many books written about Jacobson and his connection to the rich and famous. It’s hard to tell what sets this one apart, although Lertzman and Birnes do offer a lengthy aside detailing the doctor’s upbringing, medical training and emigration to the United States after the Holocaust. Perhaps most interesting is the ending, where the authors assert that Jacobson was indirectly responsible for JFK’s death. The president’s growing amphetamine addiction, they claim, was seen by the CIA as a serious threat to national security. The book concludes with a rehashing of familiar conspiracy theories regarding the Warren Commission. A thin, mostly secondhand portrait of a misguided doctor and the harm he caused his famous clientele.
1917 theory of general relativity described an expanding universe. Since everyone considered the universe static, he added a “cosmological constant” to his equations to achieve this, discarding it when astronomers discovered expansion a decade later. Historians quote Einstein calling this his “greatest blunder,” but Livio doubts that he said it. Most of these stories are familiar, but the author’s emphasis on major errors by distinguished scientists, including their reasons and consequences, provides a thoroughly satisfactory experience even for educated readers. An absorbing, persuasive reminder that science is not a direct march to the truth. (38 b/w photos)
HITLER’S FURIES German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
Lower, Wendy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (272 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-547-86338-2
A grim, original study of the nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives who made up a good half of Hitler’s murderers. Doing “women’s work” included participating in the entire Nazi edifice, from filling the government’s genocide offices to running the concentration camps, Holocaust Memorial Museum historical consultant Lower (History/Claremont McKenna Coll.) proves ably in this fascinating history. With a third of the female German population engaged in the Nazi Party, and increasing as the war went on, the author estimates that at least 500,000 of them were sent east from 1939 onward to help administer the newly occupied territories in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. They were also enlisted to run Heinrich Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Office, work in military support positions, and serve as teachers and nurses in the field hospitals and on train platforms. As key “agents of the Nazi empire-building, tasked with the constructive work in the German civilizing process,” why were so few brought to a reckoning after the war? Sifting through testimonies, letters, memoirs and interviews and pursuing the stories of a dozen key players, the author exposes a historical blind spot in this perverse neglect of women’s role in history. She finds that, similar to American women being allowed new freedoms during the war years, young German women often seized the chance to flee stifling domestic situations and join up or were actively conscripted and fully indoctrinated into anti-Semitic, genocidal policies. Many were trained in the eastern territories, and some of their select tasks included euthanizing the disabled, “resettling” abducted children and plundering Jewish property. The women’s newfound sense of power next to men proved deadly, writes Lower. That their agency in these and other crucial tasks was largely ignored remains a haunting irony of history. A virtuosic feat of scholarship, signaling a need for even more research.
BRILLIANT BLUNDERS From Darwin to Einstein: Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe
Livio, Mario Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $26.00 | May 14, 2013 978-1-4391-9236-8
Astrophysicist and popular science writer Livio (Is God a Mathematician?, 2009, etc.) delivers entertaining accounts of how five celebrated scientists went wrong. Darwin proposed that if one individual has a heritable advantage, such as strength, speed or brains, more of its offspring will survive, so the species will acquire this advantage and evolve. This would be impossible if, as almost everyone believed in Darwin’s day, inherited traits blended, so that a black cat and a white cat produced a gray kitten. Luckily, Mendelian genetics revealed that traits reside in distinct genes that are transmitted intact. The famous 19th-century physicist Lord Kelvin calculated erroneously that the Earth was about 100 million years old, too young for evolution to occur. Linus Pauling published an incorrect structure of DNA in 1953, the year before James Watson and Francis Crick got it right. For Livio, this was perhaps the most inexcusable of blunders: a mixture of poor-quality data, haste and egotism. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle stuck stubbornly to his 1940s steady-state theory of the universe even as evidence favoring the Big Bang accumulated, ultimately passing the last half of his life as a widely respected crank. Einstein’s |
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“A masterpiece of concision and a marvel of clear, controlled prose, a quality lacking in much academic writing.” from a short history of the twentieth century
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
wild, wooly world of parenthood. Magary doesn’t mince words about the many blissfully unencumbered years of marriage before he and his wife had children (“You can live cheaply. You can do drugs. You’re mobile, with no goddamn kids anchoring you to one location. You can even get divorced with a minimum of fuss”), freely partaking of spontaneous beach trips and a particular Oasis concert the writer recalls with an acerbic, fork-tongued wit many readers will either love or hate. Potent anecdotes about their first child are laugh-out-loud funny, but when coupled with the descriptive ordeal of a second child by C-section, Magary’s life becomes awash in baby monitors, an unfortunate DUI, head lice and toddler conflict resolution. A healthy sense of humor and a modern outlook on life is necessary to “get” much of what irks the author about being a parent in a memoir that shines with refreshing realness. For all his potty-mouthed, free-form commentary, Magary demonstrates a noble belief in love, honor and freeze-framing moments with kids who always seem to grow up way too fast. Missteps and foibles aside, the author admits to being happy and grateful as a family man, “even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots…in the Giants Stadium parking lot.” An outspoken dad’s brassy, wise and painfully honest view from the top of the family tree.
Lukacs, John Belknap/Harvard Univ. (220 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 1, 2013 978-0-674-72536-2 Compressed history as sharp and provocative as it is short. Though the matter-of-fact title might suggest a primer or student guide, renowned historian Lukacs (The Future of History, 2012, etc.) demonstrates the argumentative power of the simple declarative sentence. “The twentieth century was—An? The?—American century,” he writes. It “meant the end of the European age” and was “a short century, seventy-five years, from 1914-1989.” True to that last declaration, Lukacs begins with the start of World War I and closes with the belated end of the Cold War, consistently contending that the Soviet Union was overrated as a threat to the United States and American primacy. Some will take issue with how much this history focuses on Europe in general and the two world wars in particular; it gives comparatively short shrift to the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Japan, the emergence of the Third World and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Yet the author has a solid point of view and requires readers to come to terms with it, whether they agree or not. Where other histories focus on larger economic, cultural and political forces, Lukacs stresses the crucial roles played by individuals, “the historical importance of national leaders.” If someone like Hoover rather than FDR had been president in 1940, he claims, “Hitler would have won the war.” He writes convincingly about the confusion of communism with anti-Americanism and how, in the United States, conservative “meant to be fixedly and rigidly anti-Communist,” sardonically noting that “many of the now self-proclaimed American conservatives were not really very conservative at all.” He furthermore asserts that the advancement of “the equality of human people...is God’s design.” A masterpiece of concision and a marvel of clear, controlled prose, a quality lacking in much academic writing.
HOLY SH*T A Brief History of Swearing Mohr, Melissa Oxford Univ. (256 pp.) $24.95 | May 2, 2013 978-0-19-974267-7
A scholar in Renaissance literature debuts with a chronicle of cursing, from the Romans to R-rated movies. In an account that’s a bit textually schizophrenic—the tone and diction range from barroom bawdy to scholarly costiveness—Mohr moves through the centuries in her racy account of how we swear and why. She identifies two major domains of dirty: the Holy and the Shit (the sacred and the secular, the spirit and the body) and shows how each has at times been in the ascendancy. To the Romans and Victorians (the latter thought the body was an embarrassment), words about body parts and functions were highly offensive. Mohr notes that the Victorian Age was also the age of euphemism. But earlier, in the Middle Ages, the more offensive oaths (“the equivalent of modern obscenity”) were religious in nature. Swearing by God’s body parts—“by God’s nails”—alarmed authorities. During the Renaissance, obscenity spread, but playwrights (she uses Shakespeare as an example) employed wordplay, jokes and innuendo. Mohr notes that the Bard of Avon “never employs a primary obscenity.” Moving on, she notes that the world wars greatly affected the vernacular, and soon, literature and the other arts were finding ways to accommodate the new, crustier diction. (She reminds us of the “fug” Mailer had to use in The Naked and the Dead.) Mohr then summarizes the obscenity cases of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s
SOMEONE COULD GET HURT A Memoir of Twenty-FirstCentury Parenthood Magary, Drew Gotham Books (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 2, 2013 978-1-59240-832-0
The pride and pitfalls of contemporary fatherhood. The panic of emergency surgery on a premature baby with a rare intestinal disorder resonates from the riveting first chapter of novelist Magary’s (The Postmortal, 2011, etc.) memoir. The scene captures the author’s knack for electric prose as he dictates the 62
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NAMES FOR THE SEA Strangers in Iceland
Lover and discusses George Carlin, Tourette’s and the scholarly interest in swearing. She confesses that she found it more difficult to write about racial and ethnic slurs than she did about more conventional cursing. Throughout, she lists many naughty words that readers will greatly enjoy learning more about. Friskier diction would have helped at times, but the book is generally informed, enlightening and often delightfully surprising. (17 b/w halftones)
Moss, Sarah Counterpoint (368 pp.) $17.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-61902-122-8
The story of a British academic who, intending to fulfill her childhood dream of northern living, took a university job in Reykjavik. Moss (Creative Writing/Warwick Univ.) arrived in 2009, 16 years after the summer visit that was her only actual previous contact with Iceland. Finding herself living in the country she had fantasized about for so long—and with two small children in tow—wasn’t traumatic, exactly, but it was obvious to both the author and everyone around her that she was a stranger in her new country. She determined to bike in a land where SUVs are the preferred mode of transportation and the weather is hostile more often than not. Unable to speak Icelandic and unwilling to speak English, she was so clearly on the outside looking in that it would have been foolish to pretend otherwise. Still, her memoir never veers into the maudlin, a refreshing perspective from someone who was so obviously out of her element. Though Moss and her family didn’t make it to many tourist attractions (extreme cold not being ideal for toddlers), this actually makes the book better. By shielding her family from the winter and long drives in terrifying traffic, the author managed to lead what seems in her recounting to be an extremely Icelandic life. She achieved an understanding of the land and people, revealed here in subtle “aha” moments that readers will enjoy. She realized, for example, that Iceland’s financial crisis, at its height during the year of her residency, was especially traumatic for a society that considered itself truly egalitarian. Much of what Moss learned, or learned to accept, is summed up when she writes, “The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.” An infectious memoir from someone engagingly candid about her temporary homeland’s limitations—and her own.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER His Life and Mind
Monk, Ray Random House (848 pp.) $37.50 | May 14, 2013 978-0-385-50407-2
A highly detailed examination of the life and times of Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), the man who ushered in the Atomic Age and played a leading role in putting American science on the map. Monk (Philosophy/Southampton Univ.; Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, 1921–1970, 2001, etc.) does full justice to Oppenheimer’s irreplaceable contribution to the development of nuclear energy during and after World War II. The author also addresses his less well-known contributions to nuclear physics, including “a method that is used even now for understanding the physical processes that occur in the interiors of stars.” Born to an affluent Jewish family, Oppenheimer had a privileged upbringing (private schools, Harvard University and extensive study abroad), yet he faced a rising tide of anti-Semitism even in America. Among many examples, Monk quotes a reference by George Birkhoff, Harvard’s most eminent mathematician, supporting his application: “He is Jewish but I should consider him a very fine type of man.” In 1927, Oppenheimer co-authored a paper on quantum chemistry with the leading quantum physicist, Max Born, but in Europe, he faced anti-American prejudice among scientists such as Paul Dirac. Monk explains that experiences such as these prompted Oppenheimer to accept a joint teaching position in California, at Berkeley and Caltech, where he devoted himself to establishing “a world center of theoretical physics in the U.S.” The Spanish Civil War drew Oppenheimer into left-wing politics (and surveillance by the FBI), but he also had a distinguished career during WWII as head of the Manhattan Project and after, when he played a key role in shaping American nuclear policy. In 1954, renewal of his security clearance was denied, a miscarriage of justice that President John F. Kennedy reversed by awarding him the prestigious Fermi Prize. A top-notch biography of Oppenheimer to sit alongside Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus (2006).
WHAT DOCTORS FEEL How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Ofri, Danielle Beacon (208 pp.) $24.95 | $24.95 e-book | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-8070-7332-2 978-0-8070-7333-9 e-book Ofri (School of Medicine/New York Univ.; Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients, 2011, etc.) uses her experiences as a medical student and practicing physician at Bellevue Hospital to illuminate a side of medicine infrequently addressed: the psychological toll on dedicated doctors. |
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The author begins with the experiences of third-year medical students, as they leave the classroom for the “the ongoing bedlam” of a hospital ward. In addition to the difficult task of learning all the medical jargon, they absorb the gallows humor that helps medical professionals deal with the constant stress that goes with the territory. They must also learn how to deal with the stench of disease—which is worse in the case of the homeless—without losing sight of a patient’s humanity. Ofri ably describes the sheer terror that can occur when an exhausted intern or resident faces a cardiac arrest or other emergency. She describes an incident in her own career in her first week as a medical consultant. After her beeper went off, she rushed to the bedside of the patient (with interns and residents crowding around waiting for her directions), and her mind temporarily blanked. She explains how the fear of making a wrong decision stalks even an experienced doctor, especially when overworked and tired. To function, they must be able to suppress their emotions without losing the empathetic doctor-patient connection that is an essential part of the healing process. However, the constant stress can lead to temporary or permanent doctor burnout. Ofri also deals with what happens when doctors make mistakes. The loss of self-confidence and shame they feel is scarring, even when they receive support from superiors. An invaluable guide for doctors and patients on how to “recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts” of the doctor-patient relationship.
tea party websites over two years and comparing them with the more orthodox conservative publication the National Review Online. The authors then employed a multistate survey of race and politics to “tease out” differences between the supporters and sympathizers of the six different tea party formations. The belief that Obama is destroying the country, held by more than 70 percent of tea partiers, shows they are out of step with the mainstream of conservatism, where only 6 percent hold that belief. A dispassionate, academic account supported by reasoned facts in place of political passions.
ITALIAN WAYS On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
Parks, Tim Norton (320 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 10, 2013 978-0-393-23932-4
English-born expat novelist Parks (The Server, 2012, etc.) pokes affectionate fun at his fellow train travelers and surveys a rapidly changing Italian landscape. Since 1981, the author has lived in Italy and supplemented his fiction with a series of charming memoirs about his experiences there, beginning with Italian Neighbors (1992). Here, he chronicles his adventures on the nation’s rails, which became his preferred mode of travel while commuting from his home in Verona (his wife’s native turf) to his teaching job at the university in Milan. Train travel in Italy is the ultimate leveler, Parks finds, and it provides a microcosm of what is transpiring in the society as a whole since globalization has taken root. His observations mingle travelogue, history and memoir, spanning the years from 2005 to the present. During that period, parts of the main state railway, Trenitalia, were split off into private lines; regional routes were streamlined; faster trains were added to accommodate EU travelers; and reserved and class-oriented seating was introduced, along with some bewildering ticket machines. Anyone who has ever battled a provincial government functionary in Europe will be heartily amused by Parks’ anecdotes about the finer points of choosing the correct ticket from an officious clerk or getting a ticket validated with the requisite stamp. His renderings of the comical pronunciations featured in well-intentioned English public-address announcements are also funny. Parks divides the passengers into several categories: chatty; objectionable; resigned; long-suffering; pignolo, which means the stickler who obeys each rule to the letter; and (an inevitability in Italy) furbo, the sly one who tries to get around every rule. Our intrepid traveler evolves from being disoriented by the newly renovated Milano Centrale station to being capable of negotiating a trip all the way south to Otranto and back. His journeys renew his sense of being eternally an outsider in Italy, yet he also recognizes how warmly he has taken to his adopted country. Enchanting travels with the good-natured Parks. (6 illustrations)
CHANGE THEY CAN’T BELIEVE IN The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America
Parker, Christopher S.; Barreto, Matt A. Princeton Univ. (376 pp.) $27.95 | May 26, 2013 978-0-691-15183-0
Two University of Washington political science professors offer a rigorous scholarly investigation of the tea party. Parker (Fighting For Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South, 2009) and Barreto (Ethnic Cues: The Role of Shared Ethnicity in Latino Political Participation, 2010) make the case that tea party supporters are driven above all by “anxiety incited by Obama as President.” Intuitively, this may already make sense to many readers, but the authors muster the evidence in support, dividing and subdividing different categories of political activity and belief to arrive at a firm basis for their conclusion. They support the steps of the argument with bar charts, regression analysis and a methodological appendix. They identify the tea party’s racism and commitment to the policies of a bygone age with reactionary, revolutionary conservatism, as opposed to the evolutionary type. For them, the tea party is the latest in a series of organizations and movements that include the KnowNothing movement, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. Parker and Barreto established frames of analysis by studying 42 64
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“The most authoritative, important book on Stonehenge to date.” from stonehenge —a new understanding
STONEHENGE—A NEW UNDERSTANDING Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument
CONSPIRACY OF ONE Tyler Kent’s Secret Plot Against FDR, Churchill, and the Allied War Effort Rand, Peter Lyons Press (272 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 6, 2013 978-0-7627-8696-1
Pearson, Mike Parker The Experiment (432 pp.) $27.50 | Jun. 7, 2013 978-1-61519-079-9
An in-depth look at the intriguing, dark days at the break of World War II, when fear of a “Fifth Column” was rampant. Sifting through a cache of archives at Boston University, where Rand teaches journalism, the author became aware of the hushed-up story of a low-level American embassy employee in London who had been arrested in May 1940 by British MI5 for squirreling away compromising missives between the top U.S. and British leaders. Tyler Kent, then a code clerk in the American embassy and formerly part of the first U.S. embassy team put in place by William Bullitt in Moscow, was a strangely disgruntled young man who deeply sympathized with growing reactionary elements, like pro-German, pro-isolationist, antiSemitic views then vying with more interventionist segments both in England and in the U.S. In fact, Kent had been flirting with (and providing documents to) members of the Right Club in London, led by a destabilized, intensely anti-Semitic Member of Parliament, Archibald Ramsay, convinced of the pernicious “Jewish menace” trying to ruin the government; and another dangerous member, Russian Baroness Anna Wolkoff, who was actually providing said documents to the notorious William Joyce, making his incendiary broadcasts in Berlin. Although Kent had been under surveillance for some months, the defeat of British naval forces in Norway intensified the “Fifth Column Panic” then sweeping the government, and Kent was apprehended, stripped of diplomatic immunity, quietly tried and imprisoned for the duration of the war. The damning documents found in Kent’s possession would have revealed Roosevelt’s and others’ attempts to circumvent the Neutrality Act, which Kent intended to reveal to U.S. senators. A fascinating work enriched by the author’s deep knowledge and command of his material.
Renowned archaeologist Pearson (Archaeology/University College London; From Machair to Mountains, 2012, etc.) presents the findings of the most ambitious and scientifically informed investigation of Stonehenge thus far. Majestic, enigmatic and captivating, the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge is a mystery archaeologists have been struggling to solve for more than 300 years. Here, the author unveils the critical new discoveries made during the massive investigation he oversaw from 2003 to 2009: the Stonehenge Riverside Project. Forty-five excavations within the 6,500-acre Stonehenge World Heritage site revealed Stonehenge to be not just a monument that exists in isolation, but one of many monuments constructed within an ancient sacred landscape. From a massive Neolithic avenue connecting the neighboring wood henge Durrington Walls to the River Avon, to the discovery of 63 ancient cremation burials at Stonehenge, Pearson presents new evidence that indisputably links Stonehenge to a network of similar cremation monuments and ancient cemeteries across greater Britain. The project has also provided a tantalizing glimpse into the lives and minds of Britain’s prehistoric people. Lipid analysis of animal bones discovered at Durrington indicates that feasting took place there on a grand scale during midsummer and midwinter. Along with animal bones in large quantities, an entire Neolithic settlement was unearthed there as well, proving that while Stonehenge was a place that honored the dead, Durrington was a place of celebration for the living. Filled with maps, drawings, photographs and diagrams, the book details the group’s findings in a well-organized, absorbing manner. While the tone is decidedly academic, Pearson’s style is accessible enough—and the information discussed provocative enough—to make this book required reading for serious Anglophiles, students of archaeology and anthropologists alike. The most authoritative, important book on Stonehenge to date. (16-page color insert, plus b/w illustrations throughout)
THE MAGICAL STRANGER A Son’s Journey into His Father’s Life Rodrick, Stephen Harper/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $27.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-06-200476-5
Journalist Rodrick’s powerful debut chronicles the long, difficult process of coming to terms with the untimely death of his father, a Navy pilot. Black Ravens squadron commander Peter Rodrick was just 36 in 1979, when his airplane went down in the Indian Ocean. |
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After his son turned the same age in 2002, Stephen’s then-wife told him that he wouldn’t be “a proper father” until he “made peace” with his dad. The younger Rodrick tried, writing an article about Navy pilots on the Kitty Hawk, his father’s last ship, but Pete remained the enigmatic “magical stranger” of his childhood. The peacemaking task didn’t begin in earnest until Stephen received an invitation to a ceremony involving Pete’s old squadron in 2009. Getting to know the Black Ravens’ newly commissioned commander, James Hunter Ware III, he realized, would help him better understand his father. The resulting narrative weaves between Rodrick’s memories of a brilliant, mysterious father and his account of Ware’s personal and professional trials in the same job. Peter Rodrick was a dedicated officer and fearless “cowboy” pilot, but he left the task of guiding his wayward son to a beleaguered wife against whom Stephen battled throughout his childhood and adolescence. By contrast, Ware struggled with his competing allegiances to the Navy and a wife who had sacrificed everything for him. Through his examination of both men’s lives, the author came to accept his father and understand that the accident was not the result of Pete’s “sin” of reckless bravado. Finding closure with his father’s death, he could finally acknowledge the quietly heroic role of his mother. It was ultimately she, he concludes, who made him “worthy” of the Rodrick name. Candid and affecting.
Hans Christian Andersen was perhaps even more “extraordinary” as a paper cutter than as a storyteller. He writes of forgery and collage and of the paper trail that documents our lives from birth to death, and he writes with an intimacy that paper makes possible: “Paper’s most powerful magic? Simply this. That paper allows us to be present—or to appear to be present—when we are in fact absent. It both breaks and bridges time and distance. I am talking to you now, for example, on paper.” An enjoyable argument that speaks to the paper lover in all of us. (50 b/w images throughout)
THE NEW DIGITAL AGE Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
Schmidt, Eric; Cohen, Jared Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-307-95713-9
Two Google executives examine how emerging technologies will change the future of foreign affairs. “Forget all the talk about machines taking over,” write Schmidt and Cohen (Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East, 2007, etc.). “What happens in the future is up to us.” The pair met in Baghdad in 2009 while working on a memo for the State Department. While there, they found that Iraqis not only valued technology, they believed in its potential to improve their lives and their country. With that in mind, the authors look at our increasingly networked world and speculate on what new global connections could bring, particularly as it will change foreign affairs in a future that “will be more personal and participatory than we can even imagine.” The authors encapsulate a vast sweep of ideas, including personal citizenship online and off, censorship of electronic information as national policy (e.g., in China), and even what future revolutions (similar to the Arab Spring) will look like in years to come. The ability of technology to change the world for the better sometimes comes across as either excessively optimistic or bordering on science fiction. In one passage, the authors surmise that witch doctors, false holy men and procurers of child brides could all soon change their ways, since “[w]ith more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference.” Conversely, the chapter on the future of terrorism is especially chilling, offering such possibilities as mobile explosive devices made from parts easily bought online or a well-coordinated, simultaneous bomb explosion in multiple American cities, followed by cyberattacks to cripple emergency services. The likelihood that technology could create a future that is both better and worse, in different ways, is probably the book’s most accurate prediction. A thoughtful and well-balanced prognostication of what lies ahead. (First printing of 150,000)
PAPER An Elegy
Sansom, Ian Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $23.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-06-224143-6
With a playfulness that begins with the title, this “elegy” to paper is instead a celebration of its essential, ubiquitous role in society, culture and life itself. A surface reading of modernity suggests that we are on the verge of a “paperless” society, as everything from bills to books goes digital. Not so, writes Sansom, a British journalist, broadcaster and mystery writer (The Bad Book Affair, 2010), who writes, “As this book will attempt to show… reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated.” In chapters that encompass everything from treaties to toilet paper, from passports to wallpaper to origami, the author shows how paper remains central within our collective consciousness, how even when we move our eyes to an e-reader or computer screen, we will see page numbers for the cyberpages that we “turn” or an on-screen wastebasket for the documents we wish to delete. “We are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists.” While skipping across centuries and continents through prose that combines scholarly research and conversational engagement, Sansom insists that “this book is not, strictly speaking, a history of paper. It is, rather, a kind of personally curated Paper Museum.” He explores the significant role paper has played in the lives of Dickens and da Vinci and suggests that 66
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“A piquant memoir blending lush memories of a remarkable father and adept analysis of his work.” from as i knew him
SMILE AT STRANGERS And Other Lessons in the Art of Living Fearlessly
against a dramatically lit set, intoning cautionary observations about human beings, fate, or the universe.” But fame was radically different in those days, his daughter writes; celebrities were less afflicted by “the mayhem, the pandemonium, or the complete and disrespectful lack of privacy that exists now.” During Anne’s childhood, the family lived in Los Angeles for the school year and decamped for the summer to a cabin in upstate New York, where everyone could relax. At the end of its third season, The Twilight Zone was cancelled, and Serling began teaching at Antioch College. CBS later resumed the series for two more years, but Serling was less creatively involved with the show, though he still wrote some episodes. His liberal ideas affected his reputation with conservative TV executives, the author argues. Discrimination and prejudice were anathema to Serling, and it infuriated him when story ideas rooted in his principles were shunted aside in favor of simple entertainment. After writing some scripts for the TV show Night Gallery, for example, he complained to Universal Studios, “I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but totally uncommentative on anything.” The author deftly utilizes correspondence to illustrate the bumpy interplay between her father’s strong beliefs and the commercial imperatives of network TV, illuminating as well the political and pop culture of the turbulent 1960s. A piquant memoir blending lush memories of a remarkable father and adept analysis of his work. (16 pages of photos)
Schorn, Susan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (304 pp.) $25.00 | May 28, 2013 978-0-547-77433-6
One woman’s journey to overcome fear through martial arts. Two-time black belt Schorn didn’t always feel confident in her surroundings. In fact, before she discovered karate, she was often immobilized by either fear or anger. “I was angry at the way fear constrained my life; angry at the world for failing to obviate my fear,” she writes. “I was angry that society seemed to think women should just get used to seeing themselves as victims. I was angry that a lot of women seemed to agree.” When a colleague invited her to an all-female dojo, Schorn was able to vent her frustration and overcome her fears while “hitting things and yelling.” Using karate as the background, the author shows readers how she overcame her anxieties and demonstrates how they can overcome their own fears: of the dark, of saying “no,” of feeling like a victim. Schorn couples detailed descriptions of Kyokushin karate moves with statements that will build women’s confidence and empower them to resist and reject the common perception that they are weaker and more vulnerable than men. She also discusses how looking down instead of at someone shows passivity and how finding one’s center works in both karate and life. Some of the occasionally clichéd but often true axioms include, “parenthood is the most terrifying ordeal you will ever undergo, enjoy it,” and “push yourself past your limits; then let your friends push you further.” Although karate may not be the right discipline for some people, Schorn’s experiences encourage women to stand up and fight for what they believe in, despite the odds, and to smile and enjoy the process while doing so. Useful, perceptive advice on life found through the practice of karate.
INTO THE ABYSS An Extraordinary True Story Shaben, Carol Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $25.00 | May 21, 2013 978-1-4555-0195-3
White-knuckle account of a terrifying 1984 plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and its improbable reverberations in the lives of four survivors. National Magazine Award–winning journalist Shaben’s debut has at its center a stranger-than-fiction, cinematic sequence: the injured survivors—the pilot, a politician, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and his prisoner, a fugitive drifter—hanging on to life together overnight in subzero temperatures. The politician, Larry Shaben, Canada’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, was the author’s father. Fortunately, this personal connection only amplifies Shaben’s determination to reconstruct the incident and its aftermath from all four survivors’ perspectives. She places the crash in the context of the shaky standards of the commuter air industry. Her meticulous account first focuses on the survivors’ back stories: She portrays the pilot as well-meaning but guilty of error under pressure (including flying into bad weather with no co-pilot and incomplete instrumentation). The most compelling character arc is that of the drifter, who rescued his captor from the wreckage and was instrumental in keeping the others alive. He was hailed as a hero, yet his life continued on a dark downward spiral, while the cop he saved left
AS I KNEW HIM My Dad, Rod Serling
Serling, Anne Citadel/Kensington (288 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 30, 2013 978-0-8065-3615-6 Exploring her deep bond with the creator of The Twilight Zone, the author delves into her father’s writing career, his deep commitment to social justice and her grief following his death. Rod Serling (1924–1975) served proudly in World War II and then attended college. He began his writing career after winning a prize for a radio-show script, and he became a 1960s icon as host of The Twilight Zone: “the man in the dark suit standing |
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“A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most stimulating essayists.” from the faraway nearby
THE HUMAN FACE OF BIG DATA
the force for a spiritual quest. On top of all this, Shaben also follows the formidable rescue effort quickly mounted by the hardy rural Canadians. Though the book’s propulsive pace slackens in the final sections, dealing with the crash’s aftermath—blame was showered on both the airline’s corner-cutting and on the luckless young pilot, who was frank about his errors and faced a long redemption—this is a complex, chilling narrative rendered with depth and precision, engaged in both its characters and the larger social moment (the crash led to recommendations for commuter air reform, not always followed in the years since). A worthy addition to the canon of extreme-survival nonfiction. (8-page b/w photo insert)
Smolan, Rick; Erwitt, Jennifer Against All Odds Productions (224 pp.) $50.00 | Nov. 20, 2012 978-1-4549-0827-2 Crunch the numbers, change the world: a big book, backed by big business (FedEx, Cisco et al.), on the big ocean of information that humans are generating,
for better or worse. Smolan (of Day in the Life series fame) and Erwitt (coauthors: America at Home, 2008, etc.) open with an aptly numerate observation from Eric Schmidt, the executive chair of Google: From the dawn of time until 2003, humans spun out 5 exabytes (that is, 5 quintillion bytes) of data, an amount we now generate every two days. We take in much of that data unwittingly via the billboards and ads and sound bites and such that fill our eyes and ears. Computers take it in via the “trail of digital exhaust” that we leave behind: GPS positions, phone calls, texts, web histories and so forth. Smolan and Erwitt tell the stories of some of this data with, for instance, a medical/genetic profile of a young Afghani-American woman whose DNA indicates such probabilities as “less than 2 percent chance of developing Parkinson’s disease”; a sidebar by ubiquitous nerd A.J. Jacobs, an adherent of the self-tracked (as opposed, one might think, to the self-examined) life; and, of course, the inhuman side of the question in the matter of drones, a question that has lately been exercising Rand Paul—drones being controlled by humans, after all, whence their inclusion here. Smolan and Erwitt don’t seem to have a specific political program, but they tend to the data-is-good side of the argument, or, perhaps better, the data-is-good-if-put-to-gooduses school. Those good uses are plenty, from maximizing planting seasons and human fertility cycles to predicting bad weather to figuring the makings of the universe. Still, one wants to see the human face of, say, a sneering Dick Cheney targeting some opponent—for, as the authors conclude, “Data is the new oil.” Not for the technophobic or number-averse, but for the rest of the audience, an often fascinating look at the quantification of us all.
MY PROMISED LAND The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Shavit, Ari Spiegel & Grau (432 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 19, 2013 978-0-385-52170-3
Israel has betrayed its best, truest self, argues Haaretz journalist and peace activist Shavit in this wrenching dissection of the nation’s past and present. Born in 1957, the author is the descendant of intellectuals and idealists who brought Zionism to the shores of Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. The author’s great-grandfather, a successful British solicitor, first visited Palestine in 1897 with a Zionist delegation; his reports on the marvels of progress and modernization that he witnessed there gave Theodor Herzl hope that a deprived people could create a future in their ancient homeland. To note that Palestine was in fact already populated, as one of the delegates dared to do, was received as “scandalous heresy” by his fellow Zionists. The movement’s denial of Palestinians’ existence, Shavit contends, meant that first Zionism and subsequently the state of Israel were established on a rotten, unstable foundation. Step by step, the author follows the Zionist dream as it played out in Israel. Kibbutz socialism initially had great success as the pioneer generation rebelled against the “daunting Jewish past of persecution and wandering.” But tit-for-tat violence, fueled by global anti-Semitism and Arab nationalism, led to a “messianic impulse” that the author believes ran amok with the West Bank settlements initiated in 1975. While on military reserve duty, Shavit served as a guard in an internment camp for Palestinians; his searing account of the grim conditions there, “On Gaza Beach” (published in the New York Review of Books in 1991), made a seminal statement of his despairing belief that innocence is finished in his native country. Various internal revolts have riven Israeli society, Shavit writes, rendering it as chaotic as “an extravagant bazaar.” His effective mix of autobiographical reflections and interviews with key participants peters out toward the end into journalistic snippets, but that hardly muffles the overall impact of his anguished cri de coeur. Thoughtful, sobering reflections on a seemingly intractable conflict. 68
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THE FARAWAY NEARBY
Solnit, Rebecca Viking (272 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 13, 2013 978-0-670-02596-1
Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2010, etc.) considers the nature and purposes of storytelling in a series of elegantly nested meditations. The author begins with 100 pounds of apricots, picked from a tree outside the home her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother can no longer safely inhabit. Canning this abundance of perishable fruit to preserve |
it, Solnit begins to think about the ways in which the stories we tell arrest time; her musings on decay and death gain greater urgency when she learns that she has a potentially cancerous condition that requires surgery. In “Mirrors,” she recalls that telling stories was a vehicle for her mother’s deeply conflicted views about the past; their relationship was fraught, and Solnit escaped from constant criticisms and resentments into the solace of books. Yet “books are solitudes in which we meet,” she insists, repeatedly using the word “empathy” to characterize the essential quality needed to create stories that express our common humanity. Solnit co-opts Georgia O’Keeffe’s wonderfully evocative phrase “the faraway nearby” to specify the delicate balance between distance and closeness that enables this process of reaching out through storytelling. She employs a series of chapter titles that serve as both metaphors and precise physical descriptions—“Ice,” “Flight,” “Breath” and “Wound”—to propel her narrative into the central “Knot.” In it, she is operated on, “then sewn shut with thread and knots,” prompting her to expatiate on Greek mythology’s ancient image of human life as a thread winding through a labyrinth. “Unwound” begins the process of re-using previous chapter titles to give them new meanings as Solnit recuperates in Iceland, and the text moves toward a final consideration of those apricots as “a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts.” A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most stimulating essayists.
and the explosion of Nelson’s passion for the spirited second wife of elderly Lord William Hamilton. Having gained heroic stature for destroying the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Nelson then turned to repulse Napoleon’s forces from the Kingdom of Naples, before lingering rather too long there among the lotus-eaters, to the detriment of his reputation and marriage. Sugden judges sexy Emma harshly in comparison to saintly Fanny, while Nelson is portrayed as a veritable cauldron of conflicting emotions (vanity, humility, honor, guilt), a man who yearned to do his duty yet craved a bit of happiness, too. Despite its length, a tremendously engaging work with few dull moments. (33 b/w illustrations; 16-page insert)
ECHOES OF MY SOUL
Tanenbaum, Robert K. Kensington (288 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-7582-8535-5
A former New York prosecuting attorney and prolific novelist recounts miscarriages of justice on the way to solving a highly publicized 1963 double murder. Tanenbaum (Bad Faith, 2012, etc.) learned legal ethics and courtroom tactics from New York District Attorney Frank Hogan and Hogan’s assistants Mel Glass and John Keenan. This nonfiction murder mystery is intended as a tribute to those three, who realized police had arrested the wrong man after the August 28, 1963, murder of roommates Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie on the Upper East Side. Suspicion cast on George Whitmore Jr. in that case also led to felony charges against him in two Brooklyn cases. Using archival material and relying to some extent on his memory, Tanenbaum explains the tunnel vision, racism and overaggressiveness of police and prosecutors that led to the mistreatment of Whitmore. Eventually, the shoddy treatment of Whitmore figured into the historic Supreme Court ruling requiring law enforcement officers to issue Miranda warnings to suspects. In a parallel narrative, Tanenbaum also shows how Glass engineered the new investigation leading to the arrest and conviction of the actual murderer, Richard Robles. Many of the elements of the narrative are inherently fascinating: the circumstances of the crimes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the police investigations, the prosecutors’ deliberations and the courtroom dramatics. Unfortunately, the author hampers the narrative flow with extended quotations that are obviously recreated using far too much novelistic license, and he also made the questionable decision to grant false names to 19 real-life characters, including police detectives, which calls into question the credibility of the story. Furthermore, page after page is filled with clichéd writing. An intriguing saga that should have been better presented.
NELSON The Sword of Albion Sugden, John Henry Holt (944 pp.) $45.00 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-8050-7807-7
The exhaustive second volume of this definitive biography treats the admiral’s supreme command of the British Navy and the bittersweet Lady Hamilton years. British biographer Sugden is a scholar’s dream: He provides a gracious introductory bibliographic essay on previous works about Nelson and Hamilton, includes extensive maps of significant battles and even offers such helpful extras as a diagram of an “expansion” of Merton Place, Nelson’s last home in Wimbledon. Nelson: A Dream of Glory (2004) covered Horatio’s formative years: early patronage, solid marriage to Fanny and rise in ranks over the four years of wars with the French, culminating in his fame at the battle of Cape St. Vincent. This installment opens as the gravely wounded rear admiral, having lost his right arm in the disastrous defeat at Tenerife, returns to England to convalesce in Bath with his wife and aged father. Considering that his death at the Battle of Trafalgar looms in the near distance, and that the book weighs in at over 900 pages, there is a great deal to magnify over these few years. Equally epochal were the push back of Napoleonic aggression in the Mediterranean |
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UP How Positive Outlook Can Transform Our Health and Aging
what, in former days, was the heart of the communist German Democratic Republic. He was based in Erfurt, once the regional center of the Stasi secret police. Nearby is a Buchenwald memorial. Today, Western influence has seeped into Erfurt; Tweedie notes McDonald’s and American music. The Tweedie family was housed in a dreary concrete prefab apartment. Though he had merely passable language skills, the author nevertheless soon found Germany and Germans to be comfortable and cordial, and he and his family made good friends. Tweedie works hard to find significance in all that happened during the year, from a stolen car to rides on the streetcar. Double beds and dinky Trabant autos serve as analogies for life after the phantom Wall, and there’s further importance to Karl Marx kitsch or participation in an acrobatic circus performance. Readers are led down divergent paths with varied narratives, anecdotes and snapshots. Yet, despite imagination and experience, the author acknowledges the lack of a genre, a form on which to draw— thus, perhaps, the stretched metaphors and his tendency to overwrite (for example, the time he “chortled” at a comment). Readers may not relish the country or love the people as much as the author confesses he does, but despite the overblown search for meaning, they may enjoy the trolley ride.
Tindle, Hilary Hudson Street/Penguin (304 pp.) $25.95 | May 30, 2013 978-1-59463-121-4
A spirited appreciation of and guide to the health benefits of an upbeat outlook on life. By now, there have been enough studies to state the obvious, even if we haven’t cracked its genetic code or calibrated its precise nature/nurture balance: Being able to find your way to the bright side of the road will bless you with a longer, happier life than any grump out there is going to enjoy (or rather, not enjoy). Tindle (Medicine/Univ. of Pittsburgh) presents the latest findings on this subject with a freshness that could sell thousands of rose-colored glasses. Yet hers is not a witless optimism but a hard-won state of awareness, achieved by fighting through sloughs of despond and touched by a bit of knowing blindness that “protects us from being paralyzed by the fear that naturally arises on facing the unfiltered gravitas of a tough scenario.” Tindle recognizes the value of an individual’s outlook, with its particular personality, character traits, disposition and attitudes, but she also sharply discourages readers from pulling the optimistic wool over their eyes. Among her correctives are short, educational passages on cognitive behavioral therapy, contemplation, guided imagery and motivational interviewing. She is constantly on the hunt for outlook optimization and ever mindful of the challenging psychological gymnastics of preventive health care. “If things become unstable,” she advises pragmatically, “scanning the horizon [and] formulating a plan B” are valuable fallback positions. A questionnaire helps readers locate their “attitude latitude,” a too-cute phrase for the insightful summary it provides of a respondent’s basic outlook. “Perhaps the real fountain of youth emanates not from the cosmetics counter but from what’s between your ears.” Tindle makes a warm, accessible case, though Estée Lauder may not want us to hear it.
CITY OF AMBITION FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York
Williams, Mason B. Norton (544 pp.) $29.95 | May 28, 2013 978-0-393-06691-3
A thoroughgoing, sometimes plodding account of the first major federal bailout of New York, one met with happier tidings than the equivalent of that old headline reading, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Fiorello LaGuardia might have seemed an unlikely ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt; though born in Greenwich Village, he was from Arizona, wore a black Stetson hat to remind himself of his birthplace and was a Republican, conservative by even the standards of the era. Yet, writes debut author Williams, he was also both fiercely pragmatic and an enemy of the old political machines that conspired to keep him, as mayor of New York City, from doing his job. As a believer in market forces, LaGuardia helped build “a physical infrastructure in which commerce could thrive and the interdependent processes of urban enterprise function efficiently.” LaGuardia’s eventual progressivism, coupled with Roosevelt’s willingness to put the federal government—through myriad programs, including the famed Works Project Administration—into action to solve the city’s problems, were of a piece in creating “a new conception of urban governance” that wedded private and public decisions and initiative, without need for those corruptible and corrupting political machines of yore. “Like LaGuardia,” writes Williams, “Roosevelt understood governments as parts of a continuity of social organization, with responsibilities derived from the
IN THE SHADOWS OF A FALLEN WALL
Tweedie, Sanford Univ. of Nebraska (208 pp.) $19.95 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-8032-7141-8
Before it came crashing down in 1989, the wall that divided East Germany from the West had stood for a generation. Now, a later generation in the East still bears vestiges of that Cold War separation. Courtesy of a Fulbright grant, Tweedie (Writing Arts/Rowan Univ.) took a post teaching English composition for a year in 70
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“Seriously funny, humorously serious, scholarly, witty and wise.” from no joke
NO JOKE Making Jewish Humor
interdependence of modern society.” It is not Williams’ fault that remaking a major city into another kind of major city is a complex business, but he errs toward too much completeness instead of eliding some of the lesser moments—the argument over whether subway fares should be free, for instance, or subsidized by a commuter tax. Perhaps too detailed, but a useful contribution to an already rich literature.
Wisse, Ruth R. Princeton Univ. (256 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-691-14946-2
A survey and analysis of Jewish humor, from the Bible to Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. Wisse (Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature/Harvard Univ.; Jews and Power, 2007, etc.) has chosen an engaging style: sturdy, eclectic scholarship leavened with personal asides (she talks about a book-closing fit of laughter), informal diction (“One update, and I am done,” she writes near the end), good jokes and continual references to popular culture—from Saturday Night Live to Henny Youngman to Jerry Seinfeld. But all is in service of her serious agenda. She begins with an uncomfortable moment—a Gentile woman upset about a Jewish joke—then off she departs for a tour of the genre. She examines the history, the low and high humor, the literary and dramatic practitioners, Sigmund Freud on humor and much more. Along the way are names familiar to general readers—Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and many others—but she also introduces writers and humorists known principally to the cognoscenti—among them, Joseph Perl, the “master storyteller” Rebbe Nachman and a number of Yiddish comic writers (Moshe Nadir, Itzik Manger). Wisse also briefly examines the efflorescence of American Jewish novelists in the 1960s (Bellow, Heller, Friedman), then takes us to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, where she shows us how humor thrived even in the shadows of Auschwitz and the Gulag. She reminds us that the Soviets executed both Moyshe Kulbak and Isaac Babel for being humorous in the “wrong” way. She then turns to the notion that Israel, at least at its inception, had no sense of humor—a notion she dispels. At the end, she takes some swipes at political correctness and invites us to lighten up. Seriously funny, humorously serious, scholarly, witty and wise. (14 halftones)
MY BRIGHT ABYSS Meditation of a Modern Believer
Wiman, Christian Farrar, Straus and Giroux (192 pp.) $24.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-374-21678-8 A poet approaches the Almighty with halting steps. In the shadow of a recently discovered cancer, Poetry editor Wiman (Every Riven Thing, 2010, etc.) rediscovered faith. Not the faith of his Baptist, Texas youth, but a faith first steeped in the unbelief of modernism. Here, the author attempts to understand and elucidate that faith, and he writes as if readers may not believe him. Thus, he acts as an apologist, but to himself as much as to others. Indeed, Wiman is careful not to allow himself belief in traditional Christianity, but only in a vague and open, yet Christ-centered idea. “Faith is nothing more…than a motion of the soul toward God,” he writes. “It is not belief. Belief has objects—Christ was resurrected, God created the earth—faith does not.” Structured in short sections, some practical, some wholly creative, Wiman infuses his writing with lyricism and a playfulness with language (“if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness”). He augments his own mastery of language with the liberal use of quotations from other poets and writers, spanning an impressive range of literary backgrounds. Wiman’s depth of knowledge as a reader truly undergirds this work, as he invokes everyone from George Herbert to Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonheoffer to Seamus Heaney. As the author struggles to understand God, he also struggles to comprehend the institution of Christianity, seeing in it deep flaws, an inability to fully grasp the depth of the God it proclaims, and what he sees as a childish clinging to legend and myth. “Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not,” he writes. At times poignant and focused, at other times vague and meandering, Wiman’s grasp of the written word carries this unconventional faith memoir.
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AN APPLE A DAY A Memoir of Love and Recovery from Anorexia
lure audiences back from the movies by giving them something unavailable on the silver screen. Such luminaries as Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm and Dixie Evans dish on backstage rivalries, the depredations of the road, the stigma of stripping and all other aspects of burlesque life, providing an engaging behind-thescenes analysis of an art form most people have heard of but few understand. In fact, the performers themselves contribute contradictory perspectives, describing the shows variously as bawdy but innocent escapism for cash-strapped regular folks or exploitative flesh parades with audiences full of men furtively masturbating behind newspapers. However, the interviewees share a common spirit of toughness and rueful good humor, which jibes with their status as, in the main, poverty-stricken young women who could earn more disrobing than waiting tables. A defiant pride in burlesque’s second-rate status in the entertainment firmament—the performers may not have had the goods to make it in “legitimate” venues like the movies or Broadway, but they left the audiences happy—also unites the subjects, who take poignant pride in their brief moments of relative fame. The narrative moves briskly and will engross anyone interested in midcentury Americana. There is much colorful ground-level showbiz detail and descriptions of what it was like to work circuses, carnivals and the rotating theatrical circuit known as “The Wheel,” and the anecdotes are never less than good fun. An affectionate and historically valuable document of an intriguing, little-served corner of American entertainment.
Woolf, Emma Soft Skull Press (256 pp.) $16.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-59376-515-6
British journalist Woolf documents her struggle with anorexia. Expanding on her weekly columns for the Times (London), the author chronicles her affliction and her work to overcome it. By her early 30s, she had stabilized after 10 years of starving herself, rising from a frighteningly low weight of 77 pounds to a merely painfully thin 105. She yearned to start a family, and she knew her boyfriend was right when he told her she needed to give up running and start eating more if she wanted to get pregnant. But she just wasn’t sure she could do it. In this heartfelt look at the causes of her eating disorder, Woolf emphatically states that her anorexia was not the result of striving to look good based on unrealistic media images but rather a mental illness based on her need for control. She admits that, deep down, a part of her wanted to remain sick: “I needed to be visibly thin; in some strange way I needed the chaos inside my head to show on the outside.” Woolf reveals how she avoided food or any social situation at which she might have to eat, while at the same time obsessively exercising and never slowing down. Step by step, she changed her behavior; she frankly discusses which therapies worked for her and which didn’t, though she declares herself open to the potential merits of each for other anorexics. As Woolf walked through her personal process of self-discovery and change in her newspaper columns, she touched a chord with fellow sufferers, their families and their therapists, whose responses she includes here. Her perceptive and articulate account is frank about the mental torment she endured without being morose. Insightful and informative, with fresh insights into the nature of eating disorders.
BEHIND THE BURLY Q The Story of Burlesque in America Zemeckis, Leslie Skyhorse Publishing (368 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-62087-691-6
The salty reminiscences of participants in the classic age of burlesque enliven this companion volume to a documentary film directed by the author. Zemeckis assembled an impressive number of surviving performers from roughly the 1930s through the late ’50s to recount their experiences toiling in this often misunderstood cul-de-sac in American performing arts. An evolution of vaudeville, burlesque added striptease to the program in an effort to 72
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children’s & teen
MOUSE BIRD SNAKE WOLF
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Almond, David Illus. by McKean, Dave Candlewick (80 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2013 978-0-7636-5912-7
FORMERLY SHARK GIRL by Kelly Bingham......................................76 BEN RIDES ON by Matt Davies.........................................................81 THUNDERSTORM by Arthur Geisert..................................................83 WILL & WHIT by Laura Lee Gulledge................................................ 84 SCHOOL SPIRITS by Rachel Hawkins...............................................87 THE BOY WHO LOVED MATH by Deborah Heiligman; illus. by LeUyen Pham..........................................................................87 FIRECRACKER by David Iserson....................................................... 92 THE THING ABOUT LUCK by Cynthia Kadohata..............................93 HOW TO by Julie Morstad.................................................................102 ANNIE AND SIMON by Catharine O'Neill......................................105 NO FITS, NILSON! by Zachariah OHora.........................................106 UNICORN THINKS HE'S PRETTY GREAT by Bob Shea.................. 111 WHAT MAKES A BABY by Cory Silverberg; illus. by Fiona Smyth........................................................................... 111 FOXY! by Jessica Souhami.................................................................. 113 BREAKFAST ON MARS edited by Rebecca Stern; Brad Wolfe......... 113
An award-winning British team conjures a haunting graphic novella that shows what happens when the complacent gods stop creating things and children pick up the slack. The gods—slothful as Roman emperors—loll about halfnaked in the clouds eating cake and looking down upon their creations, which range from mighty mountains to delicate wisteria. But they abandoned their world-building long ago, leaving empty gaps and spaces as huge as deserts or “no bigger than a fingernail.” Harry, Sue and Little Ben are children who inhabit the gods’ incomplete world. One day, Ben, finding this too-empty landscape peculiar, yells up at the gods, “It needs more things in it!” The children proceed to imagine—and then construct with twigs, clay and grasses—a few things themselves. The titular mouse, bird, snake and wolf spring to life! Spoiler: Creating the wolf backfires hideously. Skellig (2009) author Almond’s tale is as otherworldly as ever, his themes of imagination and creativity nuanced. In inventive comic-book–style panels and theatrical full-bleed spreads, McKean adds a fierce, frightening texture to the narrative. The edgy, toga-wearing gods above and children down below are sculptural, as if they were molded out of clay—a fitting image for a creation story. Wild and alive, this visually extravagant fable of the marvel, power and active nature of the creative process howls at the moon. (art not seen in full color) (Graphic novella. 9-12)
GOLDEN BOY by Tara Sullivan......................................................... 113
GODDESS
Angelini, Josephine HarperTeen (432 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 28, 2013 978-0-06-201203-6 978-0-06-220880-4 e-book Series: Starcrossed, 3
DINO-STORE STORYBOOK by Roger Sedarat; illus. by Trade Loeffler.........................................................................120
Power, love and vengeance come together in this consistently over-thetop conclusion to the Starcrossed trilogy. Nantucket teen Helen Hamilton is a direct descendent of Helen of Troy, and she’s as entangled as her ancestor was in wars between gods and men. Helen is |
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a Scion, one of an ancient family descended from the Greek gods and cursed to re-enact the old hatreds throughout the ages. Her erstwhile lover Lucas is himself the reincarnation of the first Helen’s lover, Paris. Along with the other Scions— most of whom are confusingly similar to multiple other characters and have seemingly random Classical names, such as Orion, who looks exactly like his uncle Adonis and is Aeneas reborn—Helen must keep the Greek gods from destroying the Earth. With monster-filled battles and the Earth at stake, the plot has no need for the ludicrous forces creating unresolvable sexual tension between Helen and Lucas. Their love has been destined for eons, leaving them without the free will to feel as strongly about others. Helen and Lucas are first cousins, and Scion close relatives always have insane children. They can’t choose to be childless because of another ancient curse which will damn the human race if Helen doesn’t have a baby. Cinematic battle scenes are punctuated with a presumably unintentionally hilarious fireworks-backed kiss and culminate in an overly expository epilogue. Oh, the humanity. (Paranormal romance. 14-16)
PEACE, BABY
Ashman, Linda Illus. by Lew-Vriethoff, Joanne Chronicle (32 pp.) $15.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-4521-0613-7 When things aren’t going right, what’s the best reaction? Peace, baby! “Sasha, bouncing on the bed, / conks you on your sleepy head. / You could hit her, or instead / try peace, baby.” When life squeezes you or when your friends or classmates don’t act correctly, what should you do? There’s a lot you could do to escalate the situation, but there’s one response that’s sure to cool things off. “Sofie, racing toward the snack, / nudges Nora, pushes Zach. / Should they elbow Sofie back? / Nah, peace, baby.” Kids and toddlers are admonished in gentle rhyme to use their words, share the cookie or just offer hugs. “When you want to push and shout, / hoot and holler, punch or pout, / breathe in slowly. Let it out… // Say: Peace, baby!” Ashman’s rhythmic text and repeated refrain will quickly work its way into little listeners’ minds, and they will likely recognize the situations described on each double-page spread. LewVriethoff ’s Photoshopped pen-and-ink illustrations have the look of watercolors, and kids of many colors will find themselves represented in the happy (and not-so-happy) multiethnic youngsters in the city- and townscapes. Excellent advice in a sweet and easy-to-swallow package. (Picture book. 2-6)
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TINY PIE
Bailey, Mark; Oatman, Michael Illus. by Hemingway, Edward Running Press (32 pp.) $15.95 | May 7, 2013 978-0-7624-4482-3 Ellie the elephant learns to make a tiny apple pie. Ellie is brushed off during a “grownup party,” but instead of going to bed, she makes an amazing discovery. Inside the little mouse hole is a TV studio where a mouse chef is teaching the audience to make a tiny apple pie. To rhyming couplets, Ellie learns about mixing and rolling out dough, chopping apples and seasoning the pies. It took four people to create this confusing concoction: two writers, one illustrator and chef Alice Waters, whose Edible Schoolyard Project is to receive a portion of the proceeds from sales of this book. Busy, bright illustrations show an array of animals wearing everything from tuxedos to evening dresses to a chef ’s coat. Children will empathize when Ellie is left out of the adult party because she is too little, but the transition from her view through the mouse hole to what appears to be a dream sequence is far harder to gauge. Also, the story starts at bedtime but ends with mom and dad discovering her snoozing on the floor in front of the mouse hole and then making pie with Ellie. What happened to her sleep or to their party? Another quibble: The pies shown in the kitchen scenes and on the recipe page are two-crust pies, while Waters’ recipe is for a never-pictured turnover. The recipe is lengthy and complicated. A muddle. (Picture book. 4-7)
SIEGE AND STORM
Bardugo, Leigh Henry Holt (448 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-8050-9460-2 Series: Grisha Trilogy, 2
The Grisha Trilogy turns from bildungsroman to political thriller in its second installment. Sun Summoner Alina and former Ravkan army tracker Mal, once her childhood friend and now her would-be love, are on the run. All they want is to put Ravka and the megalomaniacal Darkling far behind them. Alas, this is not to be. Captured by the Darkling and forced onto a ship captained by the notorious pirate Sturmhond, they find themselves in pursuit of the second of three magical amplifiers that will make Alina powerful beyond belief—and bind her ever-closer to the ancient, evil Darkling. Sturmhond has an unexpected agenda of his own, though, and turns on the Darkling. Darkling temporarily thwarted, Alina and Mal find themselves back in Ravka’s capital as part of the ailing king’s younger son’s attempt to find his way to the throne. Bardugo’s sophomore effort smooths out many of the rookie
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“Audiences can skip this amateur hour at the National Symphony.” from maestro mouse and the mystery of the missing baton
wrinkles that marred Shadow and Bone (2012); Alina’s wry voice does not interfere with worldbuilding, instead keeping readers immersed in the plot. Characters are rich and complex, particularly the Peter the Great–like younger prince and Alina herself, beset by competing claims and desires. Is she Mal’s lover? Prince Nikolai’s pawn? Commander of the Grisha Second Army? Saint? Scheming and action carry readers at a breathless pace to an end that may surprise them and will definitely leave them panting for the series’ conclusion. (Fantasy. 13 & up)
MAESTRO MOUSE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING BATON
Barnes, Peter W. Illus. by Barnes, Cheryl Shaw Little Patriot Press (40 pp.) $16.95 | May 7, 2013 978-1-62157-036-3
When Maestro Mouse loses his baton, a group of young concertgoers conduct a search through all the sections of the orchestra. The Barneses, whose mice have previously explored U.S. history and the workings of our federal government, now turn their attention to Washington, D.C., culture, setting this new story in a slightly altered Kennedy Center. (The exterior is Carnegie Hall in New York City; the inside a clear representation of the Center’s Concert Hall and vast corridors, though the bust of Kennedy has been replaced by one of Beethoven.) This well-meant introduction to a symphony orchestra is hampered by awkward language and unskilled illustrations. The lost-andfound story is written in rhyming fourteeners—a verse pattern that requires unnaturally lengthy lines and is difficult to write smoothly or read aloud comfortably. The conductor’s facial features differ from page to page, his shirt buttons occasionally change orientation, and, on one page, he’s lost his boutonniere. Section by section, mouse children, differentiated by their clothing, scurry through the orchestra seeking the baton. Usually the illustrations follow the text, but the larger stringed instruments don’t appear until three spreads after their mention in verse. Scott Hennesy and Joe Lanzisero play the same premise more skillfully in The Cat’s Baton Is Gone (2012). Audiences can skip this amateur hour at the National Symphony. (notes for parents and teachers, matching game, facts, a page for a written response) (Informational picture book. 6-8)
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THE LAKE AND THE LIBRARY
Beiko, S.M. ECW Press (242 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 1, 2013 978-1-77041-057-2
A teen romance rooted in the bizarre turns deadly in this debut novel. Ash can’t wait to move out of Treade. Besides her friends, nothing there interests her—except a lockedtight, abandoned building in the woods. After a tree falls on it during a storm, Ash finds a hole big enough to crawl through. Inside she discovers a library and a charming, mute boy named Li. The two of them spend hours every day creating their own worlds out of the books that surround them, and Ash starts to lose her connection to her worried friends and her sick mother. Li’s original charm turns dark as he tries to keep her with him forever. Beiko delivers a clever, interesting plot but loses authority at the sentence level. The language is flighty and ceaselessly romantic in a way that makes it difficult for readers to connect with the characters: “[We’d] pass the story on to Paul, the words and inspiration slipping out of me like twinkling coins into his lap. Our reunion would electrify our tender souls back to life. The three of us would bask in this new adventure, this new sanctuary....” This ghost story will be attractive to readers wellversed in esoteric dreaming but frustrating to those who need a more tangible foundation. (Fantasy. 12-16)
MÄKO
Béziat, Julien Translated by Jones, Evan Illus. by Béziat, Julien Fitzhenry & Whiteside (36 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 31, 2013 978-1-554455-275-7 A walrus’ artistic prowess brings more than just visual rewards to his hungry neighbors. Mäko inhabits a world of ice floes and deep, cold water. He dives for fish, the inspiration for sculptures he creates with his tusks. Other walruses, seals and penguins then use these statues as their guides when finding fish. Then, suddenly and without warning, the ice floe collapses and with it the culinary map. The other animals, now hungry, discover a newfound respect for Mäko, whom they previously thought somewhat odd. That night, he sets to work on a collection of ice blocks, and the result is quite dramatic, bordering on biblical proportions. In his debut picture book, Béziat, a French author and artist, has created a stark world of white ice and blue water, with animals defined through fine, black, line drawings. His tale, written in short declarative sentences, is open to interpretation. Adult readers may ponder the power of artistic vision, but children are likely to just see a pretty
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“Bingham hits the mark with her completely realistic portrait of a strong girl coping with emotional difficulties….” from formerly shark girl
amazing character. Unfortunately, the staccato text feels at odds with the lofty theme. Art as the ultimate sustainer of life—food for thought, albeit puzzling. (Picture book. 4-7)
RUMOR CENTRAL
Billingsley, ReShonda Tate Dafina/Kensington (256 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-7582-8951-3 In a fast-moving mean-girl story with a dash of suspense, a teen television star is asked to dish dirt on her well-connected friends. Fabulous Maya Morgan and her friends star in a reality show called Miami Divas. Then the network decides to cancel Miami Divas and offers Maya a host spot on a new show, Rumor Central, where she will both interview the likes of Nicki Minaj and share celebrity gossip. When Maya’s new gig drives a wedge between her and her former co-stars, she decides any of her ex-friends’ secrets are fair game. Results are predictable but compelling: The studio is thrilled, but the subjects of the gossip get hurt, and both Maya’s parents and her school are believably concerned. Most dramatically, someone begins sending Maya threatening messages, and the book’s climax sees her uncover her stalker’s identity and fend off an attack. Although much of the book’s pleasure resides in watching the drama unfold, the action also raises some thought-provoking questions: To what extent is Tamara, Maya’s closest contact at WSVV-TV, on her side? Who is more to blame for the gossip show’s fallout: Maya, for betraying confidences, or the studio, for pressuring her to do so? A well-constructed take on the pleasures and pitfalls of fame. (Fiction. 12-16)
FORMERLY SHARK GIRL
Bingham, Kelly Candlewick (304 pp.) $16.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-7636-5362-0
This sequel to Shark Girl (2007) chronicles Jane’s recovery from her injuries. The verse format enhances the affecting story as Jane struggles with boyfriends and with her future: Will she become a nurse or continue as an artist even though she has lost her drawing hand? Her artwork continues to improve, but she feels obligated to give back to others what she received from the doctors and nurses who saved her life when she lost her right arm to a shark. She receives letters, interspersed throughout the book with no comment, from strangers who have been following her story. Do these influence her? Meanwhile she struggles 76
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in her science class, finally hiring a tutor who turns out to be Max, “the heartthrob who got away” in the last book. Max loves swimming, however, and when Jane decides to go with him to the pool, she finds that she can’t cope emotionally with being near water again. Meanwhile she faces another difficult decision: whether or not to undergo more hated surgery to cure the neuroma that’s causing excruciating pain in her phantom limb. Bingham hits the mark with her completely realistic portrait of a strong girl coping with emotional difficulties, taking advantage of her format to include a lyricism that might be lost in straight prose. An absorbing, genuine and uplifting tale of a strong girl making difficult decisions. (Fiction/verse. 12 & up)
BLACK FLAME
Blackcrane, Gerelchimeg Translated by Holmwood, Anna Groundwood (224 pp.) $16.95 | $12.95 paper | $12.95 e-book May 14, 2013 978-1-55498-135-9 978-1-55498-107-6 paper 978-1-55498-364-3 e-book A dog’s-eye view of life in Tibet and Mongolia. Kelsang is a large, black Tibetan mastiff, sometimes mistaken for a bear. As a puppy, he loses his mother to a tragic encounter with a snow leopard. Soon after, his life becomes a series of adventures in which he plays the varied roles of sheepdog, guard dog, guide dog, rescue dog and loyal companion. As a result of his experiences with different owners, including being virtually stolen away and held in captivity, Kelsang ultimately bonds most deeply with the gentle Han Ma, who brings him along to his teaching jobs at both the School for Deaf and Blind Children and the Chinese Youth Volunteer Corps. Blackcrane, a winner of National Children’s Literature awards in China, captures Kelsang’s emotions and sensory experiences with candor and empathy. He also interprets much of Kelsang’s physical turmoil as an inner longing for compassionate, human leadership. Readers will get a whiff of life on the city streets of Lhasa, as well as in the grasslands of northern Tibet and Inner Mongolia. This is a tale that is beautifully translated, although the pacing is occasionally slow and plodding. A heartfelt story for dog lovers in a setting rarely seen in the West. (Fiction. 10-14)
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I AM NOT A COPYCAT!
Bonwill, Ann Illus. by Rickerty, Simon Atheneum (32 pp.) $15.99 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4424-8053-7
Hugo the Hippo takes pride in being “unique,” which causes tension when his friend Bella (a bird) tries to be just like him. For reasons that remain unclear throughout the story, Bella persists in her adoration and emulation of Hugo, whose dialogue makes him sound both full of himself and also quite uncaring about her feelings. Happily, his rebuffs don’t seem to affect her, and she doggedly keeps up with his various moves in a complicated water ballet. “Bella, will you stop being a copycat!” he demands. “I am not a copycat,” she responds, expanding rather flatly, “I am a bird.” Then, instead of allowing the two to resolve their conflict alone, Bonwill introduces another hippo-and-bird pair, who show up poolside and say, “You two are amazing synchronized swimmers!” This compliment eases Hugo’s mind, and they celebrate with ice cream. This time Bella takes the lead, with Hugo ordering “exactly the same” flavor she does, though she changes her mind so that they enjoy different scoops. Throughout, cartoonish digital art fails to live up to the promise of endearing line art on the endpapers, and it never adds much to this rather pedestrian tale. A picture book that tries and fails to offer a “unique” spin on the tried-and-true odd-couple–friendship formula. (Picture book. 4-7)
THE GLITTER TRAP
Brauner, Barbara; Mattson, James Iver Illus. by Halpin, Abigail Disney Hyperion (240 pp.) $16.99 | May 14, 2013 978-1-4231-6373-2 Series: Oh My Godmother, 1 A chance encounter with a fairy godmother with a penchant for glitter leads to merry mischief for 12-year-old Lacey. Discovering a curmudgeonly fairy godmother named Katarina trapped in her hair is just the beginning of Lacey’s venture into the world of magic and fairies. When Lacey’s cat tries to eat Katarina and injures her, Lacey learns that the fulfillment of her own dreams is dependent on Katarina’s completing her fairy-godmother mission. To resolve the problem, Lacey must temporarily assume the role of a fairy godmother. However, her determination turns to dismay when she learns she must fulfill the dream of Paige, the most popular girl in sixth grade. Soon, with the reluctant guidance of Katarina, Lacey is endeavoring to learn the basics of magic—with hilarious results whenever she attempts to wield a wand and create spells. While struggling to determine Paige’s dearest dream, Lacey discovers some surprising details about Paige’s seemingly perfect life. Through her efforts to help Paige, Lacey |
gains a greater appreciation of family. Brauner and Mattson enliven a familiar storyline with comical scenarios featuring a plucky, likable protagonist. They also address common middle school issues as Lacey navigates friendship quandaries and first crushes. Halpin’s humorous sketches, appearing throughout the text, playfully complement the story’s whimsical tone. Featuring zany escapades, madcap magic and a cantankerous fairy godmother, this effervescent series debut enchants. (Fantasy. 9-12)
10 LITTLE INSECTS
Cali, Davide Illus. by Pianina, Vincent Wilkins Farago/Trafalgar (80 pp.) $19.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-9871099-1-0 A remote island and a weekend getaway, with murder on the menu. Think Agatha Christie’s classic Ten Little Indians retold as a graphic novel, an inspiration that Cali’s characters freely reference in the story. These characters, guests on remote Tortoise Island, are various insects: a fly called McFly, who comes in on an airplane; green Mr. Krikkit, who plays a guitar; the tall, yellow, segmented Johnny Nail; and others. Each thinks he’s coming for a different reason: a medical conference, swim meet, etc. An ominous recorded voice upbraids all assembled for unspecified misdeeds and predicts their imminent deaths. (The female praying mantis admits to tearing off her husband’s head and then eating him, but that’s just normal mantis behavior.) Accusations, search parties and crazy killings follow. One insect is poisoned when cider is added to the dung all are feasting on; another is locked in the freezer; a third drowns while trying to swim to the mainland for help. Secret tunnels, a mysterious lighthouse, a skull and a séance all figure into the twisty tongue-in-cheek plot. The storytelling is ably carried along by Cali’s punnish narrative and Pianina’s colorful cartoon panels, which run from five to 10 per page. The playful cover and book size falsely imply a story for young children, but it’s more for preteens and even teens. Bright and altogether engaging; aspiring entomologists should find it extra amusing. (Graphic mystery. 10-15)
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OUT OF THIS PLACE
Cameron, Emma Candlewick (416 pp.) $17.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-7636-6404-6
A trio of characters give their perspectives in this emotionally gripping Australian import. Luke has been in love with Casey since forever and longs to protect her from her overbearing and chilly father. Their friend Bongo’s abusive home life worries them both, though it is Casey, a kindred spirit in understanding how paralyzing a lack of autonomy can be, who’s better able to identify with him. Each takes a turn narrating, describing some of the same events cast in different lights and extending them to tell their own stories more fully. This alternation works well in terms of providing a window into each of their experiences, though the style changes little from character to character. The simple free verse in which the novel is written bridges the gaps among the three most of the time, but there are instances where it doesn’t ring true—such as when teenage boy Luke thinks to himself that a dress Casey wears, “shimmers like the Emerald City.” Complex issues, including drug addiction, homelessness, unplanned pregnancy and first experiences with sex, are presented with nuance and sensitivity, and if the conclusion is happier for all concerned than might be common, readers will be cheered by it nonetheless. A smart and hopeful debut novel about the necessity of finding one’s own way. (Fiction/verse. 14 & up)
YOU LOOK DIFFERENT IN REAL LIFE
Castle, Jennifer HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-06-198581-2 978-0-06-220977-1 e-book
Five teens linked by a documentary following their lives reunite to film a third installment. As 6-year-olds, they became easy friends, playing dress-up, watching cartoons and trying to stay quiet enough to win a prize from the kindergarten treasure box. At 11, their lives were more complicated. Autism, the loss of a parent and bullying are all caught on tape. When the filmmakers return five years later, the five barely speak to one another. Felix feels invisible. Nate is big man on campus. Keira is coldly beautiful. Rory is an awkward loner. Justine, the star of the first two movies, drifts without purpose. The reunion promises, for better or worse, to change everything. Multiple storylines and characters are slowly revealed through snippets from the films as well as Justine’s memories. The five teens are well-rounded and interesting. Unfortunately, the story is unnecessarily 78
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complicated by a too-big cast and throwaway characters. Additionally, Justine’s abrupt change from hating the camera to loving its voyeuristic power feels false. The story lags in the middle, making pacing an issue. In spite of these glitches, Castle’s individual scenes shine. Unfortunately, the sum of the parts does not equal a whole. Clever premise, uneven execution. (Fiction. 13 & up)
THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL
Chainani, Soman Harper/HarperCollins (496 pp.) $16.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-06-210489-2
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied. Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish). Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)
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“Middle-grade readers will find many ways to connect with Anna and her friends in this warm family and school story.” from the year of the baby
THE YEAR OF THE BABY
Cheng, Andrea Illus. by Barton, Patrice Houghton Mifflin (176 pp.) $15.99 | May 28, 2013 978-0-547-91067-3
Worried that her newly adopted baby sister isn’t gaining weight, fifth-grader Anna Wang and her friends Camille and Laura make the toddler the subject of a successful science-fair project. Anna, who became a better friend in The Year of the Book (2012), proves to be a capable older sister as well. Three months have passed since her family brought Kaylee from China to the United States. She looks fine to Anna, who enjoys taking care of her, but she doesn’t want to eat. Camille gets her to swallow a few bites by distracting her with a song, planting the seed of an idea that blooms into an easy-to-follow experiment involving both Chinese and American nursery songs and a silent meal as a control. Laura’s moves between her parents’ two households complicate their activities, but, though she’s not Chinese, she has joined Anna and Camille at language school, providing continuity. All three use occasional simple Chinese phrases (translated in the opening pronunciation guide). As in the previous title, there are also frequent references to familiar children’s books. An ending that has their teacher also considering adoption from China seems an unnecessary embellishment, but the recipe for Grandma’s steamed bao zi is welcome. Middle-grade readers will find many ways to connect with Anna and her friends in this warm family and school story. (Fiction. 7-10)
RUBY REDFORT TAKE YOUR LAST BREATH
Child, Lauren Candlewick (400 pp.) $16.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-7636-5468-9 Series: Ruby Redfort, 2
Thirteen-year-old secret agent Ruby Redfort (Look Into My Eyes, 2012) barely has a week to breathe before finding herself in the middle of another dastardly evil plan—oh, there are also pirates, a sea monster, a mysterious stranger and a lost treasure, too. This retro spy adventure opens with a series of strange marine disturbances. Coast Guard signals are scrambled, all the fish are gone, and there is a whispering sound coming from the ocean. Plus, one of the divers from Spectrum, the supersecret spy agency where Ruby trains, has washed ashore, dead. To add to the ever-evolving, sometimes belabored plot, the boat that Ruby’s parents are on is attacked by pirates, leaving both Sabina and Brant Redfort missing at sea. All of the subplots are ocean-related, but readers (and Ruby) don’t know how they |
are connected until Count von Viscount, the villain from the first volume, shows up briefly—his manifest evil nature enough to tie everything together. Child’s cliffhanger chapter endings help the pace tremendously, and the codes (musical and binary) that Ruby deciphers are great fun. But thrilling and edge-ofyour-seat adventure? That seems to be the territory of other literary spies, despite a cover that oozes intrigue. A harmless, middle-grade mystery for budding sleuths. (Mystery. 9-14)
BAD BOY, GOOD BOY
Chorao, Kay Illus. by Chorao, Kay Abrams (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4197-0520-5
The tale of a young pup whose good deeds only appear naughty falls flat due to the repeated use of judgmental phrases in speech bubbles. In four brief chapters, young readers meet Sam, an exuberant, somewhat impulsive pup whose heart is in the right place. While he does run amok through the grown-ups’ activities (“Bad boy!”) on the way to finding a friend’s lost hat (“Good boy!”), he is very careful not to make the same mistakes upon his return, though the adults don’t notice. When banned-from-cooking Sam helps blind-without-his-glasses Grandpa with his midnight snack, the large cartoon panels show Mama’s progression from anger to understanding. Some quite accidental mishaps at school provoke his teacher to call him a “Bad boy!” and send him to the corner, where he purposefully starts trouble and, confusingly, is dubbed a creative “Good boy!” In the final chapter, Sam slips out unseen during a storm; his frantic relatives find him sheltering a fallen baby bird. Watercolor, gouache and pen illustrations show anthropomorphized dogs whose expressions speak volumes, especially the angry and fearful ones. Unlike Chorao’s Kate (Up and Down with Kate, 2001), Sam doesn’t face everyday situations, so readers may find it difficult to relate…unless they often hear the titular phrases. What is most worrisome is that even when the grown-ups seem to recognize that Sam is trying his best to do the right thing, they don’t see that he learns from his mistakes and is a good boy indeed. Readers will be left saying, “Poor Sam,” after this one. (Picture book. 4-8)
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“A haunting, atmospheric, intergenerational tale of the ‘inbetween,’ suffused with selkie lore.” from tides
PRINCESSES ON THE RUN
Coh, Smiljana Illus. by Coh, Smiljana Running Press Kids (40 pp.) $15.95 | May 14, 2013 978-0-7624-4612-4
A prettily conceived and executed design, a decorative Eastern European sensibility and a fairly unconventional storyline make Princess Antonia stand out among the current crop of princesses. Antonia has toys, gowns and “the largest book collection in the entire kingdom” but finds herself unaccountably bored. Her friends always seem to be busy: Rapunzel’s in her tower, Cinderella’s cleaning, Snow White’s coping with a household full of dwarves, and Sleeping Beauty’s always tired. One day, Antonia simply runs out of the castle, out of town and into the forest. She finds that all of her friends decided to escape that day, too. Soon, all five princesses are joined by Little Red Riding Hood and a whole bevy of forest denizens. After they reach the sea, each returns home, energized: Rapunzel bobs her hair, Sleeping Beauty learns to practice yoga, and Antonia decides to take her elephant (!) out to run, too. This winsome, slight tale gains strength from its collaged, computer-manipulated illustrations. There are floral patterns and furbelows galore. Geometrically formed bodies have pipestem limbs, faces sport comma-and– polka-dot features, and some amazing curlicues of red, blonde, brown and black hair sprout from these girls’ heads. The bedizened, rose-colored cover will be enough to lure in young readers, and the rather formless storyline might even get them thinking. (Picture book. 4-7)
ALL I NEED
Colasanti, Susane Viking (240 pp.) $17.99 | May 21, 2013 978-0-670-01423-1 An unlikely young couple finds true love during summer break—but can it withstand their different lives? Skye spends her summers vacationing on the Jersey Shore in her family’s large beach house, positive that nothing interesting will ever happen. Unexpectedly, she meets Seth at a party on the last night of the summer, and the chemistry is immediate and intense. A plan to exchange contact information goes awry, and they part not knowing how to find each other. Fate reunites the couple the next summer, and they decide to make their relationship work. Well-to-do Skye and Seth, a boy of lesser means, must find common ground despite their very different lives: Seth worries endlessly about money and paying for his Ivy League education, while Skye is still working through high school dramas. As Seth and Skye feel their way through the trials and tribulations of young love, the world marches on 80
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around them, and the two of them shakily navigate how to find their place together in it. Romantic and swooning plotlines filled with chance encounters soon dissipate into the real-life logistics of making a relationship work. Readers shouldn’t fret: The romance ramps back up to a swelling crescendo, sure to leave enthusiasts sighing and reaffirmed about the power of true love. Grab your blankets and sunscreen now: This is an ideal summer beach book. (Romance. 13 & up)
TIDES
Cornwell, Betsy Clarion (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-547-92772-5 In this debut, a contemporary teen arrives at New Hampshire’s Isles of Shoals for a coveted summer internship and discovers the liminal boundary between fantasy and reality. Eager to begin his dream internship at the Marine Science Research Center on Appledore Island, Noah and his sister, Lo, are staying with their grandmother, Gemm, who lives on nearby White Island. Noah and Lo quickly realize Gemm and her friend Maebh are partners, while Gemm learns Lo is bulimic. Meanwhile, Noah meets an intriguing young woman named Mara, who spends a lot of time in the ocean. Attracted to each other, Noah and Mara tentatively become friends, which proves challenging after Mara reveals she and Maebh are selkies, living most of their lives as seals but with the ability to remove their skins and appear as humans. When a young selkie vanishes, Noah suspects the Research Center’s director may be involved and risks his life trying to uncover the shocking truth. In addition to her sensitive portrayal of Gemm and Maebh’s lifelong relationship and Noah and Mara’s emerging romance, Cornwell successfully incorporates themes of same-sex relationships, eating disorders and ruthless scientific research into her novel. A haunting, atmospheric, intergenerational tale of the “inbetween,” suffused with selkie lore. (Fantasy. 12 & up)
INVISIBILITY
Cremer, Andrea; Levithan, David Philomel (368 pp.) $18.99 | May 7, 2013 978-0-399-25760-5 A story of doomed love on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sixteen-year-old Stephen has been invisible—literally—all his life and spends most of his time watching television or wandering through Central Park, alone and depressed. No one in his life has been able to
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see him, so he’s totally taken aback when a spunky teen girl in his building, Elizabeth, spots him in the hall. A schmaltzy love story between the two ensues, enlivened by the added friendship of her younger, gay brother, Laurie, who may be the most fleshed-out character in the novel. The novel stumbles at first as Cremer and Levithan work to build their world together, introducing some minor plot contrivances that are tied up eventually (clothes conveniently disappear when Stephen puts them on, for example). Things pick up quickly, however, at the halfway mark, when the trio learns more about Stephen’s situation. From there on, the novel races forward with lots of supernatural action, complete with witches, curses, spells, a villain and much more. Though it begins as a stumbling, near–coming-out story (for Stephen), the novel deftly switches gears to a fast-paced supernatural thriller that will surely leave readers wanting more. This love child of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Levithan’s Every Day (2012) is surprisingly successful in the end. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)
NIGHT SCHOOL
Daugherty, C.J. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | May 21, 2013 978-0-06-219385-8 Series: Night School, 1 A smart, engaging heroine and gripping, suspenseful plot trump this series opener’s all-too-predictable romance. Angry and upset over the loss of her brother, Christopher, Allie’s vandalism gets her expelled from school—again. Her exasperated parents pack her off to Cimmeria Academy, a boarding school in the remote English countryside. Puzzlingly, her classmates aren’t troubled youth like Allie but the gifted offspring of wealthy families educated at Cimmeria for generations. Everyone, especially Allie, wonders why she’s there—and why the school’s hottest guys are smitten with her: smooth, uber-male Sylvain and smoldering, bad-boy Carter. Although readers can plot the triangle’s romantic trajectory early on, other narrative twists and turns remain pleasurably unpredictable. Cimmeria’s as much an enigma as its students. They’re not to enter the woods after dark; computers and cellphones are forbidden. A few, Sylvain and Carter included, attend the mysterious Night School but refuse to discuss it. Even Allie’s best friend, Jo, keeps secrets from her. Frustratingly, whenever love or attraction is in the air, Alllie’s gutsy leadership dissolves into old-fashioned passivity (somewhere between Bella and Katniss on the heroine-autonomy spectrum). But when the summer ball ends horrifically, Allie’s ready to take action. Hints of tantalizing plot twists to come will have readers panting for the next installment. (Romantic thriller. 14 & up)
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BEN RIDES ON
Davies, Matt Illus. by Davies, Matt Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 28, 2013 978-1-59643-794-4 Young readers and listeners will feel like cheering when this unprepossessing hero gets his due. Davies’ signature caricature art lends itself perfectly to an exaggerated visual accompaniment for this earnest, simple and sweet tale of a boy, his bike and a bully. Ben’s great new bike takes him by any route he likes to school, including the long one over hill and dale, hopping across a stream on the heads of what look like sharks, leaping a line of school buses. But, alas, arrival at school only means that Adrian Underbite (“perhaps the world’s largest third-grader”) makes off with Ben’s bike. When Ben later finds Adrian in “a significant spot of trouble,” both readers and Ben may find that doing the right thing is not the first thought that comes to mind. “How extraordinarily terrible,” Ben muses sardonically. There are a few tense moments in the brief narrative when it seems that no good deed will go unpunished, but a familiar story emerges—spoiler here: A bully has a change of heart—and it becomes astonishingly fresh and fun in Davies’ hands. Davies’ cheeky, cheerfully frayed line gives readers figures somewhat larger than life—and indeed twice as natural. Ben’s hasty, heroic hoodie rescue is dramatic and funny, and the last line and accompanying illustration will provoke out-loud laughter. Great amusement for the bold and timid alike. (Picture book. 4-8)
WEATHER WITCH
Delany, Shannon St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-250-01851-9 The lives of an accused Witch, her would-be suitor and the man seeking to develop her alleged magic all intersect in an alternate-history fantasy. Lady Jordan Astraea lives a life of luxury in the strict (yet woefully underdefined) class system of the New World of 1844. In this history, the colonists escaped the Old World for a land where magic is strictly outlawed. On the night of her high-society 17th birthday, Lady Jordan is victimized, accused of being a Weather Witch. The mystery behind Jordan’s false accusation, obvious to readers, takes her the entire book to partially solve. Luckily, arresting Jordan means removing her from high society and the overly descriptive, lengthy sentences that aim to demonstrate rich decadence but end up clunky and baffling. Jordan is brought to the Maker, Bran Marshall, whose job is to torture witches. This somehow turns them into Conductors, an energy source used in place of electricity and steam power. Bran’s storyline, involving
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a newly arrived illegitimate daughter, features another painfully predictable twist as he grapples with the nature of his work. The bright spot is Jordan’s not-quite boyfriend, a witty lush who achieves heroism. The ending leaves almost all storylines open to set up for a sequel. The partially defined world has potential but not enough to overcome the plot contrivances. (Fantasy. 12-14)
WASH-A-BYE BEAR
Docherty, Thomas Illus. by Docherty, Thomas Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-7636-6486-2 A paean to filthy, sticky, beloved stuffed animals everywhere. Flora and Bear are nearly inseparable, but then comes a dire transformation. “I love you, Bear,” she explains. “But Mommy says you are smelly and full of stains and you need a wash.” As he spins in the washer with faithful Flora seated outside, every stain conjures a memory, whether of hiding in fallen leaves or snacking on jam toast. The washing done, Flora finds that Bear no longer looks, smells, tastes or even feels like himself. It is a problem remedied by some additional play. When the child worries that Bear will no longer love her after she is washed and clean, her mother reassures her that he always will. Winning watercolors nicely set memories within a circular washing-machine-window–shaped frame. As for the characters themselves, Bear is subtly expressive and Flora an admirably active young woman. While not every rhyme in the text is perfect (“trees” with “leaves”, “games” with “stains”), readers will have so much fun playing along with the two friends they’ll hardly notice. The endpapers depicting Bear engaged in every activity, from sticking his paws in yogurt cups to finding himself belly-down in puddles of paint, drill home the fun to be had with a stuffed little friend. Muck and mess make good, clean fun. (Picture book. 4-8)
THE DARK SHORE
Emerson, Kevin Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 21, 2013 978-0-06-206282-6 978-0-06-206284-0 e-book Series: Atlanteans, 2 The heroes of The Lost Code (2012) race to stay ahead of EdenCorp and reach the powerful, climate-altering Paintbrush of the Gods first. The trio is dangerously low on food, water and protection from the sun’s radiation. They take a chance on a supply run at an old Wal-Mart in a dead city, where they encounter members 82
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of the Heliad-Seven cult, which has taken control of EdenSouth from EdenCorp. The cultists invite the three to their city, Desenna, to join a girl whose Atlantean DNA indicates she may be the Medium. If so, she will complete the set of three guardians, together with Mariner Leech and Aeronaut Owen. With this sequel, Emerson jumps into action and plot right away, as the heroes struggle to escape and survive, especially Lilly, who badly needs a doctor. When EdenCorp’s Paul finally catches them at an Atlantean temple holding a crucial tool, they barely escape to Desenna. Heliad-Seven leader and former EdenSouth director Dr. Victoria Keller has remarkably logical explanations for the religion she invented, and she asks that they participate in the living myth alongside Seven, the Atlantean descendant viewed as a goddess. Seven expands the growing rift between Owen and Lilly, creating a love triangle. The twists at Desenna are expertly executed, surprising while illuminating, and some pack emotional sucker punches. Readers will beg for the follow-up to this tense, wellplotted sequel. (Science fiction. 12-17)
TYLER MAKES SPAGHETTI!
Florence, Tyler Illus. by Frazier, Craig Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2013 978-0-06-204756-4
Florence and Frazier are back (Tyler Makes Pancakes!, 2012), this time with dinner as young Tyler learns about spaghetti—how to cook it and where its ingredients come from—in this masterfully illustrated story. When Chef Lorenzo asks Tyler for help making spaghetti and meatballs, the burgeoning cook can’t wait to begin. Together they take an imaginary adventure to pick tomatoes from the vine, unearth onions, visit olive groves and witness the pressing process. Even cheese-making, from cow to curds and curing, is seen. But the author conveniently evades any explanation of the origin of the meatballs, which are presented pre-made. Ingredients assembled, the industrious Tyler creates a delicious dinner for his family, with each step of the cooking process described. Sadly, the text is labored, despite the author’s best intentions of connecting readers to food, land, and the people that create and care for both. However, Frazier’s strong pictorial narrative carries the day. As always, he exhibits exemplary skill at creating deceivingly simple illustrations with his exceptional ability to edit. The characters, often appearing as stick figures, are incredibly expressive, and the silhouettes offer both depth and insights into the text. Florence’s purpose is clear: “Good food can save the day!” A worthy message, drawn perfectly by Frazier, whose illustrations could work without the words. (recipe, additional information) (Picture book. 4-8)
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“Masterfully, [Geisert] captures the shifting light as thunderheads build, rain sheets and the night-dark storm moves through.” from thunderstorm
OUR SONG
Fraiberg, Jordanna Razorbill/Penguin (336 pp.) $17.99 | May 2, 2013 978-1-59514-268-9 Having been revived after her heart stopped beating for three minutes, Olive is given a second chance at life and love. Olive tries hard to convince herself and others that she didn’t drive into that tree on purpose. Even though she was devastated by her breakup with her boyfriend, Derek. Even though she was speeding and she didn’t slow down at the curve in the road. Alive but not well, 18-year-old Olive returns to school. Now, however, Derek has a new girlfriend, Olive’s grades are slipping, and she’s got this inexplicable song continually swirling about in her head. At a gathering of near-death enthusiasts, Olive meets Nick, a mercurial young man with an English accent. He makes her feel valued and beautiful, but there’s something he’s not revealing. There’s a slim mystery threaded throughout, but this story has all the elements of a formulaic romance: Jerk boyfriend breaks girl’s heart, girl meets new guy, ex comes begging back, girl has misunderstanding with new guy, true love prevails. Olive is wishy-washy, obsessive and has no real sense of self. Eventually, she begins to clear her boybefuddled brain to better understand her family and create some goals for herself. Irritatingly, the song’s mystical origins come as a stunningly anticlimactic nonrevelation. Readers looking for an undemanding beach read may find a few hours’ pleasure here. (Fiction. 13-18)
THUNDERSTORM
Geisert, Arthur Illus. by Geisert, Arthur Enchanted Lion Books (32 pp.) $17.95 | May 7, 2013 978-1-59270-133-9 A powerful summer storm careens through a Midwestern farming community in six hours, leaving an uneven wake of destruction. Geisert’s pictures (wordless except for selected times of day) incorporate vast expanses of sky and earth. Intricate cross sections show the interiors of houses, barns and animal homes. As the storm builds, fox families take to their dens, and rabbits hie to their warrens. A lightning strike cuts off power at 12:15 p.m.; roiling funnel clouds fell trees and pulverize a farmstead on the horizon. A family in a red pickup towing a trailer of baled hay makes deliveries, stopping to help elders prepare. When the truck breaks down, it’s towed and repaired—but the family must shelter under a stone bridge for the worst of the storm. The next spread is the story’s most dramatic—a flash flood sweeps through, propelling house parts, uprooted trees, fences, a tire swing and more. It takes two tense page turns before readers know that the community’s inhabitants are intact: They’ve |
all gathered to repair the house and barn of hard-hit neighbors. Geisert’s meticulous line compositions are etched onto copperplate, inked and hand-colored. Masterfully, he captures the shifting light as thunderheads build, rain sheets and the nightdark storm moves through. Though children might need some reassurance, this beautifully nuanced meditation on the power of nature— and community resilience—will reward repeat readings. (Picture book. 4-8)
EVERY DAY AFTER
Golden, Laura Delacorte (224 pp.) $15.99 | $10.99 e-book | $18.99 PLB Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-385-74326-6 978-0-307-98312-1 e-book 978-0-375-99103-5 PLB The year Lizzie Hawkins turns 12, she loses her father, her treasured locket and her position as best student in her class—but narrowly avoids losing a friend. Times are hard in Bittersweet, Ala., in 1932. Lizzie’s outof-work father has vanished. Her mother has become silent and unresponsive. Determined not to ask for help, the sixthgrader struggles to cook, wash, keep house and garden, as well as doing the outside mending her mother used to take in to pay the mortgage. Worse, a bullying classmate, determined to steal Lizzie’s academic standing as well as her friend, threatens to reveal her circumstances. Caught up in her own troubles, Lizzie fails to notice that her best friend Ben’s life is even more difficult. As Lizzie tells her story, interspersing it with occasional long journal entries, readers will become more and more impatient with her stubbornness. But, as one of the chapter-heading proverbs preaches, “The greatest conqueror is he who conquers himself,” and providentially, she does. There is a clear, pleasing sense of time and place in this debut novel, created through solid details of a difficult daily life. Lizzie’s voice isn’t always convincing, especially when she writes. But her determination is commendable. Inspired by the writer’s grandparents’ experiences, this Depression-era story should resonate with modern middle-grade readers. (Historical fiction. 10-13)
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“…supported by Gulledge’s stylish black-and-white illustrations, this sophomore offering shines as bright as the lamps Will surrounds herself with.” from will & whit
THE ALLIANCE
Goodman, Gabriel Darby Creek (104 pp.) $7.95 paper | $20.95 e-book | $27.93 PLB May 1, 2013 978-1-4677-0708-4 978-1-4677-0970-5 e-book 978-1-4677-0595-0 PLB Series: Surviving Southside After the suicide of Jamie Ballard, a gay teen who was being bullied, two very different students at Southside High try to start a Gay-Straight Alliance. Like other installments in the Surviving Southside series, this one delivers a short, focused plot without sacrificing characterization. Two different characters narrate alternating segments: golden-boy football player Scott King, who was Jamie’s best friend, and opinionated, out lesbian Carmen Mendoza. As Carmen and Scott try to collect the required number of petition signatures to create the club, each runs into obstacles. Scott’s football friends refuse to express interest in “that fag group,” and other students remember Scott’s own acts of bullying too keenly to trust him. Carmen, well-liked among a variety of social groups, encounters resistance among teachers, including a sinister assistant principal who subtly insults her in an effort to discourage her from starting the GSA. When the two finally unite, the club seems poised to get off the ground. A parent group’s last-minute intervention, however, puts the club on hold, a believable turn of events that nevertheless makes the story feel unresolved, particularly given that there is no indication that the new “neutrality policy” will be addressed in The Fight (2013), another Surviving Southside volume. A brief, believable and sobering look into bullying and school bureaucracies. (Fiction. 12-16)
AGAIN!
Gravett, Emily Illus. by Gravett, Emily Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 16, 2013 978-1-4424-5231-2 Gravett, that master of the metafictive die cut, returns for a savvy bedtime satire. It’s time for this little green dragon’s bedtime story. Clutching a blankie, it snuggles up to its parent dragon for the story of fierce Cedric the red dragon, who wreaks havoc every night. “Again?” pleads the little dragon, holding up the red, clothbound storybook (readers who remove the paper jacket will see that it’s exactly the book that they are holding). The patient parent reads it again, with a little editorial revision: “At nighttime when Cedric SHOULD be asleep….” And again: “Cedric the dragon’s a big sleepyhead. / He’s decided it’s time / HE WAS REALLY IN BED.” With each iteration, the storybook’s illustration changes, and Cedric transforms from a 84
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fire-breathing terror to a princess-kissing softie. At the fourth, parent dragon conks out, the ZZZs from its snoring mingling with the few letters on the storybook’s page. Enraged, the little green dragon begins to turn red, shouting, “AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN!” Fully red after several futile repetitions, it puts some firepower behind its final “AGAIN,” burning a hole through the last page and back cover. The storybook characters escape, luckily (and, though unseen, so does parent dragon, human parents will no doubt note). This little bit of bedtime foolery feels a little incomplete, but it should strike a chord—and it’s far wittier than the similarly themed Go the Fuck to Sleep. (Picture book. 3-6)
CHANTRESS
Greenfield, Amy Butler McElderry (336 pp.) $16.99 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4424-5703-4 In an alternate England, a young girl raised in isolation may hold the power to save the nation. Lucy scarcely remembers anything before the shipwreck that left her, with nursemaid/guardian Norrie, on a deserted island. She does know never to sing, and she knows that she must never ever remove the stone pendant her mother left her. So it will be no surprise that when she does both, she opens the gates to magic and is transported to 17th-century England, where the nearly mad Lord Protector and his enchanted ravens control by fear and terror. Lucy is a Chantress, possibly the last and, as a result, the only hope the revolutionaries (including the cute and smart Nat) have to destroy the Chantress-fueled magic of Lord Scargrave. The plotting is pedestrian to a fault and laughably simplistic, but Lucy is engaging enough, and Greenfield’s England balances the familiar with the original to great effect. There are no surprises: Of course Lucy succeeds; of course she and Nat fall in love; of course there will be a sequel. Formulaic doesn’t mean faulty, though, and girl-centric historical fantasy’s ever-growing niche can certainly hold another volume. (author’s note) (Historical fantasy. 12-16)
WILL & WHIT
Gulledge, Laura Lee Illus. by Gulledge, Laura Lee Amulet/Abrams (192 pp.) $12.95 paper | May 7, 2013 978-1-4197-0546-5 After the untimely death of her parents, an artistic girl living with her aunt must face her fears. Willhemena Huckstep—Will for short—is planning on spending a perfectly quiet summer working at her aunt’s antiques shop, making lamps and spending
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time with her friends. Two fateful events quickly steer her plans off course: a chance meeting with a group of teens who are putting together an eclectic carnival and a savage summer storm named Whitney that will plunge her town into a prolonged blackout in its wake. Offbeat Will is scared of the dark (her lamp-making skills came from her grandfather, who taught her how to make her first night light). In confronting the darkness, both literal and figurative, though, Will finds herself stronger and happier than she could have imagined. Peppered with popculture references from Doctor Who to The Hunger Games and supported by Gulledge’s stylish black-and-white illustrations, this sophomore offering shines as bright as the lamps Will surrounds herself with. Will is an intensely likable character, as are her funky group of friends. With its emphasis on a world wonderfully unplugged, maybe this will jar some readers’ memories about how excellent and exciting a life without Facebook and Twitter can be. Quirky, clever and insightful; a must-read for fans of Raina Telgemeier. (Graphic fiction. 12 & up)
HOW I LOST YOU
Gurtler, Janet Sourcebooks Fire (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 1, 2013 978-1-4022-7794-8 Seventeen-year-old Grace and her best friend Kya are inseparable, and they plan to keep it that way by using their mad paintball skills (yes, paintball) to make the all-women team at Seattle University. At least that’s what Grace thought the plan was. But the closer the girls get to realizing their dream, the more Kya begins to unravel. Knowing that her friend carries scars from a secret past, Grace risks everything to try and save Kya from herself. With so many “buds before studs” novels out there to choose among, Grace and Kya’s story fails to distinguish itself. It’s difficult to root for the duo when their friendship never seems worth the fight to begin with. Readers must rely on Grace’s word that there was a time that she and Kya shared a meaningful and reciprocal relationship, since it’s difficult to find evidence of it in any of the book’s 28 chapters. Manipulative and self-destructive from the start, Kya never shows any true affection for Grace. Surely, what happened to Kya was terrible, but while Grace uses it as an excuse for her best friend’s destructive and hurtful behavior, readers will find themselves rooting alongside a host of more appealing secondary characters for Grace to wise up before it’s too late. This friendship story fizzles. (Fiction. 14 & Up)
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TO BE A CAT
Haig, Matt Illus. by Curtis, Stacy Atheneum (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-4424-5405-7 This offbeat tale offers an uneasy mix of magical transformation, violence and bullying, and the dreary misery of family dysfunction. Ultimately, Barney Willow’s sad and odd story drags on a bit too long. Depressed by his parents’ divorce and tormented by a schoolmate, Barney is manipulated by a cruel adult into wishing his life away—literally. After magically switching bodies with a small cat named Maurice, Barney must discover how to regain his humanity. Pursued by Miss Whipmire, the school principal who encouraged his metamorphosis for reasons of her own, Barney seeks protection from his best friend Rissa and his mother. While they eventually understand his outlandish predicament and do their best to help, it’s Barney’s (mysteriously) absent father who provides the information needed to return to his former life. Haig’s writing has somewhat Snicket-ian overtones with occasional coy authorial asides and plenty of pain, suffering, danger and despair. The plot offers some surprises but also feels repetitious in spots. Characterization is brisk but generally effective, with familiar types occupying the background: the quirky best friend with supportive, artsy parents, the vicious bully who turns out to have a surprising weak spot, the harried mum trying hard to carry on in the face of domestic difficulties. Simultaneously predictable and quirky, this will likely appeal to the author’s fans but may not attract new readers. (Fantasy. 8-12)
EVERYONE SLEEPS
Hall, Marcellus Illus. by Hall, Marcellus Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 2, 2013 978-0-399-25793-3 An imaginative pug with insomnia explores the night world of sleeping animals with a dreamlike narrative in rhym-
ing text. Conrad the pug just isn’t interested in sleep when his family heads off to bed. He slips out into the night alone and sees all sorts of familiar animals sleeping near his home. As Conrad ventures further into the heart of darkness (his name is Conrad, after all), his observations veer into the fantastical. He can see under water and into distant environments, spotting such unusual animals as elephants, monkeys, a panda and a tiger. At first Conrad is an observer, but he becomes a participant, swimming with the “creatures of the deep” and sleeping on his back tucked into a group of walruses. He returns home to find the
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little girl of his family still awake, and Conrad falls asleep in her bed. Readers will find the girl in an irritated state of wakefulness on the final page. This jarring attempt at a humorous ending doesn’t complement the magical, ethereal tone of Conrad’s journey. Intriguing illustrations in ink, watercolor and gouache capture the mysterious tone of the world at night, with a wide variety of perspectives and creatively integrated strings of ZZZs coming from the sleeping creatures. An inventive if not wholly successful look at the nighttime world of nature. (Picture book. 3-6)
MERMAIDS IN THE BACKYARD
Hapka, Catherine Illus. by Castelao, Patricia Random House (112 pp.) $4.99 | $4.99 e-book | $12.99 PLB Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-307-97637-6 978-0-307-97638-3 e-book 978-0-375-97120-4 PLB
A girl forges friendships with the mermaids in the ocean behind her house. Lindy Michaels misses her best friend, her bedroom and everything else she left behind in Chicago when her parents moved their family to a South Carolina coastal island. Lindy’s no fan of the ocean or of her new neighbor, a stereotypically “[l]oud, messy, and annoying” boy named Matthew. Lindy isn’t willing to give Little Hermit’s Island a chance until a storm strands mermaid Sealily and her pet sea horse Finneus in a tide pool. Quick-thinking Lindy saves Sealily and Finneus and strikes up a friendship with them. When the weather clears, they entreat Lindy to come swim, offering up sea sponges that will enable her to breathe underwater, but frightened Lindy declines. Later, Matthew captures Finneus, and, knowing Sealily and her family must be distraught, Lindy trades away her most valued possession for the creature. While returning Finneus to the ocean, Lindy is pulled out to sea by a riptide. The grateful mermaids come to her aid in turn. They help her to the shore and break her of her fear of the water in a rather cheesy lesson that emphasizes giving things a chance. The illustrations rely on hair color and fins to help readers tell characters apart, but facial expressions are great and settings inviting. A middling chapter book for mermaid lovers who don’t want big conflicts. (Fantasy. 6-9)
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JUST GRACE AND THE TROUBLE WITH CUPCAKES Harper, Charise Mericle Houghton Mifflin (208 pp.) $15.99 | May 28, 2013 978-0-547-87744-0 Series: Just Grace, 10
Mix the ingredients of a school fair, Grandma’s cupcake recipe and a broken promise to a friend, and you have the 10th entry in the Just Grace series. Just Grace is still in third grade, her best friend, Mimi, lives next door, and she loves to romp with her dog, Mr. Scruffers, who’s really a female. The plot centers on a visit from Grace’s grandmother, her excellent cupcake recipe (included in the backmatter) and the annual school fair. When Grace accidentally suggests cupcakes for the fair theme, she breaks a pinkyswear promise with Mimi: to support Mimi’s idea that candy should be the theme for the school fair. Two devices add to the charm of Grace’s ingenuous narrative. Frequent captions in place of chapter headings facilitate flow; such brief phrases as “The Thing That Made Me Extra Happy” and “What Is Really Hard to Do” break the text into bite-sized chunks and lead readers smoothly through transitions. And Grace’s love for creating new words by putting two together—mad + frustrated = mustrated, yummy + delicious = yummilicious—is downright endearing. Black-and-white spot art with balloon dialogue is just right for Grace’s spunky personality. This title can be read alone and will win new fans, while long-standing fans will cheer. Just Grace continues to be just delightful. (Fiction. 7-10)
A MISCHIEF OF MERMAIDS
Harper, Suzanne Greenwillow/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | May 28, 2013 978-0-06-199613-9 Series: Unseen World of Poppy Malone, 3 A skeptic trapped in a family of believers comes face to face with nasty nautical ladies in the third book of a series. Poppy’s parents may be hokey paranormal investigators, her older teen sister a twit and her little brother an incipient psychopath, but at least she can rely on her twin brother, Will, and their buddy Henry. Yet ever since her family borrowed a houseboat on a lake reputed to be an alien hotspot, she’s found the two boys prefer to do things without her. Alone and miffed, Poppy stumbles on the titular mischief of mermaids, and one of them takes her curiosity about the human world to the next level. Unfortunately this results in Poppy’s sister Franny’s mistakenly sprouting a tail of her own. Can she be turned back before she forgets who she was? Stock characters and sitcom-style dialogue do little to set this series
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“The polished, disarming text offers Pham free rein for lively illustration that captures Erdos’ childlike spirit.” from the boy who loved math
apart from the pack. Still, the action comes steadily, and readers will not grow bored at any point. Oddly, interest in the supernatural seems split almost equally between the Malones’ misguided alien hunt and Poppy’s very real mermaids. And while the mermaid storyline comes to a satisfactory close, Poppy’s falling out with Will and Henry is forgotten entirely. A serviceable fantasy best suited for those kids who have already enjoyed Poppy’s previous adventures. (Fantasy. 8-12)
ALICE-MIRANDA TAKES THE STAGE
Harvey, Jacqueline Delacorte (304 pp.) $14.99 | $9.99 e-book | $17.99 PLB May 14, 2013 978-0-385-74333-4 978-0-449-81074-3 e-book 978-0-375-99107-3 PLB Series: Alice-Miranda, 3
Seven-year-old Alice-Miranda returns in a jaunty adventure that combines mystery and theatrics. Upon returning to boarding school after break, AliceMiranda discovers several new mysteries to solve. A contentious new arrival, a neglected estate in the woods and an upcoming school play add intrigue to the new school term. Although the girls at Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale Academy for Proper Young Ladies are looking forward to collaborating with students from the nearby boys’ school on the play, a perplexing series of complications quickly emerges. Sloane, the school’s newest student, has an ulterior agenda. Her tasteless, social-climbing mother, determined to achieve wealth and social prominence, has devised a scheme that threatens to close the boys’ school. Naturally, Alice-Miranda seeks to uncover the truth. Harvey deftly incorporates clues for discerning readers so that the story’s dramatic conclusion is believable. Ultimately, it is AliceMiranda’s act of kindness, when she compassionately befriends a lonely woman, that provides the key to solving the dilemma. Both fans of the previous stories and readers new to this series will enjoy the diminutive sleuth’s ability to solve problems with a signature blend of friendliness and clever ingenuity. Harvey’s tale, featuring a comically inept, melodramatic villainess and a precocious heroine who is unfailingly kindhearted, will captivate readers. (Mystery. 7-11)
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SCHOOL SPIRITS
Hawkins, Rachel Hyperion (304 pp.) $17.99 | May 14, 2013 978-1-4231-4849-4
Izzy—short for Isolde—and her mother are the last in their centuries-old line of monster killers. Izzy’s sister Finley disappeared while the sisters were dealing with a witches’ coven, and Izzy has felt guilty about the incident ever since, holding herself responsible. Looking for a break, Izzy’s mom moves them to Ideal, Miss., and sends Izzy to high school, an environment completely foreign to the girl, with the hope that she will be able to deal with a local ghost. Izzy makes actual friends there but learns that this ghost has far more power than usual, and she comes to suspect that one of her cherished new friends may have summoned it. Worse, she’s attracted to Dex, but the boy gives off vibes that Izzy picks up as supernatural. She can’t tell just what kind of being Dex might be, but she hopes she won’t have to kill him. Hawkins dials the level of humor up to high throughout most of the book, with deftly phrased witticisms in both the narrative (“worry slithered through me”) and her characters’ dialogue (“I am affronted!” declares Dex). Her characterizations shine as original and funny, especially Dex and Torin, an Elizabethan-era warlock trapped for centuries in the Brannicks’ mirror, who dispenses dubious advice. Finley still being missing, it’s entirely possible this, itself a spinoff of the Hex Hall books, may become a series. Here’s hoping the Brannicks will be back—their story’s marvelous fun. (Paranormal comedy/suspense. 12 & up)
THE BOY WHO LOVED MATH The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos Heiligman, Deborah Illus. by Pham, LeUyen Roaring Brook (48 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-59643-307-6
An exuberant and admiring portrait introduces the odd, marvelously nerdy, way cool Hungarian-born itinerant mathematical genius. Heiligman’s joyful, warm account invites young listeners and readers to imagine a much-loved boy completely charmed by numbers. Paul Erdos was sweetly generous throughout his life with the central occupation of his great brain: solving mathematical problems. Unmoored from the usual ties of home and family once grown, he spent most of his career traveling the world to work with colleagues. Erdos was known for his ineptness at practical matters even as he was treasured, housed and fed by those with whom he collaborated in math. The polished, disarming text offers Pham free rein for lively illustration that
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“Warmth and love pervade this novel, an Alaskan version of the Little House books, and characters are well-drawn.” from bo at ballard creek
captures Erdos’ childlike spirit. She uses a slightly retro palette and line to infuse Erdos’ boyhood surroundings with numbers and diagrams, conveying the idea that young Paul lived and breathed math. She populates his adulthood with his affectionate colleagues, even including a graph with Erdos at the center of several dozen of the great mathematical minds of the 20th century to illustrate the whimsical “Erdos number” concept. An extensive author’s note includes a bit more biographical information about Erdos and points to George Csicsery’s 1993 film N is a Number as well as to Heiligman’s website for links for further exploration. Pham’s illustrator’s note invites young readers to go page by page to learn about the kinds of numbers that captivated Erdos and to meet him among his cherished mathematicians. Social learners and budding math lovers alike will find something awesome about this exceptional man. (Picture book/biography. 3-9)
BO AT BALLARD CREEK
Hill, Kirkpatrick; Illus. by Pham, LeUyen Henry Holt (256 pp.) $15.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-8050-9351-3 A warm tale set in an Alaskan goldmining town in 1929-30. Bo, a 5-year-old girl, was adopted as a newborn by two gruff but tenderhearted blacksmiths who’ve toiled in the mining camps of the Yukon for years. These unlikely fathers smoke a bit and swear a bit, but they love Bo with all their hearts. Theirs is an extraordinarily generous, solicitous, close-knit community, comprised of indigenous neighbors and workers from around the world. Events unfold at a leisurely pace in this narrative that’s enriched by authentic details that make the time and place come alive. Readers discover that life in a mining town means surviving brutal winters, handling day-to-day chores in all seasons while still having fun, doing backbreaking labor, and finally, actually extracting the gold from the dirt. (Readers will learn more than they probably ever needed to know about how this is accomplished.) Life in a remote backwater also entails high excitement, such as the townspeople’s first-ever sighting of an airplane and bulldozer. Warmth and love pervade this novel, an Alaskan version of the Little House books, and characters are well-drawn. Some realistically sad and frightening events occur, but the novel ends on a happy, though wistful, note. Final art was not seen, though samples are charming and reinforce the Little House feel. Some may find this overly sweet, but Bo is an endearing Pollyanna in a parka. (Historical fiction. 8-12)
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DARK WATERS
Holt, Christopher Illus. by Douglas, Allen Little, Brown (336 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-316-20012-7 Series: Last Dogs, 2 Man is not dog’s best friend in this animal dystopian sequel. Max and his companions are adrift— literally—after escaping from vengeful Dolph and his wolves, as well as the megalomaniacal Chairman. Hungry and thirsty, they find refuge on a stranded steamboat with other dogs, careful not to upset the pack dynamics or challenge the gruff but brave alpha, Boss. But Max still yearns to find his young owners, or “pack leaders,” Charlie and Emma, and an unfortunate encounter with a group of human arsonistrobbers propels Max and the steamboat inhabitants back into action. Following his visions and the advice of new friends, Max embarks on a journey to understand why people abandoned their pets and where the humans might have gone, following the scent through a zoo and an abandoned city and into a mad scientist’s lair. With reluctance and dimwitted cheer, respectively, Rocky, the hungry, whining dachshund, and Gizmo, the overly perky Yorkie, follow. Max’s prophetic dreams and the cataclysmic effects of medical experimentation on animals are both too convenient and handled more subtly in other, humanprotagonist dystopian stories. Implausible but entertaining action sequences leaven clumsy exposition, while animal behavior coexists uneasily with narrative need. Dystopian training wheels for the Warriors set. (Dystopian adventure. 8-12)
DIG, SCOOP, KA-BOOM!
Holub, Joan Illus. by Gordon, David Random House (24 pp.) $3.99 paper | $12.99 PLB Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-375-96910-2 978-0-375-96910-2 PLB
An accessible, rhyming text drives this story-with-a-twist about a construction site, inviting new readers to hone
their emerging skills. Initial spreads depict a variety of vehicles engaged in digging, scooping, lifting and so on, detailing the activities of a construction site. Varied visual perspectives in the art draw the eyes to the different machines, but they can be disorienting— particularly in the worm’s-eye view on the spread reading “Digger’s teeth bite the ground,” which does not show the “[t]racks skid[ding] around” as indicated by the text. On the other hand, while some readers may wonder why the vehicles’ operators are not seen in the art, this omission is satisfyingly resolved in a
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long-shot spread that depicts a group of children playing with toy trucks in a sand pile. The vehicles are clearly miniversions of those from prior pages, and it’s refreshing to see both boys and girls and at least one child of color included in the group “working like a team.” From here, the narrative draws the children’s play to a conclusion by book’s end, providing readers with a fictive parallel to their own accomplishments in finishing the book: “Good work, crew!” An early-reader book to build on. (Early reader. 4-6)
THE NEPTUNE PROJECT
Holyoke, Polly Disney Hyperion (352 pp.) $16.99 | May 21, 2013 978-1-4231-5756-4
Several centuries after global warming has devastated the planet, a tyrannical government has taken control of the West Coast of America. In a small seaside community in what was Southern California, Nere lives with her scientist mother and a pod of trained dolphins. Unbeknownst to Nere, her parents have genetically engineered her and several other children to breathe under water so they can live free there someday. When the government announces its intention to move the entire community inland, Nere’s mother finishes the alterations on the children and sends them away into the sea, where they will try to join Nere’s father’s colony for these new “Neptune children.” Nere and her friends, along with their friendly dolphins, must make their way there under the sea while fighting sharks and avoiding capture by government forces. They communicate telepathically, and Nere is even able to talk with the dolphins. Together with other Neptune children from Southern California, they head north, hiding and fighting all the way. Holyoke keeps her prose well-pitched to her audience, providing enough violence and even death to create suspense but muting it appropriately. She creates an interesting and diverse set of characters, including the dolphins. The science-fiction elements are nothing new, but they are built on good information about oceanography. This suspenseful, undersea dystopia should keep middle schoolers hooked. (Science fiction. 9-12)
LINKED
Howson, Imogen Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-4424-4656-4 A teenage girl learns the terrifying truth about her physically painful visions of another girl’s life. Elissa misses her old life, before the hallucinations, the pain, the mysterious |
bruises and the endless doctor appointments for a condition most people think is attention-seeking behavior. Finally, a specialist offers brain surgery to end her visions. But when Elissa finds proof that one of her visions was real, she discovers her condition isn’t just a brain malfunction. The visions are a telepathic link that lead Elissa to her newly escaped, tortured twin: Lin, a Spare, is viewed as nonhuman. Elissa, unwilling to let the scientists catch Lin and hurt her again, runs away with her, giving up normalcy for good. Each twin brings tools to help them as they barely evade authorities—Elissa has convenient, hightech false IDs that double as no-limit credit cards, and Lin has electrokinetic powers—in an action-packed, tense chase. Lin’s lack of compassion and trust for anyone except Elissa and Elissa’s naïve worldview test their newfound bond. Their only hope is to get off the planet by manipulating and taking advantage of Elissa’s love interest—a complex character despite the forced romantic subplot. While escaping, they discover the secret purpose of Spares, and the ending resolves the standalone plot in a way thematically consistent with the girls’ growth. Moral dilemmas and character development distinguish it from the crowded dystopian field. (Science fiction. 12-17)
FML
Hutchinson, Shaun David Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 paper | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-4424-8318-7 978-1-4424-3287-1 paper Two different storylines about one party may result in a “who cares?” shrug. Cassandra Castillo is throwing a party at her house, and it’s a golden opportunity for Simon. He’s been in love with her since freshman year, and senior year is nearly over. So Simon’s plan is simple: He’ll get a kiss from Cassie and confess his love, even though his friends Ben and Coop tell him to forget her. Thus begins two alternating, complicated storylines, denoted for readers by different typefaces, as Simon attempts to woo Cassie. In one, there’s dancing and a session of Q-and-A beer pong before Simon can tell Cassie how he feels. The less realistic storyline features a strange girl, Stella—who just might be perfect for Simon—and Simon dressing in drag. In addition to the expected drinking, drugs, rude humor and fights, Hutchinson throws in Coop and Ben’s worries about sex ruining their relationship and strange interactions with Cassie’s ex. In only one storyline will Simon kiss Cassie, but in both he’ll find that this party has changed his life. Bland characters and plot gimmicks make this an empty-calories book. (Fiction. 14 & up)
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Meg Medina
Naming the Monster By Andi Diehn When novelist Meg Medina talks about her own experiences with bullying, the pain in her voice is still acute. “There’s a shame to it,” she says, quietly. “You start to wonder if there really is something wrong with you.” The title and first line of Medina’s new book, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, is taken nearly word for word from a threat Medina received as a teenager. “Someone approached me and said, ‘So and so is going to kick your ass.’ And I had no idea who that person was, no clue why I was targeted. It had a huge and terrible impact on me,” she recalls. “I started to skip school and try on all kinds of personalities, each more fierce and reckless, to try and make myself as hard as possible, so I’d be more fearsome. It didn’t work!” Medina can laugh now at her past attempts to be tough. But “being afraid in a place that was supposed to be safe—that takes years to get over.”
Photo Courtesy of Candlewick Press
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Medina’s character, Piedad Sanchez, tries the same techniques as Medina. A once-eager student, Piddy starts skipping school, falling behind and hanging out with people her mother disapproves of. Her aggressors are relentless and manage to make Piddy’s life miserable. It’s only the intervention of a new friend that saves her from making decisions that would have probably had a lasting negative impact on the rest of her life. “What was important to me in writing the book was to present the experience honestly in terms of the fear,” Medina says. Medina acknowledges that bullying today is different than it was when she was in school. While now there are more programs established to combat bullying, there’s also the sweeping power of social media. “It’s another level of humiliation,” she says. “What’s being said becomes so public, you can’t hide from it. And it’s so easy for the person who’s doing the victimizing—they’re behind a keyboard; they can say whatever they want.” Bullying isn’t the only issue Piddy has to deal with: learning about her absent father; finding common ground with her mother; relationships that suddenly evolve beyond her control—the list of challenges is long. “I think that’s the chief work we’re wrestling with at that age,” says Medina. “We’re trying to figure out desperately what our truth is, who we are as people, what our relationship is going to be with our parents as we try to pull away. It’s such hard work! When bullying happens, or any other major life event, it doesn’t stop the rest of your life from happening. It all becomes this murky soup.” “It wasn’t a conscious decision to include all that when I sat down to write the book,” she adds. “But I was writing in first person and sort of mainlined back to when I was a teen. Some days you write it white-knuckled because you go back to those feelings. It’s hard.” While Medina’s book hits some pretty heavy pressure points (Kirkus, in a starred review, discovers “themes of
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identity, escapism and body image” while calling the book “far more than a problem novel”), it’s still a hopeful read rather than a depressing one. One particular point of brightness is Salon Corazon, where Piddy sweeps hair for tips every Saturday. In addition to the money she earns, she gains an understanding about her mother, her family and her community. Medina’s mother emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba and worked in an electronic transistor factory in the New York City area. “The factory floor was a sea of Cuban ladies who had fled from the Cuban revolution,” Medina remembers. “These ladies would go once a week to this little hair shop in Queens. They’d all go! It was that time when they’d have those hairdos that were teased and sprayed and would last a week and then they’d go have it done again.” In Yaqui Delgado, Fabio is a dog, but Fabio was actually the favorite hairdresser at that hair salon. “It was a respite,” Medina adds, “a place where they could go and be made to feel pretty once a week and gossip and talk and so on. It was the women’s voices, the fabulous women who have populated my life, strong Latinas of all stripes…” this entire range all brought together by cultural identity and by their identity as immigrants.” She mentions that some of the women’s occupation was to fold towels; one was married to a spice importer in Great Neck. Books about big issues run the risk of sounding like lectures, but Medina never falls victim. “To write it honestly I had to just say what it was, even though it was painful,” she says. “Otherwise we start to write books that moralize. If we name things honestly, it helps to move the conversation.” Andi Diehn is a freelance writer living in rural New Hampshire. You can find her at andidiehn.com.
Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass Medina, Meg Candlewick Press (272 pp.) $16.99 March 26, 2013 978-0-763658-59-5
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Inside Scoop
Five Issue Books That Don’t Read Like Lectures One of the notable accomplishments of Medina’s new novel is that it addresses headon the gut-wrenching aspects of what it’s like to be bullied without feeling didactic. Other young adult books, all of them starred by Kirkus, that pull off that feat include: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) by Sherman Alexie Fourteen-year-old Junior is a cartoonist and bookworm with a violent but protective best friend Rowdy. Soon after they start freshman year, Junior boldly transfers from a school on the Spokane reservation to one in a tiny white town 22 miles away. I Am J (2011) by Cris Beam Finally, a book about a transgender teen that gives its central character a life in which gender and transition matter but do not define his existence! Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012) by Joyce Carol Oates At the heart of Oates’ riveting and poignant story of three teenage girls in crisis is the notion that a “secret can be too toxic to expose to a friend.” Street Dreams (2012) by Tama Wise Compassionate, thoughtful and expressive, this New Zealand import traces a Maori teen’s journey through friendships, family, work and the realization that he is gay. Cut (2000) by Patricia McCormick McCormick ultimately portrays Callie as a normal teenager who yearns for a stable family structure and friends and who also has a psychological problem. It is a thoughtful look at teenage mental illness and recovery.
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FIRECRACKER
Iserson, David Razorbill/Penguin (336 pp.) $17.99 | May 16, 2013 978-1-59514-370-9 Not your everyday poor-little-richgirl story. Astrid Krieger is incredibly rich. She has no friends and has just been expelled from her private school. She is being forced to attend (horrors!) public school and to see a therapist, the same guy who expelled her for cheating. But don’t feel sorry for Astrid: She has never been at a loss in her life and will undoubtedly not only survive, but make miserable anyone who has ever offended her. As Astrid recounts her story, her astringent wit and distinctive outlook is reflected in a wry, consistently diverting voice that occasionally indulges in a surfeit of swearing. The arc of the plot is never in doubt, as from the first page readers know this self-centered egoist will eventually find friends and learn that doing good can be great. Astrid’s version of doing good gradually gains some depth, but she never loses her sense that she belongs at the center of the world or, er, galaxy. A ditzy older sister and the curmudgeonly grandfather who built the family fortune are some of the more entertaining characters, while the fellow students who populate both private and public schools are considerably less vivid, but that is as it should be. Astrid seldom notices in any depth the lesser beings in her universe, with a choice few exceptions. Being called a firecracker is a derogatory term as far as Astrid is concerned, but for readers, it simply means entertaining. (Fiction. 12-16)
PAPER SON Lee’s Journey to America
James, Helen Foster; Loh, Virginia Shin-Mui Illus. by Ong, Wilson Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-58536-833-4 Series: Tales of Young Americans The journey from China to the United States and the experience on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay are fraught with anxiety and peril for 12-year-old Wang Lee. In order to gain admittance, he takes the “paper son” name Fu Lee, taking the place of someone whose records had burnt in the 1906 earthquake and fire. If he does not pass the examination on Angel Island (the Ellis Island of the West), he will be returned to China. Like many hopeful emigrants, he has carefully memorized each small detail in a “coaching book”: the number of windows in “his” house, its location vis-à-vis neighbors and other minutiae of another family’s home in China. The entire experience is expensive and traumatic, and waiting in the barracks on Angel Island is tiresome, strange and frightening, 92
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all at once. To lose family, name and everything else that one knows takes a brave person, desperate for the opportunity that Gum Saam can provide. Fu Lee meets these demands in a book that clearly shows the boy and his fears and hopes. Ong’s paintings of place and persons make the journey, setting and experience come alive. Backmatter on Angel Island provides historical context. An effective and empathetic depiction of the Angel Island experience. (Picture book. 8-12)
THE LOST (AND FOUND) BALLOON
Jenkins, Celeste Illus. by Bogade, Maria Aladdin (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-4424-6697-5
In a pleasing tale by the recipient of the 2011 Cheerios New Author Contest, cheerful Molly releases a balloon and
gains a friend. Short rhymes describe the red balloon and how “Molly tied on a note / and set it afloat / with hopes it soon would be found.” Text and art capture the growing distance between Molly standing in her yard and the balloon floating higher in the sky: “Close to a cloud. / Sounds not so loud. / Barking dogs hushed. / Honking cars shushed.” The aerial perspectives are dizzying, and Bogade uses uncluttered pen-and-ink artwork to best advantage by leaving swathes of white for eyes to rest on, making bright splotches of color pop whether it is rooftops, fields or the balloon itself. The balloon’s journey over a body of water lasts a magical two spreads, from dusk and through the moonlit night, until it bobs toward shore at sunrise: “Town getting nearer. / Sounds getting clearer. / Blue bird sings. / Tower bell rings.” The excitement and anticipation comes from seeing where the balloon will land after it has traveled such a great distance and who will find it. In a surprising twist, the balloon introduces a new friend much closer than Molly—or readers— might ever have expected. It’s an altogether charming book, but children may want to imitate Molly; adult caregivers of those that do should check environmental cautions and state law first. (Language to this effect will be added to the book in subsequent printings.) (Picture book. 3-6)
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“Kadohata makes all the right choices in structure and narrative. ” froms the thing about luck
GRASSHOPPER MAGIC
Jonell, Lynne Illus. by Dorman, Brandon Random House (112 pp.) $12.99 | $9.99 e-book | $15.99 PLB May 28, 2013 978-0-375-87084-2 978-0-307-97469-3 e-book 978-0-375-97084-9 PLB Hollowstone Hill’s magic (Lawn Mower Magic, 2012, etc.) returns in grasshoppers that, when fried and eaten, give Abner Willow an unexpected bounce. Abner needs to practice bravery in order to lead the annual Willow Days parade, costumed as the ancestor for whom he was named. The costumer, Mrs. Delgado, has assured the four Willow children that the grasshoppers they’ve caught are a delicacy in her home country and cooks them up for lunch. Both Abner and Tate try the baked versions. Soon they are exploring the advantages and disadvantages of being able to leap 20 times their height. When they realize that Mrs. Delgado’s 2-year-old will also be bouncing uncontrollably, they set off to forestall an inevitable catastrophe, but the rescue is not what readers may have expected. Still, family teamwork triumphs again. This latest in a series which began with Hamster Magic (2010) stands alone well, with energy, humor and just enough suspense to carry readers along. Occasional grayscale illustrations will support the story. (Final art not seen.) The third-person narration includes plenty of dialogue and enough yuck factor to please any 8-year-old. But with the children’s ages and grades unstated in this title, both early able readers and older struggling ones will find someone to identify with. With Celia, Derek and Abner all having played starring roles in the series, fans will be eager for Tate’s turn. (Magical adventure. 6-9)
THE THING ABOUT LUCK
Kadohata, Cynthia Atheneum (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4169-1882-0
Twelve-year-old Summer and her Japanese-American family work every harvest season to earn money to pay their mortgage. But this year, they face unprecedented physical and emotional challenges. It has been a particularly hard-luck year. Among other strange occurrences, Summer was bitten by a stray, diseased mosquito and nearly died of malaria, and her grandmother suffers from sudden intense spinal pain. Now her parents must go to Japan to care for elderly relatives. So Summer, her brother and their grandparents must take on the whole burden of working the harvest and coping with one emergency after another. |
She writes a journal chronicling the frightening and overwhelming events, including endless facts about the mosquitoes she fears, the harvest process and the farm machinery that must be conquered. As the season progresses, her relationships with her grandparents and her brother change and deepen, reflecting her growing maturity. Her grandparents’ Japanese culture and perspective are treated lovingly and with gentle humor, as are her brother’s eccentricities. Kadohata makes all the right choices in structure and narrative. Summer’s voyage of self-discovery engages readers via her narration, her journal entries and diagrams, and even through her assigned book report of A Separate Peace. Readers who peel back the layers of obsessions and fears will find a character who is determined, compassionate and altogether delightful. (Fiction. 10-14)
THE ETERNITY CURE
Kagawa, Julie Harlequin Teen (432 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-373-21069-5 Series: Blood of Eden, 2
Seventeen-year-old Allie Sekemoto is back with a vengeance in the second installment of Kagawa’s (The Immortal Rules, 2012) Blood of Eden series. Banished from Eden and separated from her first and only love, Allie finds herself on a dangerous quest to rescue her sire, Kanin, from unspeakable (even by vampire standards) torture. Bonded by blood, Kanin calls to her through agonizing visions and leads Allie on a treacherous journey that will bring her face to face with her human past and with an evil so great it threatens the futures of humans and vampires alike. The stakes are high, and the journey is an incredibly personal one for Allie, which adds deliciously complicated layers to an already compelling plot. Allie again proves herself a force to be reckoned with as she fights to protect the ones she loves and to save both mankind and monster. Readers will also appreciate glimpses of her vulnerable side when it comes to matters of the heart and her desire to cling to the basic tenets of humanity despite the Hunger within. With its Tarantino-esque level of violence and gore, this novel is not for the faint of heart. But those who can stomach it will be counting the days to find out what happens next. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)
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“Kamata writes the intricacies of cerebral palsy—the little maneuvers of cooking, the jerk of an arm betraying emotion— as deftly as Aiko draws or Laina sculpts.” from gadget girl
GADGET GIRL The Art of Being Invisible Kamata, Suzanne Gemma (228 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 29, 2013 978-1-936846-38-2
Originally a novella published in the magazine Cicada and the winner of the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award in Fiction, Kamata’s latest is a sharp, unusual coming-of-age novel. For Aiko Cassidy, it’s hard enough sitting at the “invisible” table and dealing with trespassing geeks. It’s harder when her cerebral palsy makes guys notice her in all the wrong ways. Even worse, Aiko’s mother, Laina, uses her as a model for her sculptures. For privacy, Aiko conceals herself in manga; her alter ego, Gadget Girl, can rescue cute guys and tie her shoes. Aiko dreams of traveling to Japan to meet her favorite artists—and, perhaps, her father. When a sculpture of Aiko wins her and Laina a trip to Paris instead, Aiko meets handsome Hervé and discovers a startling view of her family. Kamata writes the intricacies of cerebral palsy—the little maneuvers of cooking, the jerk of an arm betraying emotion—as deftly as Aiko draws or Laina sculpts. Aiko’s awkwardness is palpable, as are her giddy crush and snarky observations. Some points remain realistically unresolved, in keeping with the garden metaphors throughout the book: “You’re not supposed to be able to see the whole thing at once. Most Japanese gardens are revealed little by little....” Awkwardly and believably, this sensitive novel reveals an artistic teen adapting to family, disability and friendships in all their flawed beauty. (Fiction. 13-17)
COUSIN IRV FROM MARS
Kaplan, Bruce Illus. by Kaplan, Bruce Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4424-4923-7
Sometimes relatives are so weird that they seem to be from outer space. This one just happens to be from Mars. When Teddy’s mother mentions Cousin Irv is coming for a visit, all he knows is that he lives on another planet. Irv lands and proves to be a bit difficult. He blames Teddy’s mother for giving “the worst directions,” eats everything in the kitchen— “in fact, he ate the whole kitchen”—keeps Teddy up at night with his loud breathing and listens “to the most horrible music.” Kaplan (Monsters Eat Whiny Children, 2010), a veteran cartoonist for the New Yorker and television writer (Girls, Seinfeld), pairs the wry text with spare illustrations executed in pen and ink with watercolor. Things take a turn when Cousin Irv takes Teddy to school. Irv finds out Teddy has no friends and decides to do something about it. The duo causes a stir at school, especially 94
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when Irv pulls out “his electromagnetic ray and vaporized a few things in the classroom.” The teacher bans the ray gun but as a result is vaporized as well. This spread is alarmingly effective: One side shows a close-up of a blue gun producing green rays, and the other is mostly blank except for a lonely pair of gray heels and pink streaks highlighting where the teacher once was. Soon Teddy finds more to appreciate in his eccentric relative, but then Irv returns to Mars, leaving Teddy quite lonely…until his dad has a change in work assignments. Clever, but the sophisticated humor seems aimed at older readers and adults. (Picture book. 5-8)
THE FIGHT
Karre, Elizabeth Darby Creek (128 pp.) $7.95 paper | $20.95 e-book | $27.93 PLB May 1, 2013 978-1-4677-0709-1 978-1-4677-0971-2 e-book 978-1-4677-0596-7 PLB Series: Surviving Southside Teens at Texas’ ethnically diverse Southside High fight an anti-gay school policy after incidents of homophobic bullying. When her teacher witnesses an act of anti-gay violence in the school hallway and refuses to intervene, Bella—short for Isabel—is horrified. Even though Dominic, the student being bullied, downplays the incident when Bella asks him about it, Bella feels called to action. When she decides to join the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, however, she discovers the club only exists unofficially. Zoe, one of the students involved, explains, “There’s something going on....The teachers are totally freaked out about anything having to do with gay people.” Readers who remember The Alliance (2013), set at Southside a year earlier, will recognize the district’s “neutrality policy” as the reason teachers refuse to intervene in homophobic bullying or even teach works by queer creators such as Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay or Aaron Copland. Here, Bella and Zoe uncover the policy and launch a community-wide battle against it. Although the story is bare-bones short, the characters are well-drawn, and there is room for nuance. Bella is interested in a female classmate, June, but what that means about her sexuality is left refreshingly ambiguous. An inspiring tale, simply told. (Fiction. 12-16)
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THE HIDDEN DEEP
Kinde, Christa Zondervan (272 pp.) $14.99 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-310-72489-6 Series: Threshold, 2
This second volume in the Threshold series stands, as did the series debut, with one foot in the clouds—amid an epic battle of angels and demons—and another planted firmly on the Earth, entrenched in the ordinary lives of the Pomeroy family. In this relatively slow-paced sequel, 14-year-old Prissie Pomeroy learns that an angel has been kidnapped right from her family’s apple orchard. The other angels she knows—some of whom are members of her community in human guise—are trying to locate and rescue him. The angels are also concerned with protecting Prissie; she is important to the mission of the angels in some way and is in serious danger, but the nature of her role is not made clear. Scenes of angels and occasionally demons going about their mysterious, ethereal business are woven into the more commonplace story of a young woman dealing with complicated friendships and family dynamics. While the angels-and-demons subplot is a bit baffling, the more realistic elements of the narrative, such as the scenes that describe Prissie’s struggles with jealousy of the time and attention her father devotes to his bakery assistant, are well-executed and resonant. A slow but ultimately successful installment in a serviceable Christian fiction series aimed at middle-grade readers. (order of angels, discussion questions) (Fantasy. 10-14)
A MATTER OF DAYS
Kizer, Amber Delacorte (288 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-385-73973-3 978-0-375-89825-9 e-book 978-0-385-90804-7 PLB Two siblings make their way across an America devastated by a killer pandemic. After the death of their mother and pretty much the entire city of Seattle, Nadia and Rabbit decide to travel across the country to reach their grandfather and uncle in West Virginia. They pass through a world where the weaponized BluStar virus has killed practically everyone, leaving bodies rotting in the streets. As they travel, they discover that the very few other survivors can be savage and are serious threats in a world with no law or order. However, there are unexpected kindly allies too. Alliances formed with those they meet and the ability to manage in a world with no electricity or media are critical. Fighting to survive, these siblings heed the advice their Marine father gave them before dying in Afghanistan: to “[b]e |
the cockroach, not the orchid.” The trip from Washington to the Mississippi is a long and detailed one, comprising more than three-quarters of the book, but then events compress. There’s a cute boy, a dog that needs rescuing and fortuitous caches of supplies at regular intervals along the trek. Despite these clichés, the narrative is engaging and the characters believably portrayed. This post-apocalyptic tale is particularly frightening as it doesn’t take place in some distant, imagined future. A solid, realistically imagined survival tale with a strong female protagonist. (Post-apocalyptic adventure. 11-16)
TWINKY THE DINKY DOG
Klimo, Kate Illus. by Fleming, Michael Random House (48 pp.) $3.99 paper | $12.99 PLB May 28, 2013 978-0-307-97667-3 978-0-375-97122-8 PLB
A petite, pampered pooch learns how to run with the big dogs in this funny early reader that will resonate with any kids who might long for a less protected, more exciting environment. Twinky, a diminutive Boston terrier, is completely coddled by his overprotective owner. She sends him to charm school and carries him in her purse. She dresses him in sweaters and “made him go potty on a wee-wee pad. That was the worst!” Klimo cleverly uses repetition of all these pampered-pet features as a humorous device that also reinforces those terms for new readers. When Twinky escapes to the dog park to play with larger, more experienced dogs, he learns “big-dog moves” like “struts and growls and snarls and scowls.” This comes in handy later that night, when Twinky must defend his home from a burglar. Twinky’s heroics are recounted in a newspaper story, and he is allowed to act like a normal dog with his new pals. Snappy, computer-generated illustrations provide a contemporary flair for Twinky’s adventures, with stylized, angular shapes for the dogs and a muted palette of sophisticated shades. Kids will cheer as the little guy breaks free from mom’s apron strings—go, Twinky! (Early reader. 5-8)
THE GREAT LOLLIPOP CAPER
Krall, Dan Illus. by Krall, Dan Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $16.99 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4424-4460-7
As some ingredients have more flavor before cooking, this edible protagonist has more flavor before he learns his lesson. The punny title’s “caper” is a brined flower bud, the kind that lands on plates for eating—well, eating
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by some people. “[A] caper is a tiny pickled sourpuss, who lives in a jar in your fridge and is never eaten by children.” Adults effuse, “Ciao, Mr. Caper, delicioso!!!” and, “Ya Meester Caper, ve luv you!!!” But the grouchy caper seethes with jealousy of a tall red lollipop who’s desired by children. So Mr. Caper executes a caper—he sneaks into a factory and pours a beaker of green liquid—caper flavoring—into vats of lollipop batter in order to make unwitting children “appreciate my complex flavor.” Worldwide, children lick green lollies, turn green with nausea and start “acting in the most appalling ways.” They upend trash cans, stick out their tongues and bring home bad grades. Moral: Capers can only ever be an acquired taste, and this remorseful one must wait until the kids grow up. Krall’s shiny digital illustrations are cartoony and bold, with some Grinch-like expressions and dramatic composition. One Everykid-likes-lollipops spread could be straight from Disney’s “It’s a Small World.” There’s a sly edginess to characters who’ll do anything to be eaten, but this particular pickled sourpuss loses his tang as he lowers his expectations. (Picture book. 4-7)
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SNIFF FOR
Krulik, Nancy Illus. by Braun, Sebastien Grosset & Dunlap (128 pp.) $4.99 paper | May 16, 2013 978-0-448-46399-5 Series: Magic Bone, 1
Magical travel, doggy style. When Sparky, a yappy mutt, unearths a magic bone, he is transported to Buckingham Palace. There, he quickly befriends a bossy corgi who helps him navigate the new terrain. Though the story is told in Sparky’s ingenuous first-canine voice, it’s clear that Sparky is a less-than-obedient dog. Young readers will revel in his naughtiness, especially when he upbraids his appendages for causing all his troubles. Eventually, he is captured and sent to the pound and escapes again, this time with new dog pal Watson, a forlorn little mongrel. Together, they find the bone again and test out the magic. The dog’s point of view wears thin in spots, especially when Sparky sinks into potty talk: “tooting” when eating beans and sniffing a human’s behind. Calculated to capture the Captain Underpants crowd, these diversions interfere with the dog voice and detract from the true humor of the story. The constant reference to humans as “two-legs” when Sparky seems to have a good command of other vocabulary seems forced, as well. Black-and-white illustrations grace most spreads and add smiles and energy. Emerging readers, especially dog lovers, will find this light fare easy to read but not particularly meaty. Not much to chew on here. (London facts) (Fantasy. 5-8)
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FIVE SUMMERS
LaMarche, Una Razorbill/Penguin (384 pp.) $17.99 | May 16, 2013 978-1-59514-672-4 BFFs Emma, Jo, Skylar and Maddie meet up at Camp Nedoba the year after their last summer at the traditional camp, intending to renew their personal vows of loyalty to each other and to enjoy a nostalgic week of s’mores and summer fun. The lifelong friendships start to crack under the strain of very real adult dilemmas caused by boyfriend trouble, deception and betrayal. The girls are forced to examine their summercamp relationships through the prism of their increasingly complex lives. Each of the four harbors a secret that is revealed at an inopportune moment. Middle-class Maddie has invented a wealthy family; Skylar doesn’t get along with her demanding father; Emma has a secret, unrequited passion for one of the boys at camp; tomboy Jo, the daughter of the camp owner, realizes that being the life and soul of camp administration is not helping her image in the boyfriend stakes. However, in the end, friendship trumps all, and each girl finds her own resolution to life’s gnarly problems. The chirpy narrative, though introduced in Emma’s first-person, alternates its third-person focus from girl to girl and is punctuated by flashbacks to earlier summers. Despite orienting chapter headers, the lack of differentiation of flashbacks from the present-day story is sometimes confusing. In the end, this debut feels long and may not contain enough real substance to appeal to even the most avid of summer-camp fans. (Fiction. 12-16)
OCEAN COUNTING
Lawler, Janet Photos by Skerry, Brian National Geographic (48 pp.) $16.95 | May 14, 2013 978-1-4263-1116-1 Gorgeous photographs and straightforward counting offer preschoolers a few facts about some ocean animals. As is to be expected for a National Geographic title, Skerry’s photographs take center stage. Each double-page spread is filled completely with a close-up of the featured species in its natural environment, capturing a small slice of life and hooking readers. From the photo of the hammerhead sharks, seen in shadow from underneath, to the brilliantly colored glass eye fish that “dart and dip” such that the picture’s background shows a slight blur, each page turn surprises. Young readers will be fascinated by the mix of mammals, fish and invertebrates—a green sea turtle, Bermuda sea chub, harp seals, star-eyed parrotfish, Caribbean reef squid, Adélie penguins, sea otters—that represent a wide range of marine environments. The brightly colored numerals in the corners are prominent, while a brief paragraph tells about each of
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“Readers feel the weight of the worry and stress overwhelming Erica as she narrates her struggle….” from ask my mood ring how i feel
the 10 different marine species, giving basic facts and frequently drawing readers in with a question. “Five arms on this pink sea star bend and flex. Tube-like suckers underneath these arms hold the sea star in place. What else do the suckers do? They grab food and help the sea star move.” “Did you know” boxes provide one other tidbit. Backmatter includes more counting practice, facts about each species (home, size, food, predators, young), a map, glossary and list of resources. A great counting and learning combination. (Informational picture book. 3-5)
BOO ABC A to Z with the World’s Cutest Dog Lee, J.H. Photos by LeMaistre, Gretchen Chronicle (32 pp.) $12.99 | May 28, 2013 978-1-4521-0919-9
Boo, the “world’s cutest dog,” stars in an ABC book with staged photographs of his toys, clothing, friends and activities. This is the third entry in a series of books starring the cuddly, cute canine that became famous for YouTube clips of his antics. Boo is a Pomeranian with a unique haircut that gives him the appearance of a stuffed animal rather than a live dog. He peeks out from under a blanket on the book’s cover, with an endearing look that invites readers in. Each page includes one alphabet letter with a related word highlighted in a white dog-bone shape, with Boo showing off that item. An additional sentence on each page is written in Boo’s voice, describing the scene. Most of the alphabet entries work well enough, though the giraffe on the G page is inexplicably missing its head, and two entries show Boo with treats containing chocolate, which is toxic to dogs. Some of the associations are abstract, particularly given the composition, so adults will need to be actively engaged (the portable salon-style hairdryer on the F page makes Boo “fluffy,” for instance). Although the text is mundane, the high-quality photographs are clear and well-staged, and the star of this show is undeniably appealing. Fluffy and cutesy, just like Boo. (Picture book. 3-6)
HAPPY BIRDDAY, TACKY!
Lester, Helen Illus. by Munsinger, Lynn Houghton Mifflin (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 14, 2013 978-0-547-91228-8 Series: Tacky the Penguin
It takes a lot of planning to put together the perfect penguin party. And even then... The Nice Icy Land is “crackling with busy-ness.” Everyone is deep into preparations for Tacky’s Birdday Party. This |
includes baking, practicing the special song and making a whole slew of cards for their decidedly odd friend. Tacky wakes up the next morning and, in a purple scarf and shirt decorated with yellow flowers, immediately starts doing the Flapwaddle Dance, which he has just invented. A huge “Surprise!!” interrupts him. The party throwers give Tacky a beautiful dinner jacket; he asks whether he should eat it now. All his friends are dumbstruck, and Tacky’s characteristically bizarre behavior further astounds them. The cake eventually lands on Tacky’s head, where everybody eats from it like a polenta. How imperfect can a party get? Only the big finale remains: It’s Twinklewebs the Dance Queen in all her pink glory. So enthusiastic is she that she overdoes it and hurts her web feet. Tacky comes unexpectedly to the rescue, teaching her and the whole party his Flapwaddle Dance. Now that’s a great party! Lester’s celebration of differences continues to make its point. Both her text and Munsinger’s illustrations are sunny and impish. Another enthusiastic embrace of silliness from Antarctica. (Picture book. 3-6)
ASK MY MOOD RING HOW I FEEL
López, Diana Little, Brown (336 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-316-20996-0
A funny and heartfelt story about a girl dealing with the trials of middle school and her mother’s breast cancer. Until the summer before eighth grade, 13-year-old Erica “Chia” Montenegro has only had to worry about her ever-expanding Chia Pet collection, her annoying siblings and “close encounters” with the boys on her Boyfriend Wish List. When her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, Erica’s world is turned upside down. Readers feel the weight of the worry and stress overwhelming Erica as she narrates her struggle to balance a heavier academic load, increased household chores and caring for her 2-year-old brother so that her mother, exhausted from chemotherapy treatments, can rest. It only makes things worse that her mood ring seems to better understand her feelings than the Robins, her nosy group of friends. When Erica makes a promesa, committing to get 500 sponsors for her Race for the Cure walk, she finds it’s not an easy promise to keep, and she’ll need to be strong in order to help herself and her family make it through this challenging time. Balancing the heavy subject matter with generous doses of humor and an authentic young teen voice, López crafts a story that blends family and middle school drama successfully. (Fiction. 11-14)
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“The multilayered, multimedia collage makes things look real enough to touch (and readers will try)….” from the things i can do
THE SKELETON PIRATE
THE THINGS I CAN DO
Lucas, David Illus. by Lucas, David Candlewick (30 pp.) $15.99 | May 1, 2013 978-0-7636-6107-6
Mack, Jeff Illus. by Mack, Jeff Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-59643-675-6
The terror of the seas is not fleshand-blood; he’s all skin-and-bones! Surfing the ocean on a detached hatch, the Skeleton Pirate waves his cutlass and declares, “I’ll never be beaten!” He vanquishes a giant patchwork sea serpent, but a full ship’s complement of living pirates chains him up and throws him into the briny deep. Luckily, a friendly mermaid with a skeleton key swims by and frees him—but an enormous whale swallows them both. Inside its belly is a huge array of priceless pirate swag, including a golden ship encrusted with jewels. The Skeleton Pirate hatches an escape plan; he and the mermaid travel through the whale’s insides to a rounded door right at the ear. Opening it carefully, the Pirate tells the whale all about the booty in his stomach. “No wonder I feel so ill,” the whale declares. The Skeleton Pirate says he knows exactly what to do. He and the mermaid load up the golden ship and sail away into the sunset. Dropping to one knee in front of the mermaid, he produces a diamond ring and says, “I think I’ve been beaten at last.” Both Lucas’ over-the-top yarn and loopy larger-than-life ink-and-watercolor cartoon illustrations wink at readers while producing one clever surprise after another. Exhilarating pirate fare. (Picture book. 4-8)
THE STORY OF THE LITTLE PIGGY WHO COULDN’T SAY NO
With boundless energy and bouncing rhyme, a boy shows readers his handmade book—this book—about his burgeoning independence. From making his own lunch and getting his own drink (milk spills down the page), to bathing in the sink and fixing toys with a lake of glue, this boy’s on a hilarious tear. Self-portraits race across the spreads, outlined in bold, black crayon. The boy’s head and ears evoke Charlie Brown. He’s always in motion, and every supply in the house seems to have been commandeered for this project. The multilayered, multimedia collage makes things look real enough to touch (and readers will try): pencils and Popsicle sticks, Legos and paper towels, circular confetti from a hole punch, construction paper and shiny paper and graph paper—and appearing most touchable of all, liberal amounts of cellophane tape, masking tape, duct tape and stickers. Bits of photo stand out amid the childlike art—the spray attachment on a faucet and the boy’s teeth while he’s brushing them (though not the rest of his face). “I can brush my own teeth. / I can pick out my clothes. // This sweater was perfect!!! / For wiping my nose.” A drop of snot (plenty big enough to be seen from a distance) and the underwear on his head will be popular. Rowdy and infectious: Fetch tape and crayons. (Picture book. 4-7)
Ludwig, Sabine Illus. by Wilharm, Sabine Sky Pony Press (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-62087-684-8
HEATHER FELL IN THE WATER
With everyone making demands, what’s a little piggy to do? “The day is lovely with bright sun. / A swim, thinks piggy, would be fun.” She grabs her beach-fun supplies and heads out for the ocean. But her mother wants a kiss goodbye, and piggy misses her bus. She decides a walk will do her good, but she’s accosted by a dog who demands her swim tube, and he pops it. A kitty takes her hat. Piggy loses her ball to a bunch of soccer-playing rabbits. A crocodile snatches her shades; a badger takes her cookies. And finally, a bear insists she help him escape a bog. Piggy’s had enough! Putting her trotter down has unforeseen consequences...but they aren’t all bad. Something is definitely lost in translation in this German import. Piggy never even gets the chance to say “no” as animal after animal accosts her along the way. The animals who steal and destroy her belongings all end up having a blast in the mud of the bog, so their unacceptable behavior is rewarded. The genial, bright, coloredpencil illustrations can’t save this forcibly rhymed text. Piggy never learns to say no; she plans to play with her tormentors tomorrow. Saying “no” to this piggy should be easy. (Picture book. 4-8) 98
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MacLeod, Doug Illus. by Smith, Craig Allen & Unwin (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-74237-648-6
Young Heather experiences an interesting relationship with water in this
slightly offbeat tale. Heather falls into puddles—and horse troughs on the farm they visit, fountains at the art museum and the lake at the Japanese tea house. It gets so bad that her parents insist on her wearing water wings even in bed (there’s a small puddle with her clothes in it on the floor of her room). Heather figures that the water hates her. But when her parents note that she really needs to learn how to swim in case she meets up with some seriously deep water, she takes on the challenge and realizes that the water actually loves her. She promises to learn to swim if the water stops making her fall in all the time. She does, it does, and she goes on to swimming competitions as she gets older (with a little parental joke at the end). The watercolors are delightfully watery, and readers will actually see the water grin at Heather as
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she becomes more proficient. Heather keeps her determined expression throughout, but various animal companions are mostly smiling. It’s hard to say whether this might convince fearful children that the water is their friend, but its sly attitude is definitely amusing. (Picture book. 4-8)
BETTER TO WISH
Martin, Ann M. Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 1, 2013 978-0-545-35942-9 978-0-545-53926-5 e-book Series: Family Tree, 1 Martin delivers the first novel of a planned quartet, set to span four generations of daughters. In a brief prologue, 100-year-old Abby muses about time’s swift passage and the kaleidoscopic aspect of memories—and secrets— recalled from the past. Readers meet Abby Nichols at age 8 in 1930. She’s big sister to Rose, good friend to Sarah and Orrin, and she’s already expert at navigating the moods of her domineering father, Luther, and emotionally fragile mother, Nell. Ensuing chapters cover 15 years. Luther builds a prosperous business, moving the family from their small Maine seaside cottage to a fancy house in a larger town. Servants, store-bought dresses and Zander, the appealing boy next door don’t dampen Abby’s longing for the authentic friendships of life before. Her academic and social successes are pummeled by tragedy: Beloved Sarah drowns in an icy pond, and Nell breaks after Luther secretly institutionalizes their developmentally disabled 5-year-old son. While outwardly obeisant to her bigoted father— who cruelly forbids friendships, jobs and college—Abby builds a capacity for compassion that sustains her siblings. Eventually—and critically—she learns to use it to nurture herself. In a 1945 epilogue, Abby’s a working girl in New York City—and Zander’s on her doorstep. Some threads—whither Orrin?—are left dangling. But the deftly rendered theme of personal resilience, laced with romance and Americana, will earn this a deservedly wide audience. (Historical fiction. 8-12)
GETTYSBURG The True Account of Two Young Heroes in the Greatest Battle of the Civil War Martin, Iain C. Sky Pony Press (208 pp.) $16.95 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-62087-532-2
Wagonloads of detail weigh down this overstuffed account of the Civil War’s most significant battle and its aftermath. |
Martin builds his narrative around numerous eyewitness accounts, despite the implication of the subtitle. He covers events from the rival armies’ preliminary jockeying for position to Lee’s retreat, the heroic efforts to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers left behind, as well as the establishment some months later of the cemetery that was the occasion for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The battle itself, though, quickly becomes a dizzying tally of this regiment going here, that brigade charging there, the movements insufficiently supported by the small, hard-to-read battle maps. Overheated lines like “As the armies met in battle, the ground…soaked up the blood of Americans flowing into the soil” have a melodramatic effect. Moreover, as nearly everyone mentioned even once gets one or more period portraits, the illustrations become a tedious gallery of look-alike shots of scowling men with heavy facial hair. Still, the author does offer a cogent, carefully researched view of the battle and its significance in both the short and long terms. Thorough to a fault, and for young readers at least, no replacement for Jim Murphy’s oldie but goodie The Long Road to Gettysburg (1992). (glossary, index, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 12-15)
PI IN THE SKY
Mass, Wendy Little, Brown (256 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-316-08916-6 Astrophysics and cosmology play around with haphazard cheer in an experimental comedy that could be a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for kids. Joss is 13 (well, “more like a few billion and thirteen”) and lives in The Realms, a huge place “inside what you call dark matter.” As seventh son of the Supreme Overlord of the Universe, Joss’ job is to deliver pies. He only partially understands why it matters—after his deliveries, “[s]omehow the Powers That Be distribute the pies to the far reaches of the universe, wherever new star systems are forming”—but he understands the rule (like Star Trek’s Prime Directive) that The Realms “never interfere with the planets’ natural evolution.” That said, if any planetary life-form sees The Realms, the penalty is “immediate disintegration of the entire planet.” Yet when human Annika Klutzman spots a Realms pie-baker through a telescope, the PTB don’t demolish Earth—they rip it “out of the space-time continuum” so it never existed (sort of). Annika herself materializes inexplicably in The Realms, where she and Joss labor to rebuild Earth’s solar system. Chapters open with tantalizing quotes from the likes of Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and, of course, Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Science and absurdity frolic together to gleeful effect. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-12)
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THE COLOR OF RAIN
McCarthy, Cori Running Press Teens (352 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-0-7624-4821-0 A science-fiction thriller delivers on suspense but turns squeamish over its edgy premise. Seventeen-year-old Rain White is so desperate to escape the slums of Earth City that she agrees to trade her body to a handsome young starship captain for passage across the Void and medical treatment for her brother. But Johnny, it turns out, has a whole stable of “girls,” expected to sexually service his passengers and crew. When Rain discovers that his real business is even worse, it will take all of her smarts and courage just to survive. The futuristic societies and technology here are not mere window dressing but integral to the plot. Rain’s narrative voice is generally thoughtful and poetic, except when she’s berating herself for her inexplicable attraction to Johnny (despite presenting him as consummately vicious and abusive) while disregarding her obligatory gorgeous, supportive and noble secondary love interest. More disturbing, although everyone exclaims how pretty, clever and brave Rain is, and although the story (commendably) never romanticizes sex work, Rain—even after years on the streets with her prostitute best friend—remains unbelievably virginally innocent and prudishly judgmental. Her sexual encounters are glossed over in vague terms (unlike the many graphic descriptions of gory violence), and her unselfish motives and lack of alternatives are so frequently emphasized that her constant wallowing in shame and self-denigration becomes more irritating than sympathetic. Those ready to gloss over the stereotypical characters, the presentation of an all-white, exclusively hetero future and the unfortunate subtextual implications will enjoy an elegantly written and emotionally cathartic page-turner. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
NEVER
McEntire, K.D. Pyr/Prometheus Books (302 pp.) $17.95 | May 14, 2013 978-1-61614-771-6 Series: Lightbringer, 3 Left powerless and near death in Reaper (2012), Wendy must unravel the mysteries of her Reaper family before the Lady Walker’s evil plans reach fruition. While physically comatose, Wendy joins her ghost friends in a desperate attempt to thwart her family’s schemes and stay alive. These plots now come from two angles, as her cousin Jane isn’t working with Reaper leader Elise anymore. Also, there’s the Lady Walker, who, in between reaching out to invite Wendy to join her side, opens pathways to the 100
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Never for the terrifying creatures that live in the space between worlds. These grotesque creatures are a welcome addition to the story, as horrifying as they are fun. To defeat Elise’s manipulation and the Lady Walker’s destructive plans, Wendy must uncover her mother’s history with Elise as well as Piotr’s past and history with Reapers (and surprising Reaper mythology). The expository flashbacks and dream sequences occasionally disrupt the story rhythm, but the action scenes are exciting and mostly believable. Some of the awkward dialogue that plagued the trilogy’s previous installments is minimized by the faster pace and near-constant action. Wendy’s siblings, drawn into the fray, join the cast of side characters endangered to raise stakes. The conclusion drops a few plot points entirely, but it ends on an emotionally complex, satisfying note. Easily the best book in the trilogy. (Fantasy. 12-17)
PIECE OF MY HEART
Menna, Lynn Maddalena Merit Press (240 pp.) $17.95 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4405-6105-4
Blessed with an impressive fouroctave vocal range, 17-year-old Marisol Reyes is ready to make a name for herself in the glamorous and perilous world of the music industry. When a YouTube video of Marisol goes viral, she soon finds herself performing and partying with top stars, many of whom are drawn from current pop culture (Jay-Z and Beyoncé make cameos, for instance). Her ambition leads to jealousy among her friends and tension in her on-again, off-again relationship with her high school boyfriend. As Marisol inches closer to realizing her dream, she discovers that the music business has its own rules. Despite tedious stretches of song lyrics, the plot in Menna’s debut moves quickly, with short chapters full of frenemies, fashion, relationship status changes and sexual innuendo. Marisol flip-flops between independence and naïveté as she navigates how much of herself she is willing to compromise in order to get ahead. Unfortunately, her selfcenteredness makes it difficult to empathize with her struggle. She is scathingly judgmental of the people around her yet easily intimidated by those whom she perceives as powerful, especially men. With so many strong female protagonists in young-adult literature, one wonders if today’s teen readers will be willing to endure Marisol’s constant pouting. This attempt at a rags-to-riches tale of a wannabe pop superstar delivers more whining than wailing. (Fiction. 14 & up)
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“…Kiara has few adult resources, and her frustration with the world rings true in her first-person narration.” from rogue
THE SECRET OF THE TWELFTH CONTINENT
Michaelis, Antonia Translated by Hosmer-Dillard, Mollie Illus. by Nievelstein, Ralf Sky Pony Press (288 pp.) $14.95 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-1-62087-539-1 A foundling with anger issues takes on a sentient island with the same problem in this loosely linked sequel to The Secret Room (2012). Certain that he’ll never be adopted like his friend Achim from the previous volume, 12-year-old Karl sneaks away from the orphanage with only a toothbrush and a toy boat for baggage. The latter immediately comes in handy, as Karl runs into a crew of thumb-sized sea nomads who have lost their ship and are eager to return to a certain strange island (which they dub a “continent”) where their children disappeared. Thanks to a magic biscuit, Karl shrinks down to join them and after a short voyage, finds himself on that island. It turns out to be governed by a mysterious Ancient One prone to rages that cause violent storms and earthquakes. Nursing deep feelings of abandonment that tend to express themselves in furious outbursts, Karl can relate. Spinning her tale around sympathetic characters rather than a plausible storyline, Michaelis equips her mercurial protagonist with lots of thoroughly convenient magical and fullsize human help. He ultimately finds not only the children (who have been transformed into trees), but also tidy cures for both his anger and the Ancient One’s. In frequent vignettes, Nievelstein focuses on objects and setting rather than cast members. Facile, but well-stocked with tiny people, odd little twists and narrow squeaks. (Fantasy. 10-12)
ROGUE
Miller-Lachmann, Lyn Nancy Paulsen Books (240 pp.) $16.99 | May 16, 2013 978-0-399-16225-1 An eighth-grader’s Asperger’s syndrome complicates her navigation of an unpredictable—and often inexplicable—world. Kicked out of school after cracking a popular (and rather deserving) girl on the head with her lunch tray during one of her many angerdriven meltdowns, Kiara’s searching for a real friend. When 12-year-old Chad and his little brother move in across the street, it seems like the perfect opportunity. Chad is deceitful, but Kiara quickly discovers it’s mostly because his parents are using him to buy large quantities of Sudafed, an ingredient for their meth lab. She also explores a developing connection with Antonio, a friend of her older brother and someone who seems to understand her focus on Rogue, one of the X-Men, whom she |
views as a comforting alter ego. Whether Antonio’s just being friendly or trying to exploit her innocence is never clear, but his attractiveness lands her and Chad at a high school drinking party. With her back-up-singer mother performing in Canada and her father not really understanding her, Kiara has few adult resources, and her frustration with the world rings true in her first-person narration. Her meltdowns, unfortunately, come off more as tantrums than manifestations of her syndrome, making her a less-attractive character than she deserves to be. An interesting and somewhat enlightening look at a girl struggling but sometimes making bumpy progress in dealing with Asperger’s. (Fiction. 12-18)
THE ELEMENTALS
Mitchell, Saundra Harcourt (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-0-547-85314-7
The final book in Mitchell’s historical trilogy with paranormal overtones. (The Springsweet, 2012, etc.). In Connersville, Ind., young Julian Birch struggles to accept the limitations imposed by his polio-withered leg: Unlike his brothers, he won’t be able to fight in World War I or work the family farm. But Julian has inherited a gift from his parents. Father Emerson can affect earth (how is not precisely clear), and mother Zora calls water. Julian can bring dead insects back to life; he also has visions of a strange girl on the edge of an ocean. Meanwhile, Kate, the bohemian daughter of Amelia (fire elemental) and Nathaniel (air), can stop time—but is much more interested in becoming a filmmaker. Eventually, the two meet in Los Angeles, where they discover exactly how much their gifts cost. The ending of the book is truly compelling. However, it’s a tough road getting there. Readers unfamiliar with the first two books will struggle to understand veiled references to the elementals’ gifts. The menacing character of Caleb/Virgil appears at first with seemingly no reason. Frequent point-of-view shifts and a certain floridness in Mitchell’s prose make it difficult to care about the characters, and uneven pacing means that some characters get far too much page time for their importance to the plot. The least successful of the three. (Paranormal historical fantasy. 12 & up)
NIÑO WRESTLES THE WORLD
Morales, Yuyi Illus. by Morales, Yuyi Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-59643-604-6
Little luchador Niño battles out-ofthis-world opponents one by one until he finally meets his match.
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“Smart, clean design and a text built around unpunctuated phrases offer room to pause, ponder and discuss in this book of quiet joy.” from how to
Niño has a big imagination and a love of lucha libre, the popular Mexican masked wrestling. While his sisters nap, he becomes an impressive luchador, facing competitors often drawn from Mexican history and folklore. The text, unfolding as if by a commentator calling the action, begs to be read aloud. Challengers are vanquished not by violence but by gentle horseplay and clever wit—until Niño meets Las Hermanitas, awake from their naps, and must quickly devise a new strategy to take on such crafty adversaries. A multiple Pura Belpré medal winner, Morales’ (Just in Case, 2008, etc.) style of illustration continues to evolve with this title. She uses a graphic approach reminiscent of a comic book, with speech bubbles and sound effects, a smart choice for moving along the action of the plot. This design will appeal to children who may struggle to find picture books that match their interests and energy level, especially boys. Trading-card–style introductions to each opponent on the endpapers include pronunciation guidance for Spanish names. Occasional challenges with text placement and page flow keep this title from being flawless, but young readers will be so engrossed with this humorous story that these issues are easy to overlook. Sure to be a smash. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)
SAVING THE TEAM
Morgan, Alex Simon & Schuster (176 pp.) $15.99 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4424-8570-9 Series: Kicks Olympic gold medalist Morgan runs down the celebrity-sports-fiction checklist in this series opener: New school? Check. New friends? Check. New boyfriend? Maybe! New soccer team? Check. Inspire said team to take on snooty archrival private school? Check. Quickly shedding perfunctory initial reservations, Devin sails into seventh grade at Kentville Middle School, makes instant connections in class and at Kangaroos soccer tryouts. She meets requisite bully Mirabelle at the latter, then goes on to be elected team co-captain. After a disastrous start to the season, she helps her team’s members and even the less-than-rigorous coach land on the same winning page. Following a sleepover, a dance, team-building drills and exercises, pep rallies, minor problem-solving and motivational strategizing, Devin prods the Kangaroos into position to beat the haughty Pinewood Panthers in a climactic rematch while also schooling Mirabelle, who has jumped ship to join the rival team. Wholesome? Yes. Proper hard work and teamwork values in place? Yes. Paint by numbers? Oh, yes. (soccer glossary) (Fiction. 8-10)
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I AM CAT
Morris, Jackie Illus. by Morris, Jackie Frances Lincoln (28 pp.) $17.99 | May 9, 2013 978-1-84780-135-7 Striking illustrations and lyrical descriptions will please fans of big cats, but this combination of pictures, fiction and facts may not have quite enough substance to inspire repeat readings or engage general readers. Morris’ beautiful watercolors are clearly the major draw. Starting with a marmalade house cat and moving through a series of nine wild felines, each double-page spread shows a different kind of cat. Individuals, pairs and parent-child combinations appear in a variety of geographic settings. The central premise, that each scene is a dream of the sleeping house cat, feels a smidge predictable, while the repetitive start to each section of text, “I dream…” begins to pall after the first few pages. Another minor quibble is the confusion that may arise from the cat dreaming of being both what appears to be a mother puma with her three cubs and, a few page turns later, a male lion lazing in the sun. Like the paintings, however, the quality of the text is distinctive enough to overcome these weaknesses. One to three sentences poetically describe setting and actions and in some cases allude to specific situations—for example, the endangered status of the Amur leopard. A final double-page spread offers thumbnail paintings of the different cats with miscellaneous facts appended. Slight but exquisite, this lovely hybrid will supplement more comprehensive approaches to the topic. (Picture book. 4-7)
HOW TO
Morstad, Julie Illus. by Morstad, Julie Simply Read (36 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-897476-57-4 Smart, clean design and a text built around unpunctuated phrases offer room to pause, ponder and discuss in this
book of quiet joy. Ample white space foregrounds a multicultural cast, whose patterned clothing, props and minimal, but visually exciting, settings take center stage. In the opening spread, “how to go fast,” readers consider options as eight youngsters whoosh by, one riding a scooter, another navigating stilts, a third sporting butterfly wings. The parade’s leader is nearly off the page. “How to see the wind” prompts conversation about the kites, grass and hair shown at various angles—and the metaphysical question itself. Morstad explores topics of interest to children, from “staying close” (two girls sharing one braid) to disappearing—a scene in which meaning comes first from the curtained image; the text is nearly invisible. She intersperses colorful
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backgrounds, as well as single- and double-spread compositions for an overall effect that elicits anticipation at every turn. As in this Canadian’s illustrations for the work of other authors (Caroline Woodward’s Singing Away the Dark, 2010; Sara O’Leary’s When I Was Small, 2012), the characters’ delicate features exhibit an absorption in their activities that simultaneously signals the seriousness and satisfaction of concentration. The “be happy” conclusion portrays unself-conscious movement—including that initial runner, leaving the book. In these inventive scenarios, children will recognize themselves and find new ways to be. (Picture book. 2-6)
THE BATHING COSTUME Or the Worst Vacation of My Life
Moundlic, Charlotte Translated by Bedrick, Claudia Zoe Illus. by Tallec, Olivier Enchanted Lion Books (40 pp.) $15.95 | May 21, 2013 978-1-59270-141-4
An 8-year-old boy prepares to have the worst vacation of his life. To give his parents an opportunity to prepare for a move, young Ronnie (short for Myron) finds himself bound for Grandma and Grandpa’s without Mama for the first time in his life. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’ll be there with his three rowdy, older cousins. Even worse, he has to do “a little work every day,” getting ready for third grade by writing a cumulative letter to his mother. With editorial savvy, he leaves out throwing up in the car and having his bed short-sheeted. He omits the competition he devises with his cousins to see who can wash least, and there is absolutely no way he will tell her everything about the “amazing” time he spends biking in the backyard with his cousins—sans helmets. Though he is clearly settling in, he is apprehensive about the final day, on which he will have to dive from the high diving board, a family tradition. Exacerbating this is the fact that he has his older brother’s much-too-big “bathing costume” (Grandma’s language). Moundlic’s tale of burgeoning self-confidence is on the lengthy side, but it resonates with emotional truth. Tallec’s gentle watercolors capture Ronnie’s misery, the beauty of the French countryside, the energy of a summer with cousins and Ronnie’s bare-bottomed triumph. “I want to have exactly the same vacation next year,” he concludes. Who wouldn’t? (Picture book. 6-9)
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PEDAL IT! How Bicycles are Changing the World
Mulder, Michelle Orca (48 pp.) $19.95 | May 1, 2013 978-1-4598-0219-3 Series: Orca Footprints
A bike’s design is to get you from A to B, concedes Mulder, but it can also mix a smoothie, spin a centrifuge, grind grain and even change the world. Mulder’s evolutionary survey of the bicycle is, like the subject in question, a piece of many parts: a cultural history, a course in mechanics, a soupçon of physics, a spotlight on economic class and a springboard for innovation. In a bouncy, friendly tone, she proceeds roughly chronologically but has no hesitation to follow a thread or a whim, often in colorful boxed asides. The main narrative—an easygoing, fundamental examination of the bike’s impact on America’s history and the world today (without running too deep)—is shot through with archival and modern photographs. Some are just priceless, like the father and son riding penny-farthing bikes fit to their size. They range from stiletto-sharp photos of bread couriers balancing huge trays of loaves on their heads to a salesman whose bike is festooned with plastic bags full of water and goldfish. Mulder twines the mechanics of bicycles with cultural phenomenon, the environmental benefits of cycling and even the change in women’s fashions. It publishes simultaneously with Nikki Tate’s Down to Earth: How Kids Help Feed the World as part of the Orca Footprints series. A smart, tangy history of our two-wheeled friend. (Nonfiction. 8-14)
AMAZONIA Indigenous Tales from Brazil
Munduruku, Daniel Translated by Springer, Jane Illus. by Popov, Nikolai Groundwood (96 pp.) $24.95 | May 14, 2013 978-1-55498-185-4
Twelve folk tales from various Amazonian cultures are retold, but their audience is unclear. A full-bleed illustration opens each myth, with greens, browns, oranges and golds predominating. The short myths and pourquoi tales feel fragmentary, although the longer stories are just as confusing. Perhaps the convoluted publishing history is to blame. Popov, the Russian illustrator, created the intricately dreamlike gouache and India ink paintings for an academic collection of Brazilian tales. (Humans wear few clothes, as is natural in this region.) Groundwood and a Brazilian publisher wanted to reuse the illustrations and invited Munduruku to present selected tales in a voice that is unquestionably authentic but will probably feel unfamiliar to North American readers,
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particularly young readers accustomed to European-American storytelling voices. Eight different groups are represented, but the book doesn’t provide information about the different cultures; strong relationships among the region’s flora and fauna and its indigenous groups are revealed. There is no map, but there is an excellent glossary. Readers hoping for drawings of the many local animals and plants mentioned will be disappointed. As the reteller states in his preface, “Myths allow us to recognize our proper role in the web of life,” but this anthology will require an intermediary who can creatively make the connections between the text and its readers. (Folk tales. 9-12)
LITTLE MOUSE
Murray, Alison Illus. by Murray, Alison Disney Hyperion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-1-4231-4330-7 Murray captures a young girl’s changing moods—from feeling big and bold to little and cuddly—in this playful, empathetic story. Mommy sometimes calls her daughter little mouse, which amuses the spirited child because her self-perception is that she’s strong as an ox and brave as a lion and that she can howl like a wolf. But when bedtime nears and the sprightly child gets sleepy, she is more than happy to curl up in her mother’s arms and be that little mouse. Friendly animals populate both the pages and the girl’s imagination as the artist implies similes: The protagonist stomps in front of a bear, waddles beside a penguin and trumpets with an elephant. Attractive backgrounds, done in a pleasing pastel palette, showcase Murray’s textile-design training. However, the artist’s digital work, done to look like the gouache illustrations of a bygone era, lack the depth and richness classic illustrators like Richard Scarry, Gyo Fujikawa or Mary Blair offered. As with so much digital art, the computer here produces a certain feeling of sameness in the illustrations (the child’s face is depicted in only profile or full, frontal view, for instance). Despite this, it is a charming bedtime tale, accessible and winsome and a delight for little readers anytime. Youngsters will clamor for more as they climb into a lap and ask to also be called their mommy’s little mouse. (Picture book. 3-6)
LIFE OF TY Penguin Problems
Myracle, Lauren Illus. by Henry, Jed Dutton (128 pp.) $14.99 | May 2, 2013 978-0-525-42264-8
The spinoff from the popular The Winnie Years series will offer a new, younger generation of Myracle fans the chance to enjoy the ups and downs of the
Perry family. Seven-year-old Ty was the baby of the family until his little sister came along, and getting used to life with a demanding new baby around hasn’t been easy. Desperate for his mother’s attention and struggling with feelings of jealousy he’s too young to understand, Ty begins to act out. Though the action doesn’t really pick up until Ty makes it to the aquarium about a third of the way through the book, his escapades will entertain and endear Ty to readers. With its easily accessible language and engaging black-and-white illustrations, this book makes for a wonderful read-aloud, particularly for young children who are likely to be experiencing the same growing pains in their own homes. Early chapter-book readers, however, might be turned off by the fact that Ty often feels more like a 4- or 5-year-old than a “big guy” second-grader. Some might secretly relate to what Ty is going through (like rediscovering the comfort of a pacifier), but it’s hard to imagine that most children capable of reading a book like this on their own wouldn’t seek out a more mature protagonist. Still, Ty might hit the spot for certain kids in that liminal stage. (Fiction. 6-8)
PICTURE DAY
Nees, Susan Illus. by Nees, Susan Scholastic (80 pp.) $4.99 paper | $4.99 e-book | $15.99 PLB May 1, 2013 978-0-545-43851-3 978-0-545-54009-4 e-book 978-0-545-49609-4 PLB Series: Missy’s Super Duper Royal Deluxe, 1 Shaped like an early chapter book rather than an easy reader, this effort, one of a new series called Branches, introduces super-duper Missy and her encounter with school picture day. Missy, a very exuberant and headstrong young grade schooler, spends her whole week imagining all of the wild outfits she could wear to have her picture taken. The full-color, cartoony illustrations, some humorously depicting her numerous clothing changes and wild design concepts, fill most of the white space on each page and effectively portray Missy’s personality, as well as that of a bookish classmate, Oscar. She
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“[The characters’] mutual attachment is clearly expressed in gestures, expressions, eye contact and, in the final scene, a tender smooch on the head by Simon….” from annie and simon
adores ruffles, striped tights and lots of over-the-top accessories, a fascination that many young female readers will recognize and enjoy. Missy’s mother forces her to wear a plain blouse and skirt with suspenders for her picture, though, and she fusses and fumes through her school day. Eventually, she and Oscar, who loves suspenders but is wearing a plaid vest and bow tie, hatch a scheme that resolves her woes. Most pages feature only a sentence or two but include some challenging sight words, considering how brief the text is: “gracious,” “chocolate” and “information” among them. Not quite as easy a read as similarly formatted Boris on the Move, by Andrew Joyner (2013), this will nonetheless appeal to emergent female readers wishing to look especially accomplished to their peers—and who doesn’t enjoy that feeling? (Fiction. 5-7)
THE EYE OF THE WHALE A Rescue Story O’Connell, Jennifer Illus. by O’Connell, Jennifer Tilbury House (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2013 978-0-88448-335-9
With this story that amazes while it informs, readers cannot help but be touched by a singular event in which an ensnared humpback whale makes a profound connection with her rescuers. Off the coast of San Francisco in 2005, a fisherman radios an alert that there is a trapped whale caught in crab-trap lines. When a rescue boat is sent to investigate, it is clear that extreme measures must be taken to save her. Four divers risk their lives to swim up close in order to sever each of the lines cutting into the whale’s skin. As the divers work, the whale’s big eye watches them. Once free, the whale dives, begins circling around the divers and then seems to disappear. Diver “James is puzzled.” In a dramatic page turn, readers can experience the same surprise as the diver: “With a jolt, James sees her heading straight for him!” This is just one instance where O’Connell expertly merges the art of storytelling with journalistic excellence in recounting this well-researched past event. The drama builds to the moment in which the huge whale gently gives “a little nudge” to every diver before swimming away. The painted illustrations portray the situation from various perspectives and are a strong complement to the gripping text. A whale of a tale for sure. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 5-8)
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ANNIE AND SIMON The Sneeze and Other Stories O’Neill, Catharine Illus. by O’Neill, Catharine Candlewick (64 pp.) $15.99 | May 1, 2013 978-0-7636-4921-0 Series: Annie and Simon, 2
Four more emergent-reader episodes featuring little Annie, her “big, big brother,” Simon, and bucketloads of sibling togetherness. O’Neill opens with a thematic link to Annie and Simon (2008). Simon (still) has trouble telling Annie’s drawings of a crayfish and a dragonfly apart but answers her skeptical response to his claim that frogs have knees (“Oh, Simon. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Teehee-hee”) with nature facts until she admiringly asks him if he knows everything. “Well,” says Simon, “I hate to brag.” In subsequent episodes, Simon’s sneeze unleashes a patiently borne flood of little-sister TLC; Annie’s efforts to get her dog Hazel to purr end abruptly when she sees the neighbor’s cat stroll by with a mouse in his mouth; and the sudden disappearance of a wagonload of horse chestnuts left on the porch sparks a bit of detective work. In the author’s informal, loosely brushed watercolors, the gangly figures fit comfortably in outdoorsy suburban and cozy domestic settings. Their mutual attachment is clearly expressed in gestures, expressions, eye contact and, in the final scene, a tender smooch on the head by Simon: “You know,” he says, “you’re my favorite little sister.” “I know,” says Annie. Would that all sib relationships were so harmonious. (Early reader. 5-7)
THE BOOK OF BROKEN HEARTS
Ockler, Sarah Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | May 21, 2013 978-1-4424-3038-9 A poignant coming-of-age story intertwines loyalty, disease and summer love. At age 10, Jude Hernandez pledged to her three older sisters that she would never get involved with the Vargas family, which has a long history of breaking Hernandez girls’ hearts. However, fast-forward to the summer before college, when Jude finds it hard to keep her promise as she and Emilio Vargas, a mechanic, connect over rehabbing her father’s vintage Harley. Although not really a biker—theater is more her thing—Jude spearheads the renovation project with hopes of bonding with her father and recharging his memory before it can be stripped away by El Demonio—early-onset Alzheimer’s. Despite her promise to her sisters and her frequent review of their scrapbook of broken hearts detailing the Vargas’ transgressions, as the summer progresses and her father’s health fails, Jude is
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“Cheery matte colors, crisp white spaces and thick black outlines carve out a child’s binary world, in which moods run from hot to cold in a mercurial minute.” from no fits, nilson!
drawn closer to Emilio. Narrator Jude’s voice is steady, honest and clear as she faces head-on her responsibility for her father’s care, her desire to step from her sisters’ shadows, her own genetic connection with her father’s disease and forbidden love. At its core, this is a touching father-daughter story made even stronger by realistic family complications and Jude’s need to find her own voice. (Fiction. 14-17)
NO FITS, NILSON!
OHora, Zachariah Illus. by OHora, Zachariah Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 13, 2013 978-0-8037-3852-2 Amelia helps a 9-foot blue gorilla named Nilson avoid tantrums by repeatedly reminding him, “No fits, Nilson!” Chunky, acrylic illustrations depict age-old meltdown triggers: a toppled block tower, uncooperative sneakers that just (eeergh!) won’t get (oof!) on your feet and boring grownup errands. Cheery matte colors, crisp white spaces and thick black outlines carve out a child’s binary world, in which moods run from hot to cold in a mercurial minute. When Nilson rages, his simian eyes squint, his shoulders hulk, and his mouth spews GAARRRGHH! in oversized, black, block letters. Children will empathize and, thanks to Nilson’s absurdity (this ape wears a newsboy cap, multiple watches and Adidas), see tantrums for what they really are—disproportionate and silly. Amelia, a cutie with hair clips, an inky bob, stripy tights and a monster scooter helmet, seems to always keep her cool…until the ice-cream truck runs out of her favorite banana flavor. Watch out! Readers sigh with relief when Nilson shares his scoop, and another fit is averted; they giggle with unexpected pleasure when Amelia kisses him good night and see that he’s a pint-sized stuffed animal who’s actually been helping her manage her feelings all along. Foot-stomping fit pitchers will take multiple timeouts for this amusing modern fable. (Picture book. 2-4)
SWANS & KLONS
Olsen, Nora Bold Strokes Books (170 pp.) $11.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-60282-874-2 In an idyllic all-female future, Rubric and Salmon Jo’s luxurious life is disrupted by their Utopia’s dark side. Ever since a chromosomal problem created the Cretinous Male, distasteful things like sexual reproduction and pregnancies were replaced by hatcheries and the genetics of 300 exemplary women—300 Jeepie Types, “Jeepie” referring to “Genotype Phenotype.” Young girls won’t encounter their 106
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Jeepie Similars (sharing a Jeepie Type) until they mature, and they rarely encounter Jeepie Similar Klons. Despite sharing Jeepie Types with humans, Klons are regarded as a different species, altered to be better suited to unpleasant labors. The exposition lacks grace as Olsen rushes to the plot, but then it rumbles along. When Rubric’s girlfriend, Salmon Jo, is assigned to the Hatchery where Klons and humans alike are decanted, her scientific curiosity uncovers their society’s big lie. Knowledge endangers them. Rubric’s plan to reveal the truth brings her to her Jeepie Similar Klon, Dream. They help Dream escape Society to freedom in the Land of the Barbarous Ones. Salmon Jo takes to life outside better than Rubric, who yearns for art over labor and wants to fight Society’s injustice. She and Dream return on a mission of liberation; disappointingly, the mission’s escalating stakes end in a cop-out. Although aimed at LGBT readers and despite its unevenness, philosophical dystopia fans of all orientations will find much to appreciate in this story that tackles big ideas. (Dystopian adventure. 13-17)
PARADOX
Paquette, A.J. Random House (240 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-375-86962-4 978-0-375-98438-9 e-book 978-0-375-96962-1 PLB The fate of two worlds hangs in the balance in this unorthodox science-fiction thriller. She wakes in restraints with no memory of where or even who she is. Learning her name is Ana from a name tag, she discovers a handwritten letter telling her that she’s awakening from suspended animation in a rocket on a new planet, Paradox. She has a limited amount of time to get to a specific place on an electronic map, and she’s also been provided supplies to get there. Hoping that answers to her missing memory lie at the intended destination, she sets out across a barren landscape only to be attacked by a giant, monstrous worm. Escaping it, she discovers Todd, who appears to have also come from the rocket, and before long, they meet Ysa and Chen. The group trek through dangers, but Ana is beset by memories of a very different life… and then she wakes again. The odd construction of Paquette’s present-tense thriller can leave readers feeling as confused as the main character. The often slow-moving, descriptive main text is punctuated by news articles about the discovery of the planet and subsequent missions to it and by the off-puttingly melodramatic memories of an Earth scientist. The reveal is interesting if wholly unbelievable. The science behind this fiction is ludicrous, but patient fans of the genre may enjoy the twists. (Science fiction. 9-14)
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SURVIVOR
Phelan, James Kensington (256 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-7582-8068-8 Series: Alone, 2 Jesse’s hunting for survivors, but he’s got husks on his heels. Twelve days after the attack on New York City that transformed the population into shells with an unquenchable thirst, 16-year-old Jesse starts casing the city to find Felicity, a young woman whose taped message Jesse has discovered. While searching, Jesse runs into soldiers who are researching the plague, and he finds Rachel, a dedicated zoo intern caring for the Central Park animals, and Caleb, a former jock holed up in a bookstore. Jesse’s goal of bringing all the survivors together falls apart when military drones begin targeting survivors and Chasers alike, and one of his new companions is caught in the crossfire. With this second in the Alone series, Phelan fails to address the problem of the first novel: The Chasers are simply not scary. Truly successful zombie novels describe the individual appearances of the beasts, but the Chasers are lumped together with bland characteristics like “sunken cheeks and “bloodied mouths.” As a main character, Jesse is dull, but the supporting cast manages to infuse him with a bit of depth. The suspense never builds into real tension, making the whole narrative a plod to the setup for the (hopefully) final book. A shell devoid of true action and suspense. (Horror. 13-16)
IF I SHOULD DIE
Plum, Amy HarperTeen (416 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 7, 2013 978-0-06-200403-1 978-0-06-220924-5 e-book Series: Die for Me, 3 The Die for Me series about an American teenager involved with undead revenants in Paris concludes. Courageous, loyal Kate mourns not the death, which is a normal occurrence for revenants, but the cremation of her undead boyfriend, Vincent, at the hands of Violette, leader of the evil numa. Vincent can’t come back to life if his body no longer exists. Luckily, Kate and Bran, the revenants’ healer assistant, unearth a ceremony that might restore him but only if they also can find the ancient, lost equipment necessary. With or without Vincent, the book continues with preparation for battle, then actual battle, with plenty of wellpaced tension. Appropriately spaced romantic interludes provide variety. The major plot point is the identity of a prophesied champion, destined to win the battle between good and evil, at least in Paris, for now, and of course, the heroine faces the usual insurmountable odds. Fortunately, this series doesn’t take itself |
completely seriously. Plum includes fairly frequent tongue-incheek humor lampooning her own plot—“my safety was at risk because of an evil undead medieval teenager”—which helps lift the book above standard undead fare. Yes, it’s the usual mishmash of romance and the supernatural, but the author keeps the narrative moving along at a sprightly pace and handles the suspense well. Formulaic but fun, which makes all the difference. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)
THE SWEET DEAD LIFE
Preble, Joy Soho Teen (256 pp.) $17.99 | May 14, 2013 978-1-61695-150-4
For 13-year-old Jenna Samuels, things have been going really badly: She’s pretty sure she’s dying, her father has mysteriously abandoned the family, her mother is nearly catatonic with depression, and then her brother dies and becomes an
“A-word.” Her life—and health—rapidly disintegrating, Jenna is convinced that she is dying. Through her journal entries, she recounts what she knows for sure as she tries to piece together a month’s worth of her life turning upside down. Jenna and her anything-but-cherubic brother Casey work together with the help of another angel, Amber, to determine what exactly has happened to the Samuels family and why. Soon they discover a sinister plot and realize they must save their family before it’s too late. Jenna’s sarcastic and sassy tone will easily resonate with readers, and her keen observations are derisive and laugh-out-loud funny. While the refreshing lack of romance is a welcome change from the usual angel fare, some conventions of the trope remain (will we ever get away from paranormal beings who sparkle?). Certain plot aspects, however, seem not entirely fleshed out: Amber’s character has a shadowy past that’s never addressed; it’s never really clear how humans can see and interact with angels and never guess that they’re otherworldly; and then the book abruptly ends—perhaps a sequel waits in the wings? Hallelujah! A paranormal tale of angels that’s not a romance, making it a novel that breaks the mold. (Paranormal fiction. 13 & up)
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BOOM! Big, Big Thunder & One Small Dog
Ray, Mary Lyn Illus. by Salerno, Steven Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-4231-6238-4
Addressing the fears children have of severe weather is a parenting rite of passage, and this book tackles astraphobia with a small dog named Rosie. “Although Rosie was a small dog, she was usually very brave— just like the boy she knew best.” She isn’t afraid of tigers or orangutans or garbage collectors or even fire trucks. Not even of shadows at night. But, like many dogs (and children), she is afraid of thunder. An approaching storm sends the pup scurrying under rugs and inside a sock. Illustrator Salerno creates a breezy, retro feel reminiscent of classic Curious George illustrations. Broad brush strokes and scratchy textures in a subdued palette convey energy and emotion as the storm approaches. Sounds are written in enormous angry type across the pages. Like a parent comforting a child, the young boy tries to help his frightened dog. He tries treats and singing and even imagination to explain the noise away. Nothing helps. As a last resort, the boy takes little Rosie to a safe place and curls up on his bed with the dog. And they wait for the storm to pass, together. As there is no logical way to explain away fears, facing frightening things with someone you love is the best remedy out there. Though not particularly creative, this back-to-basics approach will appeal to straightforward, no-nonsense thinkers—and who is going to refuse a little comfort? (Picture book. 4-8)
TRUCK STOP
Rockwell, Anne Illus. by Iwai, Melissa Viking (40 pp.) $16.99 | May 16, 2013 978-0-670-06261-4 A day in the life of a truck stop as told by its youngest worker, whose love for the place is very clear. A little boy and his parents start out before the sun is up to go to work at their busy truck stop beside the highway. The routine of their day will soothe readers: They prep the food, Uncle Marty opens the garage, and they wait for the regulars to make an appearance. “I love how they come rumbling their wheels, / and with air brakes whooshing.” Sam and Eighteen-Wheeler are first. Uncle Marty checks tires while Mom puts in Sam’s usual order. It’s coffee and doughnuts for Maisie, who drives Milk Tank. Then come Diligent Dan’s Moving Van and Digger riding on Flatbed. But where is Green Gus, the old pickup? Once Pete and Priscilla arrive in their Tow Truck, it’s time for the boy to board Big Yellow Bus. Along the way, he spies Green Gus. Pete and Priscilla come to the rescue, and Uncle Marty gets to 108
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work. The trucks and drivers go their separate ways, but only until tomorrow. Iwai’s mixed-media collage illustrations invite readers into the scenes with their bright colors and interesting textures. While a truck stop is a business, the text and artwork together spin a web around the boy and his family that make it seem quite homey, complete with good friends and good food. For truck lovers everywhere. (Picture book. 2-6)
NEW LANDS
Rodkey, Geoff Putnam (336 pp.) $16.99 | May 2, 2013 978-0-399-25786-5 Series: Chronicles of Egg, 2 The second installment of the Chronicles of Egg delivers more danger, diabolical plots and dastardly villains than the first, and that’s saying a lot. A few short weeks after teenagers Egg and Guts arrive via pirate ship in Cartage, supposed home of the treasure they seek, they are kidnapped by enemies. Lucky for them, they are soon rescued by Millicent—Egg’s love interest and daughter of evil Roger Pembroke, who is also trying to find the treasure in hopes that it will enable him to rule the world—and Kira, new friend to Egg and Guts and member of the Okalu tribe to whom the treasure once belonged. The four spunky teens trek deep into the wilderness in search of an Okalu elder to help them translate the treasure map that Egg carries only in his memory. Along the way, there is bartering for supplies, severe illness, bickering and good-natured fun until the group is captured by Moku—enemies of the Okalu and Pembroke conspirators—and Egg discovers that his family, whom he thought murdered by Pembroke, is still alive, if not for long. Egg’s narration, fresh and funny as ever, keeps readers engaged with the increasingly complicated plot. Occasionally gruesome, often funny and full of suspense, this one is sure to win Egg some new fans. (Adventure. 10-14)
ASTRONAUT ACADEMY Re-Entry
Roman, Dave Illus. by Roman, Dave First Second/Roaring Brook (192 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 14, 2013 978-1-59643-621-3 Series: Astronaut Academy, 2 Hakata Soy and his fellow students at Astronaut Academy return from break to an academy in lockdown. Hakata Soy, formerly of Meta-Team, a group of intergalactic preteen superheroes, is trying to get over the fact that his crush in that group, Princess Boots, is now dating his archrival (since
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“Acute, wickedly funny observations on appearance and identity punctuate this sprawling, caustic fairy tale that cheerfully skewers the fashion and film worlds and their celebrity-culture spawn.” from gorgeous
kindergarten), Rick Raven, of the villainous group Gotcha Birds. Thalia Thistle is hiding her participation on the school fireball (sort of like lacrosse with halberds and balls of flame) team from her father (who teaches at the academy). Tak Offsky is hiding his crush on Thalia and his disappointment that she hangs out so much with her former enemy, Maribelle Mellonbelly, richest girl at AA, who has a crush on Hakata. All the students are in danger from something disguised as a student that steals hearts (everyone starts out with three, and losing them all can result in death). Can everyone resolve their romantic entanglements in a school where love—and fun—have been outlawed for student safety? Roman’s second tale, told in a series of black-and-white comicstrip chapters each focusing on a different student, requires a gowith-the-flow reader. The deadpan quirk, consciously misspelled and misused words, anime-cute artwork and fractured plot are not for readers seeking a straightforward story. Definitely goofy. (Graphic science fiction. 10-14)
GORGEOUS
Rudnick, Paul Scholastic (320 pp.) $18.99 | $18.99 e-book | May 1, 2013 978-0-545-46426-0 978-0-545-46489-5 e-book Acute, wickedly funny observations on appearance and identity punctuate this sprawling, caustic fairy tale that cheerfully skewers the fashion and film worlds and their celebrity-culture spawn. Something magical will soon befall checkout clerk Becky Randle, 18, her mother tells her, making Becky promise she’ll say yes to it. After her mother’s death, the mysterious yet ubiquitous designer Tom Kelly flies Becky to New York, proposing to create three dresses for her guaranteed to make her the most beautiful woman on the planet. With, at best, average looks, Becky’s understandably skeptical, but Kelly delivers, and Rebecca is born. Though Rebecca’s gorgeous, confident and smart, Becky stubbornly hangs onto her identity (she sees her glamorous alter ego in mirrors only when others are present). Supermodel Rebecca lands a movie role alongside the star Becky’s crushed on since middle school (veteran screenwriter Rudnick’s film scenes are hilarious). Soon, smitten with Rebecca, the heir to the English throne captures Becky’s heart— but which of her is he in love with? While Becky’s voice and cultural referents are far too sophisticated and mature for a teenager raised in a Missouri trailer park, her fears and hopes are universal. A Cinderella story with a difference, Becky’s journey to reconcile her inner household drudge and outer princess starts where most fairy tales end. (Fantasy. 14 & up)
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THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER
Say, Allen Illus. by Say, Allen Levine/Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-545-17662-0
When an episode of teasing makes Yuriko doubt herself—her name, her heritage, her interests—her father gently guides her back to her roots and herself. For a school assignment, Yuriko brings in a photograph of herself in a cherished kimono. When she comes home, her excitement has changed to despondence. Her classmates laughed and told her that Japanese dolls have black hair, while Yuriko is blonde. Then the new art teacher mispronounces her name and assigns a subject Yuriko has depicted in art before. In response, Yuriko impetuously declares she should now be called Michelle, and Michelle does not like art. Her father listens carefully and cleverly takes Yuriko to revisit the things she loves: her favorite restaurant for sushi and the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park. Illustrated with spare, clean watercolors, there is subtlety in this tale that’s told almost completely through the dialogue between father and daughter. Some will identify with the cultural details that ground the tale; all will relate to how teasing makes Yuriko feel uncertain about the very things that make her unique. Yuriko does some critical and creative thinking about her identity and her art, proving herself her father’s original—and favorite—daughter. This is as much a story about cultural pride as it about self-esteem and problem-solving, from which all can draw a lesson. (Picture book. 5-8)
RIPTIDE
Scheibe, Lindsey Flux (288 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3594-8 This debut about a surfer girl delves into hidden child abuse and scores with strong characterizations. Seventeen-year old Grace Parker loves to surf and hang out with her best friend, Ford, who coaches her in their favorite sport. Grace yearns to win a surfing scholarship to her local school, the University of California at San Diego, but feels trapped by her parents, who push her toward the Ivy League. Her father works as a high-powered immigration attorney, the field Ford, who’s half Mexican, hopes to enter. Ford lands an internship in Mr. Parker’s office, thereby placing his future in the man’s hands. Unbeknownst to Ford, though, Parker for many years has been bursting into sudden violence and hitting Grace, a fact denied even by Grace’s stylish mom. Meanwhile, Grace and Ford each battle a strong attraction to the other, knowing that the Parkers will never approve of a romantic relationship
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“Sharafeddine tells the story in a deliberate, third-person, present-tense voice, creating a narrative with an old-fashioned, rather formal feel and a clear preference for women’s self-determination and independence.” from the servant
between the two. Readers know a clash will occur, but what choices will both Grace and Ford have to make? Scheibe alternates chapters between Grace and Ford, writing each in first person. The emotions of both teens come across as realistic, and the difficulties they encounter ring true as well. The author clearly knows the surfing culture, with its lingo (there’s a glossary for those who don’t) and its lingering chauvinism, and she balances the suspense in both her subplots well. Solid. (Fiction. 12 & up)
THE SLEEPWALKERS
Schwarz, Viviane Illus. by Schwarz, Viviane Candlewick (96 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 14, 2013 978-0-7636-6230-1
THE SERVANT
From a floating, dream-proof Safe House, a diverse squad intrepidly issues forth to rescue children from attacks of nightmares in this melodramatic, rather confusing graphic outing. Missions include snatching one child away from a torrent of mice and others from endless falling, impenetrable darkness, an N.I.P. (“Naked in Public”) scenario and a bellowing red monster. Against this backdrop, three overworked sheep create a sock monkey named Amali, Sophia, a bird with a pen-nib head, and tubby Bonifacius, a grumpy bear sporting a Mexican wrestler’s headpiece as successors before retiring through a one-way door. The narrative vertigo in this passing-of-the-torch tale caused by multiple cast changes and forays into dreamscapes subject to surreal twists and sudden transformations is only intensified by Schwarz’s splashy, sketchy art—which occupies small panels further crammed with sound effects and dialogue balloons. A closing museum visit set in the waking world has, at best, a tangential relationship to the rest of the story. An intriguing premise, but it’s too cramped and cryptic to reach its full potential. (Graphic fantasy. 10-13)
CORAL REEFS
Seymour, Simon Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | $6.99 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-06-191495-9 978-0-06-191496-6 paper The author of over 250 science books for children turns his attention to coral reefs. Coral reefs, readers learn, are both the skeletons of reefbuilding corals and the community that makes use of them. Although they make up only a tiny portion of the ocean floor, they provide a home to a quarter of all underwater ocean life. Only a rain forest ecosystem supports more plants and animals. In an expository text that sometimes reads like a set of lecture notes, Simon’s introduction covers reef formation and locations 110
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and describes some inhabitants: different kinds of coral, fish and invertebrates. He notes that activity is different at night, and he mentions both the value of these areas and threats to their survival. Beautiful stock photographs, some stretching across the fold and some showing humans exploring that marvelous world, make this a treat for the eye. But this is eye candy, not nourishment. There are no labels. Images usually connect with something in the accompanying text, but without previous familiarity with the subject, readers will find them hard to interpret. A nighttime scene features a lionfish, but there is no mention of the danger that invasive species poses to Atlantic reefs. For research or for pleasure, titles by Jason Chin, Sneed Collard or Gail Gibbons offer more. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 6-10)
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Sharafeddine, Fatima Groundwood (160 pp.) $16.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book May 14, 2013 9781554983070 978-1-55498-308-7 paper 978-1-55498-309-4 e-book First published in Arabic in 2010, this is the compelling story of a determined young woman coming of age during the Lebanese civil war in 1987. Faten is a mere 15 when she first makes the long trip from her mountain village to Beirut, where her father has arranged for her to work as a maid to help the family make ends meet. For two years, she does nothing but work, keeping none of the money she earns and getting only a few hours per week to herself. Unsatisfied with this life, Faten longs to go to university to become a nurse. Eventually, she makes contact with Marwan, a handsome neighbor who helps her to arrange to take the exams she’ll need to get into college. But when she sneaks away to take the first of the tests, she is caught and fired from her job. Chastened, Faten returns to her village, where she must try to secure her father’s understanding, or at least forgiveness, and make her way back to Beirut to pursue her dream. Sharafeddine tells the story in a deliberate, third-person, present-tense voice, creating a narrative with an old-fashioned, rather formal feel and a clear preference for women’s self-determination and independence. Fans of literary and historical fiction will be drawn to this rich portrayal of the challenges faced and opportunities forged by brave young women in patriarchal, war-torn Lebanon. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)
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UNICORN THINKS HE’S PRETTY GREAT
truly enjoyable read is the overbusy panels during the Robot Rumble, which can be a bit confusing. Smart and funny; don’t miss this one. (Graphic fiction. 13 & up)
Shea, Bob Illus. by Shea, Bob Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $15.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-4231-5952-0
RUSH
Goat can’t stop comparing himself to Unicorn and coming up short. With slumped shoulders and a sulky frown, Goat is the picture of dejection. Before Unicorn moved in, he thought he was pretty cool. But now? He just can’t compete. Goat bakes marshmallow squares to share with his friends, but Unicorn makes it rain cupcakes! (Brightly colored ones with adorable smiles, at that.) Goat tries to wow everyone with his new magic trick, but Unicorn is able to turn things into gold. “Dopey Unicorn! Thinks he’s so great!” Goat scoffs and stamps in a jealous huff. But suddenly, one slice of goat-cheese pizza changes everything. Goat finds out that Unicorn is actually envious of him, too. Who knew that cloven hooves were so awesome? Shea examines a universal struggle that readers of all ages face: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Unicorn may seem like he has it all—on every page he is surrounded by a glow of love and adoration, with rainbows and sparkles ready to burst forth at any moment—but that doesn’t mean he’s content. Even unicorns want to eat something besides glitter now and then. Brilliant in execution and hysterical in dialogue; Shea’s pretty great, too. (Picture book. 3-6)
NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG
Shen, Prudence Illus. by Hicks, Faith Erin First Second/Roaring Brook (288 pp.) $16.99 paper | May 7, 2013 978-1-59643-659-6 An unlikely assemblage of robotbuilders and cheerleaders rally together for a common cause. Charlie and Nate have been friends forever, and even though Charlie is a quiet jock and Nate is the president of the robotics club, they remain friends against the high school grain. However, when Charlie’s ex—coldly calculating cheerleader Holly—threatens to usurp precious school funds away from the robotics club so her squad can have new uniforms, Nate decides to run for student council president to ensure that the funds go to his club. Not to be outdone, Holly decides that Charlie will run against him. When the mud-slinging election goes too far, both sides find themselves without any school monies. They must then join together and enter a Robot Rumble contest in hopes of snagging a top prize. Shen’s writing is spot-on and often laugh-out-loud funny. Hicks’ modish art serves as an apt complement, with many panels deftly capturing deadpan looks where words would otherwise fail. Perhaps the only flaw in this |
Silver, Eve Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 11, 2013 978-0-06-219213-4 978-0-06-219216-5 e-book Series: Game, 1 Miki’s understanding of reality completely changes when she’s thrust into a deadly virtual game. Having recently lost her mother to cancer and dealing with her dad’s alcoholism, the 16-year-old is trudging through life grief-stricken and angry. When she is hit by a truck while trying to save a little girl, Miki’s broken body is suddenly whole again when she’s “pulled” into an alternate dimension. Here, Miki’s mission is to play a live-action video game. She earns points by terminating predatory alien creatures, the Drau. Battling at her side are four other gamers, the leader of whom is Jackson, a young man of few words and alluring looks. They are pawns of an unseen force, and it quickly becomes clear that a game injury deals real and agonizing pain and that destroying the aliens is much more than a game. The battle scenes are visceral and taut. The intricate, multilayered plot is inventive, twining hostile alien takeover (these guys are superbad, brain-eating beasts) around uncertainty about Miki’s and Jackson’s true heritage and their growing romance. The story, however, unfolds through a constant litany of questions from Miki, which has the effect of bogging down the plot and making Miki appear dense. Mind candy for those teen readers who love the thrill of the game. (Adventure. 13-18)
WHAT MAKES A BABY
Silverberg, Cory Illus. by Smyth, Fiona Seven Stories (36 pp.) $16.95 | May 7, 2013 978-1-60980-485-5
A sex educator and an artist with a graphics background craft an unusually flexible explanation of baby-making for sharing with young children. Silverberg’s text and Smyth’s inclusive illustrations work together not only to answer questions about where babies come from, but also to provide an opportunity for caregivers to share as much or as little about that particular child’s history as they want. Eggs and sperm come together to share their stories, there’s a uterus to grow in, people waiting for the child’s birth and two possible ways to exit (through the vagina or through
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a temporary opening in the belly). The narrative leaves lots of room for child listeners to see their own stories, and it even invites conversation. “Who was waiting for you to be born?” Lively illustrations done with heavy lines inked in a cartoon style make extensive use of color à la Todd Parr. They feature children and adults of strikingly varying ages, skin colors (lots of greens, blues and purples, some grays, pinks and oranges) and apparent abilities or disabilities. This book was born as a Kickstarter project and self-published, first, in 2012. Designed for all kinds of children in all kinds of families, this will be particularly welcome in adoptive and nontraditional families but is, uniquely, an appealing and informative complement to early sex-education discussions with any child. (Informational picture book. 2-7)
FAERIE AFTER
Simner, Janni Lee Random House (272 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB May 28, 2013 978-0-375-87069-9 978-0-307-97455-6 e-book 978-0-375-97069-6 PLB Series: Bones of Faerie Trilogy, 3 With the faerie and mortal lands crumbling away, a teenage girl must work with both worlds if anyone is to survive. The Bones of Faerie series concludes with this high-stakes adventure for Liza. Relative peace has descended upon Liza’s town, where she practices her summoner magic and waits for her half-faerie baby sister to be born. But the forest is showing new dangers, though subtle ones: a strange-smelling gray leaf that crumbles away; a dying squirrel whose back half has turned to dust; “a pair of empty boots, as far apart as a man might stand, filled with the same dust.” Liza’s quest to find out what’s wrong reveals fresh disasters. In Faerie, the dust is everywhere but hardly as tragic as the fire fever— radiation poisoning—that’s devastated the population since the War. In the mortal world, the dust is rapidly spreading in the bloodthirsty, carnivorous forest that was Faerie’s weapon against the humans. Liza’s solution to the problem of the rapidly unwinding universe is not always easy to follow, but the personal is sufficiently compelling to outweigh any problems with the metaphysical. In a satisfying trilogy conclusion, Liza confronts the conflicts between saving the world and saving her friends in an environment where nobody is willing to let go of the last generation’s hatreds. (Fantasy. 12-16)
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WILD AWAKE
Smith, Hilary T. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 28, 2013 978-0-06-218468-9 978-0-06-218470-2 e-book A young woman spirals into mania after hearing the truth about her sister’s death in this flawed but heady debut. While her parents are on a six-week anniversary cruise, 17-year-old piano prodigy Kiri is responsible for watering the azaleas and practicing daily for the upcoming International Young Pianists’ Showcase. But when a stranger calls claiming to have information about her deceased sister, Kiri abandons her disciplined routines and sets out to discover the truth about Sukey, since “[w]hen she died, it was like my house burned down.” After learning Sukey was murdered, not killed in an accident as she had been led to believe, Kiri eschews sleep, takes drugs, goes on midnight bike rides, wins a battle of the bands and falls in love with a formerly paranoid-schizophrenic musician. Each questionable action brings her closer to closure over Sukey’s death, but will she survive the summer? Though the secondary characterizations are sometimes sketchy, and the plot has some holes (would Kiri’s strict parents really leave her alone for six weeks? Is Kiri suffering from delayed grief or true mania?), Smith’s exuberant use of language helps gloss over them. Similes such as “[t]he piano is like a sleek black submarine that carries me deep, deep down, until the surface world is nothing but a muffled shimmer” sing off every page. Beautiful and energetic, if jumbled; Smith’s a writer to watch. (Fiction. 14 & up)
WELCOME TO NORMAL
Soderberg, Erin Illus. by Light, Kelly Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $13.99 | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-59990-789-5 Series: Quirks, 1
Having hastily moved 26 times, the aptly named Quirks arrive in Normal, Mich., determined to blend in—a tall order as all but nearly 10-year-old Molly have magical abilities and underdeveloped senses of responsibility. Being (seemingly) the only Quirk without magic and the most well-adjusted to boot, Molly gamely struggles to ride herd on her filthy, prank-loving little brother, Finn, who is invisible to all but her (except, as it turns out, when he’s chewing gum), and her depressed, troubled twin Penelope, whose every stray thought or mental image turns real. The rest of the clan? Molly’s father vanished five years ago; her frazzled mother, Bree, holds a job only because she can control the minds of others to cover
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“The stark contrasts Habo experiences on his physical journey to safety and his emotional journey to self-awareness bring his growth into sharp relief while informing readers of a social ill still prevalent in East Africa.” from golden boy her incompetence; a wimpy monster named Niblet lives under Molly’s bed; Grandpa Quill can reset time in small doses but not always voluntarily; and Grandma is a bird-sized fairy justly terrified of cats. Though spinning these discomfiting circumstances and abilities into light slapstick is at best a quixotic enterprise, Soderberg tries. She surrounds the Quirks with relentlessly oblivious regular folk, creates a series of consequence-free messes and disasters that disappear tidily between chapters, and hauls in heavy contrivances at the climax to make the town’s collective effort to create the world’s largest wad of chewed gum a success. Light’s frequent illustrations capture most of the grosser incidents, of which there are a goodly number. A cliffhanger ending isn’t the only sour note in this series opener. (Fantasy. 8-10)
FOXY!
Souhami, Jessica Illus. by Souhami, Jessica Frances Lincoln (28 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2013 978-1-84780-218-7 An excellent spin on a familiar trickster story. Souhami tells the story of one bag, one fox and some gullible humans. The tale starts when a fox catches a bee and puts it in a bag. He asks a woman with a “very fine rooster” to watch it but warns her, “DON’T LOOK IN THE SACK!” Of course she does, and that allows Fox to strike a deal. The bee is lost, so he takes the rooster in exchange. Trick follows trick as the rooster is exchanged up for a pig and then for a boy. Eventually, Foxy is finally outfoxed. The cumulative nature of this trading-up story makes it especially appealing as a read-aloud for very young children, who will undoubtedly holler out warnings before Foxy does. The oversized typeface and easily decoded vocabulary makes this perfect for sharing with groups who might want to practice reading along. The uncluttered collaged art is set off by wide expanses of white space, allowing the drama of the story to easily unfold. Children who like turning stories into dramatic play will enjoy this easy-to-memorize traditional tale, and teachers will find this an easy tale for young storytellers to memorize. A clear and humorous trickster tale for the youngest readers—a treat. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-7)
BREAKFAST ON MARS And 37 Other Essays to Devour Stern, Rebecca; Wolfe, Brad--Eds. Roaring Brook (224 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-59643-737-1
A guide for writing teachers that is truly useful. Good models abound for teaching fiction, nonfiction and poetry, but |
accessible ones for young essay writers? Not so much. Though essay writing is a staple of the junior and senior high curricula, examples of good essays accessible to young readers have not been readily available. So this handy volume fills a gap. Thirtyeight essays for young readers by contemporary writers demonstrate that “essays can be just as enjoyable to read as fiction (perhaps even more so!).” Essays on fears, favorite places, a time a friend helped you, memories of being young, crazy experiences, a time you felt like an outsider will inspire students to write their own essays. Highlights of this collection include “Breakfast on Mars,” a persuasive essay; Gigi Amateau’s “River Girl,” an elegant and beautifully descriptive personal essay; and Scott Westerfeld’s “Warning: This Essay Does Not Contain Pictures,” an informative essay. Teachers might use this volume best by offering three or four choices and models at a time, so students can choose one that best connects with them. A companion volume might be one in which three or four essayists write on the same topic, demonstrating how different writers approach the same idea. An important collection that ought to become a staple in writing classes. (Essays. 10 & up)
GOLDEN BOY
Sullivan, Tara Putnam (368 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 27, 2013 978-0-399-16112-4 Some call Habo a zeruzeru—a zero-zero—nothing. Others willingly pursue the riches his albino body parts will bring on the black market in Sullivan’s intense debut. With his white skin, shaky, blue, unfocused eyes and yellow hair, 13-year-old Habo fits nowhere in his chocolate-brown Tanzanian family—not with his brothers who shun him, nor even with his mother, who avoids his touch. Did this bad-luck child even cause his father to abandon him at his birth? Only Habo’s sister, Asu, protects and nurtures him. Poverty forces the family from their rural home near Arusha to Mwanza, hundreds of miles away, to stay with relatives. After their bus fare runs out, they hitch a ride across the Serengeti with an ivory poacher who sees opportunity in Habo. Forced to flee for his life, the boy eventually becomes an apprentice to Kweli, a wise, blind carver in urban Dar es Salaam. The stark contrasts Habo experiences on his physical journey to safety and his emotional journey to self-awareness bring his growth into sharp relief while informing readers of a social ill still prevalent in East Africa. Thankfully for readers as well as Habo, the blind man’s appreciation challenges Habo to prove that he is worth more alive than dead. His present-tense narration is keenly perceptive and eschews self-pity. A riveting fictional snapshot of one Tanzanian boy who makes himself matter. (Fiction. 12-16)
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“Superb concepts and plotting will hook readers from the start, and though Wren echoes the reluctant-heroine trope common to many recent dystopian adventures, she is sympathetic.” from reboot
SEW ZOEY Ready to Wear
forward than on subtler techniques. However, his trademark inventiveness and depth are still present, making this an excellent offering for any dog lover or for anyone looking for a tale of friendship. An enjoyable mixed bag of potty humor, insightfulness and the powerful bonds between a pet and its owner. (Graphic fantasy. 9-12)
Taylor, Chloe Simon Spotlight (176 pp.) $15.99 | $5.99 paper | Jun. 4, 2013 978-1-4424-7934-0 978-1-4424-7933-3 paper Most novels about fashion end up being more about little divas than about the clothing; this is an exception. This story celebrates the rewards of personal creativity and risks of self-expression. Zoey, an eighthgrader who loves to design new outfits, decides to start a fashion blog the summer before her middle school abolishes the rule requiring school uniforms. The stress of creating an outfit for the first day of school is alleviated by using her deceased mother’s sewing machine. Like the way she pieces together an outfit, Zoey assembles a valuable group of friends to support this endeavor. Some people, like her trusted best friends, Kate and Priti, know her inside and out. New friends, like Libby, provide a bit of embellishment. Others, like Jan from the notions store, and the new principal, Esther Austen, bring to the table the structure, wisdom and encouragement Zoey needs. The storyline follows a mildly dramatic arc, as Zoey is asked to design a prom dress for a fundraiser. When the unthinkable happens, Zoey must figure out a solution—quick! Can she do it? This book will appeal to a middle-grade crowd that isn’t into vampires and dystopias, as well as to those who create art with their hands. (Fiction. 8-12)
TOMMYSAURUS REX
TenNapel, Doug Illus. by TenNapel, Doug Graphix/Scholastic (144 pp.) $19.99 | $10.99 paper | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-545-48382-7 978-0-545-48383-4 paper A young boy loses his beloved dog, only to have him return as a feisty and lovable T-Rex. Ely and Tommy are inseparable. Tommy might not be the best-behaved dog—he digs up Ely’s mother’s garden and steals bacon from the breakfast table— but he is loyal to Ely, and their bond is palpable. When Tommy meets a tragic end, Ely decides to spend the summer working at his grandfather’s farm. After being chased by a bully named Randy, he stumbles upon a gentle (and full-sized) T-Rex who reminds him of a certain dog he used to know. While Ely’s love for the prehistoric creature is immediate, the other townsfolk must be persuaded. When a plea to win their affections goes terribly wrong, Ely must again face the possibility of losing a friend. This colorized reprint of TenNapel’s 2004 indie graphic novel lacks some of the sophistication of his more recent works, relying more on crude humor to drive aspects of the story 114
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REBOOT
Tintera, Amy HarperTeen (384 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 7, 2013 978-0-06-221707-3 978-0-06-221709-7 e-book This compulsively readable sciencefiction debut will appeal widely. Seventeen-year-old Wren is one of many young people who, after dying of a widespread virus called KDH, came back to life. Called reboots, they are stronger and more aesthetically refined. They also tend to be more aggressive and less empathic; these traits become more pronounced with each minute spent dead. They are confined to Human Advancement and Repopulation Corporation facilities, where they are forced to train as soldiers who carry out the will of their captors. Dead for a record 178 minutes before she reanimated, Wren commands respect and is reasonably satisfied with her second life. But the introduction of a new detainee, Callum, to whom she’s inexplicably drawn coincides with her sickening realization that the humans have been experimenting on the lower-numbered reboots with terrifying results, leading her to forge a desperate escape. Though undeniably derivative of so many in the genre, this is a well-imagined story in its own right. Superb concepts and plotting will hook readers from the start, and though Wren echoes the reluctant-heroine trope common to many recent dystopian adventures, she is sympathetic. The tension between Wren and Callum is playful and often sweet, offering plenty to those who appreciate romance. Though the story is neatly resolved, the possibility of a sequel is still tantalizingly possible. (Dystopian adventure. 14 & up)
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CODA
Trevayne, Emma Running Press (320 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 7, 2013 978-0-7624-4728-2 In a dystopian future where music is a corporate-controlled mind-altering substance, an illegal underground band revolts through pure music. It started with specially encoded music that provided pain relief when |
pharmaceutical medicines ran short. By the time Anthem comes of age, music has gone beyond medical and even recreational uses. It’s how the Corp controls the population. All citizens are legally required to be music addicts, craving it even though it eventually destroys them. Lower-class citizens like Anthem are further destroyed by working as conduits, plugging their bodies into machines to power the Corp’s Grid with their energy. Anthem’s only reasons for living are protecting his younger siblings, comforting his dying father, spending time with his notquite girlfriend, and playing real, unencoded music in a secret underground band. Despite conflicting opinions on whether the band should risk playing for audiences, they stay private— until one of their own is killed immediately upon listening to a corporate music track. Anthem strikes back through his music in illegal concerts, planning a revolution. A betrayal endangers everyone Anthem loves, forcing him to make difficult choices. The fictional world doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but the quick pace conceals it well. Anthem’s personal connections to the richly written cast make the character-driven plot sing. Trevayne’s debut showcases a creative concept, skillful dialogue and vivid characters. (Science fiction. 13 & up)
SPIES AND PREJUDICE
Vance, Talia Egmont USA (304 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 11, 2013 978-1-60684-260-7
A young woman who assists with her dad’s private-investigation business is drawn to a stormy newcomer in this mystery that features glimmers of Austen’s revered tale. Headstrong Berry is often charged with spying on the errant husbands of her father’s clients, which has left her skeptical about relationships. She and her father have also endured years of grief over her mother’s unexpected death, ruled a suicide by the police. So when Berry begins to suspect that her best friend Mary Chris’ dad may have been somehow involved, she initiates a clandestine investigation that lands her between two guys new to her school: the seemingly friendly, helpful Drew and the gorgeous but complicated Tanner. It also opens a rift between her and Mary Chris, who is enraptured with Tanner’s stepbrother, Ryan. Berry is a likable, tough character whose acerbic wit is tempered by moments of vulnerability layered in her internal dialogue. Many other characters are less well-developed, though romance fans will relish the smoldering between Berry and Tanner. Mary Chris and Berry’s friend Jason is often very funny (at one point he’s described as making a gesture “between jazz hands and some kind of seizure”), but at times, he feels a little stereotyped in the gay-best-friend role. Fun and tightly plotted, if a bit formulaic. (Mystery. 13 & up)
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TRANSPARENT
Whipple, Natalie HarperTeen (368 pp.) $9.99 paper | $8.99 e-book May 21, 2013 978-0-06-212016-8 978-0-06-212017-5 e-book An invisible girl finds it hard to hide in this X-Men–meets–The Godfather debut. Ever since Radiasure was invented as an anti-radiation pill during the Cold War, genetic mutations have become widespread, and 16-year-old Fiona is the world’s first invisible individual. She has been living in Las Vegas as a spy for her crime-lord father. When he decides to upgrade Fiona’s status from spy to assassin, the teen and her telekinetic mother run away to a small town in Arizona. Despite a few improbabilities (most notably, presuming that a world-renowned celebrity would not be turned in to the media), the quick-paced story, set in the present day, ticks along. Attention to worldbuilding gives interesting details of Fiona’s lifestyle, such as the way she accessorizes to draw attention to the outlines of her body. Even as she constantly worries about her father and her brother, his henchman, catching up with her, she begins to trust and befriend fellow classmates with equally impressive and secret powers of their own. The slow buildup of romance with blue-eyed Seth and the revelation of his special ability heighten the tension and leave Fiona wondering if she’ll ever have a chance at a normal life. A great fit for fans of unusual love interests, happily free of all the brooding of Twilight. (Science fiction/romance. 13 & up)
A BIG GUY TOOK MY BALL!
Willems, Mo Illus. by Willems, Mo Hyperion (64 pp.) $8.99 | May 21, 2013 978-1-4231-7491-2 Series: Elephant & Piggie
Gerald the elephant and Piggie return with another playground psychodrama, this one with a twist. Piggie just loved the big ball she just found—“it was so fun!”—but the fun was short-lived, as the titular “big guy came— and—and—and— / HE TOOK MY BALL!” Piggie’s distress is so great Gerald is literally bowled over. “That is not right!” he declares. “What makes those big guys think they are so big?!” “Their size?” suggests Piggie. Gerald stalks off the page to give the big guy what-for, but…the big guy is “very BIG.” In fact, the big guy is a land-going whale, who first thanks Piggie for finding his “little ball” and then laments that no one will play with him because of his extreme size: “LITTLE GUYS HAVE ALL THE FUN.” (The whale speaks in all-uppercase letters, though the font changes with his mood; the previous sentence
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is printed in tiny, all-capped type.) This morality play in false assumptions and relativity unfurls with Willems’ customary command of visual pacing; gags are spaced just right to keep the pages turning and readers giggling. His deft exploitation of comic-book conventions sets speech balloons to overlapping and appropriately varying in size. Nineteen books and five Geisel medals or honors along, Elephant and Piggie are still delivering funny, emotionally perceptive stories for just-emerging readers. As the big guy says: “BIG FUN!” (Early reader. 5-8)
HELLO IN THERE! A Big Sister’s Book of Waiting
Witek, Jo Illus. by Roussey, Christine abramsappleseed (28 pp.) $16.95 | May 7, 2013 978-1-4197-0371-3
A little girl eagerly awaits her new sibling. She talks to the baby in mama’s belly about cupcakes, strawberries, sailing and swimming; sings songs extra-loud to be sure baby can hear and wonders what her new sibling will look like. The enthusiastic big sister is rendered mostly in black and white, with a large smiling face, upturned nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Each left-hand page depicts a pregnant belly in profile, gradually growing from a small bump until it finally crosses the center line and begins to crowd in on the right-hand page. Each rendering of the belly features a hidden flap under which can be found an adorable baby with closed eyes, a sweet smile and rosy, red cheeks. The flap and the baby it conceals grow bigger as the belly does, until finally, the big day arrives. Big sister waits patiently at home, getting dressed up for the occasion, until mother and father return home and place the little one, eyes wide open now, in big sister’s arms. Those looking for new-baby–jealousy or sibling-rivalry themes will need to look elsewhere; this one is all sweetness and light. Thick and sturdy pages and flaps are made to withstand many eager perusals as big sisters and brothers everywhere gear up for their own big days. (Picture book. 2-5)
THIS BELONGS TO ME Cool Ways to Personalize Your Stuff
Wray, Anna Illus. by Wray, Anna Running Press Kids (128 pp.) $12.95 paper | May 1, 2013 978-0-7624-4929-3
Snazzy! Funky! Cool stuff, not boring! Somehow the vocabulary seems a little dated, but the idea is fairly neat: making stencils, collages and other items to personalize backpacks, tabletops, jeans and even your skin (jagua or henna tattoos). 116
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There are 14 projects divided into three sections: Clothes, Accessories and Room, as in your bedroom. While gender is not mentioned, the overall feel is girls-only, but most of these crafts could certainly be enjoyed by decorative-minded young dudes. For each project, there is a list of supplies and caveats (“ask an adult to help if you are not used to ironing”). Instructions are clear and straightforward, although possibly not detailed enough for readers who might never have used fabric paint before. Each project is preceded by a large double-page spread for practice, with an outline image of jeans, backpack, tabletop or other item to test ideas upon. The images used are very simple and meant to encourage any young designer to try a hand at appliquéing a T-shirt or making a polymer-clay doughnut to add to headphones. A glossary of terms is included, although some of the terms and their definitions have a definite British slant. A list of web sources would have been most useful. All in all, nifty stuff for the artistically inclined. (Nonfiction. 9-14)
KOREAN NURSERY RHYMES “Wild Geese,” “Land of Goblins” and Other Favorite Songs and Rhymes Wright, Danielle Illus. by Acraman, Helen Tuttle (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2013 978-0-8048-4227-3
Consider this collection Kindermusik that teaches English or Korean as a second language. Like singing in a round, there is a lot going on—it is fun and exciting and very busy. Each part deserves attention. First, the book can stand alone as a bilingual book of 14 children’s nursery rhymes. Chirpy, simple and bright, the traditional rhymes may puzzle a bit in translation. “Little one, little one, clap your hands / Little one, little one, raise your hands up / Little one, little one, see you later”; in the context of a jump-rope rhyme, it makes sense, but alone, it’s a little mystifying. Second, the language translation is repeated three times: first in Hanguel script, then in Romanized, phonetic Korean and finally in English. The types of rhymes are universal: games to decide who will be the next person “out,” rhymes to teach babies basic concepts and even a version of “Duck Duck Goose.” Finally, the music CD allows readers to listen to correct pronunciation, with each song (played by guitar and sung by young children) performed in Korean and then English. The illustrations are two-dimensional and cartoony, with round bodies and smiling eyes. Both unusual and useful, for this ever-shrinking world. (pronunciation guide, guide to the CD) (Nursery rhymes/bilingual. 1-5)
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“The witty minimalism of the black-and-white line artwork by Swiss illustrator Albertine in this extreme landscape-format children’s book belies the psychological depth of the content.” from line 135
interactive e-books
DON’T EAT THE BABY
Young, Amy Illus. by Young, Amy Viking (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 16, 2013 978-0-670-78513-1
PRANCING DANCING LILY
They’ll eat him up they love him so. Or so this new big brother fears. Tom would be the first to admit that he’s not a huge fan of his new little brother, Nathaniel. “The Blob,” as Tom calls him, spends most of his time pooping, sleeping and crying. Though relatives inform him that someday he’ll have fun with his little bro, Tom remains skeptical. Yet for all that the baby is a time suck (sometimes it’s like no one even notices Tom anymore), he is terribly perturbed whenever a visitor meets Nathaniel and comments that they’d like to nibble, bite, eat or otherwise nosh on him. All this comes to a head at a party for the new baby when Tom decides he needs to take drastic steps to ensure that his new little brother remains undevoured. What could come off as creepy ends up being rather touching thanks to the wordplay at work. Simple acrylic paints set just the right tone for this tale of a newly protective sibling. And scenes of realistic baby-based chaos (a living room flooded with baby stuff) will ring true with both parents and siblings, whether veterans or new at the job. Who would have thought that threatened cannibalism could yield such a sweet and original little read in a market glutted with new-sibling stories? (Picture book. 3-7)
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Zullo, Germano Illus. by Albertine Chronicle (44 pp.) $18.95 | Apr. 30, 2013 978-1-4521-1934-2 The witty minimalism of the black-and-white line artwork by Swiss illustrator Albertine in this extreme landscape-format children’s book belies the psychological depth of the content. A child is traveling by train from her mother’s home in the city to her grandmother’s home, which is “practically on the other side of the world.” The train, the only color element of the whole book, moves through a landscape that begins as a modern European cityscape (plenty of signs in French for language practice!) and increasingly becomes more surreal and Seuss-ian as the landscape becomes more rural. The story is a gently veiled moral tale of resolution and independence. In spite of the admonitions of her mother and grandmother, who tell her that it is impossible to know the whole world, the child asserts that she intends to travel everywhere, and thus she will be able to know the whole world. Her assertions of independence and determination gain momentum as the train continues. The fact that the train does arrive at its far-distant destination, reuniting the girl with her grandmother, suggests that the child is right and that adults are too rigid in their thinking. Readers will thrill to the sense of discovery and exploration the girl experiences: “It is possible.” (Picture book. 2-4) |
Arnold, Marsha Diane Illus. by Manders, John Fat Red Couch $1.99 | Jan. 15, 2013 1.2.6; Feb. 26, 2013
Arnold’s story app of a cow trying to find her calling is minimalist in every way, except some handsome artwork from Manders. Lily, a bit of a freethinking, free-hoofing bovine living on a farm in Wisconsin, has an inkling that her hooves were made for more than support in the milking stall. Soon it will be her turn to take her Grandmoo’s place as the “bell cow,” the leader of the herd, but where Lily goes, chaos reigns. Surely, somewhere in the world, there is a place for a dancing bell cow. So off she ambles, in search of her calling. As Lily makes her world tour, Manders provides good scenic backdrops, but Lily is a klutz. Whatever she tries, she gives up right away. Until, that is, the conga crosses her path, a basic step-and-thrust with which even the most challenged cow can find the rhythm. For all the gumption Lily shows in taking to the wide-open road from her little farm in Wisconsin, it’s too bad she’s such a milquetoast when confronted with the flamenco, the tap dance or even the Senegalese stilt dance. The translation from Arnold’s 2004 traditional book to interactive app adds little beyond rudimentary animations and sound effects. A puzzle game offers three levels of difficulty. Keep plugging, follow your muse, find your right fit in the world. Fine sentiments, though they might need a little more nerve than Lily is willing to give. (iPad storybook app. 5-8)
ARTHUR’S BIRTHDAY
Brown, Marc Illus. by Brown, Marc Wanderful $4.99 | Jan. 4, 2013 1.0; Jan. 4, 2013
Arthur and Muffy have planned their birthday parties for the same day, which kicks off a round of problem-solving and a lesson in conflict resolution. Chock full of action, this app puts equal focus on reading skills, storyline and sense of fun. The text is available in both Spanish and English, and one can easily change the languages back and forth on each page. Every page is fully animated and interactive. Features range from silly fun—the students’ drawings on the walls act out hilarious vignettes, and two kitchen chairs produce an impressive musical sequence—to animations that serve to move the story forward. For instance, when readers
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“No bells but maybe a few whistles and definitely some giggles.” from each to his own!
swipe to turn the first page, Arthur gathers his things and heads off to school. Options on the home page give detailed tips for parents on how to use this app to build reading and language skills. Extensive teacher resources explain the educational features built into the app to help tailor it for individual learning needs. “Patience mode” requires readers to wait until one activity is finished before starting another; “page story completion” ensures that the whole page has been read before interactions are activated. With all the care put into the features, it’s too bad the art is quite pixelated. This Arthur app makes great use of humor to help make reading skills fun. (iPad storybook app. 4-8)
creation than an actual storybook for the toddler set. It’s simply illustrated and offers tappable action, but without any narration options, index or any learning component, simplicity for simplicity’s sake isn’t much of a reward. The most unfortunate part of this trip to the park is the complete lack of a storyline and the clunky narrative. The app begins: “Hello Bi-Bi! We are at the park! So many toys here....There’s even a little snail with us!” and goes downhill. “It’s funny slip down in the red trunk of the elephant!” will set readers to scratching their heads. Taps produce tepid animations and brief bursts of sound, but interactions do nothing to extend the nonstory. Take your toddlers to Axel Scheffler’s Farm instead. (iPad storybook app. 6 mos.-3)
EACH TO HIS OWN!
A TROOP IS A GROUP OF MONKEYS
Cali, Davide Kite Edizioni Srl $0.99 | Feb. 20, 2013 1.1; Mar. 1, 2013
In this droll, wordless import, a dozen dogs or other animals are connected to as many walkers by, usually, very long leashes. Walker and animal being generally located at opposite ends of a long horizontal that is only partly viewable at any time, swiping leads to an initial visual surprise. A cowboy’s “dog,” for instance, turns out to be a huge bull, a delivery man walks a giraffe, a woman in upscale dress trails well behind a skunk. Single or multiple taps on the cartoon figures in each pairing activate more foolery in the form of low-volume sounds or visual effects. These range from jumps or color changes to “poots” of colored gas from the skunk, a tilt-responsive cascade of gifts from Santa and (a sure crowd pleaser) a discreet but decidedly risqué flurry of brightly patterned and even pictorial squares continually replacing Tarzan’s loincloth. There is no particular order or plotline, and the single-screen gallery/index opened by a corner icon allows viewers to skip around at will. No bells but maybe a few whistles and definitely some giggles. (iPad novelty app. 5-9)
BI-BI AT THE PARK
Ciaffarini, Jessica Illus. by Ciaffarini, Jessica Jessica Ciaffarini $0.99 | Feb. 16, 2013 1.0; Feb. 16, 2013
Hedlund, Julie Illus. by Baron, Pamela Little Bahalia Publishing $3.99 | Feb. 17, 2013 1.0; Feb. 17, 2013
From a parliament of owls to a tower of giraffes, young readers will learn interesting collective nouns used for groups of animals. With pleasant rhyming text, Hedlund teaches children about 16 different collective nouns for wild animals. “A parliament of owls hoots in the night. / A pandemonium of parrots begins to take flight.” The rhythm and rhyme contribute to a pleasant narration in the “Read to Me” option. Appealing watercolor-and-pencil illustrations using textured backgrounds are warm and inviting. Catchy music opens and concludes this app, with an original song based on the text of the app. Unfortunately, even though the interactive features enhance the story with brief animated actions, this app does not make full use of the tablet’s ability to involve readers or reinforce new vocabulary. Young readers would benefit from being able to see the target word highlighted or written in large font on the screen, and it would help for young readers to be able to hear the new vocabulary word repeated if they tap on the group of animals. After all, what distinguishes this app is the chance for readers to learn about different collective nouns. A pleasing app, but one that could use the iPad’s interactive features to help children learn new vocabulary more effectively. (iPad informational app. 3-7)
Bi-Bi goes to the park. Beginning and end of story. Bi-Bi, a vaguely clover-shaped, clownlike creature with clunky orange feet, goes to the park, where there are butterflies and squirrels and all sorts of things to do, but Bi-Bi doesn’t really do much of anything within the static, one-dimensional landscape. The app presents more like a student design project or experiment in sound-effect 118
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BIG BEE GOES TO SEA
just a second longer than might be wished for some of the images to load. A workmanlike venture through the meerkat world. (iPad informational app. 4-8)
Lee, Angus Angus Lee $0.99 | Apr. 15, 2013 1.0; Mar. 7, 2013
Touch screens will definitely need a wiping off in the wake of this serene and wordless but seldom dull sea voyage. As Pachelbel’s Canon in D tinkles in the background, the rotund, titular bumblebee and “boyCat,” a smaller feline sidekick, ride a tandem bike down to the dock, board a ship and steam off for encounters with Nessie (in a fetching tartan tam), an inquisitive whale, and also fish, birds, a treasure chest and a number of other small surprises. All are hidden behind rows of nearly transparent tiles that disappear with a touch. Though in some scenes the ship just glides past with minimal interaction, usually most of the very simply drawn figures will also twitch, hop, squeak, flash into view or (in the case of the ship’s captain) salute when tapped. The cruise ends on a sunny tropical beach, with Big Bee and boyCat lounging on blankets. There is no “home” button nor any way to turn off the music, but arrows on each screen allow viewers to page back and forth easily enough. Smooth sailing, with rewards aplenty for tap-happy younger travelers. (iPad storybopok app. 2-3)
MEERKATS
LivoBooks LivoBooks $3.99 | Feb. 16, 2013 1.1; Feb. 25, 2013 Meet a mob of meerkats in this unassuming natural-history app. Although this brief introduction to the meerkats of southwestern Africa has a tendency to drone, meerkats can save pretty much any situation. They are just too sweet to resist, though any creature that eats scorpions probably isn’t to be underestimated. The presentation may be dry, but it also covers all the bases, from habitat to social life, diet to vocalizations. The narration is remarkably flat and follows a script on the screen with the word being spoken pulsing somewhat like the old follow-the-bouncing-ball reading tool. The creators have put together an excellent selection of stills and clips that convey a good sense of the meerkat’s environment and personality. One area where the app doesn’t lack pizzazz is in its engagement with readers. They get to feed the meerkat its remarkably atrocious diet, put together—or at least try to put together—a jigsaw puzzle, roll a meerkat out of a maze by tilting the iPad, take a number of quizzes and meet other residents of such locations as the Kalahari Desert, including spotted hyenas and cobras. The app’s interactive ease makes it suitable for a fairly wide readership, but be prepared to wait |
DOUBTING DASHA
Mironova, Tatyana illus. by Shalvashvili, Inga Tatyana Mironova $3.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 1.0; Mar. 12, 2013
Doubting Dasha goes where everyone else fears to tread because she doubts there are monsters in the forest stealing her town’s grain. Somebody is raiding the granary. Rumor has it that the scary ones who live deep in the swampy parts of the forest are the culprits, but that sounds like a stretch to Dasha, who specializes in doubting. So into the forest she marches, taking various routes and meeting with multiple monsters, from ugly, old Baba Yaga and a troll with a serious case of foot fungus to a werewolf with fleas and a zombie who is losing body parts right and left. Dasha defeats them all with kindness, and readers get to join her in curing the monsters’ many ills. The games are not mentally challenging, but a couple require a sure sense of screen touch, especially in ridding the werewolf of fleas and keeping the zombie’s eyeballs from dropping out of his head. The monsters’ dialogue is set in verse, which treads the line between cute and clownish: “We decided to come back / And help you with your human pack. / If you don’t mind that I’m so farty / We decided to throw a party!” A mildly annoying, noodling bit of music accompanies Dasha on her quest, but the artwork is an eyeful, full of the velvety colors of night. And, should readers persevere, they will learn the identity of the dirty rat making off with the grain. The level of engagement and the story’s braided scenarios are taxing enough to keep younger users fully attentive. (iPad storybook app. 5-8)
UNDERGROUND KINGDOM
Packard, Edward illus. by Díaz, Karla Visual Baker $2.99 | Jan. 15, 2013 1.1; Jan. 31, 2013
An extended version of a Choose Your Own Adventure episode from 1983 features more possible endings, color illustrations and melodramatic sound effects. The scenario opens at the top of Greenland’s Bottomless Crevasse and branches variously through a fall (or a controlled descent) to the Earth’s hollowed-out core where “you” explore, meeting primitive residents, exotic creatures or wild beasts and escaping—or, more often, not. Along with tap-activated groans
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or roars, figures in the elaborately detailed illustrations often drift about on their own or in response to tilting. The original’s text (and its available Spanish option) has been built up by extending the number of “your” possible fates to 23. A “Book Map” is accessible with a toggle from any screen and becomes visible piecemeal as each plot choice is selected. This handily allows readers both to keep a tally of endings reached and to get back quickly to previous points where the plotline branches. It’s definitely an upgrade from the print edition, and it’s much easier to navigate than previous attempts to carry the series over the digital divide. A nifty digital exploitation of a tried-and-true franchise. (iPad book app. 7-10)
FOUR LITTLE CORNERS
running amok is nothing new to children’s books, this original story is pretty nifty. Loeffler’s (Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework, 2010) illustrations are clear, expressive and warm. Young readers will giggle as they try to donate the baby dinosaurs to the museum, take them to school and finally return them to the store. The narration is exaggerated just enough to draw out the humor, emphasizing the playful side of this story. The visual layout includes clear, well-designed presentation of the text on the page, varying the print size and location, creating interest in the words for new readers. Interactive features, usually simple animations or silly sound effects, add to the humor and keep children engaged with the story. Readers will undoubtedly want to find a basket full of these silly, helpful dinosaurs at their own supermarkets. (iPad storybook app. 3-7)
Ruilier, Jérome DADA Company $2.99 | Feb. 8, 2013 1.0; Feb. 8, 2013
JACKIE JUNKO
A circular doorway stops Little Square from joining his round friends. What to do? With prodding from a fingertip, a small square and eight Little Circles bounce and spin against plain white backgrounds until a bell summons all indoors. Little Square can’t follow despite his best efforts to bend and stretch into a more rounded shape, so the Circles offer to saw off his corners. Little Square’s understandable rejection of that idea leads to a better solution: sawing corners into the door (with further help from a tapping finger). This rudimentary episode is presented on just nine screens, with an animated, multivoiced audio narration that can be muted and lively background music that cannot. A Spanish version is available as a separate purchase. More scenario than story, but workable as a starter for discussions about cooperation and physical differences. (iPad storybook app. 4-6)
DINO-STORE STORYBOOK
Sedarat, Roger Illus. by Loeffler, Trade Bluemarker.com $1.99 | Jan. 5, 2013 1.1; Dec. 18, 2012
Springy Thingy Springy Thingy $1.99 | Feb. 20, 2013 1.0; Feb. 20, 2013
Not even a barnacle escapes attention in this captivating story of a little boat and his adventure to the Old Ship Yard. Little boat Jackie Junko can’t go out on a sea voyage with his dad because he must go to school, but with the help of his sidekick Ping, a tug, he braves a water-world adventure of his own. The first in an original series, the tale shows the polish seasoned digital animators can bring. Visually, it is impressive, mixing the best of traditional illustration with 2-D animation and thoughtful, interactive fun. Each page is layered with lush, Asian-inspired land, city and seascapes (though it takes place in Aberdeen Harbour), and brilliantly detailed creatures and characters. Readers can swipe the fish to make them swim, twirl the starfish, release the sea monster, help Ping pull Jackie from danger and learn to spell some key words along the way. Spot-on English-accented narration joins playful sound effects and background music for a pleasing aural experience. A read-to-me mode with a highlighted-word function and a page menu add up to an enjoyable learning experience for emerging readers. The actual writing is a little on the wooden side, but the rest of the package is solid. If this maiden voyage is any indication, Jackie Junko is set for smooth sailing ahead. (iPad storybook app. 3-7)
A trip to the grocery store leads to a whimsical tale as a family struggles to find a home for a dozen baby dinosaurs. At the store, Leo asks his dad to get an enormous box of eggs. When they get home, Leo and his dad are surprised to discover a dozen baby dinosaurs have hatched and are happily eating their groceries. Just what are Leo and his family to do when the baby dinosaurs take over their apartment? While dinosaurs 120
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MY ZOO ADVENTURE
Thompson, Dorothy Illus. by Heath, Beverly ConsumerSoft $1.99 | Feb. 16, 2013 1.0; Feb. 16, 2013
A customizable child goes to the zoo with his or her father. As young readers open this app, they are asked to choose the name and gender of the main character and to choose an avatar (happily, a number of skin colors and ethnicities are provided, though none has explicitly Asian features). The story then uses this name and adjusts the illustrations to match. While this is nifty at first, it does not make up for the lackluster storytelling or interactive features. Some suspense is injected into the basic trip-to-thezoo storyline when the main character hides in the zookeeper’s food cart, but essentially, this app is created to teach readers about different animals’ diets and habitats. The app does not provide any narration or touch-activated animated interactions. On each screen, readers may tap a star to learn more facts about the zoo animals, take simple quizzes about animals’ diets and sometimes hear recordings of animal sounds. The digital artwork is colorful but on the cold side, with only a few facial details. From the main screen, users can play more games— matching facts from the story to particular animals, the “feed the animals” quizzes from the story and a simple coloring game. An enjoyable trip to the zoo? Readers would be better off going in person or exploring the many other options available in both print and tablet formats. (iPad storybook app. 4-8)
This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • Katie Cunningham • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Carol Edwards • Robin L. Elliott • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Ruth I. Gordon • Melinda Greenblatt • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Lauren Maggio • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Michelle H. Martin PhD • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner • R. Moore • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Melissa Riddle Chalos • Amy Robinson • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mindy Schanback • Katie Scherrer • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Stephanie Seales • Chris Shoemaker • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Karin Snelson • Jennifer Sweeney • Bette Wendell-Branco • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko
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continuing series
INFERNO Chronicles of Nick, #4
Kenyon, Sherrilyn St. Martin’s Griffin (464 pp.) $18.99 Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-250-00283-9 (Paranormal suspense. 14 & up)
JUSTINE MCKEEN, EAT YOUR BEETS Justine McKeen, #4 Brouwer, Sigmund Illus. by Whamond, Dave Orca (64 pp.) $6.95 paper May 1, 2013 978-1-55469-933-9 (Fiction. 7-9)
MYSTIC So Seekers, #3
Noël, Alyson St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $18.99 | $9.99 paper May 7, 2013 978-0-312-66488-6 978-0-312-57567-0 paper (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)
FALL OF NIGHT The Morganville Vampires, #14 Caine, Rachel New American Library (352 pp.) $17.99 May 7, 2013 978-0-451-41425-0 (Paranormal adventure. 12 & up)
ELLRAY JAKES THE DRAGONSLAYER! EllRay Jakes, #4
Warner, Sally Illus. by Biggs, Brian Viking (128 pp.) $14.99 May 16, 2013 978-0-670-78497-4 (Fiction. 6-9)
THIS PLACE IS WET Imagine Living Here
Cobb, Vicki Illus. by Lavallee, Barbara Walker (32 pp.) $8.99 paper May 28, 2013 978-0-8027-3400-6 (Informational picture book. 7-9)
GHOULFRIENDS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN Monster High, #2
Daneshvari, Gitty Little, Brown (240 pp.) $12.99 Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-316-22253-2 (Fantasy. 8-12)
STORM OF SHARKS Wereworld, #5
Jobling, Curtis Viking (512 pp.) $16.99 May 21, 2013 978-0-670-78558-2 (Fantasy. 12-15)
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indie MISWIRED
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Angres, Daniel H. CreateSpace (276 pp.) $11.50 paper | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 2, 2013 978-1-4775-7093-7
A Beer Drinker's Guide To Knowing And Enjoying Fine Wine by Jim Laughren............................................................128 CODENAME: SOB STORY by Jena M. Steinmetz............................134 The Warrior With Alzheimer's by Stephen Woodfin............. 135
CODENAME: SOB STORY The Tale Of A Picketline Sailor During Wwii
Steinmetz, Jena M. CreateSpace (312 pp.) $18.00 paper $7.99 e-book Jan. 14, 2013 978-1-4800-3107-4
After a life of depression and addiction, Dr. David Sternn undergoes an innovative brain procedure that seems to be an almost miraculous cure in Angres’ (Positive Sobriety, 2012) sci-fi novel. The novel quickly pulls readers into Sternn’s world via a therapy session centered on the doctor’s suicidal thoughts, bringing them deep into his fragile psyche. Sternn’s self-centered cynicism, existential ruminations, and horror at interacting with people and the world at large may remind some readers at times of characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea. The author reveals Sternn’s history through flashbacks from his boyhood as the son of Holocaust survivors, through his college drug use, medical education in Mexico, love life and work as an emergency room physician. This technique allows for the smooth insertion of technical and medical details, as Sternn undergoes a procedure called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted in his brain to alleviate his symptoms and alter his feelings. The electrodes’ effects can be fine-tuned by using two devices—one controlled by Sternn and another, more powerful one by his psychiatrist. Sternn soon starts to believe that the psychologist is manipulating him. Throughout, the author also drops hints about a man named Umberto Waller, who plays a key part in Sternn’s story. As the narrative progresses, readers see all facets of the main character, who is by turns intelligent, professional, cunning and hopeless, with an outsize ability to rationalize. Although the end is a surprise, it’s wholly in character. Angres, a recovering addict and an addiction psychiatrist, is spot-on in his descriptions of medical procedures and technologies and the slippery emotional states of depressives and addicts. He’s also in tune with the mindsets of people on both sides of the psychiatrist’s desk. An expertly told psychological sci-fi tale, with an emphasis on cutting-edge medical tech.
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GIVING UP JUNK-FOOD RELATIONSHIPS Recipes for Healthy Choices Barnes, Donna iUniverse (220 pp.) $27.95 | $17.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Jan. 25, 2013 978-1-4759-7277-1
This debut self-help book asks readers to think twice about what they eat— and how they fall in love. The market for self-help books about love and sex is seemingly insatiable. So, too, is the market for health and diet books. Life and relationship coach Barnes cleverly combines the two genres into one book that outlines the steps to maintain healthy bodies and healthy relationships. Barnes argues that just as chips, pizza and candy make us sick, so do relationships that fulfill temporary emotional cravings. They may feel good in the moment, she writes, but they soon lead to an emotional “crash” akin to a blood-sugar dip. Using templates created by the food industry to distinguish types of foods and portion sizes, Barnes reimagines love lives as a series of ingredients that make up a “Well-Balanced Meal,” or a lovely, decadent “Dessert” (Barnes’ term for casual dating). Self-respect, forgiveness, communication and proper boundaries make up a deliciously satisfying romantic partnership, she writes, while self-doubt and criticism are junk foods to be tossed out immediately. The author extends this conceit all the way through the book, expounding upon emotional “Food Poisoning,” “Between-Meal Snacks” (rebound relationships) and “Forbidden Fruit.” Although her numerous quizzes may strike readers as a bit trite, her food metaphors are so original that they give renewed taste to stale concepts. Barnes isn’t a nutritionist, but her health and diet tips are common-sensical and avoid the didactic tone of many diet books. She even destigmatizes such issues as sex addiction and emotional wounds by filtering them through the lens of nutrition, allowing readers to examine their own inner physical and emotional workings more objectively. A welcome addition to the self-help genre that aims to heal body and mind.
VERSES IN RED
Berry, J.W. CreateSpace (528 pp.) $21.95 paper | Jan. 3, 2013 978-1-4791-7527-7 A panoramic saga of three troubled people and their search for God. Berry’s (To Move the Mountain, 2007) novel begins explosively with an illicit romance in 1967 New Mexico between Ann Gonzales, a young woman, and Father Andrews, a parish priest. Soon, Ann is carrying Father Andrews’ child; she’s summoned by the local bishop to account 124
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for her indiscretions, and he brutally rapes her. After this harrowing prologue, the tale leapfrogs back and forth in time, describing the continuing story of Ann and the defrocked Father Andrews and the back story of Ann’s attacker, Bishop Coro. After her baby dies, Ann leaves her family in New Mexico to pursue a college education in Boulder, Colo., where she becomes a key political player in state politics; she eventually finds herself embroiled in sordid political intrigue that results in her being falsely implicated in a terrorist bombing. A disgraced Father Andrews enlists in the U.S. Marines and decamps for the war-torn jungles of Vietnam, eventually descending into a fog of alcohol-fueled dissipation. The story of Bishop Coro’s rise provides a lesson in the perversity of unbounded ambition, grotesquely cloaked in priestly garb. The plot races toward a climactic crescendo that improbably reunites the trio in Jerusalem. This complicated tale quickly shifts between times and places, from New Mexico in 1967 to Spain in 1949 to Vatican City in 1984, and so on, which may sometimes confuse readers. It’s a Russian nesting doll of layered plots that tucks torrid drama inside even more drama. Although the prose is typically sharp, the dialogue can be a bit wobbly at times: “I could give a rat’s ass about how you feel. Reach out into the jungle with your heart, and tell me what you feel.” That said, the story’s breakneck pace, lively characters and narrative surprises will likely keep readers interested. A long, rich and theologically astute epic that dramatizes the challenges of faith.
CHUCK YEAGER GOES SUPERSONIC An Action-Packed, True Flying Adventure Biermann, Alan W. Illus. by Lim, Yaejin CreateSpace (48 pp.) $10.80 paper | Dec. 28, 2012 978-1-4802-7632-1
This straightforward biography engages young readers’ imaginations, respects their intelligence and takes them along on an exciting, real-life adventure. From Chuck Yeager’s childhood in the Depression, through his experience in World War II, flight school and finally his chance to pilot the first supersonic flight, this debut children’s book brings his biography to life and includes a science lesson for eager young minds, as well. Biermann expertly weaves vignettes from Yeager’s life—like the time he plowed a test plane through a chicken coop—into the narrative, creating a tale with a cinematic, easy-to-follow rhythm. These anecdotes illustrate Yeager’s character in a natural, show-don’t-tell fashion. Biermann’s explanation of the science behind sound waves, the sound barrier and supersonic flight is so clear and memorable, it’s sure to stick with readers well into their adulthood. (Some adults who read this to kids will be relieved to have this burden lifted from them, so they don’t have to sputter out shaky explanations themselves.) While this story may inspire a lifelong
“Nothing is as it seems in Chiveneko’s science-fiction–tinged tale, which introduces readers to a lethal cast of bad guys and bad girls with tangled motivations.” from the hangman’s replacement
interest in science, it’s unlikely to inspire a lifelong love of poetic language. From the very first paragraph—“Chuck Yeager loved to fly airplanes. He loved to fly high. He loved to fly fast.”—the language is a bit unadorned. But it is crystal clear, precise and geared with almost mathematical accuracy to a young elementary reading level. Science- and adventure-minded readers who are just here for the sonic boom won’t care that the book reads more like a technical manual than poetry. The illustrations are of a piece with the language: precise down to the buttons and badges on Yeager’s flight suit but flat and stylized, reminiscent of old-school film strips. And, like the language, while the illustrations are not inspiring or beautiful, they are perfectly suited to the book’s likely audience, who will probably be scrutinizing the cockpit controls. An excellent work of children’s nonfiction that just may inspire the next Chuck Yeager.
THE HANGMAN’S REPLACEMENT Sprout of Disruption
Chiveneko, Taona Dumisani CreateSpace (490 pp.) $14.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Feb. 22, 2013 978-1-4812-1193-2 A desperate villager’s quest to become Zimbabwe’s newest executioner kicks off this intriguing debut horror novel involving man-eating plants, organ harvesting and other uncanny oddities. Abel Muranda is a devoted family man determined to do whatever it takes to feed his starving rural family, even if it means journeying far into the big city on foot in the hope of landing a job as the government’s hangman. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s ruling elite is in an uproar because someone has created a batch of carnivorous flame lilies capable of digging up the dead—and the government’s ghastly secrets, as the plants have been unearthing unmarked graves. Nothing is as it seems in Chiveneko’s science-fiction–tinged tale, which introduces readers to a lethal cast of bad guys and bad girls with tangled motivations. One intriguing subplot follows a man charged with creating a special gallows to be used for executions; he uses discarded weapons of war as his raw materials and would rather spend time cuddling up to his cold, metallic creation than to his warm, loving wife. At nearly 500 pages, this intricately woven novel is a disconcerting parable exploded to epic proportions. The author renders its many characters, from the mad genius responsible for the impending botanical apocalypse, to the prostitute/undercover operative who falls in love with Abel, to the seemingly simple Abel himself, with frightening subtlety and detail. One member of the elite, called Doll Eyes, is described as follows: “Planted into the lower part of his skull was a jaw of menacing proportions. If someone ever tied to mug him at gunpoint, all he had to do was clench it. This alone would demoralize the robber.” The boughs of this arboreal shocker threaten to creak under
the weight of its ever-mounting plot, but they never quite crack. Instead, readers are left wondering just how deep the roots go. A thought-provoking, singularly strange and absorbing novel.
THE SOCIALLY EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT AND INTELLIGENT DEMOCRACY A Diagnosis and Cure for Political Systems and the Policymaking Process Coad, Sasha CreateSpace (232 pp.) $22.00 paper | $9.00 e-book Dec. 21, 2012 978-1-4800-1202-8
A call to alter the ways of governmental policymaking that hinder democracies from reaching their full potential. It’s easy to critique the shortcomings of democratic political systems but much more challenging to offer plausible remedies. Coad admirably takes on this daunting task, though some readers might prefer to see more illustrative examples employed throughout the text. However, when Coad does provide examples, they are well-chosen and effective—in particular, the sections on climate change and oil and gas prices—and his writing style is accessible even when discussing complex economic issues. The first half of the book could serve as required reading for an advanced high school civics class or an introductory level college course in political science, where students can fill in perceived gaps by researching or extrapolating their own examples of flawed public policy strategies. The centerpiece of the text consists of 10 guiding principles for a socially efficient government “acting in the best interests of all of its citizens” and a network of governmental agencies that would rely upon trained experts in a given field to propose and evaluate legislation. In fact, Coad faults unqualified legislators for the sad state of affairs in many democratic governments: gross misconceptions, politically expedient decisions, unproductive ideological battles and political gridlock. As Coad writes: “To produce efficient policy requires a high level of expertise, which is far, far beyond the knowledge and ability of any individual voter, politician or political party.” While an emphasis on competition, efficiency, flexibility, transparency and accountability among these largely autonomous agencies sounds appealing, the possibility that truly independent experts—with reduced conflicts of interest—could collect and interpret data with fewer biases isn’t entirely convincing. Nevertheless, Coad returns to more solid ground in the three final chapters on free market capitalism, the Great Recession and social responsibility before reiterating his 10 principles in the appendix. Contains some wishful thinking, but many readers will appreciate this admirable effort in pursuit of a more perfect union.
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DANIEL DINOSAUR
Cobb, Daryl K. Illus. by Castagno, Carla F. 10 to 2 Children’s Books (40 pp.) $15.99 | $10.99 e-book | Dec. 22, 2012 978-1-4243-1712-7 Cobb and Castagno’s cute, colorful picture book illustrates the bond between a brother and sister. Daniel Dinosaur has just turned 4, and his favorite pastime is playing hide-and-seek with his younger sister, Sue. One day, his parents ask him to watch her while they’re away, and he loses track of her. The book then follows Daniel as he looks for her in trees, pokes his head into a lake (where a friendly large-toothed fish lives) and even searches a volcano. Once Sue realizes she has scared her brother, she comes out of hiding and explains that she thought they were still playing. From then on, they stick even closer together, which is adorably portrayed in a cave painting of the two of them playing. This will be a good book for young siblings or for children who have a little brother or sister on the way. Danny and Sue play together and care about each other without being too sappy, and since their parents are absent for most of the book, the reader gets the sense that they can rely on each other. Danny’s search for Sue is humorous, and it’s rendered with lively drawings. The parents’ absence gives Danny his first taste of adult responsibility, but the drama of losing Sue is so brief that it shouldn’t be frightening, even to sensitive children. The light, whimsical drawings maintain a sense of fun. The dinosaurs, however, are a bit underdrawn; most kids love dinosaurs, can recognize different types and would likely appreciate more detail. However, that certainly doesn’t diminish the overall charm of the story. A sweet story told in simple rhymes that young children would likely enjoy.
BETA PROJECT AVATAR
Hays, A.M.D. Diadema Press (414 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-9854182-0-5 Debut novelist Hays delivers a dynamic cyberthriller featuring glamorous settings and a delightful female protagonist. From the moment readers meet genius cryptographer Dee Lockwood, mischievously swiping a bottle of champagne from a plush private jet, they’ll know they’re in for a good time. She soon becomes enmeshed in a top-level conspiracy involving an off-the-books U.S. military operation—and some enthralling personal-assistant software. Her colleague on the plane downloads the software, the titular Beta, to Lockwood’s phone moments before bumbling hijackers put him into a coma, and Lockwood quickly finds herself fleeing from 126
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Black Ops agents. She gets assistance from a dashing British software salesman with some suspiciously adroit espionage skills She also calls in a favor from an old college pal involved with an international hacker organization called the Substructure; he helps her unlock the mystery behind her new person-of-interest status. But her greatest asset is Beta’s amazing artificial intelligence; it not only books plane tickets at a moment’s notice, but also, quite literally, guides Lockwood through car chases, burglaries and gutsy escapes. Readers may never look at their iPhones the same way again—although some tech-savvy readers may raise an eyebrow at Beta’s “adaptive fuzzy logic.” Hays provides sumptuous descriptions of each of Lockwood’s half-dozen international locations, although such richness occasionally slows the action and adds unneeded heft to the book’s 39 chapters. However, the author depicts a female character not often seen in the cyberthriller genre: an independent, sassy protagonist unafraid of striking out on her own, leaving colorful male accomplices in her wake. When she’s not hacking into government databases or leading an Alpine high-speed chase, she’s slipping into designer disguises and freshening her manicure. She even calls family members and her cat sitter as she evades murderous military men from Bangalore to Rio de Janeiro. Lighthearted fun with a quick-witted heroine and her astounding smartphone app.
THE LEGEND OF ANNE SOUTHERN First of the Legend Series
Hodge, J. Rivers; Hodge, Brenda iUniverse (552 pp.) $38.95 | $28.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jan. 4, 2013 978-1-4759-4596-6 The Civil War gets a supernatural assist in this blood- and sex-soaked epic, the first entry of a planned series from the husband-and-wife writing team. Opening shortly before the first shots of the War Between the States, the novel traces the rise and fall of several characters but focuses mainly on the titular Anne, an astonishingly lovely Southern belle who begins the story in a life of bliss. Happily (and lustfully) married to a successful plantation owner, Anne and her two sons lead a pampered life of comfort. As war nears, however, Anne’s husband leaves home to join the fight, urged on by his malefic father, who turns out to be more than he appears. Forced to move to Atlanta, then to flee home as Sherman’s men loot and burn a path to the ocean, Anne is forced into an increasingly compromising series of choices, culminating in a confrontation with a deeply disturbed Union major, who has his own history with her father-in-law. As befitting the first novel in a planned series, a great deal of narrative ground is laid, with a sometimes-dizzying number of characters getting their own stories and points of view. While the
“The author handles each scene with a delicate hand, establishing just the right atmosphere with steady brush strokes of detail.” from the coal picker
number of plot threads and characters can be overwhelming— particularly in the last 150 pages or so, where new developments and characters are still being introduced into the richly layered story—the Hodges develop most characters with a surfeit of attention and detail, usually bringing the speaking roles to life with confidence and a sure sense of story. However, not every plot thread and theme is handled with equal verve; the supernatural element, embodied in Anne’s father-in-law, seems to stand alone for most of the book, and veiled references to future events and stereotypical character traits stand out as examples of threadbare development. Nonetheless, the Hodges’ knack for epic storytelling and the otherwise believable characterizations help propel the story past the slow parts, all the while displaying a remarkable style. With more than a hint of being a bodice-ripper, this accomplished debut will speak to fans of historical fiction and epic novels.
THE COAL PICKER Hula, Martin J. Manuscript (261 pp.) Feb. 23, 2013
Hula’s debut novel portrays the fear, violence and small acts of grace in a small coal-mining town during early unionbusting efforts. In 1931 Moss Creek, a coal-mining town where men as young as 14 are expected to “go under ground or leave,” young Johnny Marko witnesses the torture of a miner by company thugs and fears for his father’s safety. With best friend Andy Strovos—an adventurous Huckleberry Finn to Johnny’s cerebral Tom Sawyer—he observes adults’ behavior, although he’s not yet old enough to understand the brutality and desperation shadowing his idyllic childhood. When Johnny’s father dies in a suspicious mining accident, the boy suspects Ray Kruger, the company’s “bitter” and “shameless” supervisor, to be the man responsible. Given a chance to avenge his father’s death, young Johnny chooses, as his father taught him, to do the right thing and avoid violence. But the memories haunt him, and many years—and a world war—later, Johnny returns to his “older, dirtier and more decayed” hometown, under an assumed name, to finish the “game” Ray began. With the help of Andy and the love of a local girl, Anna Alberston, Johnny soon discovers that the limited time he and his father spent together was more valuable than the lifetimes most fathers and sons get. Hula’s tale is long on misery and short on humor, but it transcends its melancholy through honest observation and rich, evocative details of a bygone era: freshly baked bread, homemade root beer, storage cellars, spittoons. The author handles each scene with a delicate hand, establishing just the right atmosphere with steady brush strokes of detail. Along the way, he introduces a caravan of characters, including Danny, an 8-year-old boy who reminds Johnny of himself as a child, who instinctually makes the best of his decrepit
environment. The most memorable character, Maggie—a thoroughly modern cashier at the company store—serves as the “town’s central news agency” and a selfless matchmaker. Because of her kindness, Johnny’s odyssey ends with love, justice and peace. An original, compelling hybrid of period novel, murder mystery and bildungsroman.
THE INCOMPLETE MAN
Iqbal, Icki DDKM (DADU, DEVI, KAARTU, MOOCHI) Publishing Ltd (290 pp.) $14.50 paper | $5.00 e-book Nov. 7, 2012 978-0-9570266-3-6 Part coming-of-age tale, part darkside-of-business exposé, this novel chronicles an immigrant experience. Majid Khan, who’s studying math at Cambridge in the 1970s, is more comfortable with numbers than people. He plans on becoming an insurance actuary, but it’s through Cambridge Union debates that he makes his mark and meets the fellow students who make a profound impact on his life. Ellen Evan is the first and only girl he takes an interest in, and Nick Knights brings out Majid’s competitive side, both in debates and after graduation, when Nick and Majid end up on the management fast track at the same firm. As his relationship with Ellen continues, Majid, who makes frequent references to the fact that he was almost considered autistic as a child, grows more comfortable with the fuzzier, more emotional side of life—something the author symbolizes by having Majid suddenly develop a sense of smell after being without it from birth. His professional life takes off at the same time, with the firm’s executives pushing Majid out of his comfort zone and into a place of prominence. He realizes he could one day see himself as a CEO, if only to ensure that Nick doesn’t get the position. When Majid tries to push the firm to meet the new British regulatory requirements (which, along with the country’s 1980s privatization plans and the intricacies of estate agencies, may be somewhat opaque to American readers), it’s evident that trouble lies ahead, especially when Majid, who has already seen his relationship with Ellen disintegrate, is pushed out of the company. Majid’s ethical man–vs.–corporate corruption battle makes for a compelling storyline, though it can at times get bogged down in the minutiae of financial products and management training exercises. On the other hand, his relationship with Ellen, especially as he sets wedding dates several years in the future and lets them slip by, may leave readers wondering if Majid will ever make it out of his extended adolescence. A well-portrayed streak of emotional growth runs through this man’s journey from bookish undergraduate to business leader.
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“A sweet, bright humor pervades the book, as Laughren makes wine tasting sound like fun rather than an opportunity to embarrass yourself.” from a beer drinker’s guide to knowing and enjoying fine wine
LOVE POEMS FOR CANNIBALS
Keen, Raymond CreateSpace (166 pp.) $9.95 paper | $2.99 e-book | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-4701-8268-7 Startling, cynical, satirical free verse about life among the postmodern ruins. Keen’s debut poetry collection arrives at the party already a little drunk, a bit raucous and talking a mile a minute, but the longer the night goes on, the more sense it seems to make. After all, he’s not out to hurt anyone; he’s just trying to figure out where it all went wrong for all of us. With considerable energy and tightly coiled wit, Keen ranges across the political, spiritual and pop-culture landscapes only to find them all a little disorienting and largely bereft. “There is no sadness,” he writes, “But the fear of sadness. / There is no despair, / But the distraction from despair. / There is no suffering, / But the avoidance of suffering. / We’re living in bad times, / Biochemically speaking.” Regardless of where he looks, nothing essential remains. Love is sold “in bottles now, / and smells like aftershave,” Christ is “lost in all the traffic” and “so far away from now.” Even your sense of self is suspect: “In this cellular moment, / This eternity / Among strangers, / You see / Yourself / In bits / And / Pieces, / Impossible to describe.” Trapped by the postmodern condition and yearning for the teleologically secure time “before the world was shattered,” Keen’s narrators respond in seemingly the only way available—playing their own language games, answering absurdity with absurdity and papering over fragmentation with pastiche. Meditations on death are peppered with popular advertising slogans, and the apotheosis of Western civilization is reduced to Michelangelo’s David infested with maggots. With no certainty, even of the self, the poems join in the cannibalizing of culture, seeking irony in unexpectedly ironic situations. Amid the brutality arises humor, and Keen ably joins a long tradition in American avant-garde poetry of lampooning demagoguery with poems like “The Demystification of Henry Kissinger” and “Even at Night All Snakes Swallow Their Prey Whole: Looking Back at Arafat & Some of His Peers.” Supporting the politics, satire and social commentary is a more than capable, sometimes beautiful verse that relies heavily on repetition—from anaphora to choral refrains—and startlingly precise imagery (“sway-backed surgeons, / Peeling human skulls like eggs”) for great effect. Thought-provoking, incisive and entertaining; a remarkably well-rounded debut.
A BEER DRINKER’S GUIDE TO KNOWING AND ENJOYING FINE WINE
Laughren, Jim Crosstown Publishing Inc. (206 pp.) $16.95 paper | Dec. 10, 2012 978-0-9855336-1-8 For all the beer-drinking die-hards, Laughren serves an enticing, thorough, though not suffocating introduction to hops’ fermented friend, the grape. Though the shelves creak under the weight of wine books for dummies and gun-shy tipplers terrified by wine-speak, here’s a welcome addition that’s relaxed, inviting and intelligent. Laughren is a bon vivant without being a boob, a sensualist even if he wouldn’t put it that way. He likes his beer—the book is liberally sprinkled with beer wisdom, as if to soothe the wary brewer—but he’s also a big fan of wine, and he wants readers in on the action. He aims to provide an unintimidating yet rich tour through the world of wine, highlighting its conviviality but undergirding it with a candid sense of what’s in the glass. With a healthy dose of detail, Laughren touches on the history of wine, factors in its production and an appreciation of terroir. He sketches various social scenarios and the wines he might choose to complement them: a zinfandel with a basketball game on TV; a big, young Brunello di Montalcino when the brothers of your new squeeze stop by to check you out; a cabernet sauvignon for dinner with the boss; a dry sherry when the squeeze comes over to break up with you. A sweet, bright humor pervades the book, as Laughren makes wine tasting sound like fun rather than an opportunity to embarrass yourself. His descriptions— “like sucking stones and chips of slate dipped in lime and lychee juice”—require attention. He’s chummy, like a knowledgeable friend who doesn’t need to wear it on his sleeve, though the insight seeps through. Most importantly, he’s on your side: “there’s no need to excuse your preferences,” he says, but be open to new experiences. Also included are excellent maps of wine-producing regions and a brief survey of various oenological tools. Cheers to this spirited, perceptive guide.
YES YOU CAN: The Achievable Diet Le Dean, Diana Maree CreateSpace (220 pp.) $19.90 paper | Feb. 4, 2013 978-1-4782-0747-4
Le Dean’s debut self-help book, cleverly disguised as a diet book, makes a case for transforming one’s body through a series of gradual, sustainable changes. Le Dean strikes a note of balance right from the start, explaining that her mission is to “reclaim the original definition 128
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of ‘diet’—simply, the food and drink a person regularly consumes.” She encourages readers to construct their own one-way journeys toward weight loss, recommending gradual, sustainable changes over drastic, desperate measures. “There is no real ‘finish line,’ ” she writes. “Your ideal weight is an admirable goal to aspire to, but the greater goal is to try to enjoy the process.” Her tools for easing said process range from incremental food substitutions to a Red-Yellow-Green-light food chart for those who’d rather follow set guidelines than read labels. Le Dean’s writing is grounded, authoritative and thoroughly approachable—she captures the charisma of a motivational speaker without the corniness. Her only bobble is the Red-YellowGreen food chart; the foods don’t seem to occupy any particular order, making it difficult to find what you’re looking for quickly. Directions to “scroll through” the chart make sense in the electronic version but are awkward in print. Chart notwithstanding, Le Dean provides all the tools to recognize, own and finally transform one’s relationship with food. She also couldn’t make her approach any less cookie-cutter; she dodges some hot-topic issues like whether artificial sweeteners help or hinder weight loss, but she isn’t shy about bucking popular opinion in other areas, as when she suggests getting on the scale every single day. But unlike many other diet-book authors, she always explains exactly where she’s coming from and why, leaving it up to the reader to make the final judgment. Le Dean skillfully guides readers on a journey through weight loss while maintaining a healthy perspective.
TALE OF A BABOON FROM BOTSWANA Marsh, Richard O. CreateSpace (82 pp.) $15.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-4793-4470-3
Following in the footsteps of Aesop, Ricahard O. Marsh’s (ROM) debut early reader presents an amusing reminder that what goes around comes around. Under the shade of an African mahogany tree, near a large watering hole in the middle of the Okavango Delta, there lives a wise, friendly tortoise. The tortoise is on sociable terms with the numerous animal species that come to drink at the watering hole—elephants, giraffes, monkeys and lions included. When the tortoise receives an unexpected dinner invitation from a young, cocky baboon, he eagerly treks all the way to the baboon’s palm tree home. However, the baboon refuses to come down from the top of the palm tree with all the delicious food. The tortoise, obviously unable to climb the tree, is forced to make a long and hungry journey back home. After giving it some thought, the clever tortoise decides the baboon should be taught a lesson. He enlists the assistance of the other animals, all of whom dislike the loud and obnoxious baboon. The elephants, giraffes, monkeys, and even the cranky honey badger and quiet bushman agree to help the tortoise. A happy
cabal is formed as the residents of the Okavango Delta set out to cleverly teach the baboon a lesson on respect and manners. Vundi, a safari guide and native of the Bantu tribe, learned the tale from his grandfather and later passed it on to ROM. It’s a gentle reminder to treat others with respect and dignity, though the story also provides insight into the personalities and mannerisms of a variety of African animals. Colorful photographs are peppered throughout the book, accompanying ROM’s vivid descriptions. The moral of the story is clearly conveyed, and ROM’s fable serves as a wonderful teaching resource. Children will enjoy the simple yet engaging narrative while parents will appreciate the values it upholds and lessons it delivers. A sweet story that takes on life’s bigger lessons.
THE GREEK FIRE KILLINGS Miles, Bruce A. CreateSpace (260 pp.) $10.25 paper | $1.99 e-book Dec. 18, 2012 978-1-4802-7256-9
A compelling, thoughtful thriller that follows a couple’s attempt to escape danger. In a world where we are forever watching and being watched, can anyone truly keep a secret? This question churns at the center of Miles’ (The Shootings At Summerhill High School, 2012) novel, a tale of deception and intrigue that also serves as a troubling commentary on the loss of privacy. Blissfully celebrating their first anniversary, newlyweds Derrick and Rhiannon Brewster escape to a remote cabin in the mountains. While eating at a restaurant just before their retreat, they witness a horrifying murder. Sen. Wilkins, suspected of being behind a brutal political campaign designed to shut out the democratic candidate, is accosted by an eager young journalist. The senator pulls a gun on the young man and kills him in front of a restaurant full of witnesses; it’s caught on video for good measure. Predictably, the video goes viral, both on news channels and, in an uncut version, all over the Internet. Derrick, a journalist, now finds his job hanging in the balance for having fled the scene of the crime rather than reporting it. Rhiannon’s unwitting appearance in the video astounds one viewer. Rhiannon had foiled Marc David Anthony’s attempt at creating an international data mining operation; she then took on a new identity and went into hiding, unbeknownst to her new husband. Anthony tracks Rhiannon and sends professional hitmen to her house, making it clear he’s thirsty for revenge. The couple soon lands in intense danger, needing to find strength from within themselves and from each other. Suspenseful and captivating, Derrick and Rhiannon’s story brims with love and intrigue as they travel the country in search of safety. Miles tells a fast-paced story that explores what can happen to a couple when they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Transcends the common thriller while examining contemporary disregard for privacy.
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Colin & Ryan Pyle
World Conquerors, Self-Publishers By Tom Eubanks
RYAN PYLE PHOTO © CHAD INGRAHAM/G219 PRODUCTIONS
the Pyle brothers met up one afternoon between a break in their busy schedules in New York’s Central Park. On a hill above a playground, Colin confessed, “working for the man is not a nice life.” He told his brother he was looking to resign. Within minutes, the brothers were on Google Earth at the Apple store on Fifth Avenue charting an “audacious” counterclockwise route around China. After more research, they chose a pair of BMW F800GS off-road motorcycles with Touratech upgrades to complete their “massively ambitious” tour. What eventually transpired—despite the doubts of publishers, production companies, potential sponsors, friends and even their wives—was a 17,674-kilometer journey, documented in a self-published book and a self-produced television show that premiered on April 10 on National Geographic International. “We didn’t make the Guinness Record Book because we backtracked a little bit in one section and they discounted all of that,” Ryan explains from his home in Shanghai.
Ryan and Colin Pyle, whose full-throttle travelogue debut The Middle Kingdom Ride details their circumnavigation of China on motorcycles, grew up in and around Toronto. Children of divorce, Ryan spent his formative years with their father, while Colin remained with their mother. Although they were only three years apart and, at one point, fellow students in the same high school, they were never fully fraternal. They were further separated by Ryan’s decision to relocate to China, where he met his wife, Jasmine, started a family and pursued a self-taught career in photojournalism, shooting images of his adoptive homeland for such outlets as the New York Times and Newsweek. Colin remained in Toronto, where he “made a substantial amount of money” through a company he started, sold and then, unhappily, worked for. “As my bank balance increased, my soul seemed to diminish,” Ryan writes. Halfway across the world, Colin was feeling the same. As Lehman Brothers crumbled,
COLIN PYLE PHOTO © CHAD INGRAHAM/G219 PRODUCTIONS
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But the trip wasn’t about records or sponsorships or a book deal. It was about getting away from it all, grabbing “an opportunity to experience something new every day” for 65 days and, most importantly, reconnecting as brothers. “I’ve been to so many of these places, but my fondest memory was seeing things through Colin’s eyes, the stereotypes of China being broken every day,” says Ryan. Excerpts from Colin’s diaries at the end of each chapter give the reader epistolary recaps of what is predominantly Ryan’s detailed narrative. Colin sums up the steep hills and muddy valleys of their adventure. On Day 28, he writes, “The ride this afternoon was spectacular.” The following day, after 120 kilometers in horrible, icy conditions, a mechanical breakdown and an accident along the border with Pakistan, he begins, “Today turned out to be the new worst day of the trip.” “We had so much difficulty trying to include our separate voices,” Ryan says. In the book, he claims to “have a tendency toward the over-dramatic,” whereas his younger brother “tends toward understatement.” This personality difference and the deep bond they share provide humor and insight. “I didn’t want to use the royal ‘We’ because we didn’t agree on much about what we saw and how we saw it,” Ryan explains. With the help of “a very, very excellent editor, who tore it apart and helped us put it back together,” Ryan bolstered the main narrative with the many hours of video footage shot by a small crew along the way and punctuated it with Colin’s end-ofday reflections. “I’m a shorthand guy,” admits Colin, on a separate call from his home in London. In a small book that he carried to keep track of their finances, he also noted “little points, a snapshot of an emotion or a feeling at that exact moment, to come back to, at a later date.” An agent in Toronto eagerly pitched their project, but “we weren’t celebrities,” says Ryan. “And who would want to know about two nobodies riding motorcycles around China?” After sponsors, “traditional television and traditional publishing turned their back[s]” because they didn’t “fit their risk profile,” the pair said, “You know what? People don’t want you until someone else wants you. It’s the same in television, it’s the same in publishing, it’s the same in anything. We’re two competent business people. We’re very passionate about this project. We’re gonna do it ourselves.”
“Our risk profile is beyond normal,” Ryan laughs. So they began G219 Productions, named for the highest and most remote highway in China, which the two “almost died on” but “loved so much.” With Ryan’s day-to-day organization and Colin’s entrepreneurial input, G219 published The Middle Kingdom Ride and produced the companion documentary. Their upcoming follow-up, The India Ride, arrives later this year. “It’s been a long, long journey,” sighs Colin. “I don’t know what’s been harder: riding around China or getting [the book and television show] completed.” Tom Eubanks is a writer and editor living in New York. In publishing for over two decades, he also represents authors and artists. He’s currently working with fashion icon Pat Cleveland on a long-anticipated memoir.
The Middle Kingdom Ride Pyle, Colin; Pyle, Ryan G219 Productions (306 pp.) Price varies by seller December 2, 2012 978-1-468159-81-3
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INSIDE YOUR THERAPIST’S MIND How a Psychotherapist Thinks, and Why it Works Permut, Drew E. CreateSpace (112 pp.) $12.99 paper | Dec. 28, 2012 978-1-4793-0269-7
Permut’s guide outlines how psychotherapy functions and heals. With clarity and professionalism, Permut, a clinical psychologist who’s practiced psychotherapy for over 30 years, reveals a full picture of his field by describing his experiences as both therapist and patient. The author stresses the importance of active listening in successful psychotherapy. The emotionally engaged therapist closely observes and feels the patient’s story in order to “understand a patient’s personality dynamics and motivations” and to delicately guide the person in “the difficult task of challenging old assumptions and confronting deep seated fears.” Permut notes that “treatment is not teaching or explaining; it is more like exploration and reconstruction.” The author expertly addresses the differences between psychotherapists and psychiatrists and stresses that in psychotherapy, the focus isn’t on diagnosis and medication but on “knowing who is this person, and what is the meaning of her or his suffering.” Developing a trusting, professional relationship is paramount to facilitating the dialogue. Effective therapists require more than professional knowledge and clinical training; they also need “substantial therapy themselves” to build the extensive selfknowledge necessary for competently understanding and counseling others. The many clinical examples show the successes and failures of talk therapy. Presenting therapy in these terms might ease readers’ fears about revealing their own hidden thoughts and anxieties. Though Permut avers this book is “no substitute for the psychotherapy experience,” the reader might gain personal insight and understanding in addition to knowledge about the practice and importance of psychotherapy. Skillfully maps the process of psychotherapy.
PLATO’S CAVE
Proctor, Russell CreateSpace (256 pp.) $9.80 paper | $0.99 e-book Dec. 28, 2012 978-1-4793-0879-8 A spirited, high-speed chase for answers when the ground rules of physicality morph overnight. Emily Bramwell is an ordinary college student in Australia nursing heartbreak and a hangover when a sausage appears out of nowhere in her bathroom sink. Then she starts reading weirdly accurate horoscopes. After that, her experience of reality is never quite the same. And that’s just the beginning of the disorienting 132
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changes that lead her out the door in search of explanations. While Emily finds herself at the vortex of what increasingly looks like an interdimensional rift, there’s evidence brewing of an unfolding drama that’s bigger and more confusing than her personal woes. Metaphysicians, scientists, a room with peculiar properties and a house plant named Mike figure into her quest, which alters her perceptions forever. Proctor’s (Days of Iron, 2011) heroine and fantastical plot are engaging and oddly believable, given how far the story departs from what we think we know of reality. Emily, the narrator, is winningly determined, annoyed, unflappable and self-aware, a likable exemplar of a modern, independent young woman. Her conversational voice takes the reader by the arm and pulls him along for a well-constructed ride that hints at the author’s past as an actor. Amid the abundant fun, Proctor explores a variety of stances on the meaning of life, including Emily’s initial lack of interest in bigpicture questions. When an astrologer and a scientist grapple with the same observed phenomena, their esoteric explanations (which reflect solid background knowledge) enjoy equal weight. In Emily’s view, they might be saying the same thing. An intelligent, whimsical, nondogmatic roller coaster of a novel, which leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots.
SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF TEETH
Roberts, Richard Curiosity Quills Press (277 pp.) Feb. 14, 2013 978-1-62007-080-2 A dark and complex young-adult fantasy of love, longing and war. Roberts’ remarkably accomplished, involving (if lamentably titled) YA novel centers on Fang—a nightmare embodied in the form of a large, ferocious black dog with the thoughts, feelings and soul of a classic teen-novel bad-boy hero. Fang inhabits the Dark—a shifting, kaleidoscopic landscape inhabited by other nightmares, demons and brawling angels—where his “Muse” sits all day sad and silent in her ramshackle house, indifferent to Fang’s feelings for her. Fang’s existence as a stalker of other people’s dreams is being challenged from multiple directions (and by multiple females)—his indifferent Muse, the dreaming mortal girl Anna, and even Lily, a demon with hair like “blood” and a surprisingly romantic heart (“I’d trade a house full of regular flowers for just one,” Lily tells our hero, “if it was picked because it was perfect for me”). Complicating matters at the outset is Fang’s friend Jeffery, who concocts a scheme to radically extend the reach and power of the Dark—a plan that eventually upsets the delicate balance of power in the supernatural realm and sparks a war. Scene-stealer Baal heads the team of bad angels. He contemptuously tells one of the good guys, “Not all of us spend every night praying we could lick our Father’s boots again.” Roberts charges virtually every scene with tension and some refreshingly unsentimental dialogue, and the underpinning worldbuilding is complex and convincing. Through adroit pacing, distinctive
“Schuetz provides an intriguing premise that hits the ground running and—via judiciously timed revelations—continually piques interest.” from splintered star
GRAY SKIES
characters (especially Fang himself, who’s the perfect balance of tough and tender) and some quite lovely prose, he crafts a story of surprising emotional punch. The lone-wolf-finds-love YA formula, tweaked and reshaped with a poet’s sensibilities.
SPLINTERED STAR
Schuetz, Noah CreateSpace (510 pp.) $12.95 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jul. 27, 2011 978-1-4636-2469-9 In Schuetz’s sci-fi novel, a man frozen in time is awoken in the far future to play his role in a mysterious destiny. In the near future, the Alexander Virus—unleashed by brilliant scientist Miles Alexander—has killed millions. Now, 15 years after the outbreak, billionaire Douglas Worthington has summoned the scientist’s adult son, Alan Alexander, for something only he can provide: himself. Alan is the biometric key that will unlock his father’s research data on temporal stasis. Just as Alan arrives, chaos erupts. Alan is forced into the stasis field, and from one instant to the next, the world changes utterly. Rana, 15, a dancer and priestess-in-training, lives in the small fishing village to which a confused Alan is first brought. In her world, technology is highly advanced but scarce. When Rana is summoned to the capital to become a Guide—a human specially gifted with the Shepherd deity’s powers—Alan accompanies her small group to seek answers. Essentially, they’re off to see the Wizard. Along the way, as the group faces dangers, various memories and thoughts confuse Alan. In his debut novel, Schuetz provides an intriguing premise that hits the ground running and—via judiciously timed revelations—continually piques interest. Other points of view (a highhanded princess, a time-traveling villain) round out the story and give us further glimpses into this future world with its different cultures. The story becomes a bit confusing toward the end, and Schuetz doesn’t address some basic questions: Why is English unchanged after tens of thousands of years? Why doesn’t Alan ever wonder how the geography he’s traversing corresponds to the America he knows? But the issues Schuetz does combine here—selfhood, hubris, the ways technology or religion can be used for good or ill—make a meaty stew. Mystery, sci-fi and political intrigue merge in this energetic, absorbing tale.
Self, David CreateSpace (164 pp.) $12.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Dec. 31, 2012 978-1-4781-6209-4 Self ’s debut Civil War novel fictionalizes the true story of his ancestors and their place in United States history. Alabaman Jon Self is a true American patriot with relatives who fought proudly in the Revolutionary War, but he attempts to remain neutral when the Civil War breaks out. He takes up blacksmithing to avoid the draft, but three years into the war, conscript hunters urgently need to fill the dwindling Confederate ranks. After they threaten to take Jon’s oldest son, Jon signs up with the 58th Alabama Regiment, leaving his beloved Mary and their five children behind. Against his will, and caught up in something far beyond his power, Jon fights in a series of intense skirmishes, surviving alongside his buddy John Laster. “Numb and dangerous” after so much violence, death and pain, Jon is captured in a final confrontation with Union troops at Missionary Ridge in Georgia and loaded with his fellow POWs onto a train heading north to the “frozen hell” of the Rock Island prison camp. The camp held more than 12,000 Rebel soldiers during the 20 months of its brutal existence, and such specifics don’t escape the author’s notice. In well-researched and footnoted tangents, he discusses such subjects as training and leadership issues within the Confederate States Army, the splintered nation’s burgeoning railway system and the importance of the new technology of photography. Self also excels at depicting the unusual behavior of men at war; for example, he describes opposing troops laying down their arms to observe the Sabbath when distant church bells pealed. Later, similar chimes, when heard from the prison camp, “seemed to be a mockery of God’s injustice.” The author mentions the frequency of the letters between Jon and Mary, but he only quotes a few snippets; readers may wish that he showed more of their correspondence. The lives of tenacious Mary and her brood don’t come into focus until the final chapters, at times making the book feel a bit like Gone with the Wind from Ashley’s perspective. But Self ’s decision to concentrate primarily on Jon’s travails helps keep the book at a steady, readable pace. A succinct historical war novel that combines thorough research with a moving family tale.
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“Readers will quickly care about Steiny, making his postwar life relevant in vignettes that range from harrowing to heartwarming.” from codename: sob story
THE STAINED GLASS VIRGIN Smith, Mason McCann Mad Scavenger Publishing (360 pp.) $11.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Feb. 13, 2013 978-0-9788580-8-7
A fictionalized retelling of a famous murder in 16th-century Rome. Smith (Oliver in Bronze, 2012) brings to life the story of Beatrice Cenci, a Roman aristocrat who suffers the abuse and violent temper of her father, Francesco. Francesco’s behavior is known far and wide, but money and the unjust class system have him hopping in and out of jail, tormenting Beatrice, her brothers and the staff of the Cenci household. Beatrice is eventually sent away to the Cencis’ family home in La Petrella del Salto, where she, her brothers and her secret lover hatch a plan to be rid of Francesco once and for all. But things don’t go as planned, and Beatrice finds herself caught in a swirl of money, religion and power, as the pope and the authorities of the Inquisition struggle to deal with the widely known motivation for her crimes while keeping the peace. By turns an arrogant aristocrat, a woman struggling to break free of society’s rigid expectations, and a crafty and stubborn conspirator, Beatrice is a complex character who grows and changes as the novel progresses. Smith digs deeply into Beatrice’s character, painting a realistic and compelling if not entirely likable portrait of the famous historical figure. The weakest part of the story may be Smith’s occasional efforts to inject commentary on gender roles of the time: Beatrice says things like, “Just because I’m a girl, you think I don’t want things?” and, “What man would ever want an over-educated wife?” True or not, these expository lines somewhat break the immersion the rest of the novel fosters by seeming out of place with what the reader sees of Beatrice, especially since her situation is about much more than genderbased oppression. Though these lines feel forced and shallow compared to the depth of the rest of the story, overall Smith avoids any easy answers, and the book churns with a brutal, lyrical physicality of bodies, torture and lust that paints a vivid and readable portrait of the time period. Thoughtful, well-researched and passionate.
CODENAME: SOB STORY The Tale of a Picket Line Sailor During WWII Steinmetz, Jena M. CreateSpace (312 pp.) $18.00 paper | $7.99 e-book Jan. 14, 2013 978-1-4800-3107-4
In this notable debut penned by his granddaughter, a World War II veteran recalls action in the Pacific fleet. 134
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Ten months after Pearl Harbor, young but gung-ho Robert J. Steinmetz convinced his parents to sign off on his Navy enlistment. “Steiny,” as Philadelphia working-class buddies called him, plunged from civilian shipbuilder to Shipfitter, Third Class, aboard the USS Gear ARS 34. The Navy issued these sailors only Marine knives for their assignment to plug holes in sinking ships. “Not even worth real weapons,” he concludes— “the lowest of the low.” He survived seven invasions and battles that forever changed him, hiding his anguish from family members for nearly 70 years. Fortunately, Steiny turns out to be a gifted storyteller. Jena Steinmetz, who began this as-told-to memoir as a project for her English degree, deftly captures her grandfather’s language and personality, as if readers are listening across the kitchen table. Despite a number of typos and editorial lapses that seem to have survived the production process, she demonstrates skill and judgment in transforming extemporaneous talk into fluid prose. Sentence fragments fill the book yet enhance conversational tone rather than hinder readability. Dialect, such as “nuttin’ doin’,” flavors the narrative without overshadowing it, and though some characters swear like sailors, it never feels heavy-handed. Steinmetz also uses novelistic techniques to control the presentation, opening with tense sailors below deck hearing gunfire, then backfilling Steiny’s childhood, enlistment and shipmate bonding. Steiny recalls events with remarkable clarity, and as Steinmetz writes with rich detail, summoning all the senses, the short chapters and poignant scenes propel readers, while time shifts help connect wartime and civilian life. A circle of blood on a white parachute evokes the Japanese flag, food tastes like gasoline, melting metal hisses, and rotting corpses, fresh paint and Iwo Jima’s sulfurous odor assault Steiny’s nose. Most painfully, screams of the fallen and handfuls of clinking dog tags haunt him: “It’s the sounds that still scare the man out of me,” he admits. Readers will quickly care about Steiny, making his postwar life relevant in vignettes that range from harrowing to heartwarming. A grand tale told well.
THE SUCKER
Vellal, Kumar Amazon Digital Services (182 pp.) $0.99 e-book | Dec. 23, 2012 Vellal’s debut novel tells the story of a troubled man who comes to Wall Street looking for answers. J Cavanaugh arrives in Manhattan for a job interview with the prestigious Wall Street firm of Drake and Steiner. Despite his lack of experience, he’s hired at once, thanks to the influence of his financier father, Ian Maxwell. J sees his new job as a chance to have a normal life for the first time. He was raised by his disturbed mother, Maxwell’s mistress, and after leaving home, he spent most of his life in a Seattle psychiatric clinic. As a result, he knows almost nothing about how regular people behave, but he thinks he’ll have the chance to prove himself at Drake and Steiner. Unfortunately, his boss,
Michael Edwards, hired him only as a favor to his father and has no intention of giving J real work. As the financial crisis unfolds, the firm suffers huge losses and lays off many of its employees. Meanwhile, J begins to struggle with his delusion that the Jews, whom his mother said were responsible for the death of Christ, are behind the economic crisis and spitefully throwing families out of their homes. He eventually believes that he’s destined to become a new Christ, equal to the original, and as he grows more dissatisfied with his job, he begins to wonder if he’ll have to destroy the “creatures” behind the economic disaster. Soon, he becomes obsessed with the idea that executives at Drake and Steiner and other Wall Street firms are literal vampires, out to destroy humanity. Vellal’s portrayal of a man sliding deeper and deeper into insanity is disturbingly vivid. He uses memorable flashbacks to gradually build a picture of J’s distorted home life and the baleful influence of his fanatical, mentally ill mother. Although the prose can be awkward in spots, it will likely draw many readers into J’s fun-house world with its unnerving clarity. A disturbing vision of the financial crisis as seen through the eyes of a madman.
etc.), an attorney with several thrillers to his name, expertly combines the detailed machinations of the legal system with a fast-moving, twisting plot that leads to an unanticipated climax. His tender portrayal of Woody and Maggie’s deeply felt love is a welcome surprise, as are the many near-poetic depictions of dementia that evoke pathos without a hint of sentimentality. A fine thriller, with a bittersweet love story that lingers long after the last page.
THE WARRIOR WITH ALZHEIMER’S The Battle for Justice
Woodfin, Stephen Amazon Digital Services (288 pp.) $5.99 e-book | Sep. 1, 2012 A legal thriller that does double duty as a poignant tale of a love challenged by the indignities of Alzheimer’s and the corrupt judicial system that refuses to acknowledge them. Woodrow “Woody” Wilson has begun to forget things. He’s having not just the typical memory slips that increase as a man enters his 80s, but telling lapses such as not recognizing family members or believing their good intentions. When such moments arise, Woody takes off in his truck, and his loving son, Waylon, and wife, Maggie, tail him as he revisits cherished places from his past. One day, however, Woody ditches his truck and disappears with an unknown man. The family enlists the help of investigator Sherwood “Shot Glass” Reynolds, a recovering alcoholic who witnessed his own father’s battle with dementia. Reynolds soon identifies the stranger as Linus Schmutzer Jr., aka Doc Smooth, a psychiatrist forced to resign for conducting unauthorized experiments on Alzheimer’s patients. Yet all is not as it seems, as Waylon and Reynolds unravel a wartime connection between the abductor and abductee that stretches back to Auschwitz. A dangerous lapse into dementia leads Woody to hold a deputy at gunpoint, which results in his arrest. His court-appointed lawyer, Pythagoras “Thag” Clemons, lives a woebegone existence that makes Reynolds’ sad life shine by comparison. Thag is also painfully familiar with Alzheimer’s, and he joins the motley crew, which soon includes Woody’s cellmates, in an audacious plan to get justice for the ailing World War II veteran. Woodfin (The Lazarus Deception, 2013,
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 Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 2013 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948-7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744. Subscription prices are: Digital & Print Subscription (U.S.) - 12 Months ($199.00) Digital & Print Subscription (International) - 12 Months ($229.00) Digital Only Subscription - 12 Months ($169.00) Single copy: $25.00. All other rates on request. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Kirkus Reviews, PO Box 3601, Northbrook, IL 60065-3601. Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, TX 78710 and at additional mailing offices.
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Who will save our books? Our bookstores? Our libraries? If there are no bookstores, no libraries, no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors, what will happen to our literature? Who will discover and mentor new writers? Who will publish our important books? What will happen if there are no more books like these? All the President’s Men
by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 by William Manchester
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
Different Seasons by Stephen King Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley The Forever War by Dexter Filkins Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Herzog by Saul Bellow The Hours by Michael Cunningham I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Beloved by Toni Morrison The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam Black Boy by Richard Wright by Maya Angelou Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy In Cold Blood by Truman Capote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Junot Díaz
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Color Purple by Alice Walker The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
by Brian Selznick
Maus by Art Spiegelman The Natural by Bernard Malamud The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Underworld by Don DeLillo The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L’Engle
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
“The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Or, if the answer is state and local government, where are they? Is any state doing anything? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines? Who will save our books? Our libraries? Our bookstores?”
—James Patterson