April 15, 2015: Volume LXXXIII, No 8

Featuring 291 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXIII, NO.

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REVIEWS

FICTION

Finders Keepers

by Stephen King The master of horror places another novelist in danger from a crazed fan. p. 20

NONFICTION

The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser A former reporter rescues the almost unbelievable account of one family’s experience in Nazioccupied France. p. 68

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Ink and Ashes

by Valynne E. Maetani An assured debut thriller pits a Japanese-American teen against her father's secret yakuza past. p. 105

INDIE Bestseller Barbara Freethy on indie vs. traditional publishing p. 126

on the cover

Orange Is the New Black actor Kate Mulgrew’s memoir, Born with Teeth, is unlike any other celebrity memoir (and that’s a good thing). p. 60

from the editor’s desk:

Noteworthy New Books B Y C la i b orne

Smi t h

Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter

“A lady boxer, a poxy lady, and a louche pretty boy tangle in 18th-century England” is the opening line of our starred review of Anna Freeman’s The Fair Fight (April 14), an opening that goes in the Kirkus record books, filed under “arresting ledes.” Set in Bristol, the story concerns two sisters in a brothel (known as “the convent”) encouraged to fight one another while men look on. One of those men becomes both girls’ patron. “Gamblers, drinkers, fighters, hookers; the fancy, the rowdy, the rude—Freeman does a Claiborne Smith wonderful job of spinning this furious yarn, in which the fury of women plays the lead role,” our reviewer writes. “Great characters and wild turns of events make this book a knockout.”…Onward to the 19th century: Elizabeth Berg, probably best known for her bestsellers Tapestry of Fortunes, Home Safe, and the Oprah’s Book Club pick Open House, has a new novel about the life of French writer George Sand, The Dream Lover (April 14), which our reviewer calls “part biography, part George Sand fantasy.”…

Debut novelist Marian Palaia is someone to watch. We gave a starred review to The Given World (April 14), which is about a girl named Riley whose brother goes missing in Vietnam in the ‘70s. “Palaia demonstrates a magnificent command of craft for a first-time novelist, but it’s her emotional honesty that makes this story so rich and affecting,” our reviewer writes. “The novel ends on a more hopeful note than the reader might expect, but it rings true nevertheless.”…Jon Krakauer’s new book is about acquaintance rape, specifically the rash of both reported and unreported cases that have occurred in Missoula, Montana. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town is embargoed until April 21. It’s rare, given the gap of time between a manuscript’s submission and its pub date, that a hard-hitting book has the chance to really influence the coverage and conversation about a contentious issue. But Missoula has a distinct opportunity to do that, given the stories about rapes on campus that have hit the national news and the Dec. 2014 report from the Department of Justice that estimates that 110,000 women between the ages of 18 and 24 are raped each year.

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N # President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Executive Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com Editor in Chief C laiborne S mith csmith@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Fiction Editor L aurie M uchnick lmuchnick@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Senior Indie Editor KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Indie Editor RYA N L E A H E Y rleahey@kirkus.com Indie Editor D avid R a p p drapp@kirkus.com Assistant Indie Editor M AT T D O M I N O mdomino@kirkus.com Assistant Editor CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkus.com Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Director of Kirkus Editorial CARISSA BLUESTONE cbluestone@kirkus.com Associate Production Editor S arah Rodrigue z Pratt srpratt@kirkus.com Director of Technology E R I K S M A RT T esmartt@kirkus.com Director of Marketing SARAH KALINA skalina@kirkus.com Marketing Associate A rden Piacen z a apiacenza@kirkus.com Advertising/Client Promotions A nna C oo p er acooper@kirkus.com

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contents fiction

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................ 5 REVIEWS................................................................................................ 5 editor’s note..................................................................................... 6 Attica Locke and Her Liars....................................................... 14 Emily Schultz’s Creepy Blondes.............................................. 24

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

Mystery...............................................................................................35 Science Fiction & Fantasy.......................................................... 41 Romance............................................................................................ 43

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 45 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 45 editor’s note...................................................................................46 On the Cover: Kate Mulgrew ................................................... 60 Brad Gooch’s Intimate New Memoir .....................................66

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 85 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 85 editor’s note...................................................................................86 Rita Williams-Garcia Goes to the Country..................... 102 Neal Shusterman’s Unexpected Co-Author.................... 106 continuing series....................................................................... 116 Foreign Influence...................................................................... 118

Susan Southard provides an intense, deeply detailed, and compassionate account of the atomic bomb’s effects on the people and city of Nagasaki, then and now. Read the review on p. 81.

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................119 REVIEWS.............................................................................................119 editor’s note................................................................................. 120 Bestseller Barbara Freethy ................................................. 126

Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre-publication reviews as they are released on kirkus.com—even before they are published in the magazine.

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indie books of the month........................................................ 141 Field Notes..................................................................................... 142 Appreciations: The Inspiration for Cabaret...................143 |

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©George Anttila

Angela Flournoy

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LIVE APRIL 21 Luis Alberto Urrea has just published two new books, Tijuana Book of the Dead and The Water Museum: Stories. He finds time to talk with us on Kirkus TV today.

©Willy Somma

Photo courtesy LaToya T. Duncan

That’s the question Angela Flournoy explores in her debut novel, The Turner House.

For the 13 Turner siblings, the house on Yarrow Street isn’t just a childhood home; it’s also the first house their parents bought after getting married and a shared link between 13 very different adults. But violence has corroded the East Side, causing housing prices to plunge.

Their ill mother, Viola, lives elsewhere. There’s seemingly no point in holding onto the Yarrow Street house, yet all 13 have their own closely held reasons for keeping it. Lelah, the “baby” of the family who’s now in her 40s, is evicted

LIVE APRIL 20 The Xalisco Boys in Mexico are only one cause of America’s enduring opiate-abuse epidemic; we talk to investigative journalist Sam Quinones about the others at kirkus.com today.

©Joe Mazza

Live April 17 The Turner family’s house has stood the test of time on Detroit’s East Side for 50 years. But what happens when the city begins to conspire against them?

from her apartment due to a rebuild has been a constant gambling addiction and takes fixture in the news—and a up residence in the now- reminder of what could very abandoned house; Troy, a dis- well happen to other Ameriillusioned police officer, plans can cities—Flournoy’s novel to short-sell the house to his is particularly relevant, as it on-again, off-again girlfriend. reveals a side of the city that And Cha-cha, the oldest, has most of us don’t see. Flournoy, been recently visited by a whose father’s family is from luminous ghost that he’d first the East Side and who grew seen at the Turner home as a up visiting often, explains small child, drawing him to this was part of what motithe house 40 years later. Soon, vated her to write the book. “I the siblings’ dilemmas worsen wanted to show that Detroit as Cha-cha’s obsessive fixa- and the people who live tion with the ghost threatens there are not just a sum of to destroy his marriage, while crime statistics or per capita Lelah’s gambling addiction income,” she says. “People spins out of control, fractur- still have happy lives; people ing her relationship with her have very proud lives. Detroit daughter. Flournoy ramps up is a very proud city.” In The the suspense until one night Turner House, as Flournoy’s all three are drawn to Yar- characters battle demons row Street, leading to a fight and eventually join together with intractable results—and to face their shared past, the revealing buried truths about family’s pride and resilience the Turner family’s past and are what—eventually—will the city they live in. carry them through.

At a time when Detroit’s —Miriam Grossman dramatic collapse and slow

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LIVE APRIL 23 Kate Bolick has always felt “more alive when alone”; in Spinster, the essayist analyzes her own decision to remain single and why over 100 million Americans are doing the same.

LIVE APRIL 30 What do Joan Collins, the “Joan Collins of Beaumont, Texas,” and a perturbed Elaine Stritch have to do with one another? They’re all in Jamie Brickhouse’s candid new memoir Dangerous When Wet.

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fiction THANK YOU, GOODNIGHT

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Abramowitz, Andy Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $26.00 | $13.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4767-9177-7 978-1-4767-9179-1 e-book

IN THE COUNTRY by Mia Alvar..........................................................8 THE TRUTH AND OTHER LIES by Sascha Arango...............................8 BITTER BRONX by Jerome Charyn..................................................... 11 BOOK OF NUMBERS by Joshua Cohen...............................................12 THE GOVERNOR’S WIFE by Michael Harvey................................... 17 THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR by Scott Hawkins......................... 17 FINDERS KEEPERS by Stephen King................................................. 20 THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE by Milan Kundera; trans. by Linda Asher........................................................................... 20 OUR TOWN by Kevin McEnroe......................................................... 26

IN THE COUNTRY Stories

Alvar, Mia Knopf (368 pp.) $25.95 $12.99 e-book Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-385-35281-9

After the failure of his band’s second album, Teddy Tremble traded in his guitar for a law degree.

A decade after the band parted ways, Teddy receives a mysterious message from his ex-drummer: an unflattering portrait of Teddy—with a devastating caption—taken by a Swiss photographer, is hanging in the Tate Modern in London. Enraged, Teddy travels to Switzerland to confront the man and makes a startling discovery: despite the fact that the band, Tremble, has been largely forgotten by most of the world, it still possesses an ardent following in a small Swiss town. Though Teddy is confused by his continued popularity, he’s also shaken and begins writing music again.

The response from his old producer, the iconic Sonny Rivers, is positive, and Teddy sets out to reunite a band whose members, now in their mid- to late-30s, have moved on with their lives. Though the drummer, Warren Warren, had contacted him about the photograph, he’s a teacher and family man with little desire to step back into the public eye and leave behind his family for life on the road. Guitarist Jumbo Jett, who lives in his exwife’s basement, is more than ready, however. The missing piece for a Tremble reunion, and the one Teddy has the most anxiety about approaching, is bassist Mackenzie. Despite the passage of time, and his own long-term relationship with girlfriend Sara, he still struggles with his unrequited love for Mack. While it would have been easy for Abramowitz to fall back on rock-androll stereotypes, these characters—even the ones who initially feel familiar—are complex and unique. The pacing is quick, the emotional current soars, and the dialogue rings true.

Abramowitz’s debut is both funny and compassionate, using the world of the music industry to illustrate the questions of life and legacy that so many of us ponder.

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on vacation, finding a series worth reading back at home

Photo courtesy Sigrid Estrada

I write this from Florida, where I’ve spent a week sitting in my parents’ backyard, reading. (I’ve done a few other things but not much. This is my idea of a good time.) Vacation, for me, is a time to read books that have nothing to do with work, and the first thing I wanted to do this time is catch up on Elena Ferrante, whom I’d never read.

Instead of diving into the Neapolitan novels, I started with The Days of Abandonment, which is fairly short; it always feels good to begin a vacation with a feeling of accomplishment by zipping through a novel. Told in the first person by Olga, a woman whose husband announces one day, while clearing the table after lunch, that he wants to leave her—“then he assumed the blame for everything that was happening and closed the front door carefully behind him”—the book takes a sharp descent into darkness and perhaps insanity.

Unfortunately, Olga never made sense to me; she’s livid with rage Louise Penny at her husband, even physically attacking him in the street, but when he decides he wants their children to spend every weekend with him and his new girlfriend, she goes right along with it— and then when he tells her it’s too much for him, she goes along with that too, never even thinking there’s anything wrong either time. Ferrante didn’t convince me that such anger and such passivity could co-exist in one woman.

Then I turned to Still Life, the first of Louise Penny’s tales about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. I’ve written before about my search for a new mystery series to love, and I think I’ve found it. Gamache is wise and uxorious, like my other favorite, Commissario Guido Brunetti, but it’s clear there are complications in his background that have led his career to stall and that we’ll find out what they are later in the series. I may not be able to wait until my next vacation. —L.M. Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

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THE NEW WORLD

Adrian, Chris & Horowitz, Eli Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $24.00 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-22181-2 Imagine a more benign Brave New World yoked with a short love story from a New Yorker back issue.

Originally published as a digital novel, this collaboration of novelist Adrian (The Great Night, 2011, etc.) and former McSweeney’s publisher Horowitz is an unwieldy hybrid of domestic romance and science fiction speculating on the prospect of immortality through decapitation. (And no, you didn’t misread that.) Jane Cotton, a pediatric surgeon at a New York hospital, is having enough trouble coping with the death of her husband, Jim, a chaplain working at the same hospital.

What makes matters worse is finding out that his corpse is missing its head, which has been cryogenically preserved by an enigmatic corporation called Polaris. Through an appropriately icy company spokesman named Brian, who apologizes to Jane for her “perceived loss,” Jane finds out that Jim’s frozen cranium is being preserved and stored for reattachment and restoration at some undetermined date in the distant future.

The chapters concerning Jane’s frantic quest for more information, legal redress, and (she hopes) Jim’s head alternate for the most part with chapters that seem to be set in that aforementioned future in which Jim is in a painful struggle of his own as he adjusts to a new physical form while trying to retain whatever memories he has of his previous life. A disembodied voice named Alice tries to get Jim 2.0 to adjust to a world where money, among other things, “hasn’t existed for a while.” It’s possible to interpret Adrian and Horowitz’s gimmick as a scenario for a hypothetical breakthrough in biotechnology, along with its potential ramifications. It’s also possible to interpret this new world as an old-school metaphor for reincarnation and its own hypothetical discontents. But until the book’s latter two sections, which seem to move backward instead of forward in time, you don’t care enough about any of the novel’s characters to even begin considering its ideas.

People do a lot of weeping in this book. Maybe that’s meant to compensate for its lack of emotional depth.

LOCUS AMOENUS

Alexander, Victoria N. Permanent Press (192 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-57962-391-3 Alexander’s (Naked Singularity, 2003, etc.) newest novel finds Hamlet taking place in rural America against the backdrop of 9/11 and the Iraq War. “Something is rotten in the United States of America.” So says Alexander’s narrator, a young man named Hamlet. After his father dies on 9/11, Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude, move to upstate New York, where they maintain a farm. After several years, Gertrude meets Claudius, a bureaucrat and scientist who contributed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s World Trade Center report. Of course, Hamlet doesn’t trust Claudius, and, well, you no doubt see where this is headed—especially when Hamlet meets his old teacher, Mr. Horatio, a conspiracy

theorist and engineer who has some ideas about 9/11. Yes, this is Hamlet reimagined as a truther, and in this retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the protagonist isn’t just feigning madness— he’s genuinely losing his mind. In the beginning, it feels like Holden Caulfield playing the role of Hamlet, but by the end, Jared Loughner has taken over. The tone never quite works in the novel’s second half; Alexander’s writing is a little too glib to support the heavy subject matter, a problem that becomes especially clear in the violent coda (bluntly powerful though it may be). The novel works best when the author jettisons Shakespeare entirely. The sequence in which Gertrude tries to convince her neighbors and fellow school board members to embrace healthier cafeteria options has madcap comic intensity.

But Alexander’s desire to stick to Shakespeare means that the characters sometimes feel like props. For instance, Gertrude marrying Claudius feels less like something the free-spirited mother would do and more like something Alexander needs Gertrude to do to move the plot forward.

An occasionally clever novel that, in its weakest moments, makes a trifle of national tragedy.

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IN THE COUNTRY Stories

Alvar, Mia Knopf (368 pp.) $25.95 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-385-35281-9 978-0-385-35284-0 e-book In this debut collection, Filipino students, teachers, activists, maids, and chauffeurs negotiate their lives under martial law at home and seek fortune abroad in the Middle East and New York.

Each of these nine revelatory stories delivers characters who are equal parts endearing and disturbing. In the stunning “Esmeralda,” a cleaning woman ponders her station in life as she dusts offices in the twin towers in the months preceding 9/11.

“You lay there—Esmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God’s name till your hands or heart gave out—reclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground.” In “A Contract Overseas,” a budding fiction writer in the Philippines reveres her older brother despite his immoral, often dangerous behavior in Saudi Arabia. “I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination?” In the chilling “The Miracle Worker,” a special education teacher befriends her student’s family’s maid—who, it turns out, has a dark side. “I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions that no one, until now, had seen.” Alvar deftly flips the master-servant dynamic on its head. Her electric prose probes the tension between social classes, particularly in “Shadow Families,” in which wealthy Filipina housewives in Bahrain throw parties for working-class Filipinos. “These katulong—‘helpers,’ as we called them—were often younger but always aging faster than we were, over brooms and basins, their lungs fried with bleach and petroleum vapors....Helping these helpers, who’d traveled even farther, felt like home.”

A triumphant, singular collection deserving of every accolade it will likely receive.

BEACH TOWN

Andrews, Mary Kay St. Martin’s (448 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | May 19, 2015 978-1-250-06593-3 978-1-4668-7291-2 e-book Bestseller Andrews introduces Greer Hennessy, a third-generation worker in the film industry, whose difficult background and current job trigger a flood of problems.

Greer’s personal life is a mess, and her professional one is no laughing matter, either. Following an incident involving a fire on her previous job, the location scout/manager is hoping 8

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to redeem herself working for Hollywood’s newest golden boy, director Bryce Levy. Although the script for his latest movie is vague and ever changing, Greer finds him the perfect location, a small dot on the map along Florida’s Gulf Coast fraught with heat, humidity, palmetto bugs, and little else. Economically stagnant Cypress Key has seen better days, and Greer assumes its citizens will jump at the opportunity to make some quick cash and spotlight their town. The area also features an old ramshackle building along the waterfront that’s perfect for the final scene—so long as Greer can secure permission to blow the erstwhile Cypress Key Casino to smithereens. Mayor Eb Thibadeaux (who apparently emulates Dr. Seuss’ Bartholomew Cubbins in the hat-wearing department: he’s also co-owner of a local motel, a realtor, grocery store and boat repair shop owner, and town engineer) is skeptical about the benefits of having a film crew invade the town, and he’s definitely against Greer’s plans for the historic structure. But he’s attracted to Greer, and she to him. A romance quickly develops, then ebbs and flows as a tidal wave of complications creates misunderstandings between the two—and there are plenty as Andrews floods the story with several secondary characters and subplots. The author uses her tried-and-true formula to good effect, though.

As in many of her preceding novels (Save the Date, 2014, etc.), Andrews masterfully creates an entertaining story filled with likable characters and a few lightweight, havoc-wreaking troublemakers. Although far-fetched, it’s entirely fun.

A perfect fit for the romance lover’s beach bag.

THE TRUTH AND OTHER LIES

Arango, Sascha Translated by Taylor, Imogen Atria (256 pp.) $24.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-4767-9555-3 978-1-4767-9557-7 e-book Having become a famous author by publishing his wife’s brilliant crime novels with his name on the cover, Henry Hayden creates his own devious fictions to avoid detection in a series of mysterious deaths.

Psychologically damaged since childhood—when his father, who abused him for bed-wetting, tripped down the basement stairs and died on the same day his mother disappeared— Hayden is a drifter with no human connections. Waking up hung over after sleeping with a stranger, Martha, he discovers a manuscript under her bed and is so impressed that he sends it off to publishers as his own. Martha, an oddball who writes books in the middle of the night and tosses the perfectly composed manuscripts in the cellar, is fine with that. After Hayden marries her, the first novel becomes a huge bestseller. Living large with a sports car and fancy clothes, he has an affair with his editor, Betty, who becomes pregnant with his child. It’s only a matter of time, or so it seems, before he’s exposed for the fake he is. But he remains master of his made-up world, even with

The co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society takes a similar approach to the insular hamlet of Macedonia, West Virginia. the truth according to us

the police breathing down his neck after first Martha and then Betty disappear and even with a stalker who knows everything about his past seeking vengeance. A cross between James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith, with a wide streak of sardonic humor, this is one wicked tale. You keep waiting for the author to slip, plot-wise, but, as with his protagonist, you wait in vain.

German screenwriter Arango’s first novel is superior pulp, with schemers all around and plenty to say about fame, identity, and mortality.

THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US

Barrows, Annie Dial Press (512 pp.) $28.00 | $13.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-385-34294-0 978-0-8129-9784-2 e-book The co-author of a novel about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands now turns her attention to scandals besetting a small Depression-era West Virginia town.

Barrows, who co-wrote the surprise bestseller The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008), takes a similarly panoramic approach to the insular hamlet of Macedonia, West Virginia, using multiple points of view with epistolary interludes. It’s 1938, and the owner of Macedonia’s primary employer, the American Everlasting sock factory, has just laid off 44 workers over the objection of Sol McKubin, longtime plant manager. This would never have happened had the Romeyns, once Macedonia’s most prominent family, not lost control of Everlasting after the original factory was destroyed by arson in 1920. The novel’s main source of suspense is the mystery surrounding that disaster. Vause Hamilton was alleged to have set the fire, killing himself and wrecking the future of his best friend, Felix Romeyn. Presumably the motive was theft: the safe was robbed and some of the money disappeared. Sol claimed Felix and Vause were in cahoots, but Sol’s motives are suspect: not only was he envious of the two golden boys, Vause and Felix, but he loved Felix’s sister, Jottie, who had eyes only for Vause. Now Jottie, who has never married, is raising Felix’s young daughters, Willa and Bird, the products of a shortlived marriage, while feckless but charming Felix disappears for long stretches. Willa, a whip-smart tomboy in the Scout Finch mold, is alarmed at her father’s flirtation with Layla, a Washington, D.C., debutante who is boarding at Jottie’s house and writing a history of Macedonia for the WPA Writers’ Project. The novel is too long: an initial section of exposition regarding Layla, a relatively superfluous character, could have been streamlined, and italicized flashbacks abound. The ironic contrast between Macedonia’s official and actual history is played to the hilt, and this unique corner of Americana—a mélange of Yankee and Southern cultures—is re-created as vividly as the very different AngloEuropean milieu of Guernsey.

Undeniably entertaining but as slow-moving as a steamy Macedonian summer.

HARD LATITUDES

Birtcher, Baron R. Permanent Press (336 pp.) $29.00 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-57962-390-6 In Birtcher’s fourth Mike Travis novel, the Hawaii-based PI, reluctantly answering a cry for help from his brother, finds himself threatened by a Hong Kong sex-trafficking ring.

The unprincipled sibling, Valden Van de Groot, runs the family’s powerful finance company in Los Angeles. Though he’s married, he was videotaped groping a prostitute in a hotel elevator, and now someone’s blackmailing him. The girl, who’s only 17, was imprisoned and programmed for eight years by the White Orchids, a sex trade operation with ties to local banks and officials. Travis, a former LAPD cop who dropped his aristocratic last name to distance himself from his wealthy family, intercepts a message from the blackmailers at

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a political fundraiser. With the help of an old cop friend and a sidekick from Hawaii, he connects the dots leading from one unsavory suspect to the next. Between incidents of violence and the kidnapping of a billionaire pharmaceutical executive’s young grandson, Travis has to face up to relationship troubles back home. Birtcher is a solid, fluent writer; the story unfolds with good-humored ease, and Travis is a personable narrator.

But though all of the elements are in place for a tense thriller, the book is consistently low-boil. The female victim is drawn rather sketchily, and the bad guys, who mostly operate offstage, aren’t especially convincing.

Birtcher’s latest is an agreeable but undercooked mystery about the sex trade.

THE WILD INSIDE

Carbo, Christine Atria (416 pp.) $16.00 | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4767-7545-6 978-1-4767-7546-3 e-book Grizzly bears, murder, mauling, and mayhem mix in Carbo’s debut novel.

Ted Systead’s past and present intersect in an unexpected—and chilling—manner against the incongruously gorgeous backdrop of Glacier National Park. When Systead was a kid, his father, a pathologist, was dragged off and killed by a grizzly bear in Glacier. Now, decades later, Systead is a homicide investigator for the Department of the Interior based out of Denver. When the body of drug user and general lowlife Victor Lance is found shredded by a park grizzly after having been secured to a tree, Systead must push back against his own demons to work the case. In the process, he reluctantly teams with Park Officer Monty Harris, who he suspects is little but a spy for his boss, Eugene Ford. But, as they work their ways through the people who populated Lance’s life (his mother, former girlfriend, and others), Systead gains a grudging respect for Monty and finds himself unraveling other peoples’ lives in order to get at the truth. Carbo likes detail and packs the book with trivia about the park and its wildlife inhabitants, which prove interesting. However, when it comes to literary restraint, the author comes up short, launching into exhaustive and ultimately extraneous detail about the characters and their lives, forcing readers to wade through a surfeit of description and a flood of characters. Although the writing is fine, the plotting isn’t electrifying and the story is not hypnotic enough to withstand the flood of information the author unleashes. By Page 50, she’s introduced more than 20 named characters, many of whom serve next to no purpose. In subsequent chapters, even more characters pop up, contributing nothing more than their presences to the unfolding plot.

While the park setting’s attractive and has potential, the excessive detail and avalanche of characters, combined with a protagonist who doesn’t seem all that competent, get in the way of narrative drive.

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HOTEL MOSCOW

Carner, Talia Morrow/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-06-238859-9 978-0-06-238860-5 e-book An American investment adviser, on a mission to counsel businesswomen in postglasnost Russia, encounters corruption, organized crime, and extreme sexism.

In 1993, the Russian economy is reeling under the extreme measures introduced by Boris Yeltsin to shock the country into capitalism. Brooke Fielding, on furlough from a Manhattan investment firm, accepts an invitation from Sidorov, head of an official-sounding “Economic Authority,” to join a team of experts mentoring female Russian entrepreneurs. When she’s shaken down by customs agents at the airport, Brooke realizes that being American is no protection against a civilization in free fall. In the seedy, bug-infested Hotel Moscow, where Brooke’s group is housed, service and meals are grudging and skimpy, respectively. The only child of Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, Brooke is also shocked by the unapologetic anti-Semitism she observes. When their tour bus takes them to a woman-owned factory, Brooke and the other visitors witness an attack by gangsters who stab the company’s controller and beat up managers including Svetlana, one of Brooke’s guides. Svetlana and Olga, a prominent sociologist, take up the story, illustrating the harsh conditions they endure now that the social safety net conferred by communism has unraveled. Olga, elderly at 48, has her car capriciously confiscated by her boss and is mugged on the street by thugs who steal her hard-won groceries. Olga’s best friend, Vera, owner of a cookware factory, has been tortured by gangsters. Svetlana, struggling to raise her daughter in a cramped communal apartment, is raped by Sidorov.

After rejecting the help of a handsome fellow American whose motives she distrusts, Brooke embarks on an audacious plan to find out who—among many possible miscreants—is targeting the women, even though a long-ago indiscretion has rendered her vulnerable to blackmail. Generalized commentary, not to mention some PowerPoint-worthy business lectures, occasionally interrupts the far more compelling narrative of lives lived in dystopia.

Still, the novel sheds much-needed light on this turbulent period in Russian history.

Grifters, gangs, vamps, and lost souls pursue gritty lives in this collection. bitter bronx

BITTER BRONX Thirteen Stories

Charyn, Jerome Liveright/Norton (320 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-0-87140-489-3

Grifters, gangs, vamps, and lost souls pursue gritty lives in “the brick wilderness of the Bronx” in this collection of tales by a veteran storyteller and native of the New York borough.

The opening line, “Howell was still on the lam,” establishes a noirish tone and diction that will appear often, beginning with this tale of a man who travels the U.S. conning widows until he returns to his Bronx hometown and rediscovers an old flame. The time of the collection spans the postwar era, when New York gangs danced into West Side Story, through the sad days of the 1950s, after a Robert Moses highway split Charyn’s boyhood turf, uprooted neighborhoods, and led, in the 1970s, to the desolation

of the South Bronx. Historical figures enter these little fictions, just as admitted fabrications drifted into two Charyn childhood memoirs (Bronx Boy, 2002; The Black Swan, 2000). A Diane Arbus type named Dee tries to capture in a photo the soul of the 8-foot9-inch Eddie Carmel. Mobster Frank Costello moves in the background of a trio of stories featuring a good-looking kid who becomes a male model (“I was 15 when Rosenzweig discovered me at the Frick Collection”). In another trio, a Manhattan woman discovers where her sister vanished to at age 5 and retrieves her from a “home for alcoholic movie stars and mental patients.”

Charyn’s staccato style is full of jolts, surprising observations, and turns of phrase. It works well with the rough struggle for survival and success in “the wild lands of the Bronx.” And some stories soar: in particular, the troubled romance between a plumber and an Irish nurse in “Major Leaguer,” which artfully assembles such Bronx icons as street gangs, the drug trade, Robert Moses, and the New York Yankees.

Charyn calls the work “no sentimental journey through my own traces as a child,” yet there’s a writer’s deep affection here for a world full of color and character.

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BOOK OF NUMBERS

Cohen, Joshua Random House (672 pp.) $28.00 | $13.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-8129-9691-3 978-0-8129-9692-0 e-book A writer’s effort to prepare a biography of a Google-like company’s founder sits at the core of this smart, choppy novel that’s trying to take on technology, creativity, and much else.

In a couple hundred pages fewer than 2010’s mammoth Witz, Cohen (Four New Messages, 2012, etc.) presents a writer named Joshua Cohen whose last novel fared poorly because it came out on Sept. 11, 2001. Ten years later, the fictional writer is offered the job of writing “the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I’m always mistaken for,” the “genius googolionaire” creator of the Internet-search firm Tetration.com. Long stretches rich in high-tech lingo entail the Web genius describing his growing up, how the company got going, and how success affected the initial team, particularly the enigmatic Moe, who made searching profitable and then disappeared. The villain—whose complicity with the government raises echoes of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange—is the unsubtly named Tetration president, Kori Dienerowitz (with the likely laugh that the real writer may have made little dinero on Witz). The first fictional Cohen’s rocky marriage allows for fun pokes at bad blogs (his wife’s) and sloppy emails (her boyfriend’s). The real Cohen riffs impressively on countless Web-related matters, from chaos to code to venture capital to Y2K and the woes of single-minded work: “we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitis...circadian rhythm disorder, tendonitis.” The corollary for common readers could be frustration at the flood of tech terms, shorthand, and slang. It’s comparable on both counts to William Gaddis’ comic dissection of postwar finance in JR. Like Gaddis, Cohen also recognizes the laughs and peril at this technologically challenging stage of the human comedy and its new questions about what people are searching for, how the results may affect them, and what it all may cost.

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY Selected Stories

Constantine, David Biblioasis (304 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-77196-017-5

A selection of short fiction by a British author, poet, and translator, this book aims to correct the problem of Constantine’s obscurity in North America.

If nothing else, these 17 stories—crafted over the course of 30 years—demonstrate the admirable consistency of Constantine’s writing, both in subject matter and quality.

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Sometimes stuffy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes chatty, Constantine’s work is what people mean when they call something “European.” In other words, the stories are slow, chilly, cerebral, whispers rather than shouts. But they are not entirely indirect; rather, Constantine chooses his moments to strike. That way, when a man named Mr. Carlton cries at the end of this book, it’s an emotional scene that feels earned because of the author’s restraint elsewhere. Are these stories sometimes too spare, too reserved? Perhaps. But then, many of Constantine’s characters are reserved people, and his world sometimes recalls those of Harold Pinter and Ian McEwan, in which the banal niceties of comfortable living—dinners, funerals for colleagues, business trips—seem to conceal great menace. You know that popular cliché—the tip of the iceberg? Well, it’s what goes unspoken in so many of these stories that seems so powerful. And then, there’s the ice itself: in “The Loss,” ice becomes a metaphor for the frustration of a man who has lost his soul. In the chilling title story, ice is what encases a young girl, killed while exploring a glacier, only to be found decades later, “just the way she was.

Twenty, in the dress of that day and age.” This ice becomes so powerful that it spreads across the entire collection; even when a man and woman have tea near water (as in “Tea at the Midland”), all the reader can think about is the frozen world ahead.

An author who deserves serious consideration.

A PLACE FOR US

Evans, Harriet Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (432 pp.) $25.99 | $13.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4767-8678-0 978-1-4767-8679-7 e-book A scattered family comes together for a mysterious announcement in Evans’ (Not Without You, 2014) latest novel.

From an English estate called Winterfold, Martha Winter sends out invitations for her 80th birthday party with a puzzling statement: “There will be an important announcement. We ask that you please be there.”

Only her husband, David, a well-known cartoonist, knows what this announcement might be. The Winters have been fixtures in their Somerset village for 45 years, raising their three children, Florence, Bill, and Daisy, there, though both Martha and David come from humble backgrounds in London’s East End. Now only their son Bill lives nearby. Daisy hasn’t been seen in years after having gone off to do charity work in India, and Florence is an art history professor in Italy. All three children, though successful in their careers, seem to fail when it comes to personal relationships. Bill is on his second marriage, Daisy abandoned her daughter, Cat, and seems to want little to do with the family, and Florence is an awkward spinster in love with a man who treats her with disdain. Told from the perspectives of various family members as they receive Martha’s invitations, it’s clear this family’s story is full of unanswered questions. How did Martha and David come to Winterfold, and what were they

Parisian bookseller Jean Perdu has lived in a time capsule of his own grief. the little paris bookshop

running from? Why did Daisy disappear, and will she make an appearance at the party? Why did Florence always feel like an outsider in her own family? And of course, what is Martha’s big announcement? These questions create a quiet suspense, and their surprising answers come at a satisfying pace. Each of the characters is distinct and sympathetic, and the tensions in the family are often treated with a comic touch even in the midst of tragedy.

While a story with this many characters could have felt disjointed, here they are interwoven tightly to create a single, absorbing tapestry.

THE CAKE THERAPIST

Fertig, Judith Berkley (304 pp.) $16.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-425-27732-4

A pastry chef with an uncanny ability returns to her hometown to make sense of her future while delving into the past.

With her marriage on the rocks, Claire “Neely” O’Neil leaves New York City behind to open up her dream bakery in Millcreek Valley, Ohio. Though she’s unsure of the fate of her relationship, her bakery, Rainbow Cake, is a success in the town’s thriving bridal district. Neely is able to “read” people by connecting feelings to flavors, which helps her pair the perfect cake and frosting with any customer. This allows her to construct a unique flavor profile to help someone cope with the complexities of his or her life: “Every flavor, I knew, was a shortcut to a feeling. Sorrow. Joy. Anticipation. Fear.” In many cases, this skill proves helpful, though Neely is overwhelmed by a ubiquitous sour flavor that she doesn’t quite understand.

The narrative alternates between Neely’s first-person accounts in the present and a complicated secondary story told in the third person that begins in 1908 and interrupts what had been a steady pace. The dueling storyline starts with a unique piece of jewelry and then delves into the young lives of Olive and Edie Habig in the 1930s. As with some of Neely’s more adventurous flavor combinations, it requires the reader to take a leap of faith that the two tales will eventually converge. Though the path toward clarity is long and winding, it does get there in the end.

Neely’s “gift,” and her insistence on following through with every sense that she experiences, complicates what might have been a charming novel. The prose is at its best when it focuses on the smells and tastes of the bakery—the decadent buttercream, the elegant cakes, and the whirr of the espresso machine constantly in motion.

Contrasting flavors struggle for dominance in Fertig’s debut novel.

THE LITTLE PARIS BOOKSHOP

George, Nina Translated by Pare, Simon Crown (320 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-553-41877-4 978-0-553-41878-1 e-book

This newly translated German bestseller is a warmhearted, occasionally sentimental account of letting go of the old loves to make room for new.

Parisian bookseller Jean Perdu has lived in a time capsule of his own grief. Twenty-one years ago, his lover, Manon, left, leaving behind only a letter to explain herself—which Jean never opened.

Ever since, Jean has devoted his life to his floating bookstore, the Literary Apothecary, a barge docked on the Seine. He can diagnose a shopper’s ills (ennui, disappointment, a range of fears) and select the correct literary remedy. When heartbroken Catherine moves into his building, Jean brings her an old table and a stack

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Attica Locke

The multifaceted writer investigates race post–civil rights era, from the screen to the page

By Joshunda Sanders Photo courtesy Jenny Walters

Most writers tell the same story again and again, regardless of genre. Scandal showrunner Shonda Rhimes says her story is “You are not alone.” Whether she is writing for TV or one of her fast-paced novels, Attica Locke’s favorite story to tell is: “They’re all lying.”

That may sound cynical, but Locke is actually having a moment that artists dream about. Her third novel, Pleasantville, publishes on April 21. After 10 years of writing scripts for studios from Paramount to DreamWorks that were never made into feature films, she is the co-producer for Empire—a show that has shattered ratings records since it debuted earlier this year.

“When I decided to become a novelist, I profoundly needed that in my life,” Locke says. “I got really lucky that my heart was open to something radi14

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cally different.” While she enjoyed the craft screenwriting involves, the business side was frustrating. “I was one of those people whose screenwriting never got made,” she says. “At some point, it felt empty. I decided to stop and write a book to stretch myself and to write for people who love to read.”

In 2005, Locke took a second mortgage out on her house and took a year off to write a novel. After a decade of confining her ideas to 120-page scripts, she cut loose and penned a 600-page draft of Black Water Rising in 10 months. It was clear that writing fiction instead of screenwriting was what she needed at that point in her life. “That leap of faith was this huge thing I needed to stretch as an adult,” Locke says. “I knew as an artist I needed to write in a different way, and writing a book was the most transformative thing in my life other than motherhood.”

When she shopped the book around, it was rejected several times, mainly because of length. Locke trimmed it by 200 pages, and by the time she edited it, her Hollywood agency had a book department.

That led to the publication of her first novel in 2009.

Black Water Rising centers on the cranky and compelling Houston attorney Jay Porter, whose personal life is in as much disarray as his professional one when he stumbles unwittingly into the cross hairs of an oil company’s malfeasance. Pleasantville returns to Porter 15 years after the events of Black Water Rising and centers again on corruption, this time in politics.

When Locke wrote her second book, The Cutting Season, her only daughter was a toddler. The bestselling book won the 2013 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Beyond affirming her talent for writing fiction, the book also taught Locke to write in a different way. “When I wrote the first book, my husband went to work, and the house was mine, so I

could write. With The Cutting Season, my daughter was a little bitty toddler who needed so much,” Locke says.

Now she can write even while her daughter is watching television—although she doesn’t recommend it—and “the blessing is that I can’t afford my neuroses. If I have an hour free, I can’t spend 30 minutes of that beating myself up.”

Instead, she has to use every free moment she has to continue her life’s work, which she describes as “chronicling contradictions and complications around race post–civil rights. My whole time on this Earth is informed by the fact that I was born on the other side of the movement and exploring the question of where are we. I think Empire is another piece of that; it’s another way of exploring black life.”

Joshunda Sanders is a writer based in Washington, D.C. Pleasantville was reviewed in the Feb. 15, 2015, issue.

of books to cure her crying. In the table Catherine finds Manon’s unopened letter and demands Jean read it, or she will. The two fall into kissing, and Jean, buoyed by Catherine, finally reads Manon’s letter, but the truth is heartbreaking. Manon returned to her home in Provence (and her husband—it was complicated) to succumb to the cancer she had been hiding. Her last request was for Jean to visit before she died. Jean, overwhelmed by news of her death, his tragic error, his wasted life pining for a dead woman, lifts the Literary Apothecary’s anchor to finally make the journey to Manon.

Stowed away is his neighbor Max, a young novelist running away from his fame. The two navigate the canals of France selling books for food, engaging in adventures small and large, all against the backdrop of quaint villages and bittersweet memories. They take on some passengers: a roguish Italian who has been searching the waterways for his long-lost sweetheart; and a renowned novelist.

As Jean makes his way to Manon’s home (all the while writing love letters to Catherine), he prepares to ask for forgiveness—from the memory of Manon, from her husband, and from himself.

A charming novel that believes in the healing properties of fiction, romance, and a summer in the south of France.

STAY

Gischler, Victor Dunne/St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-250-04151-7 978-1-4668-3805-5 e-book Ex-Army stay-at-home dad David Sparrow taps into his inner warrior when his family is threatened by a crime lord.

Men everywhere give a sigh of relief as he reclaims his masculinity.

On a break from his stressful, secret Army job after he begins to lose his edge, David takes charge of his kids, Brent and Anna, so his wife, Amy, can focus on her high-profile promotion in the district attorney’s office. Her first big case is prosecuting Dante Payne, a sartorially enthusiastic sociopath who, it quickly turns out, has his foot soldiers everywhere, even on the police force and in the DA’s office itself. After a professional breaks into the Sparrows’ house to steal a zip drive from Amy’s store of evidence, David realizes two things: he will do anything to protect his family, and there is a larger conspiracy at work. From this point on, most of the novel consists of car chases, shootings, boat crashes, and beatings, quick cuts in action movie–like scenes. Apparently Gischler (The Deputy, 2010, etc.) has already sold TV rights to the novel, and it clearly strives to be translated into a more visual medium; Gischler is also a writer of graphic novels. Without the depth of illustration, however, the action scenes begin to feel repetitive and easily skimmable. The novel also exposes that cultural stereotypes of men and women have not changed as much as we may think they have. On a basic level, Gischler argues, no man can be sustained by being “Mr. Mom,” and David is clearly more intellectually and physically engaged in his life and his marriage when he’s “acting like a man” and protecting his family.

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THE NAKEDS

Glatt, Lisa Regan Arts (288 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-941393-05-5 The latest novel from the author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (2004).

Seven-year-old Hannah Teller is on her way to school when she’s hit by a car. Martin Kettle—just out of high school, still drunk from the night before—is the driver who injures Hannah and leaves her by the side of the road. Glatt follows the intertwined lives of these two characters as they deal with the accident’s aftermath. As a little girl, Hannah is precocious and shy.

While her intellectual curiosity persists, her reticence falls away—bit by bit—as she grows into a teenager. But the series of casts she has to endure as doctor after doctor tries to help her walk again serves as a barrier between Hannah and the kids around her. She sees the world as divided between the normal and the damaged, and she wants desperately to resume her place among the normal. Unfortunately for Hannah, her leg isn’t her only obstacle. Even by the standards of Southern California in the 1970s, her family is...different. Her father leaves her mother and Judaism for his mistress, evangelical Christianity, and surfing. Her mother marries a psychology student specializing in sexuality, which leads to weekends at a nudist colony.

Hannah has a lot to navigate—on crutches—and she does so with a mordant wit that makes her delightful company. Martin’s story is sadder but not without its moments of comedy and gentle beauty.

Immediately after the accident, he’s paralyzed by guilt—an emotional analog to Hannah’s immobility. First, he tries to hide; then he tries to run. Ultimately, neither helps much. Throughout this novel, hope is as much a curse as it is a blessing, and in the end, Glatt doesn’t shy away from this ambiguity. What she leaves her characters—and her readers—with is possibility.

Funny, wise, and painfully honest.

TIN MEN

Golden, Christopher Ballantine (368 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-345-54885-6 978-0-345-54886-3 e-book A futuristic thriller that mixes science fiction, world politics, and gobs of action.

In an unspecified future, America polices the world, deploying robots—Tin Men—to quell civil wars, “defuse the world’s hot spots,” make the globe safe for democracy, and get resented for it. The U.S. Army Remote Infantry Corps operates out of an underground base known as The Hump in Wiesbaden, Germany, where military personnel climb into “metal coffins” for eight-hour shifts to mindmeld with armed robots that operate in remote trouble spots such as Syria, where much of the novel takes place. The robots are tough 16

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but not invulnerable, as mercenary Bot Killers sometimes demonstrate. Bad guy Hanif Khan decides he must not only destroy the Tin Men, but kill specific talented operators such as Pvt. Danny Kelso. Then a worldwide electromagnetic pulse from an unknown source devastates most of the Earth’s technology, although the Tin Men continue to function. “The world isn’t ending,” one character claims. “It’s already over.” Human society is in mortal danger, but the Tin Men have a chance to save it. Readers will never be far from the nearly nonstop mayhem that pervades the story, yet the rage against the machines often feels unaffecting. Arms get blown off, faces charred, eyes put out, yet the Tin Men soldier on unless they are reduced to shrapnel. Meanwhile, the lives of real humans— good guys, the people readers are expected to care about—are at stake: presidents Matheson of the U.S. and Rostov of Russia, along with American enlistees. Don’t look too closely at the logic behind the technology or the logistics, and imagine that you’re reading an extended comic book without the pictures. In fact, the author writes comic books, and his style shows it.

An enjoyable and almost plausible peek into a future world under American protection.

SUMMER SECRETS

Green, Jane St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-250-04734-2 978-1-4668-4774-3 e-book Before sobriety, Catherine “Cat” Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol.

Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.

By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.

A spellbinding story of world-altering power and revenge. the library at mount char

As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.

THE GOVERNOR’S WIFE

Harvey, Michael Knopf (256 pp.) $24.95 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-307-95864-8 978-0-307-95865-5 e-book A seasoned PI tackles Chicago corruption head-on when he’s hired to look into the disappearance of a popular but dirty governor.

Harvey (We All Fall Down, 2011, etc.) brings back his crack private eye, Michael Kelly, who’s still smarting from his last case, a bioterrorism disaster that not only cost hundreds of lives, but also precipitated the demise of Kelly’s relationship. Leery about new assignments, he’s nonetheless intrigued when an anonymous email arrives asking him to track down former Illinois Gov. Ray Perry, who vanished— literally—two years earlier from the courthouse minutes after being sentenced to 37 years in prison for racketeering. The case attracted national media attention, and everyone from the Chicago PD to the FBI grilled Perry’s wife, Marie, about her husband’s disappearing act and came up empty-handed. Kelly isn’t sure what more there is to do, but since his mysterious client is offering $200,000, he’s willing to take a look. Marie is the obvious place to start: she was with Ray the day he disappeared, and no one believes that one half of a couple so in sync would have no idea what the other half was planning. Kelly also digs into the exact mechanics of Ray’s escape and—in a series of twists worthy of the power-hungry cast of House of Cards—a political scheme involving a construction project and some of Chicago’s wealthiest and most influential players.

Harvey makes political corruption personal: this isn’t a story of anonymous millions being shuffled between various offshore accounts. The consequence of every decision in Kelly’s gritty world bleeds.

Library. Carolyn studied languages—and not only human ones.

The other children studied the ways of beasts, learned healing and resurrection, and wandered in the lands of the dead or in possible futures. Now they’re all in their 30s, and Father is missing.

Carolyn and the others are trying to find him—but Carolyn has her own agenda and her own feelings about the most dangerous of her adopted siblings, David, who has spent years perfecting the arts of murder and war. Carolyn is an engaging heroine with a wry sense of humor, and Steve, the ordinary American ally she recruits, helps keep the book grounded in reality despite the ever growing strangeness that swirls around them. Like the Library itself, the book is bigger, darker, and more dangerous than it seems. The plot never flags, and it’s never predictable. Hawkins has created a fascinating, unusual world in which ordinary people can learn to wield breathtaking power—and he’s also written a compelling story about love and revenge that never loses sight of the human emotions at its heart.

A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book. You’ve never read anything quite like this, and you won’t soon forget it.

THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR

Hawkins, Scott Crown (400 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-553-41860-6 A spellbinding story of world-altering power and revenge from debut novelist Hawkins.

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This debut is peopled with lively, engrossing characters who reflect a sophisticated understanding of human nature. mr. and mrs. doctor

THE CONVICTIONS OF JOHN DELAHUNT Hughes, Andrew Pegasus (352 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-794-1

Debut novelist Hughes imagines the circumstances leading up to the Victorian-era real-life hanging of John Delahunt, a convicted Irish child-murderer.

Trinity College education near complete, Delahunt anticipated launching himself into 1840s Dublin society as a gentleman. Then his father died. Delahunt soon learned the estate was mortgaged to pay for his father’s care.

That was an inopportune time to meet Thomas Sibthorpe, who works for the shadowy “Department” at the Castle, headquarters of Dublin’s police. Transpiring thereafter is an intense character study, one in which Delahunt’s life becomes Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short. He accepts money from Sibthorpe to give false testimony about a street fight in which a constable was injured.

Delahunt sees an opportunity for more easy money, necessary because he’s wooing Helen, a young woman of substance. Delahunt approaches her father for permission to marry. It’s granted, then rescinded once the father discovers Delahunt’s proclivities.

The couple elopes. Helen is rejected by her family. The pair lands in a decrepit apartment. Delahunt later witnesses an assault, but there’s more money in witnessing murder. Delahunt, psychopathic and greedy, kills the wounded man. His testimony leads to an innocent being hanged. Helen’s the more ambiguous character.

Although ignorant of the murder, she acquiesced to perjury for money. Then she descends into laudanum addiction following a botched abortion, and the marriage collapses, as does Delahunt.

There’s much that is cringe-inducing as these less-than-admirable characters skulk through the cold, rain-drenched streets of Victorian Dublin. “Lyster had begun to use my fork to clean the grime from beneath his fingernails,” Delahunt notes when a Sibthorpe cohort visits his apartment, a fitting observation of character in this tragedy, which is morbid reading on every page.

A Kafkaesque study of an amoral weakling consumed by an unrestrained bureaucracy.

MARGARET OF ANJOU

Iggulden, Conn Putnam (448 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-399-16537-5 Series: Wars of the Roses, 2

In the second volume of his War of the Roses trilogy, Iggulden (Stormbird, 2014, etc.) follows beautiful young Queen Margaret as she defends the Lancaster realm against York rebels.

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at St. Albans, at Ludlow, and finally in the fields outside Sandal Castle. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, sparks the violence by sending warriors led by his son Thomas to strike a Salisbury wedding party. Percy, a supporter of the king, had grown weary of York ally Salisbury’s incursions on his lands. Iggulden thereafter moves the action swiftly to the clash between mentally fragile and often stuporous King Henry VI, aided by loyalists Buckingham and Somerset, and York, Salisbury, and Warwick. “There will be no peace while York lives,” says Margaret. But York only seeks “to strip the whisperers away from King Henry’s side before his house was destroyed by them.”

From such disputes thousands die as battles clang with sword and axe. Iggulden deftly describes the keys to victories: Warwick’s breakthrough at St. Albans; Trollope’s betrayal at Ludlow; and Margaret’s bartering for Scots allies to corner York and Salisbury at Sandal. Iggulden’s fictional Derry the spymaster reflects Margaret’s court activities, but other characters peek from history’s mists to populate the narrative, like York’s son, giant Edward of March, only 18 and carrying “a weight of muscle that made experienced warriors want to look at their feet in his presence.” But it is the yowling, pain-riven, spine-twisted Richard, who York believes should have been put out “on a winter’s night and let the cold take him,” who foreshadows the bloodletting to come.

Highly readable as a stand-alone novel, but those who loved Stormbird will be anticipating Iggulden’s take on the mesmerizing Richard III.

MR. AND MRS. DOCTOR

Iromuanya, Julie Coffee House (288 pp.) $16.95 paper | $12.99 e-book May 12, 2015 978-1-56689-397-8 978-1-56689-398-5 e-book

Newlywed Nigerian expats in America attempt to cement their careers and social standing as an ex’s return threatens the life they’re building.

Job Ogbonnaya has returned to his Nigerian homeland for an arranged marriage with Ifi, who has been seduced by Job’s reputation as a big doctor in America. Job has also promised to send Ifi to an American university to study nursing. But after a rocky beginning in which Ifi is repulsed by Job’s rough sexual advances—everything Job “knew about sex he learned from American pornography”—things only get worse. Job isn’t a doctor with a fancy house; he’s a nurse’s aide living in a run-down walk-up. With one year left on his student visa, he dropped out of college; his American citizenship is the result of a green-card marriage to a twice-divorced woman from Nebraska. And when Ifi learns the truth about Job from his scheming ex-wife, Iromuanya embarks on a masterful exploration of the interplay of desire, loyalty, and ambition. Ifi has no desire to admit Job’s failure to the world and lose the respect of her Nigerian community back home, but Job has no desire

to make good on his ongoing promises of medical school and a better life in America. And so the masquerade continues, the clock counting down on just how long Job and Ifi’s charade can last. This refreshingly well-drawn debut novel is peopled with lively, engrossing characters who reflect a sophisticated understanding of human nature and relationships.

Against a backdrop of the micro- and macroaggressions African expats endure in the West, Iromuanya presents a fascinating and often hilarious drama of marriage, highlighting the discrepancies between who we say we are and who we really are.

THE THIRD WIFE

Jewell, Lisa Atria (352 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4767-9218-7 978-1-4767-9220-0 e-book British bestseller Jewell’s last few novels have been a revelation—emotionally sophisticated and complex—and this latest, which gradually rewrites the history of a “perfect” family, is a fine follow-up.

Late one night, alone and uncharacteristically drunk, 30-yearold Maya is hit by a London bus. Was it an accident? Suicide? Her husband, Adrian, can’t imagine why his sweet Maya would want to kill herself, but as the novel unfolds, cracks are revealed in his perfect family. An architect pushing 50, Adrian Wolfe is a lovely man, as everyone agrees. His first wife, Susie, mother of the gregarious Cat and pretentious Luke, both in their 20, holds no hard feelings that he left her in the country for a glamorous London

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life with the chic Caroline. Caroline lives in their stunningly restored Islington townhouse with their three children, all under 12, Otis, Pearl, and Beau. When, four years ago, Adrian left Caroline for Maya, he made every effort to keep the family intact—all of them holiday together (three wives, five children) and happily share custody. Or so Adrian insists to anyone who asks. When a strange woman begins stalking him, and Luke finds threatening emails addressed to Maya on her laptop, Adrian begins to investigate. In flashbacks from Maya’s perspective, another side of the Wolfe family is revealed—she feels like an interloper, childless in a family where children are totems, and is slowly disintegrating from the onslaught of anonymous emails (though she knows they must be from a family member—the missives are too intimate and immediate to have been written by anyone else). Most damning of all, she finds herself falling in love with the family’s other outsider, Luke. Adrian is convinced the woman stalking him has answers, if only he can track her down. Although it is certain no one literally pushed Maya into that bus, Jewell shapes the novel as part whodunit, part psychological thriller: Maya was excised from the family, but why and by whom?

Taut pacing and complicated characters shape this rich examination of the modern family.

FINDERS KEEPERS

King, Stephen Scribner (448 pp.) $30.00 | $14.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-5011-0007-9 978-1-5011-0013-0 e-book There are suggestions throughout this second installment of a planned trilogy that King’s motley, appealing trio of detectives from Mr. Mercedes (2014) have some bad juju in their collective future that may make the case here look like a relative afternoon at the mall.

As in Misery and The Shining, King swan dives into the looniness lurking at both ends of the writer-reader transaction. The loony in this particular joint is a pale, red-lipped sociopath named Morris Bellamy, who, in 1978, robs and murders his favorite novelist, John Rothstein, because he can’t forgive him for making his lead character, Jimmy Gold, go into advertising in the last published installment of his epic trilogy. Yet along with the cash Bellamy collects during his crime are several notebooks comprising a rough draft for a fourth installment suggesting an outcome for Gold that Bellamy finds potentially more satisfying. Bellamy buries a trunk with the money and notebooks for safekeeping, but a 35-year prison hitch interrupts his plans. By the time Bellamy is paroled in 2014, Pete Saubers, a high school student who’s something of a Rothstein aficionado himself, has excavated the trunk, sent the money in anonymously labeled parcels to his financially strapped parents, and stashed the notebooks for a possible sale on the proverbial rainy day—whose somewhat premature arrival comes, alas, at roughly the same time Bellamy appears in the Sauberses’ life. Fortunately, Pete’s back is covered by the oddsquad private detective team of portly, kindly ex-cop Bill Hodges, 20

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wisecracking digital whiz Jerome Robinson, and Hodges’ phobicsavant researcher Holly Gibney, who first pooled their talents in Mr. Mercedes—a book whose central crime, the murder and maiming of innocents by a luxury car, looms over this sequel like a stubborn shadow. This being a King novel, the narrative hums and roars along like a high-performance vehicle, even though there are times when its readers may find themselves several tics ahead of the book’s plot developments. But such qualms are overcome by the plainspoken, deceptively simple King style, which has once again fashioned a rip-snorting entertainment; one that also works as a sneaky-smart satire of literary criticism and how even the most attentive readers can often miss the whole point behind making up characters and situations.

Reading a King novel as engrossing as this is a little like backing in a car with parking assist: after a while, you just take your hands off the wheel and the pages practically turn themselves.

THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE

Kundera, Milan Translated by Asher, Linda Harper/HarperCollins (128 pp.) $23.99 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-06-235689-5 Forgotten tyrants and blatant belly buttons have equally playful roles in this deceptively slight, whimsically thoughtful tale of a few men in Paris not doing

or saying much.

The sight of young women with exposed navels in the Luxembourg Gardens sets Alain to musing “on the different sources of feminine seductiveness.” Not far away, Ramon avoids a Chagall show because of the long line. D’Ardelo, whose medical tests reveal he doesn’t have cancer after all, nonetheless lies when he meets Ramon in the park and says he does. A man seduces a woman with banal remarks because brilliance challenges her to compete, “whereas insignificance sets her free.” Stalin enters the narrative by way of a biography of Khrushchev given to Charles, who tells a visiting Ramon that “our master” provided it. The master is the narrator or author, whose intrusions resonate with Charles’ desire to use the Khrushchev story in a marionette theater. The Stalin thread opens with a bad joke about his bagging 24 partridges on a hunt, a story derided by Khrushchev and others over the urinals they share. (Scholars may reference the latrine fouled by Stalin’s son in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.) Charles, Ramon, and Alain discuss how the monstrous Stalin has faded from memory. But the narrative recalls an official named Kalinin, a “poor innocent puppet” in Stalin’s government, who has a weak bladder. He and the tyrant reappear late in the book, shooting and urinating in the Luxembourg Gardens before driving off in a small carriage drawn by two ponies. Art, sex, disease, history, and friendship are lightly treated themes woven through scenes whose significance may be partly the disproving of a concern raised in Kundera’s Ignorance, that “emigration causes artists to

lose their creativity.” But does the Czech-born writer who’s lived in France for years truly believe, at age 86, that insignificance is “the essence of existence”?

This strangely amusing novella has the power to inspire serious efforts to find significance in the very book in which it is so perversely denied.

UNDER A DARK SUMMER SKY

Lafaye, Vanessa Sourcebooks (400 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4926-1250-6

It’s 1935. As a monstrous hurricane bears down on the Florida Keys, black and white residents and a group of World War I veterans building a bridge must face not only the truth of nature’s cruelty, but also of man’s.

In Lafaye’s debut novel, she explores Depression-era Florida, following the relationships among Missy, a self-educated AfricanAmerican nanny; Nelson and Hilda Kincaid, the richest, and most unhappy, white couple in town; Henry, a veteran who has just returned home to work after 18 years away; Dwayne, the town sheriff; and Selma, Henry’s sister, who has the power to invoke supernatural forces. During the annual town barbecue, tension between black and white residents boils over, and Hilda is beaten nearly to death.

Soon the hurricane comes to wipe the slate clean. Lafaye’s novel is based on true circumstances, a fact she drives home in an opening historical note. This matters less than she thinks, because the novel is rooted in human relationships, with the hurricane serving more as symbol than climax to the plot. The characters are flawed and interesting, and the descriptions of place and culture are colorful. But somehow the novel fails to achieve any great depth or pathos until the very end, when Lafaye enumerates the lives lost during the storm.

This is only a problem because it seems that Lafaye wants this to be more, a story of our nation’s racism and the scars it left behind. But the true focus is on individuals and their struggles; the book fails to transcend and become universal commentary.

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A young Civil War veteran ventures West, encountering violence and moments of revelation. american meteor

Character-driven drama that, while it doesn’t offer any new insights into our country’s racist past, explores a unique setting.

PARADISE SKY

Lansdale, Joe R. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (416 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-316-32937-8 978-0-316-32935-4 e-book How did Deadwood Dick get his name? Readers can learn this, and a whole lot more, in this picaresque Western from a master of the form (The Thicket, 2013, etc.).

Willie Jackson’s origins didn’t prophesy a future any brighter than that of most black Americans born in East Texas so soon after the War Between the States that he can still remember his years as an infant slave. What seals his fate, however, is looking the wrong way at the rear end of Sam Ruggert’s hatchet-faced third wife. Ruggert, not one to take this slur on his manhood lying down, organizes a lynching party. Although Willie escapes, his father doesn’t, nor does the family farm. Taking to his heels, Willie lucks into kind neighbor Tate Loving, who shelters him for several years. But when he’s recognized one day by a chance visitor, his real adventures begin. In short order he lights out again, changes his name to Nat Love, enlists in the U.S. Cavalry, deserts his post, crosses paths with four Chinese women, loses his heart to a ratter named Win Finn, lands in Deadwood, where he’s befriended by James Butler Hickok—Wild Bill to you—and wins the shooting competition that earns him his enduring sobriquet. Soon thereafter, Ruggert and two hirelings catch up with Ruggert’s long-sought quarry and exact a terrible vengeance. The tables now turned, Willie, or Nat, or Dick, plots his own revenge on the man who stole his happiness.

Noting that he’s starred in many a dime novel penned by his old friend Bronco Bob Brennen, the narrator maintains in closing: “Here is the straight record.” That assurance is a lot harder to swallow than the rest of this tall tale, which goes down smooth and easy as a vintage sarsaparilla.

CHARLIE MARTZ AND OTHER STORIES

Leonard, Elmore Morrow/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-06-236492-0 978-0-06-2364944 e-book Fifteen mostly unpublished stories— Westerns, war stories, dispatches from Detroit—written in the 1950s.

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Leonard’s son Peter notes in his brief introduction that Hemingway was the formative influence on his father’s prose, and you’ll find echoes of Papa everywhere here. The slight coming-of-age story “The Line Rider” and the will-he-or-won’the-stray anecdotes “Arma Virumque Cano” and “Evenings Away from Home” drag their unprepared heroes into Hemingway territory; “Charlie Martz” and “First Western Siesta in Paloverde” bring the sheriff of Doña Ana County up against two shooters hungry for revenge; “Short Stories for Men: The Bull Ring at Blisston” forces an ex-bullfighter to cap one last bull in Michigan; and the Anglos stopping in a Torremolinos hotel in “A Happy, Lighthearted People” could have stepped right out of “Homage to Switzerland.” More subtle echoes of Hemingway turn up in the twisted marital idyll of “The Italian Cut” and the moral dilemmas the heroes and heroines face in the Mexico of “Confession,” the Malaya of “Time of Terror,” and the Civil War of “Rebel on the Run.” But the most obvious influence is in the testosterone posturing that drives the avenging brother of “One, Horizontal” and the farmer invited to become a sales rep in “The Trespassers.” Like Hemingway, Leonard excels in dramatizing the point at which apparently friendly mano a mano joshing threatens to erupt in violence for the Hollywood extra in “The Only Good Syrian Foot Soldier Is a Dead One” and the rifle-toting ex-boyfriend of “For Something to Do,” perhaps the most characteristic of all these tales.

Not by any means apprentice work—Leonard’s first four novels appeared over the same period as these stories— but interesting mostly for the signs and promises of the author’s future laconic command of dialogue and action and his knowing, lazy, wryly amused trademark voice.

AMERICAN METEOR

Lock, Norman Bellevue Literary Press (208 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-934137-94-9 A young Civil War veteran ventures West, encountering violence and moments of revelation on his way.

Lock, whose work often encompasses eras and notions of history and literature in unexpected ways, is working in a more restrained manner in this novel. Narrator Stephen Moran encounters real-life figures (including Walt Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant), his path quietly intersecting with major historical events from the Civil War to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Initially a bugler, Stephen loses one eye in a battle and winds up working on President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train. From there his life takes him West, which will further shape his character, especially his time working for photographer William Henry Jackson. There’s a brief metaphor involving an aging Huck Finn that will stand on its own to some readers and evoke for others Lock’s The Boy In His Winter (2014), in which Huck and Jim travel through decades’ worth of history via the Mississippi River. Like that novel, this one is structured

with an older narrator looking back over his life. As the story progresses, Stephen has fateful encounters with George Custer and Crazy Horse, leading to moments of vengeance and haunting realizations. Stephen is aware of his moral shortcomings and conscious of the racial conflicts and power struggles—some of them fatal—that play out around him. “There was room on the calendar for only one martyrdom in April,” Stephen notes after a run-in with a group of Confederate sympathizers after Lincoln’s death. He’s a memorable narrator, seeking to understand the new medium of photography but also capable of acts of swift violence. A subplot involving his visions of the future—“It came to me in dreams. Terrible ones!” he says—arrives halfway through the book but turns out to have a solid payoff.

This novel memorably encompasses grand themes and notions of transcendence without ever losing sight of the grit and moral horrors present in the period.

DAY FOUR

Lotz, Sarah Little, Brown (352 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-316-24294-3 After three days of fun, sun, and excess, a cruise ship suddenly loses all contact with the outside world. The beleaguered passengers and crew soon find themselves fighting off the norovirus, lots of creepy noises, a few ghosts, and, eventually, each other.

Lotz’s (The Three, 2014) horror-thriller begins as an intriguing take on the classic “locked room” mystery since, as weird things begin to happen, there is no way on or off the ship. She employs this claustrophobic feeling very effectively at first, also developing the fear factor by exploring the mind of a serial murderer on board and by introducing Celine del Ray, a mostly fake medium who suddenly begins to show signs of true spirit possession just as

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the creepy roots of the blondes

Photo courtesy Brian Joseph Davis

In The Blondes (April 21), Emily Schultz’s new novel, a contagious disease afflicts only flaxen-haired females.

Prior to death, victims of Siphonaptera Human Virus, popularly known as “Gold Fever” or “California Rabies,” are highly prone to violent attacks.

“Save it, Burroughs! Her brain’s bleached. She can’t hear you,” one police officer shouts to another at John F. Kennedy International Airport while subduing a flight attendant. The woman attempted to maul a toddler.

The airport scene is a bit of a nod to The Blondes’ roots, Schultz says.

“I was on a plane with my husband, reading a Vanity Fair from the seat-back pocket, and it had this Gucci ad of these blondes in the jungle. They looked really creepy, and I kind of made this creepy [deepened] voice, ‘THE BLONDES.’ That’s how the book started—from something that looked like horror to me,” she says.

Schultz’s narrator, Hazel Hayes, is a Canadian graduate student who traveled to New York on the recommendation of her cultural studies professor and lover, Karl.

From the uncertain safety of his cottage in the woods outside Toronto, all alone, she recounts the pandemic and her personal life to their (unexpected) unborn child.

“If you survive, the world you grow up in will be one that has experienced intense panic and distrust, violence and hysteria— though that’s a loaded word. I don’t think I would have used it before this past year,” Schultz writes. “But now? All of us living with a disease that affects only girls and women?

Emily Schultz Hysteria is so bang on.”

Two parts horrifying, one part wry, The Blondes gives a fresh look at epidemics, academics, media, and motherhood. —Megan Labrise Megan Labrise is a freelance writer and columnist based in New York. The Blondes received a starred review in the Feb. 15, 2015, issue.

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the ship gets lost (on New Year’s Eve). But as every short chapter ends with a bang (sometimes literally), the novel begins to feel both formulaic and unfocused. The six or seven characters who drive the narrative (the chapters rotate among them) aren’t interesting enough to carry the reader with them, nor is the mystery deep enough to sustain or encourage their development. By the time the engines start working again and Lotz switches her style to newspaper articles and interviews, it feels like a gimmick with no payoff. In the end, it’s still pretty unclear whom or what Celine was channeling, but apparently it’s one step up from demonic possession—malevolent but not up to dragging anyone down to hell.

There’s another disturbing side to this novel: the basis for the plot might be taken from some recent headlines about disappeared airplanes, and there’s something a bit too salacious about the way the story unfolds when one has those current losses in mind.

A little creepy but juggling too many narrative (and horror-movie) threads.

SEAL TEAM SIX: HUNT THE FOX

Mann, Don & Pezzullo, Ralph Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (320 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | May 12, 2015 978-0-316-37748-5 978-0-316-37749-2 e-book Dispatching SEAL Team 6’s Black Cell into anarchic Syria to secure a cache of sarin gas, Mann (Seal Team Six: Hunt the Falcon, 2013, etc.) shoots up another headline-inspired plot.

Warrant Officer Thomas Crocker’s a good guy, hard used, always ready to stretch orders for a mission accomplished. Crocker is a familiar yet nuanced character, suffering from angst—combat losses, marriage implosion—while dispatching Shabiha terrorists, “paid assassins working for President Assad,” in Istanbul before he’s even taken a meeting with a CIA handler and Talab, a Syrian source. There, the team leader learns that Black Cell’s been ordered to retrieve a cache of sarin nerve gas stashed near Idlib, northern Syria. That means infiltrating through Assad’s Russianand Iranian-supported forces. Then there are the war-torn areas controlled by a major player called the Fox, Mohammad Farhad al-Kazaz, an “active ISIS jihadist, considered highly intelligent, with a fervent following and global ambitions.” Black Cell members—SEALs “selected, in part, because their bodies produced an abnormal amount of an amino acid known as neuropeptide Y (NPY), which regulates blood pressure and also works as a natural tranquilizer”—dash through high-tension border checkpoints disguised as medics from Doctors Without Borders, detouring to treat incognito the Fox’s wounded son, fight running battles in country, smash-and-grab the sarin, only to have it stolen later from a Turkish military base. Technophile readers get much acronym look-up material—MEATS insertion, AS532 Cougar, PG-7VR rocket—before Black Cell disrupts a cruise ship hijacking led by a beautiful traitor wielding a Bottega Veneta crocodile shoulder bag, despite interference from dillydallying desk jockeys and an

arrogant CIA chief who leads by yelling obscenities. But there’s no rest for Crocker and company—their high-value target must be nabbed off the streets of Paris.

Cast Russell Crowe as Crocker for a cinematic thrill ride.

ANATOMIES

McCarty, Susan Aforementioned Productions (250 pp.) $16.50 paper | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-941143-03-2 A promising debut collection of short fiction and other ephemera from McCarty (English/ Salisbury Univ.).

The author offers a surprising diversity of tone scattered among the kinds of solid short stories that emerge from places like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The first of three distinct sections, “Animalia,” strongly represents melancholic remembrances. The book opens with the

title story, a travelogue about crisscrossing New York City during a hot summer. The next story, “Fellowship,” concerns a teenage girl who’s dealing with her parents’ imminent divorce while simultaneously finding sexual frustration with the abstinent Christian boy to whom she’s attached herself. “Indirect Object” describes an uncomfortable encounter between a tutor and the father of one of his students. Another, “The Fat of the Land,” is about what it’s like to become soft when exchanging Manhattan for Iowa. The middle section, “Histology,” is brief, as are the flash fictions included within. They’re slight experiments like “Passive Aggressive,” which lays out all the reasons a woman is not speaking to her partner in advance of a girls’ weekend in Las Vegas. The final third, “Bacterium,” is where McCarty gets far more experimental with her storytelling. “Field Reports” amusingly examines a sexual encounter in the form of a lab report detailing blood alcohol levels, costuming, and body posture. The social satire “Another Zombie Story” takes aim at the deadening of life through technology. The final few stories fall back on more Midwestern slice-of-life moments centered on brash, masculine protagonists familiar to anyone who grew up in rural America. The collection sums itself up with “Anamesis: An

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Epilogue,” a kind of self-survey that notes a variety of conditions ranging from “Consistently underhydrated” to “One failed relationship ending in death.”

Nothing astonishing here; just a gifted purveyor of American short fiction working on her craft and offering up the results.

OUR TOWN

McEnroe, Kevin Counterpoint (256 pp.) $25.00 | May 12, 2015 978-1-61902-528-8 If Ernest Hemingway had chosen to write about late-20th-century Hollywood while wearing Tennessee Williams’ sunglasses, the result might read very much like this.

McEnroe, the son of Oscar-winning actress Tatum O’Neal and tennis superstar John McEnroe, brings to his first novel a shrewd, melancholy knowledge of celebrity and its discontents. It tracks the descent of Hollywood actress Dorothy White from her charmed, promising youth to dismal, mortifying late-middle age. The Georgia-bred Dorothy is described early on as “a B-movie actress who only briefly experienced any true success, her beauty and her vanilla voice and her appetite for proper living earn[ing] her, almost, infamy.” But she also wanted to be “a good woman. A good wife, and a good mother. And a good grandmother, too.” As detailed as a coroner’s report, but with the delicacy of a romantic elegy, the book spans decades in its description of Dorothy’s best and worst impulses; her penchant for relationships with abusive men, beginning with her more successful movie-star husband, Dale; and, most poignantly, how her addictions to alcohol, tobacco, and drugs abet her physical and emotional decline. The book abounds in rich descriptions of the Southern California landscape, whether of grand Hollywood parties or of a seedy off-track betting parlor in Ventura. Those who know about McEnroe’s family history will find it next-to-impossible not to be haunted while reading by the memory of his actress grandmother, Joanna Moore (1934-1997), with whom Dorothy shares several biographic details. Yet it’s a measure of McEnroe’s promise as a writer that his main character transcends real-life memories to become a vivid, enrapturing personality in her own right. McEnroe’s writing style is felicitously hard-boiled, by turns tender and sardonic, but never less than compassionate toward an ill-starred woman who “never quite figured out how to get out of her own way.”

The novel often evokes the twilight graces of a classic pop ballad, each lyric evoked with care in a cocktail lounge by a soft, sultry voice etched with pain.

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WHITE CROCODILE

Medina, K.T. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (384 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-316-37400-2 978-0-316-37401-9 e-book Mysterious disappearances, danger, and death converge against the exotic backdrop of post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia in Medina’s debut effort.

Medina, a former member of the British armed forces, takes her alter ego, Tess Hardy, to the jungles of Cambodia, where impoverished villagers live in fear of a killer they call the White Crocodile. Tess has enlisted with the MCT, a charitable mineclearing agency that rids the fields of some of the thousands of mines left behind by the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered countless Cambodians. But Tess didn’t really go to Cambodia to clear mines: she came to find out what happened to her former husband, Luke.

Cruel and abusive during their marriage, Luke left a cryptic message for Tess before his death, and although she was relieved to be out of the marriage, she still wants to know the truth about him.

When Johnny, another mine clearer, is badly injured in an explosion, Tess goes back to the field and finds a second, more deadly mine had also been planted. Even though it failed to explode, she realizes that someone or something is murdering both villagers and mine clearers. Meanwhile, in Manchester, England, two detectives—Wessex and Viles—are probing the death of a young woman whose body was found in the woods. The book takes place over eight consecutive days, and Medina weaves together the two different, but interconnected, stories. The book’s real plus is the peek it allows into a world few Westerners see: the ravaged society the Khmer Rouge left behind in Cambodia, with rampant poverty and hunger, as well as the dangerous, deadly job assigned to mine clearers. Medina struggles the most in the book’s beginning and end. The story’s early pages are confusing, as if it took time for the author to gain traction, while the final pages suffer from the opposite problem and come off a bit rushed.

A heart-rending look at a culture decimated by the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge.

PHILOSOPHICAL TOYS

Medina, Susana Dalkey Archive (300 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-62897-086-9 paper

Family histories, cinematic obsessions, fractured relationships, and the films of Luis Buñuel converge in this pensive novel set in London and Spain.

The plot of Medina’s novel, which abounds with references to art, cinema, and literature, takes a little while to get going. When it does, however, the story it tells is a powerful and mysterious one.

The novel is structured as the reminiscences of Nina, a Spanish woman living in London, looking back at a period of her life lasting several years. (“I was in time to witness the last vestiges of the punk civilization,” she writes early on.) Concerns over Nina’s father’s health lead her to find a mysteriously vast archive of shoes kept by her late mother, who had worked as an actress for a time. And what emerges slowly from this is a web of obsessions and fetishes, from the wealthy collector gathering props from the films of surrealist film giant Buñuel to the shoe and foot fetishes that turn up in some of Buñuel’s films to the unknowable desires of Nina’s parents. Throughout the novel, primal desires and heady discussions of artistic theory exist in a state of relative balance. One character is described as “an emissary of sensuality whose rubbery mouth was an unaware conduit for unusual unconscious ticks.” And at one point, Nina describes a particularly charged scene in the city: “I drifted along libidinal streets, sinister streets, listless streets....” These moments are balanced with lengthy musings on art, memory, and philosophy—which, given the occupations of many of the characters, seems entirely fitting.

This novel’s headiness might seem daunting, but readers who take a patient approach will find a deeply rewarding and often haunting narrative emerge.

THE PRESIDENT’S SHADOW

Meltzer, Brad Grand Central Publishing (416 pp.) $28.00 | $14.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-446-55393-3 978-0-446-55395-7 e-book This third outing for the storied Culper Ring, sworn to protect the U.S. presidency, shows them doing what they do most: sniffing out conspiracies, falling for deceptions, and perpetuating that grandest of all American political institutions, the clueless double take.

Orson Wallace is still president, Beecher White still toils in the National Archives, his mentor Aristotle “Tot” Westman

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still languishes in the hospital after getting shot in the head.

But things have changed for Nico Hadrian, who failed in his attempt 10 years ago to assassinate the president and instead killed the first lady, who continues to talk to him after all these years. Nico recently escaped his padded cell at St. Elizabeth’s mental institution, just in time to be on the loose when current first lady Shona Wallace turns up a severed human arm in a White House garden. After its opposite number turns up in quite a different location, the two arms are identified as those of Kingston Young, who killed himself two weeks ago. Or is Young really alive and masquerading as the late Tanner Pope’s loose-cannon grandson, Ezra, a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a guild of assassins who trace their membership back to John Wilkes Booth? Meltzer attacks the web of conspiracies with an unbridled barrage of flashbacks, switching from past-tense to present-tense verbs, from first-person to thirdperson narratives, until you’re as ready as poor Col. Doggett, whom Nico slowly tortures, to cry uncle and confess to all the terrible things you’ve done, just like everyone else in the Culper Ring, the Knights of the Golden Circle, and the Plankholders, for whom Doggett recruited Nico so long ago.

Unlike the previous installment (The Fifth Assassin, 2013), this one doesn’t provide much in the way of exposition but instead throws you unceremoniously into the deep end.

Fans will survive, but unwary newcomers had better watch their backs.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL HER

Norton, Carla Minotaur (368 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-250-03280-5 978-1-250-03281-2 e-book A kidnapping victim must use her insight into her former captor to catch him after he escapes from a psychiatric hospital.

Reeve LeClaire, nee Regina, earned herself the nickname Edgy Reggie for her harsh look at the trial of her kidnapper, Daryl Wayne Flint. Four years of captivity and abuse took the vulnerability out of Reeve and made her strong enough to watch as Flint was sentenced to Olshaker Psychiatric Hospital rather than prison. Years later, Reeve has worked through some of her bottled-up feelings by helping a fellow victim (The Edge of Normal, 2013), and she’s moved on to start college in San Francisco. She’s concentrated on what’s hardest—trusting people—and has even managed to make a few new friends when her world is upended once more by the news that Flint has escaped the psych hospital. Knowing that she has a special connection to Flint, or rather, that he does to her, Reeve is drawn back to Seattle to try to understand what’s happened. The FBI doesn’t want her help, but when Flint kills just 24 hours after his escape, they have no choice but to see how important her knowledge is. Reeve, already wary of trusting others, has no interest in working with the feds, but her value 28

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to the case emboldens her to ask for Agent Milo Bender to help with her investigation. Reeve knows Bender as a kind face from her childhood rescue days, and though early retirement has put him out of commission, this particular case and his loyalty to Reeve make him willing to step up. Going on pure intuition, the two try to match Flint’s motivation to a greater plan and figure him out before he can get to them.

In spite of allowing the second entry in the series to tap into emotional back stories that might better have been saved for later, Norton writes smart characters and cleverly leaves herself room for a sequel.

THE HOPEFUL

O’Neill, Tracy Ig Publishing (258 pp.) $16.95 paper | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-63246-002-8 O’Neill’s debut novel tracks an aspiring figure skater’s journey of obsession, triumph, failure, and addiction.

In a psych ward in New Hampshire, 17-year-old Alivopro “Ali” Doyle tells her doctor, “In the beginning was skating, and skating was everything....” At one time, Ali was an Olympic hopeful training for the regional championships, until a fall on the ice caused neck trauma and ended her amateur career. As the narrative weaves through sessions with her psychiatrist and a recounting of her training as a figure skater, what emerges is not a predictable story of loss and hope but a complex family drama. While Ali’s father, Alvin, embraces her ambition as a distraction from his own depression, her mother, Lou, is more disturbed by Ali’s single-minded desire to be a champion at any cost. Further complicating this dynamic is that Ali is adopted, born to a Native American mother. For Ali, her ethnicity and unknown heritage bring up insecurities about her body as she tries to keep herself in “Olympic condition,” and her adoption often becomes a sticking point in arguments between Ali and Lou. After her accident, the family that was tentatively held together by a common goal begins to fall apart. Ali becomes addicted to amphetamines, determined to lose weight and start skating again, with predictably disastrous results. The entry into this novel can be difficult. The chronology is often unclear; many chapters are almost exclusively unmarked dialogue between Ali and her therapist; and sometimes the reader is not given enough context to fully understand a scene. But the book soars in its descriptions of figure skating, capturing its strange and brutal beauty and achieving a beauty of its own in the process.

For fans of figure skating, this book is edgy and serious enough to not feel like a guilty pleasure.

Palma’s principal players are anything but stupid, but they do have a way of finding themselves in supernatural jams. the map of chaos

THE MAP OF CHAOS

Palma, Félix J. Atria (608 pp.) $27.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-4516-8818-4 978-1-4516-8820-7 e-book What lies on the other side of the beyond? Does The Shadow know? Certainly the Invisible Man does, and therein lies a knot in Palma’s (The Map of the Sky, 2012, etc.) newest delightful puzzler.

Said unseeable person comes into the picture courtesy of H.G. Wells, with whom Palma’s tale opens. Wells is an unflappable model of Victorian Englishness, convinced that “his was the most significant generation to have walked the Earth” inasmuch as—among other things—it possessed the seeds of the knowledge required to end life on the planet. Rational and resolute, Wells must grapple with the unfolding reality that there’s a whole irrational, surreal, irresolute world out there, some of

it of his own creation. Palma is happy, it seems, with the idea that writers are pretty significant people at that: in the panoply of heroes he enlists to the cause of humankind’s salvation are Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll. Then there’s fearless vampire/werewolf/villain hunter Cornelius Clayton, never too busy to appreciate “proud breasts” and baronial manses and for whom things can never get quite weird enough, and his own army of allies, confidants, and informants, including a friendly proto-shrink who helpfully says, “If I devoted myself to treating stupid people I would have a full practice, and I would be a wealthy man.” Palma’s principal players are anything but stupid, but they do have a way of finding themselves in supernatural jams. His shaggy doggish, steampunk-y tale, with many moving parts, threatens to spin off disconnectedly at any moment, but somehow he keeps things straight (and straight-faced, though he is often very dryly funny); in the end it all coheres, however improbable the story he conjures. Though sometimes talky and sometimes didactic (“But more importantly, he was afraid that if he continued writing Sherlock Holmes adventures, his readers would identify him with what he considered not his best

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writing”), Palma’s yarn is altogether a satisfying, thoroughly entertaining creature feature.

And never mind the loose ends: there’s another volume on the way, and we look forward to it.

THE TEMPLE OF LIGHT

Piazza, Daniela Open Road Integrated Media (440 pp.) $17.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-5040-0069-7 978-1-4804-4270-2 e-book Piazza debuts with complex historical fiction linking Celtic mysticism to the medieval construction of Milan’s Santa Maria Nascente Cathedral.

In 1447, Milan’s Duke Filippo Maria Visconti dies without a male heir, threatening instability or aggression from the neighboring city-states of the Italian peninsula. There’s an eligible but unknown illegitimate son, Niccolò, but he’s too young to rule. On his deathbed, Filippo demands Archdeacon Onorio, part of the group supervising the cathedral’s construction, become the boy’s guardian. The duke doesn’t know that Onorio’s also a member of the Brotherhood of Druids of the Light, nine “philosophers and wise men” with “faith in a divinity whose name had changed through time,” originally venerating the Celtic goddess Belisama, who they believe is an incarnation of the Virgin Mary. In fact, the cathedral is being built over Medhelan, “the heart of the ancient Celtic shrine.” Following Niccolò over three decades as he’s torn between the brotherhood and the world of flesh, Piazza’s narrative is chronological, but it’s complicated and moves slowly. However, amid the thoroughly detailed schemes, murders, and flashbacks to mystical Druid ceremonies, Niccolò proves a believable, likable hero, especially in interactions with contemporaries Lorenzo and Maria. The pair were street children who found their way into service of the new duke, Francesco Sforza, Filippo’s son-in-law.

Lorenzo becomes a deadly assassin; beautiful Maria’s first the kept woman of the castle steward, later the madam of Ca’ Gioiosa, a brothel for the court’s courtiers, guests, and rich prelates.

There’s a love story for Niccolò, much ado about the cathedral’s construction, political intrigue, rape, torture, and murders in this readable but overly detailed novel.

It’s Dickens-meets–New-Age-fantasy, but it’s an effort that may not fully satisfy fans of either genre.

THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

Rich, A.J. Scribner (288 pp.) $26.00 | $13.99 e-book | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-4767-7458-9 978-1-4767-7460-2 e-book

A student of forensic psychology finds her fiance mauled to death. Did her dogs do it?

Morgan Prager gets home from a lecture at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to find her apartment covered in blood and her three dogs frantic. In the bedroom, a body has been mutilated so badly she isn’t sure at first that it’s her fiance, Bennett. The police arrive, shoot one dog, take the others into custody, and send Morgan to Bellevue. In a few days she will reveal to her psychiatrist that she met Bennett when he responded to a profile she set up on a dating site to test a theory she has about women who are victims of sexual predators. Then he turned out to be perfect for her. After she gets out of the hospital, she tries to mail a condolence letter to Bennett’s parents, at which point it turns out everything she knows about the guy, including his name, is a lie.

Two other fiancees, one of them recently murdered, an ex-wife, and other nasty surprises await as Morgan attempts to unravel the truth. At the same time, she’s working with a pretty hot animal advocacy lawyer named Mackenzie to defend her dogs, who face execution. This pseudonymous debut is a collaboration between Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment, gifted novelists whose failure to breathe life into their heroine is perplexing.

The quirks and attitudes, sexual history and behavior, dead best friend, lawyer brother, and oddly cold voice they have invented for her never alchemize into what feels a real person. Some details, like the fact that her psychiatrist used to be a backup singer for Lou Reed, almost feel like they came from another book. On the other hand, the information presented about sociopaths, psychopaths, victims, and dogs, particularly dogs in trouble, is extremely interesting.

Despite its lack of believable characters and events, this slim, nasty thriller is hard to put down.

THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL

Roby, Kimberla Lawson Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $20.00 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4555-5956-5 978-1-4555-5957-2 e-book Fans of the Reverend Curtis Black series will rejoice with this latest installment of the extended-family saga.

Despite their spiritually rich environment, temptations abound for the members of the Deliverance Outreach community. This time, Curtis’ daughter, Alicia, takes center stage. Preparing to remarry Phillip Sullivan, assistant pastor of her father’s church,

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Alicia should be happy, particularly given that Phillip has forgiven her for ruining their first marriage by having an affair with Levi Cunningham. But as the nuptials approach, Levi finishes his prison sentence for dealing drugs and immediately contacts Alicia. Determined not to betray Phillip a second time, Alicia tries but fails to ignore Levi’s overtures. Maybe he’s her true soul mate? But does that justify letting down not only Phillip, but also her entire family? Meanwhile, Alicia’s best friend, Melanie Richardson, discovers that her husband, Brad, has once again lost thousands of dollars in the stock market. He’s promised to reform, but he’s said that before. His late nights at work aren’t helping their marriage, either. To make things worse, Melanie’s mother—the delightfully rude and awful Gladys—relentlessly needles Melanie about her weight, cautioning her that Brad will stray if she doesn’t get down to at least a size 8. Soon Melanie finds herself slipping back down the rabbit hole of her childhood eating disorder, exercising twice a day, eliminating solid foods, and making excuses to keep others from guessing the extent of her problem. Roby (A Christmas Prayer, 2014, etc.) toggles back and forth between Alicia’s and Melanie’s stories, ratcheting up the tension as both women’s lives threaten to careen completely out of control. The writing is simple and clean though sometimes a bit saccharine. Nonetheless, Roby is a master of making a delicious mess of otherwise good, merciful, God-fearing people’s lives.

Melodramatic, yes, but compellingly readable.

both cultures. After Pearl Harbor, tensions estrange the pastor from his wife, who leaves with his son for an internment camp, rejecting the religion he represents. Billy eventually returns to his father, and much of the novel finds him following in his dad’s footsteps, studying to become a minister and a missionary, showing an affinity for Japanese women. The fate of Mitsuko is a mystery he must resolve as he follows his mission to Japan and has all sorts of revelations, some more probable than others.

There is plenty of insight and illumination into cultural difference between the two countries, but these never coalesce into a fully fleshed novel.

THE SUN GODS

Rubin, Jay Chin Music Press (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-63405-950-3 A debut novel, from the longtime translator of Haruki Murakami’s work, about culture clash between Americans and Japanese in the World War II era.

This novel arrives with an impressive pedigree; in addition to translating Murakami, Rubin (Making Sense of Japanese, 2002) is a scholar of Japanese literature who has taught at Harvard. So readers might be surprised at the heavy-handedness and lack of nuance in his fiction, which suffers from undeveloped characters, maudlin dialogue, and a contrived plot. Before Pearl Harbor, the widowed pastor of a Japanese congregation in Seattle becomes smitten with a newcomer to the church. “He felt his legs grow weak” at his first sight of Mitsuko. “She was stunning.” The pastor, who is white, has a young son, Billy, who will mature into the novel’s protagonist. Mitsuko lost a child and no longer has a husband, having left one who beat her in Japan. For the purposes of fiction, the coincidences are perfect.

He lusts for her as much as a devout Christian can, while she, in turn, feels stirrings as well. “The Lord is tempting me now,” she tells him. “You are my temptation, Pastor Tom.” She and Billy form a bond much stronger than the one the boy has with his father as the marriage between the two meets resistance from |

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THE HEART OF THE ORDER

Schell-Lambert, Theo Little A/New Harvest (254 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4778-2953-0

A first novel that’s a monologue: an injured major league baseball player describes his rehab.

An awkward slide leads to a torn knee ligament for Blake “Xandy” Alexander, a young left fielder and sixth in the batting order for the Carolina Birds, based in Raleigh-Durham. This happens in May, so it’s the end of the season for Xandy. His account covers the three-plus months he spends in rehab, living alone in a borrowed house in East Palm Beach, Florida. He starts with a knee brace and crutches and records his progress meticulously, eventually dispensing with the crutches and taking his first swings again. Boy, is he proud of that healing knee! (Athlete’s Knee would have been a more accurate title.) There’s no plot; Xandy fills up the pages with random thoughts on baseball gear. Apart from brief references to sliders and brawls, he paints the game as squeaky-clean.

Astonishingly, he doesn’t once refer to the use of steroids, though he does voice some skepticism about “the whole ‘band of brothers’ thing.” Money has undercut that kind of camaraderie; Xandy makes $1.2 million a year. When he travels to North Carolina to watch a home game, he reports “we all got pretty blitzed at the restaurant” but doesn’t elaborate. He’s just as closemouthed about himself. Does he have girlfriends? Has he ever? Or is he asexual?

There’s just a hint he’s attracted to one of his therapists, Jenn, a single mom with an 8-year-old boy, but when he meets her by chance at the supermarket, he can’t even manage an icebreaker. He purports not to be bothered by “the great quantities of alone-time rehab gives you,” so perhaps he’s just a cold fish.

It’s the narrator’s blandness, rather than the lack of plot, that will doom the novel for fans and nonfans alike.

SWEET FORGIVENESS

Spielman, Lori Nelson Plume (336 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-14-751676-3

Bullied in middle school, abandoned by her mother, and betrayed by her fiance, Hannah Farr has little interest in exposing her emotional vulnerabilities.

But the new fad of Forgiveness Stones, the brainchild of poet and attorney Fiona Knowles, is impossible to escape. The concept is simple: send two stones to someone you’ve wronged. When they return a stone to you, you have been forgiven. When they send the remaining stone (with its new partner stone) on to a new person, the Circle of Forgiveness expands. Hannah wants nothing to do with the Forgiveness Stones. Her goal is security. Hannah’s scrambled to the top of Louisiana’s ladder for local television anchors, leaping 32

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from weekend anchor to evening news to host of her own show.

But everything is jeopardized now that young, beautiful, conniving Claudia Campbell is jockeying for Hannah’s job; now that her new boyfriend, mayor Michael Payne, has not only not proposed marriage, but actually encouraged her to seek a job 900 miles away in Chicago; now that Fiona has sent Hannah a velvet pouch of her own Forgiveness Stones, begging absolution for having bullied Hannah in middle school; now that even Dorothy, her best friend (and the mother of her ex-fiance), has embraced Fiona’s scam. Hannah may scoff at the Circle of Forgiveness, but she’s willing to use the fad to further her own career. Setting up an on-air Forgiveness Circle among Fiona, herself, and Dorothy (or maybe her own mother) seems like a great idea, but making amends with the past may prove costly. With quirky characters, Spielman (The Life List, 2013) spins an effervescent tale in which betrayals fizzle out into human weaknesses and grudges dissolve into mercy.

Bright prose, a plucky heroine, and more than a few plot twists make for a delightful read.

THE MASK

Stevens, Taylor Crown (352 pp.) $24.00 | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-385-34896-6 978-0-385-34897-3 e-book Stevens sends the gritty, tough, and very deadly Vanessa Michael Munroe to Japan, where she settles a score, piling up bodies in the process.

Munroe’s in love, but that doesn’t mean she’s grown soft. Her specialties—the ability to pass as either a man or a woman; superior fighting skills; an instinctual ability to curate information; almost mythic language abilities—come in handy when her lover, Miles Bradford, is jailed on a bogus charge of murder. Not one to simply hire a lawyer and walk away in a country where the accused have few rights, Munroe works her way deep into the Japanese company that hired Bradford as a security consultant to uncover the motive and mastermind of the setup. Bradford’s arrest sets the stage for Munroe to unleash her masculine side and return to the company on the pretense of finishing the job, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s picked up fluent Japanese during her short time there. Stevens (The Catch, 2014, etc.) puts her own unorthodox upbringing as part of an international cult to good use as she once again explores a side of society that few see. Some previous Munroe novels have played out against the backdrop of less affluent countries in both Africa and South America, where the protagonist’s no-holds-barred style of fighting sometimes goes unnoticed; by setting this story in a cutting-edge company in a highly developed country, Stevens presents new challenges for her lethal yet deeply troubled and larger-than-life heroine.

Although slow to evolve, the action eventually revs up and the storyline grows more interesting as Munroe closes in on the real killer. Though the author eventually addresses this issue, it still takes a healthy suspension of disbelief to buy into the idea that

a corporation worried about industrial espionage would allow another of Bradford’s associates to take his place after his arrest.

Although Stevens takes longer to develop the action than usual, any Munroe is better than none at all.

THE BOOK OF SPECULATION

Swyler, Erika St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-250-05480-7 978-1-4668-5779-7 e-book When a young librarian comes into possession of the diary of a traveling circus from more than 200 years ago, he decides the book may hold clues to a family mystery he needs to solve to save

his sister’s life.

Narrator Simon and his younger sister, Enola, grew up in an 18th-century house on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound.

Taking after her mother, a former circus performer who drowned herself when Simon was 7, Enola travels with a carnival as a tarot card reader. Simon is still living in their dangerously dilapidated family home when, out of the blue on one June day, he receives a book from an antiquarian bookseller, who had noticed Simon’s grandmother’s name inside. Soon Simon discovers a frightening pattern among his female ancestors, all unnaturally good swimmers, all drowning as young women on July 24. If this “coincidence” sounds a bit far-fetched, it sets the bar for the novel’s credibility.

Swyler intercuts Simon’s present drama—intensifying research into the diary’s history, loss of his job at the local library, incipient but already rocky love affair with fellow librarian Alice, return home of Enola, irretrievable collapse of the family manse—with the romantic tragedy of Amos, a traveling circus performer, and Evangeline, an aquatic performer with a guilty secret. Born in the 1780s and abandoned by his parents, Amos is mute when he joins a traveling troupe to perform a disappearing act as a “Wild Boy.” The fortuneteller takes him under her wing, teaching him to read the future. But despite her warnings, he falls for the dangerously mysterious Evangeline. She has his baby girl, and the havoc that follows leads straight to the curse that Simon, a whiny loser, is frantic to solve before someone else dies. A bit fey, even as romantic whimsy.

For die-hard mermaid-fiction lovers only.

ANA OF CALIFORNIA

Teran, Andi Penguin (368 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-14-312649-2 Fifteen-year-old Ana Cortez has spent her life shuttling into, but mostly out of, foster homes. Now she has one last chance to find a home—working on a California farm.

Spunky Ana has seen everything from gang shootings to child abuse, but she doesn’t know the difference between Chinese eggplant and turnips. Farm owner Emmett Garber is skeptical about her ability to do well on the farm, but his sister, Abbie, hopes that with enough food and affection Ana will come into her own. But Ana’s hot temper, her fashionista best friend, and an enigmatic boy who keeps turning up at all the wrong times keep landing her in trouble.

In her debut novel, Teran presents a modern riff on the beloved classic Anne of Green Gables. Fans will recognize their favorite moments embedded in a darker take. Teran populates her novel with modern bugbears—drugs, gang violence, and hipsters. Newcomers will find a smart-mouthed heroine, a small town populated by a cast of lovable characters, and zippy dialogue that keeps the plot trotting along.

Anne of Green Gables fans will rejoice; newcomers will find a satisfying tale; and Ana’s high jinks will leave both types of readers smiling and asking for more.

POST-EXOTICISM IN TEN LESSONS, LESSON ELEVEN

Volodine, Antoine Trans. by J.T. Mahany Open Letter (100 pp.) $12.95 paper | May 12, 2015 978-1-940953-11-3

French author Volodine aims at the head rather than the heart in this postmodern novel featuring one of his main alter egos, Lutz Bassmann, supposedly the author of his most renowned book, Minor Angels.

From the title alone we know we’re not in a Jamesian tradition of realistic fiction. Volodine is far more interested in crafting an aesthetic than a novel with plot and character conflict.

The opening conceit here is that sometime in the future, the incarcerated Bassmann is facing death for unknown reasons (though primarily because he’s seen as a revolutionary), yet he remains to the end a spokesman for the “post-exotic principle according to which a portion of shadow always subsists in the moment of explanation or confession, modifying the confession to the point of rendering it unusable to the enemy.” This 11th “lesson” of post-exoticism—the main narrative thread—is interrupted by 10 other lessons made up of lists and aesthetic manifestos of various pseudo-authors/alter egos such as Maria Clementi, Elli Kronauer, and Bassmann. These names are all masks for Volodine himself, whose authorial voice remains enigmatic in the extreme. The manifestos primarily define and examine a world of post-exotic forms, the most important of which are romånces, Shaggås, and interjoists. A random sampling of Volodine’s (and Bassmann’s) preoccupations would include the following: “A Shaggå always breaks down into two distinct textual masses: one part, a series of seven sequences rigorously identical in length and tone; the other, a commentary, in which the style and dimensions are free.” To be sure we get the point, the tenth (and final) “lesson” of the novel consists of a list of 343 works identified by title, author, form, and date, a whimsical and tortuous exhibition of post-exoticism itself. |

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Twisted, depressed characters are up to no good in a tony East Coast beach town. the invaders

Elaborate fiction that has a certain perverse fascination—though one wonders subversively whether it needs doing at all.

THE INVADERS

Waclawiak, Karolina Regan Arts (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-941393-29-1 Twisted, depressed characters are up to no good in a tony East Coast beach town.

“Each time they put up big white signs welcoming people to LITTLE NECK COVE, A CONNECTICUT BEACH ENCLAVE, they were set on fire or spray-painted. The new homes that were being built on Spruce were vandalized. Everyone thought it was townies....

But it wasn’t them. It was us: me, Joe, Steven, Chucky, and Rob. That’s what was so funny. It was us all along—their own children doing it to them.” This is Teddy speaking, one of two unlikable narrators of this creepy story of suburban dysfunction and violence. Just kicked out of Dartmouth, Teddy has rolled home to live with his father, Jeffrey, and stepmother, Cheryl, a much younger retail clerk Jeffrey married after ditching Teddy’s mother—who fell drunkenly to her death off a pier a few months later. In any case, folks are not welcoming anyone to Little Neck Cove anymore. As the story opens, the twodimensional country-club ladies who populate the “enclave” are throwing fits about the local men who come to fish from the rocks each morning. Once aggressive measures are taken to keep out these potential intruders, who are in fact totally harmless, Little Neck’s denizens are hemmed in by a massive, gleaming white fence. Behind it, things go south as the bored, drunk, pill-popping head cases of the community torment, maim, and sexually harass each other. Subtly edged out and ostracized by the other women, abandoned by her husband, haunted by her past, Cheryl becomes increasingly alienated and unmoored and rushes, in her muffled and deadpan way, toward the story’s apocalyptic denouement.

This would-be dark comedy of manners will be too dark for some.

TINY LITTLE THING

Williams, Beatriz Putnam (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-399-17130-7

During her husband’s 1966 congressional run, Christina “Tiny” Hardcastle realizes her picture-perfect life has more than a few cracks and that maybe the time has come to be true to herself rather than to the glossy facade she has created.

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“The first photograph arrives in the mail on the same day that my husband appears on television at the Medal of Honor ceremony.” So begins Williams’ second novel about the Schuyler sisters, after The Secret Life of Violet Grant (2014). Tiny’s husband is Frank Hardcastle, running for Congress in Massachusetts, and he’s attending the ceremony for his cousin, Maj. Caspian Harrison, an unexpected boon and photo-op for his campaign, while the rest of the family holes up in their Cape Cod compound. The Hardcastle family is old money, and Frank has been bred his whole life for this campaign. Tiny, the posh, polished, and always proper eldest Schuyler sister, is also from money and is the perfect wife for the perfect candidate. Except that two years into her marriage, she’s questioning everything.

Again. There seem to be a number of “tiny little things” the title refers to other than Tiny herself, including: the soul-changing events a few weeks before her wedding, when she first met Caspian; the miscarriage she suffers just days before the ceremony; Frank’s secretive behavior that leads Tiny to believe he’s having an affair; the scandalous pictures someone is blackmailing Tiny with; and the sudden and unexpected arrival of Tiny’s vibrant, alluring, and nearly-never-proper sister Pepper. Elegantly written, mainly from Caspian’s third-person 1964 perspective and Tiny’s first-person 1966 perspective, the book is strewn with unexpected heroes and villains and makes an exclusive, Kennedy-esque world accessible. The underlying message is that money can’t buy happiness, especially when you’re living in a skin that no longer fits.

A fascinating look at wealth, love, ambition, secrets, and what family members will and won’t do to protect each other.

THE ULTIMATUM

Wolf, Dick Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-06-228683-3 978-0-06-228687-1 e-book In Wolf ’s third Jeremy Fisk thriller, a sniper using a specially equipped drone is randomly killing people in New York.

He promises to continue doing so until a leaker of police intelligence materials, who has been taken into custody, is released.

The classified documents, as reported in the New York Times, reveal that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division is collecting information on law-abiding Muslims throughout the city. The information, leaked by one Merritt Verlyn, includes Fisk’s unlisted address, which his enemies in the Mexican Cartel are happy to have. They waste no time sending a hit squad to the detective’s door. On the run after escaping that threat, Fisk, whose Social Security number and date of birth were also exposed, discovers that his bank account has been emptied and his credit cards have been suspended. With a mysterious party calling himself Yodeler threatening to kill one person every day until Verlyn is released, Fisk teams up with Chay Maryland, the Times reporter who’s covering the story, to track him

down. Maryland is targeted herself by a young undercover Chinese intelligence officer who needs the leaked documents in her possession to penetrate the firewall of the newspaper and then that of the Department of Commerce. Wolf, creator of TV’s Law & Order franchise, is in complete control. The basic outlines of the story may be familiar, but his smartly drawn characters and situations lift the novel, as do the crisp chase scenes and shootouts. And the sniper and drone elements couldn’t be timelier.

Another solid thriller by Wolf, who is proving as dependable a novelist as a TV producer.

m ys t e r y SCAM CHOWDER

Corrigan, Maya Kensington (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-61773-140-2 A good cook makes an even better detective when her grandfather is suspected of murder.

Val Deniston left behind New York City and a cheating fiance for the quiet life in Bayport, a touristy Chesapeake Bay town. She works at the cafe in a local health club and lives with her crusty grandfather in a large Victorian house.

Grandad is known as the Codger Cook for his cooking column in a local paper, but his reputation is a sham, since Val does all the work while he takes the credit. A dinner at his home is a comedy of errors. Val runs and hides whenever one of the guests comes into the kitchen, where she’s preparing the meal. But it’s not so funny when one of the guests complains of stomach pain and later dies, an apparent victim of the creamy chowder. Although the guest of honor was Grandad’s girlfriend, Lillian, Val finds out there was an ulterior motive for the dinner. The dead man was suspected of running a financial scam targeting seniors, and Grandad and Lillian had hoped to unmask him. Val, no stranger to murder (By Cook or

by Crook, 2014), is determined to prove Grandad innocent. When a reporter who was at the dinner is shot dead, Val digs deeper and discovers some nasty secrets, all the while dealing with harassment from her friend Gunnar Swensen’s jealous former girlfriend. Val’s problems are reminiscent of Parnell Hall’s mysteries about the fraudulent Puzzle Lady, and the pleasant sleuth’s second case is similar to many another cooking cozy as well.

The appended five-ingredient recipes vie for pride of place with the simple mystery.

THE PRECIPICE

Doiron, Paul Minotaur (320 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-250-06369-4 978-1-4668-6868-7 e-book The disappearance of two Georgia women hiking the Appalachian Trail gives Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch a welcome reprieve from the persistent personal problems that keep intruding into his cases, or serving as their foundations (The Bone Orchard, 2014, etc.).

Well-prepared as they seemed for the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, Samantha “Baby Ruth” Boggs and Missy “Naomi Walks” Montgomery have been swallowed up by a stretch without food, drinking water, or reliable cellphone reception. Pulled away from a romantic weekend with wildlife biologist Stacey Stevens by an urgent call for volunteer searchers, Bowditch finds his physical limits tested when he’s teamed up with beekeeper Bob “Nonstop” Nissen, an ex-con who no longer needs meth to keep pushing himself day and night, and his emotional loyalties tugged every which way when Stacey herself joins him in the search. Starting with the last people to see Baby Ruth and Naomi Walks alive, the Warden Service, the state police, and the FBI combine in rare harmony, methodically narrowing down the area they must search. All this effort comes too late for Baby Ruth and Naomi Walks, who at length are found dead on Chairback Mountain, not far from where they were last seen. Along the way, Bowditch tangles with a pair of newlyweds honeymooning along the A.T.; the bouffant-haired Rev. Mott, the hikers’ camera-ready minister; the hydra-headed Dow family, who never met a neighbor they couldn’t bully into submission; and a spectral general-store clerk who tells him, “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” They’re all worth your time, but most of them are only red herrings whose underdeveloped stories go nowhere, and the monster responsible for the deaths, and eventually for Stacey’s disappearance, seems to have been cast almost as an afterthought.

As scenically evocative as Bowditch’s first four cases but not nearly as dense, conclusive, or interesting.

MARRY, KISS, KILL

Flett-Giordano, Anne Prospect Books (280 pp.) $24.95 | $15.00 paper | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-938849-53-4 978-1-938849-49-7 paper Smart cop Nola needs a margarita to get through a series of seemingly unrelated murders.

The fact that she’s the deputy chief detective for Santa Barbara’s finest isn’t going to stop the sass of Nola MacIntire’s mouth as she deals with suspects in her superficial town. Luckily, her partner, Detective |

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Lt. Tony Angellotti, is one of the few men able to match her fast talk, even though their efforts spent trying to take their relationship to the next level have completely fizzled. Their His Girl Friday, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it banter serves as the background for their attempt to solve the murder of a music man, a sweet street busker found with two slugs in him without apparent reason. Before they can find anyone who might offer information—apart from the garden-variety meth fiend perseverating on the same meaningless version of events—Nola and Tony have another case on their hands: the death of a formerly wealthy businessman wiped out in the market crash. His distraught trophy wife has Tony wrapped around her finger even if, as Nola’s intuition insists, she’s set up her husband’s murder as a suicide. Clearly, whoever’s behind the fatalities isn’t afraid to get dirty to make sure his or her reputation stays clean.

But how are the two cases connected? Pulling that string tangles Nola and Tony in a ball of yarn they may not be able to untangle.

The dialogue is the high point of TV writer FlettGiordano’s debut, though the fast-paced banter does make characters blend together and make you wonder if everyone in Santa Barbara is the same brand of smartass.

DEVIL’S HARBOR

Gilly, Alex Forge (304 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-7653-7732-6 978-1-4668-5513-7 e-book A routine patrol turns into a nightmare for alcoholic Marine Interdiction Agent Nick Finn.

Patrolling the California coast, Finn and his partner and brother-in-law, Diego Jimenez, spot a boat with no running lights. When they approach the suspected smuggler, the boat takes off. Once it’s stopped, the man on board attacks them with an automatic weapon, and Finn shoots him dead, plunging himself deep into hot water. His boss gives him no support when the government is sued by the victim’s family, which claims he was an unarmed fisherman. Although Diego backs up his story, there’s no other supporting evidence because the gun went overboard and trace evidence was washed away. To make things worse, a search reveals no indication of smuggling. Finn’s wife, Mona, a lawyer specializing in defending underdogs, is furious that Finn has been targeted. Their marriage is already cracking under the strain when Finn’s beaten and robbed of his gun, which is apparently the weapon that was used to kill Diego, neatly framing Finn. Even as he seeks refuge in the bottom of a bottle, Finn has a feeling that the case is tied to the unusual number of floaters recently recovered.

Identifying one of them leads him to the Pacific Belle, a fishing craft partly owned by attractive Linda Blake, who has a daughter with medical problems. Once Finn learns that Linda had reported no catches, he suspects her of smuggling. But his sympathy for a mother desperate to save her child launches him into a dangerous orbit that could easily end his life before he can prove his innocence.

Gilly’s debut is a real page-turner filled with thrills, chills, and unexpected surprises.

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NEW YORKED

Hart, Robert Polis Books (304 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-940610-40-5 An unlicensed private eye prowls New York in search of the man who murdered his nasty girlfriend.

Ash McKenna, born of a Coney Island firefighter but long established on the Lower East Side, considers himself “a blunt instrument”; his childhood friend Bombay calls him “the most brilliant stupid person I know.” His favored drink is Jameson’s, but he’s trying to stay sober until he finds the lowlife who murdered Chell, a Greenpoint exotic dancer and aspiring actress, hours after she left him a message begging for protection from some unnamed guy while Ash was out getting hammered. Ash’s inquiries, if you can call them that, take him from district leader Ginny Tonic, the transgender queen of the Lower East Side, to Good Kelly and Bad Kelly, the former moving to Austin, the latter sleeping with a cop, with stops along the way at every neighborhood dive that might interest or shock Ash’s cousin Margo, who’s visiting from Pennsylvania to check out NYU. He looks for Fanny Fatale, a dancer Chell beat out for a gig, and makes time with Joel Cairo, Iva Archer, and Terry Lennox, who’ve borrowed their names from the work of genre masters to whom Hart poses no threat. But there’s not much of a mystery, not even much of a story, just an after-dark tour of Gotham’s seediest, kinkiest haunts while you’re waiting for the inevitable modishly ironic anticlimax.

Though Ash’s arch world-weariness and the freak-show fleshpots are bound to attract tourists, you can’t help feeling that Hart’s making it all up as he goes along.

DRY BONES

Johnson, Craig Viking (320 pp.) $27.95 | May 12, 2015 978-0-525-42693-6 Something old and something new spell big problems for Sheriff Walt Longmire.

Walt and Undersheriff Victoria Moretti have been called out to take a look at a body found in a pond. The corpse is that of elderly Cheyenne Danny Lone Elk, part owner of a large cattle ranch. It will take an autopsy to determine the cause of death because Danny’s remains have furnished several meals for the turtles he considered sacred. Nearby, Walt and Vic run into a problem on the site of the discovery of a dinosaur fossil dubbed Jen, after finder Jennifer Watt, who along with paleontologist Dave Baumann objects to the use of a backhoe to dig up the valuable beast. The Lone Elk family claims Jen’s remains, but Baumann insists that he had his own deal with Danny. Into this heated dispute steps the acting deputy U.S. attorney, who plans

More than 100 years after the witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, is a thriving port second only to Boston. death in salem

to score political points by seizing Jen for the state of Wyoming.

While the interested parties wrangle over the bones, Walt welcomes his daughter, Cady, and granddaughter, Lola. They’re barely settled at Walt’s home when Cady gets a call that her husband, Michael, a Philadelphia police officer and Vic’s brother, has been shot and killed in a way that hints it might be payback for one of Walt and Vic’s past cases. She and Vic return east while Walt stays behind to work, without Vic’s help, on what’s now recognized as the fatal mercury poisoning of Danny Lone Elk. With the help of his friend Henry, better known as the Cheyenne Nation, Walt escapes from several dangerous situations in the rough country of Lone Elk Ranch while trying to determine who wanted the old man dead and whether his death is tied to Jen, whose estimated value provides 8 million motives for murder.

Johnson’s crusty sheriff (Any Other Name, 2014, etc.) remains tough, smart, honest, and capable of entertaining fans with another difficult, dangerous case.

DEATH IN SALEM

Kuhns, Eleanor Minotaur (336 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-250-06702-9 978-1-4668-7494-7 e-book An 18th-century weaver/detective steps into a wasp’s nest of family intrigue when he takes on his fourth case.

More than 100 years after the witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, is a thriving port second only to Boston, and its leading citizens have grown rich in trade with the Orient. Will Rees has come to buy imported fabric, and he lingers to watch the funeral procession of Anstiss, the invalid wife of merchant Jacob Boothe. Rees witnesses an ugly scene: Boothe’s estranged inlaws, a prosperous whaling family, blame him and his younger daughter, Peggy, for Anstiss’ death. Rees is on his way home to the District of Maine when his friend Stephen “Twig”

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Eaton fetches him back to Salem. Jacob Boothe has been stabbed to death, and Twig’s sweetheart, the Boothes’ slave Xenobia, stands accused. After Rees helps exonerate Xenobia, William Boothe, Jacob’s older son, retains the weaver to solve the murder. The Boothes are not a happy family.

Peggy is angry with her father for displacing her as unofficial bookkeeper and turning the accounts over to William.

The other son, Matthew, is a wastrel who seems to care less about his father than about the dramatic society he belongs to, along with one of his brothers-in-law. The other Boothe daughter’s main concern is that scandal doesn’t disrupt her upcoming wedding. But scandal there is when the cousin of Jacob’s rumored mistress is strangled. Rees thinks a woman’s sympathetic touch might help and sends for his wife, Lydia.

Together they try to make sense of hidden merchandise in Salem’s vast tunnel system, a piratical French sea captain, the mystery of a ship that once belonged to the Boothe family, and a strange tattoo that could solve the Salem murders.

Rees and Lydia would have made better progress if they hadn’t stopped to eat every few pages and Kuhns (Cradle to Grave, 2014, etc.) hadn’t described every bite, along with numerous other historical details. Still, the Reeses make an amiable sleuthing team in a post–Revolutionary War setting.

THE MISSING AND THE DEAD

MacBride, Stuart HarperCollins (592 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-00-749460-6

Even in exile, a veteran detective can’t escape the lure of a major crime.

Fresh from catching a brutal murderer who placed his victims in burning tires (Close to the Bone, 2013), maverick DS Logan McRae is initially seen tackling a female accomplice to murder, rescuing a mortally wounded victim, and violently hauling in the presumed perp, serial killer Graham Stirling. Identifying Stirling’s victim as cross-dresser Stephen Bisset puts Logan in an awkward spot with Bisset’s angry son, David, who insists that his dad isn’t a “pervert.” As usual, Logan bends the rules as freely as Dirty Harry, but this time it’s not on his home turf of Aberdeen. He’s been sent to rural Aberdeenshire on the North Sea and put in charge of the small local force. Not surprisingly, paperwork is not the restless Logan’s strong suit. Luckily, he’s able to harness his excess energy renovating the house he’s been given to live in, a stone’s throw from the police station. It’s the perfect place for him to tend to his wheelchair-bound wife, Samantha. But big-city crime seems to find him. While searching for a reported pedophile, Logan gets the sad news that a little girl’s body has been found at a local swimming pool. Logan’s heavy hand with Stirling allows the perp to go free, and Stirling is not the kind to forget a grievance.

McRae’s ninth appearance packs a potent punch, blending gritty police procedural with surprising grace notes of the hero’s humanity.

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CRAZY MOUNTAIN KISS

McCafferty, Keith Viking (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-670-01470-5

A missing teen requires the special talents of Sean Stranahan—fishing guide, watercolorist, former boxer, and occasional private eye (Dead Man’s Fancy, 2014, etc.).

Failed author Max Gallagher, who’s renting a cabin in Montana’s Crazy Mountains in the hope of writing a comeback novel, has trouble trying to get the chimney to draw. First a Santa Claus hat falls out, then he has to remove a crow’s nest, and finally he finds an eyeless female corpse stuck inside. When Sheriff Martha Ettinger brings her team to investigate, she’s not pleased to hear that Max is an acquaintance of her estranged lover Sean Stranahan. But, professional down to her booted feet, Martha’s determined to focus only on the dead girl. The medical examiner doesn’t see any signs of foul play, but he does note that the victim was five months pregnant—and five months is how long Cinderella, the beautiful teenage daughter of former rodeo star Loretta Huntington, has been missing. Loretta’s husband is wrapped up in his work as a consultant for a TV Western, and the grieving mother, who’s already lost two children, is barely holding herself together.

When she can no longer deny that the girl in the chimney is her daughter, she hires Stranahan to find out what happened. At first he’s uncertain whether Cinderella planned to use the cabin as the Mile and a Half High Club, the scene of prearranged and anonymous assignations, or whether she’d run away from trouble at home and used the cabin as refuge. The more Stranahan tries to make sense of clues as disparate as a local Bigfoot, an old powder horn, and a clown tattoo, the more intricate the puzzle grows, until he discovers an astonishing work of art that he hopes will bring peace to the tortured Loretta.

Stranahan’s fourth case blends humor with heartbreak, all flavors of eccentricity with a struggle for normalcy, and a natural backdrop that can make even the most powerful humans and their deeds look small.

THE NIGHTMARE PLACE

Mosby, Steve Pegasus Crime (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-788-0

A detective with bad dreams and a young volunteer trying to overcome her fears pit themselves against a serial rapist.

It’s always the same nightmare—a waste space, a surreal sky, a frozen figure in gray—that awakens DI Zoe Dalton.

She recognizes the place as the grim housing project where she grew up, but the figure is inscrutable. All she knows is that the nightmare fills her with the sense that something awful is about

A Wisconsin sheriff lets his conscience be his guide. death at gills rock

to happen. Something awful has already happened in Zoe’s city: a predator has beaten and raped four women. His fifth victim fits the same pattern: she’s young, attractive, and vulnerable. Zoe feels violated herself after she’s burglarized, but as a former member of a girl gang, she’s so tough that she finds it hard to work with her cautious partner, DI Chris Sands. She even apprehends one of the burglars, someone she’s known since her teen years who’s an unwitting link to her bad dreams. But she, Sands, and the rest of her department are more focused on the “creeper,” especially after he rapes, beats, and kills his next victim. When Jane Webster, a meek young helpline volunteer, defies her supervisor’s orders and breaks confidentiality to tell the police about a caller who seemed to admit to the crimes, Zoe dismisses him and his claims about a monster at large as one more crank. But she discovers how wrong she is when she’s plunged into a waking nightmare in a fast-paced thriller that plays as many mind games with the reader as with the gutsy protagonist.

Despite some awkward plot contrivances and secondary characters who are little better than outlines, Mosby (The Murder Code, 2013, etc.) has the talent to build both physical and psychological suspense. And he proves once again that he really knows how to work the strings.

VIXEN

Pronzini, Bill Forge (224 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-7653-3568-5 978-1-4668-2523-9 e-book The Nameless Detective’s so deeply impressed by the femme fatale who hired his agency and did them dirt that he devotes a prologue comparing her to such legendary vixens as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Cora Papadakis, Matty Walker, and Catherine Tramell. Not so fast, Nameless.

Looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, Cory Beckett tells Nameless that it’s just as bail bondsman Abe Melikian has said: her brother Kenneth, accused of stealing a $20,000 diamond necklace from Margaret Vorhees, the alcoholic wife of San Francisco Maintenance Workers Union chief Andrew Vorhees, has taken a powder. Armed with the information Cory has helpfully supplied, agency operative Jake Runyon soon tracks him down. But Kenneth, who’s obviously terrified of going back to the Bay Area and facing his sister, tells quite a different story. He didn’t steal the necklace that was found in his car, he insists; it was planted by Frank Chaleen, a mysterious partner in Cory’s schemes, in order to frame him. Naturally, Cory denies the whole story, and then so does Kenneth, who says he just made it up. The narrative’s shifts in viewpoint from Nameless to Jake to Nameless’ partner, Tamara Corbin, to Chaleen himself prevent the tale from developing much momentum, and by the halfway mark, the only casualty is Cybil Wade, Nameless’ mother-in-law, dead of a stroke at 88. At length the bodies duly pile up, but the evil over which Nameless waxes so

rhapsodic never seems justified by Cory’s nefarious behavior.

Judging from Nameless’ superlatives, in fact, you’d think he’d completely forgotten the women who drive the plot of Camouflage (2011), only four titles back in this venerable series. What a shame that Cory is just as forgettable.

DEATH AT GILLS ROCK

Skalka, Patricia Univ. of Wisconsin (248 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-299-30450-8

A Wisconsin sheriff lets his conscience be his guide.

Dave Cubiak is haunted by his past.

Still not over the death of his wife and daughter, the former Chicago cop has retreated to Door County, become sheriff, and started to make a new life for himself when a case that will test all his resources shocks the area. Three World War II heroes about to be honored by the Coast Guard are all found dead, apparent victims of carbon monoxide poisoning while playing cards at a cabin on the Huntsman property. Terrence “Big Guy” Huntsman, Eric Swenson, and Jasper Wilkins, local boys from the small town of Gills Rock, all enlisted together. A fourth friend, Christian Nils, lost his life in their heroic attempt to rescue 170 men stranded in the frigid waters of the Aleutian Islands. The three surviving friends have all become wealthy businessmen whose deaths would be written off as an accident if not for Cubiak’s feeling that something’s not right. When a neighbor of Big Guy’s shoots her husband dead and confesses to the crime, she avers that they all deserved what they got and then clams up. But she sets Cubiak on the road to some nasty discoveries and a growing list of suspects. Realizing that the heroes were anything but heroic and the suspects more deserving of sympathy than he assumed, Cubiak has some big decisions to make before he puts paid to the case.

The second installment of this first-rate series (Death Stalks Door County, 2014) provides plenty of challenges for both the detective and the reader.

BRUTALITY

Thoft, Ingrid Putnam (464 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-399-17118-5 A whirlwind of a Boston-based detective with a fluid sense of ethics finds answers for a grieving mother.

When a home invasion leaves Liz Barone in a coma, her mother, Bobbi, hires Josefina Ludlow to find out why anyone would hurt her daughter—a hard worker, a loyal wife, and a dedicated mother. Fina suspects it’s related to the lawsuit |

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Liz was bringing against her employer and alma mater, New England University, for the long-term effects of head trauma she suffered as a soccer-playing student. And Fina wants to know why, in spite of the lawsuit, Liz had still been getting fundraising letters from Pamela Fordyce, an NEU development officer, and why Pamela is so uncomfortable in an interview.

Fina also catches Liz’s former coach, Kevin Lafferty, who’s a volunteer booster-club president for NEU, in a couple of lies. Fina’s not above telling whoppers herself, even though she rationalizes she’s fibbing for a good cause, especially after Liz dies and the case turns from assault to murder. Fina’s under orders to steer the NEU lawsuit into the Ludlow family shop, one of the leading personal-injury law firms in the country, but she hopes it will bring relief to Liz’s survivors. Although she’s a law school dropout herself, Fina uses her energy and determination to follow every lead (including some that lead to a couple of unrelated cases), with numerous pit stops for fast food and an occasional tumble with her guy pals. She soon has all too many clues, and the definite idea—thanks to a threatening note and a bomb that sets her borrowed car on fire—that someone wants her to back off. But whoever hopes to discourage her doesn’t know how relentless Fina can be and how hard she’ll work to find the killer.

Fina’s third adventure follows the pattern of the first two: fashion, fat, and sugar. But Thoft (Identity, 2014, etc.) is an entertaining storyteller, and her quirky protagonist’s the equal of any male gumshoe.

BLACK VALLEY

Williams, Charlotte Bourbon Street/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-06-237126-3 978-0-06-237127-0 e-book The psychotherapist heroine of The House on the Cliff (2014) entangles herself in the dangerous world of fine arts.

Elinor Powell has been claustrophobic and unable to paint ever since she came into her art studio in Cardiff and found her mother’s body. The police think Mrs. Powell was murdered when she surprised someone stealing a valuable family painting. In a session with therapist Jessica Mayhew, Elinor bemoans the scrutiny that she, her twin sister, and her sister’s husband, Blake, are getting from the police, although Elinor is suspicious and fearful of Blake too.

Jess is sympathetic toward the needy, childlike Elinor—and intrigued by the art scene her new client introduces her to. At a party in honor of the new (but absent) art sensation Hefin Morris, Jess meets Jacob Dresler, a London art critic who gives a lecture about the reclusive Morris. Jacob shows such interest in Jess that he helps her forget she’s a middle-aged mother of two and that her estranged husband is involved with a younger woman. After a passionate night with Jacob, Jess agrees to go away for a weekend with him at an inn in Cwm Du, the Black Valley, which happens to be in the same area where Elinor has 40

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camped by herself. But the romantic getaway at the inn built around a ruined 12th-century castle becomes a nightmare when Elinor and Blake converge on the inn and Blake is found dead at the foot of the tower. Jess had misgivings about him, but now she can’t help wondering about the other people she’s recently become close to. And her theory about the mysterious Morris may be difficult to prove—especially if the next death is hers.

For someone trained in reading subtle cues, Jess seems oblivious to the warning signs all around her. But her sleuthing does get her out of her office and into a complex puzzle that keeps you reading in spite of the plot contrivances.

BLACKBIRD

Wright, Tom Europa Editions (288 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-60945-270-4 In Wright’s second novel (What Dies in Summer, 2012), Texarkana Police Detective Lt. Jim Bonham investigates the death of psychologist Deborah Gold, found mutilated and crucified.

Gold was an easy person to want dead, with an ugly reputation for hosting a kinky BDSM club, for “lying and cheating,” for pirating patients from other psychologists, and for tailoring her court testimony for the highest bidder. Suspects are multiple: fellow psychologists, disgruntled sex-club partners, even anti-Semitic survivalists. “I can’t think of anyone who didn’t dislike her,” Bonham is told. The case grows more complicated when another sex-club participant is killed. It doesn’t help that Bonham’s being harassed by the city manager, who wants him fired for crossing a line to keep a fellow detective from being charged with murder. Bonham is also frustrated and angry because his wife’s moved out. She wants him to give up dangerous, demanding police work and take over the family ranch. In spite of relying on the hard-worn trope of the emotionally wounded, stoic, closed-off protagonist, Wright spins a solid what’s gonna happen next? narrative from Bonham’s point of view, with flashbacks to the detective’s teen years and his then-girlfriend, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Wright’s gift for artful language lets those scenes glow with appreciation for unbreakable family bonds and Texas ranch life, but the author’s forte is characterization: Bonham’s chief, OZ, “silent, fearless, incorruptible”; Detective Jacquanda Mouncey, jive-talking but unflappable; and incarcerated Keets, Chaplain of the Army of the Sword of the Lord, “intelligent but not smart.” Bonham seeks help from his cousin, LA, herself a psychologist, and things crack open when both LA and Bonham’s wife and daughters are attacked.

Noir crime with a distinct Southern accent.

science fiction and fantasy

assassination and in search of an explanation for the sudden, frightening intensification of her powers as a healer. Her traveling companion is the handsome, devoted Alonzo Garret, a former assassin and spy-turned–diligent protector who provides Octavia with a bluntly appealing romantic interest and bantering partner. Their search for safety and knowledge takes them from the familiar but conflict-ravaged country of Caskentia to the southern nation of Tamarania, where education and invention are prized and magic is looked upon with distaste. Unsurprisingly, danger and intrigue soon follow, and Octavia and Alonzo run an engaging, if predictable, series of adventures that involve murder attempts, kidnapping, battling mecha matches, and a host of the endearing, human-created chimeras known as “gremlins.” Octavia’s powers continue to change, growing ever stronger, stranger, and more unsettling. Her reaction to the transformation of her magic, and her fear of what it means for herself and her beliefs, gives the pleasant entertainment of the novel a welcome jolt of human disquiet. The story often rides on the appeal of well-trodden territory—the characters and magic system feel like variations on familiar fantasy types; the trappings and accessories of steampunk serve as unexamined decoration—but its ingenuous fondness for those comfortable elements and the occasional sacrifice it requires from its characters gives it a charming energy that keeps the pages turning.

A satisfying follow-up that sticks to the comforts of familiar fantasy elements but still offers an entertaining, swiftly moving adventure in the company of Cato’s appealing characters.

TERRA’S WORLD

Benn, Mitch Gollancz (280 pp.) $19.95 paper | Jun. 1, 2015 978-0-575-13213-9 The sequel to Terra (2013) confronts apocalypse with a breezy, British air.

The apocalypse in question threatens a planet called Fnrr, the adopted home of Terra, a teenage human girl. Terra’s family and planetary history are a bit murky, but her motivation is clear: save her world from certain destruction. While a mad dictator is terrorizing her adopted city, a mysterious planet-sized weapon seems to be on a collision course with the whole planet. However, Terra has a knack for stopping wars and saving worlds—we’re told she’s done it before. The novel addresses the core SF theme of cultural miscommunication, and there are some endearing interactions among characters, who display the dry wit one expects from a properly British apocalypse-sufferer. But the point of view can switch on a sentence-by-sentence basis, leaving the reader confused. The use of italics rather than quotation marks for alien dialogue adds to the difficulty. Unfortunately, the story’s simple plot is not quite engaging enough to overcome the sometimesweak prose. Obstacles fall like dominoes as Terra and her friends advance on their quest. Useful tools appear exactly when needed.

Hiding places are easily found. Henchmen are reliably dim, and evil practically invites its own destruction. The result is less satisfying than the initial promise.

This novel is best for fans of Benn’s first book. Though comprehensible on its own, it offers little new ground as a stand-alone science-fiction story.

THE GOSPEL OF LOKI

Harris, Joanne M. Saga/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $25.99 | May 5, 2015 978-1-4814-4946-5 If everything you know about Loki begins and ends with the actor Tom Hiddleston, this book is for you.

Harris (Peaches for Father Francis, 2012, etc.) collects the ancient Norse myths about the trickster god—Loki’s origin in Chaos; his sworn oath of brotherhood with Odin; his endless, nasty pranks on the gods of Asgard; his torturous imprisonment; the end of the world, etc.—into a single, quippy novel in contemporary (indeed, anachronistic) speech. All Loki wants, or so he says, is to be liked, but most of the gods are against him from the very first, and so he does his best (his worst?) to live up to their expectations. The way Harris writes him, you can’t help but like him, even as he confesses to the most absurd and/ or horrific deeds; well, you like him, but you wouldn’t really want to be acquainted with him—being his enemy or his friend seems equally dicey. Readers who are surprised that Harris has it in her to be so cynical and snarky are probably the same people who think the charming-veering-toward-sentimental film Chocolat was faithful to the 1999 novel, which was actually considerably darker. One has to admire the author for imposing her own take

THE CLOCKWORK CROWN

Cato, Beth Harper Voyager (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-06-231398-0 978-0-06-231399-7 e-book

In a return to the steampunk-flavored world of her first novel, Cato (The Clockwork Dagger, 2014) sends her likable cast of characters on a more tightly written, higher stakes fantasy adventure.

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on the character: the Marvel films’ portrayal is fairly pervasive, and bestselling fantasist Neil Gaiman has had a crack at it twice (in his Sandman comic-book series and the novel American Gods).

If not exactly fresh, certainly a rich, in-depth addition to the modern mythic canon.

WOLVES

Ings, Simon Gollancz (400 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 1, 2015 978-0-575-11987-1 A new novel that probes the relationship between perception and reality.

First-person narrator Conrad works in Augmented Reality (think Google Glass). He decides to visit Michel, a close childhood friend from whom he has drifted apart. Michel, always obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, has acquired a partner, Hanna, and a boat the pair are refurbishing as an ark against rising sea levels. Conrad soon founds a startup business with genius coder Ralf, whose software enables Conrad, via the glasses, to see what isn’t there—but also not see what is. Michel, meanwhile, has written a bestselling post-apocalyptic fantasy and parlayed it into a movie deal, bringing him once again in proximity to Conrad. It turns out that the movie mogul, Vaux, himself only partially sighted, is thrilled with Conrad’s technology and “imagines dreams woven through the real, and all the dreamers dreaming.” Vaux makes a deal with Conrad’s company. The glasses, meanwhile, have morphed through contact lenses into implants all but independent of hardware, blurring further and further the boundary between that which is perceived and objective reality. The narrative blurs and blends too, especially in the past, where we learn of Conrad’s complicated relationships. His father helped blinded veterans by designing a jacket studded with sensors that restore some level of sight; his mother struggled with mental illness and was, apparently, murdered. Michel’s father, a soldier, was beheaded on camera. Vaux turns out to have been one of the veterans treated by Conrad’s father. But in all this toying with reality’s demarcation, British author Ings (Dead Water, 2011, etc.) succeeds only in producing solipsistic and rather sociopathic characters who never evoke the reader’s sympathy.

A novel that’s easy to admire but almost reptilian in its lack of warmth.

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THE INVASION OF THE TEARLING

Johansen, Erika Harper/HarperCollins (528 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-06-229039-7 There’s a tear in the Tearling, and Tears are falling.

Seriously. As Johansen (The Queen of the Tearling, 2014) opens the latest installment in her sword-and-sorcery series, Tear troops stationed on the borders of the kingdom find themselves battling an invasion by the Mort—you know, the bad guys across the line in the Mortmesne. It’s a good thing Col. Hall is on the job, a fellow fate has put in just the right place at the right time: “Fortune had taken Hall away from Idyllwild,” Johansen intones, “not good fortune, but the backhanded sort that gave with one hand while it stabbed with the other.” Many stabbings, catapult launches, and other gruesome maneuvers later, the Mort are repelled. (It helps that, in a Tolkienian move, the hawks, real hawks, are on the side of the doves, metaphorical ones.) But the Mort’ll be back, and an ugly picture will get even uglier. Meanwhile, the queen, our ever resourceful Kelsea, is getting prettier. At least after a fashion: “She wasn’t beautiful, Kelsea thought, not by any stretch. But she was no longer plain either. She looked like a woman someone might actually remember.” Whether Meryl Streep or Merlin, Kelsea rises to the occasion, despite all the obstacles that the Morts—and Johansen, for that matter—throw in her path. But is she the True Queen? Ah, that’s for events to decide, nicely unfolded in this long—but not too long—yarn. Johansen is a skillful maker of fantasy worlds, weaving medieval and modern themes together with the comprehensiveness of a George R.R. Martin, though without his penchant for overly long episodes of violence that would make Sam Peckinpah blush. She does both battle scenes and quiet conversations equally well, though, with all the requisite plotting, regal self-doubt, and good-vs.-evil grappling required of the genre.

A satisfying, well-crafted sequel that will leave readers looking forward to what might happen next to “that fantastic vision inside Tear’s jewel” and those who treasure it.

r om a n c e

THE SPRING BRIDE

Gracie, Anne Berkley Sensation (336 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-425-25927-6

EVER AFTER

Deveraux, Jude Ballantine (368 pp.) $27.00 | $13.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-345-54185-7 978-0-345-54186-4 e-book Deveraux (For All Time, 2014, etc.) saves the best for last in the final installment of the Nantucket Brides trilogy, in which a physical therapist rehabilitates a wounded military veteran in a haunted house.

When Hallie Hartley unexpectedly inherits a home on the island of Nantucket, she knows she’ll have to move quickly to keep it away from her spoiled stepsister, Shelly, who steals Hallie’s identity to try to claim the house for herself. Hallie hastily honors Shelly’s arrangement with veteran Jamie Taggert, who had planned to move into the Nantucket home with the woman he thought was Hallie for round-the-clock physical therapy to escape his meddling family. While Hallie insists that her massage therapy techniques are strictly professional, the innuendos practically write themselves: “It’s been a tough day and I took my anger out on you,” Hallie says to Jamie. “Why don’t you take your clothes off and let’s start over?” Legend has it that a pair of beautiful ghosts named Hyacinth and Juliana still haunt the house with the aim of uniting people with their true loves.

Hallie believes she’s already met hers, and she hopes that her childhood friend, Braden, will take his mother’s advice and propose to her. Braden, however, prefers lanky models, and curvy Hallie isn’t his type. Braden arrives at the house assuming that Jamie will feel the same way, which makes it all the more gratifying when Jamie says he likes Hallie’s curves, proving that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Hallie is still torn between the two men when a bevy of Montgomery-Taggert cousins from previous books invade the house for a wedding celebration, giving her blessings and warnings that muddle her feelings but thankfully don’t muddle the plot. Behind the scenes, the two scheming ghosts intervene with a whimsical touch, inspiring heartfelt revelations as both Hallie and Jamie heal old wounds to find new love.

This sexy, lighthearted romp brings the series to a satisfying close.

A nobleman’s son returns from eight years of spy work on the Continent to discover that he’s about to be disinherited, if he’s not convicted of murder first.

Gracie (The Winter Bride, 2014, etc.) returns with the third book in her Chance Sisters series, featuring Jane Chance, who has spent a lifetime evading lecherous men because of her beautiful face and figure. She and her sisters (one biological, two sisters of the heart) have escaped from poverty thanks to Lady Beatrice Davenham, an eccentric and lonely old lady. Two of Jane’s sisters have recently made brilliant love matches, but Jane is more practical. Her parents were disinherited for running off together.

They both died in poverty, leaving Jane under the protection of her sister Abby when the girls were only 6 and 12 years old. Jane is determined not to let love lead her into such foolish behavior that might possibly subject her future children to a life of hunger and peril like her own childhood. She accepts the proposal of a rich but dull baron in spite of her growing attraction to Zachary Black, a mysterious figure who changes accents more frequently than he changes clothes. Zach, meanwhile, can’t declare himself to Jane until he’s cleared of a long-ago murder charge and routed the cousin who’s trying to take over his inheritance. With both Jane and Zach using assumed names, their eventual unveiling will make them more compatible than they expect.

In spite of a rather convoluted plot and a herky-jerky beginning, the novel settles into a funny and fast-paced rhythm. The main characters are vibrant and complex, and if some of the secondary characters are a bit typecast, the author’s skill as a storyteller makes this well worth reading.

SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER

James, Julie Jove/Penguin (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-425-27376-0

After a scary break-in, divorce attorney Victoria Slade rents a new condo, but that doesn’t stop her panic attacks—and it brings complications in the form of a sexy neighbor.

After years watching marriages come to harsh endings as a successful divorce lawyer, Victoria has concluded that happily-ever-after doesn’t exist. She makes good money and has a nice life, great friends, and the occasional fling, so being single’s no hardship. When a violent home invasion forces her into a rented condo and brings on a spate of panic attacks, though, Victoria goes into therapy, then meets her sexy neighbor Ford Dixon, who comes across |

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as an arrogant player. But her opinion of him changes when she meets his sister, a struggling single mom, and agrees to help her find her daughter’s father and get financial support for the girl.

Ford, it turns out, is an investigative reporter, and the two join forces to track down the missing parent. It’s clear they share an intense chemistry, but discovering she likes him is a surprise to Victoria. They’re both confident, successful people, neither of whom believes in love or commitment, so it makes sense they’d have an affair, but when her attraction kindles into something more, Victoria can’t reconcile her distrust of relationships with what she’s beginning to want with Ford. When her panic attacks increase, she chooses to break it off with him rather than face her fear of commitment and the uncharacteristic uncertainty that’s become part of her life. Unused to confronting problems she doesn’t know how to solve, Victoria must decide if her unattached life is really all she wants or if Ford is worth fighting for.

Known for smart characters and witty banter, James maintains intensity and high emotional stakes even as, for the second time, she moves beyond her typical suspense subplot, incorporating a psychological rather than physical sense of danger.

James’ trademark mix of bright humor, emotional perceptiveness, and sizzling sexual tension make this a radiant winner.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF SCANDAL

Linden, Caroline Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | May 26, 2015 978-0-06-224492-5 Lord Atherton is the last man on Earth Penelope Weston wants to marry, but when a scandal forces her to do just that, they’re surprised to discover they’re a perfect match, though not everyone is pleased with the union.

Benedict Lennox, Lord Atherton, has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with her, so Penelope is determined to quash any attraction she feels for him. He may be the heir to an earldom, but he’s also an arrogant cad. But when Penelope tries to help a friend and Benedict steps in to protect her from assault, he winds up compromising her, and wicked rumors rise up around them. Benedict compels her to marry him—he’d been looking for a mild, temperate heiress to marry in order to get out from under his abusive father’s control, but when fate puts the fiery, passionate Penelope in his path instead, he accepts the situation first with resignation, then with gratitude as he realizes she’s his perfect wife. His father, however, neither approves of his marriage nor forgives his impudence at marrying without his blessing, and when the earl creates a dangerous situation that places Penelope in peril, Benedict realizes he must break free of his father’s influence once and for all if he is to create a future with the woman who makes him happy. Linden has written a satisfying romance with a touch of mystery that digs into the psyches of an abused boy grown into an honorable man and 44

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the delightfully passionate heroine who unwittingly saves him.

The ending ties everything up a little too neatly, but we forgive that small weakness because we are so invested in Benedict and Penelope’s happily-ever-after.

A smart, poignant, deftly written romance with characters who remind us that good can triumph and love can heal.

AT HIS SERVICE

Rock, Suzanne St. Martin’s (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-250-05925-3 Magnate Leo Perconti comes to Boston to save his family’s hotel company, focusing on turning the luxury flagship Palazzo around and curbing his siblings’ extravagances, but meeting intern Karin Norell is a sexy distraction that helps and hinders his progress.

The Perconti family fortunes have taken a turn for the worse. Brothers Marco and Dante have been treating the Boston Palazzo property like a personal playground, running their finances into the ground and ignoring the details of running the business. When eldest brother Leo comes to town, he has specific plans to address the situation and get the business back on track, plans that will take attention and discipline. What he does not need is a sizzling sexual encounter with a sexy maid in his suite or his inability to stay away from the woman, who turns out to be not a maid at all but the hotel’s incredibly businesssavvy intern. Karin is smart and sexy and has years of experience running hotels with her family. Plus, as an insider at the Palazzo, she has insight into what’s been going on and some great ideas for making changes. Of course, since she’s an employee, sleeping with her is highly problematic for Leo, and embarking on a red-hot affair’s even more so, especially just as years’ worth of Perconti misconduct and mismanagement boil over. Rock presents an intriguing premise in this erotic novel, apparently the beginning of a series revolving around the Perconti siblings, which touches on a few popular tropes—sexy billionaire, a vague Cinderella theme, the prim girl awakened to naughtiness.

But while the plot and the writing can be fun, the book doesn’t hang together well. The many sex scenes are repetitive and flat, while the characters make annoying choices, undermining our belief in them. Karin careens back and forth from empowered woman to shrinking victim so often we’re dizzy, and how the leader of a billion-dollar empire can “suddenly” step in on the brink of bankruptcy surely makes us question his competence.

A decent idea with uninspired execution.

nonfiction THE ART OF THE CON The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: THE TANK MAN’S SON by Mark Bouman & D.R. Jacobsen............ 48

Amore, Anthony M. Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-1-137-27987-3

THE COST OF COURAGE by Charles Kaiser..................................... 68 MEANWHILE THERE ARE LETTERS by Suzanne Marrs & Tom Nolan.............................................................................................72

The big business of art fraud.

Former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving once declared that 40 percent of art in museums is fake. The FBI has a special, highly trained Art Crime Team, and the London-based Art Loss Register has compiled a database of nearly 200,000 stolen artworks. Amore (co-author: Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists, 2011, etc.), head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, offers riveting profiles of ingenious con men and women who have duped gallery owners, collectors, museum officials, and appraisers to pass off forged paintings as originals by the most famous artists in the world.

Among them are Pei-Shen Qian, a talented Chinese immigrant in need of money who produced abstract expressionist paintings complete with the signatures of Pollack, Rothko, and de Kooning; and the brilliant Wolfgang Beltracchi, who claimed that he “channeled” the spirits of the artists whose works he imitated. Forgers, Amore notes, are usually “middle-aged men frustrated by their own failures as artists (or perhaps the failure of the art world to recognize their greatness).” They tend to produce impressionist or abstract expressionist paintings since they are easier to make than old masters; and they work in oils, not the more delicate watercolors. To sell forgeries, they must come up with each work’s provenance, or record of ownership, producing documents that themselves are fake. Art scams require buyers: one con man who auctioned worthless paintings on eBay believed that buyers were motivated by “optimistic self-delusion” that “they have found something good.” That self-delusion might even explain why the head of New York’s famed Knoedler Gallery was taken in by forgers: probably, writes the author, “she was intoxicated by the prospect of being part of the unleashing of a heretofore unknown collection on the world.”

An engrossing read about brazen, artful scams.

FASTEST THINGS ON WINGS by Terry Masear............................... 73 MOLINA by Bengie Molina & Joan Ryan............................................ 73 I, MIGRANT by Sami Shah..................................................................79 NAGASAKI by Susan Southard............................................................81

MOLINA The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty

Molina, Bengie with Ryan, Joan Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4516-4104-2

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new season, new books THE ORDINARY SPACEMAN From Boyhood Dreams to Astronaut

Spring has finally sprung, with allday sunshine and temperatures moving into the meaty part of the 70s—at least down here in the South. As my northern colleagues still work to shake off the snow and the bone-chilling cold, my thoughts have turned toward the gradually awakening outside world and all its warming, soul-gladdening possibilities. I always look forward to reading books that match my mood, the season, or both, and April has a host of excellent options.

Here are three:

Anderson, Clayton C. Univ. of Nebraska (400 pp.) $29.95 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-0-8032-6282-9

An astronaut’s memoir from “a smalltown boy from Nebraska—nothing special, just an ordinary American.”

Retired astronaut Anderson spent more than 38 hours spacewalking and five months on the International Space Station (“ISS”—acronyms proliferate at NASA and in his book). The athletic former Boy Scout from Nebraska, previously employed as an engineer at the Johnson Space Center, finally landed the coveted job as astronaut after 15 years of annual applications. After his acceptance, Anderson underwent rigorous preparation in jets, on mountainside treks, and in prolonged periods underwater. He learned Russian and trained in Star City, located outside Moscow, in order to work on the ISS. The stressful, rigid toil paid off, and the author delivers graphic descriptions of the sensations experienced during liftoff into space and life in orbit, including annoyances that were expressed perhaps a bit too freely to colleagues on Earth. He was not listed for future long-duration flights. Better were conversations in space with his wife and children who, throughout the book, receive heartfelt expressions of his enduring love. The author also frequently registers his Christian faith. Some NASA arcana, like mission commemorative patches, will interest true space buffs, and Anderson seems eager to answer predictable questions regarding bodily functions in space. He announces, more than once, his pride in the “incredible opportunities” to “poop in four different spacecraft!” He goes into considerable detail about that opportunity and natural human bowel movements in general. Indeed, the author is prideful in several areas, including his modesty and humanity in the face of stresses and dangers. Throughout, Anderson seeks to maintain an upbeat tone. However, underneath the brave bonhomie, there is occasional snarky, artificial gravitas, and the geniality sours just a bit.

A spaceman delivers an overlong chronicle of his adventures that may prove engaging to ardent space fans.

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

by Cynthia Barnett Other than blooming flowers, what’s more quintessentially “spring” than rain showers? In this “multifaceted examination of the science, the art, the technology, and even the smell of rain throughout history,” Barnett delivers a variety of fascinating stories about this indispensable part of the natural world.

Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light by David Downie Paris in spring is loaded with newfound energy, bursting flowers, and romantic possibilities, and Downie dives headlong into a history of the city in the 19th century, when Hugo, Dumas, Delacroix, and so many others were active in the City of Light. As our reviewer astutely notes, “the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its artists grants him a mystical gift of access: doors left ajar and carriage gates left open foster his search for the city’s magical story.”

All the Wild that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

by David Gessner Where would the health of the American West’s natural landscape be without Abbey and Stegner? In his latest book, creative writing instructor Gessner engagingly investigates the lives of these two vital figures in the history of American environmentalism. “For all their differences in style, they converged in recognizing the increasing vulnerability of the West to drought, fires, fracking, and overwhelming tourism,” writes our reviewer. —E.L. Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.

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THE FULL CATASTROPHE Travels Among the New Greek Ruins

DAISY TURNER’S KIN An African American Family Saga

Angelos, James Crown (304 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-385-34648-1

Beck, Jane C. Univ. of Illinois (344 pp.) $24.95 paper | Jul. 1, 2015 978-0-252-08079-1

Endemic problems plague a proud country.

Growing up on Long Island in the 1980s, freelance journalist Angelos often visited his grandmother, who lived in a humble, pastoral Greek village with a view of an Apollo temple. In 2011, returning on assignment for the Wall Street Journal, the author found a country in economic ruins, a place “both familiar to me but still foreign enough that I often found myself bewildered by it.” For his revealing and well-informed debut book, Angelos revisited Greece many times, interviewing politicians and ordinary citizens, government administrators and religious figures, émigrés and xenophobes, to investigate the causes and extent of the country’s financial and political crises. Many of those who spoke with him were angry, cynical, and despondent about the future. Repeatedly, the author discovered evidence of waste, graft, and political patronage. Years after two town treasurers were convicted of murdering a mayor, for example, they continued to receive their salaries, even while Greece’s official creditors pushed for bureaucratic reform. Bribes were a fact of daily life; tax evasion, “a national preoccupation. The pervasiveness of the habit, and the government’s enduring unwillingness to do anything about it, was more than any other single factor the cause of Greece’s financial troubles.” Many Greeks resented the European Union for imposing conditions in order to grant economic relief. Germany, especially, was hated by a population that recalled the brutal Nazi occupation. Germany, many felt, “was plundering Greece again, but this time without an army.”

Like other European nations, Greece struggles with an influx of immigrants seeking refuge from poverty and persecution.

Often the first country where these immigrants land, it resentfully sees itself as “Europe’s basement.” Many citizens believe in a self-serving narrative of “Hellenic purity and superiority” that has resulted in the rise of a fascist political party espousing antiSemitism, anti-Turkish hatred, and strident anti-immigration rhetoric. Angelos follows these many threads with aplomb.

A candid, unsparing look at the challenges Greece has yet to overcome.

A deeply, patiently researched journey into the unusual English-African roots of a long-lived Grafton, Vermont, storyteller.

Emeritus director of the Vermont Folklife Center, Beck was a folklorist employed by the state arts council in 1983 when she first met the extraordinary Daisy Turner, then 100 years old and a well-known modern-day Homer situated on her family homestead of Journey’s End in Grafton. In the tradition of the West African griot, a kind of genealogist, historian and singer, Turner was the keeper of her large family’s narrative, as had been her father and grandfather. Beck believed her stories should be

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Never preachy or self-pitying, just an honest story well written and well told. the tank man’s son

recorded and preserved. Over two years, they worked together, culminating in the 1990 documentary Journey’s End: Memories and Traditions of Daisy Turner and Her Family, which won a Peabody Award. Although Daisy died in 1988, Beck felt compelled to complete the project in book form, allowing the stories of Daisy’s grandfather Alessi and father, Alec, to unfold more elaborately while detailing how the factual record dovetailed nicely with the kept memories. The tale starts with a young English wife shipwrecked off the West African coast and rescued by a Yoruban chief ’s son; she was sheltered by the tribe and, by all accounts, resolved to stay. Her baby, by the chief ’s son, was called Alessi. He spoke English and was rather arrogant, trading in the sale of his own people, until he, too, found himself on a slave ship destined for New Orleans. His extraordinary strength and fighting prowess kept him in good stead with his wealthy Virginia master. His son Alec, born in 1845, escaped during the Civil War and became an orderly for a Union officer before venturing to work in Vermont and buy land in Grafton.

Daisy tried for years to procure his soldier’s pension, remaining litigious and single all her life. Throughout the book, her quotes appear in italics, preserving the folksy, feisty temperament of the vernacular.

A well-excavated biography of a “custodian of a multigenerational American family saga.” (46 b/w photos)

settlers viewed them as a “scourge” that needed to be exterminated. Since then, ranchers, working alone and in tandem with government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, have massacred or displaced thousands of animals “to stave off alleged rangeland degradation.” The author’s examination of the history of wild horses is informative but shallow; his sensitive portrayal of his evolving relationship with Samson is the highlight of the book. At the same time, that depiction is somewhat one-sided in that the author does not probe his own life and past to reveal the deeper personal lessons that Samson taught him about himself.

Flawed but occasionally moving. (8-page color photo insert)

THE TANK MAN’S SON A Memoir

Bouman, Mark with Jacobsen, D.R. Tyndale House (350 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jul. 1, 2015 978-1-4143-9027-7

A touching memoir of a truly miserable childhood.

That Bouman could write of his life of abuse in Michigan and make it sound like fun is the mark of a man who has completely come to terms with the higher plan for his life. It may have taken him more than two decades to discover it, but when he did, he embraced it and became a man with a mission. His writing is matter-of-fact and in no way an attempt to purge the pain of living with a father who treated him like an imbecile incapable of anything and regularly beat him and his brother. Somehow, the author manages to describe a life that, between beatings, would seem attractive to most boys. When Bouman was young, his father put an airplane engine in a VW to make a carplane, and he opened up a shooting range on their 11-acre land and purchased a massive boat. He also bought a tank, which just about everyone thought was the coolest thing ever. He actually let the boys drive the tank, and it proved useful for putting out fires and demolishing unwanted buildings.

Bouman seems to be trying to paint a more pleasant picture of his childhood, but the facts of the beatings and the demolition of any character he might have developed seep through. Later on, substance abuse threatened to end his military career, until someone invited him to church. Who knows why such things appear just as a soul is sinking into the abyss? Religion changed him, and he eventually found his wife and opened an orphanage in Cambodia in the early 1990s, where he finally discovered the profit of his upbringing. This immensely inspiring story shows how Bouman tore success from defeat.

Never preachy or self-pitying, just an honest story well written and well told.

LAST CHANCE MUSTANG The Story of One Horse, One Horseman, and One Final Shot at Redemption Bornstein, Mitchell St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-250-05941-3

An attorney and horse trainer’s account of how he socialized, and ultimately befriended, an abused, psychologically damaged wild horse.

When Bornstein first met Samson the mustang, the horse had already earned a reputation as a “flesh-eating, fire-breathing monster.” His owner had rescued him from a trip to the slaughterhouse as a gesture of goodwill. However, she discovered that Samson was not only untrainable, but also dangerous to both humans and other animals. Bornstein quickly realized that a major part of Samson’s problem was that he had been misunderstood and abused by almost every human he had known.

Rather than seek voluntary compliance, previous owners had used “bullwhips, lariat ropes, anger and pain” to school Samson to proper ways of behavior. The author knew he would have to earn the animal’s trust before he could ever hope to ride him. As he describes the yearlong-plus process of training—but never quite breaking—his fierce mustang charge, Bornstein also tells the story of wild horses in the United States. Descended from Old World equines brought to North America by the Spanish conquistadors, mustangs became one of the great symbols of the American West. But by the end of the 19th century, many 48

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ANCHOR AND FLARES A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service

and bereavement. Her anecdotes are innocuously entertaining in their brevity, frankness, and sunny delivery: the gushed confessions from total strangers who see her clergy collar; her unflinchingly compassionate delivery of spiritual care at a “woodland calamity”; memories of her father, who served in the Marine Corps and fought in Korea; and the pleasures of mothering (and stepmothering) six children after remarrying. Perhaps most affecting is the sudden avalanche of worry brought on by the “salesman’s enthusiasm” of the recruiter who visited Zach after a school career day. As “the first to launch from the familial nest,” her eldest child put the squeeze on her heart when he decided to enlist in the Marines. As parents’ memories often do, Braestrup’s narrative wanders down Memory Lane often, as she shares many of Zach’s firsts, filled with foibles and amazing acts of bravery and solidarity (at 11, he sewed a rainbow patch on his book bag to oppose anti-gay classmates). While immensely proud of her oldest, the author naturally fretted over his safety. “I was afraid he would be changed into a monster and the change would be forever,” she writes. Sensitive and wholesomely charming, the book is refreshingly free of preachy

Braestrup, Kate Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-316-37378-4

An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister comes to terms with a son joining the Marines.

Maine Warden Service chaplain Braestrup (Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir, 2010, etc.) embraced a faith-based livelihood after her first husband, a state trooper, tragically perished in a car accident. With affable flourishes and a healthy sense of self-deprecating humor, the author brings her eldest son, Zachary, into vivid focus. After her husband’s sudden death, Braestrup was compelled to embark on a ministry career that led her to a law enforcement chaplaincy and countrywide speaking engagements on grief, trauma,

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A richly documented work that restores the Antelope to its central place in the long, grim history of the Atlantic slave trade. dark places of the earth

DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope

proselytization and instead addresses the bittersweetness of parenthood and perennial nurturing.

Braestrup delivers another appealing, tenderhearted memoir braiding faith and family.

Bryant, Jonathan M. Liveright/Norton (416 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 13, 2015 978-0-87140-675-0

HOW DID I GET HERE? Making Peace with the Road Not Taken

The little-known story of a slave ship, the fate of its captives, and its place in American history.

In 1820, the Spanish slave ship Antelope was captured off the coast of Africa by privateers who operated in the murky world between state-sanctioned raiding and piracy. To the Antelope’s hold they added slaves captured from other ships and then, with more than 300 enslaved Africans, set sail back across the Atlantic. In this meticulous account, Bryant (History/Georgia Southern Univ.; How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1885, 2004) describes how the Antelope was seized by a Navy revenue cutter near Florida, thus setting off a series of trials that would have a profound impact on the direction of American history. Although United States law banned the slave trade, the fate of the Antelope’s captives was subject to fierce legal debate. Bryant traces the Antelope case from proceedings in Savannah to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Francis Scott Key, better known today as the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” argued to free the captives and return them to Africa. This legal odyssey lasted eight years and, all the while, the Antelope’s captives lived and labored as slaves, dying from overwork and disease in large numbers, until their case was finally resolved. Bryant’s familiarity with admiralty law and the slave trade makes him an able guide through this complex and often confusing tangle of legal and moral issues, which general readers may find difficult to parse. He writes with compassion for the African captives—most of whom were children and teenagers—and convincingly argues for the importance of the Antelope case as a flash point in the deepening conflict over slavery.

A richly documented work that restores the Antelope to its central place in the long, grim history of the Atlantic slave trade.

Browner, Jesse Harper Wave/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-06-227569-1

A United Nations staffer and novelist meditates on the question of “how... the life we live relate[s] to lives we might have lived or ought to have lived.”

When Browner (Everything Happens Today, 2011, etc.) turned 50, “thoughts of the road not taken” began to weigh on his mind.

He had lived a bohemian lifestyle and committed himself to pursuing literary greatness throughout most of his 20s. But as he neared 30, he found himself drifting into what became a successful career as an international civil servant. In this collection of seven essays, Browner takes a critical look at his existential malaise as well as the motivations and choices that have defined his life. He examines the romanticism and self-involvement that governed his youthful thinking and caused him to scorn what Roger Shattuck called “recognized channels of accomplishment.” A strong but unacknowledged need for the familial tranquility the author did not have in childhood guided him toward a more conventional life as a husband, father, and provider. Writing became a secondary pursuit, but its presence in his life and the unlived possibilities it seemed to suggest haunted him. Literarily informed and philosophically engaged, Browner’s essays are infused with a rueful ambivalence as well as an all-too-human longing for possible pasts and futures. Yet in no way does he regret his choices. Maturity has allowed the author to see that at any given point, “there is not one future ahead of us, but multiple futures.” Creating alternate storylines for our lives is really about “creating a universe that will allow us to be our best selves.” Since choices have consequences, finding happiness means accepting those consequences as part of a process of personal growth. As for the conflicts that arise as we distinguish between what we need and what we desire and then prioritize them, they are what ultimately “give the game its tension” and make life meaningful.

A searching, occasionally profound collection/memoir.

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WILL COLLEGE PAY OFF? A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You’ll Ever Make

GETTING REAL

Carlson, Gretchen Viking (272 pp.) $28.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-525-42745-2

Cappelli, Peter PublicAffairs (224 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-61039-526-7

A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”

The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–intraining and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life

A workforce and education expert weighs the perks and pitfalls of higher education.

Cappelli (Management/Wharton School; Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It, 2012, etc.) astutely examines the enduring relevance of a college degree despite problematic funding and postgraduate employment issues. In dense chapters full of illuminating statistical and survey data, the author reports on the affordability and effectiveness of a college degree, directing his assessment to benefit future students and their families. As he notes, astronomical tuitions figure greatly into the equation, as American college costs run about four times higher than in other countries, making the decision to attend a postsecondary school an increasingly risky one. Cappelli also examines the variation in degreed students who fail to achieve success in the postgraduate employment marketplace and those who become overwhelmed by the financial burden. The factors affecting these trends are in constant flux, writes the author, and vary from the labor market requiring functional job skills to the student dropout rate and the education-to-career paths that have evolved as rapidly as their corresponding business models and sophisticated hiring processes. Cappelli’s eye-opening report card on the current state of American education gives mounting tuitions a failing grade, though enrollment and retention numbers are promising.

The author’s drilled-down conclusions suggest that students are matriculating at the same level today as they did years ago, but the expense alone has thrown many families into the depths of student loan debt or default. Whether or not investing in college is worth the risk is a major decision about which families and children need to educate themselves. “College is still accepted as necessary for advancement but also increasingly expensive,” writes the author, “and increasingly risky in terms of the likely career payoffs.”

Salient reading for students, parents, and educators on navigating toward a coveted college degree.

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at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness...in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.

For the author’s fans.

that follow. Chase discusses these effects and argues that social benefits be transformed into rights of citizenship, not just linked to increasingly changeable employment. She resurrects an older idea for a guaranteed income for all, and in this way, she answers Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work (2015) and the concerns he raises about the loss of starter jobs to the digital economy A provocative discussion of how public investment and private entrepreneurship can combine to shape future advantages from existing used and unused capacities.

NAPOLEON ON WAR

Colson, Bruno—Ed. Translated by Elliott, Gregory Oxford Univ. (560 pp.) $45.00 | Jul. 22, 2015 978-0-19-968556-1

Editor Colson (History/Universite de Namur, Belgium) closely examines the military concepts and strategies of “the greatest warrior of all time,” whose “mastery of mass warfare and his ability to raise, organize, and equip numerous armies dramatically changed the art of war.”

The author has a masterful knowledge of military history, strategy, and tactics, and he uses the structure of Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz’s reflections on the Napoleonic Wars, On War, inserting Napoleon’s writings on subjects such as the nature, theory, and strategy of war and explanations of engagement, attack, and defense. In doing so, Colson exhibits the similarities of their considerations on the theory and character of war, even as the infantryman, Clausewitz, and the artilleryman, Napoleon, disagreed on the importance of their elements.

The author prioritizes ideas over events as he writes about Napoleon’s understanding of war and how he viewed it over the years. Colson points out that peace was incompatible with his personality, likely because it included trust and self-limitation.

Napoleon felt that monarchy was, by nature, at war against republics. His views on battle are easy to grasp: attack should be swift and simple; artillery should open lanes for infantry; and moral strength, not numbers, determines victory. Napoleon personifies Clausewitz’s formula: political objective determines military objective. As he writes about grand tactics and Napoleon’s views of his troops, Colson succeeds in portraying Napoleon’s military genius as well as his broad intellectual abilities.

Napoleon himself said that the qualities essential in a general are an educated intuition and determination. His readings supplied the former, and the latter was part of his natural character.

Napoleon envisioned all possibilities and was prepared to adapt, though his victories were less decisive after 1809 because other armies copied his methods.

A thoroughly detailed scholarly work, somewhat repetitious and not for the merely curious or casual reader. For professional military historians and theorists, however, it should be highly useful.

PEERS INC How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism Chase, Robin PublicAffairs (304 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-61039-554-0

Drawing on her business success, Internet entrepreneur and internationally respected transport expert Chase details how digital infrastructure can be used to organize excess capacity and generate profit in service businesses.

In 2000, the author co-founded Zipcar, a pioneering Webbased company that rents cars by the hour. The company provided on-demand auto availability for people who did not want to rent by the day or assume ownership of an asset they would only use a small fraction of the time—perfect for New York and other metropolises. Subsequently, ride-sharing (her own Buzzcar, taxi services like Uber) and apartment rental businesses (Airbnb) were added to the mix. Chase and other innovators have defined market potentials and developed them into significant moneymaking ventures. First, the author established that people are prepared to share goods like automobiles, if the economics make sense; second, that a wireless-enabled Web infrastructure makes sharing easy; and third, that people can be trusted. More generally, Chase understood that she needed to build a company with a per-rental transaction cost of as close to zero as possible. Public investment in the Internet provided the pre-existing platform that could support the application and was paid for by the users’ payments to their service providers.

Furthermore, digital mapping has helped to make these apps successful. Cost reductions are among the many public benefits 52

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THE MEANING OF THE LIBRARY A Cultural History

the past, present, and future of the often rarefied space known as the library. Victorianist John Sutherland looks at the growth of public libraries in 19th-century Britain, where the hardback, three-volume novel was unaffordable for ordinary readers. By the 1890s, a new publishing venture followed a hardback first issue with a cheap edition costing a few shillings. This forerunner of the paperback led to the growth of the personal library.

Free public libraries, along with fee-based lending libraries, led to a burgeoning readership. At the popular Railway Library, travelers could buy a cheap, pocket-sized book for a journey or even rent one, “borrowed at a departure station and returned at the destination station.” Among essayists on how libraries have been imagined in fiction, poetry, and film, Oxford professor Laura Marcus describes libraries in movies as “repositories of secret or occulted knowledge.” In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, for example, the library is inhabited by angels “who act as the comforters of the living and are able to listen in to their subconscious thoughts.” In Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, “the human mind and memory” hold libraries. Stephen Enniss, director of the esteemed Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas,

Crawford, Alice—Ed. Princeton Univ. (312 pp.) $35.00 | Jul. 1, 2015 978-0-691-16639-1

The invention and reinvention of libraries.

Before the printing press, only royals and scholars collected books. A personal library of more than 1,000 volumes was considered huge, “the work of a lifetime.” But by the 16th century, Europe abounded in some 9 million volumes; the book became “no longer an object of wonder, but an everyday aspect of life.” Crawford (New Directions for Academic Liaison Librarians, 2012, etc.), digital humanities research librarian at the University of St. Andrews Library in Scotland, has gathered a dozen illuminating essays by distinguished historians, librarians, and literary scholars about

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A disarmingly modest yet profound tale of redemption. george the dog, john the artist

BEING BERLUSCONI The Rise and Fall from Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga

offers a fascinating look at assembling writers’ archives, complicated by the ubiquity of electronic files.

A rich, informative, and engaging collection.

Day, Michael Palgrave Macmillan (288 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-137-28004-6

ENABLING ACTS The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

In the first comprehensive examination of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s life and career, Independent Italy correspondent Day paints a lively but noncomplex picture of an ambitious and deeply flawed man in a system that accommodated his numerous vices.

Berlusconi’s rise is a fascinating story that reads straight from a tabloid, littered with corrupt politicians, shady dealings, and women who emerge more as caricatures than real people. The author ably brings to light the various avenues by which Berlusconi first made his fortune and later made Italy his playground through self-serving legislation. With such rich fodder and his experience for nearly a decade as a journalist in Italy, it’s not surprising he is able to do so. However, Day vacillates between treating Berlusconi’s antics as a political sideshow and exposing them as a true threat to Italy’s political system. When the author does turn to his subject’s legacy, highlighting the extensive damage he did to the country’s culture and reputation, it reads more like an afterthought than a legitimate meditation. Day gives great attention to the sex scandals that made Berlusconi an international joke, but he focuses less on exploring the system within which Berlusconi existed. Leaps between his roles as an entrepreneur and a politician and between investigations and public scandals feel jarring, as the author gives too little context. In other instances, however, Day provides too much detail—e.g., the minibiography of one of the young girls whose relationship with Berlusconi eventually brought about the political titan’s downfall.

Although the author explains the many whats of Berlusconi’s long career, he largely neglects the more intricate questions of how. In so doing, he makes Italy seem more like a bit player than the stage in Berlusconi’s circus.

As entertaining and shocking as one would hope for, but the book leaves readers with more questions than answers.

(8 pages of b/w photos)

Davis, Lennard J. Beacon (296 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-8070-7156-4

An examination of how the Americans with Disabilities Act came about, 25 years after the legislation passed into law.

The civil rights movements that get the most attention are often those where the most work remains to be done. Rightly so, but there is also something to be said for spending time exploring past successes, not only for the reassurance that comes from a reminder that change can happen, but also for practical insights into how it happens. Significant progress in other parts of the world has been modeled on the civil rights legislation involved with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Davis (Disability Studies and English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era, 2014, etc.) has done the necessary rigorous research—interviews with dozens of legislators, activists, and others involved in the process—and worked all of those accounts into this book, a mix of journalism and historical overview. It traces back to a handful of individuals: Bob Funk, who helped start the Disabled Rights Education Fund; Patrisha Wright, known as “The General” for her leadership style; Arlene Meyerson, “the brains”; and Mary Lou Breslin, who had the financial acumen. Davis spins the story outward from this core group, and many other players enter the narrative. The DREF worked to bring the disparate elements of a still loosely defined group—“the disabled”—together in common cause. The author’s account occasionally veers toward insider baseball; his scholarship on the subject is evident, and at times the narrative is bogged down by it. At the same time, however, there’s a great deal on how a few deeply liberal activists and a few staunchly conservative lawmakers found a way to work together to effect real, lasting change. Now, there’s a minority that could use some support.

Reading this book would be a great first step toward further civil rights progress. (photo insert)

GEORGE THE DOG, JOHN THE ARTIST A Rescue Story Dolan, John Overlook (320 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4683-1120-4

The story of a desperately poor Londoner and a twice-abandoned Staffordshire bull terrier named George poses the question, “Who rescued whom?”

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When acclaimed East London–based artist Dolan was jobless and living on government assistance, he could easily have blamed others or several factors that led to his hard circumstances. However, in his first book, he is surprisingly cleareyed and honest about how he largely caused his own failures: truancy, substance abuse, and being a career criminal with nothing going for him throughout his 20s. He was clearly disappointed in himself but managed to retain a kernel of optimism. Living in poverty in a cold, dirty apartment, Dolan admits he was “as far away from sensible as you can get.” Then he agreed to take George in from a couple of fellow transients. Readers share his sense of expectation of changing fortunes when he writes movingly about the first time he took George outside: “I just wanted to concentrate on how good it felt to be walking a dog again....

It seemed like the first time in fifteen years I’d walked anywhere with a good honest purpose.” The author’s forthrightness and great empathy for his new best friend (“God, I felt sorry for him. I knew exactly how it felt to be the one not chosen, the one who got left behind”) make him sympathetic and engaging.

With George beside him at all times, Dolan regained his creative fire and love of drawing, both of which were suffocated by his miserable circumstances. Knowing the book has a happy ending dulls any distress reading about the author’s struggles or George’s sad early life. With dry wit and a lack of sentimentality, the author maintains reader investment. His unpretentiousness and the struggles that preceded his eventual (and well-deserved) success keep this Cinderella story gritty and grounded.

A disarmingly modest yet profound tale of redemption.

(16-page color photo insert)

of presidents Kim Il-sung (d. 1994) and his son Kim Jong-il kept the North Korean residents. Rejected by relatives when they showed up at an aunt’s house, the mother and two daughters lived on the streets in Rajin until the Tumen froze again and they could scurry across the river. Soon taken advantage of by a hardened procuress and forced into marriage with a Chinese peasant, the author’s mother had to bear a son in order to gain some freedom. The women dispersed into teeming Chinese cities to find jobs and gain false papers. It took years to make the necessary fortune required to pay smugglers to take them over the Mongolian border, at incredible risk and danger. Yet the welcome South Korea tendered toward the family was heartening, even if the South Koreans tended to look down on these poor refugees.

An urgent cry for compassion for the author’s fellow North Koreans, trapped and strangled of liberty and life.

A REFRESHINGLY POSITIVE

take on a well-known but little understood problem affecting millions: The increasing scarcity of housing we can afford.

A THOUSAND MILES TO FREEDOM My Escape from North Korea

REBUILDING A DREAM REVEALS

how we got into this mess and who’s responsible. It explains the proven solutions, and how to overcome political obstacles to implement them—before things get worse.

Eunsun Kim with Falletti, Sébastien Translated by Tian, David St. Martin’s (240 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-250-06464-6

A sobering account of survival of the fittest in North Korea by a young woman on the run for nearly a decade.

Translated originally from the French edition and reading like a slender, exciting, first-person French novel, this chronicle

by Eunsun Kim (a nom de plume) re-creates in immediate-feeling detail the horrific conditions of starvation that prompted her mother to flee with the author and her sister across the Tumen River bordering China in the winter of 1998. The author, then 11 years old but appearing much younger due to her blighted growth caused by malnutrition, had been fairly oblivious to the increasingly dire conditions in North Korea as the famine gripped the country and food rations were cut back.

Having lost the family’s beloved father, then the grandparents, the author’s mother nearly lost all hope, until she resolved to defect to China and become a traitor to her country—knowing little about the outside world and how hoodwinked the regimes

Praise for Rebuilding a Dream “… a blueprint for converting retreat into progress.” “… recommended for anyone who wants to understand housing problems while working toward solutions.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review Win a FREE copy of Rebuilding a Dream signed by the author.

Go to www.p4sc.org/RAD for your chance to win.

Buy at Ingram, Amazon and Barnes & Noble ISBN: 978-0-9905187-0-9 Contact publisher at: carol@p4sc.org or 415-453-2100 x302

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Not for the fainthearted, but a good wake-up call for those concerned with decent treatment of animals and healthy food on the table. project animal farm

PROJECT ANIMAL FARM An Accidental Journey into the Secret World of Farming and the Truth About Our Food

I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997

Faruqi, Sonia Pegasus (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-798-9

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence & Ginsberg, Allen Morgan, Bill—Ed. City Lights (292 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-0-87286-686-7

A searing exposé of the brutal treatment animals receive on their ways to our

Literary archivist Morgan (Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide to the Beat Generation in America, 2011, etc.) collects the correspondence of Ferlinghetti (Blasts Cries Laughter, 2014, etc.) and Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), beginning with Ginsberg’s first publication Howl and Other Poems (1955).

Limiting his comments to background information, Morgan lets Ginsberg’s personality emerge above and beyond what his poetry reveals. In addition to his work as a leading poet and painter, Ferlinghetti founded City Lights Books in San Francisco, a haven for Beat poets and other countercultural writers.

Their relationship, during which he published much of Ginsberg’s work, lasted for the next 25 years. The letters are a perfect picture of the San Francisco renaissance and the rise of the Beat poets, with Ginsberg at the top of the heap. Not only was he the best, but Ginsberg also knew everyone and their work. He ceaselessly recommended writers to Ferlinghetti, who tended away from the Buddhist-inspired poets toward the more European-inspired ones. While there is some discussion of editing problems, these letters are much more tuned to both men’s work. The big New York publishers often tried to lure Ginsberg away, but Ferlinghetti’s defense of Howl and Other Poems against obscenity charges ensured Ginsberg’s loyalty, as well as their friendship. Ginsberg was not only a poet; he was a world traveler who kept copious journals, many of which were later printed. He was also totally honest about his drug use and noted which works were accomplished under the effect of a specific substance. Having some familiarity with both men’s work is actually unnecessary, as their lives and outlooks come through in this compilation of their correspondence.

A good primer to convince readers who have not experienced the works of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg to give them a try.

dinner plates.

Following a whim, debut author Faruqi decided to take a break from the hectic pace of Wall Street and volunteer for two weeks on an organic dairy farm a few hours outside Toronto.

That decision proved to be both eye-opening and life-changing.

Her lifelong plan to establish a career as an investment banker was put on hold due to the 2008 recession, and her goal shifted from earning lots of money to exposing injustice. Despite the fact that the farm was certified as organic, her introduction to the on-the-ground reality was far from the charming pastoral scene she had imagined. Faruqi was horrified by the cramped quarters in the shed where 65 cows lived, “shackled to stalls by neck chains” and forced to stand in their own excrement. With her interest whetted, she visited commercial farming operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Asia. Investigating “organic” poultry farms, egg warehouses, and cattle, pig, and sheep farms, she found widespread force-feeding, unsanitary conditions, and confined living space. She began to realize that the bottom line was maximizing profit without regard to animal welfare, product purity, or even rudimentary sanitation.

Since organic products command a higher price—in 2013, sales reached $35 billion in the United States—and the regulatory system is lax, organic has become a desirable alternative to traditional farming. Even small, family-run operations often use the methods of factory farming, which set the standards and control the supply chain—e.g., by calibrating weight gain to profitability. Faruqi contrasts this with a visit to a successful pastoral farm to demonstrate a humane alternative at only slightly higher consumer prices. The author’s expertise in finance provides an extra dimension to this well-documented report.

Not for the fainthearted, but a good wake-up call for those concerned with decent treatment of animals and healthy food on the table.

MORE FOOL ME A Memoir Fry, Stephen Overlook (400 pp.) $29.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4683-1133-4

Fry brings his life story into the next decade in this pleasing follow-up to The Fry Chronicles (2012) and other books of memoir.

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It’s not that he’s self-absorbed but rather that the author has packed plenty of lives into less than 60 years: intellectual and criminal, genius and addict, beset by countless maladies but always game to wander off onto mountaintop or into jungle in the service of adventure. Viewers of BBC America will now know him as the host of QI, fans of the Hobbit films will know him as a gold-crazed lakeside doge, and fans with longer memories will remember him from A Bit of Fry and Laurie (with House’s Hugh Laurie) and other confections—to all of which Fry adds that he’s a “representative of madness, Twitter, homosexuality, atheism, annoying ubiquity and whatever other kinds of activity you might choose to associate with me.” With so much to tell, it’s a touch disappointing that Fry drifts from coherent narrative to sometimes less-than-scintillating diary entries.

There’s also perhaps a bit more about the agonies and ecstasies of cocaine than one might care to read (“As my prosperity rose my ability to acquire higher-quality cocaine increased commensurately....Better purity meant less diarrhea, nasal bleeding and nausea”)—though that was the late 1980s and early ’90s for you, a time of excess and abandon that today’s grim austerity makes all the more nostalgiaworthy. Fry, a gifted writer with a perfect sense of comic timing and anecdote-spinning, name-drops to beat Jim Harrison, but what a list of names he has to drop: from Emma Thompson to Alastair Cooke, P.G. Wodehouse, John Mills, Christopher Hitchens, and the Prince of Wales.

If you’re a fan of Oscar Wilde, whom Fry has portrayed on stage and screen, then by near definition you’ll be a fan of this writer and this book. Lots of fun—and readers who have been following all along will be wanting more, and soon.

lockdown of an entire neighborhood while the manhunt took place struck many as a violation of civil liberties, but the war on terror offered a free pass to law enforcement, both to do whatever they wanted and to answer to very little in the aftermath.

Gessen believes the brothers are guilty, but those who think the bombings were a setup by the FBI have ample material to build the case for conspiracy, so voluminous were the redactions and refusals to divulge information. Most chilling is the sheer normalcy of the brothers, one a small-time pot dealer who wasted time playing video games, the other a married father who was still very much an adolescent at heart. How could they do such a thing? Did they act alone or, as seems likely, have help building the explosives?

There are no pat answers, but Gessen makes it eerily plain to see how simply an atrocity can manifest.

THE BROTHERS The Road to an American Tragedy Gessen, Masha Riverhead (288 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-59463-264-8

The bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon resulted in a deluge of media coverage, none of which offered a satisfying explanation of why it happened.

This book attempts to find an answer.

Russian-American journalist Gessen (Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, 2014, etc.) follows the Tsarnaev family on their unending quest for a stable life; a map in the front of the book details a dozen moves in less than 30 years.

Uprooted repeatedly by war or lack of opportunity, the family remained in Cambridge for nearly a decade before things turned sour. After the bombings, with Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar in prison, the treatment of local Chechens by law enforcement overwhelmingly echoed the treatment they fled at home. The sense that things were no better for them in the United States highlights the disillusionment that some wouldbe terrorists convert into hatred and, often, violence. The |

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Fascinating reading about an intriguing woman. the goddess pose

THE GODDESS POSE The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West

THE HUNTER KILLERS The Extraordinary Story of the First Wild Weasels, the Band of Maverick Aviators Who Flew the Most Dangerous Missions of the Vietnam War

Goldberg, Michelle Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-307-59351-1

Hampton, Dan Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-06-237513-1

Investigative journalist Goldberg (The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, 2009, etc.) fluidly explores the extraordinary life of Indra Devi (1899-2002), the woman who helped transform the ancient Indian discipline of yoga into a worldwide phenomenon.

Born Eugenia Peterson to a noble family in Riga, Latvia, Devi’s early life was marked by instability and separations from family members. Her father vanished after divorcing Devi’s mother, who pursued a peripatetic life as an actress. After graduating from school in 1916, Devi followed her mother from Moscow to Berlin, where both immersed themselves in cabaret culture. In 1926, Devi had a life-changing encounter with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who introduced her to the Indian-inflected spirituality known as theosophy. She traveled to India, a place that so beguiled her with its “constant sense of transcendence” that she found she could no longer live comfortably in the West.

She returned to India, where she continued her involvement in esoteric spirituality and began serious study of yoga, then an all-male practice. Yet she was able to charm some of the discipline’s leading exponents, including Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, into teaching her. Just before the outbreak of World War II, she moved to Shanghai with her diplomat husband, where she began teaching yoga and going by the name Indira (later changed to Indra) Devi. By 1947, she had found her way to California.

There, she gravitated into the orbit of cultural luminary Aldous Huxley, taught yoga in Hollywood, and, after a divorce, married a homeopathic physician named Siegfried Knauer. Devi opened a yoga school in Mexico and became close to the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. Eventually, she moved to Buenos Aires, where she continued her work as a yoga teacher and lecturer. Goldberg’s book, which uses material she uncovered about Devi on four continents, is not only thoroughly researched; it also offers insights into a magnificently elusive figure, the culture she loved, and the yogic practice she bequeathed to the West.

Fascinating reading about an intriguing woman.

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Weapon wizardry and exciting, in-the-moment pilots’ accounts comprise this homage to the group of first trackers of the pesky surface-to-air missiles during the Vietnam War. Former Air Force lieutenant colonel and bestselling author Hampton (Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, from the Red Baron to the F-16, 2014, etc.) fashions the book as a kind of tribute to the lost pilots. Of the 72 “Hunter Killers” shot down during the Vietnam War, 31 were killed in action, 19 were POWs, two died in captivity, and 20 were rescued. Soviet specialists aided the North Koreans in developing the SAMs necessary to knock down American fighters, as was disastrously proved in July 1965 when USAF F-4 Phantoms were successfully targeted, to the Americans’ utter surprise. Although American tactical aviation was supreme, not much had changed in military mentality since the Korean War until the advent of the anti-aircraft missiles. With President Lyndon Johnson’s long-sustained bombing campaign Operation Rolling Thunder unleashed in March 1965, the pilots, flying low in altitudes without specific intelligence or specialized technology, became increasingly vulnerable to SAMs, the launch sites of which were frequently moved and expertly camouflaged. The key to a countermeasure would be radar detection: developing an antenna for the bottom of the jets tuned in to the SAMs’ specific signal. The California-based Applied Technology, Inc. was employed to come up with the answer in a stunning 30 days in August 1965. Without training, the pilots were supposed to “just make it work,” as successfully validated by pilots Jack Donovan and Allen Lamb, who knocked out the first SAM in November. Hampton’s command of the nuances of technology, in addition to his knowledge of the Vietnam War on the ground and in the air, renders this book both informative and moving.

A fast-paced Vietnam War story that cheekily employs the pilots’ vernacular as well as plenty of technological terminology.

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A magnificent rendition of a classic Aesop fable from Caldecott Medal-winning artist JERRY PINKNEY ★“From an unparalleled artist, another brilliant work.”

—Kirkus Reviews

★ “Remarkable.”

—Publishers Weekly

★“Lively and engaging.”

978-0-316-40081-7

—School Library Journal

LittleBrownLibrary.com

LittleBrownSchool

@LBSchool

25 YEARS RUNNING JERRY SPINELLI’s Newbery Award-winning classic celebrates 25 years

978-0-316-80906-1

Includes an ALL-NEW introduction by Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate as well as a Q&A with Jerry Spinelli.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES Kate Mulgrew Her mother once told the actress that if her life were a book, she wouldn’t be able to put it down; now it is

By Chelsea Langford Photo courtesy Tess Steinkolk

family, as she describes her “first conscious memory of who I was as a reasonable human being…my first struggle with morality.”

And so Mulgrew sets the tone off the bat, writing not necessarily as Mulgrew the actress, but choosing instead to reveal herself on a more intimate footing to her reader, seeking to portray the entirety of her person through “the episodes in my life that have not only informed me, but have shaped me and defined me—from the beginning to the age of about 47,” she says.

It’s clear from early on that the story of Mulgrew’s inner life will prove more rewarding than snippets of gossip and moments on set. She set off on a focused track toward success when her mother gave her—though only in grade school at this point—something to consider: “You can either be a mediocre poet or a great actress. Now, which do you think you’d rather be?” Mulgrew had just finished a poetry reading at school, fulfilling an aspiration of hers, but now was the time to start anew. “I pursued my life as an actress. But I think I’ve always longed” to write, she says. “I think I’ve always yearned to express myself in this way but lacked the confidence and lacked perhaps the articulation.

Perhaps the timing was off.”

Mulgrew is coming up on her 60th birthday, though, and the timing now feels right: “events have conspired to lend themselves to the opening of a new gate and a new day, if you will. And I felt that it was time to write this story.” It’s clear that the storyteller in Mulgrew has always been alive, if not at the forefront of her consciousness. Throughout her life, she mentions she “wrote long, heartfelt, often searching letters to friends. And they assumed an importance, a literary importance, in my life. I wasn’t yet writing stories or didn’t have the guts yet to write stories, but I think I wrote them in letter form.” Along with “stacks of journals sky high,” she had been writing down and exploring the significant moments of her life on paper for a long time, developing a narrative voice that is intoxicatingly personable.

“This is a story known only to my family and to my closest friends. And now I’ve put it into the world, and so I’m scared but I’m ready. I’m not so scared that I didn’t write it, right? It needed to be written,” Mulgrew says, noting that “when some kind of art needs to be created, you can do ev-

If you’re new to the Kate Mulgrew fan club, you might first think of her as the strong-willed, irascible mother figure, Red, on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. If you’ve known Mulgrew for a while, then you probably fell in love with her as Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. And while acting has been Mulgrew’s life pursuit—a role delegated to her by her mother at a very young age—her first memoir, Born with Teeth, goes far deeper than the everyday life and struggles of an emerging actress.

A celebrity memoir might do well to focus mainly on life behind the scenes of the actor’s most famous productions: what fan wouldn’t enjoy hearing the inside scoop?

And while Patrick Stewart, Mulgrew’s predecessor as captain in the Star Trek franchise, does have a brief appearance in the book, that’s about as far as Mulgrew goes with celebrity anecdotes. Born with Teeth does not begin at the helm of a Starfleet starship or even on the set of the daytime soap Ryan’s Hope, where Mulgrew got her big break.

Instead, it starts in Iowa, among Mulgrew’s large Irish 60

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erything you can to resist, but resistance is futile.” Mulgrew wrote for herself, bending to the desire to create, but as she modestly notes, “I thought perhaps it would have something to offer some people. Women in particular.” And oh, it does.

Mulgrew reveals her saddest moments: her sister’s long battle with a brain tumor, her mother’s emotional turmoil, the darkness that enveloped her after getting pregnant in her early 20s and giving the baby up for adoption, embarking on a decadeslong search for her daughter. She shies away from nothing, writing with the realization that “we have a lot of sadness in our lives, women, that we stow away…because we’re ashamed or we’re afraid. And that’s fine. That helps us to survive.”

But in revealing herself as an example—a woman with an innate strength who is both afraid and brave—her story can become a “kind of comfort or elucidation,” she hopes.

“Girls get pregnant, you know, when they don’t expect to,” she states matter-of-factly. There is no reason to shy away from that truth. And Mulgrew is not afraid to bare all—to show her teeth.

It’s impossible not to see an actress’s artistry living in these pages, though, and it makes Mulgrew’s recounting of her most human moments all the more powerful. Take this moment, when she has just returned to the set of Ryan’s Hope very shortly after giving her daughter up for adoption. The writers had written her pregnancy into the show, and she was to deliver a monologue to her new child:

explode with her responsibilities at home. She writes about this connection to her character: “When Mulgrew suffered, Janeway picked her up. And when Janeway felt like giving up, Mulgrew slapped her into shape. I was put to good use in every way, and this saved me.”

But just as she’s able to portray her connection to this iconic character, she also notes an important contrast. In a powerful line, she writes, “I played Captain Janeway in an era that had not resolved the conflicts surrounding mothers and work.” On screen, she achieved exactly the level of independence and respect a woman should receive, but real life was not as simple. “I tried to write how I went through it and survived it but without taking myself off the hook for one minute. I really missed my children; my children really missed me,” she says.

Throughout, Mulgrew is brazenly honest. She is a woman filled with passion. She falls in and out of love, she makes mistakes, she goes after what she wants and builds her career, and if that makes her controversial, then so be it. She reveals this all without shame, and while her tone may be familiar, the character behind it is a brave one.

“I think this is going to be sort of like taking the luge… they’re just going to pop me in to that little thing, and away I’m going to go. I think I’m going to talk about my life a lot,” she says of what it will be like once her story reaches the world.

And talk about it she will, as her story begs to be told. In the book, Mulgrew asks her mother—who always seemed to get it right—if she’s doing right in life: “ ‘I don’t know, Kitten,’ she said, zipping up her money belt, ‘but I’ll tell you one thing—if it were a book, I wouldn’t be able to put it down.’ ”

A monologue about love, a monologue about courage, a monologue about, above all else, loyalty, ending with the words: “I will never leave you, Ryan.

We will never be separated. This is my solemn promise.”…My work done, I gathered myself, and walked toward the door.

Chelsea Langford is the assistant editor at Kirkus Reviews.

Born With Teeth was reviewed in the Mar. 1, 2015, issue.

Mulgrew is not in the business of dictating her life for her readers; she is reliving it, and this lends a vividness and immediacy to her narrative. “An actor studies human behavior, so all of these human beings whom I’ve recollected in my book and then regurgitated have been absorbed into my vivid memory as an actor,” she notes. “That probably helps me very much as a writer.”

Many of Mulgrew’s pivotal moments are explained not through hindsight or reflection but through dialogue, evoking the moment exactly how it lives in her memory. She recalls her first audition for Star Trek, an important day for many reasons: “ ‘I’d like to apologize to those of you watching this audition,’ I said into the camera, ‘it is not good work by any stretch of the imagination, but you see I’ve fallen in love and I can’t concentrate.’ ” This unscripted moment is perfect for showing the melding of her personal and professional selves. Of course, we want to hear about the early days of Captain Janeway, but Mulgrew is inherent to that character. She is in love, she is a mother, she is a woman balancing a career that is about to

Born With Teeth

Mulgrew, Kate Little, Brown (320 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-316-33431-0

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Homogenization is inevitable, but we are an extraordinarily varied species today, and Harcourt delivers an opinionated but always science-based account of how we got that way. humankind

HUMANKIND How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity

THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE

Hart, Gary Blue Rider Press (240 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-399-17523-7

Harcourt, Alexander Pegasus (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-784-2

A former presidential candidate and senator explores America’s mounting discontent with the nation’s political landscape.

In this loyalist manifesto, prolific author and American diplomat Hart (The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life, 2010, etc.) writes that our nation’s republic has become a “vast and cancerous network” of corruptive lobbyists and policymakers uniformly entwining special interest groups with partisan legislation. The author amply demonstrates personal disillusionment with America’s exclusionary national leadership network and how we have strayed from the original ideals and intentions set forth by the Founding Fathers. “We are not the same country we started out to be,” he laments. A self-proclaimed “political fundamentalist” and staunch proponent for the reformation of the “massively corrupt” congressional structure, the author intelligently appraises government first from a historical context, referencing the Constitution, the ideals of past presidents, Federalists, and even foreign theorists like Machiavelli. He contrasts this with an astute discussion on the decline in moral authority of 21st-century governmental policy and procedure, and he places blame on the country’s foreign entanglements, its accepted “burden of policing the world,” deteriorating social justice, and an imbalance of security and liberty—none of which our pragmatic forebears ever intended. Hart is insistent that the only way to improve our governmental track record is to restrategize with progressive thinking, the reconciliation of current political policies, and a divergence from the concentrated economic powers that have such an undue influence on members of Congress and other politicians. While his recommendations may read as easier said than done, and he doesn’t provide many detailed plans, the book is written with aggressive advocacy and hopeful intentions. Hart’s impassioned plea for reform seeks to empower political compatriots to rethink the direction of U.S. governance, thus closing “the gap between promise and performance.”

A proactive appeal to restore confidence in the American republic.

In his previous book, Harcourt (Emeritus, Anthropology/Univ. of California, Davis) wrote a definitive text on his specialty: Human Biogeography (2012). This book, directed at a popular audience, is a dense and often politically incorrect but lucid summary of everything you would want to know about human diversity.

Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The exodus, which was really a slow trickle, began 60,000 years ago, but these few hundred homogenous emigrants produced 7 billion descendants with wildly dissimilar cultures, appearances, physiologies, and even DNA. Evolution works slowly, but we can see its action over the life of our species.

All human babies once lost the ability to digest milk as they matured. Herders who began keeping cattle and goats gradually regained it. People who live at high altitudes—for example, in Tibet or Bolivia—develop enlarged lungs and increased blood oxygen transport. Small, thin bodies lose heat faster, so humans in cold climates grew larger and huskier. The dark skin of Africans protects them from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Northwest Europeans are pale because they need some ultraviolet to produce vitamin D. In regions where travel is difficult and tribes quarrelsome, cultures multiply. New Guinea has over 800 indigenous languages; Britain, 12. Evolution is not the only factor. “Humans are extraordinarily good at picking trivial differences to separate ‘us’ from ‘them,’ ” writes Harcourt. “Ironically, this irrationality is the key to preserving the world’s rich cultural diversity because technology, prosperity, and easy travel are a relentless force for homogenization.”

Unlike in his previous, academic book, the author makes all of this information comprehensible for general readers.

Homogenization is inevitable, but we are an extraordinarily varied species today, and Harcourt delivers an opinionated but always science-based account of how we got that way.

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STEVE JOBS Insanely Great

forced out of the Apple he had founded because others considered him so difficult. He wasn’t the computer whiz that his early collaborator Steve Wozniak was, but the marketing acumen of his passion for design and simplicity proved equally crucial in Apple’s transformation of the personal computer from a hobbyist pursuit into a paradigm-shifting commercial product. “Woz is the engineering genius,” the author writes in a kid’s scrawl that matches the rough-hewn illustrations. “Steve is the salesman with the big picture.” As she later quotes her subject, who saw Apple prosper beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, “I don’t think it would have happened without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.” Recognizing his own deficiencies, Jobs recruited Pepsi’s John Sculley to run the company: “While Steve knows himself to be quirky, tactless, confrontational, and insensitive, he knows Sculley is polite, polished, and easygoing”—though inevitably, there was a power struggle between the two. The narrative somehow squeezes Jobs’ important innovations—the iMac, the music empire of iPods and iTunes, the smartphone revolution, the iPad—into a breezy narrative that engages and entertains.

Hartland, Jessie Illus. by the author Schwartz & Wade/Random (272 pp.) $22.95 | Jul. 21, 2015 978-0-307-98295-7 A free-wheeling graphic biography of Steve Jobs.

The late visionary behind Apple and Pixar lent himself to caricature, and illustrator Hartland (Bon Appétit: The Delicious Life of Julia Child, 2012, etc.) takes full advantage. Her inspirational version of the “insanely great” Jobs is a misfit who refused to follow the rules or play well with others, who was as rebellious as he was smart. Eventually becoming one of the richest men in the world, he followed a spiritual path of asceticism, looking for gurus, seeking a purer truth than can be found in material possessions. Yet he showed a remarkable lack of compassion and empathy toward his associates and was

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A thoroughly researched excavation of an astoundingly important (and sadly sacrificed) spy for the CIA during the low point of the 1970s. the billion dollar spy

THE HOUSE IS FULL OF YOGIS

Nothing new or revelatory here, but the book can serve as a good introduction to Jobs and will impress with its concision those who already know a lot about him.

Hodgkinson, Will Borough Press/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jun. 5, 2015 978-0-00-751464-9

WHY INFORMATION GROWS The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

Adolescence meets enlightenment in this funny memoir, which details what happens to an awkward English teenager when his middle-class, middle-aged father decides to go Hindu.

At the start of this droll coming-ofage account, rock critic Hodgkinson (Song Man: A Melodic Adventure, or, My Single-Minded Approach to Songwriting, 2008, etc.) is a Jimi Hendrix–loving 11-year-old who has just moved into a newer, bigger home with his well-paid journalist parents, Nev and Mum, and his surly older brother, Tom. The folks have little in common; Nev is a patient, easygoing, well-respected journalist, while Mum is a loud, brash, well-paid Fleet Street doyenne. It was a rocky but solid environment that was destabilized when Nev became seriously ill—and had a blinding light vision that would lead to permanent family embarrassment. Soon after, he joined the Brahma Kumaris, an ascetic, female-led Hindu cult that proclaims the virtues of meditation, vegetarianism, and celibacy. For Mum, this transformation wasn’t a total disaster; she hated sex and was glad to give it up. For the author, Nev became the source of confused emotions; he loved and defended his dad, and he was also ashamed of him. The situation led to some hilariously described episodes, such as when Nev showed up unannounced at Will’s school, in regulation pajamas, to explain meditation to the class. (It didn’t take long for Will’s classmates to “start sniggering, whispering, and generally making it clear that this was something I would never, ever be allowed to forget.”) With a sharp wit that is never mean-spirited, Hodgkinson recounts his growing up and coming to terms with all the various characters in and out of his family.

A sweet-and-sour account of a family that is unhappy in its own unique—and very amusing—way.

Hidalgo, César Basic (220 pp.) $27.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-465-04899-1

An interdisciplinary theorist, Hidalgo, the Macro Connections group leader at the MIT Media Lab, invites us to understand the economy in an entirely different way.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, an outpouring of books—for example, J.K. Galbraith’s The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014)—has criticized the insularity of economists and their unwillingness to expand the discipline’s perspective. Now comes Hidalgo (co-author: The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity, 2014) with a lens wide open. Drawing insights from chemistry, history, biology, anthropology, economics, and sociology, he urges us to see economic growth as “the social manifestation of the growth of information,” “information” defined not as meaning but rather as physical order. Hidalgo’s nontraditional approach requires careful definition of a number of words—e.g., “knowledge” and “knowhow,” “entropy” and “computation”— and occasionally a new vocabulary (the awkward but useful “personbyte” and “firmbyte”). In the world as Hidalgo sees it, a Bugatti is “an uncommon configuration of matter” whose value (new vs. crashed) depends entirely on the configuration of atoms. As he progresses from atoms to economies, Hidalgo offers a variety of startling insights about physical objects as the embodiment of information; about whirlpools as “information rich”; about markets as incarnations not of riches but of wisdom; about the limits of once-productive networks like Ford’s River Rouge; and about the perilous consequences of a social group’s isolation. He explains why the human capacity to crystalize wisdom is “geographically speckled”; why modern products no longer remain strongly associated with particular regions (Champagne with France, clocks with Switzerland); and why a trip through the birth canal is akin to time travel.

Some readers, perhaps economists especially, will construe Hidalgo’s widely allusive musings as dotty dispatches from Jonathan Swift’s Laputa; others will delight in his novel, holistic take on the dismal science. (17 b/w illustrations)

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THE BILLION DOLLAR SPY A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Hoffman, David E. Doubleday (336 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-385-53760-5

A thoroughly researched excavation of an astoundingly important (and sadly sacrificed) spy for the CIA during the low point of the 1970s.

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (2009), Washington Post contributing editor Hoffman has strong credentials to tell the unheralded story |

of Adolf Tolkachev (1927-1986), a radar engineer who offered invaluable information on the state of arms technology in the Soviet Union until he was snagged by the KGB in 1985 and executed soon after. The CIA was scrambling to make a connection in the Soviet Union after the loss of the extremely productive spy Oleg Penkovsky for clandestine acquisition of technology for the West in the 1960s, though the agency was hampered by the “long shadow” cast by ultraparanoid chief of Moscow counterintelligence James Angleton, who believed the KGB was employing a “vast ‘master plan’ of deception,” and thus he trusted no one. Once he left in 1975, a younger generation of more enterprising officers trained in Berlin and other Eastern Bloc cities—e.g., Burton Gerber, who advocated for rigorous sifting of genuine sources from phony ones. Consequently, when a Russian engineer at Moscow’s Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering repeatedly approached American diplomats with his declared access to the development of a “look-down, shoot-down” radar system, they finally paid attention. Given the code name CKSPHERE, Tolkachev was motivated to photograph reams of priceless documents out of deep

resentment of the “impassable, hypocritical demagoguery” of the Soviet state. Inspired by famous defectors Viktor Belenko and Andrei Sakharov, Tolkachev also wanted money—the “six figures” that Belenko reportedly got, as well as rock albums for his teenage son, all of which would push him to take too many risks. Hoffman ably navigates the many strands of this complex espionage story.

An intricate, mesmerizing portrayal of the KGB-CIA spy culture.

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remembering a harsh, hazy, new york moment CLAY WATER BRICK Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least

That sex and modeling feature heavily in Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s (April 14), Brad Gooch’s new book, should come as no surprise to readers familiar with his work—they’re both aspects of his past that have been explored to critical acclaim in Scary Kisses and The Golden Age of Promiscuity. Yet this memoir is a marked departure from Gooch’s earlier works.

It is both unparalleled in its intimacy, focusing on his romance with the filmmaker Howard Brookner, and its universality, as a testament to the havoc wreaked by the AIDS pandemic, something he witnessed firsthand in Brookner’s decline and eventual death in 1989.

The idea of returning to that period had long been on his mind, but it was the city itself, the backdrop to their life together, that served as the ultimate impetus. “I moved back to Chelsea three years ago,” Gooch says, to an apartment within walking distance of the one he and Brookner had shared at the Chelsea Hotel, the one in which Brookner died. “I was having these daily flashbacks.

But then, at the same time, everything was so radically different,” he says. “It was Brad Gooch vaguely familiar, but altered.

It got me thinking about how we got from there to here— the smash cut, or the jump cut—from that time to now.”

It wasn’t easy, Gooch admits, to find the best approach to the narrative. “There are only so many ways you can say, ‘That was a wild club and everyone was zonked,’ ” he says with a laugh. “It doesn’t really communicate that time.” But as he continued to wade through old notebooks and letters, it became clear that there was only one way forward. “When I began writing,” Gooch says, “I realized that the heart of the story was about my relationship with Howard, and everything else was this fantastic scenery.” —James McDonald

Jackley, Jessica Spiegel & Grau (240 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-679-64376-0

Photo courtesy Henny Garfunkel

A memoir about how the Internet can help in the fight against poverty, from the co-founder of Kiva, “the world’s first personal microlending platform.”

Jackley chronicles how her life was transformed in the fall of 2003 when she heard Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, explain how he was enabling the poor in Bangladesh to free themselves from predatory lenders. Yunus’ account of his work turned the notion of poverty “on its head,” and his speech provided the author with an exciting new method for thinking about the alleviation of poverty. She understood that the poor are “not weak, helpless people. These were people who were capable, tenacious and resourceful.” Jackley went on to co-found Kiva, which enables people to lend small amounts of money, as little as $25, to businesses in countries like Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. The author describes how she began to investigate and define a plan that would lead toward her goal.

Hooking up with Brian Lehnen and his Village Enterprise Fund, she traveled to East Africa to survey the fund’s grantees and their cultures. In the aftermath of that trip, Jackley designed Kiva to work with existing microlenders, lend money online, and maintain contact through regular updates. As reflected in its mission statement, the company promised “to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.” Less than 10 people got the ball rolling, and their requests for loans were filmed and posted online. An email to friends helped raise funds, and the author’s venture quickly grew. Yunus’ 2006 Nobel Prize created further interest, which accelerated growth. But it was not all success. In Uganda, they fought against fraudsters and the diversion of funds, and legal and regulatory obstacles doomed her next business, ProFounder. In addition to her own story, Jackley includes folksy business lessons learned from her borrowers—e.g., why the roosters should eat first.

A charming account of how “to pursue opportunity and possibility where others see none.”

James McDonald is a British-trained historian and a New York–based writer. Smash Cut was reviewed in the Dec. 15, 2014, issue.

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HOW TO CATCH A RUSSIAN SPY The True Story of an American Civilian Turned Double Agent

OUT OF ASHES A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century Jarausch, Konrad H. Princeton Univ. (896 pp.) $39.50 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-0-691-15279-0

Jamali, Naveed & Henican, Ellis Scribner (304 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4767-8882-1

Massive but well-contained and richly detailed account of history’s bloodiest century.

Even confined to Europe, the victims of the 20th century number in the millions. Jarausch (European Civilization/Univ. of North Carolina; After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, 2006, etc.) examines the origins and effects of the bloodletting: in, among other things, “unbridled nationalism among the policy elites as well as the popular masses” and an equally unbridled belief in Social Darwinist notions that supposed inferiors were rightly destined to extinction at the hands of history’s winners. There were positive trends, as

The story of a millennial who became an informant for the FBI. Jamali is straightforward in setting up his unusual tale: “For three nerve-wracking years, I spied on America for the Russians...[as] a double agent working closely with the FBI. The Cold War wasn’t really over. It had just gone high-tech.” After a brisk opening in which the author passes classified training manuals to a Russian military-intelligence officer, he settles into a long discussion of his second-generation immigrant upbringing and aimless 20s. Although his French and Pakistani academic parents thrived by operating a research clearinghouse service, Jamali lacked ambition, until 9/11 inspired in him the desire to become a naval intelligence officer. “I was eager to do something more meaningful than running the business,” he writes. Jamali found an opportunity to improve his prospects in Oleg, a U.N.–based Russian intelligence officer. His parents had updated the FBI on Russian purchases since the 1980s, but the author decided to accelerate the relationship. He sold himself to his parents’ FBI contacts as an asset, able to prod the Russians toward illicit pursuit of classified military documents. At first bemused by his go-getter attitude, the FBI soon encouraged him, giving him tradecraft tips and a watch with a hidden digital recorder. After a long series of gradually escalated handoffs to Oleg, the FBI abruptly wrapped up the operation by pretending to arrest Jamali in front of the diplomat (who walked away)—to Jamali’s dismay: “I thought we’d been aiming big and thinking long term.” Although Jamali received his naval commission and rare plaudits from the FBI, the narrative feels plodding, padded by such gambits as discussions of his love for spy movies and exotic cars. Prolific co-author Henican (Amish Confidential, 2015, etc.) gives the prose a slick feel, but he errs in not developing a fuller look at the wider geopolitical moment to which this youthful spy wannabe was responding.

An intriguing but minor testament to the persistence of old-school military espionage.

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At once heroic and heartbreaking, this story leaves an indelible mark. the cost of courage

well. The years immediately following World War I, writes the author, showed a rapid growth in democracy, though within two decades, all but one “turned into nationalist authoritarian regimes.” So vast a canvas leaves Jarausch room to explore fruitful themes, among them the origins of the dystopian view that machines represent “a mechanized menace,” the stock in trade of science fiction from H.G. Wells’ time to our own. One does not have to read far between the lines to sense that Jarausch is sympathetic to the foundational ideals of the League of Nations and United Nations in abolishing the “nation-state as the basic unit of politics,” which, of course, never happened. The nationstate is alive and well, as is the demand for national sovereignty and the constant pulling at the edges of entities like the European Union (and the U.N., for that matter). The text can be eye-glazing at times (“The introduction of comprehensive secondary schools was a progressive move, but the requirement of political loyalty showed that education was instrumentalized for the maintenance of party power”), but for the most part, Jarausch’s study of people and states in conflict is both accessible and coherent.

Comprehensive and with a convincing closing defense of the best of European ideals as contrasted with the “prescriptions of military strength, unilateral intervention, unrestrained speculation, and social conservatism” that prevail on the other side of the Atlantic. (31 halftones; 12 maps)

to orient readers. In the foreground always, though, are the young Boulloches and their close confederates. Smuggling arms, recruiting friends, gathering information, enduring torture, tales of escape, secret knocks, Gestapo interrogations, fortuitous encounters, sabotage missions, clandestine apartments— all are part of their story. Their resolve and bravery and even the “romance” of their exploits are plain to readers but not to the survivors who knew too well the price the family paid. For 50 years they remained, even to their own children, largely silent about all of it. Thanks to a family connection forged in the war’s immediate wake, Kaiser has managed to gather all the painful details, and he assembles them masterfully.

At once heroic and heartbreaking, this story leaves an indelible mark.

THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS A Memoir

Keret, Etgar Translated by Silverston, Sondra & Shlesinger, Miriam & Cohen, Jessica & Berris, Anthony Riverhead (192 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-59463-326-3

A writer’s life amid tremors of war.

In his debut book of nonfiction, Israeli writer Keret (Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, 2012, etc.) chronicles seven years bracketed by two momentous events: the birth of his son, Lev, and his father’s death from cancer. The author represents each year with a handful of musings, some serious, others frothy. He recounts an absurd conversation with a telemarketer, for example; silly dedications he makes up during Hebrew Book Week; growing a mustache as a birthday present for his son; his lackluster efforts to exercise; and Lev’s many cute remarks. The best pieces are quietly moving. After a neighbor asked him if he had considered whether his son, then 3, would join the army, Keret was surprised that his wife had already made her decision.

“I don’t want him to go into the army,” she announced. Would she rather have other people’s children fight instead? Keret asked heatedly. “I’m saying that we could have reached a peaceful solution a long time ago, and we still can,” she replied, but not if Israeli leaders “know that most people are like you: they won’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.” One day as they were driving, an air-raid siren blared. Lev refused to lie down on the side of the road until Keret devised a game of “Pastrami Sandwich,” with he and his wife as the two slices of bread and Lev the pastrami between them. It was such fun that Lev wanted to play Pastrami “if there’s another siren...but what if there aren’t any more sirens ever?” he worried.

“I think there’ll be at least one or two more,” Keret assured him.

After a Polish architect built the author a minimalist house in Warsaw, reflecting his stories’ spare structures, Keret sat in the kitchen eating jam “sour with memories.” His mother grew up in Warsaw and became an orphan after the Nazis killed her family.

Gentle reflections on love, family, and heritage.

THE COST OF COURAGE

Kaiser, Charles Other Press (300 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-59051-614-0

A former reporter and award-winning author rescues the almost unbelievable account of one family’s experience in Nazi-occupied France.

Between the cruel caricature of a nation of collaborators and the purposeful, Charles de Gaulle–promoted myth of a country full of valiant resisters lies the truth for most of the French during World War II. In the same manner a young girl’s diary once vivified the Holocaust and the fate of 6 million for a postwar audience, Kaiser (The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, 1997, etc.) tells, through the Boulloche family, the story of lives turned complicated by the bizarre realities of Vichy France. He fills us in first on the toll World War I took on France, on the Boulloche family pedigree, and on the iconoclastic, republican spirit of the parents, Jacques and Hélène. Although by no means pro-German and for honorable reasons of their own, neither they nor their oldest son joined the Resistance. Nevertheless, their arrests, deportations, and deaths in the infamous internment camps all resulted from their silent approval of the decision by André and sisters Christiane and Jacqueline to actively oppose the Nazi occupation. Hitler, Eisenhower, Patton, Churchill, Roosevelt, and, of course, de Gaulle appear frequently in the background of this narrative and help supply just enough historical information 68

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GREAT MEN DIE TWICE The Selected Work of Mark Kram

the end of World War II when she was a Radcliffe student and he, an engineer stationed at Los Alamos. Her essays, as much as her poetry, reflect her outlook on life and the importance of her animals: her horses and dogs, many now buried near the pond that she and her husband dug so many years ago. Even those not attuned to the music of poetry will be moved by her work, which is very much rooted in the rural landscape. Her eventual move toward strong political statements took her from light verse to the poetry of witness. She grew up in the 1930s and fought to become a poet against the usual attitudes against women becoming, well, much of anything. A grant in 1961 from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study gave her the validation she needed to spur her career on. She became a staff member at Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England, and was named poet laureate in 1981. By that point, Kumin had ensured her place among the great American poets of the 20th century. The real joy of this book is the author’s love of all things country and New England.

Kumin and her husband experienced an idyllic life on their 200-acre horse farm in New Hampshire, “living a wide-open lifestyle.” Happily, she shared that life with the rest of us through her writing. (10 photos)

Kram, Mark Kram Jr., Mark—Ed. St. Martin’s Griffin (304 pp.) $16.99 paper | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-250-06499-8 paper

Edited by his son, Kram Jr. (Like Any Normal Day, 2012), this is the first collection of work from one of the more literary sportswriters of the 1960s and ’70s, whose mixed legacy leaves a hole at the center of this volume.

As one of the stars of Sports Illustrated during its golden era, Kram became most closely associated with boxing in general and with the fierce rivalry between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in particular. His Ghosts of Manila (2001), expanding on his coverage for SI a quarter-century earlier, putting the fight in context, was criticized by some who revered Ali because it showed his darker, meaner, bullying side against an adversary who deserved better in the public eye. The early sections of this anthology seem to write all around that fight without ever zeroing in on it. Kram shows what a complex figure Ali was and is outside the ring, both as a man and as a larger-than-life symbol.

As he writes from the champion’s hospital bed, in the epigram that gives the book its title, “Great men, it’s been noted, die twice—once as great, and once as men.” It also applies to Kram, who saw the greatness of his legend tarnished by the effects of alcohol, domestic and money troubles, and charges of ethical misconduct. After SI let him go, he wrote pieces for magazines such as Esquire and GQ on topics other than sports—including an essay on Marlon Brando that ranks among the book’s most provocative. Yet boxing and “blood sports” in general brought out the poet in him. He’s particularly evocative in a piece on cornermen and in a challenging assignment to profile Ali’s Muslim manager Herbert Muhammad, about whom he is warned, “You can sum up Herbert in three words...dull, dull, and dull.”

He isn’t, of course, the way Kram writes about him.

A solid introduction to an important sportswriter.

THE GENERAL AND THE GENIUS Groves and Oppenheimer— The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb Kunetka, James W. Regnery History (480 pp.) $29.99 | Jul. 13, 2015 978-1-62157-338-8

Former University of Texas vice president Kunetka (Shadow Man, 1988, etc.) follows the long road to the atom bomb.

In this nearly 500-page book, the author has plenty of room to explore both the planning and building of the atom bomb.

He begins with short biographical sketches of his two primary subjects, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) and Gen. Leslie Richard Groves (1896-1970) of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, in addition to heading the Manhattan project operation, also oversaw the building of the Pentagon. Although billed as the history of “the unlikely partnership that built the atom bomb,” that story is sometimes buried beneath the large cast of secondary characters. However, the narrative is often a fascinating look at one of the pivotal moments in both military and human history, and Kunetka deftly weaves together science, politics, and personal color to bring to life the extraordinary circumstances facing his subjects. The author also communicates both the urgency and the unpredictability of the entire operation. When Kunetka focuses on the interaction between Oppenheimer and Groves, he clearly illustrates their unique dynamic and the impressive productivity of their working relationship. However, given the sheer volume of information,

THE PAWNBROKER’S DAUGHTER A Memoir Kumin, Maxine Norton (160 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 6, 2015 978-0-393-24633-9

A posthumous publication of five essays by former Poet Laureate Kumin (And Short the Seasons: Poems, 2014, etc.), who died in 2014.

The last essay, written when she was 88 years old, shows a still-sharp, sensitive woman, happy in her life on a New Hampshire farm with her 92-year-old husband, Victor. They met at |

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Not necessarily for casual readers, but for the scientifically curious, a challenging book that presents ideas about the most intricate processes that link genes and energy. the vital question

ARMS AND THE DUDES How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History

those instances are few and far between. More often, Oppenheimer and Groves are footnotes to each other’s stories, while other men and women become the focus of each section. The book works best as an overview of the Los Alamos operation and the Manhattan project rather than an examination of Oppenheimer and Groves.

An accessible and expansive look at the development of the atom bomb, but those looking for a deeper understanding of Oppenheimer and Groves should look elsewhere— either Ray Monk’s Robert Oppenheimer (2013) or Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus (2005).

Lawson, Guy Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4516-6759-2

Or, the gang that couldn’t scam straight. “ ‘Do I agree with the Iraq War?’ Diveroli asked Packouz and Podrizki one night as they passed a bong around....No. But am I happy about it? Absofuckinglutely. I hope Bush invades more countries, because it’s good for business.’ ” You’ve got to like a book that charges headlong in the same dopey spirit of its subject, but as the story turns serious, so does Lawson (Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con, 2012), whose writing for Rolling Stone is the basis of this book. The subject is three stoners from Miami who dealt a little pot on the beach, avoided work as much as possible, and seemed destined for a go-nowhere future until the more ambitious of them happened on a government website listing civilian contracts available to award. A few clicks of the mouse later, and they were arms dealers—and soon implicated in a shadowy world in which government officials didn’t want to know what was happening as long as our allies were being equipped with arms. Being criminalminded but capitalistic as well as stoned, the trio decided to buy as low and sell as high as they could, turning over barely serviceable arms from former Soviet states to the Afghan army, among other customers. How things went south, as they were destined to once the trio got greedy and fell victim to avarice and betrayal, is the subject of Lawson’s rollicking yarn, which is oddly entertaining: mix up James Fallows’ sturdy but humorless reporting, 30-odd years ago, on the procurement shenanigans surrounding the M16 rifle with a solid dose of gonzo and a pile of coke, and you’ve got this book.

An eye-opener and an excellent job of reporting and writing. The only drawback will be the dawning realization that as bad as the three stoners were, the government is sanctioning far worse in its zeal for secrecy and deniability. (8-page b/w insert of 14 photos)

THE VITAL QUESTION Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

Lane, Nick Norton (352 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 20, 2015 978-0-393-08881-6

An evolutionary biochemist argues that while single-cell life emerged early in Earth’s 4-billion-year history, complex life arose only some 2 billion years ago as the result of a rare, even freakish, event.

Lane (Evolutionary Biology/Univ. Coll. London; Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, 2009) is known as a writer of popular science, but this is a rigorous work that requires close reading and the ability—and willingness—to tackle and comprehend complex technical processes, such as chemiosmotic coupling and the ATP synthase. The rare event was an endosymbiosis between two single-cell prokaryotes, forming a eukaryote, a complex cell. When this happened, mitochondria formed from the cell that was captured inside the host cell and continued to live in the new organism. The acquisition of mitochondria changed everything, greatly expanding the cell’s genome and volume. Mitochondria contain genes in their DNA that differ from the genes in the cell nucleus and that mutate much faster than those in the nucleus. This high mutation rate lies behind our aging and certain congenital diseases such as cancer. Mitochondria may even have given rise to sex, which is necessary to maintain the function of genes in large genomes. To aid readers, Lane includes line drawings, diagrams, and black-and-white photographs, many with lengthy captions that also require close attention. A helpful glossary provides definitions of technical terms. The author writes with enthusiasm, generously gives credit to other scientists in his field, and freely acknowledges that some of his ideas may be wrong. Curiously, an epilogue reports that in 2010, Japanese scientists found an organism next to a hydrothermal vent in the Pacific Ocean that suggests that perhaps that rare event of 2 billion years ago recently happened once again.

Not necessarily for casual readers, but for the scientifically curious, a challenging book that presents ideas about the most intricate processes that link genes and energy.

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LANTERNE ROUGE The Last Man in the Tour de France

investigations into the economics of everyday things. In the intervening years, the uncompromising writers have kept their freak flag flying, penning a series of equally challenging blog posts further aimed at discovering the hidden underpinnings of society. Here, the authors bring together a selection of those posts. The format, however, doesn’t always serve the contents.

Careening from the oil apocalypse to the benefits of cheating in sports is lots of fun, but the ride can be jarring without a contemplative break in between. In their original form, Levitt and Dubner’s blog posts went off like tiny literary land mines. But they allowed time to think and regroup. Here, they often leave readers feeling like they’re being repeatedly subjected to a series of head-snapping hit-and-runs. Wait. We should allow folks to vote as many times as they like in elections as long as they pay for it? What? Levitt and Dubner’s latest foray is much more successful when it reflects the lively online interactions 10 years of blogging have brought them—e.g., the time they sought out the best aptonyms on the planet and found a dentist named “Chip Silvertooth” and an undertaker named “Eikenberry.” Equally pleasing is their account of the episode in which the Internet deftly managed to turn the tables on the supersavvy economists when they attempted to find and congratulate their 400,000th Twitter follower.

Opportunistic, to be sure, but the authors provide plenty to revel in if you haven’t been keeping up with 10 years of freaky blog posts.

Leonard, Max Pegasus (272 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-786-6

In a race as grueling as the Tour de France, where do we draw the line between winning and losing? Writer and amateur cyclist Leonard challenges what it means to achieve greatness through the mythos of the sport’s underdogs.

The author provides little information about the competitors we recognize as champions of the sport, instead populating the narrative with a strange sort of idol worship. He resists the urge to discuss at length the exploits of well-known Tour de France personalities like Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Lance Armstrong; Leonard focuses on the tragicomic, unofficially recognized heel of the century-old competition, the lanterne rouge, the last rider to finish the race. Instead of Fausto Coppi and Hugo Koblet, the spotlight is on beautiful “losers” like Abdel-Kader Zaaf (among the first Algerians to compete in the race) and Tony Hoar. Leonard waxes philosophical between chapters titled like Jungian archetypes of Tour lore—e.g., “The Survivor,” “The Rebel,” “The Debutant,” “The Maverick,” “The Fall Guy.” In each of these chapters, the author highlights an episode (or episodes) in the unsung history of the lanterne rouge, filling the pages with romantic significance. The pace of his prose, like the Tour itself, can be a little fast and treacherous. For those new to the sport and its figures, there may be a lot of catching up to do. But there is much to learn from this book, which will prove amusing for cycling enthusiasts and interesting enough for sports buffs without a clue.

“Being lanterne rouge is about so many other things than being last it is barely about being last at all,” writes Leonard. “It’s about...doing what you can do to the best of your abilities and not giving up.” Indeed, it’s nice to know that there is a place in history for those whose great achievement is seeing it through to the end. (16 pages of b/w photos)

CHARITY DETOX What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

Lupton, Robert D. HarperOne (208 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-06-230726-2

New ideas and approaches toward charity.

Charity is often carried out with a compassionate intent and the belief it will lift people out of poverty. Yet, after decades of working with the poor, charities, and ministries, Lupton (Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, and How to Reverse It, 2012 etc.) writes, “I have witnessed firsthand how food, clothing, and money given to assist those in need more often than not produce unhealthy dependency and end up harming those the donation was intended to help.” His ideas regarding charity turn the concept upside down, as he suggests that more should be expected of the poor so that they wind up helping themselves rather than waiting impatiently for the next handout. In times of extreme crisis—e.g., emergency situations such as earthquakes or tsunamis, Lupton readily agrees that aid is necessary and should arrive rapidly. However, once the initial crisis has passed, the drive should be to rebuild self-esteem by asking those in need to contribute to their own advancement. Using numerous examples, particularly of Christian ministries, Lupton shows

WHEN TO ROB A BANK ...and 131 More Warped Suggestions and WellIntended Rants

Levitt, Steven D. & Dubner, Stephen J. Morrow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $25.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-06-238532-1

The Freakonomics guys return with another kooky and counterintuitive compilation of economic analysis that might appear wildly offbeat but just might be surprisingly spot-on.

It’s been a decade since Levitt and Dubner (Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, 2014, etc.) first set the thinking world on end with their provocative |

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An intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship. meanwhile there are letters

MEANWHILE THERE ARE LETTERS The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald

how many charity-based organizations have taken his ideas and restructured their methods so that people learn to care for themselves. He bases his ideas on the solid belief that to end poverty, one must be able to work: “the most effective method of poverty alleviation is economic development. Jobs...are the key.” Lupton shows how this can be accomplished in a variety of scenarios. His enthusiasm for this method is evident throughout the text and brings hope to readers that if more organizations adopted these practices, there really could be a better future ahead for all of us, not just the poor.

Radical new methods that could take charity to a new, more effective level.

Marrs, Suzanne & Nolan, Tom—Eds. Arcade (512 pp.) $35.00 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-62872-527-8

Tender letters reveal interwoven literary lives.

Mystery writer Ross MacDonald, the pen name of Kenneth Millar (1915-1983), first wrote to Eudora Welty (19092001) in 1970 about her novel Losing Battles; it was a “fan letter” thanking her both for that book and her mention of his work to a New York Times reviewer. That letter began a 13-year correspondence that lasted until Millar’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Edited, helpfully annotated, and sensitively introduced by Welty’s biographer Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.; What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 2011, etc.) and MacDonald’s biographer, Nolan (Artie Shaw, 2011, etc.), the letters offer eloquent testimony to the writers’ deep affection. “I’m so grateful that we understand each other and feel alike,” Millar wrote.

“Your letters are like tokens of goodness and kindness coming to me out of a terrible world,” Welty replied. In 1971, the two met for the first time in New York. “I feel that there wouldn’t ever have been a time when we wouldn’t have been friends,” Welty wrote afterward. But they saw each other only rarely: in 1975, both were headliners at a writers conference in Santa Barbara, where Millar lived with his wife. Although Millar wrote about her affectionately, the editors reveal that the Millars’ marriage was strained, and Millar apparently had hidden Welty’s correspondence, discovered by a friend after his death.

Both exulted in nature, especially birds: Millar noted whitecrowned sparrows and a horned owl, Welty, warblers, kinglets, and gnatcatchers. The flight of sandhill cranes, Millar wrote, “was the greatest natural sight I ever witnessed.” They shared news of writing, reading, triumphs, and loss: Millar’s daughter died; Welty’s friend was murdered. In the late 1970s, to Welty’s dismay, Millar wrote of a “shadow on my memory and therefore on my mind.” He soon could not write, even to his beloved friend.

An intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship. (16 b/w photos)

POPULATION CONTROL How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us

Marrs, Jim Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-06-235989-6

Conspiracy guru Marrs (Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?, 2013, etc.) describes a worldwide plot by the global elite to hoard wealth and reduce the population.

In a wide-ranging, alarmist screed, the author writes that “global corporate masters” have turned America into “a culture of death—from deadly drugs, food, water, and air to violent entertainment and blood sports.” We’re unaware of this turn of events because “we are being psychologically programmed by a mass media controlled by a mere handful of corporate owners.” Drawing on the research and views of both dubious and recognized experts, Marrs devotes his book to a litany of real issues and controversies—from the need for vaccination to overprescribed drugs to unhealthy foods—and consistently uncovers deliberate conspiracies by the powers that be, whose only concern is to make enormous profits. Drugs are at the root of growing youth violence, he writes, and are making the health problems of returning war veterans worse. According to some nutritionists, sweeteners and other toxins in foods may be part of a corporate-sponsored genocide. Marrs even dusts off the issue of fluoridation of water supplies as an effort to medicate the entire population without its consent. Other controversies covered include finance capitalism, the rise of a police state, and the general failure of the federal government to take needed actions. To solve these societal problems, the author urges citizens to take personal action and work through local governments.

This will undoubtedly put the fear of God into the same crowd that made successes of the author’s earlier books on the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 as an inside job.

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A simply told, deeply moving story, quite unlike the usual baseball book. molina

FASTEST THINGS ON WINGS Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood

MOLINA The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty

Masear, Terry Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (320 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-544-41603-1

Molina, Bengie with Ryan, Joan Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4516-4104-2

The frantic, rewarding life of a hummingbird-rescue hotline worker.

In this bright, engrossing debut, Masear, who teaches English as a second language at UCLA Extension, recounts her experiences as a rehabber of injured or orphaned hummingbirds in Los Angeles. Since 2008, some 20,000 callers have sought her help for birds in trouble.

Whether hit by a golf ball in Bel Air, or by a stretch limousine in Beverly Hills, or simply found floating in a Hollywood Hills swimming pool, the cute, charismatic little creatures invariably win the hearts of humans—and prove demanding, stressinducing patients. “I got involved in saving hummingbirds because their delicate beauty and poetic flight spoke to my soul,” writes Masear, who spends her summers advising panicky callers regarding birds in distress (“The birds are screaming, my kids are crying, and my wife hates me....What do I do?”), often conducting rescues herself. In a film-prop warehouse, she saved one trapped bird by duct-taping an antique butterfly net to an aboriginal spear. With a sharp eye for anecdotes—both bird and human—the author offers highly readable stories of birds like Gabriel, who was near death when she began his five-month rehabilitation, and an astonishing range of callers, from goths and martial artists to the woman who communicated telepathically with birds in her backyard. There are five species of hummingbirds in the Los Angeles area—the Allen’s and Anna’s are most common—and their numbers range in the thousands.

Masear describes their courtship practices, flight maneuvers, and migrations; her hectic rounds of half-hourly feedings; and her emotional trauma over birds she cannot save. For her own guidance, she turns to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (“Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things”). In the past four decades, Southern California rehabbers have released more than 10,000 healthy young hummingbirds.

Not just for birders, this captivating book brims with warmth, humor, and drama that will have wide appeal. (16 color photos)

An affecting memoir about a remarkable man who raised three sons to become baseball champions.

Fans have always been intrigued by baseball families—the DiMaggios, the Alous, etc.—and the foremost family act of our era is undoubtedly the Molinas. Brothers Bengie, José, and Yadier, all catchers, together have six World Series rings. All are known as consummate professionals and outstanding defensive specialists. With the help of Ryan (The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, Her Son, and Their Second Chance, 2009, etc.), Bengie Molina, the oldest, tells the story that accounts for their success.

For 30 years a factory worker, Benjamin Molina Santana, “Pai,” coached his sons and others on the field across from their home in Puerto Rico, teaching lessons about punctuality, hard work, humility, teamwork, integrity, and respect. On that same field, he died of a massive heart attack at 58. As a youth, he’d played second base “like a scorpion,” but he never made the minor leagues. What kept him from even showing up at a Milwaukee Brewers tryout in 1973? What kept this man, who appeared to love baseball above everything, from fulfilling his dream? For years, Bengie strove to win his father’s respect, working hard to achieve the financial and professional success Pai never had.

His account covers all the usual stops and stories attending any ballplayer’s rise through college, the minors, and his tenure with three major league teams. He includes some personal tales about his brothers, his own bitter divorce and eventual remarriage, but these are all incidental to his larger obsession: his relationship with and final assessment of his father. He comes to understand that he was entirely mistaken about his beloved Pai’s ambition, that it was likely no accident the Molina brothers all became catchers. After all, these are the men who, on the baseball field, are the coaches, the caretakers, the fathers, the ones who protect home.

A simply told, deeply moving story, quite unlike the usual baseball book.

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THE SHAPE OF THE NEW Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World

THE WEATHER EXPERIMENT The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future

Montgomery, Scott L. & Chirot, Daniel Princeton Univ. (512 pp.) $35.00 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-0-691-15064-2

Moore, Peter Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-86547-809-1

A broad survey of the ideas that have driven modern history since the 19th century—and on account of which millions of lives have been changed for good or ill.

According to Montgomery (Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research, 2013, etc.) and Chirot (Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious and National Conflicts in Today’s World, 2011, etc.), both professors at the University of Washington, these ideas are fourfold, resting in the single persons of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin, and then in the struggle between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the nature of the new republic that would grow from certain parallel and antecedent ideas. The first two are economic in nature, the third biological, and the fourth political. But all are political, of course, and the authors nicely move to depersonified history by examining deeper values: the idea embodied by Smith, for instance, that “individuals should have the freedom to make all essential decisions affecting their material and moral lives.” The authors’ argument is fluent and mainly unobjectionable; as intellectual historians, it is their bread and butter to maintain that ideas matter, and the ideas they enumerate have inarguably “structured the modern world.”

Their later elaborations sometimes seem a stretch, if by modern world one means modern ideas, which would discount some of their cases. The book is academic in outlook and attitude and sometimes in execution. The prose is accessible, though, and the narrative is well-written, made more interesting by the authors’ willingness to tangle with tough constituencies and mount tough arguments—against, say, the narrowness of religious fundamentalists or the aridity of “postmodern pedagogy and scholarship,” with their lamentable habit of reducing the love of and insistence on reason as a species of evil.

A pleasure for students of modern history, especially useful for those seeking an introduction to the broad field of intellectual history. Barzun, Berlin, and Needham would likely argue at points, but this fits squarely in their tradition.

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In 1800, no one had a clue about what controlled “the heavens,” which made the unlikely science of meteorology one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the 19th century.

At the turn of the century, the unpredictability of weather was often devastating. Storms tore through cities and upended ships without mercy. These conditions were perfectly suited to the mostly divine theories about what controlled the weather.

Despite the progress in fields including astronomy, geology, and physics, no one had yet unlocked the mysteries of the skies. This sets the scene for the arrival of an eclectic group of intrepid observers committed to decoding the weather. Moore (Damn His Blood: Being a True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution, 2012) writes about this band of ad hoc scientists with brio, and it’s hard not to be awed and charmed by their united “quest to prove that earth’s atmosphere was not chaotic beyond comprehension, that it could be studied, understood and, ultimately, predicted.” This diverse group shared a naturalist bent, and they included adventurers, sailors, engineers, chemists, inventors, and artists. The author argues that perhaps the most notable figure was Robert FitzRoy, who famously captained Darwin’s Beagle. An enigmatic and complex man, he went on to forge the analytical and social foundations of meteorology. By the 1860s, a vocabulary that categorized weather patterns had begun to codify, and the first storm warnings and weather forecasts were introduced. Enhanced by a revolutionary new technology, the telegraph, the weather shifted from an experience that always occurred in the present to a hotly discussed topic that transcended time and place. Moore complements chapters of readable scientific history with lyrical interludes reminding us that, even when deconstructed, the harmonies of the natural world cannot be contained.

Detailed and insightful, this book is as relevant as ever in this era of rapid climate change. (8 pages of color illustrations; 18 b/w illustrations in text)

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A brisk, well-researched look at a significant part of New York’s boisterous past. an unlikely union

AN UNLIKELY UNION The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians

81 DAYS BELOW ZERO The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness

Moses, Paul New York Univ. (368 pp.) $35.00 | Jul. 3, 2015 978-1-4798-7130-8

Murphy, Brian Da Capo/Perseus (272 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-306-82328-2

How two ethnic groups made peace.

Former Newsday city editor Moses (Journalism/Brooklyn Coll.; The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace, 2009) sees himself as “a social science statistic”: a third-generation Italian-American New Yorker, educated in Catholic schools, who married an Irish-American woman. Their 1976 marriage, he realizes, was not unusual, but a century earlier, it would have been almost scandalous. In this lively history of the clashes, compromises, and eventual bonding between two feisty immigrant groups, Moses looks at Irish and Italian expressions of religion, social customs, and family life; access to political power; competition for jobs; and cultural forces that shaped their images. Irish immigrants had gained a foothold in American life before waves of Italians arrived in the late 19th century. Although both groups were predominantly Roman Catholic, their religious practices were starkly different.

“The Irish shunned...loud shows of faith,” a result of persecution by the British; southern Italians, on the other hand, celebrated noisily, with feasts and fireworks that the Irish deemed crude.

The two groups did not bond in their churches, nor in the workplace, where they often competed for jobs, causing dissension, especially in hard economic times. Italians’ feeling of powerlessness was underscored by a criminal justice system dominated by the Irish. “Like later minority groups in New York,” Moses writes astutely, “Italian immigrants believed that police, judges, and juries were biased against them.” Taking justice into their own hands, Italians waged gang warfare in the form of the Mafia and Black Hand. The author offers deft capsule biographies of such figures as activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her Italian lover, Carlo Tresca; spunky New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his rival, the suave Jimmy Walker; Al Capone and his quietly elegant Irish-American wife, Mae Coughlin; and Frank Sinatra, who got his big break from tough Irish band leader Tommy Dorsey.

A brisk, well-researched look at a significant part of New York’s boisterous past.

A reporter for the Washington Post debuts with the forgotten story of a pilot whose B-24 crashed near the Charley River in some of Alaska’s most remote territory in December 1943.

At the outset, Murphy acknowledges a number of problems.

The pilot, Leon Crane, who died in 2002, was never willing to talk much about his ordeal; there were no other survivors among the crew. Later, the author writes, researchers have not been able to settle on a definite cause for the crash. Much remains unknown, so Murphy supplies what is missing, inventing dialogue (exterior and interior) and other aspects of the narrative. He also writes— sometimes at unnecessary length—about other crashes, other survival stories, other players in the drama, and other events in the region (the Klondike Gold Rush). He alludes to Jack London and “Bard of the Yukon” Robert Service, and he teaches us about frostbite, hypothermia, and other dangers of the North. Crane’s story remains a compelling and astonishing one. He survived in brutal conditions, principally because he stumbled upon a remote cabin that held all sorts of supplies—food, clothing (until the cabin, he’d had no mittens), a rifle, and a stove. He survived some nearly fatal falls through the Charley River ice and managed, at last, to find a cabin inhabited by a friendly soul who was able not just to comfort him, but, later, to introduce him to the man whose cabin and cache Crane had discovered. The author does some hopping about in time and space, periodically devoting space to Douglas Beckstead (an on-the-ground Crane-crash researcher who did not live long enough to write his own account), the failed recovery efforts launched by the military in late 1943, and the horrified families.

A gripping story whose grasp sometimes loosens in explanatory passages. (16 pages of b/w photos)

VENDETTA Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa Neff, James Little, Brown (384 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-316-73834-7

Seattle Times investigations editor Neff (The Wrong Man: The Final Verdict on the Dr. Sam Sheppard Murder Case, 2001, etc.) turns his attention to the visceral war of wills between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa.

This account of Kennedy’s crusade against corrupt union officials and organized crime may not be as cinematic as Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies or as darkly subversive as the fiction |

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of James Ellroy, although it does share a kindred spirit with them. However, by transposing these two larger-than-life characters and utilizing his own considerable investigative skills, Neff succeeds in shining a light on one of the darker corners of American history. The book opens on a critical moment, as Kennedy learns of the assassination of his brother in Dallas and Hoffa coldly observes, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.” From there, the story jumps back to 1956, when Kennedy was chief counsel for the Senate investigations committee and Hoffa was vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, using intimidation, threats, fraud, and violence to control his sphere of influence. Their conflict was inevitable, as Kennedy saw Hoffa as “weak, unbalanced, crooked and greedy,” while Hoffa considered the Kennedy brothers to be “ ‘spoiled brats,’ soft-handed Ivy League types who had little understanding of the working man.” Neff deftly portrays their volatile relationship through the McClellan Committee hearings in the Senate, where Hoffa displayed an intuitive ability to avoid telling the truth, all the way through the Kennedy presidency, when the younger Kennedy used his startling appointment as Attorney General to form the “Get Hoffa” squad to dig deep into the labor leader’s taxes and finances. At times, the book reads like a spy novel, as both camps used double agents, secret recordings, tails, and blackmail to keep track of their opponents. Ultimately, Kennedy is something of an enigma, while Neff paints Hoffa as having a grudging affection for his nemesis.

The sordid, sweeping history of what Kennedy insider Pierre Salinger dubbed “a blood feud.”

the supreme creature in the ocean for about six million years”; these big-brained marine mammals are “the oceanic counterpart to humans.” Neiwert adroitly weaves several intriguing Native American legends that honor the whales’ power and the natural world into his discussion of the critical role of modern evolutionary science. He probes the difficulties in discovering “just how intelligent” the orcas are and highlights many traits worthy of extensive study, including their communication methods and socialization among families and pods. This narrative is perhaps a bit long but accessible and persuasive. The author authoritatively presents his facts and will likely inspire readers to share what they’ve learned from his call to action to ensure the orcas’ survival. His tone isn’t alarmist or strident, but his message is urgent.

A wide-ranging, interesting book that should be required reading for school-aged environmentalists. (29 b/w images)

NOTE BOOK

Nunokawa, Jeff Princeton Univ. (336 pp.) $29.95 | May 1, 2015 978-0-691-16649-0 Literary-based reflections on and of the virtual age.

Nunokawa (English/Princeton Univ.), whose professional interests run the gamut from George Eliot and Henry James to Oscar Wilde (Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire, 2003, etc.), here excerpts favorite musings on random topics that happened to cross his mind daily from August 2007 through July 2014. Over this time period, Nunokawa used Facebook’s notes feature to post a daily entry consisting of a title or inspirational quotation, a brief personal reflection, a footnote, and an accompanying photo, all with the aim of communicating “some version of ‘me’ to some version of ‘you,’ as near and far as the closest heart.” For example, “3095. ‘Why this overmastering need to communicate with others?’ / Virginia Woolf, ‘Montaigne’ / I used to think it was because I was good at it. Now I think it’s because it may be my only shot at being good.” Though not deeply wedded to their chronology, Nunokawa’s posts have both an episodic and journalistic feel to them. Though best read in several sittings, the collected notes convey an urgency for audience, whether it be through deep existential contemplation or identification of common interests like soccer and Joni Mitchell. Because Nunokawa is quite introspective and revelatory about the unusually public medium selected for his diarylike, more typically private enterprise, one takes at face value his somewhat Whitmanesque belief that “the loneliness at the heart of my project is not mine alone” but “the hunger for a feeling of connection” that “flows from a common break in a common heart.” Looking to befriend the reader yet not exactly open a conversation, Nunokawa draws one in with these temptingly lyric essays while resisting the larger buffers of narrative or explicit chronological context.

OF ORCAS AND MEN What Killer Whales Can Teach Us Neiwert, David Overlook (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4683-0865-5

A champion for orcas convincingly spells out the threats to their survival, their misery in captivity, and what scientists can learn by studying them.

At the outset of this compelling book, Seattle-based journalist Neiwert (The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, 2009, etc.) plainly states, “captivity has been a catastrophe for most killer whales taken from the wild.”

Unfortunately, he writes, “you will never, ever hear about the endangered population of killer whales” at the marine parks where they are doggedly trained to perform acrobatic stunts.

(Readers might be shocked to learn just how popular these destinations are: in 2012, marine parks such as SeaWorld drew more visitors than attendance at Major League Baseball, NFL, and NBA games combined.) The author’s main focuses are the ethical concerns about orca captivity and breeding, but he also emphasizes the immense value of scientific research. Killer whales’ value largely derives from the fact that they “have been 76

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A smart book of straight talk where laughter and logic meet. gumption

INTIMACY IDIOT

An engaging multimedia project offering even more food for thought when translated to the linearity of the printed page. (95 color illustrations)

Oliver, Isaac Scribner (288 pp.) $24.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4767-4666-1

GUMPTION Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers

A gay writer reflects on his life as a single man on the prowl for sex and connection in New York City.

Oliver first moved to the city to attend college. But it wasn’t until after he graduated that he “started hooking up” with the colorful strangers he describes in this offbeat collection of wickedly humorous essays, sketches, and poems about urban life and love. Intimacy typically came in the form of one-night stands with men he found on Internet websites like Manhunt or mobile apps like “Grindr, Scruff, and Tindr.” The men—like the married lawyer from Connecticut, the “Broadway understudy under whom [he] studied for a night,” or the Australian flight attendant with a fetish for dressing up as a dolphin—were as unique as they were transient. When Oliver wasn’t scoring dates or sexting with men online or handing out his telephone number to the “bartenders, waiters and merchandise managers at Broadway musicals,” he was busy fantasizing about hot men on the subway. Hit-and-run as his relationships were, Oliver did occasionally think about marriage. Yet when he or his sex partners tried to communicate a desire for closeness, neither side could respond with complete acceptance. When the author tried to kiss a neighborhood hookup, the man “pulled away [and] smiled politely.” When a hockey player began calling Oliver out of loneliness and despair over being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, Oliver could only listen and offer no comfort. Only after a sexless encounter with another gay writer at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire did the author finally find an unacknowledged mirror for himself and his actions. The writer had plenty of opportunities for sex but not “plenty of people to confide in, people to feel close to”—just like Oliver himself, who was caught in the ceaselessly carnival-esque flow of big-city life.

In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments. (b/w photos throughout)

Offerman, Nick Dutton (368 pp.) $26.95 | May 26, 2015 978-0-525-95467-5

An actor’s comedic exploration into America’s most gumption-exemplifying citizens.

Offerman (Paddle Your Own Canoe, 2013), best known as the hilarious Ron Swanson in Parks & Recreation, delivers 21 profiles of the men and women he admires most. “I am always hugely inspired (and personally relieved) to learn of the hard work that was required of any of my heroes before they could arrive at the level of mastery for which they ultimately garnered renown,” writes the author, an ethic reflected throughout his examples.

From well-known historical figures (George Washington and James Madison) to more obscure men (boat builder Nat Benjamin, toolmaker Thomas Lie-Nielsen), Offerman smartly infuses history with humor, the result of which is an entertaining, educational reading experience. Though his tone may rile historians (“Young Theodore [Roosevelt] was, for lack of a better term, a wuss”), it’s a trespass easily forgivable for the comedic reward.

Surprisingly, however, the author is at his best when he momentarily deviates from humor to reflect on society’s more serious problems. From partisanship to homophobia to the separation of church and state, Offerman utilizes his heroes as entry points to explore a range of subjects. The success of this tonal shift is exemplified in the chapter on writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry, a chapter that Offerman notes contains “less hyperbole than I would sophomorically like to apply to it.”

Yet the risk pays off, proving to readers that the author is after much more than a chuckle, but concerted conversation as well.

Though a bit bloated—the literary equivalent of Ron Swanson after a robust meal at Charles Mulligan’s Steakhouse—Offerman’s book is nonetheless satisfying. His ability to vacillate between gruff history teacher and concerned citizen gives readers a reason to demonstrate their own gumption and follow him to the end.

A smart book of straight talk where laughter and logic meet.

MOB COP My Life of Crime in the Chicago Police Department

Pascente, Fred with Reaves, Sam Chicago Review (320 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-61373-134-5

A former crooked cop looks back on his conflict-of-interest life as a policeman and midlevel grifter.

Italian-American and native Chicagoan Pascente’s nonfiction debut, co-written with crime novelist Reaves (Mean Town Blues, 2008, etc.), is a rollicking mess of a wiseguy memoir that vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and |

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sins of a long-vanished criminal gangland of Chicago. Born in 1942 (he died in 2014) in a typically rough urban district of the city’s Near West Side, Pascente grew up with future “made man” Tony Spilotro (immortalized in Nick Pileggi’s book Casino), who would eventually be financially linked to Pascente’s future police boss William Hanhardt. While Spilotro went on to become a mob heavyweight running a casino empire in Las Vegas in the 1960s, Pascente served in the Army before getting an early discharge for joining the police force; he ended up working under Hanhardt, who would exploit Pascente’s gangland connections.

During his more than 25 years as a cop, the author may have spent more time committing crimes than preventing them. The book is packed cover to cover with Pascente’s pithy tales of the dirty deeds he and his corrupt cohorts (with cartoon gangster names like Johnny Bananas, Louie the Mooch, and Milwaukee Phil) pulled off for big money: insider bank scores, racetrack betting swindles, casino heists, mail and insurance scams, and plenty more. Pascente, for all his shady dealings, ended up doing very little jail time in a minimum-security prison for insurance fraud (although he did lose his police pension). Of course, his criminal curriculum vitae can’t compare to those of Henry Hill or Whitey Bulger, but Pascente comes off about as affable as any criminal could. In the end, he expressed a modicum of shame and regret over his weakness for the lure of easy money.

Not exactly a self-portrait of a criminal mastermind, but a somewhat worthwhile glimpse into the schizoid world of a corrupt cop. (25 b/w photos)

to hire her, and Phillips saw her own reputation rise. Along the way, she signed Robert Redford (“an actor who has both good looks and real ability”), Peter Sellers, David Bowie, and Barbra Streisand, among others. Planning to represent Liza exclusively, she resigned from CMA, where she had worked for 15 years. But Liza suddenly, and without explanation, dumped her, leaving her stunned, depressed, and unemployed. When friends invited her to see a musical production at the Actors’ Studio, she reluctantly dragged herself out of the house. That evening changed her life, and she decided to reinvent herself as a producer, starting with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

An unsparing look at the dark side of show business.

HOLACRACY The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World Robertson, Brian J. Henry Holt (240 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-62779-428-2

An introduction to a new kind of corporate management system modeled on the self-organizing structures of organic

matter.

Management consultant Robertson, founder of HolacracyOne, offers a primer on the system he pioneered, accompanied by procedures required for its adoption and the outline of a training program. The author’s program incorporates elements of traditional organization theory as well as inputs from David Allen, who created the “Getting Things Done” time management system. As opposed to a hierarchy, a “holarchy” is analogous to complex, multilayered systems like those which the author writes are “all around us in the way nature organizes itself.” He points to the relationship between cells and their containing organs, which “simultaneously honor autonomy and enable self-organization at every level within.” The author argues that his system will enhance productivity and reduce time spent in unwieldy meetings, and he provides ways to help overcome resistance to the new procedures he recommends and the inevitable fears roused by the adoption of these radical innovations. Robertson expects that such structures will enable individuals to define roles for themselves within the overall framework of corporate governance. With the use of his system, organizations can reduce the impacts of personal, emotion-driven conflicts and political infighting. He outlines how each autonomous layer should deliberate and define choices for action, within and between each element of his proposed assembly. Robertson also describes the mechanics of agenda construction and the roles of participants. The primacy allotted to choice and deliberation seems to undermine the author’s intent to imitate the form of complex natural structures, which, thus far, have not provided evidence of either. Nor has there been found a formal structure that can substitute for transformative individuals like Bill Gates, Andy Grove, or Steve Jobs.

JUDY & LIZA & ROBERT & FREDDIE & DAVID & SUE & ME...

A Memoir Phillips, Stevie St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-250-06577-3

Adventures among the stars.

Agent and producer Phillips begins her candid debut memoir by recounting three miserable years as assistant to Judy Garland, “a demented, demanding, supremely talented drug addict,” a self-destructive drunk who lived on a cocktail of pills downed with limitless bottles of liebfraumilch. Enraptured with Garland from childhood, Phillips quickly became disillusioned with the woman she was charged to travel with, minister to, dress, feed, and, most of all, manage to get on stage. Despite feeling exploited and angry, Phillips admits that Garland served as “the lens through which I have seen, lived, and dealt with my life” and gave her “the armor to face the world.” As this sometimes-venomous and often very funny memoir shows, there were many deep chinks in that armor.

After leaving Garland, the author became an agent at Creative Management Agency; her first client was 16-year-old Liza Minnelli, Garland’s “brilliant and lovely” daughter. Phillips took her under her wing, starting her on a dazzling career. After seeing her perform on TV variety shows, producers and directors clamored 78

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Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing. i, migrant

BIG DATA BASEBALL Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak

Despite some intriguing nuggets scattered throughout, this book is a booster piece seemingly based on science but proposing a remedy for not adequately specified conditions. (23 b/w illustrations)

Sawchik, Travis Flatiron Books (256 pp.) $26.99 | May 19, 2015 978-1-250-06350-2

NABOKOV IN AMERICA On the Road to Lolita

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writer Sawchik debuts with a celebration of the Pirates’ recent return to glory with the help of some computer all-stars.

As the author notes in his subtitle, the Pirates had been pathetic for more than two decades. But their resurrection began, he writes, when manager Clint Hurdle, who was in danger of losing his job in 2013 after two disappointing seasons, decided to embrace “big data”—the vast amounts of information becoming available about everything from the positioning of infielders to the grips that pitchers use on their fastballs. Sawchik employs several techniques throughout, giving the back stories of the various principals in the drama, clearly explaining the technological advances in the game (Money Ball and beyond), recording the strategies and successes that management employed and enjoyed. We hear about Hurdle, pitcher Francisco Liriano, and catcher Russell Martin. But it’s not just the players. Computer whiz Dan Fox, for example, also gets his due. The story advances as the team—more or less willingly—accepts the necessity of listening to what the data are whispering. Shift infielders from their traditional positions, get pitchers who induce grounders from the hitters, find catchers who “frame” pitches for the umpires, measure the specific skills of outfielders—these and other topics fill most of the text, along with a few accounts of specific moments in games and some playoff game summaries. Sawchik, of course, is a “homer,” so he rarely describes any mutinous mumblings aboard the Pirate ship. At times, the story reads almost like a John R. Tunis baseball book for boys (The Kid from Tomkinsville, etc.): Tunis’ optimism, idealization of character, and overall enthusiasm all are here. Most important is Sawchik’s realization, however, that the diamond will never again be so rough—datagatherers and -analysts are polishing assiduously.

Both a comprehensive and a focused look at how computer-recorded data are fundamentally altering America’s pastime.

Roper, Robert Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-8027-4363-3

The Russian writer chased butterflies, and fame, in America.

When Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) arrived in New York in 1940, fleeing war-torn Europe, he was a struggling writer who hoped to make a living from college teaching. Two decades later, after the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he returned to Europe a literary star. In this fresh and engaging biography, biographer, novelist, and critic Roper (Writing and Film/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, 2008, etc.) traces the trajectory of his career, friendships, and family life, as well as his indefatigable passion for butterflies. Drawing judiciously on Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) and Stacy Schiff ’s biography of Vera Nabokov (1999), as well as the writer’s correspondence, Roper illuminates such works as Pnin, Speak, Memory, and Pale Fire. Foremost among Nabokov’s new American friends was eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson, a trusted reader, who was instrumental in forging publishing connections. Although the friendship eventually ended in bitterness, Roper sees the two men as kindred spirits: “literary out to their fingertips, contentious know-it-alls; sons of upperclass families, their fathers distinguished jurists involved in politics; lovers of Proust, Joyce, Pushkin.” Because of Wilson’s stewardship, Nabokov found that “cultured, powerful people were magically available to him.” Fame, though, did not come quickly. Moving from one teaching job to another—Stanford, Wellesley, Harvard, Cornell—gave Nabokov, Vera, and their son ample opportunity to mount butterfly-hunting expeditions that resulted in a huge collection, which Nabokov donated to the American Museum of National History. Roper traces those journeys, illustrating the book with his own photographs of motor courts where the family stopped and various landscapes that they explored during their 200,000 miles of travels.

Although Roper could well have shortened his excerpts from Nabokov’s works and letters, they support his assessment of the writer as “an extremely talented fellow” but not, in every piece of writing, a genius.

I, MIGRANT A Comedian’s Journey from Karachi to the Outback

Shah, Sami Allen & Unwin (282 pp.) $24.95 paper | Jul. 1, 2015 978-1-74331-934-5

A Pakistani-born comic’s account of how he sought salvation in stand-up comedy and then found a new home in Australia. |

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Growing up in Karachi, a city bloodied by political violence, Shah spent most of his youth “reading, drawing comic books and masturbating.” The first time he left Pakistan was in the late 1990s when he came to the United States to attend college, major in English, and dream of becoming “Pakistan’s answer to Stephen King.” Never especially religious, Shah became a practicing Muslim after 9/11. But when he returned home, he found that the Islam he believed was anything but a religion of peace and promptly turned atheist. “My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just gotten an earring and done some drugs,” he writes.

After a stint in advertising that led him to “a deep existential crisis,” Shah found his way into journalism, a career he thought would help him make sense of the “bomb blasts, suicide attacks, gun fights [and] assassinations” that were part of daily life in Pakistan. Witnessing so much bloodshed had the added effect of eventually pushing the author into comedy. He joined an improvisational comedy troupe that earned a devoted following in Karachi and accolades at a Manchester theater festival.

Shah later went on to produce, direct, and host a short-lived news satire show called News Weakly. After the show was cut, he left journalism and returned to advertising while continuing to hone his craft. Determined to find a better life, Shah and his wife moved to Australia. There, he not only found the freedom to practice his art, but also became part of the growing national debate about the place of political refugees in Australian society.

The narrative is refreshing for its openness about religion, sexuality, and politics, topics that, for the most part, are taboo in the Islamic world. Honest and inspiring, Shah’s book is a reminder of how laughter is not only necessary, but also life-sustaining.

Humor at its most vigorous and unsparing.

long-term relationships with men in the flight industry; her ultimate goal seemed to be joining the “mile high club” via sex in an airplane at 5,000 feet (Smith’s induction ceremony took place precariously in a tiny Cessna). Yet much of the book also consists of Smith and her stewardess sisterhood either going gaga over muscle-bound millionaires or being picked up by all manner of desperate creeps while quaffing cocktails and partying nonstop in bars and hotels from New York to Johannesburg.

Although Smith’s portrait of herself throughout is (presumably unintentionally) as a figure of fun and easy ridicule, there comes a point in her marriage-minded mid-30s that she actually ends up a figure of pathos. After being cruelly used by a succession of millionaire jerks, readers may feel some respect for her when she finally lowers her ridiculous standards and marries a guy who sells gym memberships.

The literary equivalent of a wet–T-shirt contest, despite the bittersweet ending.

ANOTHER PERSON’S POISON A History of Food Allergy Smith, Matthew Columbia Univ. (304 pp.) $29.95 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-231-16484-9

A scholarly history of food allergy.

Smith (Health and Healthcare/Univ. of Strathclyde; Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD, 2012, etc.) writes that food allergy has been riven by ideological controversy since the word “allergy” was coined in 1906. Sure, the ancients knew that some foods made people sick. However, at the turn of the 20th century, little was known about the immune system, and all doctors could go by was patient reports of headaches or upset stomachs when they ate certain foods.

Moreover, the skin tests used to diagnose hay fever or asthma were unreliable in detecting food allergies. So practitioners split into two camps: orthodox allergists believed that few food allergies existed; others saw a cornucopia of problematic foods, which after World War II, grew to include food dyes and other additives. Some became “clinical ecologists” who added the dangers of modern environments and developed elaborate toxicity tests and elimination diets. By the 1960s, the discovery of the immune system molecules responsible for allergic reactions led orthodox allergists to increase their limited roster of allergycausing foods. Then came the peanut. In the 1990s, there was a rash of sensational stories of children dying within minutes of unwittingly imbibing traces of peanut or even food cooked in peanut oil. The resulting paranoia led to today’s bans on serving peanuts on airplanes and in other public places, along with educational alerts. But how do we account for the rise in peanut and other food allergies and autoimmune diseases? It’s frustratingly elusive, writes the author, who cites popular theories like the hygiene hypothesis as well as the hope for peanut desensitization therapies. But as a historian, he is more interested in a century’s lack of medical research to find answers than in defending

CABIN FEVER The Sizzling Secrets of a Virgin Airlines Flight Attendant Smith, Mandy with Stow, Nicola Plume (272 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-14-751598-8

A former Virgin Airlines flight attendant’s steamy recollections of international binge drinking, obsessive shopping,

and a host of affairs.

The latest in a long line of flight attendant literature beginning with the irreverent Coffee, Tea, or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses (1967), Smith’s debut memoir (co-written with Stow) recalls her time shagging and shopping her way around the world as a young sky waitress. This one features a level of sophistication relative to Geordie Shore and Sex in the City. When not relating high-altitude tales of annoying passengers, randy pilots, silly stewardess high jinks, or near-emergency inflight incidents, Smith regales readers with soft-core sexual details of the many physically dynamic but intellectually dim hunks she bedded over the years. At first, the author’s sexual escapades were mostly limited to 80

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A valiant, moving work of research certain to provoke vigorous discussion. nagasaki

NAGASAKI Life After Nuclear War

old dogmas and definitions, a situation he finds parallel to the history of psychiatry.

While Smith’s text sometimes reads like a doctoral dissertation, all that meticulousness adds weight and authority to the evidence of the serious shortcomings of a medical specialty.

Southard, Susan Viking (416 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-670-02562-6

Intense, deeply detailed, and compassionate account of the atomic bomb’s effects on the people and city of Nagasaki, then and now.

The generation of hibakusha, or atomicbomb survivors, is sadly passing away, as journalist and artistic director Southard (Essential Theatre, Tempe, Arizona) acknowledges in her tracking of the experiences of five who were teenagers in the once-thriving port city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. As the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb over Nagasaki approaches, the author aims to enlighten her American audience, whose largely unequivocal stance about the rightness of forcing Japan to capitulate and the ignorance regarding radiation exposure the U.S. government took great pains to promote have kept readers unaware, she believes, of the magnitude of this nuclear annihilation—“a scale that defies imagination.” These five teenagers, and many like them, had all been enlisted in the war effort, as had their families in Nagasaki, one of Japan’s first Westernized cities, containing the largest Christian population. One of the teens delivered mail, one was a streetcar operator, and several worked in the Mitsubishi factories that lined the river. When the bomb obliterated the Urakami Valley, where many of them lived, all lost family members and were horribly injured and scarred for life. Southard’s descriptions stick to the eyewitness accounts of these and other survivors, and they are tremendously moving, nearly unbearable to read, and accompanied by gruesome photos. She alternates first-person accounts—e.g., reports by the Japanese doctors who first treated the burns and identified the subsequent radiation “sickness”—with an outline of the political developments at the war’s conclusion. The author emphasizes the postwar censorship imposed by the U.S. occupying force in Japan regarding the discussion of the bombing or radiation effects (see George Weller’s First into Nagasaki), as well as the bravery of the hibakusha, who were determined to speak the truth.

A valiant, moving work of research certain to provoke vigorous discussion.

PLAYING SCARED A History and Memoir of Stage Fright Solovitch, Sara Bloomsbury (282 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-62040-091-3

A debut memoir by a health and medical journalist about the stage fright that forced her to forsake her promise as a musical prodigy.

Interspersed with her own story, Solovitch provides plenty of context on performance anxiety in general: its roots (both in the individual and in the culture), its history of treatment, and its pervasiveness. To Carl Jung, “stage fright is a primal fear, awakening archetypal memories of ourselves as herd animals thrust outside the safety of the pack. Our predators—the lions, the sharks, the audience—smell our vulnerability and hover nearby, waiting for that one mistake.” It is more common than commonly admitted among musicians and athletes, it often involves perfection that can never be achieved, and it frequently begins with the high expectations of dominating parents. The author suggests that the story of Moses, “who expressed understandable anxiety when asked by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt,” represents the earliest narrative of stage fright, a term that was first used by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Solovitch shows the frequency of its manifestations, from the pulpit to the urinal (“shy bladder syndrome,” more common among men than women), from the baseball diamond to the bedroom. The author discusses her interviews with Steve Blass and Steve Sax, two baseball players who were inexplicably unable to throw straight in front of a crowd (the latter recovered, the former retired). But throughout the wide expanse of this examination is the thread of Solovitch’s own experience, as she prepared to play piano in a public recital to commemorate her 60th birthday and gave herself a full year to make herself confident, consulting piano teachers, sports psychologists, and other musicians who have dealt with and overcome similar jitters.

For those who similarly suffer, and they are legion, the book suggests, the memoir offers comfort and hope.

THE QUIET MAN The Indispensable Presidency of George H.W. Bush Sununu, John H. Broadside Books/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $28.99 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-06-238428-7

A droning, 400-page toast to George H.W. Bush. |

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In his first book, Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and longtime chief of staff known as “Bush’s Bad Cop,” tries to set the record straight on his old boss, relying mainly on willful blindness to his faults, a flattering reinterpretation of his failures, and a gross exaggeration of his accomplishments.

Readers inclined to the view that Bush was underrated, or at the very least a decent, ethical, and kind man (no argument there), might be put off by Sununu’s starry-eyed perception of Bush as a leader whose life is a testament to his selfless love of country and whose grasp of domestic and international politics was so sure and subtle that no one saw how brilliant it was. The president’s slowness to act on getting rid of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was just an example of a master gunslinger biding his time for the right moment. In the author’s view, Bush’s actions in Desert Storm were sure and unwavering; the Margaret Thatcher who said, “Don’t go wobbly on us, George,” is nowhere to be found. The Bush who blundered so badly by saying, “Read my lips—no new taxes” isn’t the one that’s important; it’s the Bush who saw the error of his ways and nobly raised taxes anyway. All of this might be regarded as pardonable bias if the book were at least an interesting portrait. Although Sununu does have his share of anecdotes and some glimpses of life inside the White House, the book is primarily written in press release prose, thickly woven with cut-and-paste positions, platform planks, and robotic quotes from the commander in chief.

For true believers only—and even they are going to have a hard time lasting through this dull book, which actually encourages more skepticism than it erases. (16-page color photo insert)

enormous chasm between the very few elite—they had electricity, cars, Chinese roller skates, foreign delicacies, the ability to take trips to the zoo or circus—and the rest of the 23 million oppressed masses struggling to survive with inadequate food and appalling living conditions. The “robotization” of the totalitarian message has been relentless and all-encompassing. There are statues of the dictators everywhere, widespread denial that the North was the instigator of the Korean War, and a complete lack of acknowledgement of the horrific famine of the late 1990s. Within the frame of the visit, Sweeney delves into reports of those who visited and witnessed the dictatorships before him, from Ceausescu’s translator to IRA bomb-makers to gulag prisoners to defectors.

In a carefully footnoted and documented work, Sweeney has done his homework, though the snide tone grates.

(16 pages of illustrations)

THE RIGHT WAY TO LOSE A WAR America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts Tierney, Dominic Little, Brown (400 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-316-25488-5

A manifesto that offers alternative stratagems to waging war in a changing geopolitical landscape.

Maybe the supercomputer in the 1983 film War Games got it right about war: “The only winning move is not to play.”

But simply choosing not to fight isn’t enough in an age when America is already embroiled in two traditional conflicts, the blood bath of Syria, a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and the undying war on terror. In this natural follow-up to his previous book, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010), Tierney (Political Science/Swarthmore Coll.) doesn’t just analyze, although there are plenty of examples drawn from ancient and modern history. Instead, he offers a cogent argument and concrete strategies for minimizing loss of life by assessing the risk-benefit ratio of a given conflict. “First of all,” he writes, “we must realize that the outcome of war is not a binary like victory or defeat—where only victory is tolerable....Achieving a draw rather than a catastrophic loss may be a profile in courage that saves thousands of American and allied lives.” His strategy rests on three central tenets: a “Surge” to undermine counterinsurgency and lessen the risk of a fiasco; “Talk,” which uses diplomacy and negotiation to effect an honorable exit; and “Leave,” exiting the conflict zone with a clear plan for political succession and healing of veterans. Hawks may view Tierney’s platform as defeatist. However, when he uses historical facts to illustrate the costs of what he calls “The Dark Age”—in which America has suffered embarrassing defeats and inexcusable human losses in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—it’s hard not to think that there must be a better way, win or lose.

NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER Inside the World’s Most Secret State

Sweeney, John Pegasus (336 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-802-3

The mocking account of an English investigative journalist’s undercover visit to North Korea underscores the fact that the dire state is no laughing matter.

Embedded with a group of London School of Economics students in 2013 on an official guided tour to Pyongyang, the author was fired from the BBC after the dust-up over his subsequent documentary for BBC Panorama, North Korea Undercover. Sweeney has previously taken on some of the evil forces of corruption and power without flinching (The Church of Fear: The Weird World of Scientology, 2013, etc.). In this account of his strange and troubling visit inside North Korea, on and off the tourist bus, minded at every step by Mr. Hyun and the more sunny Miss Jun, Sweeney doesn’t even have to try too hard for laughs—e.g., his chronicle of the first day’s stop at the mausoleum housing the open viewing of the country’s first two tyrants, Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. (“How can you satirize this?” Sweeney muses.) Most glaring for the author was the 82

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From the renowned Peruvian novelist and essayist, a survey of where Western culture finds itself these days—which is mostly nowhere. notes on the death of culture

ALL DOGS GO TO KEVIN Everything Three Dogs Taught Me (that I Didn’t Learn in Veterinary School)

Tierney is clearly not optimistic about real change in the near future, but his useful book’s coda offers some interesting long-term strategies to avoid endless war in the future. (45 photos/drawings/illustrations)

Vogelsang, Jessica Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-1-4555-5493-5

NOTES ON THE DEATH OF CULTURE Essays on Spectacle and Society

Veterinarian Vogelsang pays tribute to the dogs that have played important roles in her life and professional practice.

The author punctuates the narrative with deaths, beginning with the untimely passing of her husband’s best friend, Kevin.

She writes movingly of how she tried but failed to comfort him and how their dog, Kekoa, succeeded. As a child, her family’s dog, Taffy, offered her the companionship otherwise lacking in her life. Vogelsang explains that she was an introverted child with few friends who endured bullying. With high grades, her plan was to become a doctor; however, marriage to Brian, her college sweetheart, reinforced her decision to pursue a less stressful career as a veterinarian. Taffy’s death occurred in the first years of their marriage. She made the fortunate choice of taking a job with CareClinic, a highly structured corporation with clinics across the country. This situation, she explains, suited her perfectly. One of her patients was Emmett, a 2-year-old dog with an allergy to fleas, whose owner wanted him euthanized rather than pay ongoing veterinarian expenses. She cajoled her husband into allowing her to adopt Emmett into their family, which now included a daughter and son. When her son was 2 and his sister 6, Emmett developed an untreatable cancer. His death left a painful gap in all their lives, and the parents had to explain it. Although they were not a religious family, they told the children about Emmett’s ascent to heaven. The title of the memoir is based on her son’s confusion of heaven with the name of their family friend Kevin, who at that time was alive and well. “The pain of loss,” writes the author, “is the price we have to pay for all the wonder we accumulate building up to it.”

A feel-good, bittersweet memoir with few surprises.

Vargas Llosa, Mario Translated by King, John Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $22.00 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-0-374-12304-8 From the renowned Peruvian novelist and essayist, a survey of where Western culture finds itself these days—which is mostly nowhere.

If the T.S. Eliot–inflected cultural criticism of the 1950s could be said to have a modern exponent, Vargas Llosa (The Discreet Hero, 2015, etc.), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, might best wear the crown. (George Steiner is close, but he likes physics too much.) Vargas Llosa is conservative, arch, and classical; he agrees with his predecessor that the world of nuclear weapons and iPhones is “a blatant manifestation of barbarism” and that culture writ large is what makes life worth living. The essays in this collection take a predictably dim view of Marxism and of one unintended consequence of democratization, namely the democratization and dumbing-down of culture—with the “undesired effect of trivializing and cheapening cultural life.” There’s a certain get-off-my-lawn quality to some of Vargas Llosa’s complaints, but just when he seems to be falling into tired golden-age reveries, he turns on the heat. If people were better educated, he suggests, they’d be more worthy of democracy, but for the time being, they can’t be bothered to be bothered by the pandemic corruption that governs the world. If people were more cultured, we might have better cultures in which to live. If capitalism were less venal, then perhaps the cultural world would be less the province of “thinkers and artists with mediocre or zero talent but who are very bright and flamboyant, who are skilled self-publicists or who know how to pander to the worst instincts of the public.”

Of a piece with late writings by Hilton Kramer, Hugh Kenner, and even Steiner; sometimes pat but offering fresh interpretations and sharp criticisms of things as they are.

A DANGEROUS MASTER How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control

Wallach, Wendell Basic (320 pp.) $27.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-465-05862-4

Never mind the zombies and vampires. Worry about the cyborgs and nanobots—the real things, in other words.

So how do we keep such creatures from killing us in our sleep? That’s a question that is occupying the attention of not just sci-fi writers, but also ethicists such as Wallach (Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics/Yale Univ.; co-author: Moral |

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Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, 2008), who works the rich vein explored by Edward Tenner’s and Donald Norman’s looks at the Murphy’s Law–ish world of unintended consequences wrought by human design. Tinkering with the deepest levels of subatomic particles may produce a big bang sufficient to end our existence; building ever smarter robots may produce one so smart that the robots decide that humans are pests. On that score, Wallach notes that though Isaac Asimov’s laws of robots assert that robots may not hurt us, “in story after story, Asimov illustrates how difficult it would be to design robots that follow these simple ethical rules.” Lest none of the current generation of robot designers even thinks about these things, Wallach looks at some of the overall ethical problems regarding complex systems, reviews hopeful developments in the field of resilience engineering, and generally advocates a more careful approach to building and thinking about things that may kill us, whether meant to do so or not. Figuring nicely in his discussion is London’s “Wibbly Wobbly Bridge,” which illustrates the point that “mechanical systems are naturally prone to move from orderly to chaotic behavior.” Alas, human systems do as well, which occasions his call for better monitoring, modeling, and imagining the what-ifs.

Wallach describes himself as a “friendly skeptic” with respect to some aspects of technology, but readers may incline to gloom after reading all the ways things technological can go south. A well-mounted argument that deserves wide consideration.

living life to the fullest.” More seriously, not to have accepted the invitation would have been like saying, “all Germans are inherently evil.” Although she has had phenomenal success on radio and TV, her role as Dr. Ruth came about by chance when she was in her 50s as an offshoot of successful guest appearances. The author prides herself most on her academic career.

For many years, she taught graduate students at Princeton and Yale, and she currently teaches a course at Columbia Teacher’s College on family and media. Her warmth, wit, and wisdom shine through this lively account of a life well-lived.

A joy for her many fans, old and new.

HUSH NOW, BABY

Williams, Angela W. Texas Review Press (360 pp.) $24.95 paper | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-68003-034-1 An adoring view of a childhood nanny in Pinopolis, South Carolina, that does not disguise the ugly specter of 1950s segregation.

Williams, a former longtime professor of English at The Citadel, in Charleston, writes of growing up in the Deep South with both conviction and a sense of deep irony. The author was essentially raised by the African-American “help,” enlisted to take care of her when she was born in 1941. Eva Edwards Motte Aiken worked for the Williams family for 20 years, running a household consisting of three children and the disputatious, well-groomed parents who would eventually divorce. Eva was devoutly Christian and full of love and joy, unlike Williams’ own mother, Clara Lee, a college-educated, privileged white Southern girl and teacher who had her pick of husbands yet remained hard-shelled, unaffectionate, and undemonstrative toward her children. While Eva ran the household, Williams’ father, Buster, hailing from a long line of preachers, did his best to dismantle it, drinking heavily, squandering the inherited farm-supply business, beating the children, and running with women. As this is a Southern memoir, two themes predominate: family roots somnambulate spaciously, and the steely determination of the Southern female proves that it is not to be underestimated. As Buster continued his downward slide and stumbled along in appalling drunkenness, Eva and Clara Lee reshuffled the household. Clara Lee took command of the family business and eventually divorced the drunk, philandering Buster—even though divorce was fairly scandalous at that time in the South.

Meanwhile, writes the author, “the tectonic plates underneath us were moving,” politically, socially, and personally. The author, while not a direct participant in civil rights activism, demonstrates enormous sympathy for the cause and puts Eva squarely in the narrative’s front seat.

An unabashedly emotional narrative that only occasionally requires readers to bushwhack through thick vines of memory.

THE DOCTOR IS IN Dr. Ruth on Love, Life, and Joie de Vivre

Westheimer, Ruth K. with Lehu, Pierre A. Amazon Publishing (222 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4778-2960-8

An exuberant celebration of life by America’s favorite octogenarian sex guru.

Westheimer (Dr. Ruth’s Guide for the Alzheimer’s Caregiver, 2012, etc.) examines the basis for her resiliency and irrepressible joie de vivre despite the trauma of having been separated from her family at age 10 and the vicissitudes of age. As one of the last German Jewish children to escape the Holocaust, she was sent to live in a Swiss orphanage. Faced with the reality that her family had been killed and an ultimatum from the Swiss to leave the country, she went to Israel. She moved to France when the Sorbonne offered her an opportunity to pursue a higher education and then to the United States, where she earned a doctorate at Columbia University Teacher’s College. She has been married three times, with two ending in divorce and the third with the untimely death of her husband. Her secret for maintaining a joyful outlook on life is not in suppressing the negative but not in dwelling on it, either. Westheimer also writes about how she was grand marshal in New York City’s German-American Steuben Parade.

After all, she quips, Hitler “committed suicide; meanwhile, I’m 84

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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adams, Carolyn Lee Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jul. 14, 2015 978-1-4814-2262-8 978-1-4814-2264-2 e-book

BOATS FOR PAPA by Jessixa Bagley...................................................87 TOMMY by Karen Blumenthal............................................................ 89 OUT OF THE WOODS by Rebecca Bond..............................................91 FOULSHAM by Edward Carey............................................................93 8 by Elisha Cooper............................................................................... 94 THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS by Jane Kelley...........101 THE CURIOUS WORLD OF CALPURNIA TATE

by Jacqueline Kelly..............................................................................101 A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES by Patrice Kindl....................................... 103 FINDING AUDREY by Sophie Kinsella.............................................. 103 THE ASTROLOGER’S DAUGHTER by Rebecca Lim........................ 104 INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani.........................................105 SCHOOL FOR SIDEKICKS by Kelly McCullough.............................106 FIREFLY HOLLOW by Alison McGhee; illus. by Christopher Denise................................................................ 107 BINNY IN SECRET by Hilary McKay; illus. by Micah Player........ 107

Can 17-year-old Ruth’s relentless drive to win save her from a serial killer?

When she’s competing or training Tucker, her horse, Ruth Carver pushes herself to the limit to be the best. In fact, the other girls who take lessons from her mother at the stable, part of Ruth’s family’s farm, call Ruth “Ruthless.” Waking in a dark vehicle and sure she has a concussion, Ruth knows she’s been kidnapped and vows to follow her sheriff grandfather’s advice to do anything to escape. When she meets her wolflike abductor and learns she’s not his first victim and that he wants to show her the error of her high-and-mighty ways, Ruth knows this fight will take every ounce of resolve and smarts. She escapes, naked, into the Blue Ridge Mountains’ wilderness, but the “Wolfman” has plans to get his seventh victim back. Seattle screenwriter and sometime stand-up comic Adams’ solidenough debut plumbs the depths of serial-killer and bitchy-teen psychology in alternating chapters of back story that trade off with Ruth’s present-tense narration of her harrowing experience. Ruth is a strong character, but her nickname fits, and even in extremis she may be more unlikable than sympathetic. Several high-adrenaline set pieces dot this at-times improbable and repetitive thriller.

A between-books read for avid fans of survival fiction and serial-killer tales. (Thriller. 14-18)

MORE HAPPY THAN NOT by Adam Silvera.................................... 113

ARE WE THERE, YETI?

Anstee, Ashlyn Illus. by the author Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-4814-3089-0 978-1-4814-3090-6 e-book

TOMMY The Gun That Changed America

Blumenthal, Karen Roaring Brook (240 pp.) $19.99 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-62672-084-8

Good things come to those who wait.

A colorful, multiracial class greets Yeti, the bus driver: “Where are we going, Yeti?” “It’s a surprise!” he announces.

And so everyone piles into a school bus for a ride down what appears to be a never-ending road. They traverse a variety of bright landscapes: a packed city playground; a sandy stretch |

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on the passing of sir terry pratchett Let us join hands and cry, “Waily, waily!” at the passing of Sir Terry Pratchett, a writer whose ability to elicit giggles and guffaws from his readers was equaled only by his passionate love for flawed humanity.

I came late to Pratchett, I must confess. I did not grow up on Discworld, and I have not actually read any of his books for adults. But I have read many of his books for children, and each one leaves me immensely grateful for Pratchett’s genius and terribly sad that it has been silenced. He specialized in creating characters who grabbed readers with their sheer likability and then led them on deceptively light explorations of basic human truths.

It’s Tiffany Aching who stands out for me as Pratchett’s finest, most human creation. I watched her grow up, from the 9-year-old who ventured into fairyland armed only with a skillet to rescue her whiny baby brother in The Wee Free Men to the almost-16-year-old of I Shall Wear Midnight, when she has come into her own as a witch but not yet as a young woman. Her hard-won coming of age is characterized by grief and loneliness and also by a surpassing love for the people she serves.

Mind you, even as Pratchett forced readers to grapple with big ideas, he kept them in stitches, as in The Wee Free Men, when Rob Anybody Feegle tries to explain pictsie cosmology to Tiffany: “We wuz alive. Then we wuz good boys back in the land o’ the livin’, and so when we died there we wuz borned into this place,” a heaven “just as advertised!

Terry Pratchett Lovely sunshine, good huntin’, nice pretty flowers, and wee burdies goin’ cheep,” with the fightin’, an’ the stealin’, an’ the drinkin’—“Everythin’ laid on, even things to fight!” (I would submit that you haven’t really had fun until you’ve read Feegle dialogue aloud. Try it.)

Happily, readers will get one more adventure with Tiffany before saying goodbye to her, as we have to her creator.

The fifth book featuring her, The Shepherd’s Crown, is tentatively scheduled to publish this coming October. Then we can all cry “Waily!” one more time. —V.S.

where children and animals play and grown-ups lie belly-up under beach umbrellas; a mountainside adorned with skiing ducks and a sleeping unicorn. Different countrysides emerge with every spread. At a point when the class declares hunger, thirst, boredom, and a need for bathroom stops, Yeti finally announces that they have indeed arrived. But they can’t be in the right place. Their puzzling destination is still, cold, and white—the obverse of the bustling landscapes they’ve crossed.

“This is it?” asks an apprehensive boy—and then a group of young yetis emerge from their cave. The class, now wearing mittens and each paired up with a yeti buddy, frolics in the snow.

One set forms snow angels; another builds a snow-yeti, while another group initiates a snowball fight. Employing a combination of expressive illustrations and simple dialogue in bubbles, Anstee delivers a simple, satisfying, if low-key debut.

A nifty take on the perennial question “Are we there, yet(i)?” and a prerequisite read-aloud before a first class field trip. (Picture book. 4-8)

IRA’S SHAKESPEARE DREAM

Armand, Glenda Illus. by Cooper, Floyd Lee & Low (40 pp.) $18.95 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-62014-155-7

In the 1800s, an African-American boy dreamed of performing on stage and found success in Europe.

Ira Aldridge was a noted and popular Shakespearean actor in England and on the Continent, excelling in the Bard’s dramatic roles. Born to free black parents in New York City in 1807, he soon realized that America would not nurture his dreams, so he sailed for England. Success was not easy, but it did come.

Aldridge, ever mindful of slavery at home, would talk to audiences after his performances and raise money for abolitionists.

Armand presents the narrative in an easygoing style with imagined dialogue and scenes, focusing both on Aldridge’s childhood, when the beauty of Shakespeare’s words first enthralled him, and his later stage performances. Occasional quotes from Shakespeare add to the theatrical flavor. Cooper’s signature art style—oil wash with kneaded erasures—captures dramatic scenes from The Merchant of Venice and Othello, with shades of yellow effectively mimicking stage lighting. All in all, it’s a fine introduction for children to yet another distinguished name in the realm of African-American arts.

Shakespeare, racial discrimination, and strong doses of inspiration and determination—all in one notable life. (photograph, afterword, quotation sources, books, and websites) (Picture book/biography. 6-9)

Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor.

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The simplicity of the artwork enhances the quiet, meaning-drenched moments. boats for papa

OF ENEMIES AND ENDINGS

Bach, Shelby Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-4424-9787-0 978-1-4424-9788-7 e-book Series: Ever Afters, 4 Finally 14, Rory Landon gets to complete her own tale, taking on the Snow Queen and all her evil allies with the help of her classmates at the Ever After School.

In this fairy-tale world, first introduced in Of Giants and Ice (2012), rising ninth-grader Rory stands out at Ever After School: her tale is unwritten. She only knows the beginning, the part that says that in the month she turns 14 she will meet winter, death, and despair and hold the fate of magic in her hands.

There’s plenty of all that in this action-packed fantasy. The special relationship Rory thought she had with half-Fey classmate Chase seems to have evaporated; he spends all his time with Adelaide and misses important fights. The Snow Queen is amassing allies; she invades the formerly safe area of the school and threatens the world of humans. Rory teaches her special brand of fighting and goes out on one mission after another, skirmishes that lead up to the climactic battle. Bach balances 21st-century adolescent angst with self-aware fairy-tale tropes for a fizzy if formulaic read. Readers new to this fairy-tale world may find it hard to catch up, but those who’ve followed this sword-wielder through three previous volumes will be as pleased to read the end of her tale as Rory is.

A satisfying conclusion to a sword-and-sorcery series with a feminist fairy-tale twist. (Fantasy. 9-13)

BOATS FOR PAPA

Bagley, Jessixa Illus. by the author Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-62672-039-8 An anthropomorphic beaver child makes driftwood boats and sets them to sea, hoping they’ll reach his father, who has passed away.

Buckley and his mama “didn’t have much, but they always had each other.” Their house by the ocean is small and spare, but because of this, items of great import are visible: a family portrait, a snapshot of a moment at the beach, Buckley’s artwork.

Buckley spends his days exploring the beach, finding serenity and joy in the natural world. From its driftwood he makes a boat for Papa, casting it off on his birthday with a note: “For Papa.

Love Buckley.” This physical connection, with its message of love and longing, inspires Buckley to continue to create. With practice and care he learns to make wondrous boats, sending his best ones to Papa. Repeat reads reveal how deeply Mama treasures and supports Buckley, how much she wants to make life beautiful and full of wonder for him, and how much he |

appreciates her in turn. The simplicity of the artwork enhances the quiet, meaning-drenched moments—a solitary walk under the moonlight; the reassurance of a hand held; the warmth of a goodnight kiss. Done in washes of color in a gentle, earthy palette, the ink drawings have an honesty and earnestness worthy of the story.

Heartbreaking and hopeful, innocent and wise, a gentle story about healing and finding connection—both in the past and present. (Picture book. 4- 7)

ALIVE

Baker, Chandler Hyperion (368 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-4847-0683-1 A young woman’s life-saving heart transplant leaves her feeling like an outsider in her own life until she meets a new guy with whom she experiences an undeniable magnetism.

Stella is grateful to have survived surgery, but afterward she struggles with her family’s and friends’ tendency to treat her with kid gloves. Worse, she’s plagued by a searing, inexplicable pain that strikes her at exactly the same time each day, making her doubt her sanity. So when gorgeous Levi arrives at her insular private Seattle high school and vigorously pursues her, she’s more than ready for the distraction.

Being around him seems to produce an actual physical relief that mixes into their steamy attraction. Stella’s descent into a haze so unlike her normal behavior that it worries her friends is believable, as are the story’s developing chills. Characters are well-developed, including friends Henry (who seems to want more than just friendship) and tough, bawdy Brynn, who has a spot-on sarcastic edge that will be recognizable to many teens: “Okay, lovebird. Stop making me want to vom and don’t forget to use protection.” In the end, the plotting is largely predictable, but it packs in some authentic scares.

Plentiful blood-slicked scenes will please horror fans, but the eerie tone surrounding the central mystery is what works best in this supernatural thriller. (Thriller. 14-18)

WHAT’S THE TIME, WILFRED WOLF?

Barrah, Jessica Illus. by Smallman, Steve QEB Publishing (24 pp.) $15.95 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-60992-742-4 Series: QEB Storytime

Oh, the problems you can have when you can’t tell time!

Wilfred Wolf is thrilled to be invited to Ella’s party, but how will he know when it’s 3:00? He doesn’t want to miss a thing!

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As the story progresses, Benway peels away the surface and digs down to the raw emotions. emmy & oliver

Maybe his friends can help. But Boris Bear’s cuckoo clock startles Wilfred, who not only drops his lunch, but the clock as well. Now what? Amelia Squirrel offers to lend Wilfred her digital watch, but he learns the hard way that watches and water don’t mix. Oscar Owl’s solution sees Wilfred knocking on Ella’s door at 3 a.m., and Henry Rooster only greets the dawn—no special requests. Exhausted, Wilfred goes home and sleeps until afternoon, when his friends knock on his door and teach him to tell time by drawing a clock face on the ground and take him to the party, where he has a fantastic time. This lone double-page spread is the only instruction in telling time that readers will get, though Barrah incorporates many different types of timepieces and ways of telling time—by the sunrise, by when you are tired or hungry, etc. Unaddressed is Wilfred’s destruction of so many timepieces. Smallman’s anthropomorphized characters exude friendly enthusiasm. Backmatter includes a page of questions and activities for adults to share with readers.

Not the best teaching tool, though it does address aspects of time often left out of other books on time-telling.

(Picture book. 4- 7)

THE STELLOW PROJECT

Becker, Shari Skyscape (330 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-4778-2935-6

A pair of teenagers uncovers familial secrets after environmental terrorists wreak havoc on New York City.

As a killer storm approaches Manhattan, Lilah Stellow’s father send her and her sister, Flori, to the family’s cabin upstate, promising to meet them there. Days pass, and her father never arrives, leaving the girls with nothing to hide behind when a mysterious agency takes them to a scientific compound that is isolated from the rest of the world and promises answers to their father’s whereabouts. On this reserve, Lilah grows close to Daniel, the son of her father’s greatest scientific rival. Together, the two teens dig into their parents’ mutual past and hope to find answers to questions that have plagued them all their lives.

The ensuing story is reasonably exciting but is bogged down by the book’s high page count. The plot doesn’t kick into high gear until Page 74, forcing readers to plow through a circuitous, overpopulated setup. Once events are truly underway, the book improves. Lilah has a solid emotional journey, one that Becker illuminates well. Some of the mystery elements are less gracefully handled, and the obligatory-feeling romance is only mildly diverting, however.

Rough spots in the plotting drag down picture-book author Becker’s debut for teens. (Thriller. 12-16)

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EMMY & OLIVER

Benway, Robin HarperTeen (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-06-233059-8 978-0-06-233061-1 e-book A girl loses her best friend when he’s kidnapped by his father at 7 and must cope when he returns 10 years later.

After constantly wondering about his fate for a decade, at first Emmy doesn’t know how to approach Oliver when he returns, but soon their former friendship becomes a romance. However, family difficulties persist. Oliver can’t fit in with his mother and her new family, feeling as though he’s been “kidnapped all over again.”

Emmy’s parents have overprotected her to the extent that she lies to them about her surfing and even applying to college, triggering near hysteria in her mother when she is found out.

Meanwhile, they also deal with their friends, who suffer more typical adolescent traumas. As the story progresses, Benway peels away the surface and digs down to the raw emotions the teens and their families feel, focusing on Emmy’s family as seen from the inside while watching Oliver’s family from the outside.

She avoids depicting any deep psychological wounds that Oliver suffers, while indicating that those wounds exist. Instead, the story becomes more about the struggle between Emmy and her parents, who suffocate her with their irrational fears, than a study of deep emotional trauma.

As a portrait of the emerging adolescent, it engages, even if it gives the effects of the kidnapping on its victim short shrift. (Fiction. 12-18)

SQUID KID THE MAGNIFICENT

Berry, Lynne Illus. by LaMarca, Luke Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4231-6119-6

In supersaturated oceanic color, squiding Oliver, purple and with top hat and wand, becomes Squid Kid the Magnificent after saying the magic words: “smelly yellow jellyfish.”

His ponytailed, fuchsia older sister, Stella, is unimpressed.

When Oliver disappears in a cloud of squid ink, Stella points out that it isn’t magic—any squid can do it. Stella is particularly alarmed by Oliver’s use of her pet cuttlefish, Cuddles, in his act, and she notes that “cuttlefish change colors ALL THE TIME,” and that isn’t magic either. Oliver soldiers on, trying one last trick, but Stella has a trick up her, er, tentacles, too. Oliver’s magician’s patter is quite fine, and Berry’s good use of occasional internal rhyme and alliteration makes this a likely read-aloud. A couple of gatefolds add visual pop to the deep colors, and details charm. There’s the occasional audience of a besotted clam (note the hearts), and a yellow puffer fish acts as silent sidekick to

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Oliver. It’s hard to decide which is funnier: the single orthodontic bracket on Stella’s beak or Oliver’s magic chant.

Delightful brother-and-sister snark in squid form—yes, really. (Picture book. 4- 7)

BOOK SCAVENGER

Bertman, Jennifer Chambliss Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (368 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-62779-115-1 San Francisco landmarks and their rich literary histories lead two friends on an urban quest to solve clues left behind in an Edgar Allan Poe book by publisher and Book Scavenger mastermind Garrison Griswold.

When Emily Crane, a book enthusiast and puzzle-solver, moves into her new apartment, she meets James Lee, a ciphersolving whiz with a cowlick he’s named Steve. For years Emily has moved from state to state with her parents and older brother, and she longs for stability. She doesn’t allow herself to get attached, unlike James, whose Chinese-American family has lived in the same apartment building for decades. When Griswold is attacked, Emily fears for his life and the future of Book Scavenger, her beloved online geocachinglike game for books. After a disappointing book hunt at the Ferry Building, Emily finds an unexpected hardcover, The Gold-Bug, near where Griswold was attacked. Believing the book is Griswold’s prelaunched game, she becomes obsessed with solving its hidden messages while dodging two thugs and risking her friendship with James. Puzzling out the clever ciphers fascinates and adds dimension and curiosity to each quest. The characters’ use of both high and low tech, such as the letter-basket pulley they set up between floors, feels refreshing. Emily’s sleuthing weaves well with her journey to nurture friendships and set down everlasting roots.

A debut that challenges the brain while warming the heart. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)

DON’T EVER CHANGE

Bloom, M. Beth HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $8.99 e-book | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-06-203688-9 978-0-06-203689-6 e-book Socially aloof aspiring writer Eva spends her last summer before college following her new motto to “Walk Through Every Open Door” to gather experiences for writing fodder.

Eva’s goal of “Making It as a Real Writer” translates to affectations of refinement and scorn for the perceived immaturity of the high school social scene. Confidently smug in her own |

writing abilities, Eva unflinchingly doles out critiques to her writing classmates like, “There’s something missing from this story, and that something is everything,” convinced that tackling weighty subjects makes her sophisticated. But after her teacher counsels her to focus her writing on teen experiences, she attends parties, makes out with several boys, and becomes a day-camp counselor. Eva’s self-absorbed narration reveals that she often views these experiences as mere cultural anthropology, which makes her obvious misinterpretations of events initially quite humorous. But her vanity eventually weakens her friendships and gets her fired from camp, by which point her refusal to acknowledge her own failings has grown tiresome. Having burned through her scant social capital, Eva might be expected to have an epiphany about the importance of trying to understand other people’s perspectives, but the end of the book sees Eva’s narcissism largely intact.

In Eva’s case, the book’s title cuts a little too close to home. (Fiction. 14-18)

TOMMY The Gun That Changed America Blumenthal, Karen Roaring Brook (240 pp.) $19.99 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-62672-084-8

John T. Thompson created the submachine gun that bore his name but was distressed when the “impressive little killing machine” he intended for war became the deadly weapon of choice for Prohibition-era gangsters.

The Tommy gun, as it was nicknamed, was hand-held, “roughly the size of a new baby,” and could fire 800 bullets per minute. Such a gun would have been a devastating weapon in the trenches of World War I, a potential “ ‘trench broom.’ A gun to sweep away the enemy.” Instead, it was loved by the likes of Machine-gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, and their reign of gang violence was glorified in the movies of the 1930s; to some, they were heroes fighting against bankers blamed for the Great Depression. Blumenthal’s fascinating biography of the weapon is most dramatic in its chapters on the famous gangsters, as might be expected. It’s also a fair-minded analysis of what the Second Amendment intended and what society might do to curb criminal gun violence while respecting the rights of individuals to keep guns. Lively prose, wellselected photographs, and thorough source notes round out this fine work.

A gripping look at guns, gangsters, and finding the “right balance between individual freedom and community safety.” (Nonfiction. 12-18)

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LOST

Bodeen, S.A. Feiwel & Friends (144 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 28, 2015 978-1-250-02779-5 Series: Shipwreck Island, 2 Bodeen’s second book in the Shipwreck Island series wades a little deeper into the island’s mysteries.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Robinson and her newly blended family are stranded on a tropical island, where perplexing events increase as hope of immediate rescue fades. Mysterious Cash, a girl they discovered unconscious on the beach in series opener Shipwreck Island (2014), has recovered and tells disturbing tales about the Curator, a self-described collector who tried to imprison her.

Sarah’s stepbrother Marco shares Sarah’s and his own strange experiences, but their parents remain skeptical—surprising, since everyone’s seen the same scary “red orb in the sky” hurtling toward them. Meanwhile, Sarah’s stepmother, Yvonne, is sick (something more ominous than morning sickness?), and just as Sarah and her stepbrothers are beginning to embrace a cooperative relationship, Sarah’s dad and Marco’s little brother disappear. Like a deepening bad dream, the search for missing family leads Sarah and Marco (literally) to a cliffhanger and a chilling encounter with the Curator. Though characters are uneasy about splitting up, they can’t resist, which allows readers to enjoy the island’s scenic side, with crystal-clear streams and juicy mangoes. The plot, however, would have benefited from a clearer story arc, and readers will be impatient for more reveals in the next installment.

Bodeen’s enjoyable castaway fare enhanced with a touch of sci-fi futurism still entertains, but readers will hope Volume 3 tightens things up. (Adventure. 10-13)

LAZY BEAR, CRAZY BEAR

Bolger, Kevin Illus. by Hodson, Ben Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $7.99 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-06-228598-0

Bolger and Hodson explore phonics in cartoon form.

New readers encountering the opening sequence—“Cave Bear / Wave Bear // Lazy Bear / Crazy Bear”—will hardly be aware that they are supposed to be learning basic phonics because they will be giggling over the “wave” bear in surf shorts and the “crazy” bear with scissors cutting down the “lazy” bear’s hammock. On subsequent pages, the “crazy” bear, wearing an easy-to-see red-and-white–striped shirt as well as an offensively vapid smile, wreaks mild havoc. From the opening long A, each vowel is explored in subsequent chapters with occasional glosses from Gran, a bespectacled human grandmother who explains phonics rules in speech bubbles: 90

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“Long vowels say their own names.” Some of the vocabulary is quite challenging (“creature,” “relief,” “fuel”), adding an unexpected level of difficulty. Companion title Gran on a Fan uses rhyme to make its point with short vowels, but some of the choices (“bomb,” “mob,” “rob,” “cops”) take this book for emergent readers to some dark places that slapstick visual humor cannot save.

Both this title and its companion are good for reinforcing word families and building reading confidence, but sometimes a phonics book is just a phonics book. (Early reader. 5-8) (Gran on a Fan: 978-0-06-228596-6)

ESCAPE FROM BAXTERS’ BARN

Bond, Rebecca Illus. by the author HMH Books (256 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-544-33217-1 A group of talking farm animals catches wind of the farm owner’s intention to burn the barn (with them in it) for insurance money and hatches a plan

to flee.

Bond begins briskly—within the first 10 pages, barn cat Burdock has overheard Dewey Baxter’s nefarious plan, and

by Page 17, all of the farm animals have been introduced and Burdock is sharing the terrifying news. Grady, Dewey’s (everso-slightly) more principled brother, refuses to go along, but instead of standing his ground, he simply disappears. This leaves the animals to fend for themselves. They do so by relying on their individual strengths and one another. Their talents and personalities match their species, bringing an element of realism to balance the fantasy elements. However, nothing can truly compensate for the bland horror of the premise. Not the growing sense of family among the animals, the serendipitous intervention of an unknown inhabitant of the barn, nor the convenient discovery of an alternate home. Meanwhile, Bond’s black-and-white drawings, justly compared to those of Garth Williams, amplify the sense of dissonance. Charming vignettes and single- and double-page illustrations create a pastoral world into which the threat of large-scale violence comes as a shock.

Ironically, by choosing such a dramatic catalyst, the author weakens the adventure’s impact overall and leaves readers to ponder the awkward coincidences that propel the plot. (Animal fantasy. 8-10)

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Scenes of boisterous boarders in the dining room contrast with images of the same shocked men knee-deep in the lake watching the flaming red sky. out of the woods

OUT OF THE WOODS A True Story of an Unforgettable Event Bond, Rebecca Illus. by the author Margaret Ferguson/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 21, 2015 978-0-374-38077-9

In 1914, a 4-year-old boy living in Gowganda, Ontario, witnesses a forest fire that forces people and animals into a nearby lake to survive.

Bond recounts this true story of her grandfather Antonio, who grew up in a rural, lakeshore hotel his mother operated.

Antonio spends his time helping hotel staff, peeking into guests’ rooms, hanging out with lumberjacks, trappers, and silver miners, and exploring the dense forest looking for animals. One dry summer day, a forest fire quickly spreads toward the hotel. To escape, everyone rushes into the lake, soon followed by rabbits, foxes, bobcats, raccoons, wolves, deer, moose, porcupines, elk, squirrels, possums, and bears fleeing from the woods. To Antonio’s amazement, people and animals “stood close enough to touch.” Eventually, the fire dies down, the people return to the still-standing hotel, and the animals depart. Delicate watercolor-and–pen-and-ink illustrations bring palpable realism to this vivid imagined memory. Pale sepia, gray, and green washes combine with fine-lined figures to evoke the nostalgic feel of old etchings. Scenes of boisterous boarders in the dining room contrast with images of the same shocked men knee-deep in the lake watching the flaming red sky. Sensitively drawn animals, tentatively and nervously waiting together in shared peril with humans, speak volumes.

Awe-inspiring, exquisitely rendered, indeed “unforgettable.” (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-9)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CUPCAKE!

Border, Terry Photos by the author Philomel (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-399-17160-4

Using similar photographic treatment and subject matter developed in his earlier picture book, Peanut Butter and Cupcake (2014), Border follows the journey of the eponymous heroine in her search for the perfectly themed birthday party.

During a walk with her friend Muffin, she muses on the theme that would best suit all of her friends. A beach party is out, because “the beach is so hot, and some of us might get drippy.” A boat ride is risky too, because “if the ship rocks, Soup might lose his lunch.” Musical chairs would be dangerous because the softer friends might get squished. Moreover, Cupcake herself is ill-equipped to limbo. During the discussion, the friends arrive at Muffin’s house, where... “Surprise!!!” All the |

friends are gathered for a surprise party. Even though they do get drippy and a little squished, it is still the best birthday party that anyone can remember. As in his earlier picture book, Border’s characters are skillfully crafted food items with basic wire limbs arranged in simple landscapes. Visual puns abound: a pat of butter with wings attached (Butterfly, geddit?). There’s no stinting on the gross factor; everyone gets spilled and sticky in true toddler fashion; in one double-page spread, Hamburger’s frosting-and-sprinkles makeover is lovingly depicted.

Preschoolers will be delighted with the visual mayhem, although parents may cringe at the quantity of junk food depicted. (Picture book. 3-6)

RIVER RUNS DEEP

Bradbury, Jennifer Atheneum (336 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-4424-6824-5 978-1-4424-6826-9 e-book A tubercular boy is sent to live in a cave that might heal him.

Bradbury uses an odd historical fact to jump-start a story about the Underground Railroad. After his father dies from consumption, 12-year-old Elias, suffering from the same disease, is sent from eastern Virginia to live inside Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. This enormous underground labyrinth, already a tourist attraction in the 1840s, is also a sanitarium. Dr. John Croghan believes “cave vapors” can cure the disease, but he also tries restrictive diets, immobility, and horse-urine baths.

Numerous slaves attend the patients and also lead tours of the caves; in their off hours they explore the cave’s unknown edges.

Bored and lonely, Elias begins to follow them, discovering that a far cavern actually houses runaway slaves—now trapped and running low on supplies due to guards at the entrances. Elias’ family owns slaves, and he’s never questioned slavery’s morality, but in the darkness of Mammoth Cave he begins to change his views. Bradbury’s plot falters a bit at the end, when a posse of men seems more bumbling than harmful, but she will hold readers throughout with a consistent third-person perspective focused through Elias and his gradual character development, not on the glories of the cave. Several pages of backmatter give insight into the history of the cave and the real Dr. Croghan, with suggestions for further reading.

A solid look at a fascinating historical side note. (Historical fiction. 8-14)

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The novel might find an audience among readers who enjoy both the predictability of the romance genre and the warrior ferocity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. tangled webs

RUFUS THE WRITER

Bram, Elizabeth Illus. by Groenink, Chuck Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-385-37853-6 978-0-385-37855-0 e-book 978-0-385-37854-3 PLB “Rufus was watching a cloud shaped like a cushion turn into a cat when the idea first came to him. ‘I’m not going to have a lemonade stand this summer,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a story stand!’ ” Rufus runs off “to gather pencils and paper and markers,” after which an eight-panel double-page spread shows him going through the sequence of setting up a table and chair for his enterprise, carefully decorating both the table and himself. As unlikely as it may seem, when friends Millie and Walter come by and invite Rufus to go swimming with them, Rufus declines, as he has “a story stand to run.” He tells these friends that their price for a story will be a seashell from the beach. Rufus (who is Caucasian) creates a story specifically for his sister and for each of several friends of differing genders, ages, and skin tones; “payments” vary. Each simple story “by Rufus” spans two to four pages, with hand printing and colorful art. The text about Rufus is in black typeface, with artwork similar to that attributed to Rufus. The entire book—including the endpapers—is a tribute to literacy. It may appeal to bibliophiles, but its lack of action beyond reading, writing, and walking is unlikely to create any converts.

The idea is original and appealing, but the execution is less than inspiring. (Picture book. 4- 7)

YOUR KIDS: COOKING! A Recipe for Turning Ordinary Kids Into Extraordinary Cooks Brandt, Barbara Pukka (176 pp.) $39.95 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-9825952-1-3

Using a method called “Skills, Terms And Cooking Know-how,” this resource focuses more on developing cooking skills rather than mastering individual recipes.

Each STACK lesson feature dishes that highlight skills a young chef needs to learn. For instance, the recipe for French toast provides instruction on measuring ingredients, working with eggs, and flipping food with a spatula. Individual lessons are highly visual, filled with photographs designed to guide chefs step by step from ingredient selection to preparation to finished product. A second recipe then challenges chefs to prepare another dish using the same techniques but with less prompting. A final recipe invites chefs to prepare a simple treat as a reward for a job well done.

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skills rather than recipes is unfortunately muddied by overdesign.

The busy pages are simply filled with too many images and details.

Moreover, rich desserts, heavy sauces, and meat-focused recipes put into question the assertion that this resource will teach young chefs how to eat more healthfully. An accompanying DVD and a companion website offer a wealth of further information for anyone interested in learning how to cook.

A strong but flawed teaching tool. (Nonfiction. 7-11)

TANGLED WEBS

Bross, Lee Hyperion (304 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-4231-8423-2

Secret-life shenanigans in 18th-century London.

Seventeen-year-old orphan Arista survives by helping her vile and violent employer blackmail the aristocracy. As the public face of their extortion racket, she slips in and out of costume balls to deliver messages to and collect payments from sleazy courtiers. When, in the line of duty, she crosses paths with an attentive masked stranger, they are both thrown by the force of the instant attraction between them. But the course of true love never did run smooth, and this romance rehashes many timeworn tropes en route to its inevitable happy ending. Arista as a character remains elusive; her inner life is essentially just a loop of vigilant worry, and the third-person perspective puts her at an additional remove.

She’s street-smart, but is she intelligent? The novel might find an audience among readers who enjoy both the predictability of the romance genre and the warrior ferocity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the dialogue lacks the humor and warmth of the latter, and at times, the tale sags under the weight of its own overwrought exposition. Conversational anachronisms like “okay” and nagging plot holes—like how the nearly feral Arista can pass for middle-class in daily life—further disrupt the narrative momentum.

The overall effect is that the tale is underbaked; perhaps the planned sequel will help it set. (Romance. 12 & up)

THE PHANTOM BULLY

Brown, Jeffrey Illus. by the author Scholastic (176 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-545-62126-7 978-0-545-66644-2 e-book Series: Star Wars: Jedi Academy, 3 Perhaps playing off the principle that a great ending will mitigate almost anything, this story has at least a dozen endings, and all of them are pretty spectacular.

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It ends with a kiss, of course. The third graphic novel in the Jedi Academy series turns out to be a love story, although it takes the characters a while to realize it. At the beginning of the school year, Roan is still in denial, muttering, “Well, sort of. I don’t know if she’s my GIRLFRIEND exactly.” (It doesn’t help that other students call Gaiana and Roan “Groan.”) But by the close of this high jinks–filled year, every student at the academy gets a satisfying ending, even the bullies and troublemakers. Their End-of-the-Year Awards tell us how much they’ve changed, or failed to change. The honors include “Cuddliest,” “Future Sith Lord,” and “Most Surprising.” Roan, who’s training to be a pilot, is “Highest Flying.” It’s worth noting that this book has some of the best jokes in the series (the terrible school cook says, “Meat is vegetables, right?”) and a few of the worst (an assigned book is called Charlie and the Droid Factory).

Roan gets the best ending of all. It’s a small panel that shows him looking out into space, thinking about home—or maybe adventures in a galaxy far, far away.

Everybody’s middle school years should be as ultimately satisfying as Roan’s, whether they are Jedis-in-training or not. (Graphic fantasy. 8-12)

RUBY AND GRUB

Burlingham, Abi Illus. by Warburton, Sarah Little Bee (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4998-0085-2 Grub is such a muddy, mucky, messy dog! What to do?

Despite strenuous efforts, Ruby can’t stop Grub from digging in the garden, rolling in dirt, tracking paw prints all over the house, and splashing her in the bath. Finally he digs a hole under the fence, and that’s the last straw for Mom: off he goes to stay with Uncle Tom, who has three dogs already. Instantly the household just doesn’t feel right—not to Ruby, nor to her mom (“The garden’s too tidy”), dad (“The house is too clean”), or little brother Joe (“GUB!!!”).

Unsurprisingly, the exile doesn’t last long. Grub, portrayed as a small, flop-eared bundle of relentless energy, often seems out of control but seldom looks grimy enough to create the messes he leaves in Warburton’s sketchy, informally drawn domestic scenes. Though the shared adoration between girl and dog lights up the whole episode, Ruby’s narrative tends toward wordiness: “When I shout, ‘Stop digging!’ he doesn’t stop digging. Do you know what he does? He keeps digging!” The abject surrender at the end (“Now the house is a mess, the garden is a mess, everywhere’s a mess. But it doesn’t matter...”) begs any sort of realistic resolution or coping strategy.

A doggy love note, but it’s no better than a bland alternative to Harry the Dirty Dog (1956) or such descendants as Lori Mortensen and Michael Allen Austin’s Cowpoke Clyde and Dirty Dawg (2013). (Picture book. 5- 7)

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KIRBY’S JOURNAL Backyard Butterfly Magic

Caldwell, Charlotte Photos by the author Univ. of South Carolina (56 pp.) $17.95 paper | Jun. 30, 2015 978-1-61117-553-0

Eleven-year-old Kirby records close observations of butterflies made in her grandparents’ Charleston, South Carolina, backyard during a summer vacation that is as good as a safari.

Kirby’s grandparents have saved their butterfly-garden project for Kirby’s three-month visit. Together, they stock it with appropriate host plants and nectar flowers. At first there seem to be no results. Kirby practices with her new camera; her grandmother helps. They visit other likely habitats and a nearby butterfly garden. When caterpillars appear, Kirby’s ready. For the rest of the summer, Kirby and her friends observe and photograph the butterflies and occasional other insects they find in the backyard.

Her grandparents provide background, beginning with body parts and going on through classification, identification, the food web, and survival strategies. Kirby makes notes on her oversized journal pages and adds color photographs. She documents the complete metamorphosis of a Gulf fritillary, as well as a monarch emerging from its chrysalis. A short entry about habitat conservation concludes the instructive portion of her journal, but a few more entries reveal this eager observer’s continued enthusiasm.

This gentle story is the framework for a great deal of information, some of which, Kirby says, she learned in school, but is understandable in the context of her own explorations.

This pseudo-journal makes a clever invitation to a possible lifetime passion. (index) (Informational picture book. 9-12)

FOULSHAM

Carey, Edward Illus. by the author Overlook (336 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-4683-0954-6 Series: Iremonger, 2 The middle volume of the Iremonger trilogy escalates in both suspense and strangeness.

In a fantastical Victorian London, the Iremongers have become wealthy, eccentric outcasts through managing the city’s rubbish, protecting themselves by the secret ability to change people into talismanic objects— and vice versa. After defying his family, Clod Iremonger is transformed into a gold coin, while his beloved Lucy Pennant becomes a clay button, cast into the vast heaps of garbage. As Clod is passed around by the downtrodden folk of Foulsham and Lucy befriends Binadit (the exiled “It of the Heaps”), the macabre past, despicable doings, and sinister plans of the Iremonger clan are slowly unveiled. Along the way, Carey’s splendidly

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deranged imagination and deliciously peculiar prose are on display, introducing a Dickensian cast simultaneously pathetic and grotesque. The lead couple gains depth as well; sweet, kind Clod, “the friend of things,” discovers unexpected talents and surprising fortitude, while cynical, light-fingered Lucy reveals a new, fierce tenderness and revolutionary zeal. Their parallel storylines dance without intersecting, finally reuniting only to be torn apart in a climax of apocalyptic industrial horror. Beyond the gripping adventure and creepy illustrations, the premise demands consideration of the tendency of raw capitalism to make people and things both interchangeable and disposable.

A story wondrous fine, full of terrors and marvels.

(Horror. 11 & up)

THE WAND & THE SEA

Caterer, Claire M. McElderry (384 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-4424-5744-7 978-1-4424-5746-1 e-book Holly returns to the alternate realm that she can only reach from a holiday cottage.

It’s been a year since Midwesterner Holly first visited Anglielle during summer vacation in England (The Key and the Flame, 2013). Finally she’s back at the cottage, impatient to reach the magical land where she plays an important role that she doesn’t understand.

As “the last Adept,” Holly’s “a being of great magical power”— power that she doesn’t know how to wield. Anglielle has an evil king and sorcerer, back story, and an ample supply of fantastical creatures—from Ranulf the centaur to Áedán the salamander, a fire elemental who lives on Holly’s shoulder and protects her.

Holly also has a familiar, a black cat who speaks and is “forever loyal to her.” Readers who nuzzle up to these wish-fulfillment animals will happily accept that Holly feels more at home in Anglielle than in suburban America and that she has a “special purpose.” Readers craving solidity will be bored by Holly’s lack of agency and a pervasive vagueness in the rules of magic (which tends to happen “somehow”) and travel (ships sink into the forest floor to reach oceans). Dialect is overdone: “when the veil ’twixt the worlds is thinnest, we’ll call her and she’ll have ter come, innit?” A focus on water (as physical setting and magical element) isn’t enough to wash away blurry worldbuilding and meandering length.

Generic. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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8 An Animal Alphabet Cooper, Elisha Illus. by the author Orchard/Scholastic (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-545-47083-4

A distinctive animal alphabet presents a counting game.

The cover displays a large, shiny number eight. What does it mean? The author’s explanation on the title page’s verso provides the ebullient answer. “Why the number 8? Because 8 is great.

Because 8 is round and adorable. Because 8 is fun to count to (move over, 10). Because 8 is not too big, and not so small, but just right.

Because 8 is my favorite number.” So, if readers look closely at each page of animals, from A to Z, one of them appears eight times. On the A page, nine critters are listed at the bottom; among them is the ant, eight of which roam among single examples of aardvark, abalone, albatross, alligator, alpaca, anteater, antelope, and armadillo.

Cooper’s loose watercolor images are arranged harmoniously against spacious white backgrounds. The number of animals depicted varies, with the lowest being one (X for xerus). There are surprises, as in the letter I, which presents ibex, ibis, iguana, impala, and inchworm.

Readers might expect the animal to count eight times would be the inchworm, but actually, here it’s the iguana. A four-page legend in the back identifies each creature with a one-sentence, interesting fact: “Quolls use communal toilet areas.” Who knew? The heavy paper will withstand repeated viewings, which are guaranteed.

Don’t get behind the eight ball: order now; it’s great fun.

(Picture book. 4-10)

DIARY OF A MAD BROWNIE

Coville, Bruce Illus. by Kidby, Paul Random House (256 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-385-39247-1 978-0-385-39249-5 e-book 978-0-385-39248-8 PLB Series: Enchanted Files, 1 A dedicated slob and a neatnik brownie, both with fierce tempers, face off in this much-expanded version of Coville’s short story “Clean as a Whistle,” published in Oddly Enough (1994).

Coming home from school one day, young Alexandra is utterly freaked out to find her formerly chaotic bedroom neat as a pin—the work, it turns out, of her family’s ancestral brownie, Angus Cairns, newly arrived from distant Scotland. Along with adding background history, the author recasts the shorter, original tale in a mix of journal entries by both Angus and Alex, interspersed with chat transcripts and other insertions. Coville also saddles the beleaguered brownie with a double curse: not only must Angus tend certain female members of the McGonagall line in each generation, but every male

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The book’s efforts to support transgender readers are undermined by persistent, thoughtless affirmations that biology really is destiny. this book is gay

member of the household will at the same time be struck by an uncontrollable need to write bad, bad poetry. So, as Angus and Alex sort through anger issues on the way to a not-too-hard-won détente, they are subjected to such outpourings as “Oh no! I’ve caught the itch of love, / My ookie wookie turtledove” from her dad and teenage brother. Fortunately for both characters and readers, a way to break both curses lies fortuitously close at hand. Kidby provides engagingly posed pen-and-ink portraits of the various mundane and magical cast members, as well as a particularly demonic-looking cat.

A knee-slapper in this or any edition. (Fantasy. 9-11)

THIS BOOK IS GAY

Dawson, James Sourcebooks (272 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4926-1782-2 An exuberant guide to LGBT life takes the stance that “being L or G or B or T or * is SUPER FUN.” Speaking with candor, humor, and enthusiasm, Dawson addresses topics from coming out to sexually transmitted infections to sex apps. With irreverent chapter titles like “Stereotypes Are Poo” and a chatty narrative voice, the tone is largely upbeat, though the author also touches on “some MEGA-SAD FACE topics” like discrimination. Easily readable tables and humorous cartoons further liven up the presentation. To add more perspectives, segments from interviewees who represent areas of the LGBT spectrum not represented by the author himself are also included.

Chapters on sex and apps like Grindr are helpfully matter-of-fact, and readers hear from people who choose casual sex as well as those who prefer emotionally intimate relationships. The book is a U.K. import, and while U.S.–based readers shouldn’t have much trouble understanding Briticisms like “fancy” or “shag,” some of the antidiscrimination laws referenced won’t apply. More troubling, the book’s efforts to support transgender readers are undermined by persistent, thoughtless affirmations that biology really is destiny— for instance, when the author debunks the myth that “gay men are ‘girls’ ” with a jokey “Penis? Check! Yup, gay men are, in fact, male.”

Important for its frank sex talk but far less inclusive than it aims to be. (glossary, resources) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

THE ISLE OF THE LOST

de la Cruz, Melissa Disney-Hyperion (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 5, 2015 978-1-4847-2097-4 978-1-4847-1295-5 e-book Series: Descendants, 1 In a prequel to an upcoming Disney Channel film, the offspring of four familiar villains bond in an effort to impress their evil parents. |

Having grown to adolescence in exile beneath a magic-banishing dome on the titular island, Mal, Carlos, Jay, and Evie— the children of, respectively, Maleficent, Cruella De Vil, Jafar, and Snow White’s Evil Queen—set out to fetch Maleficent’s staff from her Forbidden Fortress. Along with having to pass riddle and other tests clumsily designed to get them to admit the banality of their parents’ values, the quest forces the young would-be baddies to cooperate and even to moderate their ‘tudes. De la Cruz turns the quest and its interminable buildup into a wordy string of trite situations in which every character trait is carefully explained lest readers miss something: “Lonely, Mal thought. I was lonely. And so were they. Evie, with her beauty-obsessed mother; Carlos, with his screeching harpy of a parent; Jay, the happy-go-lucky thief with a quick wit and dashing smile, who could steal anything in the world except his father’s heart.” Meanwhile, over in the United States of Auradon, Prince Ben, son of King Beast and Queen Belle, chafes at his lack of life choices and with an impulsive but unspecified notion at the end serves up a teaser for the film.

A paint-by-numbers effort to market a spinoff that’s likely to be equally ephemeral. (Fantasy. 11-13)

YOU AND ME AND HIM Dinnison, Kris HMH Books (288 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-544-30112-2

The arrival of crushworthy new student Tom drives a wedge between Maggie, who is straight, and her best friend, Nash, who is gay.

Neither Maggie nor Nash has ever kissed anyone or had a boyfriend, a situation Maggie attributes to her being fat and Nash, to the lack of out gay teens in their Seattle suburb. On the first day of school, the pair spots Tom, and Nash calls dibs, a running joke based on the assumption that neither Nash nor Maggie will have a chance. When Tom unexpectedly does start hanging out with them, particularly with Maggie, both Maggie’s friendship with Nash and her certainty that she is undesirable are challenged.

Maggie’s generosity with baked goods and her struggles against her mom’s food-related nagging add some depth to the story, but readers are privy to frustratingly little interiority despite the first-person narration. They see Maggie have her first kiss and tell off the gym teacher who continually harps on her size, but her experiences of these moments remain opaque. Stilted and sometimes clunkily expository dialogue also reveals little, making several of the book’s many interpersonal conflicts more confusing than compelling.

The (mostly) fat-positive message is important, but its delivery falters. (Fiction. 12-18)

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Bonnet depicts the writer-to-be in authentic throes of composition—breaking a pencil, throwing her notebook across the room, and weeping with frustration before finally buckling down. Take note, budding authors. poppy ’s best paper

THE ENTERTAINER

Dodd, Emma Illus. by the author Little Bee (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4998-0078-4

When the family hires the man in the big, brown bear suit to entertain at Billy’s birthday party, many surprises follow.

He wears a little purple hat and is greeted with cheers by the party guests. After voraciously consuming the proffered tea and biscuits, he lets out a surprising “BURP!” (Both Mom and Dad notice his bad manners.) The children chase him through the door, and he slips on a skateboard, spinning and whirling before crashing into a lamp. The kids love it, but the parents are rather horrified, even more so when he eats a bunch of flowers and glugs down all the water in the jug. The children want to try on his suit, but they can’t seem to get it off...or even find a zipper.

The Entertainer finds the birthday spread and eats it all, triggering a big sprawling snooze right there on the table. (Luckily, Mom had put the cake in the fridge.) Frazzled Mom and Dad are exhausted by the end of the party, but Billy wants to have him back next year. The doorbell rings; who should be standing in the doorway but a real man in a bear suit. Dodd’s illustrations are colorful, and her story rhymes briskly, with droll, two-couplet etiquette tips tucked into page corners. Children, of course, will have tumbled to the Entertainer’s real identity long before the characters do.

A pleasant party bonbon. (Picture book. 3-6)

POPPY’S BEST PAPER

Eaddy, Susan Illus. by Bonnet, Rosalinde Charlesbridge (40 pp.) $15.95 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-58089-614-6

Following her decision to become a writer when she grows up, Poppy takes a significant step in the right direction—

after a few false starts.

Poppy is blithely positive that the perfunctory career declaration she’s produced for a writing assignment will be selected for a class read-aloud. She is therefore deeply miffed when her methodical friend Lavender’s “Why I Want to Be a Brain Surgeon” is chosen instead. When, next time, Lavender’s “My Wish for World Peace” gets the nod over Poppy’s shallow, self-absorbed effort, her fury is so open that she lands a stint in the Chill-Out Chair. Third time’s the charm though, as for the assigned topic “How to Do Something,” a repentant Poppy tallies up her own rude behavior in a paper titled “How to Get in Trouble.” This ingenious apology not only earns applause from the class, but mends fences with Lavender too. Poppy, a flop-eared bunny, leads a cast of small, individualized animals drawn with an expressive delicacy reminiscent of Kevin Henkes’ 96

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figures. Also, along with sly notes like Poppy’s bright visions of future school visits and celebrity-autograph sessions, Bonnet depicts the writer-to-be in authentic throes of composition— breaking a pencil, throwing her notebook across the room, and weeping with frustration before finally buckling down. Take note, budding authors.

Poppy’s paper is hard-won but worth the A it gets.

(Picture book. 6- 9)

THE TOMB ROBBER AND KING TUT

Gauch, Sarah Illus. by Garns, Allen Viking (36 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-670-78452-3

A young boy has a close-up view of Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s

tomb in 1922.

Hassan’s farmer father is conscious that their ancestors’ occupation, gathering and selling treasures from the tombs of ancient kings, is not likely to win the boy any respect on the archaeological dig near their home. He resists letting Hassan go to participate in the dig. But Hassan is determined to be part of what seems exciting and momentous, and he is unafraid of the jinn rumored to be guarding the tombs.

He digs out a hidden staircase and is present when Carter and his companions peek into the first of the rooms of treasure in the boy king’s tomb. Garns’ gouache-and-pastel paintings in warm golds and purples evoke the desert setting and suggest the ancient royal past.

The earnestness in the boy’s face and concern in his father’s keep the focus on Hassan and his experience. The title presumably refers to Hassan, but it could hint at other removals from these tombs— including Carter’s. Gauch explains in an author’s note that Hassan’s village of Gurna was real and demolished in 2007 by the Egyptian government to make way for pharaonic tomb excavation. She speculates that in fact there might have been a curse, as Lord Carnavon and others died soon after the discovery.

An intriguing glimpse of this renowned archaeological find. (Picture book. 7-10)

SILVER IN THE BLOOD

George, Jessica Day Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-1-61963-431-2

Turn-of-the-last-century socialites discover the bloody secrets of their Old World family in this lush historical fantasy.

Cousins Dacia Vreeholt and Louisa Neulander, raised in Gilded Age New York, are sent in 1897 to Romania to reconnect with their mothers’ aristocratic clan. Once in Bucharest, Lou and Dacia (who arrives marked by a minor scandal

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involving a London playboy) quickly realize their reclusive relations, the Florescus, socialize only with the Dracula family— descendants of the infamous Vlad the Impaler. Meanwhile, the cousins’ intimidating grandmother keeps wondering aloud if each is a “Wing,” “Claw,” or “Smoke” and pushing Dacia to accept invitations from Dracula scion Prince Mihai. As Mihai begins to pursue Dacia, her London and American suitors arrive in Romania to warn the cousins about the Florescus’ supernatural connection to the Draculas, who seek to reclaim the Romanian throne. In absorbing alternating journal entries and letters, Dacia grows ever more frightened and cautious while Lou’s interest in her family’s fascinating secrets deepens. George captures the exquisite beauty of 1890s Romania—city town houses and sprawling country estates, opera halls, artisanal shops, folk dresses, and the stunning “forested slopes of the Carpathians”— while also creating an increasingly foreboding atmosphere for Dacia’s and Lou’s life-changing revelations.

Thoroughly researched historical details and bright if naïve protagonists conjure a winning period adventure. (author’s note) (Historical fiction/paranormal fantasy. 12-17)

WE WILL BE CRASHING SHORTLY

Gillespie, Hollis Merit Press (240 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 15, 2015 978-1-4405-6770-4 Series: Unaccompanied Minor, 2 The sequel to Unaccompanied Minor (2014) delivers another round of in-theair shenanigans for would-be airline heiress April Mae Manning.

Gillespie starts her story in medias res, as April explains to readers that she may have shot Mr. Hackman, but she did not decapitate him. She quickly flashes back to her driver’slicense road test, which is derailed when she sees her best friend, Malcolm, in the middle of being kidnapped by, among others, her no-good stepfather. In short order, April and the good-hearted crew of adults she rallied in her first outing are busy finding corpses, running from the law, and stowing away on the very L-1011 that was bombed only a few months before.

The plot setup here is convoluted and sporadic, the introduction of new characters adding variety but also complexity that impedes focus. April’s voice continues to charm, her dedication to the wisdom within the WorldAir flight-attendant onboard manual a throughline that both binds the story together and saves April’s skin over and over. Her surveys of flight-attendant history are trenchant and illuminating, as in her discussion of 1960s-era “secret spawning wards...full of [pregnant] stewardesses trying to keep their circumstances on the down-low so they could retain their jobs.”

Despite turbulence, an amusing airline-industry thriller that informs as it entertains. (Thriller. 12-16)

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RED CLOUD’S WAR Brave Eagle’s Account of the Fetterman Fight

Goble, Paul Illus. by the author Wisdom Tales (48 pp.) $16.95 | Jun. 7, 2015 978-1-937786-38-0

Fighting to preserve Oglala Sioux territory northwest of Fort Laramie, in modern-day Wyoming, war chief Red Cloud routs a band of 80 soldiers in 1866.

Young Brave Eagle describes the events leading up to the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands and the fierce encounter, sometimes called the Fetterman Fight for the glory-seeking captain who had led his soldiers into an ambush. There were no U.S. Army survivors. First published in 1972, this stirring story has been slightly reworked and reissued with additional material, including a forward from Native American storyteller Robert Lewis and an extensive list of references. In an opening author’s note, Goble explains that his imagined warrior’s narrative “attempts to capture the spirit of the published Indian accounts.” Maps introduce this history, and Goble’s dramatic color illustrations, digitized from his original ledger-style artwork, bring it alive. Groups of flat figures stand out on shiny white pages; they’re under, adjacent to, or nearly overwhelming the text. There’s glorious detail in the costumes, weapons, and even decorations for the horses. This is part of a series of reissues of early titles by this award-winning author/illustrator, welcome both for their good stories and for the care he’s taken to provide the sources and references that weren’t customary in children’s literature 40 years ago.

An exciting tale, rousingly told. (Nonfiction. 9-13)

THE DRAGON LANTERN

Gratz, Alan Illus. by Helquist, Brett Starscape/Tom Doherty (336 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-7653-3823-5 978-1-4424-3851-2 e-book Series: League of Seven, 2 The company of heroes destined to battle the immortal Mangleborn continues to assemble in a middle volume that blurs the line between the good guys and the bad further.

The theft of the titular lantern, which transforms people who see its light into monsters of diverse icky sorts, sends superstrong Archie in pursuit aboard a huge steam-powered robot captained by George Custer. Meanwhile, the vengeful search for those who massacred her home village leads young Seminole warrior Hachi to Marie Laveau’s New Orleans for battles with zombis, loas, and a gigantic Mangleborn serpent. Gratz sets his colorful yarn in an alternate “North Americas” made up of

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several countries (both colonial and indigenous) and populates the teeming supporting cast with both historical personages, like a windup Jesse James, and an array of tentacled horrors. He pitches his gathering band of Leaguers—grown by the end to five of the appointed seven—into a nonstop round of chases, flights, ambushes, narrow squeaks, and heroic feats. Struggling with his own dark origins as well as a tendency to bouts of irrational, wildly destructive rage worthy of the Incredible Hulk, Archie leads a vividly drawn and diverse ensemble. Helquist’s portraits of intrepid or menacing figures at the chapter heads signal the story’s shifts in focus.

Gratz has plenty of fun with his alternate history, but returning readers will notice that the dark is definitely rising. (map) (Fantasy/steampunk. 11-13)

ADRIFT

Griffin, Paul Scholastic (240 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-545-70939-2 978-0-545-70941-5 e-book Two buddies who have been through trauma together before find themselves with three relative strangers out on the open Atlantic, where survival becomes extremely uncertain.

Matt and John work at a state park, where they meet the three, and are working-class in a way that the others don’t understand. Stolid John is mechanically minded and still suffers from the death of his father years earlier. Matt is determined to get into Yale and puts his energy toward saving and studying with that goal in mind. Dark, dreadlocked Driana is visiting the park with her cousin Estefania and Stef ’s boyfriend, João. The latter two are from Rio de Janiero and have a carefree aura of entitlement—though Stef was adopted from the favelas by Driana’s uncle after her mother was gunned down in front of her.

Griffin explores their individual psychologies and interactions with nuance. Stef has a reckless streak, and her sudden jaunt on a windsurfer leads the others into danger as they go to her aid with a small, open boat. With no radio or gear for the open sea, the craft offers little help for survival as hours, then days pass, the pressures mounting on each in ways designed to test their limits. While the danger is real, the book’s at its most riveting as the characters interact and implode.

This fast-paced survival adventure makes an excellent crucible for Griffin’s examination of class. (Adventure. 12-16)

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SUGAR

Hall, Deirdre Riordan Skyscape (276 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-4778-2938-7 Can a true friend help Sugar find her way out of her gingerbread prison?

Mercy Bella Legowski-Gracia, or Sugar, as everyone calls her, deals with stress by eating. And she has a lot of stress in her life—her bedridden mother, her abusive brother, her absent father, the bullies she encounters at school and around town every single day. The huge amount of stress means she eats a lot, and her increasing weight makes her even more depressed and perpetuates the vicious cycle. Until Even comes along. Even has his own share of dysfunctional family interactions, and whatever hurts in him reaches out to everything that hurts in Sugar, making them close friends despite the ever increasing disruptions from the outside world. While it’s refreshing to find a narrative from the point of view of an obese teenager who has never known any kind of luck, the book doesn’t manage to deliver a distinctive experience. Part of the problem is a predictable plot that’s heavy on canned epiphany, as in “Maybe it’s like embracing the name Sugar. It’s part of who I am, maybe not a proud part, but it’s shaped me. Denying it would be denying part of me....” Too much self-help language gets in the way of a realistic experience.

An intriguing effort that doesn’t live up to its potential.

(Fiction. 14-18)

THE IRE OF IRON CLAW

Hamilton, Kersten Illus. by Hamilton, James HMH Books (176 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-544-22502-2 Series: Gadgets and Gears, 2

In series opener The Mesmer Menace (2014), the Kennewickett clan foiled the world-conquering plans of the evil pigeon Iron Claw and mesmerizing magician Madini, but recent acts of sabotage at the Automated Inn suggest the dastardly duo have returned to commit more mayhem.

At risk are Nikola Tesla, who plans to use alternating current to free automatons from spending their nights in charging closets, and young Wally, who’s making progress toward achieving manned flight (by kite, but still). Offering their skills and component parts to end the sabotage permanently are the automatons, led by Gizmo, who shares recipes (and feelings of more than ordinary friendship) with Mr. Jones, the train engineer. This sequel grants the automatons, especially the singing Dust Bunnies, more page time, which they must share with a plethora of human characters and fairly detailed accounts of electrical current discoveries. Narrating the proceedings, Noodles, Wally’s dachshund, interrupts the storytelling with canine asides and offers dictionary definitions of words like

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Reminiscent of Gone Girl with its elaborate twists and turns, the story leaves everyone culpable. charlie, presumed dead

“pseudo-cephalothorax” and “inveigle.” Expressive and vigorous, the art brings the characters to life (the evildoers with handlebar mustaches are a treat). Although much of the story never leaves the inn, the complicated plot and setup require close attention.

The swift pace, quirky humor, and general steampunkery should hold the interest of readers—especially the mechanically and electronically inclined. (Steampunk. 9-12)

DORY AND THE REAL TRUE FRIEND

Hanlon, Abby Illus. by the author Dial (160 pp.) $14.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-525-42866-4 Series: Dory Fantasmagory, 2

Who will be 6-year-old Dory’s friend at school if she doesn’t take Mary the monster with her?

Dory’s older siblings have plenty of advice for the new school year: “Do NOT use your imagination!” her sister warns her. “DON’T BE YOURSELF.” Remembering the problems Mary caused the year before, Dory determines to start school without the imaginary friend who behaved so badly. Indeed, right away she meets a girl with a poufy dress and two missing front teeth, surely a potential friend. But how can Dory play with Rosabelle when the hopscotch girls drag her away at recess? Luckily, monster Mary gives better advice than her older sister does. Dory reverts to her imaginative self, and by the end of the week, she’s gained a real true friend whose imagination matches her own. Dory’s first-person account is punctuated by childlike black-and-white drawings, mirroring the action described and sometimes extending the story. Those who were introduced to Dory’s appealing fantasy world in Dory Fantasmagory (2014) will be pleased at the return of her fairy godmother, Mr. Nuggy, only temporarily transformed into a chicken by the witch Mrs. Gobble Gracker. The humor and familiar school setting will invite new fans.

Old friends and new will hope this highly successful sequel will not be the last starring this inventive, original child. (Fiction. 6-9)

BERNICE GETS CARRIED AWAY

Harrison, Hannah E. Illus. by the author Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-8037-3916-1

A series of minor disappointments leads Bernice to make a greedy grab at a friend’s birthday party which in turn spurs an unexpected change of heart. |

Harrison’s acrylic paintings, a mix of double-page spreads, single pages, and occasional vignettes, depict a group of anthropomorphic animals celebrating in a forest setting. Old-fashioned outfits and activities contrast pleasingly with characters that are simultaneously cartoony and realistic in appearance and visually developed with touches of sly humor. Bernice’s increasing frustration shows in both her face and body language as she gets a plain piece of cake (no frosting rose), has to settle for warm prunegrapefruit soda, and misses out on the candy from a prematurely punctured piñata. In her determination to pluck some pleasure from the day she snatches the whole bunch of balloons and suddenly floats up into the sky. The change of scene allows her to quickly, if not entirely believably, recognize how petty her problems are. Sharing the balloons enables her to land safely while improving the moods of assorted quirky characters including a glum rain cloud, a crotchety squirrel, and a sad mother bluebird.

While the final twist is a bit heavy-handed, overall, the emotional honesty, simple, understated text, and entertaining visual humor combine to create an appealing take on a problem that occasionally plagues us all, whether child, adult, or grumpy cat. (Picture book. 3-6)

CHARLIE, PRESUMED DEAD

Heltzel, Anne HMH Books (272 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-544-38849-9

When Charlie inexplicably takes his family’s plane out for a joy ride and leaves behind only debris, everyone presumes he is dead—except for his girlfriends (yes, both of them).

When 18-year-old American Aubrey arrives in Paris to attend Charlie’s funeral, she soon discovers that the dark, enigmatic Oxford student had another American girlfriend, 19-year-old Lena. While jealousy could have made them enemies, instead they forge an instant, though tenuous, pact to search for Charlie, who they believe has faked his death for unknown reasons. As they span the globe (and party hard), collecting clues in exotic locales and from a variety of sources (including questionable friends and a transgender “ladyboy”), they discover only more of Charlie’s secrets. With the narration told from both Aubrey’s and Lena’s perspectives, readers learn the young women’s mounting secrets as well. Reminiscent of Gone Girl with its elaborate twists and turns, the story leaves everyone culpable in Charlie’s disappearance—and possibly capable of murder. Trust becomes an issue, even for readers. A taut beginning eventually becomes an ending that wanes until shocking events jolt readers once again and leave room for a sequel.

An edgy thriller that keeps the guesses coming until the last word. (Thriller. 14 & up)

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Many of the personalities tend toward stereotypes; the focus here is on thrills. the rules

SADIE’S STORY

Heppermann, Christine & Koertge, Ron Illus. by Marcero, Deborah Greenwillow/HarperCollins (176 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-0-06-233838-9 978-0-06-233840-2 e-book Series: Backyard Witch, 1 Sadie’s sad when her two best friends go on vacation without her until a witch moves into her backyard playhouse and shows Sadie a new way to see the world.

Investigating smoke rising from her playhouse, Sadie discovers Ms. M., a Sadie-size witch, inside stirring a cauldron.

Though Ms. M. looks witchy—black, smock-style dress, pointy hat—the cauldron contains soup, and the finding spell she casts to locate her friend Ethel, now a yellow warbler, proves to be the hokey-pokey. When the spell fails, they head to the park to search for Ethel, an effort that involves close observation of avian park denizens like blue jays, orioles, song sparrows, and cardinals. Ms. M. introduces Sadie to “life lists” and other birding practices and shares entertaining tales of the witching life including bowling-league matches against the Mid-City Shamans and the praise she garnered in Omens & Augury class. (Ms. M. herself is a cipher: is she a witch or even real?) Charming illustrations slyly echo the humor. However, the adult-oriented satire, simultaneously lauding and ridiculing the green lifestyle (Mom interprets the whole world through yoga; Dad uses fruit smoothies as creative aids), may confuse young readers and undermine the reality-focused “notice the amazing natural world around you” environmental message.

Adults will enjoy the witty non sequiturs, but the story, marred by conflicting themes, never quite coheres. (birding tips, resources) (Fantasy. 9-12)

THE RULES

Holder, Nancy & Viguié, Debbie Delacorte (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jun. 23, 2015 978-0-385-74100-2 978-0-375-98347-4 e-book 978-0-375-98980-3 PLB A superrich but neglected teen mourns his equally shy sister and decides to get revenge on the teens he blames for her death.

August knows his absent parents care more for their wealthy lifestyle than they do for their children. They supply him and Alexa with abundant cash, planting the teens in a wealthy community north of San Francisco and leaving them there. When Alexa drowns in a swimming pool, August dwells on the disrespect and injuries she suffered from their fellow high school students. He plans a party in an abandoned cannery and invites 100

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his victims. They will all participate in a scavenger hunt with individualized prizes. Innocent Robin inadvertently crashes the party, and Kyle doesn’t seem to belong there either. Events quickly go awry when teens start to disappear. Readers know they’ve been murdered, but the teens don’t realize that until later, with August swearing he didn’t do it—but the teens keep dying. Holder and Viguié keep the action churning along as they bounce from teen to teen for different perspectives on the action, sometimes recording a murder with appropriate gore, sometimes an escape. Many of the personalities tend toward stereotypes; the focus here is on thrills rather than on character development. Though there’s blood enough for horror, there’s nothing supernatural about it.

There aren’t clues enough to make this a mystery, but thriller fans should enjoy it. (Thriller. 12-18)

DANCING WITH MOLLY

Horowitz, Lena Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (208 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4814-1552-1 978-1-4814-1553-8 e-book A suburban girl chronicles the joys and dangers of the drug Ecstasy in her journal.

The unnamed narrator is a band geek who wishes her mother was as excited about her achievements as she is about sister Ashley’s popularity.

One night when hanging out with some friends, she tries Ecstasy, and it changes her life. The feeling of connection with everyone, the lack of inhibitions, finding beauty in everything—it makes her feel like less of a freak. Her experiences using Ecstasy, or Molly, give her the confidence to break out of her good-girl persona, even leading her to date Carson, one of the hottest guys at school. But when the narrator and Ashley get busted for using Molly at a school-sponsored event, it makes the narrator more determined to not give up the bliss she finds when using. She starts sneaking out, lying to her parents, and taking sexual risks, all for the high. But when her parents attempt to get her clean, the narrator isn’t ready—not until tragedy strikes. Like an afterschool special in book form, this trite problem novel is a by-thenumbers exploration of drug use. The shallow characters don’t inspire much interest, and the plot mechanically moves from point A to point B without any surprises.

Readers eager for a didactic, anti-drug novel would do better to pick up the classic Go Ask Alice instead of this effort. (Fiction. 14-18)

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THE LAND OF LINES

attention. Children will have no doubt as to how the animals are feeling, especially the butts of the hyenas’ jokes and tricks.

Important though the lesson is, this is too didactic and unrealistic to help children facing similar situations.

(Picture book. 4- 7)

Hussenot, Victor Illus. by the author Chronicle (44 pp.) $12.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4521-4282-1

A boy and a girl explore an unknown world of sharp lines, conquer monsters, and tumble their way into new lands.

Lost in an uncharted land full of angular cliffs and edges, a boy meets a girl who is similarly lost.

They befriend each other and learn that hiking and jumping through new terrain is more exciting with a partner than alone.

Along their journey through red- and blue-inked landscapes, a yellow, two-horned monster captures the girl. With a bit of ingenuity, the boy saves the girl, and the two escape. With barely enough time to recover from the evil beast, they stumble upon another boy and help him find his way home before returning to their own. Originally published in Switzerland in 2014, Hussenot’s pen-and-ink illustration hardly requires translation for its mostly wordless but action-packed pages. His economy of blue and red lines offers surprisingly detailed scenes fraught with hostility or bursting with playfulness. The plot veers into the too-familiar trope of boy meets girl, they fall in love, and boy saves his damsel in distress, but young readers will enjoy every skip, jump, and plunge the characters take on each page.

A familiar plot retold in imaginative drawings that beg multiple readings. (Picture book. 5-10)

HENRY HYENA, WHY WON’T YOU LAUGH?

Jantzen, Doug Illus. by Claude, Jean Aladdin (32 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-4814-2822-4 978-1-4814-2823-1 e-book

A laughless hyena regains his giggle in this debut from Jantzen and Claude.

Henry Hyena, who lives in a zoo, is having a blue day. He just doesn’t find the usual things funny—not the storks’ wobbly knees or an elephant’s burp—and he won’t join in with the other hyenas’ tricks, which include chasing the hares and cutting holes in the llamas’ new socks. “Now this kind of thing / is really quite rare / for hyenas always / laugh without care.” Dr. Long, a giraffe, knows exactly what’s troubling Henry: “It’s not that you’re sick, and you’re far from a fool. / You’ve just learned that laughing at others is cruel.” Suddenly enlightened, Henry goes on to teach the other hyenas about being nice to others, and just like that, they transform into the nicest animals in the zoo, and Henry’s laugh returns. While the verse is mostly reliable with regard to rhythm and rhyme, the words seem chosen just for their rhymes rather than to enhance or advance the story. Claude’s digital illustrations use bright colors and white backgrounds to focus readers’ |

THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS

Kelley, Jane Feiwel & Friends (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-1-250-05087-8

With the help of Tasman, a singular boy with a troubled history, Val, a goodhearted, well-grounded sixth-grader, tries to harness ancient forces in order to help her best friend, Lanora, whose attempt to “begin again” has gone seriously awry.

In this meticulously designed tale, Kelley takes an ordinary, realistic situation—upon entering middle school, a girl decides to start fresh and jettisons her longtime best friend, who is unwilling to let matters rest—and imbues it with layers of poignancy and enchantment. Readers will instantly know that there’s magical realism afoot, as the story begins from the point of view of Mau, a cat. Mau guides Val, who is genuinely altruistic and concerned about Lanora’s new path, to an antiques store.

There, she meets Tasman, a boy who is smart and intuitive but emotionally scarred and essentially alone. What gives the material its otherworldly power is the way these three very different children (and a quartet of classmates that almost acts like a chorus) use ritual and magical thinking to find the faith they need to persevere and mature. Although the story is sometimes opaque and takes a while to jell, it’s evocative and ultimately hopeful.

Readers with patience and the willingness to work with the story will find its rewards ample and lasting. (Magical realism. 9-13)

THE CURIOUS WORLD OF CALPURNIA TATE

Kelly, Jacqueline Henry Holt (320 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-8050-9744-3

Thirteen-year-old Calpurnia Virginia Tate of turn-of-the-20th-century Texas— introduced in the 2010 Newbery Honor– winning The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate—is more focused than ever on unlocking the secrets of the natural world.

But Callie Vee has her hands full with her tender brother Travis, who never met a wild animal he didn’t want to adopt (including a possibly diseased armadillo), and her ever exasperated mother,

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Rita Williams-Garcia

The author’s graceful style places readers right in the midst of one summer’s strange action

By Lora Shinn For her latest book, author Rita Williams-Garcia, a self-described “city girl,” had to learn about milking a cow.

When driving through the Pennsylvania countryside to visit family, she noticed a young Amish man milking a cow. She pulled over. “He didn’t mind us watching,” she says. When she noticed the udders strained and full, she thought, “Oh, I get it. They really have to get up and milk those cows when there isn’t a calf around.” With that, she gained new insight into a developing character, a responsible young man who makes sure the cow is milked every morning, no matter the forecast.

That character, Jimmy Trotter, shows up in Gone Crazy in Alabama (April 21), Williams-Garcia’s latest installment in a three-book series. The book’s protagonist—Brooklyn-based 12-year-old Delphine—travels by bus with her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, to stay at her grandmother’s house for the summer of 1969.

There, she gets a taste of Alabama’s country life, complete with chickens, creeks, and pecan trees, along with a family feud or two. Which engenders often humorous clashes of culture and generations; Fern recites strident vegetarian-tinged poetry at dinner after discovering how chicken gets on the table.

Yet the girls are growing up in a time of tension and transformation, which is also authentically rendered. “I was trying to talk a lot about changes not only in the world and how they affect community, but also how they affect the family and the individuals in the family,” she says, from the girls’ mother’s Black Panther involvement to an uncle’s struggle to live sober after returning from Vietnam.

Visceral details and Williams-Garcia’s melodic, graceful writing put readers right in the kitchen with Big Ma and Delphine, almost as if eavesdropping. Deep-seated grudges as heavy as the summer air are both amusing and thought-provoking, until a tragic act of God changes the family dynamics for good.

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To get details right, Williams-Garcia drew on research, along with multiple memories and sources: a childhood best friend who hailed from Alabama, along with her own childhood memories of weekend car trips from Georgia to Alabama.

Much like Delphine, “I was a very dreamy child, looking out the window,” Williams-Garcia says, imagining stories taking place in Alabama’s pine forests. Her father, looking back in the rearview mirror as if reading her mind, would say in caution, “A lot of bad things happen to black people in those woods.”

Even a young Williams-Garcia knew what he meant.

Williams-Garcia fuses both viewpoints—Alabama as a place of deep beauty and family connections but where danger thundered by on nighttime Klan rides. Admirably, she even draws the book’s nastiest character— the white sheriff—with complexity, showing the interwoven roots between Delphine’s family and his own.

In the novel’s beginning, Delphine is disgusted with the novel Things Fall Apart, the classic by Chinua Achebe, deriding the main character as a “mean, selfish ogre.” By book’s end, Delphine possesses a new respect for the nuances of adult life, the sacrifices and tradeoffs and compromises that must be made.

And Achebe’s book isn’t so bad either, she realizes.

As Williams-Garcia sipped herbal tea from her Jamaica, Queens, apartment, her obvious love for each character came through strongly over the phone. Is it difficult to close the book on the trilogy, on the characters? Williams-Garcia laughs and indicates that their story has been told. The narrative that once projected itself forward has now resolved and gone quiet. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

“It is so hard to say goodbye to these characters,” she says. “I don’t just know them, but love them like they’re real.”

Lora Shinn is a former youth and teen services librarian and now writes full-time about literacy, health, and travel. Gone Crazy in Alabama received a starred review in the Feb. 1, 2015, issue.

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Historical novels attempting the Regency comedy of manners can read like leaden, uninspired fan fiction. This affectionate homage to the genre delivers what’s missing. a school for brides

who wishes her one daughter among six sons would master the domestic arts instead of fixating on her Scientific Notebook and Charles Darwin (the source of the chapter-opening excerpts). In fact, of all Callie’s daily trials, the hardest to stomach is the injustice of being treated as a “half citizen” just because she’s a girl. But not to worry....Callie, the witty and sincere narrator, is “smart as a tree full of owls” and won’t be denied her dreams of being a veterinarian or anything else she puts her mind to. Animal lovers will revel in the abundant anecdotes about the benevolent country vet and Travis’ mangy strays—some heart-wrenching, some hilarious—while learning plenty about nature (“from pond water up to the stars”), the deadly 1900 Galveston hurricane, and early Texas history as recounted by Callie’s scholarly and beloved Granddaddy.

A warm, welcome stand-alone companion to Kelly’s lauded debut. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES A Story of Maidens, Mystery, and Matrimony

Kindl, Patrice Viking (272 pp.) $17.99 | Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-670-78608-4

Several years after the events of Keeping the Castle (2012), the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy has opened in the rainy hamlet of Lesser Hoo. The school’s mission: to ready eight young ladies, ages 12 to 19, for the marriage market.

Given the remote location—coastal Yorkshire—potential grooms are in short supply (there’s one) until a presentable young man walking in the vicinity breaks his leg. Brought into the school to heal, he’s soon joined by friends. Rounding out the male prospects is a mysterious gentleman billeted at the local inn.

Though all are single, the road to marital bliss is lined with potholes. Miss Asquith is attractive, delightful, and wealthy, but her father’s business, a low-status gin distillery, is likely to deter eligible mates. Down-to-earth Miss Pffolliott is vexed by a strange man claiming to be her devoted admirer. Closet scientist and would-be astronomer Miss Franklin pursues a man with his own telescope. Intricate subplots with exceptionally vivid characters (Crooked Castle residents among them) add to the fun. Historical novels attempting the Regency comedy of manners can read like leaden, uninspired fan fiction. This affectionate homage to the genre delivers what’s missing: a witty, intelligent plot whose characters—complex, conniving, hypocritical, and hilarious— seek happiness within an ordered world.

This airy soufflé of a tale, garnished with quirky charm, is an unmitigated delight from start to finish. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-18)

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FINDING AUDREY

Kinsella, Sophie Delacorte (288 pp.) $18.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-553-53651-5 978-0-553-53652-2 e-book Audrey, 14, is on a long, slow upswing from disabling anxiety disorders that resulted from the vicious abuse of bullies at school.

Under the guidance of thoughtful Dr. Sarah, Audrey begins to deal with her inability to make eye contact—or even to leave the house—by crafting videos of her quirky, near-farcical family, a nifty narrative device that especially shows off her “twitchy” mom. Audrey’s brother Frank is determined to win an online gaming championship with his team, in spite of their mom’s frenetic attempts to remake the family based on newspaper advice—which, sadly for Frank, includes giving up computers. Complicating this is the fact that Frank’s team includes sensitive Linus, who delicately, tenderly navigates Audrey’s vividly portrayed roadblocks. As their relationship blossoms, Audrey gains both strength and courage. The counterpoint of absurd humor against Audrey’s uncertain progress toward healing, graphically depicted in her appealing and slightly ironic first-person voice, is compelling. Since the nature of the bullying is never fully revealed, it can readily represent the experiences of other victims. It’s only as the narrative approaches its conclusion that the true source of the dysfunction in Audrey’s family is revealed: all of them have become victims in myriad ways.

An outstanding tragicomedy that gently explores mental illness, the lasting effects of bullying, and the power of friends and loving family to help in the healing. (Fiction.

12-18)

BOY, WERE WE WRONG ABOUT THE WEATHER!

Kudlinski, Kathleen V. Illus. by Serra, Sebastià Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 7, 2015 978-0-8037-3793-8

From dancing to appease a weather god to observing and investigating with modern scientific tools, humans have come a long way in their understanding of the weather.

The author of previous titles about old and new ideas about dinosaurs and the solar system here introduces Earth’s weather and climate. This lighthearted overview skips lightly through history and around the world, giving examples of past weather explanations and prediction methods. Each former belief is contrasted with today’s understandings about: the water cycle; thunderstorms; the vital role of the sun and the importance of many other geographical factors; using instruments and satellites to make predictions of hurricanes and other weather phenomena; and past and present climate change, including modern global

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Lim throws class differences into high relief and highlights the casual, cruel racism multiracial people still face in modern Australia. the astrologer’s daughter

warming and new, more destructive weather patterns. About modern climate change deniers, Kudlinski boldly states, “Boy, are they wrong!” (One exception to the “Boy, were they wrong!” pattern is the 2,000-year-old adage about red skies in the morning. This works, and Kudlinski provides a scientific explanation.)

Serra’s lively cartoon-style illustrations, created with pencil and computer graphics, are cheery and upbeat. Gray storms are contrasted with colorful indoor and outdoor scenes. Simplifying such a complex subject can lead to missteps, such as suggesting that “germs” can form the cores of raindrops rather than bacteria. But overall the information is appropriate for the intended readers.

A humorous take on an endlessly interesting subject. (timeline, websites) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

TOBY AND THE ICE GIANTS

Lillington, Joe Illus. by the author Flying Eye Books (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 11, 2015 978-1-909263-58-1

A small bison meets some ice age megafauna in this prehistoric ramble.

Assuring his mom that “I’m big now. I’m not scared!” little Toby scampers off. He collides with a grumpy woolly rhinoceros, introduces himself to a Megatherium, wonders at a woolly mammoth’s tusks, and sidles anxiously past a handful of other Pleistocene creatures—including a group of fur-clad humans—before gamboling back to safety. Along with exchanged greetings, each encounter comes with a side box of descriptive facts and comments, plus a small image of the animal posed next to a human (in modern dress) for comparison. Young viewers will marvel at the succession of massive ruminants and predators, which Lillington renders in watercolors with reasonable accuracy, if anthropomorphic facial expressions.

He offers measurements in metric units only (except for humans, whose weight is opaquely designated “average”). Rather anticlimactically, he caps his gallery with a perfunctory, unillustrated list of “some other amazing ice age animals that Toby didn’t get to meet!”

A skimpy alternative to Adrian Lister and Martin Ursell’s Ice Age Tracker’s Guide (2010). (Informational picture book.

7-9)

THE ASTROLOGER’S DAUGHTER

Lim, Rebecca Text (330 pp.) $11.95 paper | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-922182-00-5 A fiercely realized teen uses astrological skills to solve a heartbreaking mystery.

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“eventuality” to her daughter, Avicenna, but when Joanne goes missing, it’s still a shock. As Avicenna embraces her own ability to read destinies in the stars and planets to unravel the mystery of her beloved mother’s disappearance, her skills introduce her to both unlikely allies and revolting, violent foes across Melbourne’s most luxurious and down-at-the-heels neighborhoods.

Avicenna is a revelation: prickly and brilliant—she’s the first student in years to ace the entrance exam at a highly competitive magnet high school—she pursues the truth doggedly even as the likelihood of her mother’s death forces her to re-experience the physical and emotional trauma of the fire that took her father’s life 10 years prior. Lim throws class differences into high relief and highlights the casual, cruel racism multiracial people still face in modern Australia. Her taut, assured thriller weaves together astrology and mythology, poetry and poverty, and several generations of mothers whose love can’t protect their children from humanity’s ugliest tendencies.

Teen and adult readers who like their mysteries gritty and literary, with a touch of magic: seek this one out.

(Mystery. 15 & up)

A GIRL UNDONE

Linka, Catherine St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $19.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 23, 2015 978-1-250-06867-5 978-1-250-03932-3 e-book Series: Girl Called Fearless, 2 Wanted as a terrorist, Avie works to save herself and the ones she loves without giving in to the vicious Paternalists.

After the horrific shootout in Salvation, Idaho, Avie and Luke are on the run, leaving Yates to recover from his wounds. They hide in plain sight, masquerading as a married couple and altering their appearances. Meanwhile, every news bulletin and magazine display Avie’s face and the promise of a massive reward for her return to her betrothed, politician Jessop Hawkins.

Luke leads them to Laramie, Wyoming, enlisting the help of a friend of his father’s he hopes will aid them in delivering damning evidence against the Paternalist Party to Washington, D.C. But Avie senses something off about this new acquaintance, and her fears soon prove well-founded. Suddenly their road to revolution veers off course, and Avie finds herself trapped, able to help her friends only if she sells her own beliefs down the river, along with any hope of being with Yates again. Avie and Luke’s travels are rich with immersive, chilling atmosphere, quirky allies, and conniving townspeople. The middle lags as the struggle shifts inward to Avie’s internal turmoil and away from direct action. But the arduous march toward ending the brutality of the Paternalist Party will keep readers turning pages long into the night.

A realistic, sobering conclusion to the battle between one girl and a looming, Atwood-ian society. (Dystopian romance. 14-18)

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PLAYFUL PIGS FROM A TO Z

Lobel, Anita Illus. by the author Knopf (40 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jul. 14, 2015 978-0-553-50832-1 978-0-553-50834-5 e-book 978-0-553-50833-8 PLB Twenty-six pigs spend a glorious day playing with the alphabet.

When 26 pigs wake up and decide to go exploring, they race along a country road to a field of “magical surprises.” Each pig finds a large, free-standing letter of the alphabet and interacts with it in a special way. Wearing a fetching pleated skirt and pullover, Amanda Pig admires A; Billy Pig, in his form-fitting leotard, balances on B; Clara Pig, wrapped in a blue apron, cleans the C. Each appropriately costumed pig showcases a letter of the alphabet until Zeke Pig, in his pajamas, “zzz’s” on the Z, and the hungry, tired, and happy pigs return home to feast on corn and apples and fall asleep, pink bottoms up. Matching the beginning letter of each pig’s name and verb to a letter of the alphabet, Lobel reinforces both letter recognition and sound.

Working in gouache and watercolor, she frames pages in neat alphabet borders, drawing attention to each costumed pig with its featured letter. Strategically tucked into the corner of each frame, a different fruit, flower, or vegetable beginning with the same letter adds to the playful pedagogy. Drawn in her amusing signature style, Lobel’s adorable pigs steal this very clever show.

Delightfully playful indeed. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE WILD ONES

London, C. Alexander Philomel (256 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 25, 2015 978-0-399-17099-7 Series: Wild Ones, 1

Treacherous urban pets try to renege on an ancient deal with the wild residents of a city alleyway, and a young raccoon finds himself caught in the middle in this all-animal dramedy.

His parents done in by a pack of hired bloodhounds, Kit flees his beloved woodlands for squalid Ankle Snap Alley, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where he immediately falls afoul of a pair of raccoon hustlers and the feared Rabid Rascals gang. Worse yet, he is also targeted by miniature greyhound Titus, leader of the Flealess (or house pets), and vicious cat Sixclaw. They think he carries a possible clue to the whereabouts of the missing Bone of Contention that accords the alley’s formerly feral residents a right to settle there. Fortunately, Kit not only falls in with Eeni, a savvy rat who vows friendship “from howl to snap” (i.e., birth to, well...), but finds other allies too while proving himself no slouch when it comes to quick thinking and courage in the clutch. Despite metal traps springing and some |

spilled blood, the tale features but one onstage death; London further lightens the load with references to such appetizing alley cuisine as Daily Trash Casserole plus a diverse supporting cast highlighted by evangelical church mice and a retired fighting cock–turned-hairdresser.

Bold deeds, betrayals, and buffoonery kick off this series with gusto. (Animal fantasy. 10-12)

INK AND ASHES

Maetani, Valynne E. Tu Books (400 pp.) $19.95 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-62014-211-0

Claire’s parents are keeping secrets that could kill her.

Sixteen-year-old Claire Takata is a spirited, inquisitive amateur locksmith and sleuth. Claire and her brothers have always believed their father died of a heart attack 10 years ago and that their mother met their stepdad after he died. But when Claire finds an old letter in her father’s journal and pictures locked away in her stepdad’s desk that reveal otherwise, she is determined to find out the truth. Why have her mom and stepdad lied to her? Why does her mom never want to talk about her father? And what really happened to him?

Through letters Claire has written to him over the decade since his death, Claire’s father has served as her confidant, an outlet for her grief, frustrations, and longings. The author also makes smart use of these letters, interspersing them between chapters to deliver important back story. Claire’s grief and sense of loss are compounded when she eventually discovers that her father had been a member of the yakuza, transnational Japanese organized crime syndicates—and then her sleuthing attracts the attention of someone tied to her father’s past....The romantic tension between Claire and her best friend, Forrest, plays out authentically in a subplot, and the novel’s twists and turns will keep readers riveted and guessing even after they finish the book.

This fantastic debut packs a highly suspenseful blend of action, intrigue, and teen romance. (Thriller. 12 & up)

DEVOTED

Mathieu, Jennifer Roaring Brook (336 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-59643-911-5 Rachel tries to be devoted to her fundamentalist Christian church, but she’s finding it increasingly challenging.

Her large family belongs to a Quiverfull-movement church that emphasizes female submissiveness, modest clothing, no birth control, and a rigid interpretation of the Bible.

She’s been kept isolated from the world but uses a computer to

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a bestselling writer tells his son’s story, with a little help

Photo courtesy Daniel Meigs

When the diagnosis of mental illness befalls one’s child, circumnavigating turbulent seas to a place of recovery is uncertain at best. Neal Shusterman’s bright and brooding Challenger Deep (April 21) is based on the deeply personal experience of his son, Brendan, who had to plot just such a course.

Challenger is the story of 14-yearold Caden Bosch, struggling with the disintegration of the mind he once knew while trying to find the strength and means to survive. “When Brendan was really in the deepest place in his own mind…he looked at me and said, ‘Dad, sometimes it feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean screaming at the top of my lungs and no one can hear me,’ ” says Shusterman. It was then that Shusterman knew he wanted to write Challenger. “Of all the things that I’ve read—non-fiction, fiction— nothing seems to capture [mental illness]. And I wanted to be able to capture it so that people reading it can know what it feels like to have gone through that and to understand what it means to have your mind fall apart and try to pick up the pieces again.”

Intentionally fragmented and nonlinear chapters are married with illustrations by Brendan. It was this therapeutic artwork that inspired many of the fantasy aspects within the text. “When I presented the book, after my editor had read it, I told her how important the artwork was to the creation of the story and asked her if it would be posBrendan(l) and Neal Shusterman sible to use it in the book. She said absolutely.”

Facing the abyss of one’s mind shifting from the familiar to an unpredictable horror is unthinkable. Shusterman’s book is both a source for better understanding this battle as well as an homage to the bravery of his son and to the importance of familial support and optimism. —Gordon West Gordon West is a writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn. He is at work on his own picture book and teen novel. Challenger Deep received a starred review in the Feb. 1, 2015, issue.

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manage her father’s business as she reluctantly awaits her own future husband and numerous children. She’s naturally inquisitive, and that leads her to discover the blog of escaped church member Lauren, whose pithy commentary on the religion’s abuse helps Rachel re-evaluate her own situation. Her forbidden computer explorations exposed, Rachel’s threatened with the punishment of a harsh church camp used to brainwash straying teens. Her believable first-person narrative, which chronicles the navigation of her complex emotions of fear, longing, and tender love for God and her family, is both engaging and deeply moving.

Her eventual escape attempt is inevitable, and her encounters with the outside world are sympathetically drawn as is her life within the church. If some elements of the plot seem too easy, they do not mitigate the effectiveness of Rachel’s tale.

An engaging, illuminating, but never sensationalized portrayal of one plucky teen’s self-discovery and pulling away from a controlling, restrictive (and real) religious movement. (Fiction. 11-16)

SCHOOL FOR SIDEKICKS

McCullough, Kelly Feiwel & Friends (336 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 4, 2015 978-1-250-03926-2 Disquieting revelations await a fledgling teenager at superhero school.

After Evan horns in on a super beat down between A-list archnemeses Capt.

Commanding and Spartanicus shortly after his 13th birthday and against all odds survives, he wakes up enrolled in Hero High with—a dream come true—a set of variously useful new powers ranging from superhealing to supersnarky banter. Outfitted with a stylish costume and the moniker Meerkat, he delightedly joins a set of new roommates for classes like “Combat with Dinnerware” and “Bantering Basics.” But the dream takes on a nightmarish cast when his intern assignment hooks him up with Foxman, once a respected hero but now a depressed recovering alcoholic. Moreover, he learns that the whole Masks vs. Hoods thing isn’t an ongoing battle between heroes and villains at all but a secret government project with unusually vicious internal policy conflicts. Nor is there any clear distinction between good guys and bad. Still, Evan keeps his idealism intact and ultimately lands on his feet even as he works his way through thorny family and loyalty issues. Readers will savor his triumph as well as the melodramatic plot and the cast’s rib-tickling array of “metahumans,” including the unfortunately named Hotflash, HeartBurn, the dangerous Fromagier (Evan: “Sweet barking cheese, Foxman!”), and the shape- and gendershifting Blur.

Leaps the tottering stack of similar “sidekick” novels in a single bound. (Superhero fantasy. 11-13)

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As with the beloved classic Charlotte’s Web, bits of natural history are woven into a plot in which a human child’s emotional growth is secondary to a whimsical tale of interspecies friendships. firefly hollow

FIREFLY HOLLOW

McGhee, Alison Illus. by Denise, Christopher Atheneum (304 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Aug. 18, 2015 978-1-4424-2336-7 978-1-4424-9812-9 e-book Firefly and Cricket, two tiny animals with big dreams, challenge the status quo by befriending a miniature giant (a boy named Peter)—and by pursuing their destinies with the help of an old river vole.

Firefly wants to fly to outer space someday, and Cricket aspires to be “the cricket version of Yogi Berra.” Although they both have been warned repeatedly by the cricket and firefly nations about the hazards of human beings, they are intrigued by Peter’s way of life. After all, he and another miniature giant used to play catch, and others of Peter’s tribe have reached the moon.

Vole, the sole, determined survivor of his river people, has spent much of his riverbank life teaching himself to sail. As the story unfolds, readers of all ages will be captivated by a third-person voice, both soothing and gently humorous, that delves deeply and sensitively into such subjects as friendship, death, cultural conflict, dreams, and the adjustments that must be made on our lives’ journeys. As with the beloved classic Charlotte’s Web, bits of natural history are woven into a plot in which a human child’s emotional growth is secondary to a whimsical tale of interspecies friendships. Illustrations reminiscent of The Wind in the Willows further enhance a wise and lovely reading adventure.

This sweet and memorable tale deserves both a sequel and a film version. (Fantasy. 7-11)

BINNY IN SECRET

McKay, Hilary Illus. by Player, Micah Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4424-8278-4 Series: Binny, 2 Newly arrived in a small Cornish town, 12-year-old Binny Cornwallis struggles to find her footing as disasters and mysteries pile up inexorably.

Hardly has she had time to get decisively off on the wrong foot on the first day of school and so become victim of a campaign of petty harassment led by classmate Clare, than a destructive gale forces Binny and her family into a hasty temporary move to an isolated cottage. There, one of her little brother’s chickens is snatched (by a rare lynx or, as young James puts it, a “jagular”), and the brusque new landlady turns out to be...

Clare’s mom. With masterful comic timing McKay spins a whirl of horrifying yet hilarious admissions, mishaps, tart exchanges, and domestic tempests, as well as profoundly affecting discoveries and epiphanies, around her intense, sensitive, impulsive protagonist. Usually hilarious, that is—along with a poignant |

subplot, told in flashbacks, about a trio of siblings who summered in the cottage before and during World War I, the author weaves in mutually harrowing encounters between Binny and a rifle-toting neighbor. (Player’s illustrations not seen.)

There’s never a dull moment in the Cornwallis household—nor one not rich with love and laughter. Fans of Binny for Short (2013) will welcome this second chance to look in on the commotion. (Fiction. 11-13)

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Moore, Gareth Hungry Tomato/Lerner (32 pp.) $7.99 paper | $26.65 PLB | Aug. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-7201-3 978-1-4677-6345-5 PLB Series: Brain Benders A slender but diverse gallery of line and color illusions, with bright, crisply

printed graphics.

Following an introductory overview, Moore presents three or four examples for each of nine types of optical foolery. There are parallel lines that don’t look it, geometric shapes that only seem to be different sizes, illusory color changes, “persistence of vision” spots, and perspective switches such as the vase-or-faces image. His accompanying commentary verges on overexplanation, as readers are not only told with each example how to look or move and what they can expect to see, but are then provided with additional hints and explanations at the end. In companion title Think Outside the Box, he challenges viewers to match a key to one of a set of schematic tumblers, trace a maze without using a pencil, and other tricky eyes-only puzzles—though again the answers are at the back. Other volumes in the Brain Benders series newly available in this country, It’s Only Logical and Not So Ordinary, offer further mental exercises.

Visually appealing starter volumes for readers who take pleasure in giving their powers of perception and deduction a workout. (Nonfiction. 8-12) (It’s Only Logical: 978-14677-6346-2; Not So Ordinary: 978-1-4677-6347-9; Think Outside the Box: 978-1-4677-6344-8)

ABCS ON WINGS

Olivera, Ramon Illus. by the author Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-4814-3242-9 978-1-4814-3243-6 e-book Fasten your seat belts: here’s another alphabet book featuring airplanes. Does this one take flight over the others?

The geometric shapes and colorful graphic images make this one quite attractive. One or two words are assigned to each letter, displayed in both upper and lower cases, usually two letters to a double-page spread. Some words are natural choices—“Aa

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Louise’s dramatic precociousness (the text is scattered with handlettered facts, vocabulary definitions, and asides) is reminiscent of another certain fancy gal that readers adore. louise trapeze is totally 100% fearless

is for ace. / Bb is for biplane”—while others will require explanation. “Cc is for carrier. / Dd is for deck” shows a plane taking off from an aircraft carrier. “Kk is for Kitty Hawk” occupies a double-page spread of its own and depicts a triumphant Wilbur aboard the Wright Flyer with Orville running along behind in the sand. Olivera has mixed success for the tricky letters, offering up “quick,” “UFO” (paired playfully if rather opaquely for the audience with “vanished”), “X axis,” and “zeppelin.”

Most spreads include humans interacting with the key object.

Though there is no legend, there are enough interesting terms to hold kids’ attention, especially those who are fascinated with airplanes. Variations in perspective and the mood of the artwork keep the two-dimensional scenes from feeling static while retaining the posterlike style.

This title lines up between a realistic approach and a comic one, soaring along nicely. (Picture book. 4- 7)

LOUISE TRAPEZE IS TOTALLY 100% FEARLESS

Ostow, Micol Illus. by Barrager, Brigette Random House (112 pp.) $14.99 | $9.99 e-book | $17.99 PLB Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-553-49739-7 978-0-553-49741-0 e-book 978-0-553-49740-3 PLB Series: Louise Trapeze, 1

Seven-year-old Louise Trapeze is finally old enough to fly in her circus act—but the platform is so very, very high.

Louise wants nothing more than to be grown up. She uses words like “actually” and “superb” (as Louse describes: “It’s much more mature than just plain super”) to feel sophisticated.

But when it is her Birthday Eve and her parents surprise her with a sparkly, new leotard for her flying-trapeze act debut, she feels anything but mature. In fact, her stomach feels “squeezy,” and her heart goes “skitter-skitter-skitter.” Louise Trapeze is 100 percent afraid of heights! The hardest part is that Louise can’t tell anyone. What if they kick her out of the circus? Louise’s dramatic precociousness (the text is scattered with hand-lettered facts, vocabulary definitions, and asides) is reminiscent of another certain fancy gal that readers adore. Even when filled to the brim with young angst—a skirmish with her best friend, a tangle with the resident bully, and, of course, Louise’s internal struggle with her deep, dark secret—Louise Trapeze is still lighthearted and cheery.

A sweet peek beneath the big top; readers will clamor for the next one. (Fiction. 6-9)

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PRINCESS JUNIPER OF THE HOURGLASS

Paquette, Ammi-Joan Philomel (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 21, 2015 978-0-399-17151-2

A princess requests and receives a country for her 13th birthday.

With her very own country, Princess Juniper will be able to interact with others in informal, casual ways—kind of.

She gathers kids to journey to her “brand-new kingdom,” where she’ll be queen and they’ll be her subjects. But instead of their scheduled departure, the kids are rushed off the palace grounds at night, hearing distant battle sounds and directed by the king to a place on no map. The hidden basin in the mountains is idyllic, with a waterfall, fruit trees, and bedrooms carved in the rock.

Juniper loses her rule—for withholding information about the war back at home—and mounts an exciting scheme to recover it. However, this text isn’t anti-royalist: the other kids are her “friends” and “family” but still her “subjects”; and if a ruler’s heart is in the right place, it’s fine to demand heaps of work (and work itself is romanticized). Luxuries (“silks and scarves and paints and powders”) and sumptuous meals (“crispy cheese sticks”; “fresh sage griddle cakes topped with sweet butter and honey syrup”) evoke stories from a bygone era. Unfortunately, matching that old-fashioned sensibility is a “notoriously secretive tribe” of “obscure origin and uncertain habitation” and “wildness”—a stereotypical, Romany-esque portrayal regrettably poised for a larger role in the sequel.

Despite a sense of playacting, this is a gently adventurous and luxuriously detailed romp. (Fantasy. 8-11)

CALL OF THE OSPREY

Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw Photos by Muñoz, William HMH Books (80 pp.) $18.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-544-23268-6

Ospreys, severely affected by DDT in the 1960s, now serve as indicators for the success of pollution remediation on a Superfund cleanup site.

Scientists from the Montana Osprey Project invite the public to share their enthusiasm for these amazing raptors, bringing young people to visit the nests and maintaining two webcams while carrying on the work of collecting and analyzing samples of blood and feathers from osprey chicks along the Clark Fork River. Patent introduces the birds and the project, explaining environmental issues resulting from mining in the Clark Fork area, various dangers for ospreys, and the research. A chapter of osprey observations done through Web cameras, watching two pairs raise their chicks, is followed by an explanation of the problem of mercury and then a description of the attachment of transmitters to these birds to research migration patterns. There’s a great deal of

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information crammed into this title; many sidebars and special sections interrupt the exposition. Readers without a solid science background may have difficulty following the steps of data analysis.

Libraries still holding Patent and Muñoz’s Ospreys (1993) will find that simpler title a helpful overview of the species, but this one demonstrates how studying these birds may help address some knottier scientific problems.

More science than adventure, this is a challenging addition to the Science in the Field series. (Nonfiction. 12-16)

THE DOUBLECROSS (and Other Skills I Learned as a Superspy)

Pearce, Jackson Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jul. 17, 2015 978-1-61963-414-5

An unlikely hero becomes a double agent to save his parents and possibly the whole world.

The Sub Rosa Society headquarters is both a home for international spies and their families and a school for young spies-in-training. With brains and talent to spare, 12-year-old Hale should have no problem with the junior agent test, but his plus size makes passing the physical requirements difficult. When his superspy parents are compromised while on a mission, Hale relies on all his training to rescue them from evil League headquarters—but nothing prepares him for the shock he receives once he arrives. The League HQ is filled with outdated equipment, a couple of quirky kids, and some washed-up operatives. They say they are the good guys, but then what does that make him? Hale must rely on his acrobatic and perky sister, his mortal enemy, and his new League friends if he is going to expose the SRS and save his parents. Exciting missions, cool gadgets, and plenty of intrigue make this a fun read from the get-go. The icing on the cake is Hale, whose self-deprecating manner, kind heart, and intelligence will steal hearts as well as the show.

International espionage plus wacky high jinks equals plot-twisting fun. (Thriller. 8-12)

PEDRO AND GEORGE

Perret, Delphine Illus. by the author Atheneum (32 pp.) $17.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4814-2925-2 978-1-4814-2926-9 e-book Cousins Pedro and George, a crocodile and an alligator, try to correct the record on their differences in this French import.

Pedro is methodical. George is emotional. He’s fed up with being called a crocodile. Pedro suggests a trip to the city |

to correct the foolish children who perpetuate the confusion.

They pack a bag, including a comb (“of no use, of course”), and so begins a bizarre tale of discovery, all depicted in detailpacked black-and-white line drawings. The only spots of color highlight the featured creatures: green for reptiles, beige for humans. Along the way, the cousins decide that eating the children will teach them a lesson, and they try to implement their plan in Mrs. Muiche’s classroom. George bites little Josephine’s foot, but “pif paf bam,” she puts him in a judo hold for a teachable moment. Star pupil Theodore explains that George is an alligator; the crocodile is identified by his fourth lower tooth.

Although readers will take a moment to study the cartoons for the differentiation, they mostly (unlike the dutiful students) will be giggling uncontrollably. The droll storytelling and absurd action roll along to the conclusion: the reptiles go home and receive thank-you letters from Josephine for teaching them the difference between a crocodile and an...well, perhaps that is another story!

A wholly original romp told with deliciously Gallic flair in an uncredited translation. (Picture book. 5-8)

HUNGRY ROSCOE

Plant, David J. Illus. by the author Flying Eye Books (40 pp.) $17.95 | Jun. 9, 2015 978-1-909263-53-6 Persistence pays off for an urban raccoon determined to upgrade his garbagebased diet.

Weary of scrounging “rotten junk” from rubbish bins and hearing that the animals in the nearby zoo get fresh food every day, Roscoe tries to sneak in: first disguised as a tortoise beneath a green umbrella, then as a penguin with a pointy ice cream cone for a beak. Unsurprisingly, neither silly disguise fools the surly zookeeper. Finally, at the monkeys’ invitation, he steals the zookeeper’s keys to join them in their cage—whereupon they leave him chowing down and scamper off to set all the animals free. Chaos ensues. Done in a retro style with flatly applied, lowcontrast colors, the cartoon illustrations are well-stocked with active, comically expressive figures. The narrative’s poker-faced tone (“ ‘That’s not for pests like you!’ growled the zookeeper. He was not a good-tempered man”) adds a similarly antique flavor.

The locale isn’t specified beyond “a park in the middle of a big city,” but some of the skyscrapers visible beyond the zoo’s low walls may look familiar to young New Yorkers. In any case, at day’s end Roscoe generously offers the last banana in the bucket to the frazzled zookeeper and saunters off with a belch.

A droll episode, with any lesson or moral beyond, maybe, “try, try again” absent or well-buried. (Picture book. 5- 7)

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THE RISE AND FALL OF OSCAR THE MAGICIAN

Porter, Matthew Illus. by the author Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch (32 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 4, 2015 978-1-57061-929-8 Series: Monkey World

Who will be the Magician of the Year? Will honesty or treachery win the day?

Oscar the monkey magician is flattered to be nominated by the readers of Magic Monthly for the title of Magician of the Year.

Goateed rival Milton is nominated too. Worried that Oscar will beat him and thereby deprive him of a perfect set of trophies, Milton vows to trick Oscar and ruin his performances. But every prank Milton tries backfires, and audiences think Oscar is even more magnificent than ever. Milton decides to embarrass Oscar by hypnotizing him into stealing the priceless Blue Diamond Necklace. Oscar’s caught, but he convinces Mayday the detective to look deeper into the case. When Mayday too is trapped by Milton’s hypnotic monocle, it’s a good thing officers Charlie and Joe are on the case too! Porter’s characters from The Thunderbolt Express (2013) return in this tale of monkey mystery and malfeasance. The current tale parallels the previous in that this too includes a crocodile-infested river (well, a jazz band of crocodiles). Back too are Porter’s big-eyed monkeys in their spiffy suits and disguises, featured in brightly colored, full-bleed illustrations painted on pine.

A fine first caper for budding fans of mystery, monkeys, or magic. (Picture book. 4-8)

AMINA

Powers, J.L. Allen & Unwin (192 pp.) $12.99 paper | Jul. 1, 2015 978-1-74331-249-0 Series: Through My Eyes Amina Khalid is a sweet, amiable teenager—and a solid counterexample to Islamophobia and negative notions about Somalis.

The 14-year-old Somali Muslim teenager lives in war-fractured Mogadishu. She shares her grenadedamaged home with pregnant Khadija, elderly Ayeeyo, her older brother, Roble, and her father, political artist Samatar Khalid.

Unlike the stereotypes of Muslim men oppressing Muslim women and girls, Amina’s loving father and exasperated brother support the “itch in her fingertips” that “[drives] her to keep creating.” Like her dad, Amina creates renegade art—not paintings on canvas like Samatar, but multimedia street art using bombed-out buildings, hoarded charcoal, poetry, cloth strips, and other pieces of her beloved metropolis. Powers’ prose is honest, though descriptions of events such as giving birth as a circumcised woman, kidnappings by real-life Islamist group 110

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al-Shabab, and death are sometimes elliptically described. She leavens Amina’s difficult situation with school, crushes, unexpected friendships, faith, spoken-word face-offs, and real-life context as Amina and her fellow citizens reconfigure what “normal” means for their families, city, and, by extension, country.

Taken as a whole, this entry in the Through My Eyes series is solid but not gripping—and that’s OK. Readers don’t always need another heroine—sometimes a young woman living an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances will wilt stereotypes better than heroics. (map, author’s note, timeline, glossary, further reading) (Fiction. 13-16)

TUNIIT Mysterious Folk of the Arctic

Qitsualik-Tinsley, Rachel & QitsualikTinsley, Sean Illus. by Bigham, Sean Inhabit Media (60 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2015 978-1-927095-76-8

Before the Inuit came to the Arctic, there were the Tuniit.

The Qitsualik-Tinsleys offer readers an introduction to this prehistoric people, twining scientific findings with Inuit legend and even Inuktitut grammar to provide a window on the early Arctic. Without going into anthropological specifics, the husband-and-wife team, who include Inuit, Cree, and Mohawk in their combined heritage, introduce the notion that the Tuniit may not have been human before going on to say that they lived in settlements, originated the intricate stone cairns known as inuksuit, and were short, strong, and shy. They introduce snippets of traditional lore that claim supernatural powers for the Tuniit and that build a strong case for the eventual assimilation of the Tuniit by the encroaching Inuit. Anthropological discoveries validate the existence of the Tuniit and their disappearance as a distinct culture and genotype. Bigham contributes moody oil paintings and ink drawings; shifts in typeface seem to indicate corresponding shifts in mode that highlight the persistence of the Tuniit in Inuit legend, though this is not consistent.

The authors clearly wrestle with the understanding that Inuit ancestors displaced an earlier indigenous people, introducing real poignancy to their exhortation that their readers respect the Tuniit by remembering them: “We remember a fate that no culture should have to endure.”

A valuable introduction to a vanished North American people, told with nuance, engagement, and rue. (Nonfiction.

8-12)

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The large and colorful single-page illustrations successfully elicit empathy for those seeking relief from various maladies at Tata’s door. louise trapeze is totally 100% fearless

MY TATA’S REMEDIES/LOS REMEDIOS DE MI TATA

Rivera-Ashford, Roni Capin Illus. by Castro L., Antonio Cinco Puntos (40 pp.) $17.95 | $8.95 paper | $8.95 e-book May 5, 2015 978-1-935955-91-7 978-1-935955-89-4 paper 978-1-935955-90-0 e-book Following My Nana’s Remedies/Los Remedios De Mi Nana, illustrated by Edna San Miguel (2002), Rivera-Ashford offers another semiautobiographical and child-friendly recounting of the importance of sharing intergenerational wisdom, this time accompanied by Castro L.’s expressive illustrations.

From a banged-up forehead to a fever in the middle of the night, there are many opportunities for Aaron to observe his tata sharing concern and good cheer as he dispenses remedies based primarily on medicinal herbs to neighbors and friends. A Latino nonsense ditty used to console children when they are sick or hurt comes in handy when Aaron’s little brother’s itchy feet need attention (“Heal, heal, little tail of a frog; if you don’t heal today, you’ll be healed tomorrow”). Readers will be glad to know that Nana from the earlier book makes an appearance, and they may even wish that they were prescribed her freshly made empanadas, which she shares with the patients as part of Tata’s treatments. The large and colorful single-page illustrations successfully elicit empathy for those seeking relief from various maladies at Tata’s door. Botanically correct depictions of the plants utilized in the remedies decorate the text pages and are duplicated in the appendix, where properties and usage are described in more detail than within the fully bilingual text.

So many cultural treasures are dependent on wordof-mouth transmission, and this story encourages grandparents to lovingly pass on their knowledge to eager grandchildren and family members. (Bilingual picture book.

4-11)

THE FIRE CHILDREN

Roy, Lauren Ravenstone (220 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jun. 18, 2015 978-1-78108-353-6

In a fantasyland desert, one girl’s encounter with her gods is both dangerous and romantic.

Fifteen-year-old Yulla lives in Kaladim, a low-tech city seemingly ruled by superstition. Whenever the multiday eclipse comes (five or 10 or even 15 years apart) it’s the Darktimes. The people of Kaladim retreat to the undercity tunnels, in a darkness untouched by lantern light, leaving offerings above for Mother Sun’s children, who walk the city during the Scorching Days. The Fire Children are a part of a mythos involving |

Mother Sun, her betrayal by Father Sea, and the intervention of Sister Moon—a mythology of Kaladim’s priestly class that is, it seems, almost completely accurate. When Yulla sneaks from the tunnels to see the city in the forbidden Scorching Days, she expects to be endangered by the Fire Children—not by a magical conspiracy. Luckily there’s a handsome godling available for some mutual rescuing, and he’s hot: like, burning. The pantheon’s history is flatly literal, and Kaladim’s pre-industrial, exotic desert vibe is represented by Arabic and Persian elements thrown together willy-nilly. Still, the complications of dating a boy whose temperature melts sand into glass are welldeveloped, and the book seems almost quaint (delightfully so) in its use of the past tense.

This entry in the stuffed paranormal-romance genre refreshingly lacks passive angst. (Fantasy. 11-14)

FUZZY MUD

Sachar, Louis Delacorte (192 pp.) $16.99 | $19.99 PLB | Aug. 4, 2015 978-0-385-74378-5 978-0-375-99129-5 PLB When fifth-grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi and seventh-grader Marshall Walsh cut through the woods to avoid school bully Chad Hilligas, they unwittingly set off a chain of events that threatens global catastrophe.

What exactly is that pool of mud that Tamaya notices in the woods—gooey, tarlike muck with a sheen of fuzzy, yellowbrown scum on top? Whatever it is, it comes in handy when Chad attacks Tamaya and Marshall, and Tamaya scoops up a handful and shoves it into his face. But that evening, she notices a terrible rash on her hands, and Chad doesn’t show up for school the next day. Revealed in interspersed testimony from secret Senate hearings is the fact that scientists have been researching Biolene, a viable alternative to gasoline using artificial, high-energy microorganisms. The threat of mutations and “frankengerms” had been considered negligible, but now a walk in the woods has led to the quarantine of the whole Pennsylvania town as an epidemic has spread, the airport and railroad stations have been closed, and the Pennsylvania National Guard has been called in. Sachar’s tale is slim, as is the delineation of character and setting, but the fast-paced plot and enough science to give the illusion of substance will have readers racing through the pages.

An exciting story of school life, friends, and bullies that becomes a quick meditation on the promise and dangers of modern science. (Speculative fiction. 8-12)

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True to the 1980s TV show, this adaptation captures the essence of Punky. punky brewster

THOSE GIRLS

Saft, Lauren Poppy/Little, Brown (336 pp.) $18.00 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 9, 2015 978-0-316-40366-5 978-0-316-40367-2 e-book Three best friends alternate narration of their junior year of high school as they explore sex, romance, and independence.

Each teen clearly represents a high school stock character—Alex: tomboy with a secret crush on her best male friend; Veronica: proudly promiscuous; and Mollie: willing to sacrifice her sense of self to keep her athlete boyfriend. Outwardly each teen embraces her role in the trio—Veronica’s quick laughter at the slut-shaming jokes her best friends lob at her is actively painful. But the characters transcend stereotypes when their private narrations reveal each girl’s discomfort with her assigned social position in the trio and in the school’s social hierarchy. Their inner musings about the secret jealousies and hurt feelings that exist among the trio combine with the girls’ independent and collective confusion about acceptable sexual roles for women for a disheartening window into modern teens’ identity dilemmas. Unfortunately, after creating interesting characters, Saft forces the trio into a soap opera of secret sexual dalliances with one another’s boyfriends. Eventually a revenge plot involves two of the girls slipping their friend a roofie, after which she is almost sexually assaulted by a teacher. This chilling attempted sexual violence is too easily dismissed during the girls’ quick reconciliation.

Saft’s debut develops admirably complex characters but then fails to deliver a plot worthy of them. (Fiction. 14-18)

CHILDREN OF THE EARTH

Schumacher, Anna Razorbill/Penguin (368 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-59514-752-3 Series: End Times, 2

The buildup to and final culmination of prophecies from End Times (2014).

Three months have passed since the death of Janie’s baby, and in the time between novels, the townspeople have changed their minds about Daphne and now believe her a prophet—she’s attracting religious newcomers who want to participate in the final battle. But Daphne is keeping bits and pieces of her visions from them, just as she’s keeping her relationship with Owen a secret. The secrets are connected: Daphne doesn’t know what to make of visions of Owen with his fellow Children of the Earth reaping destruction and death. Meanwhile, Children of the Earth leader Luna finishes assembling her flock and shifts gears, hoping to lure Owen back by any means, as he is necessary to her single-minded goals. In less-mystical subplots, Janie’s grief and loneliness become overwhelming as she’s isolated in her 112

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in-laws’ partially built chateau, while her father-in-law recklessly attempts to steal the oil right out from under her father. The plot suffers from logical hiccups—baffling depictions of police work notable among these—but the characters’ emotional lives are rich and believable. With each character’s moves, the showdown and solution’s inevitability become clearer.

A sequel that fulfills its predecessor’s promises. (Fantasy.

14 & up)

PUNKY BREWSTER

Sellner, Joelle Illus. by Vamos, Lesley Roar Comics/Lion Forge (112 pp.) $12.99 paper | Jul. 28, 2015 978-1-63140-314-9 Series: Punky Brewster, 1 The world is once again taking note of Punky Brewster, reimagining her origins in a playful comic format.

Abandoned by her mother in a parking lot, 8-year-old Punky is homeless. Acting as a beard for a con artist, she is eventually discovered and taken to a group home. When the home tries to locate her next of kin, they find a distant cousin living nearby. Henry Warnimont is a single, 50-something photographer who’s more of a curmudgeon than a cuddler. However, Punky’s offbeat spunk and Henry’s gruff ways seem to genuinely mesh.

Unfortunately, the courts are less than eager to turn over Punky to Henry’s care, leading Punky to concoct all kinds of silly schemes.

True to the 1980s TV show, this adaptation captures the essence of Punky: her catchphrases (“Holy Macanoli!”), her adorably hilarious butchering of phrases (“shin mannequins” for shenanigans), and her bottomless well of harebrained but well-intentioned ideas.

Vamos’ spirited illustrations do a keen job of bringing Punky’s moxie to life. Originally a series of comic books, the book retains its serialized feel and takes its time to get going, but the animated antics do a fine job of helping the action along.

Today’s kids might not have the fond nostalgia for Punky that their elders do, but her tale—and the idea that family is what you make it—is as likable as ever. (Graphic fiction. 7-11)

THE GOOD GIRLS

Shepard, Sara HarperTeen (352 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 2, 2015 978-0-06-207452-2 978-0-06-207454-6 e-book The follow-up to gossipy thriller The Perfectionists (2014) begins with its protagonists reeling from a teacher’s death.

A prologue helpfully brings new and returning readers up to speed: Mackenzie, Julie, Caitlin, Parker, and Ava started talking in English

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class about whom they’d like to see killed and how they’d do the deed. Shortly thereafter, someone began committing murders in exactly the manners named. Because the girls have secrets that make them look suspicious—the prank they’d played on a murdered student, their having snuck into their teacher’s house just before he was killed—each is reluctant to tell the authorities what she knows. Shepard, famed for her Pretty Little Liars series, uses the tension inherent in this premise just as deliciously in this sequel as in the original volume. Romantic and family conflicts in each girl’s storyline, from Caitlin’s navigating a relationship with her ex-boyfriend’s younger brother to Ava’s hiding her stepmother’s cruel abuse to Mackenzie’s best-friend-turned-rival Claire competing with her for boys’ attention, ensure each chapter is chock-full of back-stabbings and barbed words. Clues about the murderer’s identity are available to careful readers, but many will be surprised by the final revelation.

A delectably devious conclusion. (Suspense. 14-18)

MORE HAPPY THAN NOT

Silvera, Adam Soho Teen (304 pp.) $18.99 | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-61695-560-1 In a Bronx neighborhood of the near future, it’s no secret that at least one person has taken advantage of the Leteo Institute’s new medical procedure that promises “cutting-edge memory-relief.”

Reeling from his discovery of his father in a blood-filled bathtub, there are lots of things that Aaron Soto would like to forget—the smile-shaped scar on his own wrist attests to that. Puerto Rican Aaron meets a boy named Thomas from a neighboring (and sometimes rival) project, who shares his love of comic books and fantasy fiction. The two develop a friendship that makes Aaron wonder if he’s a “dude-liker,” leading to a breakup with his girlfriend. When Thomas doesn’t reciprocate, Aaron considers the Leteo procedure for himself. This novel places a straightforward concept—what if you could erase unwanted memories?—squarely within an honest depiction of the pains of navigating the teen years and upends all expectations for a plot resolution. Debut author Silvera has an ear for dialogue and authentic voices. He scatters references to his characters’ various ethnicities in an unforced manner—of a midnight showing of a movie based on their favorite fantasy series, Thomas says “I was the only brown Scorpius Hawthorne.”

Thomas is the foil to Aaron’s conviction that there’s an easy way out in a multifaceted look at some of the more unsettling aspects of human relationships.

A brilliantly conceived page-turner. (Speculative fiction.

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SEX IS A FUNNY WORD A Book About Bodies, Feelings, and You

Silverberg, Cory Illus. by Smyth, Fiona Triangle Square Books for Young Readers (160 pp.) $23.95 | May 5, 2015 978-1-60980-606-4

Moving up in target audience from their explanation of reproduction, What Makes a Baby (2013), Silverberg and Smyth explore various meanings for the word “sex.”

In their own ways, Zai, Cooper, Mimi, and Omar respond to information in chapters about bodies, “Boys, Girls, All of Us,” touch, language, and “Crushes, Love, and Relationships.” With skin tones in unlikely shades (blue! purple! green!) and wildly diverse crowd scenes, chances are good that any reader can identify with someone in these pages. Refreshingly, these crowds are diverse in a way that does not appear assembled by checklist.

Lively design, bright, clashing colors, cartoon-style illustrations, comic strips, and plenty of humor support the informal, inclusive approach. Each chapter ends with questions to think and talk about. The author’s respect for different approaches to the subject comes through. No actual sexual activities are described except for masturbation, in the chapter that also deals with “secret touches.” The gender chapter tells how gender is assigned but notes “there are more than two kinds of bodies.” The character Zai doesn’t identify as either boy or girl. Illustrations show body parts of kids and grown-ups (nipples, breasts, bottoms, and parts biologically specific to boys or girls) demonstrating wide variety. Puberty will be addressed in a third title.

This carefully thought-out explanation may surprise but should be widely appreciated. (glossary) (Nonfiction.7-10)

NOBLE WARRIOR

Sitomer, Alan Lawrence Hyperion (400 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jul. 21, 2015 978-1-4847-0528-5 978-1-4847-2009-7 e-book Series: Caged Warrior, 2 A teenage mixed martial arts genius works covert ops for the U.S. government.

It’s been 10 months since the witness protection program whisked McCutcheon “M.D.” Daniels and his little sister away from their miserable lives in Detroit. In that time, M.D. has been working with the military, training in the arts of black ops, and occasionally going into the field and using his unique set of skills to catch predators. Meanwhile, back home, the Priests have targeted M.D.’s abandoned flame and his father in efforts to draw the boy that got away out from hiding. It all comes to a head with an undercover M.D. entering Jentles State Prison, a facility notorious for breaking prisoners beyond imagination.

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Sitomer’s Caged Warrior (2014) was an exciting action thriller that leaned into its darkest elements in smart, interesting ways. Unfortunately this sequel can’t pull off the same balancing act. This scenario involving top-secret government agencies and Supermax prisons is completely removed from the reality established in the previous book. Instead of escalating the stakes, the author has blown them up to comic-book levels.

When everything is so big and so tough and so gritty and so violent, there’s no room for hope, nor is there much room for reader engagement. The book concludes with a beat that feels cribbed from The Shawshank Redemption and a hint at further books. Few readers will want to follow.

A sequel that destroys the goodwill established by its predecessor. (Thriller. 12-16)

APPLEBLOSSOM THE POSSUM

Sloan, Holly Goldberg Illus. by Rosen, Gary A. Dial (288 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Aug. 11, 2015 978-0-8037-4133-1 978-0-698-15500-8 e-book

A young possum topples down a chimney to become the pet of a little girl while her brothers try to rescue her.

The runt of a litter of baby possums, Appleblossom spends several months inside her mother’s pouch before Mama Possum introduces her babies to the dangerous world. Mama explains that as solitary, nocturnal, nomadic marsupials, they must hide by day and avoid dogs, humans, and cars. When her babies are ready to survive on their own, Mama leaves. Insecure and afraid, Appleblossom and her brothers, Antonio and Amlet, stick together until curious Appleblossom accidentally tumbles down a chimney into the house of a girl named Izzy. Thrilled with her adorable new pet, Izzy pampers Appleblossom and conspires to hide her from her parents and dog. Determined to save Appleblossom, Antonio and Amlet stumble upon their parents, and together they stage a daring raid on Izzy’s house.

Use of the present tense adds immediacy to Appleblossom, Amlet, and Antonio’s naïve, amusing, and endearing high jinks.

Insights about possums add an educational element to this otherwise comic adventure, while humorous illustrations capture the wee possums’ antics and personalities.

A warm and funny possum-family saga. (Animal fantasy.

8-12)

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MY BROTHER’S SECRET

Smith, Dan Chicken House/Scholastic (304 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jul. 28, 2015 978-0-545-77155-9 978-0-545-77160-3 e-book It is 1941 in western Germany. World War II has been raging for almost two years, and Hitler’s propaganda machine is in full force.

The German people are being forced into submission through a combination of fear, indoctrination, and lies. Hitler wants a generation of young soldiers willing to do anything for their Führer. Twelve-year-old Karl Friedman is a true believer. His 16-year-old brother, Stefan, is not. Karl is a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, but Stefan is a member of the Edelweiss Pirates, insurrectionists determined to spread the truth about Hitler and the war. When Karl witnesses firsthand the brutality of the Nazis, he begins to suspect his loyalty has been misplaced. Based on true events, Karl and Stefan’s story exposes what life was like for regular German citizens during the war. The quiet themes of patriotism, courage, and compassion are presented through believable characters, gripping suspense, and an unflinching look at the lengths some will go to in order to retain control. Rather than a pedantic lesson on right and wrong, Karl’s journey is an awakening of one boy’s understanding of the world around him.

A heartfelt look at coming of age in a time of war. (Historical fiction. 9-12)

EVERY LAST WORD

Stone, Tamara Ireland Hyperion (368 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jun. 16, 2015 978-1-4847-0527-8 978-1-4847-0627-5 e-book Spa days. VIP concert tickets. The envy of the girls in the lunchroom. Sixteen-year-old Samantha and her friends, the Crazy Eights, have it all—at least, that’s what Samantha has always let everyone believe.

Nobody can know the real Sam, the crazy girl with OCD. If they found out, it would cost her everything. But when an unlikely new friend introduces Sam to a secret society of student poets, speaking her truth becomes increasingly appealing.

While the novel gets off to a misleading start as Sam battles violent, obsessive thoughts that are unlike anything else she experiences in the rest of the story, Stone does offer readers a fresh take on OCD by focusing on Sam’s internal struggle as opposed to the external behaviors that are typically associated with the disorder. Sam is an endearing protagonist readers will find familiar and enjoy rooting for. And while the Eights come off as flat, stereotypical cool girls, the oddball members of Poet’s Corner

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Those who read on will be rewarded, empathizing with Andreas as he sets forth to provide Adela her freedom and slowly learns his life calling in the process. the falconer’s apprentice

I WILL TAKE A NAP!

are genuinely intriguing. With the exception of Caroline, who introduces Sam to the group, and AJ, Sam’s new boyfriend, who are fully developed, readers, like Sam, will be left wishing they’d been allowed to get to know the rest of the crew better.

Clueless meets Dead Poets Society with a whopping final twist. (Fiction. 12-18)

THE FALCONER’S APPRENTICE

von Hassell, Malve Namelos (212 pp.) $19.95 | $9.95 paper | Jul. 15, 2015 978-1-60898-192-2 978-1-60898-193-9 paper

Andreas, 14 and lowborn, cannot bear to allow the death of a peregrine falcon, unfairly condemned by a count’s son, and so escapes with it, introducing readers to European life in the early 13th century.

The story is divided into eight parts, which are further divided into four chapters. Each part begins with an excerpt from an actual book about falconry written by Frederick von Hohenstaufen II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Frederick’s reign is at its peak as Andreas sneaks himself and the stolen falcon, Adela, onto a peddler’s cart. The peddler Richard, ostensibly a dealer of falcons, has other tricks up his sleeve. Within an imaginative but believable plot, the fictional Andreas, after many encounters with mostly fictional characters, eventually has a meeting with Frederick himself. Action-oriented readers will put down the book early on, impatient with the sometimesawkward, descriptive characterizations and historical background that set up the story: “Castle Kragenberg was located in the northern part of the Holy Roman Empire, just south of the city of Lübeck in the Duchy of Saxony, in a wide open, mostly flat, fertile region, and winters were harsh.” Those who read on will be rewarded, empathizing with Andreas as he sets forth to provide Adela her freedom and slowly learns his life calling in the process. His friendship with Richard’s daughter, Gemma, adds further dimension to the tale.

This well-researched and carefully plotted novel features a likable protagonist and a setting straight from the Newbery canon. (notes, suggested reading, acknowledgements) (Historical fiction. 11-15)

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Willems, Mo Illus. by the author Hyperion (64 pp.) $9.99 | Jun. 2, 2015 978-1-4847-1630-4 Series: Elephant & Piggie

Poor Gerald the elephant—all he wants is to take a nap.

A bleary-eyed Gerald blinks out at readers from the cover, blanket and Knuffle bunny tucked in his arms. Piggie’s head pokes into the frame from the side at a 90-degree angle, hinting at the disruption to come. Inside, “I am tired,” Gerald announces. “And cranky. // I am going to take a nap.” Those declarations set off a characteristically hilarious encounter between the fussbudget elephant and his porcine pal. He spreads out his mat, lies down...and in marches Piggie, hollering, “GERALD!” Gerald explodes from slumber in alarm.

Readers will not find it at all surprising, though they will find it funny, that pretty soon Gerald’s cranky mood spreads to Piggie, who decides that she will take a nap, too: “SNORE! / SNORE! SNORE! SNORE!” Several pages later, the stertorous swine wakes up, rested and smiling. “How are you enjoying your nap, Gerald?” Beside himself, the elephant rages that he is “NOT napping!”—but if he’s not napping, then how come Piggie is floating? And endowed with a turnip-head? Careful readers will have noticed the change in background color that cues this extended dream sequence—and they may also find themselves wondering whether Gerald could possibly be as rested as he seems when he really wakes up.

As naps go, this is about as strenuous—and as funny—as it gets. (Early reader. 3-9)

BIG TOP BURNING The True Story of an Arsonist, a Missing Girl, and the Greatest Show On Earth

Woollett, Laura A. Chicago Review (176 pp.) $18.95 | Jun. 1, 2015 978-1-61373-114-7

In 1944, 167 people died in a circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut; 59 of them were children under 10.

Some were trampled when the audience of 6,000 tried to flee the tent; others died from burns. This chronological account vividly describes the circus, the fire, the rescue, and the medical care that followed. The polished text draws from interviews the author conducted as well as legal documents, newspapers, letters, and more. Black-and-white photographs of mixed quality add both information and a sense of the time. Much of the book focuses on mysteries surrounding the fire, such as its causes and unidentified bodies, puzzling them out from official reports from the time and subsequent investigations. Woven

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Yankey lays flat, cut-paper figures of pale children, bright carpets of delicate flowers, sinuously elongated wild creatures, and flowing lines of landscape over backgrounds of deep, starry darkness. sun and moon

throughout is the story of a child’s unclaimed body, perhaps that of Eleanor Cook, a missing girl who wasn’t identified at the time. Details about the child’s clothes, her injuries from being trampled, and even a dental chart provide clues for readers to assess. It remains uncertain if the fire was caused by arson or if the body was Eleanor Cook’s, leaving readers with the realistic but possibly disappointing view that not all mysteries from the past can be solved.

History buffs and fans of forensic television shows will especially appreciate this exploration of one of the worst fires in American history. (author’s note, notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)

BILLY AND GOAT AT THE STATE FAIR

Yaccarino, Dan Illus. by the author Knopf (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jun. 30, 2015 978-0-385-75325-8

Imagining the wonder of watching flowers bloom and children play, Moon eagerly proposes the switch—but Sun makes two preconditions: first, the exchange must be permanent, and second, Moon should first spend an entire night looking down at Earth more closely than ever before. Yankey lays flat, cutpaper figures of pale children, bright carpets of delicate flowers, sinuously elongated wild creatures, and flowing lines of landscape over backgrounds of deep, starry darkness. With this technique, she shows the astonished Moon city lights shining out, sleeping children flying through magical dreams, baobab flowers floating like ghosts, raccoons scampering on mysterious errands in the silvery forest, and fireflies gleaming like low stars. All of these are profound revelations, and by the time Sun returns, the enthralled Moon has changed his mind completely about ever losing them. The narrative describes Moon’s discoveries in sonorous but unaffected language.

A lovely tale to share, day or night. (Picture book. 5-8)

continuing series

A shy lad and his horned, adventurous best buddy take in the state fair. The lights! The rides! The corn dogs!

Though Billy prefers reading about adventures rather than having them, as his caprine friend does, news of a bestgoat competition prompts him to buff up his buddy and tackle the big, bright, noisy state fair. Goat promptly chews his way loose—and from there, it’s on to the log plunge and the tractor pull, a yodeling contest, corn dogs and floral displays (goat happily chows down on both), and even a ride on a float. Yaccarino portrays it all in flat, brightly colored scenes featuring a young farmer in overalls who goes from anxious to exuberant as he catches up with his eager companion and gets into the swing of things. In the end they miss the livestock competition, but before riding away in the back of a pickup beneath a sky filled with fireworks, they do come in “third (and fourth)” in the pie-eating contest. No matter: “Billy already knew who the best goat really was.” As in Donald Crews’ Night at the Fair (1998) (and unlike Ted Lewin’s more frenetic Fair!, 1997), the crowds and carnival atmosphere come off as inviting rather than overwhelming.

Billy’s experience may encourage young children who share his attitude toward new adventures to screw their courage to the sticking place. (Picture book. 5- 7)

SUN AND MOON

Yankey, Lindsey Illus. by the author Simply Read (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 1, 2015 978-1-927018-60-6

DO YOU KNOW THE RHINOCEROS?

Bergeron, Alain M.; Quintin, Michel & Sampar Illus. by Sampar Fitzhenry & Whiteside (64 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 15, 2015 978-1-55455-344-9 paper Do You Know?

(Nonfiction. 7-11)

DO YOU KNOW TIGERS?

Bergeron, Alain M.; Quintin, Michel & Sampar Illus. by Sampar Fitzhenry & Whiteside (64 pp.) $9.95 paper | May 15, 2015 978-1-55455-345-6 paper Do You Know?

(Nonfiction. 7-11)

HUMPHREY’S CREEPY-CRAWLY CAMPING ADVENTURES

Birney, Betty G. Illus. by Burris, Priscilla Putnam (96 pp.) $14.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-399-17227-4 Humphrey chapter books, 3 (Fantasy. 6-8)

Luminous, intricate illustrations light up this tale of a lonely Moon, who yearns to trade places with the wise Sun. 116

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BAD KITTY DOES NOT LIKE CANDY

Bruel, Nick Illus. by the author Square Fish (24 pp.) $4.99 paper | May 12, 2015 978-1-62672-230-9 paper Bad Kitty (Picture book. 2-5)

BAD KITTY DOES NOT LIKE DOGS

Bruel, Nick Illus. by the author Square Fish (24 pp.) $4.99 paper | May 12, 2015 978-1-62672-231-6 paper Bad Kitty (Picture book. 2-5)

DINOSAUR DILEMMA

Cammuso, Frank Illus. by the author Amulet/Abrams (96 pp.) $14.95 | $6.95 paper | Apr. 21, 2015 978-1-4197-1534-1 978-1-4197-1535-8 paper Misadventures of Salem Hyde, 4 (Graphic fantasy. 7-9)

GOOD OGRE

Clark, Platte Aladdin (384 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-4424-5018-9 Bad Unicorn Trilogy, 3 (Fantasy. 8-12)

EVA SEES A GHOST

Elliott, Rebecca Illus. by the author Branches/Scholastic (80 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper | May 26, 2015 978-0-545-78784-0 978-0-545-7 873-3 paper Owl Diaries, 2 (Fantasy. 5-7)

THE EDGE OF SHADOWS

George, Elizabeth Viking (464 pp.) $18.99 | May 26, 2015 978-0-670-01298-5 Edge of…, 3 (Suspense. 14 & up)

PINKALICIOUS AND THE PINK PARAKEET

Kann, Victoria Illus. by the author Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | May 12, 2015 978-0-06-224596-0 978-0-06-224597-7 paper Pinkalicious (Early reader. 4-8)

THE LOCH NESS PUNSTER

Klise, Kate & Klise, M. Sarah Illus. by Klise, M. Sarah HMH Books (144 pp.) $15.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-544-31337-8 43 Old Cemetery Rd., 7 (Humor. 9-12)

FAMILY REUNION

Steers, Billy Illus. by the author Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $8.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-30109-5 Tractor Mac (Picture book. 2-5)

FARMERS’ MARKET

FLIP FLAP SAFARI

PARADE’S BEST

NICK AND TESLA’S SPECIAL EFFECTS SPECTACULAR A Mystery with Animatronics, Alien Makeup, Camera Gear, and Other Movie Magic You Can Make Yourself Pflugfelder, Bob & Hockensmith, Steve Illus. by Garrett, Scott Quirk (256 pp.) $12.95 | May 5, 2015 978-1-59474-760-1 Nick and Tesla, 5 (Fiction. 8-12)

UNICORN ON A ROLL

Simpson, Dana Illus. by the author Andrews McMeel (224 pp.) $9.99 paper | May 26, 2015 978-1-4494-7076-0 paper Heavenly Nostrils Chronicles, 2 (Graphic fantasy. 7-11)

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Steers, Billy Illus. by the author Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $8.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-30102-6 Tractor Mac (Picture book. 2-5)

Steers, Billy Illus. by the author Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $8.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-30107-1 Tractor Mac (Picture book. 2-5)

Nosy Crow Illus. by Scheffler, Axel Nosy Crow/Candlewick (28 pp.) $11.99 | May 12, 2015 978-0-7636-7605-6 Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap (Novelty. 3-7)

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Steers, Billy Illus. by the author Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $8.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-30106-4 Tractor Mac (Picture book. 2-5)

YOU’RE A WINNER

Steers, Billy Illus. by the author Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $8.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-374-30104-0 Tractor Mac (Picture book. 2-5)

ELLRAY JAKES, THE RECESS KING!

Warner, Sally Illus. by Biggs, Brian Viking (176 pp.) $14.99 | May 5, 2015 978-0-451-46911-3 EllRay Jakes, 8 (Fiction. 6-8) continuing series

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Fo r e i g n Influence Our preview of books first published overseas

By Catherine Hickley

The Girl in the Red Coat

Widows & Orphans

Hamer, Kate U.K.: Feb. 26, 2015 | Faber & Faber U.S.: None yet

Arditti, Michael U.K.: Feb. 2, 2015 | Arcadia Books U.S.: May 28, 2015 | Arcadia Books

Twenty-five girls in red coats handed out 20,000 sample chapters at London train stations to promote this compelling debut novel, a rare investment and a sign that Faber & Faber expects it to be a bestseller. The story is every parent’s nightmare: a little girl, Carmel, vanishes mysteriously at a book fair, leaving her frantic, recently divorced mother searching in vain. Carmel is whisked off to America by an elderly man who claims to be her grandfather and has recognized her special gifts. The intense exploration of the mother-daughter relationship lifts this book above the thriller genre.

The pier at Francombe, a once-genteel but now dilapidated seaside town, has been ravaged by fire, and Duncan Neville suspects that a local developer who wants to turn the site into a sex theme park has something to do with it. Neville is the mild-mannered editor of the Francombe & Salter Mercury, an ailing local newspaper whose proprietor aims to end campaigning journalism and encourage collaboration with advertisers. Arditti’s latest has invited comparisons with Graham Greene and drawn praise for the unsettling mirror he turns on the greed of contemporary society.

Photo courtesy Paula TranstÖmer

The Fly Trap Sjöberg, Fredrik Sweden: 2004 | Nya Doxa U.K.: May 29, 2014 | Particular Books U.S.: Jun. 2, 2015 | Pantheon

A bestseller in his native Sweden, Sjöberg’s memoir may be the least self-obsessed memoir you’ll ever read. Sjöberg is an entomologist, literary critic, and translator who lives with his family on the island of Runmarö, in the archipelago east of Stockholm. Sjöberg, who comes from a family of collectors, gathers hoverflies there, but his book isn’t just for the entomologically-minded. “I realised if I’m going to write this book I have to write it for readers who are not interested in flies,” Sjöberg told the Guardian in 2014. “Then you have to tell stories about people.” “In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is often poetic, sometimes inscrutable,” Kirkus’ reviewer writes.

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White Hunger Ollikainen, Aki Finland: 2012 | Siltala Publishing U.K.: Mar. 1, 2015 | Peirene Press U.S.: None yet Ice and desperation are the backdrop to this gritty Finnish novella set in 1867, the year of a terrible famine. The only hope of survival for Marja and her two children is to set off on foot in search of food so, along with many other starving peasants, they trudge through a bleak landscape of unrelenting blizzards and frozen lakes, warmed only occasionally by rays of human kindness. This debut by a reporter and photographer from northern Finland has won many plaudits and prizes in his home country.

Catherine Hickley is a Berlin-based arts journalist. Her first book, The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and His Secret Legacy, will be published by Thames & Hudson (except in North America) this fall.

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indie Eat, Eat, Eat! Cheese, Cheese, Cheese!

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Bartlett, T.C. Over the Edge Studios

Off the Reservation by Glen Merzer........................................ 131 Making A Living, Making A Life by Daniel Rose..................... 133 CONSTANT IS THE RAIN by Rex Sexton.......................................... 135 A Wolf at the Gate by Mark Van Steenwyk............................... 136

Off the Reservation

Merzer, Glen Vivid Thoughts Press (236 pp.) $12.99 paper $3.99 e-book Nov. 21, 2014 978-0-692-31516-3

Three cheese-loving mouse friends find themselves face-to-face with a hungry cat in Bartlett’s (Never Was a Grump Grumpier, 2014, etc.) cheerful children’s book.

Footloose, Fancy, and Free are three mouse pals, and like many rodents, they love to eat cheese. In fact, it’s their favorite activity in the whole world, so it’s no surprise that after the trio sneaks into Jim’s world-famous cheese emporium via a keyhole, a mousehole, and the front door, they eat themselves silly. But there’s a problem: Footloose, Fancy, and Free eat so much that they can no longer get out of the shop. Their rotund, cheesestuffed bodies simply can’t fit through the exits. Things get more harrowing when Gourmet, a cat, comes around, because her favorite thing, like many cats, is to chew up delicious mice.

What will the three friends do to escape? The answer involves a mousetrap, a pair of reading glasses, and the concept of having too much of a good thing. All readers, even lactose-intolerant ones, will be able to relate to the lesson of the mice’s story: when you can have as much as you want, it’s hard to control yourself, and there are always consequences. The book is suspenseful (the mice are in peril, after all) without being too scary; it will work well for both younger and older children as well as for adults who may be turning the pages. Bartlett’s illustrations are also fantastic; they make the book come alive with energy and add a lot to the accompanying text. The charming, thought-out design and layout, with words scattered about the pages, make it clear that Bartlett is a skilled comic writer, as does the punch line at the end. The book’s sturdy construction will also come in handy for many evenings of page-turning bedtime stories.

A fine children’s book about mice who get in a bit of wonderful trouble.

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the versatility of indieland For most of its 80-plus years, Kirkus didn’t review poetry. That changed in 2005 with the launch of Kirkus Indie, and now poetry regularly appears on our annual list of Best Indie Books. (One indie author—poet, Jesuit priest, and professor William J. Rewak—has had two of his books, The Right Taxi and The Orphan Bear, appear on our bestof lists.) The trend of standout self-pubbed verse continues in 2015.

In Pause and Ponder, Rashid Osmani balances comedy and tragedy “without making the laughs feel impertinent and the grief feel insubstantial.” In one poem, he sardonically characterizes smart bombs as “precision-guided munitions” that “ring door-bells wherever they go.”

Overall, Kirkus called his collection “eloquent and thoughtful.”

Davoud Safdarian gives us “tactile, thoughtful quatrains celebrating individual identity and experience” in Me, Rain, and a Hired Taxi. Safdarian’s poems were originally composed in Persian; they face his English translations in the book.

In his collection Help in Our Time and Manet’s Genre Paintings of Everyday Light, Ryan P. Byrne considers Edouard Manet’s interest in the lives of everyday people. “The pressing question for Byrne,” said our reviewer, “is how do we instill the weight of days with meaning?”

Apparently, the answer doesn’t include a romanticization of the workaday life; in “It’s All Just Another Day,” the narrator dryly notes: “It’s time to shut down for today / Another day working on the fringe….Another day is waking, / so the other person can win.” Kirkus called his collection “an effective exploration of the commonplace.” —K.S. Karen Schechner is the senior Indie editor.

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GREENBEAUX

Bergheim, David Manuscript

A modern-day satire about a clown who runs for president—and might just win.

Bergheim’s utterly delightful debut novel centers its gentle satire on the frustration that many Americans feel for “those clowns in Washington.” Russell Greenbeaux, a successful software company entrepreneur, understands that frustration better than most, because he’s a member of the most misunderstood minority of all: he’s an actual clown, with a bright suit, green hair, the works. With the encouragement of his strong-willed mother, Ruth, Greenbeaux makes the unorthodox decision to run for president of the United States. At first, he keeps his goals very minimal: he’ll just “get in, get recognition for the clown cause, and get out without selling his soul.” It’s somewhat against his nature to seek the spotlight; he’d like to combat coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), but he acknowledges that although “clowns were performers by their nature...most did not like to be the stars themselves.”

His campaign quickly gets popular support and media attention; the networks even dub him “The Most Interesting Clown in the World.” He takes on a wise campaign manager in the person of Virgil Munsell, who faces double prejudices as an African-American clown, and gathers support from the Clown Underground. Soon, he’s facing an amusing array of primary opponents, including a Labour Party candidate calling for a parliamentary government in Washington and a Libertarian candidate who’s very territorial about his own property. Overall, this is well-done and surprisingly effective satire, with some memorably droll moments; for example, Bergheim informs readers that Greenbeaux refuses to stoop to negative stereotypes—no balloon animals, no juggling, no cramming into cars with lots of other clowns. The real strength of the story, however, is in its low-key human dimension. Greenbeaux’s mother is the most memorably touching character, but all the players here are people that readers will like and remember.

A winsome political tale about a candidate from a very particular minority.

A DISTANT DREAM A Regaling About Mysterious Beauty, Environmental Insult, Leaving California for South Dakota, Improbable Onus, Mountaintop Success, Psychotic Devastation, and the Miracle of a Place Without “Stupid Talking Public Address Systems” Bruce, Valerie Manuscript

A moving memoir of a family’s journey into autism.

Bruce says that she uses writing as a way to cope. But these days, she does so with someone standing over her shoulder: her 20-year-old daughter, Sarah. In a prologue, the author explains that this memoir—about Sarah’s descent into autism and a period of disturbing psychosis—does have a somewhat happy ending and that she hopes that this will help readers endure its painful moments. From birth, Sarah was a different child: at 3 weeks of age, she had a rare digestive disorder that prevented her from eating properly. Later, as a young child, she never talked but only laughed; she was also extremely sensitive to noise.

Bruce initially figured that her daughter was simply developing slower than her two siblings; however, when Sarah was 3, a doctor diagnosed her with autism. The author writes, however, that the diagnosis “meant so very little as far as an actual answer.”

Speechless at first, the author tried to find comfort in the words of academics, but this proved frustrating, as the literature only focused on higher-functioning autistic children. Sarah’s childhood brought highs and lows, including a brief period of success with home schooling, some attendance at public school (with kind teachers), and some times when the noise just became too much. Bruce effectively relates her family’s anguish and confusion as they battled doctors over the years. Her choice to provide snapshots of the present day along with longer flashbacks, starting from the 1990s, is an effective one, as is her inclusion of emails from when Sarah was at her worst—talking to imaginary people, hitting others, screaming. The book’s smaller details, however, show that life’s challenges can also bring joy, such as the pleasure Sarah feels today while watching food cook in the oven, “like it’s a great television show.” Bruce’s writing is full of candor, as if she’s having a conversation with a friend, which even makes her tendency to ramble charming.

A poetic, sad and funny true story about a mother who’s willing to do anything to help her child.

BY WHAT IS SURE TO FOLLOW

Burton, Donald N. Hellgate Press (262 pp.) $21.95 paper | $9.95 e-book | Jun. 1, 2014 978-1-55571-762-9 In his debut novel, Burton explores a soldier’s struggle with PTSD years after his experiences in the Vietnam War. San Diego, 1989: Luke Sims’ outburst during a self-help session at the Veteran’s Center is so explosive—so intensely reminiscent of their time in Vietnam—that it sends the other ex-military members of the support group fleeing into the night. When Luke calms down, his VA counselor recommends he return to the hospital for yet another round of tests and yet another regimen of drugs. Most nights, in his dreams, Luke returns to the war in scenes of striking detail. He’s a Force Recon Marine once again, lying motionless in the jungle for days on end, scouting enemy movements, fearing for his life, killing when it’s necessary for mission success. He’s haunted by the loss of his unit, of which he’s the lone survivor; worse than the guilt he suffers over their deaths is the fact that he no longer has anyone around to force him to feign bravery. Burton’s novel takes readers through the history of Luke’s fear: as a draftee, as a soldier in country, and as a civilian attempting to re-enter society. His is a journey of decades. The long war didn’t end when he came home; for him, it may never end. Burton is a talented writer capable of rendering the quiet tension that makes up so much of wartime. Prose suffers from occasionally awkward syntax, and the war scenes are more engaging than scenes of Luke in the book’s present; perhaps this reinforces the inescapability of the conflict, as the brutal vividness of the jungle forever drowns out the mundanity of his postwar life. Treating Luke with tremendous sympathy, Burton successfully communicates some of the ideas underrepresented in cultural portrayals of war: the loneliness of soldiering, the constant isolation and fear, and the territory between sanity and mental collapse that PTSD seems to occupy.

A compassionate, disquieting tale of a soldier’s attempts to leave war behind.

In Every Way That Matters

Cheevers, William CreateSpace (268 pp.) $12.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Jul. 13, 2014 978-1-5004-8527-6

A coming-of-age novel set in the rural South during the civil rights era.

Orphaned as a boy and raised by Aunt Ethel and Uncle Gordon in a small town outside of New Orleans, John W. Archer is small and serious and sees himself as different from everyone else. His best friend is the similarly disenfranchised |

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Crawford Smith. Despite their mutual aloofness, they develop a firm friendship and become brothers “in every way that matters.” After a slow start to the novel—which in retrospect seems designed to sketch out the architecture of the boys’ friendship but is nevertheless, on first reading, a bit unfocused—the narrative zeroes in on Crawford’s complicated relationship with his uncle Hal Crawford and the complexities of both boys’ love interests. Hal is an outlier in their small town, living in “nigger town” and working as a civil rights lawyer during a time when segregation was the law and lynchings were not yet a thing of the past. Both boys are smart and honorable, and they see that the way things are is not the way they should be. Still, they struggle with whether their future is—like Hal’s—to stay and live and love within their imperfect world, striving in some way to improve it, or to escape, via college, to a more progressive world. The answers aren’t obvious, and in fact, the boys’ choices flip-flop as they struggle to be true to themselves and to live within the expectations handed down to them by teachers, girlfriends, parents, the formidable Aunt Ethel, and Hal, who, for all his talk about following one’s own path, is ultimately more interested in having others follow his path. Cheevers (The Able Seaman’s Mate, 2013, etc.) has a gift for dialogue, and much of the novel is composed of animated, often funny, back and forth between John, Crawford, and Hal. He’s less skilled with moments of action, focusing somewhat dispassionately, for instance, on the logistics of the novel’s climactic scene, to the extent that it reads like a series of stage directions: so-and-so raises his hand to strike, such-and-such dodges, so-and-so gets in between, such-and-such holds so-and-so back. Still, Cheever deals effectively with big ideas, and his characters are both authentic and sympathetic, investing the reader in the choices that they make and the ways they test and express their loyalties to each other and to the world around them.

Solid civil rights–era fiction; well worth a read.

THE GREEN EYED GIRL

Chew, J.W. AuthorHouse (222 pp.) $30.51 | $18.24 paper | $4.99 e-book Dec. 17, 2014 978-1-4969-9920-7 In this allegorical tale, debut author Chew creates a magical world of mayhem that’s full of parallels to modern society.

As the story opens, a dragon named Khaajd transforms herself into a young girl with striking green eyes and enters a human village, where she’s named “Lyssa.” She listens, follows, adapts, and her old life fades away as she lives among humans for 22 years. However, a shocking event—the death of her own dragon mother—rips her back into reality. Specifically, it exposes the hard truth that in a war between humans and dragons, she must choose to fight on the correct side. To that end, she shifts back into dragon form and devises a plan to learn the vulnerabilities of the human world, in order to aid the dragons in their fight. An exciting 122

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tale of deceit ensues as Khaajd transforms into Lyssa once more and pretends to live among people in order to develop a battle strategy. As the story twists and turns, the war between humans and dragons grows more intense. Chew also infuses the novel with clever social commentary regarding materialism and disparity of wealth in society. For example, Khaajd explains to a fellow dragon, “Give a dragon a promise of good food, clean water, a sheltered cave and the health of his body, and he will be happy....Give a human the exact same but no more, and he will be wretched. Humans seek happiness through things.” These nuances encourage a complex understanding of both sides— the human side, which fears dragons and misunderstands their desire to attack and demolish, and the dragon side, which views humans as the real monsters. The author successfully builds a rich world, fueled by fine dialogue and vivid descriptions, and never lets his high-concept themes overpower the action.

A fast-paced, intellectual fantasy story with lessons about values, greed, and empathy.

SCARBACK There Is So Much More to Fishing Than Catching Fish Corea, Roger CreateSpace (280 pp.) $19.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 27, 2014 978-1-4961-0226-3

In his debut novel, Corea tells the story of a man’s attempt to unite a friend with his estranged family during a hunt

for a legendary fish.

Dominic has had a hard life. Abandoned at a Buffalo, New York, orphanage by his parents when he was 10, he was harassed by his peers and teachers for his mental slowness. He ran away and worked as a migrant laborer on an onion farm, where the torment he suffered at the hands of his fellow workers was even more ghastly. Years later, he still has nightmares about his time on “the Muck.” Dominic has finally found a happy home in the town of Fairchester, New York, working at Hawk’s Deli.

His best friends and protectors are the Hawk, the deli’s proprietor, and Augie, a generous local bartender. They treat him as an equal and make sure everyone else does the same. When Augie takes a job in Chicago and an accident leaves the Hawk in a coma, Dominic’s position in this friendly bubble is at risk.

However, Augie thinks he may have found a new family to fill the hole in Dominic’s life: his original family, the one who left Dominic at the orphanage decades ago. All will be decided by one final fishing trip to catch Scarback, a legendary fish with a $1 million bounty. Set in the 1950s, this sentimental story basks in rosy nostalgia. Characters are big, loud personalities, full of zingers and colorful slang. Their affection for one another (and the author’s affection for each of them) all but oozes off the page. The whole novel feels a bit like Corea is telling it from a bar stool: “One thing was for sure: he never kept his opinions a secret, nor did he worry about offending the clientele.” As

Dalin provides a positive, hopeful message and plenty of food for spiritual thought. here and there

HERE AND THERE Dear Journ

literary fiction, it struggles to provoke much thought, but as literary comfort food, it satisfies quite well.

A pleasant, old-fashioned tale that invites readers to check their cynicism.

THE BLACK CARRIAGE

Crutchley, Edward B. Amazon Digital Services (652 pp.) $3.00 e-book | Jan. 1, 2015 From author Crutchley (Innovation Trends in Plastics Decoration and Surface Treatment, 2014) comes a novel concerning missing gold and the tumultuous world events in the time of Napoleon.

In the late 1700s, the colony of SaintDomingue (modern-day Haiti) is in a state of upheaval. With the Revolution and resulting terrors sweeping France, places such as Le Cap (“the Paris of the Caribbean”) are starting to see violence. Having come to Saint-Domingue “to find fortune in a colony as far away as possible from the chaos in our motherland,” the narrator finds instead a hotbed of activity. After joining the army in Saint-Domingue, he sees his share of riots and revolts. It’s during one such operation to quell the chaos, when the army’s “sheer numbers totally surprised and shocked the... looters,” that the narrator finds his wife has been murdered and his son gone missing. In addition, a large amount of gold “sent to finance the restoration” is believed to have disappeared. So begins an investigation known as Black Carriage. What happened to the gold, and could it be related to the death of his wife?

It’s an investigation that takes the reader to places as far-flung as Switzerland and Brazil. Part historical fiction, part investigative mystery, the book incorporates an enticing swath of the former.

Readers familiar with the era will recognize Prince Pedro, Gen. Brune, Toussaint Louverture, and, of course, Napoleon; those unacquainted with such names will learn a great deal. Readers interested in the mystery will have to wade through dense periods of military maneuvering (such as with the French campaign through Europe) in order to find answers, but the journey is kept lively with well-written scenes of firing cannons and swinging swords (“I swung my sabre at a rebel crewman who jumped overboard to avoid me, and in the same sweep cut down one of his colleagues to my left just as he was raising his spike”).

Rich with world history and a burning central question, the story provides an array of real-life characters and fascinating locations.

Dalin, Karen Dog Ear Publishing (128 pp.) $10.00 paper | Apr. 25, 2014 978-1-4575-1986-4 In this spirituality focused fiction, Rachel Levinson, killed in a car accident, initially isolates herself, then learns with the help of a little girl about the karmic cycle of life.

After arriving Here, Rachel asks for a home in an area without children due to the grief and rage she feels having lost her daughter, Carolyn, and husband, Rick, as well as the potential joys of grandparenthood. Eventually, when she longs to hear children’s voices again, the “powers-that-be” have children walk by her window. It is soon revealed that Rachel was killed in a car accident, the result of her distraction and anger over Rick’s not heeding her psychic warning that the plane he was to use for a business trip would crash. Ironically, Rachel’s death meant Rick avoided that trip, and someone else also spotted and corrected the plane’s malfunction. Rachel has one living child, Carolyn, but a son died soon after birth. With the help of Betty, a woman who encourages her to attend Here support events, and, more significantly, with the help of a young girl called Hattie, Rachel comes to realize that she has sought too much control in life and should be more tolerant about how the universe unfolds. She gets visits from others in Here—deceased relatives, a childhood lesbian friend, a beloved pet cat—and learns about their other lives and connections to her throughout her life. By story’s end, another recent Here arrival is reborn into the There world to Carolyn.

Rick, who can see beyond There, is pleased to spot Rachel in the room with the family at the child’s birth. Debut novelist Dalin’s slim yet powerful tale offers a joyous worldview and effective depictions of Here and There to dramatize a neverending circle of life. Discussion of characters’ reincarnations can get dizzying at times, and Rachel’s relationship with Rick, even in her journal entries, remains a bit murky. Overall, however, Dalin provides a positive, hopeful message and plenty of food for spiritual thought.

Charming, uplifting tale about immortality and interconnectedness in the universe.

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LETTERS FROM THE ROAD

Davis, G. Gordon CreateSpace (330 pp.) $12.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Jul. 22, 2014 978-1-4997-3980-0

In this debut historical coming-ofage novel, a father and son attempt to connect during a cross-country road trip.

Ten-year-old Keeper, born during the Great Depression, earned his name during his near-fatal birth, when his father, Chance, proclaimed, “A chip off the old block, and a keeper for sure!” Keeper is homebound with his mother and blind half brother, Early, but he admires his often absent father, who crisscrosses the country as a salesman. Other family members aren’t as enthusiastic about Chance, however, because they know of his weaknesses for women and alcohol, but Keeper is too young to understand his father’s flaws. Instead, he and his brother cherish the postcards that Chance sends them. Keeper passes the time with a trash-talking tomboy named Jonnie Prettyboy, but when they’re implicated in a fatal crime, they must keep a terrible secret. As Keeper enters adolescence, he gets an opportunity to travel with Chance, but the father-son road trip slowly spirals toward tragedy. This is a vivid, unflinching account of a World War II–era childhood in which a seemingly close family is torn apart by secret lives and hidden vices. It illuminates how civilians lived their lives as major events, such as the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, loomed in the background. Davis’ prose stays true to a young boy’s perspective, and he carefully develops each of his characters. Although some of the characters’ language feels too coarse and current for the 1940s setting at times, Davis manages to re-create the era by using a wide range of historical references, from popular culture to contemporary news events. Hardship lingers everywhere, from Early’s blindness to Keeper’s grandfather’s painkiller addiction, and even Keeper’s strong mother, Alva, seems long-suffering. The novel has its twists and turns, but its finale is genuinely shocking, as it contrasts an adolescent’s triumphant rite of passage with an adult’s self-inflicted defeat.

A carefully crafted family saga, set in an oft-forgotten place and time, that shows how love and loyalty can’t always save a family from disaster.

THE HYSTERY APP

Davy, V.T. Liberation Publishing (290 pp.) $12.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Feb. 18, 2015 978-0-9574088-6-9 A lesbian couple accidentally creates an extremely unique app in Davy’s (A Very Civil Wedding, 2014, etc.) darkly satirical sci-fi novel.

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While attempting to effectively create their own Internet in order to privately upload and share their research with each other via a satellite they dub “Big Sister,” Dr. Brogan Miller, a biophysicist, and her wife, Dr. Honor Smith, a women’s history lecturer, stumble upon a strange phenomenon. Somehow, their computer cameras are allowing them to see into the past based on any date they input. Furthermore, only deceased women show up on the video feeds, often seeming to respond to men who can’t be seen or heard. If someone were to try to watch a moment involving a still-living woman, she wouldn’t show up. Eventually, they strike upon the idea to turn it into an app that Honor names “The Hystery App,” which they believe will forever change how history is understood now that the patriarchal filter is gone. Their best-laid plans go awry, however, when men start to use it for pornography, voyeuristically watching often long-dead women in sexual situations. Davy’s imaginative, incisive story is a prime example of how sci-fi as a genre can be used to explore complex societal issues. The focus isn’t on how this app ever managed to work—besides some briefly explored wormhole theory—because the effects are more important.

The novel wisely begins by delving into the endless positive potential for its time-travel device and then shows the numerous ways it could be perverted, human (and specifically male) nature being what it is. Davy also imbues the main characters with full, three-dimensional life, making it a novel about these specific women, not just ideas. Unfortunately, the novel spends too much time mired in family drama that, while realistically crafted, feels too mundane for a concept with such intriguing possibilities. While many works of sci-fi focus on their concepts to the detriment of their humanity, this novel does nearly the opposite.

Could use more wonder but otherwise an impressively conceived story with true weight.

WYW Part 1: You Will Know What to Do

Dollahite, Derek CreateSpace (214 pp.) $11.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Jan. 12, 2015 978-1-5061-5840-2

In this debut YA techno-thriller, a computer-savvy teenager continues to develop a code language that his deceased father began.

High school senior Wyatt Fox has been seeing a graphic of a ghost while using the “Internet of Things Access” computer network. His friend Eli assumes that it’s an advertisement— just another data-tracking aspect of IOTA. However, Wyatt’s father recently died in a car accident, so the smart, lonely boy can’t help but acknowledge the weird coincidence. He had been close with his dad, who taught him how to write codes.

They created a code language together, which involved famous quotes, such as Cicero’s “The aim of justice is to give everyone

Dorris is not afraid to dwell on detail as the coming-of-age tale slowly unwinds, keeping readers’ interest all the while. salmon river kid

his due.” Now, Wyatt finds that he’s adept at manipulating a world that’s dependent on computer technology; there are selfdriving cars, holographic sports in gym class, and companies obsessed with citizens’ biometric data. Wyatt learns that the ghost graphic (and its accompanying initials, WYW) was present at the site of his father’s accident. He also receives a text message that says, “You will know what to do,” along with coordinates for an old building in the city. He and Eli head for the location via train, but once in the city, Eli vanishes from the station, and Wyatt begins to learn that his father’s life wasn’t what it seemed. Dollahite has crafted a sharp, terrifying debut novel filled with the echoes of injustice that pervade 21st-century reality. His near-future world has seen cities destroyed by rising oceans as governments and corporations enforce the status quo, hunting down the last of the fossil fuels. As Wyatt’s father says, these groups have “been collecting our data for a long time now and...little good has come of it.” Eventually, Wyatt meets a beautiful hacker, Letti, and enters his father’s world in earnest.

Meanwhile, he struggles with “how to make something just your very own.” The story creeps toward a blustery climax; hopefully, the sequel will validate Wyatt’s tough choices.

This YA narrative is full of quiet fury, and it’s remarkable watching its protagonist harness it.

SALMON RIVER KID

Dorris, Joseph iUniverse (404 pp.) $32.95 | $22.95 paper | $4.75 e-book Mar. 7, 2014 978-1-4917-2132-2 Welcome to the Idaho Territory of 1872, where a boy and his father eke out a livelihood. If the winters don’t kill you, the claim jumpers might.

Novelist Dorris (Sheepeater: To Cry For a Vision, 2009, etc.) tells of Samuel (never Sam) Chambers and his father, Charles, who have come from Iowa to mine enough gold to return to and improve the farmstead, where Samuel’s mother and little sister wait. Samuel is 14, but he’s a mature, resourceful 14. Yet this beautiful if harsh land is unforgiving country, both in terms of nature and bad guys. He and his father work like dogs at their claims, only to have those claims jumped not once, but twice. There are decent people, too. On their horseback travels, Samuel meets the lovely Bonnie McCracken, and they fall in love. Samuel’s rival is the crude, treacherous Rex Callahan, a ranch hand at Slate Creek, but eventually, Samuel spares his miserable life, and Rex quits the territory. There are also many Chinamen in the territory; unsurprisingly, no love is lost between them and the whites. But Samuel has befriended them, especially another boy named Chen. Even Charles, a basically good man, grudgingly grants the Chinamen respect, but only on his son’s say-so. In a dramatic, hair-raising trek, Samuel and Chen elude but then face the claim jumpers, and later, Samuel and his father face even more claim jumpers. Dorris, a confident storyteller, writes notably well. He’s not afraid to dwell on

detail as the coming-of-age tale slowly unwinds, keeping readers’ interest all the while. He knows gold mining, too, so readers should be prepared to learn a lot about placer mining, hard rock mining, assaying, and so forth. There are no cardboard cutouts here; even minor characters are well-drawn. In the end, the moral universe is put to rights, but—importantly—nothing comes easily.

An excellent read. Let’s hope there’s more to come.

NINE DIGITS

Duret, Jay Second Wind Publishing, LLC (284 pp.) $12.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-938101-79-3 An eccentric family competes in a reality show in Duret’s debut YA novel.

The Marcus family of Philadelphia— Skunky, Golden Boy, Barkus, Marticus, Nee Nee, and their parents, Airball and Saint Marcus—are selected to compete in a new, national reality show, where they’re woefully overmatched by the hardy, athletic Ponchatrains from New Orleans and the intellectually gifted Perfects from Boston. As the competition takes off and its producer, Buzzemiah Miller, mounts an extensive promotional campaign, readers get to know the Marcuses and their competitors in multilayered ways: through their behind-the-scenes interactions, their performances in various “challenges,” and their glossy, manufactured images, presented to and consumed by the show’s millions of viewers. The vain, attention-seeking Nee Nee, the oldest Marcus daughter, functions as the main protagonist as her family and their TV fans look for substance and redemption in the most unlikely places. A quote on the novel’s back cover compares it to Norton Juster’s 1961 classic The Phantom Tollbooth, and after a somewhat slow start, Duret’s book really does begin to approach the witty, imaginative, and accessible brilliance of that genre-busting work. It isn’t a fantasy—there’s no mystical land, unless Hollywood qualifies as such, and everything seems to follow generally accepted rules of time and space. Nevertheless, the story does have elements of the supremely absurd that are delightfully amusing and fiendishly clever. While staying focused on the action, Duret makes incisive, thought-provoking comments about what we value, as individuals and as a culture, when it comes to family, work, competition, education, and entertainment. His lively, slightly snarky prose is also a perfect fit with the material (“He didn’t seem as much to have a tan as to be entitled to one”). Overall, this book will appeal to fans of all YA genres—and their parents as well.

An action-filled story full of funny, topical, and sympathetic observations about the world today.

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Interviews & Profiles

Barbara Freethy

The bestselling romance writer talks about life on both sides of the fence

By Poornima Apte What’s been the most pleasing or revelatory aspect of self-publishing for you? What are the differences you have noticed from the traditional model?

I have total control over every aspect of my book release, from writing the story my readers want to read to branding the cover, determining frequency of publication, setting a price point and a release date, and then promoting that novel through my individualized marketing plan. The other biggest advantage to selfpublishing besides control is money. I get 70 percent of the retail price between a sale price of $2.99 and $9.99 on most of the platforms.

Can you talk a little about the new partnership with Ingram Publishing? How is it innovative?

Fifty Shades of Grey may have defined the romance market in the recent past, but Barbara Freethy will tell you there is plenty of room under the romance umbrella for various niche markets and all “levels of heat.” She should know. The New York Times bestselling author of 43 novels ranging from contemporary romance to romantic suspense and women’s fiction has sold over 5.1 million books since making the switch from traditional to indie in 2011. Freethy, who plans on launching her bestselling Callaway series into print through an innovative partnership with Ingram Publishing Services, shares her insights as someone who has seen both sides of the publishing world.

What prompted you to self-publish in 2011 after publishing traditionally?

When retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble offered up their platforms to self-publishing authors, I decided to publish several of the books from my backlist for which I had gotten back the rights. While sales started off slow, within three months I was hitting all the bestseller lists.

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One of the few disadvantages to self-publishing is the inability to distribute print books into physical bookstores across the nation without the help of a traditional publisher. Traditional publishers have been reluctant to make print-only deals because they want the digital profit too. Ingram Publisher Services is now working with me as a publishing partner, and I will be releasing my print books all around the world.

Your work in contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and women’s fiction has been wildly popular. What is it about these genres that have been especially successful in the indie space?

It’s only natural that because love is so much a part of our lives, we like to read about it. I love to write not only about romance, but also suspense, mystery, family relationships, female friendships, and sometimes paranormal. I can do all that as a romance and women’s fiction writer. There are no rules; I can respond quickly to stories that readers want to see come next.

What has been the most difficult aspect of self-publishing?

The workload is very heavy. I’m running a multimillion dollar business with the help of a team of freelance professionals, but I still do a lot of the work.

What is your advice to other writers considering self-publishing?

Join writers groups and email loops with indie authors. You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn and how easy it is to get help.

Writers need to spend enough money to present a professional product, because there is a lot of competition now, and those competitors know what they’re doing.

DARING TO DATE AGAIN A Memoir

How critical a role has marketing played in your success? What steps have you taken to market your books once published?

Marketing and promotion is the one area that all writers have to do whether they are traditionally published or are self-publishing. As a traditionally published author, I did exactly the same thing I’m doing now, because most traditionally published authors receive little if any promotional dollars from the publisher.

A writer’s work is never done. There are always more stories to tell. And a fantastic story is the heart of all successful publishing, indie or traditional.

Poornima Apte is a Boston-based freelance writer and editor with a passion for everything books.

Evans, Ann Anderson She Writes Press (290 pp.) $16.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-63152-909-2

Evans’ (The History of Abortion, 2012) memoir follows her return to the world of dating after two divorces, 12 years of celibacy, and 60 years of living.

In 2003, when Evans had not been on a date in 19 years, she decided to “seek out the touch of a man”—perhaps a courageous choice given what a minefield dating can be at any age.

She knew she was taking a risk and defying assumptions: “The normal, respectable sixty-year-old woman was expected to be quiescent sexually—that is what I had expected myself. It was shocking to find out that libido could flame intensely so late in life.” Evans was admirably not quiescent; she was instead proactive in finding sex and companionship. Her primary venues were online, where she encountered men with a wide range of manners and charm. Throughout, she kept an open mind, asking for nonjudgmental clarification when she came across a fetish she wasn’t familiar with and gamely taking trips to such places as a Vermont nude beach. She even traveled to Zimbabwe to meet Guy—a businessman she met on Craigslist—in person. Early on, one of Evans’ friends advised her to turn her dating adventures into “a research project,” and in the sense that Evans is observant, thorough, and informative, her memoir does have a researchlike nature. But it’s also funny and introspective, filled with compassion and written without an ounce of affectation or disingenuousness. Her reflections on the dubiousness of some situations—particularly those relating to the many married men seeking sex—address some of the ethical issues surrounding digital dating, which are well-worth considering. At times, readers may not agree with the author’s stance, but as she notes, she is “not the morality police.” She doesn’t go into detail about her sexual escapades; she’s more interested in exploring the social, biological, and emotional components of sex than depicting the deed itself. Her explorations are illuminating. They’re also a kick, with a surprisingly uplifting effect.

A candid, breezy memoir that may inspire even the most dating-averse.

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TWIN RIVER II Have Weapons Will Travel

DIALYSIS

Frieden, Lisa CreateSpace (202 pp.) $12.99 paper | $12.99 e-book Jul. 2, 2014 978-1-4826-7858-1

Fields, Michael iUniverse (318 pp.) $18.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-4917-4446-8

Fields’ sequel to Twin River (2013) sees a killer for hire enter the lives of two troubled Pennsylvania teens.

Polecat Hollow, near Alexandria, Pennsylvania, is home to high school sophomores Matt Henry and Connor Brooks. It’s 1980, and the boys have had trouble with local bullies Cain and Abel Tower as well as other assorted felons (see Twin River). Insisting to any inquiring party that his father, a bank manager, is on vacation, Matt decides to hire some protection for himself and the bank. A newspaper ad leads him to a man named Wesley Palladin of the agency Have Weapons Will Travel. Unbeknownst to Matt, Palladin is a contract killer for the mob, embroiled in a complex bait-and-switch operation that has other killers gunning for him. Cain and Abel, meanwhile, are terrorizing a teen named Wayne Wilson, whose sister, Becky, Cain has impregnated. Elsewhere in the region—which is possessed by a violent legacy dating back to the mid-18th century—a vile gang of kidnappers is using high school girls to make pornographic videos.

Once drawn together, Matt and Palladin learn just how alike they are as they wage war against the various forms of evil that nearby Blood Mountain seems to inspire. Snaring readers once more in the sinister rural setting of Twin River, author Fields proves himself a macabre, versatile storyteller. The tone of his sprawling narrative darkens immediately, beginning on a river in late ’60s Florida. On this fishing trip–turned-murder, young Palladin’s father teaches him that “The best and the strongest destroy and survive.” Fields’ gift for detailing violence is always at the ready: “Pulled by the treble [fish] hooks, the man’s skin stretched outward.” Yet the descriptions of nature are lush, and literary references to Catcher in the Rye are a welcome surprise: “A person needs to catch himself first before he can catch others.”

If possible, readers should tackle the previous novel beforehand for better context surrounding characters’ relationships. Standing alone, however, this tale remains incredibly effective.

This grisly thriller will sink its teeth right in you.

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A hard-charging PR pro battles kidney failure, as chronicled in this heartfelt memoir.

Weeks before Christmas 1998, Frieden (The Offering, 2013) received devastating news. Her kidneys had stopped working; by the time she was admitted to the hospital, these essential organs were just 4 percent functional. Frieden, a self-described “blonde Amazon” in her early 30s, was highly educated, professionally successful, and athletic. With no history of prior health problems, she wasn’t sure how to cope with the diagnosis of anti-glomerular basement membrane disease, a rare autoimmune disorder. She began dialysis immediately, but the Bay Area resident, who previously had “lived at a frantic pace,” had difficulty adjusting to her new reality. “Delays and endless waiting, and then sitting for four long hours on dialysis, all violated what I valued most: the speed and efficiency that drive successful high tech PR,” she recalls. Eventually, she switched from traditional dialysis at a clinic to at-home peritoneal dialysis, which gave her more flexibility but presented its own challenges. Struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy, she continued to work full-time (and even took on a high-pressure new job) while waiting for her health to stabilize enough to receive a kidney transplant from her husband, Kurt. Despite the prosaic title and occasionally grim subject matter (kidney disease is often fatal), Frieden’s memoir is fresh and engaging. She takes time to discuss the reality of living with kidney disease and how her various surgeries and treatments changed her physical health and relationship with her body, but she gives equal weight to how the disease affected her emotionally. Frieden recounts how she eventually had to accept that “I no longer fit my life story,” a realization that led to a shift in perspective and a “simplicity of consciousness that nourished a profound peace.” This memoir will naturally be of interest to those with kidney problems and their loved ones, but it will also speak to anyone who’s led a life rocked by a personal crisis.

A compelling story about coping with a serious illness, offering lessons in the value of slowing down and appreciating life in the moment.

Part call to action, part exploration of technique, the result is a persuasive and enjoyable reminder that our homes are reflections of ourselves. building a timeless house in an instant age

HUMAN EXPANSION

Building A Timeless House in an Instant Age

Holgate, Steve CreateSpace (336 pp.) $13.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Nov. 19, 2014 978-1-5010-4529-5 The second volume in Holgate’s (Human Trials, 2014) Humankind sci-fi series explores the worlds populated by the descendants of Earth.

Young Jown’s world is thrown into turmoil when a space cargo shuttle hits his apartment building, killing his parents. The shipping company is found liable, and Jown is awarded a cargo ship of his own. He uses this ship, Gater, to leave his home planet of Blue and begin the trading profession, hauling cargo from planet to planet. By traveling through the rings—phenomena that enable ships to jump to other systems—he can reach a wide range of worlds. However, it is solitary, dangerous work, subjecting him to pirate attacks and occasional run-ins with Space Force, the policing authority. On one escape from pirates, Jown discovers a base in what seems to be an asteroid. Upon further inspection, he realizes that the base is unlike anything he’s ever seen; its builders were definitely not human. Ancient alien artifacts had been found before, but these instruments seem new and in perfect working order. Jown decides to present his information and artifacts to the ES Corporation, a research and development group known for its discretion. There, he meets Ellie Goodwater, who has secrets of her own: she left her home planet to avoid being framed for a politician’s murder. Her desperate escape went wrong, and she briefly took a transport ship hostage, releasing it as soon as she was safe. Nevertheless, there’s a bounty on her head. Jown and Ellie work with the scientists of ES as well as a brilliant retired physicist and his wife, a skilled translator. They discover that the aliens are indeed alive but are under deadly attack from another group called the Consumers—who are on a direct path to the ringed system. The group races against time to unlock the aliens’ technology to defend their worlds from certain destruction. Holgate succeeds at imagining a vibrant, realistic universe. The intricate level of detail for ships, technology, battle tactics, etc., will certainly appeal to die-hard sci-fi fans. He usually treads lightly with this, however, keeping the pace lively and the more general readers entertained. Some may be disappointed not to learn juicy tidbits such as what the ominous Consumers look like, but Holgate leaves little doubt of another volume in his series, in which he’ll likely reveal that and much more.

An intricate but fun sci-fi romp.

Hull, Brent Brown Books Publishing Group (160 pp.) $26.95 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 1, 2014 978-1-61254-157-0

Hull (Traditional American Rooms, 2003) celebrates the lost art of thoughtful home construction.

We don’t build houses like we used to. The craftsmanship central to generations of construction is largely absent in modern homebuilding, which has become more concerned with creating a mass-produced product at a predetermined price. Hull takes readers through the evolution of our views on home construction: what was once valued, what is valued now, and what things most people don’t ever think about. The book includes explanations of the shifting architectural trends in residences, from Enlightenment-era builders finding inspiration in antiquity to European-style houses in America to Levittown and the rise of production building.

He also explains the processes of home design, from fire-safety concerns and framing to theories of ornamentation. He concludes with an “Illustrations and Applications” chapter to guide those who wish to implement what they’ve learned. Yet this book won’t actually tell readers how to build a house; rather, it looks at the way homebuilding was approached (aesthetically, philosophically, commercially) in Europe and America in the last few centuries and how we have arrived at our current homebuilding culture. His argument isn’t based on bleary-eyed nostalgia: it appears that houses really were objectively better in earlier eras, and if people demand as much, they can be better again. This seems like a book for the times: as people become ever more interested in “artisanal” everything, Hull reminds us that the ultimate embodiment of craftsmanship and rustic know-how is a well-built house. A construction veteran of the world of historic restoration, Hull is also a gifted writer of (better than) workmanlike prose. His narrative voice is clean and accessible; a more inspired, lyrical language sometimes arises when he broaches a topic (such as the Derby Summerhouse) that truly excites him. Part call to action, part exploration of technique, the result is a persuasive and enjoyable reminder that our homes are reflections of ourselves. As Hull says, “We need to wonder if building cheap homes doesn’t cause us to become a cheap culture.”

A pleasing, educational look at traditional home construction.

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CASH FLOW FOREVER The Real Secrets of Real Estate Investing

If Everyone Knew Every Plant And Tree

Johnston, Julia CreateSpace (286 pp.) $13.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Nov. 8, 2013 978-1-4819-1425-3

Johnson, Jeff K. CreateSpace (258 pp.) $16.95 paper | $6.99 e-book May 22, 2013 978-1-4895-2448-5

Levelheaded investment advice from a real estate expert.

This debut guide’s promissory title may smack of get-rich-quick innuendo, but it instead takes a straightforward, low-key approach to real estate investing. The author, a professional with nearly four decades of real estate experience, walks readers through the process of investing in real estate properties, using plenty of examples from his own evaluations and purchases. In short, easy-to-understand chapters, he offers sensible advice while explaining key concepts such as the financial capacity to invest, due diligence on properties, effective real estate partnerships, and a property’s income potential. Along the way, Johnson addresses more personal, philosophical issues; for example, his discussion about identifying “emotional triggers” (“the experiences in our lives that have impacted us and identify what really motivates us”) gives the book a thought-provoking depth and lifts it out of the how-to-invest genre. On the practical side, the author encourages budding investors to view property as an accumulation of assets rather than a buy-and-sell opportunity: “Accumulation is the number one ingredient in building net worth,” he writes.

In another chapter, Johnson takes direct aim at people who pitch the notion of buying property with little or no money down: “Nothing-down deals give an investor a larger monthly payment—and big headaches—if everything doesn’t go exactly as planned,” he counsels. Although the author is generally bullish regarding his subject, he tempers his enthusiasm with a down-to-earth pragmatism. Throughout, he comes across as knowledgeable, wise, and sincere as he shares his own ups and downs, as well as tricks of the trade, to help prospective investors achieve success.

A highly useful, authoritative work that should serve as a fine primer for anyone pursuing real estate investment.

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A 14-year-old finds comfort in botany while dealing with his younger sister’s illness in this debut YA novel.

As he enters his home in Newcastle, England, teenager Oliver Campbell is shocked to discover his 5-year-old sister, Lily, convulsing as his mother looks on helplessly. When Lily must be hospitalized, it upends Oliver’s family, which includes his half brothers, Nathan and Sam. It also changes Oliver’s day-to-day existence, which was usually spent hanging out with his word-nerd pal, Kamal, and crushing on a girl named Poppy Teasdale. She’s a year above him in school and works in her family’s garden shop. There, she and tongue-tied Oliver “usually ended up with little bursts of coded plant-speak.”

As the novel progresses, he faces protracted agony, as well as a brief reprieve, regarding Lily’s mysterious condition, and a sympathetic nurse shares news of his pain and plight in emails to her own elderly mother. On a school trip to the Tate art gallery in London, Oliver almost decides to run away, but he’s stopped by a sage homeless man. He also overcomes his shyness in order to practice and then perform the role of Laertes to Kamal’s Hamlet in the school play—a part that perhaps hits a bit too close to home. By novel’s end, Oliver comes to new understandings with his neglectful mother and the elusive Poppy, who’s away in Australia during much of his family’s crisis. Best of all, he has some flowers in his family’s garden to soothe his suffering and loss. Debut novelist Johnston takes readers on a rich emotional journey in this contemporary YA tale, which she tells mostly from Oliver’s first-person perspective. Through his musings, she masterfully conveys both the inner angst and deflective banter of a struggling adolescent boy, which is by turns humorous and heartbreaking. The novel’s botany motif is sometimes a bit overextended, as even the nurse has the middle name of “Dahlia.” Still, the author largely uses this device to compelling effect—most particularly when she reveals the flower name of Kamal, Oliver’s well-developed sidekick.

An accomplished, touching debut featuring moving insights into the mind of a sensitive teenage boy.

Whatever their politics, readers will chuckle at this systemwide sendup. off the reservation

FADING INTO FOCUS

Kantor, Joan CreateSpace (84 pp.) $12.00 paper | Feb. 5, 2015 978-1-5056-3398-6

Kantor (Shadow Sounds, 2010) explores the dreams, dementia, and death of her mother in this memoiristic volume of poetry.

Poetry can be a path to closure, and closure is what Kantor seeks in this collection about her mother, Miriam Gants. From the prologue poem, “I Only Saw the Stars,” Kantor reveals that her father was a louder presence in her childhood than her mother.

Addressing Miriam, she writes: “Daddy / was excitement, / fear / and fun. // You / were safe.” Yet Kantor sets out to better understand this quieter parent, gleaning what she can of her mother’s life from old family photographs and memories from her own childhood. One affecting poem, “Irony,” tells of how Miriam finally attempted to assert her individuality after the death of her husband. Then come poems dealing with Miriam’s slide into dementia and the strain it put on the mother and daughter’s increasingly one-sided relationship. Grief-filled poems deal with Miriam’s death and Kantor’s attempts to move forward with an honest, loving memory of her mother. Dancing through the book is an image of Miriam’s ballet shoes; an aspiring dancer from early childhood, Miriam forever damaged her feet by spinning on her toes when she was 5. This didn’t keep her from a lifetime love of the art, which she and Kantor would watch together on TV. Her bittersweet passion became a metaphor for the unrealized dreams of her life, and her shoes are now a treasured (if tragic) heirloom for Kantor to pass on to the next generation. Kantor is a minimalist when it comes to verse: plain language, simple syntax, no distracting conceits. A poem, for her, is often the exploration of a single, pared-down image, with no superfluous information or detail. The narrative forms like a necklace of beads, with the truly inspired images shining like gems. In “Back To Before,” dementia-plagued Miriam feels the textured paint of a museum seascape with her fingers: “There’s no point in telling her / not to touch. // Compelled, // she’s rediscovering / the beginning // at the end.”

An evocative, concentrated rendering of a complex relationship.

Off the Reservation

Merzer, Glen Vivid Thoughts Press (236 pp.) $12.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 21, 2014 978-0-692-31516-3

On the verge of retirement, a straighttalking U.S. congressman campaigns for president in this fast-paced, wryly comic, and vastly satisfying political satire.

Just weeks after announcing he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, Congressman Evan Gorgoni of Indiana finds himself thrust back into the national spotlight after his frank and defeatist appearance on Meet The Press. “Truth is...there are too many people in the world,” he says. “If civilization keeps procreating this way, we’re doomed.” Refreshed by his realist approach, the media starts floating his name for a presidential bid. The Democratic senator ignores the hype—he’s enjoying retirement—until meeting his would-be contenders. “If I don’t run,” he tells Monty Berg, his quick-witted campaign manager, “the country’s going to choose between another cynical tax-cutter, and Nate Poston. Who has never met a question he couldn’t dodge.” With the help of Monty, he wins the Democratic primary and spends the rest of Merzer’s electrifying debut novel running against his Republican opponent, Gov. Malcolm Benneton, on a loose platform of population control and environmental sustainability. Refusing to prepare speeches, Gorgoni eschews grand promises and often loses himself in tangents. “My fellow Americans, I say to you with deep conviction in my soul, let us do away, totally, irreversibly, and permanently, with the leaf blower,” he says during his acceptance speech. Using real names of contemporary figures and writing with a keen eye for the absurdities of the American political system, Merzer offers a story of brash realism in an age of congressional gridlock. While most left-leaning readers will cheer for Gorgoni, many conservatives will likely find the novel dismissive of their ideology. Nevertheless, the author writes with a steady pen, and he rarely misses the opportunity for a joke. Whatever their politics, readers will chuckle at this systemwide sendup.

A witty, winking political novel sure to satisfy liberals in an age of extreme partisanship.

THRIVING WITH CHRONIC PAIN A Holistic Guide to Reclaiming Your Life

Meshorer, Sean Param Media (210 pp.) $14.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Feb. 20, 2015 978-0-9862030-0-8 A comprehensive guide to living with constant pain.

Meshorer (The Bliss Experiment, 2012), who stretched and tore several ligaments in his right sacroiliac joint, draws on his own experiences to present a broad overview of the options available to people living with chronic agony and discomfort. He posits that “the secret to thriving with chronic pain is to simultaneously engage with it physically, mentally, and spiritually.” The book is readable and practical in its approach, as it’s oriented toward helping people live better lives without pushing any one agenda or path. The author examines different types of pain and the ways the body, the mind, and one’s own personal experiences can provide tools for healing. He sees pain not as a negative but as the body’s way of communicating |

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information, and to that end, he highlights the concepts of acceptance, mindfulness, and positive thinking. Especially notable is his inclusion of his own experiences; he details all the ways that his own constant pain forced him to re-evaluate and improve his life while also encouraging readers to do the same.

The book is full of practices and exercises, with an emphasis on looking for and valuing incremental improvements rather than relying on what he calls “magic-bullet thinking,” which he asserts is “counterproductive to our long-term well-being.”

Spirituality also figures heavily, with the author looking at different faiths’ ideas regarding pain and how they can inform readers’ own lives. Although nothing he presents in the book is particularly new or unique, Meshorer’s empowering approach and positive outlook will certainly prove valuable to his fellow sufferers. He opens up space to encourage readers to use anything that works for them, including medical interventions and alternative therapies. Overall, the book is a well-meaning, useful guide to living with a misunderstood condition.

A positive, open-minded, and practical overview.

PAUSE AND PONDER Sufiesque Poetry for the Twenty-first Century

Osmani, Rashid CreateSpace (102 pp.) $9.90 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-5028-8738-2

By turns religious, romantic, and political, this collection shows readers a skilled poet coming into his own.

Osmani (In the Footsteps of Rumi..., 2013, etc.) has published three previous volumes of verse, but in this one, he shows further maturation as a writer, and it’s a delight to watch. Among his talents is an ability to strike a delicate balance between humor and tragedy; few poets can do so without making the laughs feel impertinent and the grief feel insubstantial, but Osmani does. In “Smart Bombs,” for example, he offers a darkly comic description of “precision-guided munitions” that “ring door-bells wherever they go. / Standing by politely, respectfully, / as women and children stream out.”

The fact that the exact opposite is true only makes the “joke” hit harder. “Guantanamo Blues” is a touching, tactful tribute to prisoners of the war on terror who’ve gone so long without freedom and without trial. It also shows readers the poet’s political side, which he only shows occasionally but to great effect. “Countries Are Corporations, My Friend,” for example, tweaks former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney while lamenting the nationalism that divides people. “Drone Open Season” effectively captures the moral tensions that this newest form of warfare provokes: “Can’t catch them alive; / a dilemma if they survive.” The bulk of this slim volume, though, touches on spiritual and ethical topics.

In one of the best poems, the clever “0 for 3,” Osmani writes humbly and succinctly of the American culture’s skewed value system: “In a culture that values / wealth, looks and youth, / I 132

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am 0 for 3. /... / In a society that fosters / greed, cunningness, and arrogance, / I am 0 for 3.” Perhaps the only small snag in this otherwise accomplished work is the author’s use of the word “Sufiesque” to describe it. Sufism is a popular, mystical form of Islam that has produced some of the most influential, most read poets in the world, among them Rumi and Attar. In his introduction, Osmani defines Sufism in terms of “its tradition of viewing human existence in a much wider context than what can be encompassed by ritualistic dogma.” He casts an awfully wide net with this description, and it’s difficult to see what is Sufi—much less “Sufiesque”—about much of this collection. However, the way a poet labels his own work doesn’t matter much if that poetry is good, and Osmani’s is.

A strong poet is perceptive, eloquent, and thoughtful— and Osmani is three for three.

OF GIANTS AND OTHER MEN

Peek, Caspar Tumbleweed Books (352 pp.) $4.99 e-book | Mar. 21, 2015

A lyrical family saga that brings to light an oft forgotten period of Central American history.

Tomás is just a small boy when his father, Raúl, leaves him and his mother, Victoria, in order to fight in the 1927 conflict raging over the American occupation of Nicaragua. When Raúl is executed, Tomás struggles to grow up without his father’s guidance under the influence of an indifferent, bitter mother. Raised mostly by his Miskito nanny, Sofia, Tomás grows up a sensitive boy—more introspective than his cousin Fausto, who seems desperate to prove his strength to his own disciplinarian father. As a preteen, Tomás meets his cousin Ana, with whom he has a childlike and then more adult romance; at first, however, his view is that sex is too dirty to experience with the pure Ana. (His first sexual act was as an adolescent, when Fausto’s father’s friends pressured him into nearly raping a young prostitute.) Tomás eventually goes to medical school, while Fausto becomes a soldier, but the boys, who were once as close as brothers, find that violence, war, and love can tear them apart. Author Peek manages to weave the 20th-century history of Nicaragua together with a moving story of betrayal and redemption, without sacrificing the tale’s descriptive beauty. When Tomás finds himself in the middle of a war, for example, Peek gives readers a brief, lyrical interlude: “Tomás no longer trembled. He was aware that the grasshoppers had started chirping again. Dawn was still far away, yet he could imagine the outline of the mountains, the tall trees swinging in the night breeze, and the conger monkeys perching on their branches.” Such moments of reflection throw other passages of violence and cruelty into high relief, making for an intricately textured narrative.

A beautifully realized novel that doesn’t shy away from describing the horrors of war as well as life’s moments of beauty.

Ever the stylist, Rose’s succinct, well-cadenced prose shows an engaged mind, sharply tuned wit, and compassion and intellect that provide a model for civic engagement. making a living, making a life

ONCE UPON A ZOMBIE Book One: The Color of Fear

Phillips, Billy & Nissenson, Jenny Manuscript

Kid-friendly horror featuring iconic fairy-tale heroines for young readers who enjoy their literary fare on the darker side.

Tonally and stylistically reminiscent of the Monster High novels, this middlegrade novel (the first in a planned series) has an intriguing premise: 14-year-old Caitlin, the new kid at a prestigious London academy, gets tricked into visiting the gravesite of Lewis Carroll at night and falls down a proverbial rabbit hole into a magical realm created by particles of imagination. There, she’s befriended by a quartet of popular fairy-tale females—Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty—who have all become zombified due to the evil machinations of the Queen of Hearts and a being known as the Enchanter. Caitlin learns that she’s the only one who can save both realms from the spreading darkness that is sucking the wonder out of the world and turning the inhabitants into zombies. Caitlin’s mission is daunting—she must somehow take the Queen of Hearts’ magic scepter from her. The queen, however, is guarded by an army of zombie wolves, crows, and bats. As Caitlin, her younger sister, Natalie, and her undead princess besties trek through dangerous fantasy realms en route to the queen’s castle, Caitlin’s crush from school—a boy named Jack—finds his way into the magical realm and experiences his own tribulations. Powered by a fast-paced, action-packed narrative that features beloved childhood characters in a decidedly darker light, this story will surely delight readers of all ages. In one memorable scene, “Tweedledee and Tweedledum were terrorizing the dance floor with some super-loose hip-hop moves.

An undead and pale Peter Pan was chatting up a Blood-Eyed, rotting Red Riding Hood.”

A fast, fun read that’s undeniably cool, just like its princesses.

Making A Living, Making A Life

Rose, Daniel Half Moon Press (384 pp.) $19.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Oct. 18, 2014 978-0-692-27972-4 A real estate developer and philanthropist presents a masterful debut collection of exceptionally cogent and timely speeches and essays.

For 60 years, Rose has dedicated himself to the real estate business, but he’s also given speeches—not only about economic issues, but also his other passions, including education, religion, and the roles of philanthropy and government in resolving intractable difficulties. As a fellow of the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former adviser to the Clinton administration, Rose speaks and writes with authority, warmth, and candor. He’s no ideologue and certainly no Donald Trump. Instead, he beguiles with his broad knowledge of literature, art, and Judaica (“Judaism is a religion in which human beings talk to, argue with and remonstrate with God,” he insightfully writes), and he skillfully weaves that knowledge into his articulate, fair-minded appeals. He not only champions social and business success; he also argues that those who succeed owe a debt to society: “High standards are important in all areas of life,” he writes, “but particularly in business.” In a time when shrill voices seem to possess center stage, Rose appeals to reason, and he seems to regard his readers as being as reasonable as he is. Ever the stylist, his succinct, well-cadenced prose shows an engaged mind, sharply tuned wit, and compassion and intellect that provide a model for civic engagement. His particularly poignant portrait of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan offers a warm, engaging study of a complex thinker and political polymath. Although collections of speeches were once quite popular, major commercial publishers relatively rarely publish them these days, and this book fills a much-needed empty space.

Although a few more brief remarks on the specific occasions of these speeches might have enriched their context, this collection offers the fruits of a lifetime of dedication to the affairs of the nation.

A wise, well-honed collection of speeches that address vital issues with fresh, penetrating insight.

SWIMMING THE ELEMENTS A Collection of Poems Rosta, Joseph Self (128 pp.) $15.00 paper | Oct. 3, 2014 978-0-692-30632-1

This new collection of poetry is a garden of delights—a carefully tailored compendium that sounds as good aloud as it reads on the page.

Rosta subdivides this fine gathering of his recent verse into three pieces. The first movement takes the march of the seasons as its organizing structure, as cold circles back to cold again. Thus, an early poem called “In Winter’s Arms” opens, “In February’s / lap / the birch / whistles to warm, / and shivers; / the sky whispering china.” This last bit—on “whispering china”—is a delightfully unexpected flash, and readers see many of these in Rosta’s verse. In the alliterative shift from “whistle” to “warm” to “whisper,” the author urges readers subtly, quietly forward. As spring gives way to summer, readers get “July 3,” which is also a bit of birthday verse: “Your birthday leans deeply, / the incorrigible afternoon / friend full of gossip from / lands now in winter.” Of course, readers lean, too—ever so patiently—toward those shorter, cooler days, as “the trees toss their thin suns / in your October place.” Seasonal shift proves an apt metaphor for Rosta’s poetry as a whole: there’s a sense of balance, of timeliness, of careful development guiding readers |

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through a satisfying range of tones, temperatures and timbres, and it’s gorgeous stuff. Motherhood is the loose theme of the second movement, though the author doesn’t confine himself unnaturally to that trope, instead wandering into fruitful tangents on mourning (“Remembering That”), modernity (“Harlington, England”) and memory (“The 17th Regiment Memorial of 1861-1865”). A last section, “Love and Marriage,” is similarly focused yet digressive. Throughout, Rosta writes in short lines reminiscent of the work of Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings or, more recently, Rae Armantrout. Yet here, brief never means clipped, and readers will feel as if the author is building stack after stack of sturdy, narrow staircases. They should look forward to joining him on the climb.

Delicate, precise verse that deserves a place on any poetry aficionado’s bookshelf.

The Boys of Earth-180

Samuelson, Paul Amazon Digital Services (238 pp.) $4.49 e-book | Sep. 1, 2014 In Samuelson’s debut novel, two young cousins—levelheaded Nick and rambunctious Sid, both sons of elite astronauts and both students at the Junior Astronaut Academy near the town of Waterbeach—blast off into adventure in the not-too-distant future.

The boys’ fathers, who left on a secret and very dangerous mission into deep space, have gone missing. Nick and Sid race out into the void with the newly built spaceship Destiny Copernicus 2 to try to find the vanished astronauts and help them complete their vital mission. Along the way, they face plenty of excitement and colorful dangers, from Nick’s crush on Veronica Appleyard, niece of the National Space Institute’s commanding officer, to the misadventures of wild Sid and the strange wonders of an unknown planet orbiting directly opposite Earth—“Earth-180.” The two kids go from cadets to explorers, making contact with a strange alien race they call Orangies—both friendly and rogue—and use brains and brawn to help save the day. The upbeat, charming book has a straightforward plot that keeps the reader’s attention from start to finish. Characters are simple but sympathetic, with a level of development to make them distinguishable and entertaining. There’s just enough romance to add zest to the narrative, too. The science is lightweight and not fit for this world. For instance, after spending time with the Orangies, a flummoxed professor writes: “How the Orangies harness gravity to their will, I cannot say, and I should not presume I could ever understand. Based on my time with them, I now believe gravity is faster than light—that it is instantaneous—and distance, however great, offers no obstacle to it.” The counter-Earth concept is classic sci-fi, but here, for a change, it’s not a dystopia or a war story. Text is remarkably clean in copy editing and proofreading, with nary a typo, while a bit of bathroom humor and light swearing might appeal to preteen 134

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sensibilities. Plus, there’s more to come: this is just the first book in a planned series.

Bright, pleasant sci-fi for kids.

MURDER AT CIREY A Victor Constant Investigation

Sawyer, Cheryl Thorpe-Bowker Identifier Services (264 pp.) $10.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Mar. 30, 2015 978-0-9924728-7-0

This exhilarating first stab at a murder mystery by veteran historical novelist Sawyer (Rebel, 2014, etc.) rings true.

Primarily set in France during eight days in 1735, the novel centers around military police corps member Victor Constant, who is propelled by a strong sense of justice, which often keeps him from noticing whose toes he steps upon. It’s this stunning indifference to France’s very strong class structure that earns Parisian Constant an involuntary transfer to the picturesque rural region of Champagne. As he muses in a flashback, “Learn not to arrest gentlemen with friends in high places, or you’ll be cashiered from the military police corps of France.” Constant launches the investigation of the murder of a nobleman’s ambitious clerk on a nearby estate. At the estate, he meets, in an inevitably adversarial manner, the playwright Voltaire, opinionated lover of the estate’s mistress, Madame du Chalelet. Other members of Constant’s Chaumont brigade quickly pick up a penniless outsider as a suitable suspect in the crime. But the victim’s reputation as a philanderer and his unlikely, hidden wealth lead Constant to doggedly seek out a more conspiratorial solution to the crime, procedure be damned, especially after another man of dubious character is also found dead. Constant is soon racing the clock to find the true mastermind behind the heinous deed as he battles provincial attitudes. His partner, Renard, proffers, “If you tell me there’s conspiracy brewing [in Paris] in every street, I’m ready to believe you. But here, amongst our gentry? That’s not our way....We’re shoved away in a sleepy corner where nothing happens.” Sawyer has created a winning character in the obstinate Constant in what is the first book in a proposed series, and she has surrounded him with memorable characters, both noble and commoner. Her experience as a historical researcher shines through, such as when Constant performs the 18th-century equivalent of a ballistics match. Some of the language, especially the curse words, seems a bit anachronistic.

A promising start in a new direction featuring a headstrong but street-smart detective.

THE FIRST SUPPER A Tale of Two Hours

Schiff, Karen CreateSpace (170 pp.) $6.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-5053-3217-9

In this droll comedy of manners, sparks fly over a prospective union of two very different conservative families.

When Amanda Worthington brings her latest boyfriend du jour, Brian Grace, home from college, her wealthy, Republican parents, Chuck and Libby, figure that her relationship with the earnest, hunky football player won’t last long. However, a tizzy erupts when Amanda announces that she’s pregnant and plans to marry Brian the next day. Brian is also a Republican, but to the worldly, fashionable, and socially liberal Worthingtons, he’s the wrong kind—a devout Christian who insists that abortion is out of the question and marriage is mandatory. Even worse, he comes from a down-at-the-heels, working-class family. As Chuck strategizes a way to use his money to quash both the wedding and the pregnancy, Libby reels at her ruined plans to make Amanda into an accomplished doctor. The arrival of Brian’s parents intensifies the clash: the Worthingtons are appalled by the Graces’ dowdy clothes, untoned physiques, zealous religiosity, and concealed firearm; the Graces, meanwhile, are scandalized by the Worthingtons’ arctic-white decor, nude statuary, gay chef, and disdain for biblical strictures. As the two families learn more about what divides them, their awkwardness shades toward open enmity—just in time for dinner. Schiff has adapted her novel from her play of the same name, and this fact shows in a certain staginess: the story takes place in a single afternoon and location, the dialogue telegraphs attitudes in efficient shorthand (“Do you think he’s one of those...one of those Christians?”), the political schema is somewhat self-conscious, and the characters are stark enough to be legible from the back row. However, Schiff fleshes out these caricatures with plausible interior lives and unexpected nuances; Libby emerges as more than the shallow shopaholic she initially seems to be, and the Graces turn out to be at least as cosmopolitan and socially fluent as the Worthingtons, in their own way. Overall, Schiff ’s well-paced prose style combines whip-smart repartée with a sharp, funny knack for social observation, and she manages to infuse psychological depth and emotional resonance into the kulturkampf.

A somewhat contrived but entertaining satire on the different ways of being right.

CONSTANT IS THE RAIN

Sexton, Rex CreateSpace (306 pp.) $12.00 paper | Jan. 7, 2015 978-1-5005-0248-5

Relentless pessimism about the state of the nation infuses Sexton’s (Paper Moon, 2013) accomplished poetry and short fiction about down-and-out drifters and starving artists.

Though also a surrealist painter, Sexton proves adept at delineating character portraits through short fiction and verse. In this mixed-genre collection, most poems and short stories are only a page or two. The title piece, about hard life and untimely death in the ghetto, introduces the book’s dark atmosphere: “Being and begetting, struggling and / enduring...as gunfire crackles and sirens wail / and her fate is sealed with coffin nails.” Sexton’s characters—Nowhere Men as much as Everymen—are war veterans, hobos, sex workers, and blue-collar employees facing job losses and financial ruin. His settings are urban wastelands, often Chicago or Detroit. For instance, in “The Penworn Papers,” one of a handful of longer stories, an impoverished artist recalls his degenerate life as he moves between a freight-yard shack and a laundromat. Reversals of fortune go both ways: in “The Gift,” a Jewish satire redolent of Shalom Auslander, a young man reverts to emptiness in his old age, while “The Pawnshop” awards the child of Holocaust survivors millions of dollars to give away in scholarships.

The palette is Edward Hopper’s, the ironic tone O. Henry’s.

Black humor appears in nursery-rhyme refrains (in “Jack in a Box”) and sarcastic snarls, in “Valentine Rhyme”: “Another dandy day in the good / ole USA.” Indeed, Sexton questions American supremacy and the certainty that “in the USA, the bad guys lose, truth wills out, the righteous win.” In “Mount Money,” he undermines America’s self-identification with Switzerland’s rich neutrality by exposing an essential lack of social conscience: “I guess we’re a lot like the Swiss. / Except, of course, for the social programs / they have to take care of their citizens / from cradle to grave, which goes against / our grain.”

“Our Town” playfully affirms Thornton Wilder’s morbid vision through gloomy imagery. The poems—rich with alliteration, internal rhymes, assonance, and puns—slightly outclass the stories here. They have broader application, universalizing human depravity and the daily fight for survival in an age of austerity.

The bleakness may be hard to take, but Sexton’s talent for social commentary and character sketching marks him as—in a title he gives a character in “Chop Suey”—“the Modigliani of the Mean Streets.”

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Van Steenwyk writes in sharp, muscular prose highly suitable for the fabulistic subject matter, deftly navigating both the darker and lighter segments of the story. a wolf at the gate

DOWNBEACH

Singley, William P. CreateSpace (272 pp.) $12.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Dec. 8, 2014 978-1-4996-3985-8 A novel about a young man’s struggle to navigate a tumultuous childhood without a father.

Singley (Hook Up, 2014, etc.) describes this bildungsroman as a brief history of a small island off the New Jersey shore from 1948 to 1959. The story begins with a reunion at the Whitefish Tavern, a time-honored haunt for those who grew up on the seasonal vacation retreat.

Once the novel introduces its colorful cast of adult characters—a legion of men who still bear the traces of their youthful selves—a man called “Buckeye” steps to the podium to read his account of his childhood (and theirs as well) on South Absecon Island.

The remainder of the book relates a narrative within a narrative, as Buckeye reads his book, Downbeach—a story that’s as much about a place and a time as it is about the island’s inhabitants.

Much of the tale, as Singley relates it, has the quality of journal entries, without a clear, linear plot structure; it’s more like a pastiche of youthful memories. Buckeye effectively recounts a host of adolescent adventures, including some minor (and not-sominor) crime, boyish pugilism, and sexual experimentation. Singley reveals Buckeye’s precocious sensitivity when he encounters his first real love interest, Angel, a babysitter visiting the island for the summer; she sadly doubles as Buckeye’s first heartbreak, as well. Holding together this patchwork of remembrances is the narrator’s struggle to manage his entry into manhood without the guidance of his dad, who died during the World War II invasion of Normandy. He also thinks of how his mother dealt with his father’s absence: “Behind me...hung the captain’s photograph; without looking I could feel it. If my Dad...if he had lived, she wouldn’t be sleeping in an old chair in a worn housecoat with a warm can of beer for company.” Overall, this novel’s depiction of the wildness of adolescence is often lighthearted and funny. At the same time, it’s always haunted by the specter of war in the background—and the havoc it wreaks on those left to mourn.

A tender story of a childhood isolated by island life and tempered by world events.

POWER SHIFT From Fossil Energy to Dynamic Solar Power

Stayton, Robert Arthur Sandstone Publishing Apr. 30, 2015

A detailed blueprint for a solar-powered, all-electric future.

In this bright treatise, Stayton outlines how humanity might transition from finite, carbon dioxide– emitting fossil fuels to permanent, pollution-free solar power 136

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by the end of this century. His key points are that people must curtail carbon emissions; that solar photovoltaic electricity can meet people’s needs better than alternatives can; and that the exponential growth of solar installations shows that the shift has already begun. The author has a master’s degree in physics, college teaching experience, and years of living off the grid. He expertly blends scientific research, historical context, personal experience, and visionary thinking in this book and relates it all in plain language. He has a gift for demystifying things, from horsepower and steam engines to gigawatts and thorium reactors. His examples are practical (“A joule is the energy needed to raise a three-quarter pound book by a foot, such as lifting a book to the next higher shelf ”), and he uses concise, declarative sentences to make his points: “Every five days, the Sun delivers the energy equivalent of all the fossil fuel reserves in the world.”

He also avoids polemics: “Ocean acidification is the smoking gun evidence that convicts fossil fuel emissions of harming the planet. You don’t need to believe in climate change to accept that fact.” But although many readers may believe that the facts, and logic, make a shift to solar power inevitable, Stayton’s timeline appears too optimistic, as it requires 20 percent annual growth in solar installations for decades as well as improvements in storage systems. Also shadowing his sunny scenario is a cloud of powerful interests that stand to lose billions of dollars if fossil fuels go unused. Stayton devotes only a short chapter to this opposition—confident that collective, individual choices will drive the transformation. Whatever the pace of solar adoption, however, Stayton does manage to clarify the feasibility of quitting fossil fuels. Whether readers add rooftop solar panels to their homes or just replace their incandescent bulbs after reading this book, they’ll better understand how energy works, how much humans use (and waste), and why an epochal change is coming.

An energy book that’s a pleasure to read and sure to win new solar converts.

YOUR SMALLEST BONES Taylor, Sean D. Seventh Tangent (178 pp.) $8.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Nov. 20, 2014 978-0-578-15298-1

A short story collection that explores its characters’ sensibilities with delicacy and precision.

Of these 12 stories, seven have been previously published, and two received Pushcart Prize nominations. Taylor (Everything to Do with You, 2010) sets his tales mostly in San Francisco, often among 20-somethings struggling to make it as they navigate relationships, work, and life’s alarums and excursions. The opening story, “Flight and Weightless,” is particularly successful: two young people were once a couple, but Maria stayed in Spokane, Washington, when the narrator returned to San Francisco. Now she’s dying of cancer, and he’s helping her fulfill a last wish—to push a grand piano onto a frozen lake so she can

play it: “Thick spots [on the ice] sound like a chandelier reuniting with the ground.” In that sentence, everything depends on the unexpected but perfect “reuniting”—the chandelier’s fall (or the piano’s, or Maria’s) isn’t a disaster but a reunion. Taylor often achieves his lapidary style through similarly unexpected but fitting conjunctions; in the same story, the narrator wonders, “Who coined winter wonderland? Were they not aware of hypothermia and giving up, and goddamn Spokane?” The “and” phrases, as they move from the general to the particular (from cold weather to one couple’s breakup), nicely mirror how people personalize disaster. Some quirks, such as Taylor’s frequent interest in fingers and toes, add a surreal touch to these stories. The author seems aware of the danger that such a style can devolve into preciousness or portentousness, and in “Depluralize the Pair” he both enacts and criticizes this dynamic.

His narrator proclaims, for example, that relationships “always progress or end in ceremonies. Divorce or marriage.” Or death, perhaps, or just tapering off? But if readers become irritated at this 20-something know-it-all narrator, the story subverts the situation by granting him some self-recognition as he gets older, with his knees creaking as he unloads the dryer: “We wanted everything to be art....We finally had to deal with something hard, that wasn’t artsy or youthful or innocent.”

Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.

The Life and Times of Wilberforce Jones

Throop, D. CreateSpace (174 pp.) $9.89 paper | $3.95 e-book | Oct. 2, 2011 978-1-4663-9776-7 Throop’s (Lizard Quest, 2011) second novel delves into the life of the eccentric title character and his equally curious friends and neighbors in a small country town.

When a journalist is told by his editor to leave the city and become a “rural correspondent,” he initially balks at the idea, but financial inducements and curiosity get the better of him. At his assigned destination he meets up with Cletus Jones, a “large, muscular, corn-fed country boy,” who begins to tell him about his distant cousin, Wilberforce Jones, a man who’s led a remarkable life. For example, Cletus recounts a time that Wilberforce resolved to commit suicide by contracting food poisoning from local Mexican restaurants; he was dejected by the fact that his domestic partner had left him and because he was in debt from a scheme to win big at bingo. Unsurprisingly, the suicide plan failed, but Wilberforce used the experience to develop a recipe for salsa that became a successful, lucrative brand. Cletus also describes an incident in which Wilberforce became a preacher to a congregation that believed that a young celebrity (with a racy, leaked video) was an avatar of God. But Wilberforce isn’t the only person of interest here: Cletus also tells the story of Dennis Haney and Tad Elliot,

two fellow townsfolk who gave a series of lectures denying that NASA astronauts actually landed on the moon, which culminates in a legal showdown. Throughout the novel, Throop manages to keep the many characters and occasionally tangential storylines in clear, comprehensible order. As the primary storyteller, Cletus is as engaging and unusual as any of the people he describes. The author also gives the provincial, but unnamed, town a strong sense of place. His liberal use of rural dialect may be distracting to some readers, however, and although the journalist/narrator is a learned city man, his occasional florid turns of phrase strain believability: “Without any outward show of rancor at my attempted sally of wit, Cletus resumed his story.”

Most readers, however, will choose to overlook these minor transgressions and embrace this congenial novel’s charm.

A winsome tale that puts its quirky, rural characters on full display.

A Wolf at the Gate

Van Steenwyk, Mark Illus. by Hedstrom, Joel Mennonite Worker Press (80 pp.) $23.49 | $16.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Mar. 28, 2015 978-0-9862333-0-2 Van Steenwyk (The Unkingdom of God, 2013, etc.) offers an illustrated chapter book about an angry red wolf who encounters a saintly beggar king.

The Red Wolf is born into a pack that lives deep in the woods outside of the town of Stonebriar.

Her parents raise her with tales of the history of her kind, the Lords of the Forest, who have slowly ceded their territory to the growth of human settlement. They also teach her the necessity of never taking more food than necessary and sharing what she has with others. The Red Wolf grows up angry; eventually, her parents die, and she loses her pack before becoming the rage-fueled Blood Wolf that haunts the dreams of Stonebriar’s residents. It takes the appearance of the Beggar King, a man of peace who holds the respect of both the townsfolk and the forest animals, to calm the Red Wolf ’s anger and teach her to live in harmony with her neighbors. The Red Wolf then takes these lessons and uses them to solve a problem: a band of outlaws lives in her woods and terrorizes the surrounding towns. She must decide whether there are better solutions to cruelty than violence and whether such solutions are practical in a world short on sympathy. The story is an imaginative retelling of the legend of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio; though rooted in Christian tradition, the book contains no overt religiosity, and secular parents should feel comfortable recommending it to their children. Van Steenwyk writes in sharp, muscular prose highly suitable for the fabulistic subject matter, deftly navigating both the darker and lighter segments of the story. The true standouts of the book, however, are the illustrations by Joel Hedstrom. Taking Japanese woodblock printing and Greek vases as his inspiration, Hedstrom supplements the text with |

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full-page illustrations in brilliant colors that feel simultaneously ancient and stylishly contemporary. The result is a book out of time: a coupling of narrative and illustration that should stoke the imagination of any young modern reader.

A visually stunning work addressing themes of peace, generosity, and forgiveness.

Africa’s Heart The Journey Ends in Kansas

Wentling, Mark Peace Corps Writers (532 pp.) $20.00 paper | $8.99 e-book Jan. 15, 2015 978-1-935925-55-2

An ambitious novel concludes Wentling’s (Africa’s Release, 2014) African trilogy.

Letivi, chief of the Ataku village, is faced with a modern dilemma: wealth disparity is growing in the village between those families who have sent children to work in Europe (who then send money back home to their families) and those who have not. Letivi’s goal of correcting this problem via a wealth-sharing agreement among the villagers is hindered by his own lack of a wife or child; as a clan leader says, “Chief Letivi is without a wife or children and thus knows little about the lives we live as we struggle

Perfect Sami Saxton Perfect Series #3

This Issue’s Contributors # Adult Maude Adjarian • Joseph Barbato • Amy Boaz • Scott Borchert • Jeffrey Burke • Tobias Carroll Lee E. Cart • Andrew E. Colarusso • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Anjali Enjeti • Jordan Foster • Peter Franck • Mia Franz • Bob Garber Devon Glenn • Amy Goldschlager • Shalene Gupta • Bridey Heing • April Holder • BJ Hollars Jessica Jernigan • Robert M. Knight • Jocelyn Koehler • Megan Kurashige • Paul Lamey Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Joe Maniscalco • Virginia C. McGuire Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Jennifer Morell • Sarah Morgan • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota Gary Presley • Erika Rohrbach • Benjamin Rybeck • Lloyd Sachs • Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Michael Sandlin • Heather L. Seggel • Chaitali Sen • Gene Seymour • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon • Elaine Sioufi • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Matthew Tiffany • Claire Trazenfeld • Hope Wabuke • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz • Marion Winik Children’s & Teen Alison Anholt-White • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Sophie Brookover • Louise Brueggemann Timothy Capehart • Sandie Chen • Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • GraceAnne A. DeCandido Dave DeChristopher • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Carol Edwards • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Jessie C. Grearson • F. Lee Hall • Heather L. Hepler Megan Honig • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem Thien-Kim Lam • Angela Leeper • Lori Low • Jeanne McDermott • Shelly McNerney • Kathie Meizner • Mary Margaret Mercado • Daniel Meyer • Kathleen Odean • Sara Ortiz • John Edward Peters • Deesha Philyaw • Susan Pine • Andrea Plaid • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Leslie L. Rounds • Mindy Schanback • Dean Schneider • John W. Shannon • Robin Smith • Karin Snelson • Jennifer Sweeney • Jessica Thomas • Kimberly Whitmer • Monica Wyatt Indie Rachel Abramowitz • Paul Allen • Rebecca Leigh Anthony • Kent Armstrong • Richard Becker Robert Berg • James Burbank • Stephanie Cerra • David Chiu • Michael Deagler • Lindsay Denninger • Steve Donoghue • Megan Elliott • Eric F. Frazier • Shannon Gallagher • Justin Hickey • Robert Isenberg • Ivan Kenneally • Grace Labatt • Riley MacLeod • Collin Marchiando • Dale McGarrigle • Joshua T. Pederson • Judy Quinn • Megan Roth • Jessica Skwire Routhier • Jerome Shea • Barry Silverstein • Aya Tsintziras • Carson Vaughan

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to support our families.” Letivi, a light-skinned half-caste, is also burdened by the secrets of his own parentage: he is the son of Bobovovi, an American Peace Corps volunteer chosen by the moon god and consumed by a sacred baobab tree 20 years before. A hemisphere away, a newspaper reporter named Robin is tracking down a mysterious man named J.D., whose disappearance shocked the town of Gemini, Kansas, and whose trail will lead Robin all the way to Africa. Destinies converge, and the generational saga that Wentling began in Africa’s Embrace arrives at its conclusion. Wentling, an American, admits in the introduction that the book (and the whole trilogy) is based on his four-decade career in Africa, and indeed, the works concern themselves with more than literary pursuits. Logistical issues affecting rural Africa—sustainable farming, education, the evolving role of the village, etc.—are raised in considerable detail, and the activist’s call to awareness is ever present at the periphery. As a novel, the prose tends toward the simple and declarative, though the details of village life and the inclusion of village folklore are immersive enough to lend emotional believability to characters and their actions. Readers of the previous two books will feel a fuller connection to the history of this world (and they’ll be more forgiving of the concluding volume’s 522-page length), yet there’s enough here for the work to stand on its own. With impressive scope and flourishes of magical realism, the book transcends what might seem to be mundane storylines to instead feel fully epic.

A satisfying novel of interconnectedness and community.

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Wickard, Douglas Self (250 pp.) $3.99 e-book | Dec. 23, 2014 A sea voyage from the U.S. to Italy churns up whirlwind romance and a strong possibility of murder in Wickard’s (A Perfect Setup, 2013, etc.) latest thriller.

Sami Saxton is ready to enjoy an extended cruise with her pal Drew Shaffer. Things are off to a good start when Sami meets Giovanni Gulati, a handsome Italian who has more than a passing interest in her. But their burgeoning and exciting relationship is threatened when Sami sees a ski-masked man watching her, leading her to believe that she’s being followed by a stalker she thought she’d left behind in New York. It only gets more harrowing from there: police board the ship to investigate a missing passenger, and Sami receives a note slid under her door from “a secret admirer”— a list of crossed-out names; she’s next. Someone on the cruise may be an unsavory character from Sami’s past with sinister intentions. The suspense in Douglas’ thriller comes at a slow crawl, but effectively so. The menace onboard is introduced early with a quick perspective from an unknown person secretly keeping an eye on Sami. But much of the story is devoted to Sami’s time with Giovanni. Their romance is never tacky or

excessively melodramatic; it’s a believable relationship with a suitor who alternates between amorous gestures and, on one of their dates, standing Sami up. Author Wickard will have readers on edge before the weirdo in a ski mask even makes an appearance: married Drew reignites a dangerous affair with a shrink, and Sami notices seemingly unfounded animosity from Mr. Delphino, Giovanni’s caretaker. The story doesn’t present itself as a whodunit, so while the identity of the masked man isn’t too surprising, it doesn’t diminish him as a genuine threat to Sami and Drew. Overall, Wickard efficiently delivers a narrative that’s like a methodical, white-knuckle grip of the throat, the tension gradually getting tighter.

A leisurely paced but ultimately rewarding, riveting thriller.

PLEXUS

Wilcoxson, Troy T. Self In this debut novel, an android terrorist destroys Washington, D.C., in an attempt to take over the world.

In 2051, the Palomino Corporation can upload the minds of dying humans into the bodies of android replicas. Two weeks before Christmas, President Frederick S. Nelson holds a press conference to announce that Palomino’s widely distributed J-8000 model will be recalled due to suspected major defects. Moments later, chaos erupts at the White House as forces controlled by a vicious android named Apollyon overtake the Secret Service. This day becomes known as Day Zero—the start of “one of the greatest wars in modern history.” Caught in the middle are D.C. natives Zach Becker, a war vet and cop; Emily Wedlund, a National Guard combat specialist; and young Jiro, an 8-year-old android.

Apollyon has a specific reason for hunting the robot boy, whose cash-strapped parents threatened to return him, and he recruits another remorseless android named Emma to hijack a Wi-Fi component to help complete what he calls Operation Plexus.

Luckily, there are still some sane androids left at the Crystal Lake Chapel, where all “Palomin” are welcome. Yet nowhere is truly safe as long as Apollyon is determined to save the world from humanity. Author Wilcoxson’s blood-drenched debut will be a hearty read for fans of the films Robocop (1987) and The Terminator (1984). Comprised primarily of simple, declarative sentences, the narrative often clatters forward like a runaway screenplay. This style helps to effectively dramatize familiar scenes, including Apollyon’s introduction (“A cracked, battered, and burnt face looks up, revealing mechanical work inside the broken skin”). There are some sedate, human moments, as well, such as when Zack finds a TV remote in the fridge—evidence of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. However, they’re deeply overshadowed by the tableaux of well-crafted mayhem; in one firefight, for example, “[h]eads cock back, shoulders spin, and knees launch bone matter.” Despite a breakneck pace leading to a delicious finale, sci-fi fans may wish for a more engagingly

futuristic world (although the nod to a second Korean War helps). Nevertheless, the novel’s stunning cliffhanger balances the excessive action.

A novel of full-throttle sci-fi violence for lovers of the 1980s action-film heyday.

Sail Upon the Land

Young, Josa Keyes Ink (404 pp.) $12.00 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 20, 2014 978-0-9931248-0-8

Young’s (One Apple Tasted, 2008, etc.) novel traces an English family over 80 years and four generations, focusing mainly on its women’s tangled experiences of family life and motherhood.

After a prologue set in 1987, in which a teenage girl named Damson is raped in India, the novel begins in 1938 with 17-year-old Sarah, Damson’s grandmother. Energetic and determined, Sarah becomes a nurse, serving in France in World War II, and she and her husband, a doctor, later have a daughter, Melissa. In 1966, at the age of 18, Melissa meets Lord Mount-Hey, nicknamed “Munty.” The son of a greengrocer, Munty unexpectedly inherited his title at 13. He and Melissa marry and move into the dilapidated Castle Hey. Always subject to “glooms” and “giddy episodes,” Melissa becomes seriously troubled after the birth of her daughter, Damson, in 1968.

Motherless since babyhood, Damson grows up independent and strong-minded; before starting medical school, she decides to take the aforementioned trip to India. She becomes pregnant as a result of the rape and decides to give the girl up for adoption. She later becomes a doctor, and 20 years later, she sees her daughter again—accidentally pregnant and asking Damson to take her baby. Damson’s decision results in the unraveling of many repressed family truths. Young shows a finely calibrated understanding of English class and gender differences and has a good sense of time and place. For example, when Munty first arrives at school after gaining his inheritance, he’s uneasy about fitting in, but his tuck hamper, bulging with food, erases all social boundaries: “His new friends seemed ravenous....Born just before or during the war, none of them had ever known anything other than rationing.” The book also effectively emphasizes the bonds, traps, and pleasures of motherhood. Sex itself seldom appeals, however, even to contemporary characters.

Most seem to think of the act as something one does only to make babies and please men; a lack of it, therefore, isn’t seen as a loss. Damson, for example, avoids relationships after her rape, but “her subconscious nursery door was wide open and phantom babies streamed into her dreams.” That said, some plot elements are a bit too pat, as when Damson returns to India and confronts her rapist.

A well-written historical novel that will entertain readers with its sharp, insightful observations.

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Zucker and Corelli make appreciating the artistry easy, to the point where readers might seek out the actual recordings. franco corelli and a revolution in singing

Franco Corelli and a Revolution in Singing Fifty-Four Tenors Spanning 200 Years

Zucker, Stefan Bel Canto Society (384 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 18, 2015 978-1-891456-00-8

A critical look at the evolution of operatic tenor singing, from the 19th century to the present.

In opera, Zucker’s bona fides are impeccable. A singer himself, he earned distinction from the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s highest tenor” for reaching an A above high C during a performance at New York’s Town Hall in 1972.

He also hosted Opera Fanatic, the long-running program on Columbia University’s radio station, and founded the Bel Canto Society, a nonprofit opera organization. In this book, Zucker (Origins of Modern Tenor Singing, 1997) draws from conversations he had with the late Italian tenor Franco Corelli, a close friend and frequent guest on the Opera Fanatic program. Zucker offers their takes on popular tenors of the past, spotlighting each singer’s vocal stylings, physical techniques, strengths and weaknesses, as well as a consideration of the performance aspect.

Even nonfans of opera might recognize the most famous tenors referenced—Enrico Caruso, Richard Tucker, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, etc.—though the book by no means offers in-depth biographies. Less popular figures are given relatively brief chapters, including Jean de Reszke, Aureliano Pertile, and Mario Del Monaco. In some instances, Corelli acknowledges the tenors who influenced him, such as K i r k us M e di a LL C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Executive 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 2015 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948- 7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744.

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Beniamino Gigli: “His voice was exceptionally beautiful, warm like a lighted lamp, with a facile and inimitable emission....I remember a concert in which he gave twelve encores.” Zucker also offers frank, critical views on several singers, including legendary Caruso: “Compared with his predecessors...Caruso had less musical nuance, variety of dynamics and rubato; in short he had less musical imagination. He also had less control over dynamics. These were the prices he paid for his directness of address.” With formidable passion and knowledge from their own experiences as singers and lovers of the genre, Corelli and Zucker pick up on notes the average opera fan most likely does not. Interestingly, the book’s last portion consists of Zucker’s evaluations of several tenors’ performances as the character Radames from Verdi’s Aida based on archival recordings, such as Corelli’s from 1956, 1962, 1967, and 1972. Sprinkled throughout are wonderful archival photographs of the tenors dressed in their stage costumes. A reader not well-versed in the technical aspects of opera singing and history—let alone music theory and appreciation—might find the book a bit challenging, though die-hard opera fans and scholars will absorb it easily. Zucker and Corelli make appreciating the artistry easy, to the point where readers might seek out the actual recordings.

Zucker, expert that he is, is beyond that point; of Francesco Tamagno, one of his favorite tenors, he says: “I can go for years without listening to his records physically yet play them inside of me, for his is singing heard in the soul.”

Strictly for opera aficionados, a detailed, passionate analysis of what makes tenor singing and its practitioners unique.

INDIE

Books of the Month GODKILLER, Vol. 1

CARE GIVER

Richard Blanchard

Matt Pizzolo

Beautiful, heartbreaking, and deceptive; this fine novel taps into real mystery.

Deftly unorthodox and wickedly delectable; not so much a story as an experience.

JAMAAL’S JOURNEY

REBUILDING A DREAM

A genuine, upbeat bildungsroman of African-American high school life.

A must-read for policymakers at all levels and recommended for anyone who wants to understand housing problems while working toward solutions.

John McCormack

Andre F. Shashaty

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Fi e l d No t e s Photo courtesy Sarah Stacke/The New York Public Library

“I had Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It never recurred, and that was 20-some years ago or so. I’ve been trying to figure out how to exploit it for my writing ever since. You gotta use everything—I try to be a nose-totail writer, you know?”

Photo courtesy Paul Yoon

“The anticipation was way worse than the actual act. In fact, it felt like a physical unburdening, like the bricks on my chest had been taken off. It’s really important to know that you can do it.”

—Laura van den Berg, who told an audience at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, New York, that she started Find Me from scratch after deleting the full first draft

“My audience isn’t filled with Beliebers.

It’s filled with neon-haired, tattoocovered misfits—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

—YouTube sensation Shane Dawson, who recently came face to face with over 3,000 fans at an event in suburban Houston for his new book I Hate Myselfie.

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PA

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N BR WE CA

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—Seth Greenland, author of I Regret Everything, interviewed by Carolyn Kellogg for the Los Angeles Times

Paul Holdengräber (l) interviews RuPaul Charles

LIVE from the NYPL, “Supermodel of the World” RuPaul Charles professed a love of Animal Farm, fielded questions from Elizabeth Gilbert and John Waters, and danced to his latest single, “The Realness,” with interviewer and LIVE from the NYPL founder Paul Holdengräber. Relive the magic by video at nypl.org.

SESSION

“pagita (PAH-ji-tuh), n.: The stress of the unread.” —neologism most likely to benefit book people, from Lizzie Skurnick’s That Should Be a Word: A Language Lover’s Guide to Choregasms, Povertunity, Brattling, and 250 Other Much-Needed Terms for the Modern World

field notes

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”

Image(s): original illustrations, Emily Williamson; graphic design, Mike Domzalski

By Megan Labrise

“We are very proud of the literary genius sprouting all around us in Southwest Virginia, and are thrilled to shine a spotlight on it in our own little way.”

Lezlie Snyder, creative director of Parkway Brewing Company’s “Books & Brews” series, which creates beers based on local writers’ books. On tap: Factory Girl Session IPA, celebrating investigative journalist Beth Macy’s bestseller Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town. Up next: The Remedy Brown Ale, inspired by Martin Clark’s The Jezebel Remedy (June 9).

Submissions for Field Notes?

Email fieldnotes@kirkus.com.

Appreciations:

Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE

Photo courtesy New Directions

In the early 1930s, a time fast fading into history, strange things were afoot in Germany. Trading on ancient symbolism, timeworn prejudices, modern pseudoscience, and long-nursed grievances, a powerful right-wing coalition was rising, led by a charismatic war veteran who promised to restore it to greatness and whose name would soon be known around the world.

In those early days, he banked on being unheard outside his own country. There were eyewitnesses on hand, to be sure, to report his fantastic politics: the newspaperman William Shirer, for one, and the young British traveler and soon-to-be war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor for another.

And then there was Christopher Isherwood. As the Nazi regime was taking form, he found himself in Berlin, an island surrounded by pro-Nazi states but that itself had

no use for the swastika. Berliners were tolerant even to a fault, sympathetic to bohemians, welcoming of artists, and not in the least inclined to persecute gay men and women—who, in Isherwood’s own time and own England, were liable to serve time in prison on account of their affinities.

Isherwood landed in Berlin in 1929. He fell in love. He taught English. His young friend Wystan, soon to become famous as the poet W.H. Auden, left Berlin, looking for new adventures, but something in the swirl kept Isherwood there, even as the grip of the Nazis visibly tightened and life—gay, bohemian, and otherwise—became ever more difficult for anyone who did not embrace the rising new ideology.

He had published a novel back at home. It had not been well-received, but in the four years he was in Berlin, he gathered material enough for a dozen new ones. Instead, he wrote two thin books of short stories, the first published 80 years ago, in 1935. They contained sharp, sometimes ill-tempered portraits of the time and place and the people he met: “Meanwhile, my pupil, a very nice young man who hoped soon to become a schoolmaster, was eagerly adjuring me not to believe the stories, ‘invented by Jewish emigrants,’ about the political persecution.” “I was shown into a big gloomy half-furnished room by a fat untidy landlady with a pouchy sagging jowl like a toad.” “His brand new brown suit was vulgar beyond words; so were his lilac spats and his pointed yellow shoes.”

Most of his stories, in which a thinly disguised Isherwood is always front and center, were politically charged. One of the few that was not, ironically, became the best known of the lot, a story about a young woman, Sally Bowles, who hoped to achieve success as a singer but meanwhile was content to be kept by a succession of lovers. That story formed the heart of the play called I Am a Camera, which would become the stage hit and then the movie called Cabaret.

That play is what most of us know and remember of Isherwood today, but he went on to write many other stories and books besides. The best of them, collectively known as The Berlin Stories, hold up as if little had changed between now and then. Perhaps little has: Berlin is still an island of tolerance in a storm-tossed sea, and no other writer in English has captured it so well.

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A magnificent rendition of a classic Aesop fable from Caldecott Medal-winning artist JERRY PINKNEY ★“From an unparalleled artist, another brilliant work.”

—Kirkus Reviews

★ “Remarkable.”

—Publishers Weekly

★“Lively and engaging.”

978-0-316-40081-7

—School Library Journal

LittleBrownLibrary.com

LittleBrownSchool

@LBSchool

25 YEARS RUNNING JERRY SPINELLI’s Newbery Award-winning classic

978-0-316-80906-1

celebrates 25 years

Includes an ALL-NEW introduction by Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate as well as a Q&A with Jerry Spinelli.