January 15, 2015: Volume LXXXIII, No 2

Featuring 356 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXIII, NO.

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REVIEWS

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

My Pen

by Christopher Myers A dazzling ode in word and image to the power of the pen. p. 117

on the cover

Jennifer Niven completed the first draft of her YA novel All the Bright Places in six weeks, but it percolated in the back of her mind for far longer. p. 102

NONFICTION

The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful p. 70

FICTION

God Help the Child

by Toni Morrison A dark, fast-moving fairy tale from the Nobel winner p. 27

INDIE Country doctor Paul Carter’s house calls add up to one good book. p. 146

from the editor’s desk:

Choose Your Nostalgia Wisely B Y C la i b orne

Smi t h

Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter

If there’s a writer alive who doesn’t have an odd story about how he or she got published for the first time, that person might not be a writer. Gail Godwin, who’s been a finalist for the National Book Award three times and published five best-sellers, should receive some kind of award for perseverance, though. Her first editor, David Segal, died at the age of 42 the day before she was supposed to meet him for the first time. He published her first novel, The Perfectionists, in 1970 at Harper & Row and then moved to Knopf, where he bought her second novel, The Angel Keeper. Instead of having lunch with him, she met with legendary Robert Gottlieb, the editor in chief and publisher at the time, who asked her what kind of editor she’d like Claiborne Smith to work with since hers had just died. “Well, it will have to be someone who appreciates great literature,” she told him, according to Godwin’s new book Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir. Then she started crying in his office.

The fact that Godwin is willing in this book to be honest and tell on herself makes it a valuable guide for new writers. She knows she was being pompous the day she claimed to write “great literature,” but she also cuts herself some slack given what she was going through at the time.

You get the feeling finishing this book that Godwin has managed in her career to absorb the most meaningful advice she ever heard about being a writer. As she remembers it, Isak Dinesen once said something along the lines of “just be able to go on without hope and you’ll be fine.”

That dire counsel reads like something today’s young writers should adopt, not a woman who went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was taught by Kurt Vonnegut. But one of the insights of reading Publishing is being reminded that the trial of upheaval we’re now experiencing in publishing certainly isn’t the first, or even the most dramatic, upheaval the industry has weathered. Godwin writes evocatively about the moment she decided in the early 1980s to leave Knopf to be published by Viking. Then, in 1983, Peter Mayer fired the president of Viking. Godwin’s agent called and told her that “nobody’s answering their phones over there, but it’s rumored there’s a bloodbath coming.”

“Twice my editor or publisher was fired on my publication day,” Godwin explains. In her memoir, she refers to the early ’80s as the era when publishing “went through some ungainly and ruthless stages.” Which sounds like today.

There’s a nostalgia complex those of us in publishing sometimes like to indulge in. It’s the idea that in the good old days, publishing was a less corporate, more gentlemanly calling and everyone was kinder. After Gail Godwin doing the research for an article I wrote in 2013 on our 80th anniversary about Virginia Kirkus and the founding of Kirkus Reviews, I stopped believing all that gentlemanly stuff. Godwin’s memoir reminded me that even though the nostalgia is inapt, there are a lot of reasons to love being a part of publishing.

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 Operating 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

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

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................ 5 REVIEWS................................................................................................ 5 editor’s note..................................................................................... 6 Scott Blackwood’s “Strikingly Creepy” See How Small................................................................................. 14 Mystery.............................................................................................. 34 Science Fiction & Fantasy.......................................................... 41 Romance............................................................................................ 43

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 47 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 47 editor’s note...................................................................................48 Jill Leovy Goes Ghettoside........................................................ 62

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 85 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 85 editor’s note...................................................................................86 On the Cover: Jennifer Niven................................................ 102 continuing series........................................................................ 137

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................139 REVIEWS.............................................................................................139 editor’s note................................................................................. 140 The Doc Is In...................................................................................146 best of indie................................................................................... 158

A first-rate historian’s masterful touch conveys the profound changes to colonists’ “hearts and minds.”

Read the starred review on p. 60.

Appreciations: STILL Looking for Mr. Goodbar............. 159

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on the web In The Jaguar’s Children, debut novelist John Vaillant paints a turbulent account of a dangerous border crossing. Hector, a young Oaxacan, is trapped aboard a water truck, sealed to hide its human cargo.

When the truck breaks down, the coyotes take all the passengers’ money for a mechanic and leave, giving those left behind no choice but to wait. Hector soon finds a name in his friend Cesar’s phone— AnniMac—a name with an American number. He must reach her, both for rescue and to pass along the message Cesar has come so far to deliver. But are his messages going through?

Over four days, as water and food run low, Hector tells how he came to this desperate place. His story takes us from Oaxaca—its rich culture, its rapid change—to the dangers of the border. “Vaillant writes with power and emotion, affection and respect for Zapotec people and lands,” the starred Kirkus review notes; we interview Vaillant this month at kirkus.com.

Photo courtesy John Sinal

w w w. k i r k u s . c o m Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9 Photo courtesy Martin Tompkins

Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James is a literary debut about unlikely heroes, lifelong promises and last adventures. It all begins when Otto finds an unexpected letter from his 83-year-old wife in the kitchen of their Saskatchewan farmhouse: “Otto, I’ve gone. I’ve never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry, I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back. Yours (always), Etta.” Etta will be walking 3,200 kilometers to see the ocean, but somehow, Otto understands. He took his own journey once before, to fight in a faraway land. Moving from the hot and dry present of a quiet Canadian farm to a dusty, burnt past of hunger, war and passion, from trying to remember to trying to forget, Etta and Otto and Russell and James centers on friendship and love, hope and honor, and the romance of last great adventures. Look for our interview with Hooper this month at kirkus.com.

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

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles Allen Kurzweil’s search for his 12-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some 40 years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endured horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world’s largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California. While tracking down his tormentor, the author encounters an improbable cast of characters. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil’s account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the “parallel lives” of a victim and his abuser. “Full of intrigue and suspense,” says our reviewer, calling the book “ready-made for a film treatment.” We talk to Kurzweil this month on kirkus.com.

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fiction DARK ROOMS

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Anolik, Lili Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-234586-8 978-0-06-234588-2 e-book

TWELVE DAYS by Alex Berenson...........................................................8 THE FIFTH GOSPEL by Ian Caldwell................................................. 11 THE INFERNAL by Mark Doten.........................................................16

A young woman becomes obsessed with finding the truth behind her sister’s death in Anolik’s thrilling debut.

The idyll of a posh Connecticut boarding school is shattered when 16-year-old Nica Baker—gorgeous, wild and effortlessly cool—is found murdered in the graveyard behind her parents’ house. When another student commits suicide, leaving behind a guilty note and an apology, the police consider the case solved: It was unrequited love gone wrong, the tragedy of the loner boy who killed the beautiful faculty-brat girl who didn’t reciprocate his feelings. For Nica’s older sister Grace, though, something doesn’t quite sit right. Too griefstricken and drugged to start her freshman year at Williams, Grace is shaken from her haze when she stumbles on some information that calls the official story into question. And so Grace—Grace, who’s always been in Nica’s shadow, Grace, who’s always been highachieving and risk-averse—finds herself consumed with a murder investigation of her own. What had Nica been doing in the weeks before she died, and more importantly, with whom? Why did she break up with her longtime boyfriend without explanation?

Where did the tiny tattoo in her armpit come from? Slowly, Grace begins to untangle a web of secrets and betrayals deeper than she could have possibly imagined. In the process, she begins to find her own identity, an identity that is—for the first time—separate from her sister’s. As much as this is a crime drama, it’s also a comingof-age novel. The plot is high-suspense, but it’s the strength of the characters—and the strength of Anolik’s hypnotic, unfussy prose— that gives the book its lasting force.

Wholly absorbing and emotionally rich, this novel dodges Law & Order: Special Victims Unit clichés to deliver something deeply satisfying.

DELICIOUS FOODS by James Hannaham......................................... 20 THE LAST DAYS OF VIDEO by Jeremy Hawkins.............................. 20 THE ANIMALS by Christian Kiefer.....................................................22 GOD LOVES HAITI by Dimitry Elias Léger........................................25 A REUNION OF GHOSTS by Judith Claire Mitchell........................ 26 GOD HELP THE CHILD by Toni Morrison..........................................27 THE UNRAVELING OF MERCY LOUIS by Keija Parssinen.............. 28 AQUARIUM by David Vann.................................................................32 SUITCASE CITY by Sterling Watson....................................................32 MURDER ON THE CHAMP DE MARS by Cara Black.......................34 THE FIRE SERMON by Francesca Haig.............................................. 42 FOUR NIGHTS WITH THE DUKE by Eloisa James.............................43 FOUR NIGHTS WITH THE DUKE

James, Eloisa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Apr. 1, 2015 978-0-06-222391-3

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reading out of order JAM! ON THE VINE

I’m finally catching up with Marilynne Robinson, and what took me so long? I was afraid to read her latest novel, Lila, because it’s the third in a series after Gilead and Home, and I didn’t want to ruin the whole thing by reading them out of order—which happened to me with Edward St. Aubyn. (Take my advice and don’t start his Patrick Melrose books with At Last.) Of course, I’d always rather start at the beginning, but sometimes, because of serving on awards juries, I have to read a book that came out in the current year whether I’m ready for it or not.

Fortunately, Lila is a remarkable book and stands completely alone, though I’m sure it will be even deeper once I’ve read the other volumes; and perhaps more to come? Rereading Kirkus’ review, I find that the last line expresses my own feelings exactly: “Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longer—and will surely look forward to the next.” What will happen to Lila and her son after John Ames, the gentle husband she calls “the old man,” dies? It feels imperative to know.

My goal for this year is to catch up on two other series I’ve been waiting to read till I had time to start at the beginning: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Jeff VanderMeer published his whole Southern Reach trilogy last year, and somehow those three books seemed less daunting in their original paperback incarnations than in the gorgeous hardcover compendium FSG put out for the holidays, so I think I’ll stick with those. I’m also going to get to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword before the last part of the trilogy, Ancillary Mercy, is published in October.

After that? Maybe it will finally be Marilynne Robinson my year of reading Proust. —L.M.

Barnett, LaShonda Katrice Grove (336 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8021-2334-3

Photo courtesy Kelly Ruth Winter

An impassioned historical novel chronicles the early-20th-century resurgence of African-American activism through the life of a poor Texas girl who channels a lifelong love of newsprint into a groundbreaking journalism career.

Barnett, who has edited such anthologies as Off the Record: Conversations with African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (2014), makes her fiction debut with this coming-of-age saga, set at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries, about Ivoe Williams, a bright, avid daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalworker struggling to make ends meet in post-Reconstruction central Texas. Despite her bleak segregated environment, Ivoe grows up infatuated with the written word, most especially with the immediacy and color of newspapers she finds and, at least once, steals from her mother’s white employer. Barnett excels here at what for most writers is a difficult task: evoking what it feels like to grow into one’s calling as a writer through psychological intimacy as much as immediate experiences. The book is equally attentive in conceiving those who are closest to Ivoe, including her parents and siblings and two women with whom she would become emotionally involved while attending college: Berdis, the mercurial, flamboyant piano prodigy, and Ona, the magnetic, empathetic instructor who falls in love with Ivoe and eventually helps establish their own newspaper in Kansas City. Barnett’s book is clearly inspired by the lives of crusading black journalists such as Ida B. Wells who inspired their communities to fight Jim Crow customs and legally sanctioned lynching. Yet most of those insurgent moments are crowded—jammed, if you will—toward the novel’s end. One is left wanting less of a young black woman’s rite of passage in a hostile environment, experiences amply represented in literature, and far more of Ivoe’s journalistic accomplishments, about which there has been relatively little in American fiction.

Now that we’ve seen how Ivoe Williams came to be, we’d like to see much more of the great things she was able to do with her craft. Maybe Barnett can oblige us.

She’s got the talent to do so.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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YOUNG SKINS Stories

In “Bait,” a night of pool hustling turns into sudden violence in a turn-the-tables sexual confrontation. In “Stand Your Skin,’’ Bat is a damaged man, kicked in the head in a pub in a moment of senseless violence between a bunch of college kids and locals.

The kicker, “who couldn’t stand being in his own skin,” commits suicide while Bat has to remain in pain, living in the surgically corrected skin of his own face. This is a powerful dark shadow of a tale, the heart of this collection of six stories and one longer novella. Barrett knows the woods and roads surrounding Glanbeigh as well as he understands the youth who roam them. This is his territory, his people. He writes with beauty and a toughness that captures the essence of boredom and angst.

Barrett has given us moments that resonate true to a culture, a population and a geography that are fertile with the stuff of good fiction.

Barrett, Colin Black Cat/Grove (224 pp.) $15.00 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-8021-2332-9

A story collection in which the nights of small-town Ireland are filled with the ramblings of restless youth.

Glanbeigh is a fictional town in County Mayo, and the teens and 20-somethings are out in droves to take back the night. The pub is the center of their world. In “The Clancy Kid,” Jimmy and his mate Tug drink off a hangover and flip the car of an ex’s new fiance: “I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.” And so Jimmy sets the hopeless tone, yet there are moments of delight as Tug, a hulk of a boy-man who gets violent when off his meds, plays with a child who guards the bridge to Farrow Hill, playing at being “king.’’

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PASTURE ART

he finds that people are drawn to him, seeking forgiveness and understanding of their past indiscretions. Madeline Murray, a high-powered executive, stumbles into Gabe’s bookshop and almost immediately reveals her deepest regrets about her failed marriage and stint as a stepmother. While this kind of thing might seem unusual, Gabe comments that it happens all the time: “People regularly dissolved in my presence—even those who didn’t realize that they were harboring shame.” From this chance encounter, an unlikely business partnership is formed when Madeline realizes that what Gabe can offer—forgiveness without religious affiliation, absolution for a price—might be exactly what a media-saturated and selfish society needs. Through a series of emails, text transcripts and feverish memos developing “Forgiveness 4 You” as a brand, interspersed with Gabe’s first-person narration, the novel swings between comedy and tragedy, all while meditating on the themes of guilt and forgiveness.

Bauer (The Forever Marriage, 2012, etc.) writes with humor and compassion about a business that is both bizarre and entirely all too real and the flawed and ultimately human characters behind it.

Barton, Marlin Hub City Press (216 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-938235-09-2 Literate, deftly constructed stories of backwoods Alabama.

It wouldn’t be Southern fiction without a nod to Faulkner, and Barton gets a hint in early: He sets a hayrick on fire, synecdoche for a barn, and lets the smoke linger in the swampy air. Then there’s the land, always a central character in southerly writing: pastures, dark soil, brooding forest, river—the Tennahpush, in this case, as real and as not-real as Yoknapatawpha County. But Barton’s quiet homage and adherence to convention are just that; he’s an original.

The opening story finds a folk artist on the point of giving it all up even as the young woman who helps out around the place looks hard at a dreary future. “You haven’t made anything new in a good while, Mr. Hutchins,” she says, yearning for something different from insulin shots, pill bottles and shot glasses.

The art that she likes, she declares, involves things that will take a person away from all this; in a nice bit of symmetry, the closing words of the collection also point to the desire to leave a place that holds people fast. Barton’s best moments join human generations to that land in different times: Here a slave, hauntingly speaking of plantation violence, suddenly sees the possibility of an escape seemingly not available to most mortals, and there a modern countryman grapples not just with “crackheads and meth freaks” and other denizens of the bottomlands, but also the possibility of flying saucers. Barton is not a funny writer as such, but there is some sly humor at play, too, as when that flying saucer fellow allows that his daughter might just be a lesbian. “Lois says I make it sound like Margaret’s a monster when I say that. Like I might as well go around telling people that she turned into a werewolf, when I’m really the one who turned into a monster, according to Lois.”

Barton is generous and sympathetic toward his characters, no matter how much of a handful they are. A pleasing collection, humane and well-written.

TWELVE DAYS

Berenson, Alex Putnam (432 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-399-15974-9 John Wells returns in another exciting and entirely plausible verge-of-war thriller.

The Iranians are apparently about to get the bomb, and the U.S. is ready to go to war to stop them. But is it true?

Too late, ex–CIA agent Wells discovers a plot to dupe the two nations into a needless war. Two commercial jets explode, one of them over Mumbai. Almost 300 innocent travelers are killed.

The Iranian government disavows responsibility, but perhaps it’s sending America a warning: Don’t mess with us. Readers of his earlier adventures know that Wells is a convert to Islam, adding one more layer of complication to a life fraught with danger. His deadly adversaries include an Israeli agent codenamed Salome, an accomplished killer who wants the U.S. to believe that Iran has amassed enough highly enriched uranium to build an atomic bomb. If Salome gets her way, Israel’s best ally will destroy its worst enemy. Wells will do everything in his power to stop the plan. So Salome wants Wells dead, but she finds him “harder to kill than a Negev spider.” Despite her uncharitable opinion, Wells is a sympathetic hero who works with CIA agents to defuse a likely disaster. Eventually, “America’s fate”—Iran’s as well, obviously—“depends on three men in Bellville, South Africa. Two can’t stand each other.” Berenson is a master at building tension, with a ticking clock that’s built into the title—America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is only 12 days away. This well-written and fast-moving novel delivers more than a good plot. It illustrates how in the midst of regional chaos, a great power can jump to calamitous conclusions.

FORGIVENESS 4 YOU

Bauer, Ann Overlook (304 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-4683-1023-8

In a time when most anything can be bought and sold, forgiveness and absolution are hot commodities.

Though Gabriel McKenna, a former Catholic priest, left the church during an emotional breakdown on the altar one Easter morning, he can’t seem to escape his calling. As a bookstore employee who is barely able to afford his modest lifestyle, 8

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FINN

This one is well-worth the thriller enthusiast’s time, which holds true for all the novels Berenson has written to date.

Brookhouse, Christopher Safe Harbor (122 pp.) $12.95 paper | Mar. 15, 2015 978-0-9798226-5-0

THE PATRIOT THREAT

Looking behind propriety’s lace-curtain gentility into the hardwoods of sin, Brookhouse (Loving Ryan, 2010, etc.) offers pure Southern noir.

It’s 1960, and Francis Finnegan Butler is approaching 30 when Belle, widow of Judge Timon Spier, dies. Called Judge since he “was too big for his britches because he had money and power and didn’t have to sully himself with practicing law,” Judge raised Finn after the 14-year-old boy was abandoned by his mother, even sending him to a prestigious local school, the Academy. Now Finn teaches there, and he’s voted to admit the school’s first black student. That upsets Delia, the oldest Spier sister, but it doesn’t matter to Annabel, next youngest, nor Caroline. Brookhouse

Berry, Steve Minotaur (352 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-250-05623-8 978-1-4668-6260-9 e-book During the Great Depression, former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon gave President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a marked dollar bill and a cryptic note. The puzzle contained in those items now forces retired intelligence agent Cotton Malone to save the world economy.

Berry (The Lincoln Myth, 2014, etc.) yanks Malone out of his Copenhagen bookstore and sends him to Venice to shoot at a helicopter. The chopper crashes. Twenty million dollars go up in smoke—money from a scheme to fill the coffers of North Korea’s Dear Leader. Stephanie Nelle, chief of the Magellan Billet—the U.S. Justice Department’s elite intelligence group—had dispatched Malone to foil that caper, but he’s soon immersed in a scheme engineered by “self-absorbed, egotistical, and maniacal” Kim Yong Jin, the Dear Leader’s exiled half brother. That rogue is hunting U.S. tax protestor Anan Wayne Howell, who supposedly possesses evidence that the American income tax isn’t valid because “the 16th Amendment was illegal all along.”

There’s more: evidence that descendants of Haym Salomon are owed multiple billions for loans made to finance the American Revolution. “Bringing the United States to its knees would not be easy, but it also no longer seemed impossible” now that the long-secreted material has been uncovered by a disgruntled Treasury bureaucrat and given to Howell. The most interesting character is Hana Sung, Kim’s illegitimate daughter, who spent her childhood in a North Korean gulag, living in filth, starved and beaten. Action is frantic, major characters are static, but Malone joins forces with serious-minded Treasury agent Isabella Schaefer—an evolving player sure to appear in upcoming Magellan superspy adventures—in shoot-’em-ups from Venice to the wilds of Croatia.

Another page-turning thriller blending history, speculation and fast-paced action.

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writes memorable characters: cleareyed Finn, of course, and Annabel, who seduced him at 15 and still lures him to bed; Henry Broken-ground, an Indian full of secrets; Erskine, jaded yet progressive newspaper editor; Danielle, his reporter, who loves Finn enough to wait out his fascination with Annabel; Buck, a hick Bull Connor, who inherited his daddy’s sheriff ’s office; and Lester and Tracy, lawyers who unlock the mysteries of Schilling Club and a fur coat flaunted by a cross-dressing pastor. The plot follows the impending school integration, with Finn’s house burned and threats rumbling, but like mist in the pines, the mysteries binding Finn and the Spiers together hover over the tale. Delia bars Finn from Red Sticks, the family mansion, but Finn can’t rest until he understands why his mother abandoned him and why the Judge gave him a home. A layered work, mottled and shifting like visions through antique glass, shadowed by ever lurking violence, as if written by a Southernborn Jim Harrison.

A novel to be savored more than once, written with the same languorous, rumbling passion of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s film The Long Hot Summer.

Italy—are enhanced by historical references to things as diverse as the tommy gun, the way the repeal of Prohibition expanded the illicit drug market, the NYC music scene and the Mafia’s role in the successful invasion of Sicily.

A complex, informed and intelligent saga mating Rich Man, Poor Man and The Godfather.

PRETTY UGLY

Butler, Kirker Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-250-04972-8 978-1-4668-5068-2 e-book Aging beauty queen Miranda forces her preteen daughter to compete in pageants while her pill-popping husband, Ray, a nurse, conducts an affair with the teenage granddaughter of a hospice patient in this first novel from TV writer and producer Butler (Family Guy, etc.).

Miranda’s own haphazard beauty-contest experience hasn’t deterred her from starving her 9-year-old daughter, Bailey, so she can look “sexy” while competing in the Southern United States pageant circuit; Bailey, meanwhile, is binging behind Miranda’s back to make herself too fat to compete. Ray, whose brief stint as a doctor was cut short after he killed seven patients at a hospital in Detroit, now works as a nurse to support his debt-ridden family. When he’s not accidentally killing patients (his tally is now 365 dead), Ray enjoys sleeping with 17-yearold Courtney right in front of her hospice-bound grandfather.

When Courtney gets pregnant and has to pay the state more than $12,000 in back taxes on her now-deceased grandfather’s house, Ray’s and Miranda’s lives become far more complicated— and unexpectedly lucrative—than anyone could have imagined.

Pairing no-holds-barred character studies with pointed cultural commentary (on texting: “It was as if the world had finally figured out the perfect way to communicate, then decided to do so using only Prince lyrics”), Butler manages to elicit laughter and winces in equal measure. The situations are styled with a kind of absurdist realism; although extreme, nothing that takes place is impossible, partly because Butler is dexterous in the way he intertwines his characterization and plotting. Repugnant, tasteless and often behaving illegally, Butler’s characters are the human embodiment of misguided desire.

Butler’s excellent observational skills and hilarious prose make this a simultaneously funny and awful satire of thwarted ambition.

THE PRINCE

Bruschini, Vito Translated by Appel, Anne Milano Atria (448 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4516-8719-4 In this expansive historical epic, Bruschini traces the Mafia’s origins in Sicily’s feudal society.

Bruschini’s two-part narrative opens in Sicily between 1920 and 1939. The second part follows immigrants to New York City from 1939 through the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. The first part is foundational history, especially of the Sicilian people, “a humanity crushed by poverty and hunger, ignorance and despair” yet with “a sense of dignity...never giving up until they breathed their last.” No heroes here, but there’s a surprising reconciliation between two flawed protagonists, Prince Ferdinando Licata and Saro Ragusa, a Jewish doctor’s adopted son in the town of Salemi. History fans will enthuse over Part 1 and Bruschini’s exploration of how Sicilian landowners and aristocrats manipulated peasants and the poor through largesse and violence. Conspiracy fans get their meat in Part 2, with Bruschini’s speculation that the sinking of the Normandie and lost LendLease shipments can be tied to a mob grab for power. The story begins with Royal Guardsmen raiding a bandit family’s house, the massacre warping the surviving child, Jano Vassallo, into a bully who becomes a Mussolini Black Shirt. The raid, pinned on Rosario Losurdo, Licata’s gabellotto, or foreman, sparks a cascading series of assassinations, vendettas and romantic entanglements, culminating with Licata’s and Saro’s flight to New York.

There, Licata, through his “profound sense of justice,” becomes a respected player among the cosca’s—the mob’s—Five Families. Plot, conflict and setting—Sicily and New York’s Little 10

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“Caldwell makes intriguing literature from complex theology.” from the fifth gospel

THE FIFTH GOSPEL

rediscovered the long-forgotten Diatessaron, “a fusion of the four existing gospels into a single document.” Now Ugo’s dead, and Simon, who found his body, faces canonical trial for his murder. Ugo believed the Shroud was brought to Byzantine’s Edessa after the Crucifixion, around A.D. 33, then stolen by “Crusaders who brought home the Shroud and Diatessaron.” Too late, Alex finds that Ugo’s discoveries will damage Pope John Paul’s tentative steps to heal the Roman-Orthodox schism. Beyond the extraordinarily erudite plot and the details of daily life in Vatican City, Caldwell’s characterizations fascinate: Simon, “who can still shed the world in a heartbeat”; the anti-reconciliationist Cardinal Boia, “like standing in the path of a streamroller”; and even John Paul, paralyzed, nearly mute, eyes “[a] hypnotic Mediterranean color, a pelagic blue.

They swim with life.” While exploring Ugo’s death and dissecting theological infighting, Caldwell weaves together the Shroud’s passage from Edessa to France to Turin, the Gospels’ historical and theological truths, and Rome’s clumsy effort to assuage the bloody events of “1204...the darkest year in the history between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.” In

Caldwell, Ian Simon & Schuster (448 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4516-9414-7 Caldwell (The Rule of Four, 2004) makes intriguing literature from complex theology, weaving in a text lost to history, the Shroud of Turin and Vatican duplicity.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live in the Vatican,” says Father Alex Andreou, an Eastern Catholic theology instructor. Alex, as permitted by his Eastern faith, married Mona, but in the throes of postpartum depression, she abandoned him, leaving him to raise Peter. Alex’s brother, Simon, chose Roman rather than Eastern Catholicism. He’s now a Holy See Secretary of State, a priest-diplomat. Like their deceased father, the brothers yearn for an Eastern-Roman reconciliation, an achievement they first think possible because of Ugo Nogara’s scholarly work. Nogara

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PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING

homage to the Christian message, sin and salvation, forgiveness and redemption, love and sacrifice are chronicled from the personal to the universal.

A brilliant work.

Cheuse, Alan Fig Tree Books (387 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-941-493-00-7

NAKED EARTH

A revision of Cheuse’s 1986 novel The Grandmothers’ Club, this mystical tale traces the rise and fall of a prominent rabbi, Manny Bloch, who goes into business with a brother-in-law named Mord.

Told from the perspective of Manny’s aged mother, Minnie, through long and discursive sessions with her fellow grandmothers, the book mixes multigenerational family saga, Jewish fabulism and corruption story. Manny commits himself to his faith as a boy after his father, Jacob, is crushed to death by an overturned milk cart while working on the Sabbath. At the behest of his family’s benefactor, Ohio businessman Meyer Sporen, and prompted by birds who speak to him in the voice of Jacob, Manny goes to Cincinnati to prepare for his calling. Married to Sporen’s daughter, Maby, he becomes a beloved and prominent rabbi but leaves the pulpit to join Mord in running General Banana Company, a fruit importer with holdings in South and Central America. He accumulates a vast fortune. But not everything is kosher about the company, Maby suffers from severe psychological problems, Manny’s affair with a Holocaust survivor is not going to end well, and we know from the book’s Faust epigraph that things are not going to end well for him, either. Other Jewish novelists have plowed this ground with greater originality and comedic bite, but there’s nothing secondhand about NPR reviewer Cheuse’s singular narrator, whose delivery and gossipy asides belie her hidden depths.

At its best, this story of a Jewish immigrant family tested by fate is as haunting as it is entertaining and as fresh as it was when it was first published nearly 30 years ago.

Chang, Eileen New York Review Books (400 pp.) $16.95 paper | $16.95 e-book Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-59017-834-8 978-1-59017-835-5 e-book Love is tested against revolutionary intrigue during China’s Cultural Revolution.

In this sweeping 1956 novel, one of two Chang was commissioned to write by the United States Information Service, two earnest young students meet, quietly fall for each other, and are then separated by the currents fracturing their society as Mao Zedong’s government looks to fundamentally alter Chinese culture.

Chang, who was born in Shanghai in 1920 and moved to the U.S. in 1955, finds tension in both revolutionary schisms and everyday betrayals. In the novel, she balances the pastoral and the unsavory: Early on, for instance, she juxtaposes cicadas chirping at dawn and sunlight tenderly lighting the walls of buildings with a less comforting scene: “[H]uman excrement dotted the ground near the walls.” The scene is a small rural village, where Liu Ch’uen and Su Nan first meet. It’s a landscape of idealism ridden with denunciations and paranoia: “It was whispered among the members of the Corps that Go Forward Pao and the chairman of the Farmers’ Association were smuggling large quantities of rice and flour out of the granary.” At times, the collapse of idealism into infighting feels predictable; Liu and Su Nan are appropriately star-crossed, but the broad strokes of the plot can feel heavy-handed. In its quieter and more humorous moments, however, the novel shines: Liu tracking the increasing handsomeness of cinematic depictions of Stalin over time; gender-neutral revolutionary clothing proving handy after two characters must present themselves quickly after a tryst. And it’s telling that this novel ends on a personal note rather than on a political one.

Chang’s novel can be less than subtle at times, but its description of small compromises and grand despair are both affecting and compelling.

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THE DAY WE MET

Coleman, Rowan Ballantine (304 pp.) $15.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-553-39412-2 978-0-553-39413-9 e-book A woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease desperately tries to hold onto her family and her life in this novel from Coleman (The Runaway Wife, 2013, etc.).

Claire Armstrong and her family are dealing with her recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis as she gradually forgets bits and pieces of her life—words for common objects, how to read, and her relationship with her husband, Greg. She writes down her rare, fragmented memories in her memory book, hoping she can leave behind a record for her family. She worries about not being there for her older daughter, 20-year-old Caitlin, and |

“Everything must go in this playful snapshot of an end-of-life giveaway.” from seed

THE PRECIOUS ONE

being forgotten by her younger girl, 2-year-old Esther. Meanwhile, her family members deal with their grief over Claire’s gradual decline along with their own issues. Greg is heartbroken that Claire can’t remember him, while Caitlin faces several problems—an unexpected pregnancy, a recently revealed father and a 50 percent chance of carrying the gene that caused her mother’s illness. The romance between Greg and Claire takes a back seat to the more vivid plotline—the relationship between Claire and Caitlin. This is, at heart, a book about mothers, daughters and the strong bonds that exist between women even during heartbreak.

Coleman will make you cry with this emotional, beautifully written novel.

de los Santos, Marisa Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-06-167089-3 978-0-06-232380-4 e-book Half sisters who don’t really know each other are brought together by their emotionally domineering father for reasons of his own.

Inventor/professor/entrepreneur Wilson left his first wife and their adolescent twins, Taisy and Marcus, 17 years ago, and he hasn’t seen them in 15 years, since the first birthday party for Willow, his daughter with his new, much younger wife, sculptor Caro. But when Wilson invites Taisy, now a successful ghostwriter in her 30s, to visit him after his heart surgery, she quickly agrees. As she travels, Taisy thinks about her high school boyfriend, Ben, and the way her father destroyed their relationship. What a coincidence that

SEED

Crawford, Stanley Univ. of Alabama (200 pp.) $14.95 paper | $14.95 e-book Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-57366-183-6 978-1-57366-853-8 e-book Everything must go in this playful snapshot of an end-of-life giveaway, the sixth novel from an offbeat author (Petroleum Man, 2005, etc.).

Bill Starr is so old almost all his friends and close relatives are dead. The childless widower lives alone in a renovated 18thcentury farmhouse somewhere in the United States. Ramona, his undocumented Hispanic housekeeper, is both compassionate guardian and comic relief. Here’s Crawford’s shaky premise: Bill, less concerned about the past than the future, will bestow his possessions on his dimly remembered extended family, who will collect their booty in person, and place their names on an improvised family tree: “Things are seeds. I wish to plant mine into the future.” Their haphazard survival appeals to his free spirit. The novel alternates between visits from these relatives, who are meeting their benefactor for the first time, and Bill’s random thoughts. The tone is light and breezy. His pride and joy is Desdemona, his 1937 Pierce-Arrow, named by his late wife.

(Its hood ornament makes for good cover art.) Bill awards it impulsively to a likable young man with whom, improbably, he shares a grandfather; much better him than Bill’s greedy stepson. Though the old guy tells us nothing about his career in marketing or his happy marriage, he allows us a few peeks into his past. He sowed his wild oats in Europe with both genders: “Sex for sex’s sake.” Now he ogles, discreetly, the muscular yard boy. Creaky limbs are a constant reminder of mortality: “In the old days it was...London to Paris....Now just recliner to chaise lounge.” Yet Bill’s worldview is benign. He has no epiphanies to offer, for he ends as befuddled as he began, but he’s willing to embrace failure along with success.

Gossamer-thin entertainment.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Scott Blackwood

The victims of an unsolved crime may be deceased in See How Small, but they still speak for themselves

By Alex Heimbach months old. The sheer evil of the crime was so shocking and so senseless that the story haunted him for years. He followed the case through its many twists and turns, mulling over the possibility of writing about it but unsure how to do so. After all, murders happen all the time, and he was leery of suggesting that this case was somehow more tragic than all the others.

He decided to focus on the individual experiences of each person affected by the crime, no matter how seemingly unimportant. “The case itself is just astounding in terms of all these stories competing,” Blackwood says. His new novel, See How Small, which traces the lasting reverberations of a crime very similar to the yogurt shop murders, excavates the deep emotions behind the many different perspectives on this tragedy.

“I think the part that really caught my attention was that no one could really tell their own story,” Blackwood says of the 1991 crime. Everyone had a role to play—victim, martyr, villain—without much room for the nuances of their specific experiences.

In telling his own version of the story, Blackwood aimed to recover those individual voices and explore the particular perspective of each of the actors, from the mother of two of the girls to the fireman who discovered the bodies to the 17-year-old who served as a lookout for the murderers.

This approach meant allowing each character to speak for himself or herself—including the three murdered girls, Elizabeth, Zadie and Meredith. Their ghostly voices lend the novel a touch of the surreal, but Blackwood was far more concerned with what the girls would really be like than with the nature of any otherworldly visitations. “The supernatural itself doesn’t really interest me,” he says. “I wanted to get at their essence.” He describes the girls as his favorite

Photo courtesy Brian Cox

On Dec. 6, 1991, someone walked into an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! in Austin, Texas, and brutally murdered and raped the four teenage girls who were closing the shop. He then neatly stacked the girls’ bodies and set the building on fire, destroying much of the evidence. There were no clear suspects and no apparent motive.

The community was devastated. Austin still felt in many ways like a small town (the population at the time was around 500,000 people—it has since nearly doubled), and no one had considered this kind of crime possible. “Everyone felt like they failed in some way,” says Scott Blackwood. “Here are the Everygirls of the community, and they were completely vulnerable.”

At the time, Blackwood was working as a high school teacher and his first daughter was just a few 14

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characters to write about—they are complicated and difficult and darkly funny in a way that is both true to the behavior of teenage girls and very rarely afforded to the young victims of brutal crimes.

The three dead girls also possess a degree of perspective none of the other characters can quite muster. The survivors orbit the crime, moving backward and forward through time, permanently unable to make sense of such a pointlessly horrific act. “They’re still stuck on those moments,” Blackwood says. “The time inside is always the same.”

The police investigation, however, moves more or less sequentially. Blackwood felt it was important to lay out the procedural elements of the story as clearly as possible, to provide an anchor for the characters’ nonchronological attempts to grapple with their grief. Though the exact circumstances of the fictional case differ somewhat from those of the real one, the gist of the story is recognizably the same. Many of the strangest details in the novel are drawn from the actual case, including the fact that dozens of people called in to the tip line to confess to the crime.

Details such as that one appear throughout the book—a result of Blackwood’s following the investigation over the course of two decades, as well as a testament to the strangeness of the case itself. Despite the crime’s high profile, the police investigation made very little progress until a new detective took over in 1996 and decided to refocus on a group of four teenage boys who had initially been ruled out. In 1999, the Austin police arrested the boys, and two of the four eventually confessed to the crime.

Now young men, the two were convicted on the basis of those confessions, but in 2009, after the verdicts were overturned due in part to the discovery of new DNA evidence, the men were released. No further progress has been made on the case. “It has this ongoing history,” Blackwood says. “It’s almost difficult to keep up with in fiction.”

Pieces of Blackwood’s own life come into the story as well. “I think it’s kind of typical of my work to connect to where I am,” he says. That statement is not merely figurative—the novel takes place primarily in Blackwood’s old stomping grounds in Austin, and there is a major detour to Chicago, where he moved in 2008. He dots the book with details like street names and ambient sounds in order to evoke a sense of place, which helps ground the often fragmented narrative.

But ultimately the novel turns on the pain of losing the young girls, something that, for a long time, Blackwood couldn’t quite access. As a parent, he couldn’t quite put himself in the position of imagining such a loss. Then one day he got a call from his wife saying that she’d gone to pick up their daughter from school and she wasn’t there. Blackwood rushed home, envisioning every nightmarish scenario. They ended up finding her at a friend’s house, but Blackwood remembers the pure terror of that hour vividly. “It changes you, for sure. You can imagine it, or at least one one-thousandth of it,” he says. “It’s just temporary, of course, but you can inhabit it.”

Alex Heimbach is a freelance writer in California.

See How Small was reviewed in the Nov. 1, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

See How Small Blackwood, Scott Little, Brown (224 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-316-37380-7 |

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“This book is a considerable achievement... of nerve, scope and ambition.” from the infernal

Ben turns up back in town, too. Realizing that her father wants her to ghostwrite his biography, Taisy decides to learn his real story. For all his genius, Wilson has warped almost all the lives he’s touched. As Taisy starts her research, she also begins to re-establish a relationship with the unbelievably sensitive Ben as if neither has changed in almost two decades. Meanwhile, Willow—who considers herself Wilson’s “true daughter”—is struggling. Despite appearing tall, beautiful and collected, she’s intimidated by her older sister’s visit. She’s also judgmental, assuming Taisy did something horrific to alienate their father, who’s shown his younger daughter nothing but affection. And she’s having difficulty adjusting to the private high school she’s begun attending while Wilson recuperates. Home-schooled by Wilson through her entire childhood, Willow has little experience of peer friendship or the outside world in general. Soon she has a dangerous crush on her English teacher, but waiting in the wings is a high school boy almost as perfect for her as Ben is for Taisy.

Despite intellectual pretentions, including lots of references to Middlemarch, de los Santos (Falling Together, 2011, etc.) offers a comfort-food story in which men are either predators or perfect and women are both beautiful and brilliant.

in everything: one glance and he did it.” Indeed, Goryanchikov tells us, all the old categories and classifications fall victim to the reality of prison, where a man who’s killed six people can be less frightening than one who’s killed just one. “There were crimes of which it was hard to form even the most elementary notion: there was so much strangeness in the way they were committed.” Lacking the penitential heavy-handedness of Dostoyevsky’s later work, Notes humanizes the forgotten denizens of the first Gulag, decrying a system of punishment that does not always fit the crime.

A classic made current and a welcome addition to the library of Russian literature in translation.

THE INFERNAL

Doten, Mark Graywolf (416 pp.) $18.00 paper | Feb. 17, 2015 978-1-55597-701-6 Doten makes his fiction debut with a semihistorical novel—the kind of book people label “postmodern” because they don’t know what else to call it.

In the shadow of the Iraq War, the world seems a little strange: Jay Garner puts Paul Bremer in a chokehold on the way to the Green Zone; Osama bin Laden argues with his “students” in a cave while a dialysis machine keeps him alive; Jimmy Wales is a murderer; Mark Zuckerberg seems trapped in a digital landscape called the New City; and Condoleezza Rice was once a photographer who shot unused production stills for Chinatown. What’s going on here? Doten’s book—a stylish, surreal portrait of a 21st century gone mad—will make you scratch your head. Parts of it recall Coover’s The Public Burning, in which a crazed Uncle Sam hurls invective at Richard Nixon; other parts recall Infinite Jest’s plurality of voices (though in Doten’s novel, the voices are filtered through—and sometimes garbled by—a database).

This book is a considerable achievement, not of storytelling— there’s not really much of a cohesive plot here—but of nerve, scope and ambition. Perhaps Doten is too brash: This is one of those books where you find yourself thinking less about the characters than about the author’s fireworks. (Doten, an editor at Soho Press, seems to acknowledge this by casting himself in the novel as “the man who runs a Big Six New York City publisher.”) But in certain moments, Doten drops his narrative pyrotechnics and plays it straight. Consider a character named Tom Pally, a veteran adapting to life at home: Yes, there’s the surreal detail of him throwing up maggots, but otherwise, his chapters tell a powerful story of displacement.

Doten’s dazzling novel shows off his intellect and facility with language.

NOTES FROM A DEAD HOUSE

Dostoevsky, Fyodor Translated by Pevear, Richard; Volokhonsky, Larissa Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-307-95959-1

One of literature’s definitive prison memoirs is given new immediacy in this sturdy translation by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky (Leo Tolstoy’s War and

Peace, 2007, etc.).

Much of Dostoyevsky’s work is yellowed with age, and its mustiness isn’t entirely the fault of earlier translators; as well, he has the gloomy and moralizing air of the proselyte, especially one who’s seen the worst side of human nature, all of which makes him sometimes disagreeable to read. This piece from his middle period, first published in 1861, is an exception. It’s a thinly veiled roman a clef: The “dead house” in question is the walled prison within the greater prison that is the Siberian wild to which Dostoyevsky was remanded in 1849 after having run afoul of the czarist regime. “In prison they generally took a dark and unfavorable view of former noblemen,” he writes. Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, the nobleman in question, returns the favor; imprisoned for killing his wife (a crime eligible for parole, of course), he is full of class prejudices and certain that he deserves better company, but in time, he sheds his disdain, having discovered that “in prison there was time enough to learn patience.” Prison occasions its own society, a microcosm in which nobles become servants and another nobility emerges, one that values people such as the inmate who “was self-taught 16

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THE LOST BOYS SYMPHONY

death from cancer. Her romantic life is also complex—she’s in love with her married boss. Hiding in some bushes after midnight, staking out a deadbeat dad, Bailey is viciously raped by a masked assailant. She can recall only the feel of his gloves, a fleeting glance at his black Nike sneakers and his voice, asking her to “tell me you love me.” Another ordeal begins as Bailey, on leave from work, suffers panic attacks, severe weight loss, and recurring dreams of her attacker and circling sharks. Her half sister Claire, a nurse, comes to the rescue, accompanied by teen daughter Jade, who has done a stint in juvie and expertly picks Bailey’s locks. Despite the lawsuit, Claire’s care for Bailey is devoid of any greedy ulterior motives. She recommends a therapist and tries to discourage Bailey from another self-destructive habit she has picked up: observing a man in a neighboring highrise who has nightly sexual assignations fully visible through his open window. As his acts become violent, Bailey can’t interest law enforcement in focusing on the window exhibitionist since she’s the only one to ever observe him doing anything suspicious and her credibility is suspect due to mental instability.

The conclusion to all this involves improbable coincidences, a

Ferguson, Mark Andrew Little, Brown (352 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-316-32399-4 978-0-316-32397-0 e-book Ferguson’s playful debut novel mixes a coming-of-age story with time travel.

“I feel like I should be changing,” 19-year-old Val says. Henry, her high school boyfriend, no longer seems like enough, so she ditches him and his best friend, Gabe, for life at NYU. Soon after, Henry disappears, leaving Gabe to search for him and also to reconcile his latent feelings for Val. But Ferguson doesn’t keep Henry’s whereabouts a secret: He’s been abducted by older versions of himself—one at 80, one at 41.

Henry can travel through time, see, and his older versions want to help him avoid mistakes, even if it means altering their own realities. Sound confusing, like a Charlie Kaufman–esque head trip? This plot summary makes the novel seem more difficult than it is. As Henry moves through time, Gabe and Val remain in place, and Ferguson gives equal weight to each point of view.

In other words, though Henry’s story may be tricky, Ferguson never strays far from the anchor of the other two characters, a neat narrative maneuver that makes the novel not as confusing as it should be. Despite all the time travel, Ferguson’s core is a coming-of-age tale that takes the form of a love triangle; remove the fantasy, and you have a novel as old-fashioned as Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011). But that’s not a bad thing—Ferguson never stresses the weirdness of his construction, focusing instead on convincingly realistic details so that even the surrealism seems earthbound. The novel never quite reaches the conclusion it deserves—Ferguson opts for mezzo piano when fortissimo would’ve been best—but no matter: This book, like good music, will sweep you up.

An auspicious debut that blends a number of disparateseeming tones into something surprisingly coherent—and moving.

SOMEONE IS WATCHING

Fielding, Joy Ballantine (384 pp.) $27.00 | $13.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-553-39063-6 978-0-553-39064-3 e-book A detective searches for her rapist in Fielding’s latest thriller.

Heiress to her father’s Wall Street fortune, Bailey Carpenter lives a life of privilege in a luxury Miami high-rise and works as an investigator for a law firm. However, Bailey and her actor-brother Heath are being sued by their five half siblings, who were left out of the will. Bailey is still traumatized by her father’s fatal heart attack and by her mother’s long ordeal and |

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TOTAL WAR ROME: THE SWORD OF ATTILA

giant MacGuffin and surprising lapses of intuition on the part of supposedly seasoned gumshoe Bailey; her hypersensitivity is very selectively triggered, usually by red herrings.

Still, the mystery is not the point in Fielding’s work: A page-turning ride with a likable protagonist is, and here, she succeeds admirably. (Agent: Tracy Fisher)

Gibbins, David Dunne/St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 17, 2015 978-1-250-03895-1

Comfortably formulaic saga of Rome’s military might continues with epic characters who tread the breadth of Europe for honor.

Gibbins continues with a return to Carthage 600 years after the events of his first novel in the series (Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage, 2013). Rome is no longer the war machine it was when its famed legions conquered the world. Now it’s on the defense, and barbarians are most definitely at the gate. The Vandals have taken Carthage after a futile stand by a handful of Roman soldiers, and the Huns are coming from the north to dismantle the divided empire. Gibbins relies once again on a handful of characters teaching and training at the schola militarum in Rome to anchor the narrative.

Arturus, a British warrior-monk, shows up to assist Flavius, one of the elite whose heritage is Roman and Goth, and Macrobius, his faithful centurion. They make their way to Attila’s court north of the Danube, where an unusual proposition is made on behalf of Aetius, the last remaining great Roman general. “I come to you not with offers of concessions, but with an offer of war. It may not be this year, or next year, but it will be soon, at a place of your choosing.” However, this time around there are mythic characters in the mix of intrigue and powerful battle scenes. Arturus is, yes, the Arthur we know in legend, the once and future king, and his love interest turns out to be the daughter of Attila. That is mythmaking on a new level.

Although much of the plot is just too convenient, Gibbins does know his history, and the novel rings true with the sounds of hand-to-hand combat.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BUSTS OF EVA PERÓN

Gamerro, Carlos Translated by Barnett, Ian & Other Stories (416 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-908276-50-6

This clever comic novel about a conventional Argentinian businessman caught up in guerilla politics is buoyantly relentless in its biting satire.

Argentine novelist and translator Gamerro (The Islands, 2012, etc.) uses the context of early 1970s Peronist political turmoil for his farce, originally published in Spanish in 2004.

Our protagonist is Marroné, a placid middle manager devoted to inspirational business texts such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. When Marroné’s CEO is kidnapped by a guerilla group—frustrating Marroné’s plans to make a pitch for a promotion—his severed finger is delivered by mail to his flustered staff. Then Marroné, by now established as a deeply conventional and repressed family man, is himself abducted by the rebels and imprisoned in a plaster factory—the one where they make the eponymous busts of Eva Perón. Gamerro makes full use of his contradiction-rich setting, including bourgeois schoolboys appropriating fierce rebel names and Marroné’s dogged efforts to maintain his plans for corporate advancement in the guerilla hideout. In one hilarious passage, Marroné considers Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of how well they illustrate business management principles. In another, he contemplates Evita as a masterpiece of image-creation: “Eva Perón was a born winner, a self-made woman who had created a product—herself—that millions in Argentina and around the world had bought and consumed.”

Marroné’s persistently market-driven constructions are some of the funniest things in the book, especially when other factors suggest his flirtation with rebel leadership could turn his life around. But this seesawing makes him a very funny hero.

Though the book could use a few more characters as richly drawn as Marroné, he deserves the spotlight as a bumbling Everyman caught up in a struggle between political change and his own selfishness.

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TOM CLANCY FULL FORCE AND EFFECT

Greaney, Mark Putnam (688 pp.) $29.95 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-399-17335-6

The story of former CIA officer— and current president—Jack Ryan continues with the threat of North Korea building a nuclear arsenal.

After co-authoring a number of political thrillers with the late Clancy, Greaney (Tom Clancy Support and Defend, 2014, etc.) continues the author’s legacy by creating a realistic portrayal of political, corporate and private espionage. Jack Ryan is in the midst of his second term as president but remains as focused on sifting through critical intelligence data as ever; in this novel, it is the lurking problem of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea going nuclear that |

is at the center of the action. The president’s oldest son, Jack Ryan Jr., also faces the North Korean threat while working for the privately funded Campus, alongside standby Clancy characters Domingo “Ding’’ Chavez, John Clark and Dominic “Dom’’ Caruso. When a former CIA case officer is stabbed to death in Vietnam, the Campus operators start digging into the circumstances and soon find themselves squaring off with former FBI Counterintelligence officer Wayne “Duke” Sharps, now running Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. In Duke’s employment are former intel operators from England and France who are helping the DPRK develop an outlaw rare earth mine which could potentially be worth trillions of dollars and provide the necessary financial base for developing a nuclear cache. The DPRK is willing to do anything to obtain nuclear weapons, even attempt an assassination of President Ryan. With all these elements in play, Greaney delivers a story reminiscent of the older Clancy novels by showing evidence of a deep understanding of spycraft, current events, and the natures of the people who work in the shadows, at the desk and on the front lines.

A taut storyline with familiar characters facing new challenges.

Gruen’s handling of air raids, food rations, sad telegrams and reports from the front makes the thinness of the story’s premise all the more awkward.

At heart, this is an unlikely romance novel. A little too unlikely.

AT THE WATER’S EDGE

Gruen, Sara Spiegel & Grau (368 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-385-52323-3

Three spoiled brats from Philadelphia go to Scotland to look for the Loch Ness monster in the middle of World War II. “I pointed out, as gently as I could, what I’d hoped was obvious: that it made no sense whatsoever to throw ourselves into the middle of an ocean crawling with U-boats on a quest to find a monster that probably didn’t even exist,” explains Maddie Hyde as she embarks on that very journey with her husband and their best friend. If only she could have gotten this across to Gruen (Ape House, 2010, etc.), who is not likely to replicate the success of the best-selling Water for Elephants (2006) with this silly novel.

Unlike the other brave boys of their generation, Ellis and Hank are not off fighting Hitler; they are 4-F due to color blindness and flat feet, respectively. Instead of hanging around town being sneered at by their friends and family, they scoop up Maddie and take off for Scotland, where their dubious plan is to redeem the reputation of Ellis’ father, who supposedly faked a sighting of Nessie a decade earlier, by this time really finding the monster. After a gruesome trip through the Battle of the Atlantic, they arrive at the tiny village of Drumnadrochit, where they take rooms at a run-down public house run by a crew from Central Casting: a gruff, wild-looking innkeeper, a beautiful red-haired barmaid, etc. While Ellis and Hank spend their days getting wildly drunk and monster-hunting, Maddie befriends the locals and learns to make a bed and mash potatoes. Various types of forbidden love, deception and skullduggery ensue. |

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“A poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice.” from delicious foods

DELICIOUS FOODS

of local bigots. While working as a prostitute, she and other addicts and indigents are corralled by a woman into a van and coerced to sign a contract that effectively makes them the property of Delicious Foods, a produce farm that plies its workers with drugs and alcohol to extract cheap, unquestioning labor.

What’s so funny about any of that? Partly Hannaham’s daring approach to style and point of view: Much of the novel is narrated by the crack Darlene is addicted to. Nicknamed Scotty, the drug first shows up as a few rocks in her purse as she works the streets and throughout has a voice like the devil on your shoulder. (“I rushed into the few doubting and unbelieving parts left in Darlene’s mind and I shouted, Babygirl, surrender to yes!

Say yes to good feelings!”) The plot turns on Darlene’s struggles at Delicious Foods and Eddie’s efforts to find her, and in the process, Hannaham finds room to comment on and satirize a variety of racial (and racist) iconographies, from watermelons to David Duke to voodoo to the sexual demands of plantation owners. In that context, the fate of Eddie’s hands becomes a potent allegory for centuries of black men and women stripped of the power to control their destinies.

A poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice.

(Author tour to Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and New York)

Hannaham, James Little, Brown (384 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-316-28494-3 978-0-316-28492-9 e-book A Southern farm provides the backdrop for a modern-day slavery tale in this textured, inventive and provocatively funny novel.

The second novel by Hannaham (Creative Writing/Pratt Institute; God Says No, 2009) opens with a harrowing prologue: Eddie, a black 17-year-old, is manically driving a truck from a Louisiana plantation that he’s escaped.

His hands have been cut off for reasons not explained till the end of the novel, and he’s desperate to get to Minnesota. The story then snaps back to six years earlier, as Eddie’s mother, Darlene, descends into crack addiction after the murder of her husband, a shop owner and community organizer who fell afoul

THE LAST DAYS OF VIDEO

Hawkins, Jeremy Soft Skull Press (304 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-61902-485-4 In this funny, surprisingly tender debut novel, Hawkins tells the story of a misfit group of video-store employees whose efforts to save their beloved shop offer the reader a cast of lovable oddities and a streak of infectious adoration for the power of movies.

Waring Wax is the unhappy, unpleasant, frequently drunk owner of Star Video, a video rental store with an impressive collection of titles and oddball employees and a business that, in 2007, is slowly getting strangled by the growing presence of Blockbuster and Netflix. When a Blockbuster opens 50 yards away, the threat to Waring’s livelihood and only true home turns dire. With the help of two faithful employees— the beautiful, prickly Alaura and the awkward and virginal Jeff—he sets out to save Star Video with a series of increasingly ridiculous schemes that thrust the three of them into the presence of corporate bullies, the cultlike Reality Center and a famous film director who’s in town to make a movie while secretly plagued by Alfred Hitchcock’s ghost. The plot is often ridiculous and has a whiff of enthusiastic camp, but the characters have enough heart and vivid imperfections to make their story irresistibly engaging, even when they find their lives plunging toward slightly outdated small-town miseries.

They careen from one encounter to another, propelled by a generous dose of nostalgia, loud humor and narrative energy, but they’re given the depth to make casually beautiful phrases 20

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THE WORLD BEFORE US

ring true. “When her eyes opened, flashbulbs went off in his mind,” says the book, and it sounds exactly right.

A novel that manages to be both very funny and very sad, with an unrepentant belief in both movies and love served with a cleverness and irreverence that are difficult to resist.

Hunter, Aislinn Hogarth/Crown (432 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-553-41852-1 978-0-553-41853-8 e-book Hunter’s haunting—if sometimes elusive—second novel (Stay, 2005) wavers between practical life in the present and the unplumbed memories of a British archivist and her long-dead research subjects.

Twenty years ago, 15-year-old Jane was babysitting Lily when the 5-year-old went missing in some English woodland between the Whitmore, an abandoned Victorian mental asylum, and Inglewood House, the former estate of 19th-century plant hunter George Farrington. Now Jane is an archivist at the Chester Museum in London, founded in 1868 by Edmund Chester, whose wife, Charlotte, hinted in her diary of a romantic attachment with George’s brother Norvill Farrington. Jane has

ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD!

Hossain, Saad Unnamed Press (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-939419-24-8

In the dark days leading up to the Iraq War, two black marketeers blunder into an ancient conspiracy involving a secret sect of Islamic mystics.

Here’s the thing: If you’re going to write pulp fiction, jump in with both feet and let the blood fly. That’s what Bangladesh-based journalist Hossain has done in this kinetic debut novel set in the exploding streets of Baghdad. Our “good guys,” so to speak, are Dagr, a widowed former professor of economics who’s turned to crime in the wake of the U.S. invasion, and Kinza, an anarchist berserker who can’t wait for the bad things to come— “When the rage comes, just stay behind him, that’s all,” warns Dagr of Kinza. It wasn’t very pretty in the city in those days.

“It’s a war,” observes one of Kinza’s corrupt connections. “We kill you, you kill us, who cares? The important thing is to have a sense of humor about it. When we were bombing the Kurds, do you think they were crying like babies?” This bickering duo is trying to get out of the city when they’re hired by a local sheik to track down the shadowy “Lion of Akkad,” a suspected serial killer who turns out to be a centenarian mental patient named Afzal Taha with ties to the Druze, the aforementioned cult. Unfortunately, during a skirmish, Kinza shoots the son of Hassan Salemi, a particularly nasty imam with a thirst for bloodshed. To facilitate their movement through the war-torn city, the two renegades enlist the help of Marine Pvt. Hoffman, a dope-smoking, rule-breaking hooligan who’s supposed to be looking for weapons of mass destruction but really just wants to be in country to “blow shit up.” It’s a marvelous mix of genres, blending the visceral atmosphere of a war movie with the casual nihilism of Catch-22 or the original M.A.S.H. complete with an Indiana Jones–style treasure quest to employ a mystical watch that doesn’t tell time to unleash the ancient power of the Druze before the sect’s ancient Alchemist, the real enemy, catches up with them.

A gonzo adventure novel that shreds the conventional wisdom that pulp can be pigeonholed.

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“Kiefer is a master wordsmith.” from the animals

never truly recovered from Lily’s unsolved disappearance, guilt tangling with her confused adolescent attraction toward Lily’s widowed father, William. When she hears William speak at the Chester about his new book concerning George Farrington, unresolved feelings well up, and Jane runs away to revisit the site of Lily’s disappearance. She is not alone: A chorus of stranded souls follows her. Having found Jane while she was researching the Whitmore logbook for her graduate school dissertation years ago, they hope she will lead them to remember their lives and especially deaths. In those logbooks, Jane stumbled across another disappearance in the area a hundred years before Lily’s: a woman identified only as N. Having Jane try to solve the two unconnected disappearances, the author transforms Jane the archivist into Jane the detective. But like other fictional detectives, and despite her sizzling romance with an inappropriately young gardener, Jane is never as interesting as those she unwittingly investigates—a host of spirits with unresolved deaths who share stories heartbreaking in their complicated humanness, from the farmer who’s more bird than man to the barely closeted schoolmaster to the lawyer blaming himself for his infant’s death to Norvill Farrington, whose desperate love for the ambivalent Charlotte causes disaster.

Not an easy read but a compelling exploration of how memory shapes and is shaped by individuals and society.

being how these stories and characters are connected. Ultimately, the character who links the three is named but never given much of a voice.

This novel is populated by storytellers. One by one, they tell us that nothing, even magic (a 12-foot woman who mothers mothers or a dog who transports an orphan to safety), can erase the ugly highs and lows of life in modern India.

THE ANIMALS

Kiefer, Christian Liveright/Norton (352 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 23, 2015 978-0-87140-883-9 In Kiefer’s (The Infinite Tides, 2012) dark, lyrical novel, a man learns that no matter how hard he may try to atone for his sins, he can’t outrun his violent past or his most painful mistakes.

Bill Reed seems like a quiet loner with a difficult but satisfying life: running a sanctuary for wounded animals, dating the local veterinarian, worrying about preparing for the harsh Idaho winter. Though he sometimes has to make the tough decision to put down gravely injured animals, he also finds meaning and solace in his relationships with the animals he cares for, most particularly the blind grizzly Majer.

But Bill has a secret past that reawakens when his childhood friend is released from prison, and he finds it impossible to hide from the person he used to be and the things he did as that person. Eloquent and shattering, this novel explores, in gritty detail, how penance sometimes does not lead to redemption, a modern take on the story of Eden. Kiefer is a master wordsmith, and his dense and beautiful language intensifies the pain and isolation of the main character. He moves smoothly from past to present, from third-person narration to second-person, including and entangling the reader in the novel’s heartbreak.

The connection forged between Bill and Majer, which offers an emotional climax more stirring than the final action scenes, is both warmly compassionate and deeply, deeply tragic. This is a novel about duality: the loyalty and betrayal of friendship; the freedom and imprisonment of the spirit; the wild connection between human and animal; the goodness and horror that live in each of us.

Devastatingly beautiful. This novel embodies why we write and why we read.

SHE WILL BUILD HIM A CITY

Jha, Raj Kamal Bloomsbury (352 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-62040-904-6

A study in contrasts, this novel uses magic to illuminate poverty, violence and loss.

New City, India, contains multitudes. Journalist and novelist Jha (Fireproof, 2007, etc.) introduces the city through three main characters, Woman, Man and Child, whose disparate stories anchor the narrative as the tension between rich and poor plays out again and again. Man and his driver are stuck on the freeway as police use water cannons to disperse Old City protestors who haven’t had water or electricity for days. A “quota” medical school student sees his beloved girlfriend protesting the presence of lower castes on campus. Readers first meet Woman as she recalls the past to her grown daughter, home after a long time away. Woman draws readers in with gorgeous language: “And, thus assured, you run away, leaving a hole in the air, shimmering, through which the afternoon leaks away and evening drips in, mixes, dissolves the scents you leave behind.” On the next page, the tone turns to menace as we meet Man, a wealthy loner: “He is going to kill and he is going to die. That’s all we know for now, let’s see what happens in between.” The third character, Child, is abandoned and officially named “Orphan” by a media-savvy orphanage administrator. Each character’s story is driven forward by fear and mystery—the greatest mystery of all 22

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WEREWOLF COP

desolate building, he’s attacked by horrific giant bugs. And that’s not all that’s making his life miserable. There’s the one-nighter with a beautiful stalker he has to explain to his devout Christian wife. And there are charges that his wisecracking partner, Martin “Broadway Joe” Goulart, is dirty. While there’s no getting around the book’s hokey premise, multiple Edgar Award winner Klavan does his best to transcend it in exploring the extreme thoughts and emotions his protagonist experiences. What chance does Zach’s human conscience have of overcoming his beastly desires? It won’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment to say this may not be the last time he’s faced with those questions.

Fans of contemporary monster tales will be taken with Klavan’s thriller, and others who are willing to indulge the book’s hairy trappings will appreciate its existential musings.

Klavan, Andrew Pegasus Crime (336 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-60598-698-2 On the hunt for a nefarious European crime boss, Texas supercop Zach “Cowboy” Adams desperately searches for himself after being turned into a werewolf.

Dominic Abend is not your everyday mobster. A German-Russian worth billions, he’s thought to be in possession of a 15th-century dagger that gives him unthinkable black powers. Having taken over the American underworld, he plans to take over the world. After linking Abend to a hideous massacre in Texas, Zach travels to Germany to consult with a female sword and dagger expert. She takes him into the Black Forest, seemingly talking nonsense, where she undergoes a bizarre transformation and...changes Zach. When he comes face to face with the elusive Abend in a

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SOIL

Shirts and make it difficult for the young man to conceal his homosexuality. Lev’s wife, Josephine, risks tilting the book into bodice-ripping territory in the hot and heavy moments she spends with her therapist. The rising Nazism has a fair number of targets in this one family, and Landau derives much of the novel’s meager tension from the reader’s certainty about what the characters only suspect: That it’s not a good time or place to be Jewish, gay or ambivalent. The author’s sense of history is strong in scenes of well-chosen detail, whether in village or city. At the same time, her World War I is largely bloodless, and WWII passes by in a few mentions and pages—a shadowy presence indeed.

Landau’s talents suggest she might do well with a more directly historical novel, but she has produced some strong characters in this highly readable, oddly sanitized look at assimilation and its discontents.

Kornegay, Jamie Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4767-5081-1 In this Southern-gothic debut novel, a lost soul battles the elements and the elements win.

The Earth is a malevolent character from the opening scene, in which a rural Mississippi flood causes muck to overflow from ditches. Into this ominous setting comes Jay Mize, an idealistic misfit with a paranoid streak and unworkable dreams of running a self-sustaining farm. At the start of the book, both he and his life are well on the way to unraveling. The farm has collapsed, his neighbors think he’s unhinged, and his wife is starting to agree. Then a dead body mysteriously turns up on his property, and his paranoia hits a peak. Jay is convinced that he needs to destroy all evidence of the body, and his efforts inevitably open up new complications; especially since one hand remains missing. His wife, Sandy, leaves him and takes their son at around the same time Jay starts getting shadowed by policeman Danny Shoals. Jay has a shameful racial crime in his family history, and Shoals—who’s soon devoting his efforts to seducing Sandy—has some bad behavior in his own past. Jay’s reunion with his son provides a brief moment of hope before his final confrontation with an angry river and an angrier police officer.

The main problem is the lack of any sympathetic characters; Jay is simply too far gone to rank as a tragic figure.

But Kornegay’s skillful writing keeps the story gripping and the atmosphere haunting.

THE STOLEN ONES

Laukkanen, Owen Putnam (368 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-399-16553-5

From start to finish, a fast-moving and satisfying thriller starring a likable if unlikely duo.

In northern Minnesota, an off-duty deputy sheriff asks one too many questions of the driver of an 18-wheeler. A terrified girl bursts out of the back of the truck, and within minutes, the deputy lies dead. State cop Kirk Stevens and FBI agent Carla Windermere investigate the strange killing and soon discover the frightened girl, who speaks only Romanian. Through a translator, the agents learn that many more girls are imprisoned in that truck; a criminal ring plans to sell them as sex slaves. Just how big is this horrific operation, the agents want to know. And how can they find that truck before those girls disappear forever? Chapters both crisp and short show everyone’s viewpoints and keep the reader’s rapt attention. The escaped girl, Irina Milosovici, arrived in a shipping container and might as well have landed on Mars. She’s filthy, in great danger, has no idea where in America she is and is terrified of men—and yet she’s as strong and heroic as any character in the story. A team of criminals, including Andrei Volovoi and the fearsome Dragon, are making huge money by luring girls with promises of modeling careers in America. Losing a girl and leaving a dead cop is bad, Volovoi thinks, “[b]ut these things happened when you made your living selling women.” Stevens is a happily married dad whose family figures into the plot, while Windermere is single, black, beautiful, a wee bit profane and whip-smart. The two agents have worked together before (Kill Fee, 2014, etc.), and if there’s justice in the literary world, they will team up on many more cases. Just keep them out of the same bed and their chemistry will be great.

Thriller fans will enjoy this one. Laukkanen is a firstclass storyteller.

THE EMPIRE OF THE SENSES

Landau, Alexis Pantheon (480 pp.) $27.95 | $13.99 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-101-87007-5 978-1-101-87008-2 e-book

This first novel follows one family through two wars, four romances and one death with enough thought and craft to remain several shelves above the potboiler section.

Lev Pearlmutter, a Jew with Eastern European roots who lives a financially comfortable life in Berlin with a German gentile wife, wants to escape “the shadowy presence of another past, another history”—i.e., his Jewishness. Yet after he joins up at the war’s outbreak in 1914 and leaves for the Eastern front, he soon falls in love with Leah, a poor, beautiful Jewish Russian peasant.

She haunts him when he’s back in Berlin after a relatively easy war, but it’s only when her nephew arrives in the city and falls in love with Lev’s daughter, Vicki, that the possibility of a reunion arises. Meanwhile, Lev’s son, Franz, has grown interested in the clothing-optional men’s nature camps that foster the Brown 24

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“Léger's first novel is, all at once, a bittersweet romantic comedy of errors and...a valentine to his home nation of Haiti.” from god loves haiti

GOD LOVES HAITI

emotional rocks she’s depending on more than she should but is still very grateful to have. Shannon is the successful professional who’s sacrificed a romantic life for her career, while Pam is the happily married yet slightly restless homemaker who’s trying to bring a little zing back to her marriage. Suddenly, without planning it, all three women are at crossroads. Shannon has just met a new man who may tempt her to change her workaholic ways; Nicole’s husband may actually be on the brink of life-changing success; and Pam will face tragedy that her solid marriage can’t help her through. So for each woman, this new set of friends becomes a lifeline as she navigates unexpected terrain on her life journey. Romance superstar Mallery begins a new women’s fiction series with a novel that is both heart-wrenching and warmhearted, and readers will likely find the trials and tribulations of Nicole, Shannon and Pam accessible and thought-provoking.

A discerning, affecting look at three women facing surprising change and the powerful and uplifting impact of friends.

Léger, Dimitry Elias Amistad/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-234813-5 Can an unimaginable catastrophe bring forth a triumph of the imagination? It can and, in the case of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, has with this bright, brilliant novel.

Journalist Léger’s first novel is, all at once, a bittersweet romantic comedy of errors, a vivid evocation of a calamity’s aftereffects and a valentine to his home nation of Haiti. The calamity in question is the 2010 earthquake that ravaged the island in a manner of seconds. In the midst of the devastation, three intersecting lives arrive at a reckoning: the country’s president, who has inherited a terrible legacy from decades of tyranny and corruption; his wife, Natasha Robert, a beautiful artist who, just before the quake struck, was in a sexual clinch in the presidential palace with her former lover Alain Destinè, the dreamer/entrepreneur she dumped for the chief executive.

For a while after the quake, none of the three sides of this romantic triangle is certain the others have survived, yet they carry on with their lives on and off the island. The president is shown heading north to the U.N. in search of support, moral and otherwise. He finds it from his American counterpart in a hilarious exchange that, even if it didn’t happen, should have. Alain, meanwhile, finds himself dragging a broken foot through the debris while finding other survivors and dodging thugs ordered by the president to kill him for coveting his wife. (He’s saved from a beating by an American movie star who’s helping with the recovery.) As for Natasha, she wanders the battered landscape of bodies and rubble in a daze, her personal regrets overpowered by the grace and perseverance she finds in her people, whose country’s history was fraught with despair, death and injustice even before it was changed forever by what Haitians call the “goudou-goudou” (a euphemism approximating the sounds made by the earthquake).

With shimmering, lyrical prose, Léger conjures an incisive vision of Haiti’s complex heritage, tortured soul and dauntless spirit.

THE BRETHREN

Merle, Robert Translated by Kline, T. Jefferson Pushkin Press (416 pp.) $14.95 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-78227-123-9 Series: Fortunes of France, 1 The compelling first in a series of French historical novels, deftly translated and published for the first time in English.

Château Mespech is a fiefdom relentlessly imperiled by the weather, Gypsy bandits, royal and religious duplicity, and the plague.

Merle proceeds slowly, but his detailed descriptions of the daily workings of a 16th-century household are anything but dull. Pierre de Siorac, using notes from his father’s diary, the Book of Reason, spins the tale. His father, Jean de Siorac, was an apothecary’s son and sometime medical student who became a legionnaire, earned a title and then a barony for his exploits, and retired to the Périgord region with his fellow legionnaire and adopted brother, Jean de Sauveterre; they’re both Huguenots in a period when France is torn asunder by religious civil war. De Siorac marries Catholic Isabelle de Caumont, which soon makes the philosophical dispute personal. French kings come and go. Catherine d’Medici, sister of the pope and France’s regent, for whom religious faith is “but a pawn on the chessboard of France which she could play according to the moment or need,” is busy scheming. The plague decimates the people, and the butcher bandit Forcalquier ravages the long-suffering countryside. The two Jeans remain loyal to France even after their Huguenot religion is outlawed. Merle peoples his tale with memorable characters: villains, maids, legionnaires and townsfolk, and especially de Siorac, who maneuvers among prelates and princes and is generous to legitimate sons and bastards alike.

Merle’s is a French epic, more genteel than Dickens’ poor-child English tales and less doleful than Tolstoy’s Russian sagas.

THE GIRLS OF MISCHIEF BAY

Mallery, Susan Harlequin MIRA (416 pp.) $14.95 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7783-1774-6

Three friends support each other as life throws some unexpected curves their way.

Nicole’s Mischief Bay Pilates studio is growing every year, and it’s a good thing, since her husband just up and quit his secure computer job to write a screenplay. Since he’s barely around for their 5-year-old son, hardly helps out in the house and is living off her income, Nicole has discovered that two clients-turned-friends are suddenly |

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“Suicide seems to run in the Alter family, and now it has reached the current generation.” from a reunion of ghosts

A REUNION OF GHOSTS

a porcupine makes love: carefully.”) Suicide seems to run in the Alter family, and now it has reached the current generation: Vee, the middle sister—whose beloved husband was murdered getting lunch one day at Chock full o’Nuts—has cancer, with six months to a year left. If one sister goes, they’re all going. And so begins their project, which traces the Alter family history, starting with their maternal great-grandmother, brilliant and stifled, and great-grandfather, the German-Jewish Nobel Prize–winning chemist who invented the gas that would ultimately be used in the Nazi death chambers. “He was the sinner who doomed us all,” they write, the root of the ill-fated family tree. She died (a gun in the garden); he followed suit (morphine). With variations, the subsequent generations did the same. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, from Germany to the Upper West Side, Mitchell’s (The Last Day of the War, 2004) dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy (but mostly agony) with deep empathy and profound wit.

For the Alters, life has been a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us, the tragedy is that this stunning novel inevitably comes to an end. (Author tour to Chicago, Kansas City, Madison, Wisconsin, and Milwaukee)

Mitchell, Judith Claire Harper/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-06-235588-1 Three middle-aged sisters collaborating on a memoir that’s meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell’s masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching.

Together, Lady, Vee and Delph Alter have decided that New Year’s Eve, 1999—the cusp of the new millennium—will be the day they end their lives, quietly and with as little melodrama as possible. But first, they have embarked upon writing this “whateverit-is—this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional.” It will record the saga of the last four generations of Alters (theirs included). Also, it will double as their joint suicide note. (“Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way

HEARTBREAK HOTEL

Moggach, Deborah Overlook (304 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4683-1057-3

An aging yet charming B&B attracts guests with similar qualities in this follow-up to The Ex-Wives (1993).

When Buffy, a retired actor, leaves London to embark on a second career after inheriting the dilapidated Myrtle House in rural Wales, his optimism is endearing. Inspired by conversations with lonely visitors, Buffy decides to offer “courses for divorces,” from cooking to auto maintenance, to fill more beds.

The courses never quite take off, but the guests pick up other life skills at the newly dubbed Heartbreak Hotel. Postman Andy gets his chance to be a hero after leaving his brave but patronizing ex-girlfriend. Amy, a makeup artist whose boyfriend left her for another woman, coaxes her handsome instructor away from his clingy mother. Buffy’s love life is so complicated that there’s a character guide in the front of the book for keeping track of all his ex-wives and their adult children. Harold, a writer who mines the fictional small town for story material after staying at the inn, admits, “There were just too many characters jostling for space.”

But the details are hyper-real enough to be memorable—the breakups are sad, the backsides are saggy, and no one looks good for their age—without being bleak. Most touching is the fact that Buffy, who reminisces about his exes as fondly as he does his acting roles, has never given up on love: “There’s a lot to be said for it.

The deep peace of the marriage bed, tra-la, after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.” It’s hard not to love a rusty lothario who paraphrases Shakespeare in the face of loneliness.

The theme of love at any age is well-worn territory; here, it’s worn in all the right places.

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YOKOHAMA CALIFORNIA

time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees.” When Bride’s falsely accused teacher is released from prison, there’s a new round of trouble. Booker leaves, Bride goes after him—and ends up in the woods, recovering from a car accident with hippie survivalists who have adopted a young girl abused by her prostitute mother. Meanwhile, Bride is anxiously watching her own body metamorphose into that of a child—her pubic hair has vanished, her chest has flattened, her earlobes are smooth. As in the darkest fairy tales, there will be fire and death.

There will also be lobster salad, Smartwater and Louis Vuitton; the mythic aspects of this novel are balanced by moments like the one in which Bride decides that the song that most represents her relationship with Booker is “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”

A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye.

Mori, Toshio Univ. of Washington (201 pp.) $19.95 paper | Mar. 22, 2015 978-0-295-99474-1

Originally published in 1949, these 22 stories present subtle glimpses into the lives of Japanese-Americans in their neighborhood in Oakland, California, aka “Yokohama.”

Mori has a delicate touch, and the stories have more than a passing resemblance to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919); in fact, that book is specifically referenced in “Akira Yano,” a poignant tale about a man whose family wants him to train as an engineer though his dream is to become a writer. Unfailingly optimistic, Yano winds up paying $300 to have his book published, all the while expecting glowing reviews and never quite realizing the extent to which his “success” is negligible. In “Slant-Eyed Americans,” a family learns with shock that the parents of American citizens of Japanese descent have been declared “enemy aliens.” An added irony is that Kazuo, the eldest son in the family, is an American soldier trying to get home on leave. “Say It With Flowers” introduces us to Mr. Sasaki, the owner of a flower shop, who hires Teruo, a worker upset that “old” flowers are being passed off as fresh. Unable to get his mind wrapped around how the business is supposed to operate, Teruo winds up giving flowers away as a final gesture before he’s fired. In “The All-American Girl,” two brothers extravagantly admire Ayako Saito, a young woman who eventually gets married and moves to Los Angeles, though their admiration for her is in direct proportion to their fear of meeting her and breaking the magical spell of her presence.

Like Sherwood Anderson’s, many of Mori’s stories don’t have a beginning, middle and end; they’re nostalgic vignettes of a life that has now passed away.

GOD HELP THE CHILD

Morrison, Toni Knopf (192 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-307-59417-4

Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison’s latest.

A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebonyskinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soul—his older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences: “The last |

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“A modern Southern gothic with a feminist edge and the tense pacing of a thriller.” from the unraveling of mercy louis

THE DREAM OF MY RETURN

hide this from her caretaker grandmother, Evelia, a fierce evangelical. Evelia’s vision for, and of, her granddaughter is narrow; Mercy knows she has to be twice as pious as any other girl to make up for her absentee, crack-addict mother and be saved with her grandmother in the approaching rapture. In another corner of town, Illa Stark chafes in the ongoing role of nurse to her mother, a badly burned victim of the refinery explosion who has since mostly given up on life. Illa is more at peace as the manager of the girls basketball team, and she watches Mercy from afar with a hopeful tenderness. Meanwhile, the discovery of a fetus in a town dumpster has emotions in Port Sabine running hot and especially emphasizes the disempowerment of the town’s young women. “Around here, you’d think being a girl was the fucking crime,” a minor character says. It’s interesting to watch these moments of heightened awareness play up against the gothic structure. Mercy is every bit the innocent, blindly reliant on her grandmother and her basketball coach as pressures pile up on her, summer wears on and her relationships shift in distressing ways. There is a slight disconnect between Parssinen’s piercing narrative style and Mercy’s willful ignorance, but Illa’s ability to see the bigger pictures is, in story and style, a balancing grace.

Beautiful and awful, enraging and sad, atmospheric and page-turning: an accomplished novel.

Moya, Horacio Castellanos Translated by Silver, Katherine New Directions (160 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-8112-2343-0

An exquisitely wry novel that builds on the infinite variations of anxiety as narrative force.

A hypochondriac journalist living in Mexico visits a doctor for pain in his overwrought liver, and the history of a life is examined. He wants to return to El Salvador now that peace seems to be settling in, especially now that his wife has confessed to having an affair. The doctor is more of an alchemist, and the setting is surreal—an elegant penthouse where women drink tea and play canasta. Don Chente is a doctor, acupuncturist, psychologist and homeopath in one; he asks personal questions that probe the journalist’s intentions. Hypnosis opens memories, real or imagined, from the patient’s childhood—of his father and of the murderous politics that sent him and his uncle Muñecón into self-imposed exile in Mexico 11 years earlier. His dream of returning to his homeland is a self-inflated vision of the brave journalist reporting the sordid facts of the revolution when in reality the turmoil is about over. Mysteriously, Don Chente disappears, and the journalist is now driven by needs that include discovering what the doctor learned from him while he was under hypnosis. Paranoia creeps in as he envisions the doctor as a political informant. A drunken romp through Mexico City ensues, and when Erasmito, the journalist named only once in the novel, in a memory, passes through security at the airport, he sees his doctor passing him on his way back into Mexico.

He erupts with anxiety; he is hopeless, helpless, and his life is a never-ending cycle of hypochondria, paranoia and the absurd.

Moya has written a tight little novel that is wickedly witty and built on the idea of memory as a never-ending cause of inspiration and turmoil.

SEE YOU TOMORROW

Renberg, Tore Translated by Kinsella, Sean Dufour (600 pp.) $34.00 | Feb. 4, 2015 978-1-909807-60-0

A dense literary novel that moves like a thriller among memorable characters on parallel trajectories.

Renberg is a Norwegian writer who has won several prestigious national awards for his fiction and screenwriting. The action in this novel takes place over three days in September among a vivid cast of characters who are revealed to be likable or distasteful as you get to know them.

Chapters are written from their individual points of view, and their days move with unstoppable momentum to a scene of insidious violence that defines everyone. Pål is a hapless father of two teenage girls who digs himself into a hole as he tries to erase his online gambling debts. He engages the Hellevag Gang to help solve his problem, and they decide the solution is insurance fraud. The leader of the gang, Jan Inge, fancies himself a CEO of the underworld; Cecilie is Jan’s sister, who’s having a baby with her boyfriend, Rudi, a manic criminal, metal-music fanatic and a hoot of a man-boy. These three are the comic engines that power the narrative. Rudi spews a nonstop streamof-consciousness monologue that’s always just this side of violence. “Pleasure meeting other people who are sound. There’re not many of us left, brother! I thought you were a tosser, but you’re not—you’re the last man standing. And now I’ll give you Pål’s daughters, the angst-ridden Tiril and buttoned-up gymnast

THE UNRAVELING OF MERCY LOUIS

Parssinen, Keija Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-06-231909-8 A modern Southern gothic with a feminist edge and the tense pacing of a thriller.

Port Sabine, Texas: an economically depressed oil refinery town on the Gulf, heavy with gossip and religious superstition. With a fatal explosion at the refinery still lingering in the residents’ collective memory, they turn their focus to Mercy Louis, the star of the high school girls basketball team. Mercy knows how good she is, and in her private way, basketball is her religion, but she must 28

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THERE’S A MAN WITH A GUN OVER THERE

Malene, link to other high school students who are all struggling to grow up. Teenage angst, adolescent love, the struggles of a single father and the sexually charged lives of a gang of petty crooks all take converging tracks that Renberg uses to portray three days of highly magnified time.

Renberg gives us a novel, rooted in noir softened by comedy, that gets to the serious business of how our shortcomings are all linked.

Ryan, R.M. Permanent Press (272 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-57962-385-2

A Vietnam-era veteran recalls his childhood, leading up to a defining moment as a military policeman in Germany.

It’s hard to tell whether author Ryan (Vaudeville in the Dark, 2010, etc.) is playing fast and loose with the truth in his sort-of war memoir. Ultimately, veracity doesn’t matter much for a story in which nothing much happens. The launch is intriguing—military policeman Rick Ryan is being threatened by soldiers loyal to Staff Sgt. Elija Perkins, who’s been arrested by Ryan and his partner for bootlegging cigarettes. There’s also the tease of a fatal denouement: “And then it hit me: what kind of a story did I have to tell? I’d never been in real combat, though maybe I’d killed someone.”

From there, it’s a lot of flashbacks to a relatively idyllic childhood in Janesville, Wisconsin, and the occasional flash forward to a peaceful adulthood in the present day. Mostly it tells how Ryan got from Wisconsin to Germany, working his assignments while the Baader-Meinhof gang carries out their ultraviolence nearby. After consulting with draft resisters and failing to mutilate himself to get out of the war, Ryan enlists. He’s trained as a military policeman and deployed in Germany under a diverse rogue’s gallery of commanders. Weird side note: He talks to Albert Speer in his dreams. The married but unfaithful Ryan also takes a lover who threatens him with retribution from her Baader-Meinhof friends, which kicks off that murky ending we mentioned earlier. The book’s difficulty comes in wanting to have it both ways, leaving it unconvincing as a thriller yet lacking the emotional depth to qualify as a cautionary tale.

A novel that tries to marry the internal conflict of Tim O’Brien to the novelist style of Nelson DeMille but can’t quite stick the landing.

FIERCOMBE MANOR

Riordan, Kate Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 17, 2015 978-0-06-233294-3 A Gothic English manor in a remote valley provides the backdrop to this tale of two pregnant women living 40 years apart.

Alice Eveleigh—a well-educated but romantically naïve office worker in 1933 London—has found herself pregnant by a married man. Her mother worries only about what the neighbors will think, so she shuttles Alice off to Fiercombe Manor, the ancient seat of the noble Stanton family, where her mother’s childhood friend, Mrs. Jelphs, is the housekeeper. There, Alice can have her baby, and give it up for adoption, without bothering anyone—or so her mother thinks. Installed at Fiercombe for the duration of an unusually hot summer, Alice grows increasingly curious about the former residents of the house, especially Elizabeth, the beautiful one-time Lady Stanton, and her last pregnancy. What happened to Elizabeth, her daughter, Isabel, and the child she carried, and why was Stanton House, the monstrous modern mansion built to replace Fiercombe, torn down after standing only 10 years? Why does Tom Stanton, the current heir to the estate, feel responsible for his brother’s death 20 years before, and will his guilt affect his budding romance with Alice? “The real ghosts are the ones that take up residence in your mind,” Tom says, which means that everyone at Fiercombe is haunted by something. The stern Mrs. Jelphs can’t keep her secrets forever, though, and little by little, Alice uncovers the fate of Elizabeth and her daughter, a fate that Alice worries she and her own child may share. Despite reaching toward tales like Rebecca and the novels of Sarah Waters, Riordan offers a leaden version of an old story burdened by awkward flashbacks, flat characters, exposition-heavy dialogue, and a drawn-out, uninspired mystery at its heart.

For true gothic thrills and chills, look elsewhere.

THE ARCHITECT’S APPRENTICE

Shafak, Elif Viking (432 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-525-42797-1

Following the life of an invented apprentice to the actual Ottoman Empire architect Sinan, Turkish novelist Shafak offers a liberal interpretation of Islam that’s bound to create controversy, as her previous books have (Honor, 2013, etc.).

In 1540, Jahan, a 12-year-old runaway from Anatolia, arrives in Istanbul by ship with a baby white elephant he names Chota—“little”—a gift to Sultan Suleiman from Hindustan. The ship’s amoral British captain has forced Jahan, |

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“Sherlock Holmes meets the Brahmins in this lively, imaginative mashup.” from the fifth heart

who knows nothing about elephants, to pretend to be Chota’s Indian trainer so he can steal valuables from the sultan’s palace. Lonely Jahan loves Chota and quickly learns to take excellent care of him. Drawn to the elephant’s charms, the sultan’s young daughter, Mihrimah, begins visiting Chota’s barn. Soon, she and Jahan strike up a friendship that evolves into a chaste love that lasts through her marriage until her death. Far more complex and intriguing is Jahan’s relationship to the architect, Sinan, whose philosophy lies at the heart of the novel: “I work to honour the divine gift. Every artisan and artist enters into a covenant with the divine.”

Sinan recognizes Jahan’s untapped abilities when he and Chota help build a bridge during one of Suleiman’s wars.

Sinan arranges for Jahan’s education and makes him one of his four apprentices. As both apprentice to the sultan’s chief architect and trainer of the sultan’s prize elephant, Jahan observes the glory of the Ottoman Empire, the pageantry and brutality, over a span of almost 100 years. He experiences the plague, many wars, and the rise and fall of several sultans. Shafak acknowledges the harem system and slavery, but Jahan’s Istanbul is a cosmopolitan city made up of many nationalities and religions, all more or less getting along.

With manufactured intrigues and lukewarm romance, plot is not Shafak’s strong point. What she offers is panoramic historical fiction rich with facts, atmosphere and occasional whimsy.

Adams, half the anarchists east of the Mississippi and an extremely well-made rifle, all calculated to combine to produce chaos. Moriarty has seldom been more evil than when he sneers, “This one hour on the first of May, starting with the public execution of the chief executive of the United States of America, will make Haymarket Square look like the tiny, insignificant rehearsal it was.” Take that, Snidely Whiplash! It’s up to Holmes and James to fend off mayhem at the pass. Readers without grounding in Gilded Age history may want to keep an encyclopedia nearby, and of course, though Holmes needs no introduction, most will know Henry James only as the author of books about ghosts and perhaps furniture. Still, Simmons’ yarn is nicely self-contained.

It’s a lot of fun, too, once disbelief has been suspended and tongue tucked firmly into cheek. (Author tour to Denver, San Diego and Seattle)

CLASH OF EAGLES

Smale, Alan Del Rey/Ballantine (416 pp.) $27.00 | $13.99 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-8041-7722-1 978-0-804-17723-8 e-book Smale debuts with an intriguingly original alternate history supposing that the Roman Empire never collapsed.

It’s A.D. 1218. Pax Romana extends from the Indus to Hispania. After Rome captures a Viking pirate ship packed with riches found across the great ocean, Imperator Hadrianus decides to send “scouting parties into New Hesperia.” Praetor Gaius Marcellinus, a veteran warrior, leads the 33rd Legion from Mare Chesapica across Appalachia to the great river called Mizipi, “a grueling trek with hunger, discomfort, and danger.” Smale’s thesis, grounded in solid research into Roman history and pre-Columbian native societies, has a believable foundation, at least until he sails toward the fantastical. The Iroqua—“a confederation of five tribes: Seneca, Caiuga, Onondaga, Onida, and Mohawk”—and their enemies, the Cahokian Mizipi moundbuilders, have aircraft. Think modern hang gliders made of deer hide from which warriors rain liquid fire. The Romans are bombed from the air by guerrilla Iroqua in Appalachia, and then the legion’s wiped out in a set piece air/land battle with the Cahokians. That tribe’s Catanwakuwa clan flies 12-man Thunderbirds and single-pilot Hawks. The legion’s sole survivor, Gaius, is captured, with Smale craftily outlining how Cahokian curiosity allows him to integrate the Latin language and Roman technology into Cahokian life. The author’s best work comes with descriptions and characters, both in legion life, “a bit of muscle and the willingness to shed blood were crucial in keeping an Imperium strong,” and Cahokian society, “the calmest and most pragmatic people he had ever lived among.” Romance looms as Gaius becomes smitten with “the most magnificent woman he’d ever known,” Sintikala, all “liquid flame, a razor sharp ax, a Coliseum lioness.”

THE FIFTH HEART

Simmons, Dan Little, Brown (640 pp.) $28.00 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-316-19882-0 978-0-316-19880-6 e-book “They were the footprints of a gigantic dove!” Sherlock Holmes meets the Brahmins in this lively, imaginative mashup, done in trademark Simmons (The Abominable, 2013, etc.) fashion.

In 1893, writes Simmons by way of an opening, Henry James, “for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story),” decides to leave this cruel world, unhappy at his lack of literary success. Family members and friends have been dying all around him, so the time seems right. Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes has plunged over the waterfalls in Switzerland, locked in mortal struggle against Professor Moriarty. Naturally—well, not at all naturally, in fact—Holmes and James connect. James even pops Holmes on his famous beaker, prompting the uncharacteristic reply, “I’m sorry, James. Especially since I’ve come to think of you as a friend and I really have no friends.” Of the events leading up to such esprit de corps it might be observed that the more improbable, the better, though at least Simmons’ yarn is generally free of the steampunk affectations of the Guy Ritchie film series. Instead, Simmons posits a deliciously political plot involving President Grover Cleveland, Irene Adler, Henry 30

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Gaius is in limbo after the Iroquas’ near destruction of the Cahokian city, which promises more adventure in the Hesperian Trilogy’s next volume.

man believed to be their attacker, Rud Petty, has won an appeal and will be getting a new trial, and Hanna is being asked to testify though she doesn’t remember the night of the attack. Rud was the boyfriend of Hanna and Joe’s daughter Dawn, who’s now living in Santa Fe and trying to start a new life. While the prosecutor, Gail Nazarian, tries to make Hanna take the stand, Hanna starts to convince herself that the man she saw the night Joe died wasn’t Rud but Emmett Furth, a troubled neighbor boy.

To the horror of her eldest daughter, Iris, she welcomes Dawn back into her home. Although a grand jury failed to indict Dawn—who has always been odd—many, including Nazarian and Iris, believe she was involved in the attack. Treadway carefully constructs a scenario in which a mother is asked to believe that her child could not only be an accessory to her husband’s coldblooded killing, but has ulterior motives in coming to visit her. Wading knee deep in the suspicions of others, Hanna continues to defend Dawn even though Dawn’s own dodgy behavior makes her a perfect suspect. Treadway’s book is an excellent exploration of the agony that often accompanies parenthood, but every now and then, readers will find themselves wanting to smack some common sense into Hanna.

A worthwhile story marred by a terrible title.

THE BOOKSELLER

Swanson, Cynthia Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-233300-1 The cat-owning spinster co-owner of a struggling independent bookstore begins to experience more-than-vivid dreams of an alternate life in this debut novel.

Book lover Kitty Miller appears to have it all. She’s an independent woman in early 1960s Denver with a passion for books and a modest inheritance that helped her open a small bookstore with her best friend, Frieda. Though the store just squeaks by, and though she’s in her 30s and still single, she finds herself granted “an element of freedom and quirkiness that other women our age don’t have.” But Kitty’s simple life is interrupted as she finds herself dreaming at night of a husband named Lars, a robust sex life and children she adores. All this is very strange, and Kitty starts to doubt the choices she’s made in her daytime life, preferring the seemingly perfect housewife-life of her dreams. She can’t quite believe her dream life, though, and finds herself puzzled over how she knows how to take care of children or run a household.

She also discovers her dream life is not as perfect as she first thought: Her parents, who are very much alive in her real life, have died in a plane crash, and one of her children is autistic (which is dealt with awkwardly, as are the historical aspects of the novel); she’s also lost the bookstore and Frieda’s friendship.

There are mysteries galore, and like Nancy Drew, Kitty sets out to solve the case and find the links between her two worlds, as memories from each surprise and interrupt her.

Unfortunately, Kitty is too perfect and naïve in both her worlds to be very interesting. And for a novel about a bibliophile, there’s little about books beyond an adolescent interest.

THE DOORS YOU MARK ARE YOUR OWN

Tuvim, Aleksandr Translated by Elliott, Okla; Clement, Raul Dark House (600 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-940430-20-1 In a dark future where water is scarce and disease runs rampant, a young revolutionary plots the downfall of an author-

itarian government.

Readers are forewarned: At more than 700 pages, this slab of dystopian fiction could swallow most epics whole—and this is still just the first entry in a planned trilogy. Where to begin?

Let’s start with the literary conceit. The novel posits itself as a work in translation, taken from the Slovnik nonfiction book by fictional “Aleksandr Tuvim.” The real authors are its “translators,” debut novelists Elliott (Comparative Literature/Univ. of Illinois; From The Crooked Timber, 2011, etc.) and Clement, who chime in with the occasional footnote. After something called “The Great Calamity,” the nation has emerged as “The Federated States of America,” divided by seven tribes into seven cities. In the wake of the poisoning of its largest body of water, Joshua City’s people are not only thirsty, but also suffering from “nekrosis,” a flesh-rotting disease. To keep his constituents in line, the malevolent Mayor Adams declares war on another faction in a plot to centralize control. There is an enormous cast, but the book primarily concerns itself with three character arcs.

Nikolas Kovalski is our hero figure, a medical student who turns on the system to lead “The Underground” resistance movement as a Che Guevara–like revolutionary thinker. His best friend is Adrian Talbot, a budding young doctor who believes he can do

LACY EYE

Treadway, Jessica Grand Central Publishing (352 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4555-5407-2 Treadway checks in with this novel about family, emotional wounds and blind love.

Hanna cheated death three years ago when an intruder came into her Everton, New York, home and beat her accountant husband, Joe, to death as the two were sleeping, but she was left with physical scars and traumatic brain injury. Now the |

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“Vann’s novels are striking, uncompromising portraits of American life.” from aquarium

SUITCASE CITY

more good inside the system, treating patients. Lastly, there’s Nikolas’ older brother, Marcik Kovalski, who joins the Baikal Guards but later impersonates a dead officer, Gen. Schmidt, becoming the leader of the very army that Nikolas swears to upend. The book operates on an elaborate scale but can be unwieldy in its attempts to shoehorn in political strategy, sci-fi tropes, moods drawn from bleak points in 20th-century history and the occasional romance.

An epic novel of good and evil that may have more ambition than its story can support.

Watson, Sterling Akashic (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | $15.95 e-book Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-61775-319-0 978-1-61775-332-9 e-book A taut tale of crime and vengeance along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Jimmy Teach has led an eventful life so far. He’s piloted a boat that delivered illicit drugs to the Tampa Bay area, shot three Guatemalan smugglers, served time in the slammer but had his record sealed, starred as a college quarterback, paralyzed a gridiron opponent and lost a wife. At age 45, he’s a successful pharmaceutical salesman raising a daughter alone and vowing to become a better person. But “bartenders know the past always comes looking for you,” and man, does it ever for Teach. Bloodworth “Blood’’ Naylor oozes up from the past; he’s a former associate now bent on Teach’s destruction. A seemingly chance altercation with a young black man in a men’s room blossoms into a potential civil rights lawsuit against the white Teach, and newspaper reporter Marlie Turkel thinks his troubles will make great copy. Indeed, he views her first article as “a masterpiece of innuendo and insinuation masquerading as objective reporting.” The injured man’s attorney declares, “You, Mister Teach, are going to be on the hot seat, and it is going to be my hand on the switch.”

The plot may not be unique, but the telling is masterful and sprinkled with colorful expressions. A detective sees an obvious fact as “plain as the balls on a tall dog.” For all Teach’s flaws—he loves drinking Wild Turkey and has a quick temper—readers will sympathize with him, as he will do anything to protect his teenage daughter.

Sit back and enjoy Watson’s latest. It’s better than bourbon on the rocks.

AQUARIUM

Vann, David Atlantic Monthly (272 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-8021-2352-7 Vann, whose remarkable novels evoke worlds where violence and revenge seem the inevitable outcome of human relationships, offers here a kind of modern fairy tale, one laced with treachery and trials and the greatest demon of all to battle, the past.

It’s the early 1990s, and 12-year-old Caitlin splits her days between the dullness of school and the magic of the Seattle Aquarium. Caitlin spends every afternoon there, using it as de facto child care, until her mother, Sheri, returns from her job at the docks. The aquarium is peaceful and contains possibilities; it’s a place where her mother’s anger has no power. She meets an old man there and the two walk from one exhibit to the next, each day studying a fish, considering its place in the world, their places in the world, building a gentle friendship (the novel is filled with photographs of these fish). When Sheri finds out about their relationship, she calls the police to ambush a pedophile but discovers something she deems far worse—her own estranged father, Caitlin’s grandfather. His abandonment of his family 19 years earlier transformed Sheri from an innocent girl to a woman twisted by rage. He left his wife dying of cancer, penniless in a shack with 14-year-old Sheri as sole caretaker. In a harrowing series of scenes, Sheri forces Caitlin to play makebelieve; Sheri pretends to be her own dying mother while Caitlin drags her shit-smeared body around the apartment as they re-enact Sheri’s early life. Unlike Vann’s other novels, which exist in a closed system of violence and despair, this story offers redemption. Like all good heroines who make their ways out of the woods, Caitlin is clever and brave and convinces Sheri that the old man will sacrifice anything for forgiveness, to conquer the spell of the past.

Vann’s novels are striking, uncompromising portraits of American life; here is another exceptional example.

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THE DOG WHO SAVED ME

Wilson, Susan St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-250-01434-4 978-1-250-01435-1 e-book Wilson (A Man of His Own, 2013, etc.) again goes to the dogs to explore fractured lives, this time adding crime to the mix.

The dog is nameless and spends half the book roaming feral in the woods near Harmony Farms, Massachusetts. Symbolism, no doubt, for Cooper Harrison and Natalie Everett, romantic protagonists, are each foundering in emotional loss. Cooper’s on PTSD medical leave from the Boston police department after a madman’s explosion that killed his police K-9, Argos,the perfect work dog and companion. Ex–Wall Streeter Natalie has retreated to Second Hope Farm, a horse-rescue operation, to cope with her |

husband Marcus’ death. The nameless dog was peppered by an ill-tempered duck hunter, the town’s bigwig, and it’s Cooper’s job to corral it, having signed on as temporary animal control officer. Cooper at first doesn’t want the job back in the place where he’s known as the the town drunk’s kid: Bull Harrison, “a lumbering shaggy dog of a man, ” came back from Vietnam and took to the bottle in a ramshackle house on Poor Farm Road.

Worse, Cooper’s estranged brother is just out of Walpole Prison.

Cooper’s “spent far too many years of my professional career working to put people like my brother behind bars.” Now he’s rounding up Cutie Pie, a pet donkey. It’s Lifetime movie material—easily readable, emotion-wracked drama about love lost and found—with one-size-fits-all characters like bachelor farmer/surrogate uncle Deke, crazy cat lady Polly and gothchick shelter assistant Jenny. The feral dog is tamed, Bull falls off the wagon and climbs back on with Cooper’s help, and the rich guy gets his comeuppance.

Not the best of Wilson’s canine stories.

isn’t just priests and a couple loner weirdos.” Yglesias of course exploits headlines and Hollywood to tell his tale but not without sensitivity.

Most important, he shines a Kleig light where it may be most needed, into the parlors and playrooms where many Americans endure or perpetrate these nightmares.

THE HEROES’ WELCOME

Young, Louisa Perennial/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $14.99 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-06-235449-5 In the middle novel of Young’s projected World War I trilogy, a disfigured British soldier and the officer he saved face arduous struggles, as do the women they left behind.

The story is set in 1919, six months after the conflict ended. Riley Purefoy, who has aged well beyond his 23 years, must cope with a blown-off jaw that has rendered him barely able to speak and unable to enjoy intimacy with the plucky, adoring Nadine. After he marries her at the start of the book, he also has to cope with her disapproving parents. His friend and best man, Peter, the officer, has descended into alcoholism to shut off traumatic memories of his failures on the battlefront. His wife, Julia, uses a chemical treatment in an attempt to make herself more attractive to him and ends up defiling her natural beauty; she’s so devastated by his rejection that she leaves for Biarritz. The book centers on Riley’s slow emotional and physical healing. Once again, he becomes the self-punishing Peter’s only hope for survival. Painfully kept secrets unravel. A troubled pregnancy darkens the narrative.

For fans of Downton Abbey, there is much to enjoy in Young’s skillful plotting and sometimes-heartbreaking story, though she avoids the soap operatic trimmings of the TV show. From the start, the author is in exquisite control, beautifully balancing modest moments with dramatic ones.

Having invested in Young’s characters in the superb My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You (2011), we care even more about them the second time around. One looks forward to reading the final installment.

THE WISDOM OF PERVERSITY

Yglesias, Rafael Algonquin (384 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-61620-384-9

Three New York friends, in their childhood and adult selves, deal with a wily pedophile in an affecting novel that is big-screen lurid without being superficial or too slick.

In his 10th novel, Yglesias (A Happy Marriage, 2009, etc.) presents the children’s past trauma and their present-day reckoning in alternating chapters. Jeff ’s adult cousin, Richard Klein, has already molested the 8-year-old boy when his predatory attention turns to Jeff ’s best friend, Brian.

The third victim is Julie, Jeff ’s young cousin, who is 11. It’s hard to say whether the more devastating scene is the 23-page playlet in which Klein traps Julie on his lap in a room full of adults and children and forces the boys to watch him secretly molest her; or the paragraph in which Jeff makes an imaginary adventure of his desperate efforts to dispose of bloodied underwear without his mother’s knowledge. As adults, Brian is single and a successful screenwriter, Julie is a library archivist and married with a teenage son, while Jeff, on his third marriage, is the top film director in the U.S. After years apart, the three reunite because Klein has just managed to elude exposure in another scandal and the trio is debating going public. Yglesias provides several revelations that ramp up the shock in an already awful tale and add a touch of Agatha Christie–like mystery. The author’s experience with Hollywood as a producer and screenwriter (his own novel Fearless and other scripts) brings color and humor to the Brian and Jeff characters. Early in the book, a strange apologia for a character named Aries Wallinksi, who is clearly Roman Polanski (could this be a roman a clef in more ways than one?), previews many of the novel’s themes and then reverberates late in the story with Julie’s cry: “I want people to understand it |

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Box, C.J. Putnam (384 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-399-16077-6

MURDER ON THE CHAMP DE MARS

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett’s 15th case takes him through some of the darkest days of his checkered career.

While Joe’s surveying a field in which someone massacred a flock of endangered sage grouse, he gets a call that a young woman’s been found in a ditch, badly beaten. Maybe it’s not Joe’s adopted daughter, April, who ran off with rodeo rider Dallas Cates shortly after her 18th birthday (Stone Cold, 2014).

But Joe and his librarian wife, Marybeth, know it is, and of course they’re right. Eldon and Brenda Cates insist that Dallas got much too badly banged up at a Houston rodeo to have lifted a hand against April, with whom he’d already split up. Although April, lying in a medically induced coma, is in no position to dispute their story, Joe’s ready to kill Dallas himself—until an anonymous tip identifies survivalist Tilden Cudmore as April’s abductor. Certainly everything about Cudmore’s behavior, especially when he’s confronted by the law, indicates that he fits the bill. While Joe is still wondering which of the suspects is really guilty, his old pal Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer last seen giving evidence against murder-for-hire kingpin Wolfgang Templeton, is released from prison, made to sign away most of his civil rights into the bargain, and lured into a lethal ambush and left for dead. Who’s responsible for his shooting?

What have they done with his lover and business partner, Liv Brannan? And what hope does Joe have of solving such a range of felonies, especially those that hit closest to home?

All the action and suspense of Box’s long string of high-country adventures, with a solution that’s considerably tighter and more satisfying than most of them. One of Joe’s best.

Black, Cara Soho Crime (320 pp.) $27.95 | $27.95 e-book | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-61695-286-0 978-1-61695-287-7 e-book Aimée Leduc (Murder in Pigalle, 2014, etc.) puts everything on the line to solve her most vexing cold case—the murder of her father.

In France as elsewhere, the Roma live by their own rules, forging alliances and settling disputes within their own clans.

So when Nicolás Constantin, a manouche teenager, approaches Aimée, she can hardly believe what he asks of her: to come to Hôpital Laennec on the Left Bank so his dying mother can make peace before passing. Convinced that Drina Constantin’s deathbed confession will shed light on the explosion in Place Vendôme that killed her detective father, Aimée leaves her infant daughter, Chloé, with child minder Babette and hurries over to the chic 7th arrondissement, only to find that Drina has disappeared. Aimée is torn. She wants to be a good parent, especially now that the child’s father, Melac, and his new wife, Donatine, have shown their determination to challenge her for custody. But to be the parent Chloé needs, Aimée needs to understand her own parents. What did her father know that made someone want to get him out of the way? And was his death connected to the disappearance of her mother years earlier? Aimée’s search for answers takes her to the chic homes of haute bourgeoisie like Madame Uzes, who pinches her pennies while running missions for the gens du voyage; meanwhile, Aimée’s partner, René, haunts dives like La Bouteille aux Puces, where Madame Bercou knows somebody who knows somebody who might know Drina. But it isn’t until she finds Roland Leseur, an official at the Quai d’Orsay, whose younger brother Pascal, before his presumed suicide, was the youngest deputy in the Assemblée Nationale, that Aimée gets an inkling of the lofty heights her case will reach.

Aimée’s 15th outing is a killer, with all the suspense, all the surprise and all the Parisian flavor you’d expect from Black.

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THE TOMB IN TURKEY

Brett, Simon Creme de la Crime (192 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-78029-069-0

Vacationing in Turkey, amateur sleuths Carole Seddon and Jude Nichol bring their unique combination of lightweight Fethering conflicts and murder most foul with them.

Developer Barney Willingdon, one of Jude’s many ex-lovers—not that she’d ever tell Carole—offers her and a friend the use of Morning Glory, his villa in Kayaköy, gratis any time before July. From the get-go, the two friends react very differently to this gift horse. Jude’s eager to seize the day; Carole sits on the fence even as she scopes out websites for cheap airfares and pores over guidebooks and phrasebooks. |

DOUBLE FUDGE BROWNIE MURDER

Even before they leave England, they pick up hints that there may be a dark side to Barney’s offer. His first wife, they learn, died in a suspicious accident; his relations with his second wife, Henry, are obviously strained; and he makes it clear that he’s eager to find succor in Jude’s arms once more. On arrival, the two are met by Barney’s old friend, tour guide Nita Davies, who helps them settle in, gives them information about the village, tells them about her husband, Erkan, who’s a scuba instructor, and then gets herself murdered. But when Carole, who discovers Nita’s strangled corpse resting atop a tomb she’s gone to visit, returns with Jude to show her what she’s found, the body has vanished, and Barney, when the women ask about Nita, assures them she’s gone back to England to visit the sick mother they learn died when she was 12.

The sitcom humor is anodyne but gently effective.

There are so few suspects that you’ll spot the killer early on, unless of course you’re Jude, preoccupied with the men staring at her cleavage, or Carole, checking to make sure she’s remembered to take along her Imodium.

Fluke, Joanne Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7582-8040-4

A trip to Las Vegas brings an unexpected twist to Hannah Swensen’s love life.

Doc Knight has had it with wedding arrangements. So he whisks his fiancee, Delores Swensen, and her adult daughters Michelle, Andrea and Hannah (Blackberry Pie Murder, 2013, etc.) off to Las Vegas for a surprise ceremony in the Little Chapel of the Orchids. The biggest surprise, though, is his choice of best man: filmmaker Ross Barton, an old college crush of Hannah’s. This time, Ross more than reciprocates Hannah’s interest, and she returns home resolved to dump both of her boyfriends while waiting to see if Ross can land a job at Lake Eden’s KCOW Television. But old habits die hard, and pretty soon, she’s making Lick Your Chops Pork for dentist Norman Rhodes and detective Mike Kingston while her cat, Moishe, chases Norman’s cat, Cuddles, around the dining room table.

Even worse, Hannah’s attraction for corpses is as strong as ever, and pretty soon, she stumbles across the body of Judge Colfax, who’s been stabbed in his chambers while preparing to hear a vehicular homicide case against her. Naturally, Hannah’s a suspect, and even more naturally, she’s determined to solve the case herself. But the biggest mystery that faces Hannah is what to do about Norman and Mike when Ross gets to town.

Hannah’s love life has gotten so complicated that the mystery seems a mere afterthought. Twenty-eight recipes provide further competition.

DEAD TO THE WORLD

Cooper, Susan Rogers Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-7278-8458-9

A romantic 20th-anniversary weekend turns into a dangerous ghost hunt.

E.J. Pugh, a romance writer with a propensity for sleuthing (Gone in a Flash, 2013, etc.), has booked a weekend at a B&B in Peaceful, Texas, along with her long-suffering husband, Willis. Miss Hutchins, owner of The Bishop’s Inn, thinks she’s being haunted by the ghost of her father, who murdered her mother in 1947. E.J. doesn’t believe in ghosts, but the food is great and the town charming, so they stay on until they’re joined by ghost hunters Humphrey Hammerschultz and Diamond Lovesey. Awakened at night by a strange sound in the hall, E.J and Willis find Humphrey dead on the couch. The local police chief and his assistant aren’t inclined to invite E.J. into the investigation, but the couple is stuck in town until the killer is found. Back at home, their three same-age teen daughters—Megan; Bess, who’s adopted; and Alicia, a foster child—have a mystery of their own to solve. Bess has a crush on Logan Harris, who works at a local steakhouse. When the girls go there for dinner, they see Logan being attacked by the brother of high school acquaintance Harper Benton, who’s told him that Logan is the one who got her pregnant. When Logan denies it, the girls put aside their constant squabbling and resolve to prove him innocent. In Peaceful, where Diamond is the next murder victim, E.J. wonders if the answer to all their present problems may lie in the past.

A mystery told on several levels, each of them both tricky and amusing until the diverse sleuths prevail.

THE NIGHT THIEF

Fradkin, Barbara Raven Books (144 pp.) $9.95 paper | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4598-0866-9 A sneak thief poses an unusual series of moral dilemmas for a Canadian handyman/farmer in rural Madrid County.

At first, Cedric Elvis “Rick” O’Toole thinks his organic vegetable garden is being raided by a hedgehog or a rabbit.

But the ingenuity the thief shows in evading the traps Rick sets and the traces he’s left of a camp nearby point to a human. Oiling up his shotgun, Rick stakes out the garden and catches a 10-year-old with a strange accent who refuses to identify himself. Dubbing the thief Robin Hood, Rick takes him in and shields him from Constable Jessica Swan, Sgt. Hurley, and the tender mercies of Children’s Services, a bureaucracy with which Rick’s already tangled on his own. It’s an uphill battle. Robin can’t read, can’t count and has never even held a pencil. He’s more than willing to help Rick with chores around the farm, but |

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“You know you’ve reached a pivotal point in your relationship with the man in your life when he... asks you to give him an alibi for the afternoon.” from false impression

FALSE IMPRESSION

he seems to be sneaking out every night. One morning, Rick heads off to the woods himself and discovers a young woman whose eyes are as blue as Robin’s but who has one feature Robin lacks: a bullet hole in her side. Enlisting his mother’s aunt Penny to help Robin nurse the girl they decide to call Marian, he sits out Robin’s cryptic hints about Marian’s identity and waits for enlightenment from some other quarter. At length, it arrives in the form of an American with Alabama license plates, a short temper and a gun.

Child psychologist Fradkin (None So Blind, 2014, etc.) supplies a promising setup and a touching conclusion but not much of a story in between.

Heley, Veronica Severn House (240 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-7278-8445-9

Bea Abbot and her suburban London domestic employment agency get caught in the middle of a pitched battle over who’s going to control the corporation Holland Holdings.

You know you’ve reached a pivotal point in your relationship with the man in your life when he turns up in the office you run out of your home and asks you to give him an alibi for the afternoon. Bea’s been through a great deal with Leon Holland (False Diamond, 2014), but despite his best efforts, they’ve never been to bed, let alone perjured themselves for each other. Now that his much older brother, Briscoe, is trying to push him out of the company that was divided between the two of them earlier that year, Leon is clearly worried. The day started when his Rolls wouldn’t. On his way to a meeting his cellphone had summoned him to at a car park, he’d barely escaped getting run down and decided to skip the meeting. Leon’s fears turn out to be well-founded.

Lord Lethbury, an old friend of Briscoe’s and a major shareholder in Holland Holdings, is found fatally shot in the car park. So is Margrete Walford, whose ugly divorce proceedings are stopped dead. The murders signal the beginning of a campaign of terror, or at least of nuisances, against the Abbot Agency. Between holding Leon’s hand, bucking up his skittish niece Dilys, who’s been staying in one of Bea’s spare rooms, and watching as romances develop between Dilys and Keith, the engineer Bea calls to eradicate a virus from an infected computer, and between Anna, recently appointed head of the Holland Training College, and Hari Silva, who runs a protection agency, Bea often feels as if she’s the only grown-up in the room.

The no-nonsense exposition leads to endless distracting eruptions, a Rube Goldberg–esque finale and an uncharacteristically overextended postlude. Not Bea’s finest hour.

BEETHOVEN’S TENTH

Harvey, Brian Raven Books (160 pp.) $9.95 paper | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4598-0869-0

A piano tuner—sorry, make that piano technician—happens on the find of a lifetime, which may also be the price he pays for it.

“Today I don’t pay you in money,” elderly piano teacher Olga Pieczynski tells Frank Ryan after he restores her Steinway to proper pitch by removing Coco, her dead dog, from inside it. “Today I pay you in art,” she adds as she presses a copy of Songs of Springtime into his hands. And what art it is. An improbably cursory examination is enough to alert Frank that she’s actually given him the manuscript of the first three movements of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. It’s too late to ask Miss P where she got it or what she’d like Frank to do with it, since a strategically placed piano wire has already sent her following Beethoven and Coco into the great beyond. So Frank shares the manuscript with his frequent jazz partner Kaz Nakamura, owner of a bar, a noodle shop and a saxophone, who independently identifies it as Beethoven’s Tenth as well, and they decide to spring it on the world at a Beethoven birthday bash in nearby Vancouver in a few days. But Miss P’s ham-handed pupil, dog walker Stefan Litvak, has other plans for the treasure. So do exSgt. Bob Brossard, a private eye, and tuna futures millionaire Fujimori-san, neither of whom wants to spend a penny more than they have to for the priceless manuscript.

Scientist Harvey (The End of the River, 2008, etc.) provides all the ingredients of a novel a lot shorter than a Beethoven symphony: one crime, one mystery, one threat to the hero’s life, one near-death situation, one twist at the end. The perfect gift for mystery fans with short attention spans.

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BONE DIGGER

Hirt, Douglas Five Star (158 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 18, 2015 978-1-4328-2961-2 It’s not the elephant in the room but the dinosaur in the canyon that ignites a firestorm near a cattle ranch.

Colorado, 1877. Ranch foreman Chad Larimer catches a trio of rustlers redhanded and is forced to shoot one of them dead. The danger is ramped up when a nearby accomplice seizes and threatens Chad’s young sidekick, Eric, the grandson of his boss, but a long-range shot splits open the head of the would-be |

“A librettist-turned–reluctant detective sees the characters of his latest opera come to life and just as quickly die.” from the figaro murders

THE FIGARO MURDERS

kidnapper. Eric’s savior identifies himself as Alex Stovill and says he’s looking for work. It seems only right for Chad to introduce him to his boss, C.L. McSween, who owns the Rocking S. When the benevolent cattleman declares himself in Alex’s debt, Eric’s mother, Libby, who happens to also be Chad’s gal,expresses her concern for Eric’s safety, though she’s careful to add that she trusts Chad. It can’t help bothering Chad when Alex takes a shine to Libby. In the course of roaming the ranch, Chad comes upon courtly Samuel Cobsworth, who’s excited about a discovery of very old bones on the property. Chad is surprised when Libby shows annoyance over Cobsworth; she wants no delay in filling the ranch’s reservoir. Chad’s even more concerned about the potential rift in his relationship with her, even though their estrangement turns out to be short-lived. Chad and Cobsworth become unlikely friends, and the old cowhand settles down to study dinosaurs. But a deadly explosion and an unexpected enemy spell danger.

Veteran Hirt’s (Deadwood, 1999, etc.) plain prose has abundant heart. This Western thriller rolls a bit slowly but with ease and true grit.

Lebow, Laura Minotaur (336 pp.) $24.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-250-05351-0 978-1-4668-5619-6 e-book A librettist-turned–reluctant detective sees the characters of his latest opera come to life and just as quickly die.

Although Lorenzo Da Ponte enjoys the goodwill of the Emperor Joseph II and has earned some fame in Vienna as the Court Theater poet, he lives in exile from his beloved Venice. Scraping by on commissions and counting every florin, he longs for enough success in his collaboration with Wolfgang Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro to be able to buy a decent dress suit. When his barber, Johann Vogel, asks for his help, the kindly poet agrees to visit the palais of Baron Gabler, Vogel’s former employer, to find out something about Vogel’s birth mother. Vogel is convinced

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that she was a noblewoman and that somehow the family connection will help him pay off his debt to Gabler’s coldhearted housekeeper so that he can be released from prison and marry Baroness Gabler’s pretty young maid. The situation becomes more complicated when the baron’s impudent page, Florian Auerstein, is pushed out a window and killed. Florian, the only son of a prince, was being groomed for an important diplomatic mission with the baron, and Emperor Joseph’s minister of police forces Da Ponte to pose as Baroness Gabler’s poetry instructor—on pain of being tried for Florian’s murder himself—to ferret out a spy within the household. At the same time Da Ponte is trying to finish the Figaro libretto, link a medallion to the mystery of Vogel’s birth, and make sense of a cryptic notebook of Florian’s, he falls in love with the lovely, unhappy wife of the womanizing baron. As secrets come to light, including one or two of Da Ponte’s, the librettist finds himself no closer to an answer but very much a target for a killer.

A brisk tempo, a sympathetic hero and a plot as complicated as the beloved opera bouffe it parallels will make Lebow’s debut resonate with opera lovers and lay readers alike.

Morrell, David Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (352 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-316-32393-2 978-0-316-32396-2 e-book God save the queen—or failing that, send in the opium sot.

Morrell’s sequel to his Victorianera thriller, Murder as a Fine Art (2013), finds Thomas De Quincey, the scandalous opium-addicted author, again embroiled in a lurid series of murders as he employs his unique psychological and philosophical insights in an investigation of the slayings of prominent members of English society. Aided by his progressive-minded daughter, Emily, and two stalwart detectives of Scotland Yard, De Quincey makes for an offbeat but entirely credible protagonist in the Sherlock Holmes mold. Morrell deftly blends actual historical persons and events—De Quincey remains well-known for his proto-addiction memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are major characters—with the morbid thrills of a contemporary serial-killer narrative as the victims are arranged in grotesque tableaux, each bearing a letter naming various failed assassins of Queen Victoria and referencing a secret society known as Young England, a terrorist organization bent on the overthrow of the British government. It’s a potent formula, with genuine thrills and a satisfying mystery leavened with well-observed and meticulously researched details of Victorian life and attitudes. The villain is sympathetically drawn, with clearly defined and understandable motivations, and De Quincey’s team of intrepid investigators is a cracklingly compelling group of misfits and damaged heroes.

Morrell also entertainingly plays with formal conventions, recalling the tropes of Victorian “sensation novels,” and the whole enterprise is ripping good fun at every delicious twist and turn.

A propulsive, richly imagined yarn that never loses steam or insults the reader’s intelligence.

SIGNATURE KILL

Levien, David Doubleday (288 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-385-53255-6

When a sex killer terrorizes Indianapolis, ex-cop Frank Behr (Thirteen Million Dollar Pop, 2011, etc.) swings into action, with darkly mixed results.

His subzero bank balance prompts Frank to call on Kerry Gibbons, who’s offering a $100,000 reward for information about her daughter, Kendra, who disappeared more than a year ago. Making preliminary inquires among the people he considers his contacts, Behr soon learns that his friendships, like his finances, are running on fumes. Lt. Gary Breslau of the Indianapolis Metro PD keeps him at arm’s length. Frank’s old training officer, bar owner Gene Sasso, indicates that Frank’s extended silence has all but burned the bridge between them. Forensic pathologist Jean Gannon has retired from practice. Even Behr’s girlfriend, Susan, has moved out, taking their baby son, Trevor. Meanwhile, interspersed chapters that become harder and harder to read track the killer as he stalks, abducts, tortures, kills and photographs the latest in what turns out to be a long series of victims. Luckily, Behr finds new helpers to replace the friends who’ve dropped out, or dropped him. Criminal psychologist Lisa Mistretta is so avid to collaborate with Behr that they end up in bed. And crime scene photographer Django Quinn gets close enough to the killer to rue the day he was born. There’s never any doubt that Behr will get his man, but what happens when he does will make your hair stand on end.

The combination of peerlessly depressive Behr and the formulaic serial-killer plot produces a thriller at once mordant, grueling and routine.

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SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE MISSING YEARS: JAPAN

STIFF PENALTY

Ryan, Annelise Kensington (368 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-61773-408-3

Murthy, Vasudev Poisoned Pen (284 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $9.99 e-book $22.95 Lg. Prt. | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4642-0363-3 978-1-4642-0365-7 paper 978-1-4642-0366-4 e-book 978-1-4642-0364-0 Lg. Prt.

Pregnancy hormones and anonymous calls do little to mellow Assistant Medical Examiner Mattie Winston (Scared Stiff, 2010, etc.).

Like Alexander Portnoy, Mattie reveals her story in the course of a visit to her therapist. But unlike Roth’s hero, she has few neuroses; Mattie’s as comfortable in her skin as she is probing beneath her patients’. She was first sent to psychiatrist Maggie Baldwin after she broke her job’s nonfraternization rule with Detective Steve Hurley, and now she’s back because her persistent flouting of that rule has left a bun in her ample oven. Over the course of their marathon session, Mattie reveals to Dr. Maggie her ambivalence about marrying Hurley (she’s afraid he’s proposed out of duty rather than love), her love-hate relationship with the maternity clothes supplied by fashionista Priscilla McDaniel, owner of The Mother Hood boutique, and her concerns that a stalker, who’s been seen peeping in her window and who may be responsible for a series of hang-up calls, may actually be her father. She also mentions that she’s been cleared of official blame for killing Roscoe Schneider, a smalltime thug she ran over in her driveway, and that she’s solved the murder of Derrick Ames, a high school teacher stabbed in his home with a barbecue fork. In the end, her pregnancy comes to its inevitable conclusion. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes? Ryan’s climbed on board the latest version of the willshe/won’t-she mystery romance: the case of the knockedup gumshoe. At 400-plus pages, Mattie’s latest might take you through an entire labor and delivery.

Still wondering what the great detective was doing between his reported death in 1891 and his reappearance in 1894? Actually, he was working closely with Shigeo Oshima, director of Intelligence Research for Emperor Meiji of Japan, on the shadowy Operation Kobe55.

Or rather, working his way toward Japan, since two-thirds of this knockabout tale has passed before Holmes and Watson steam into Nagasaki Bay. After surviving his confrontation with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in a startlingly casual reboot, Holmes sends Watson a cryptic note and a ticket on the North Star, departing Liverpool for Yokohama, and the game is afoot. A murder aboard ship soon focuses Watson’s attention, and he makes confident, inaccurate accusations about which of his fellow passengers is guilty and, more amusingly, which of them is Holmes in disguise. Reunited at last, the former flat mates try one ingenious dodge after another to throw the omniscient Moriarty off their trail, pausing only long enough to converse with Rabindranath Tagore, dodge a boulder at Angkor Wat, and solve several lesser, and often more entertaining, mysteries en route to an impromptu audience with the emperor and a denouement in which Holmes unmasks a forgettable traitor lodged deep within Operation Kobe55. The most original contribution from Murthy is a series of footnotes in which Watson protests, among other things, his highhanded treatment by a young female editor at his American publisher’s office.

Bound to be overshadowed by Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty (2014), which offers a quite different account of the battle between Holmes and Moriarty. That’s a shame, because Murthy (The Time Merchants and Other Strange Tales, 2013, etc.) provides sturdy adventure, colorful Japanese backgrounds, and a mastery of many voices, including Watson’s.

SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

Sigurdardóttir, Yrsa Translated by Roughton, Philip Minotaur (336 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 17, 2015 978-1-250-05147-9 978-1-4668-5233-4 e-book A suspicious fire in a home for the severely disabled leads to an investigation of the Icelandic social safety net in Thóra Gudmundsdóttir’s fifth outing (The Day Is Dark, 2013, etc.).

The arson has supposedly been solved, and one of the house’s residents, Jakob Porbjarnardóttir, who has Down syndrome, has been convicted and sentenced to a psychiatric facility. However, one of Jakob’s fellow prisoners, a sex offender and all-around creep named Jósteinn Karlsson, hires Thóra under the pretense that Jakob’s previous lawyer missed compelling evidence that would have pointed to the true fire-starter. |

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What Karlsson really wants, however, is to play a complex game of cat and mouse with our heroine, using her to avenge what he perceives as past wrongs. Sigurdardóttir’s thriller moves slowly at first but picks up speed as Thóra speaks to more people involved with the burned-down facility—the families of the other residents, the therapists and other staff who worked there, and the beleaguered former director, who is certainly hiding something (as is Jakob’s first, barely competent lawyer). When she discovers that a comatose patient had been pregnant at the time of her death in the fire, the mystery deepens, and Thóra’s tenacity becomes more compelling and poignant. The backdrop of the novel is, of course, the collapse of the Icelandic economy, with rocketing unemployment and everyone feeling squeezed (literally, in Thóra’s case; her household is composed of her; her out-of-work boyfriend; her two children; one grandchild; and her financially imprudent parents). Yet there are also the moving stories Thóra uncovers of families with disabled children, their sacrifices and their attempts to make the lives of society’s most vulnerable members a little better.

Unusual material for a mystery, but Sigurdardóttir handles it deftly through Thóra, who is as compassionate as she is intelligent and dogged.

same ground with the human suspects and tries to worm more information out of the animals whose minds she can read without tipping off other humans to her special gift. No wonder she keeps hitting the bottle.

Spoiler alert: The kitten doesn’t kill anyone. Fanciers of chatty cat mysteries will be happy to know that all the animals survive in fine fettle.

CUBA STRAITS

White, Randy Wayne Putnam (320 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-399-15814-8 A trove of revealing private documents, rumors concerning a political assassination, a trip to Cuba—it’s either today’s newspaper or Dr. Marion Ford’s 22nd adventure.

Even before the embargo is lifted, it’s not all that hard to get Americans to travel to Cuba. Just ask Doc Ford, who agrees to go there to hunt for a missing shortstop and the briefcase he took from Ford’s old frenemy Gen. Juan Simón Rivera. Doc’s willing to chase after Figueroa Casanova even though he knows he’s involved in something illegal—Rivera’s long-running business smuggling Cuban ballplayers into the U.S.—partly because the trip offers the possibility of spotting one of the Pacific Ridley turtles native to the island. And the search is quickly successful, more or less. Ford and Sighurdhr Tomlinson find Casanova early on, but the two old friends get separated shortly thereafter, Tomlinson ending up with Figgy, Ford with the briefcase, which turns out to contain hundreds of personal letters Fidel and Raul Castro wrote to the same woman over a pivotal period in Cuba’s turbulent history. Will the truth about the 1959 revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the killing of JFK come to light? Not if sadistic Santeria priest Vernum Quick and his Russian handler, Anatol Kostikov, have anything to say about it. Luckily, Ford finds an unexpected ally in Sabina Estéban, whose mother sent her and her sister, Maribel, on a boat to Florida after Maribel, 13, witnessed a murder and worse. Sabina may be only 10, but she’s the most resourceful little spitfire you can imagine.

Cuba provides the perfect setting for White’s recent fondness for episodic, hallucinatory quests (Bone Deep, 2014). The next few months’ headlines will determine whether his view of contemporary Cuba is remarkably prophetic or yesterday’s news.

KITTENS CAN KILL

Simon, Clea Poisoned Pen (294 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $9.99 e-book $22.95 Lg. Prt. | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4642-0358-9 978-1-4642-0360-2 paper 978-1-4642-0361-9 e-book 978-1-4642-0359-6 Lg. Prt. Another suspicious death in Beauville, Massachusetts, leaves animal empath Pru Marlowe (Panthers Play for Keeps, 2014, etc.) babysitting a new kitten as she stumbles around trying to figure out who’s settling old scores.

The medical evidence says that David Canaday died of an acute myocardial infarction. That’s not good enough for Pru, who’s convinced that Ernesto Vuitton, the kitten beseeching her to play as Canaday’s body cools in his kitchen, knows more than he’s saying about the lawyer’s death. As if on cue, Canaday’s daughters, three weird sisters who might be opening a roadshow Macbeth, stir the pot of Pru’s suspicions. Jill, the youngest, attaches herself worshipfully to Pru and Doc Sharpe at the County Animal Hospital, even though she’s in line to inherit the bulk of her father’s estate. Her older sister Judith, who sent the kitten before arriving herself from LA, is very interested in the contents of her father’s will. And Jackie, the resident sister who first asked Pru to come out and take care of the kitten before she knew her father would die, is alternately defensive and combative. When another of her clients, attorney Laurence Wilkins, turns out to be Canaday’s partner, Pru knows she’s in for the long haul. So is the gentle reader, who’ll be asked to sit still for pages on end while Pru goes over and over the 40

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“Intrepid nurse-turned–private investigator Maisie Dobbs becomes embroiled in a murder case in Gibraltar on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.” from a dangerous place

A DANGEROUS PLACE

science fiction and fantasy

Winspear, Jacqueline Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-06-222055-4 Still reeling from personal tragedies, intrepid nurse-turned–private investigator Maisie Dobbs becomes embroiled in a murder case in Gibraltar on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Following the death of her husband, Viscount James Compton, in a Canadian aviation accident and her ensuing miscarriage, Maisie traveled to India rather than return home to England, despite pleas from family and friends.

Though she initially feels strong enough, both mentally and physically, to face London again in the spring of 1937, Maisie has a change of heart midvoyage and decamps in Gibraltar, a military garrison and an international outpost for those on both ends of the political spectrum. With nearby Spain on the brink of civil war, tensions run high, and support—both financial and in the form of ammunition—funnels steadily across the increasingly porous border. As often happens, Maisie stumbles—this time literally—upon a corpse and isn’t satisfied with the seemingly cursory police investigation. The dead man is identified as Sebastian Babayoff, a photographer and member of the local Sephardic Jewish community. Maisie, immersing herself in Gibraltar life by staying in a rooming house rather than the posh tourist-oriented hotel, finds Babayoff ’s second camera near the crime scene and begins her own investigation.

Winspear (Leaving Everything Most Loved, 2013, etc.) elegantly weaves historical events with Maisie’s own suffering—the bombing of Guernica is particularly well-done—all while constructing an engaging whodunit.

Fans of this long-running series will welcome Maisie’s return in this 11th installment while feeling the pain of her losses as deeply as if they were their own.

THE EXILE

Adams, C.T. Tor (352 pp.) $15.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-7653-3687-3 978-1-4668-2932-9 e-book Series: The Fae, 1 A fast-paced fantasy about a halffaerie, half-human girl struggling to figure out which world she really belongs in.

Everything is going fine for Brianna Hai—maybe a little boring, but fine—until a dangerous blonde attacks her magic shop, throwing her right back into the messy politics of Faerie, the exact mess she was most hoping to avoid. And it’s not just Brianna who’s being pulled into the land of the Sidhe. Her shop’s assistant manager, David, and his very attractive brother, Nick, get caught up in the mess, too, when a flock of venomous flying doxies attack, forcing them all to cross over into Faerie and face the false friends and outright enemies who await them there.

From the moment they do, the plot rockets along, forcing Brianna toward a confrontation with her father, who happens to be the king of the Sidhe, and her destiny. There’s danger in Faerie, but it never quite feels like a real threat to our heroine, who keeps herself “fighting fit” enough that she’s ready to duel even in the middle of a dinner party. In a book in which nearly every character is stunningly attractive, it’s hard to believe anyone’s gleaming hair will really get mussed. As a result, the plot speeds almost too quickly toward its cliffhanger conclusion.

It’s not exactly deep, but this book (the first in a planned series) will entertain readers looking for a fun fantasy that mixes adventure with just a bit of romance.

VOYAGE OF THE BASILISK

Brennan, Marie Tor (352 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 27, 2015 978-0-7653-3198-4 978-1-4299-5636-9 e-book Third in Brennan’s fine natural-history fantasy series, set six years after the events detailed in The Tropic of Serpents (2014).

This time, iconoclastic scientist Isabella, Lady Tren of Scirland, embarks on a two-year global voyage, hoping to determine the relationships among the endless varieties of dragon. Joining her aboard the research vessel Basilisk will be her commoner sidekick, |

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“This book, the first in a planned trilogy, is poised to become the next must-read hit.” from the fire sermon

Tom Wilker (here given little to do), her young son, Jake, and the vessel’s captain, Dione Aekitinos, who, we’re frequently reminded, is “mad,” although he never does or says anything that remotely warrants such an epithet. As they approach the tropics, Jake joyfully takes to the seafaring life, though to Isabella’s disappointment, he shows little interest in natural history. Also joining the expedition will be Suhail, an archaeologist whose theories—concerning an ancient, long-vanished civilization whose buildings, artifacts and script suggest they were dragon-tamers—neatly coincide with Isabella’s interests. Their relationship rapidly develops beyond the professional. But politics are never far away, with the expansionist empire of Yelang a looming threat. Then, entering the Broken Sea, a dreadful storm hurls the Basilisk onto a reef, necessitating extensive repairs. The inhabitants of the local archipelago are none too pleased with this development, suspecting them of being allies of the Yelang. Worse, they regard Isabella’s affinity for dragons and sea serpents as unnatural. This volume lacks the complexity and intensity of its predecessor but is nonetheless beautifully worked and thoroughly engrossing.

Fans of this charming series won’t be disappointed.

confidence and control, with loads of salty, piscine atmosphere, but it’s perhaps a little too self-consciously reminiscent of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith.

Superior, with plenty of crossover teen appeal.

THE FIRE SERMON

Haig, Francesca Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $26.00 | $13.99 e-book | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4767-6718-5 978-1-4767-6724-6 e-book A suspenseful post-apocalyptic adventure about a world cleaved in two.

Hundreds of years ago, the world was destroyed in a blast of fire. Now, just as history has been divided into Before and After, humans have been divided into Alphas and Omegas. Every whole, healthy Alpha child is born with a mutated Omega twin who’s missing an arm or an eye—or has one too many. And when one twin dies, the other dies, instantly, inexplicably, inevitably. Most twins are separated as infants, but Cassandra and her twin, Zach, are both born physically whole, so Cass is able to hide her mutation—the fact that she can see things that haven’t happened yet and places she’s never been. The link between Cass and Zach has the potential to change their world forever, as Zach climbs the ranks of the ruling Alpha Council, and Cass starts to dream about an island where, rumor has it, an Omega resistance is brewing. Debut novelist Haig builds a richly textured world and creates characters who immediately feel real. The suspense of the plot, driven by the fear and anger underlying this unbreakable bond between twins, never flags. Haig’s experience as a poet shows in her writing, which is clear, forceful and laced with bright threads of beauty.

With its well-built world, vivid characters and suspenseful plot, this book, the first in a planned trilogy, is poised to become the next must-read hit.

HARRISON SQUARED

Gregory, Daryl Tor (320 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-7653-7695-4 978-1-4668-5271-6 e-book New dark fantasy from the author of the splendid Afterparty (2014, etc.).

As a young boy, Harrison Harrison, aka Harrison Squared, or H2, experienced a horrific incident in a boat (he tries to suppress memories of tentacles and teeth) that cost him his leg and left him with a morbid fear of the water. Now 16, equipped with an advanced prosthetic, he moves with his marine-biologist mother, Rosa, to the gloomy and forbidding coastal town of Dunnsmouth, Massachusetts, where she intends to pursue her research. As she goes out on the water, Harrison investigates the mausoleumlike local high school.

Inside, it’s dim, dank and labyrinthine; the classes are nautically themed, with sidebars on the merits of totalitarianism and the reanimation of dead frogs. And the students seem unnaturally well-behaved. Harrison’s expected to swim in the basement pool and refuses; he finds the school lunch disgusting and, in the library, discovers a ghost that only he can see. Rosa’s boat vanishes. Harrison refuses to believe she’s dead. Somebody steals his prized comic book while leaving a note saying his mother is still alive. One of the students, Lydia Palwick, thaws a little and shows him how the students use a secret sign language to communicate. The author of the note turns out to be a halffish, half-human creature named Lub; he’s one of the Dwellers who live in the sea beyond the harbor, and their elders are hatching horrid plans. Most readers will grin at Gregory’s deft, spiky parody of high school. For the rest, it’s a tale handled with 42

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THE ETERNA FILES

Hieber, Leanna Renee Tor (320 pp.) $24.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-7653-3674-3

A corseted heroine and determined detective battle the supernatural and each other to find a formula promising either eternal life or instant death.

The deaths and disappearances of magical researchers in England and the U.S. spur intrigue in the latest melodramatic gothic fantasy from Hieber (The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart, 2012, etc.). Both nations are on the hunt for immortality, and highsociety Manhattanite and “sensitive” Clara Templeton and |

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London Metropolitan policeman Harold Spire lead the chase in this hyperventilating version of the 1880s. Spiritualist Clara must find out who killed her team of Eterna Project researchers, including her secret lover, who is now a loitering spirit. “You’re at the center of the storm. Be worthy of the squall,” another ghostly visitor urges Clara as she bows under the weight of sorrow in one of the finest lines of this richly embellished novel.

Spire tries to reconcile his desire to uncover the demonic cult infiltrating all levels of English society with the call to patriotic duty from Queen Victoria, who demands that he steal for England the Eterna team’s purported solution to untimely death.

As the narrative crisscrosses the Atlantic, each covert operation builds up a ragtag team of quirky characters. In a story juggling many elements and many perspectives, the teams’ purposes bubble up slowly, and their adventuresome trials are both vague and baggy. While Hieber carves out a chillingly reimagined Gilded Age in careful detail, the motivations of the host of characters do not convince. An abrupt ending leaves the reader assuming there will be a sequel to sort out the jumble.

Gloomy froth for the teen goth enamored of petticoats and séances. (Agent: Nicholas Roman Lewis)

KISS ME HELLO

Burrowes, Grace Sourcebooks Casablanca (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4022-7884-6 When a lone-wolf criminal defense attorney who moonlights as a farrier meets a single foster mother and her troubled but compelling charge, he surprises himself by engaging in their struggles—even when she resists his help.

For years, MacKenzie Knightley has kept to himself, avoiding human entanglements as much as possible, so when he meets Sidonie Lindstrom and her foster son, Luis, he’s surprised to feel an immediate connection. But Sid and Luis are wary of their new rural life, especially when Sid’s money becomes unexpectedly tied up in red tape, endangering Luis’ foster status.

Sid is a city girl grieving the death of her brother, trying to nurture a teen with his own issues and navigate unexpected financial stresses, so Mac’s help and attention are welcome yet disconcerting. Sid is wary of lawyers, and Mac takes his sweet time in letting her know he is one. Meanwhile, as Mac becomes more entwined with Sid and Luis, he finds his other relationships strengthening, including those with his community and his family. And the more Sid tangles with local social services, especially a narrow-minded case worker, the more Mac strengthens his emotional arsenal, surprising all of them in the process. Burrowes has moved elegantly into contemporary romance with her Sweetest Kisses series and continues her penchant for mining intense situations beyond the love story. Her exploration of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the foster care system lends an interesting and thought-provoking layer to the story while setting up the backbone of the emotional network Sid and Mac must create to save themselves.

Sweet, sexy, eloquent and poignant, with a social-justice dimension. (Agent: Steve Axelrod)

A BLINK OF THE SCREEN Collected Shorter Fiction

Pratchett, Terry Doubleday (320 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-385-53832-9

A short story collection covering the entire career of one of our most prolific, and beloved, fantasy writers.

Pratchett (Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales, 2015, etc.) wrote the first story in this collection when he was just a teenager, and it’s astonishing to see how much of the Pratchett-ness is there already. His ability to create a character in a phrase and a plot in a paragraph; his wit; his knowingness—it’s all there. Yes, some of the earlier stories are, though funny, a bit glib. And there are a few bits of Discworld ephemera that are probably for fans only.

But then there’s the loner at the outer edges of the multiverse whose peace is shattered by two intruders from the universe next door. There’s the hero who shows up at the door of the writer who just killed him off. There’s a time traveler named Mervin who gets stuck in a not-quite-England in need of a king, a bunch of witches who are pretty tired of Esme always winning the Trials, and a letter to Father Christmas that doesn’t come from the sort of person you’d expect—or from a person at all.

One of the main draws of this collection for serious fans, or aspiring writers, will be the chance to trace the evolution of Pratchett’s craft—but there’s plenty here for readers who have never heard of him to enjoy.

FOUR NIGHTS WITH THE DUKE

James, Eloisa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Apr. 1, 2015 978-0-06-222391-3 Desperate to keep her disabled nephew and her secret identity as a writer safe, Mia Carrington blackmails the Duke of Pindar into marrying her.

During a particularly humiliating episode when they were both 15, Mia swore that the last person she’d ever marry would be Evander “Vander” Brody, the future Duke of Pindar. Since Mia’s father |

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and Vander’s mother scandalized society with their long-term affair, Mia would have been happy if she’d never had to see him again. So it’s especially galling when, years later, having been left at the altar by her fiance, she has to strong-arm him into marrying her. Her intention is simply to enter into a marriage of convenience, allowing her to take guardianship of her physically infirm nephew, whom she plans to support through her lucrative, though secret, writing career. Vander, convinced that she’s had a long-standing attraction to him, turns the tables and agrees to the marriage while setting his own conditions to assuage his battered pride. After they marry, he discovers he’s wrong about her motives and that his angry retaliation has jeopardized his own future, since it quickly becomes clear that Mia and her nephew, Charlie, have become necessary to his happiness. And it turns out that they’re also the targets of a diabolical relative, who may have been responsible for making Mia’s fiance disappear. James follows Three Weeks With Lady X (2014) with a sequel that matches its excellence and intensity.

With peeks at Thorn and India from Lady X, as well as other secondary characters and storylines that enhance and add texture to an already complex plot, James gives readers a welcome opportunity to revisit a popular community and flexes her powerful romantic storytelling muscles, somehow getting even stronger.

Historical romance at its smart, poignant best.

rage in the city and their loved ones are being firebombed by armies of automata, Leo and Mina manage to conduct an entire courtship. This is the book’s biggest flaw—the idea that these efficient and duty-driven characters would be having fabulous sex and learning to trust each other while the people relying on them are in danger.

The steampunk technology is fun and the characters nice and spicy, but the book requires too much suspension of disbelief to be a really good read. (Agent: Jessica Faust)

DIARY OF AN ACCIDENTAL WALLFLOWER

McQuiston, Jennifer Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-06-233501-2

Clare Westmore’s season is going swimmingly until she injures her ankle and meets a handsome doctor who makes her question everything.

Considered a prize catch of the season, Clare is determined to land a duke, and things seem to be going well. After all, Mr. Alban, the future Duke of Harrington, is paying special attention to her. But when she hurts her ankle and meets Dr. Daniel Merial, everything changes. Fighting her physical and intellectual attraction is hard enough, but when Daniel becomes emotionally connected to her family and her siblings respond positively to his presence, it becomes even harder to disengage, even as she and Daniel begin to spend more time together and learn secrets they’re not sure they want to know. Worse, Clare’s family has secrets even she doesn’t know, and apparently her social rise is enough of a threat that some of her rivals—some she believed to be friends—will seek any opportunity to besmirch her. Meanwhile, the more she learns about Daniel—including his problematic background, professional brilliance and highly tuned social conscience—the more she realizes her social aspirations mean nothing compared to the feelings she has for him. Apparently, though, the time has come for her family to face their many secrets, and as Clare navigates the fallout, good and bad, she lets go of society’s rigid expectations to find her true self, a self who obviously belongs with Daniel. McQuiston explores class, friendship and family ties in this refreshing romance that follows Daniel’s and Clare’s journeys to self-enlightenment and love.

A charming romance with a unique, entertaining storyline that makes us cheer for the doctor hero, his broadminded heroine and their eclectic supporting cast. (Agent: Kevan Lyon)

OF SILK AND STEAM

McMaster, Bec Sourcebooks Casablanca (416 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4022-9194-4 A coldly powerful duchess finds herself distracted from political machinations by the mischievously handsome heir to a dukedom.

McMaster (Forged by Desire, 2014, etc.) returns to her London Steampunk series with a paranormal romance set in Victorian London. Aramina “Mina’’ Duvall, the Duchess of Casavian, has gained a reputation for icy elegance, with no friends, no surviving family, and only a few discreet lovers, with whom she holds the reins. But Leo Barrons, secretly illegitimate but publicly the heir to the Duke of Caine, is determined to crack her perfect facade. Both Mina and Leo are blue bloods, members of the nobility who have been infected with the craving virus. The virus gives them supernatural strength and agility and a craving for blood. Both Mina and Leo are secretly working to overthrow the evil prince consort, who dominates the human queen, Alexandra, who is the rightful ruler of England.

Neither can afford to become romantically entangled with another member of the Council of Dukes, not while the prince consort is methodically destroying those who oppose him.

When full-scale civil war erupts in the city, Leo fights alongside his blood relations, the children of his biological father. Mina is fighting for her friend the queen. But somehow, while battles 44

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RETURN TO ME

FIRST TIME IN FOREVER

Moran, Kelly Berkley Sensation (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-425-27687-7

Morgan, Sarah Harlequin (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-373-78504-9

Two star-crossed lovers are reunited when she’s hired to help him recover from war injuries, allowing them to revisit their past and start over.

Mia has lived the past 10 years emotionally scarred from the night she gave herself, body and soul, to Cole Covington, the boy she thought she loved, only to have him immediately abandon her. Now a registered nurse, she’s approached

by Cole’s sister, Lacey, to help him heal from combat wounds suffered in the Middle East. Mia resists but reconsiders when Lacey offers her long-term financial help, a welcome boost since she’s responsible for her sister who has Down syndrome. Of course, helping Cole means guarding her heart and shoring up all her defenses. She fell for the rich boy before, only to be used and tossed aside, so she knows better than to be caught under his spell a second time. Yet the angry, wounded soldier is nothing like the impish, charming teenager she knew, and when the truth is revealed regarding the tragic and devastating night that forced them apart, Mia might lose herself again to the reluctant hero. Fighting for their happiness, Cole and Mia have to sift through 10 years’ worth of secrets and extricate themselves from past misunderstandings and guilt. In a generally satisfying series launch that includes a number of popular romance tropes—including rich boy/poor girl; wounded soldier; betrayed lovers; and simmering secrets—Moran successfully juggles emotions and characters, the past and the present. Though the novel is touching and gratifying, there are a few missteps. Readers might wonder why Mia was so quick to believe Cole had abandoned her, given that they swore their devotion only minutes before, and once they’ve basically reconciled, their problems don’t seem as insurmountable as they make them out to be.

Moran’s ability to create romantic and psychological tension makes us care about the characters and root for their happily-ever-after.

When Emily Donovan’s life implodes, she seeks refuge on Puffin Island, Maine.

Emily has spent her life building walls that allow her to avoid emotional attachments, so when her estranged movie-star sister dies, leaving Emily the guardian of her daughter, Lizzy, she isn’t sure where to turn.

She’s recently lost her job and her lukewarm boyfriend, and she needs to find a safe place for her niece, since the paparazzi are on the hunt for the movie star’s orphan. Emily takes Lizzy and escapes to her friend Brittany’s cottage on Puffin Island, but since a childhood tragedy left her terrified of water, life there is a challenge. With a de facto daughter, however, she knows that her irrational fear is just one obstacle she needs to face. She also has to overcome her isolationist tendencies, to forge a real connection to Lizzy, and attempt new friendships and maybe even a new professional direction. The truly fascinating and frightening element she must navigate, though, is her stunning attraction to Ryan Cooper, the owner of the local yacht club.

At first frantic to figure out where to go next, Emily finds that she’s suddenly tempted to stay. Of course, she barely knows Ryan, really, and when she learns about his past, it gives her a perfect excuse to keep him at arm’s length. Can Emily let go of a lifetime of fear and acknowledge her love for Lizzy, Ryan and an island full of people with arms wide open ready to embrace her?

Morgan begins a new series with a sweet, sexy and emotionally layered story that introduces us to a friendly, welcoming island and three college friends who each need a little nudge toward true love.

Touching, sensual and warmly inviting.

THE IMMORTAL WHO LOVED ME

Sands, Lynsay Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-06-231600-4 Thrust into an unknown supernatural world, Sherry Carne has to reorient her perspective, a situation made easier

by Basileios Argeneau, the sexy vampire who could be her life mate.

On the day a teenager bursts into Sherry’s kitchen-products store, pursued by a group of violent, bloodthirsty criminals, she learns of the existence of vampires and is propelled into a new world she never believed possible.

Meeting the Argeneau family is crazy enough, but her sizzling reaction to Basileios is mind-blowing, and when she learns she might be his life mate, she’s not sure what to think. The man is |

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compelling and the sex is explosive, but the idea that he would want to change her into an immortal makes her uneasy. When Sherry is folded into the tight Argeneau family, aspects of her interactions with the vampires lead Basil to believe she might not be as foreign to the supernatural world as she thinks. Exploring her past unearths a wealth of secrets that will completely change Sherry’s history and even her identity, but as she absorbs so many new truths, the criminals who started it all by invading her store have set their sights on her. As sworn enemies of the Argeneau family, they see Sherry as perfect prey since she’s mortal and destroying her would devastate Basil. Sands continues her Argeneau series with Basil’s story and maintains the levels of suspense, heat and humor she’s known for. Basil and Sherry’s relationship moves beyond the sexual, and the physical and emotional dangers they have to confront create a strong, endearing bond.

Intense sensuality, captivating romance. (Agent: Jenny Bent)

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nonfiction WHITE BACKLASH Immigration, Race, and American Politics

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: BECOMING A MOUNTAIN by Stephen Alter...................................... 50

Abrajano, Marisa; Hajnal, Zoltan L. Princeton Univ. (256 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-0-691-16443-4

AMERICAN WARLORD by Johnny Dwyer......................................... 58 WHIRLWIND by John Ferling..............................................................60 LENS OF WAR by J. Matthew Gallman; Gary W. Gallagher........... 61 BONAPARTE by Patrice Gueniffey...................................................... 65 THE FOLDED CLOCK by Heidi Julavits............................................. 70 DAUGHTERS OF THE SAMURAI by Janice P. Nimura.......................75 THE EDGE OF THE WORLD by Michael Pye.......................................77 THE AGE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

by Jeffrey D. Sachs.................................................................................77 KL by Nikolaus Wachsmann................................................................. 82

KL A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Wachsmann, Nikolaus Farrar, Straus and Giroux (880 pp.) $40.00 Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-374-11825-9

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Two University of California, San Diego, political science professors set out to conclusively establish the obvious.

Supported by dense statistical analysis, Abrajano (coauthor: Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Advertising to Latino Voters, 2010, etc.) and Hajnal (America’s Uneven Democracy: Race, Turnout, and Representation in City Politics, 2009, etc.) contend that immigration is transforming United States politics by arousing in many white voters “a broad backlash that results in more restrictive immigration policy, more punitive criminal justice policies, less generous public spending, and a large shift to the right politically that results in more support for the Republican Party.” But not all immigrants inspire this—“only one racial group—Latinos—is at the heart of white Americans’ [negative] response to immigration.” The authors further contend that this response is significantly driven by “an ongoing and often-repeated threat narrative that links the United States’ immigrant and Latino populations to a host of pernicious fiscal, social, and cultural consequences,” pushed by profit-seeking media. The force of the authors’ argument is damaged by a consistent failure to differentiate among attitudes toward the entire Latino population, documented Latino immigrants and undocumented immigration by anyone, resulting in frequent references to “anti-immigrant” policies and documents that target illegal immigration but, in some cases, actually support immigration generally. This muddling of critical concepts is endlessly confusing and sits uncomfortably beside the authors’ statistical charts. Also unconvincing is Abrajano and Hajnal’s claim to have teased out attitudes toward Latino immigration from all the other reasons advanced by pundits for white voters leaving the Democratic Party.

The authors ponderously demonstrate that white voters who oppose unrestricted Latino immigration increasingly support the party that shares their concern and resists paying for social services for undocumented immigrants. Not worth the effort.

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opening up north korea with books Over the holidays, I rented The Interview, the much-talked-about comedy from Seth Rogen, James Franco and company. As I expected, it was mostly amusing, occasionally over-the-top ridiculous and often sophomoric, but as I watched and thought about the controversy surrounding the movie’s release, I was consistently reminded of the level of secrecy surrounding North Korea and how difficult it has been for interested onlookers to receive any reliable information about the country and its people.

There have been a handful of solid histories and political/ cultural appraisals of North Korea over the past few years— Paul French’s North Korea, Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea, Victor Cha’s The Impossible State, not to mention Guy DeLisle’s fascinating graphic treatment, Pyongyang—but I have been particularly intrigued by one recent and one upcoming book about the notoriously impenetrable nation.

In Without You, There Is No Us, Suki Kim, who was born in South Korea and lived there until she immigrated to the United States when she was 13, chronicles her time teaching English at a school outside of Pyongyang, where she faced constant surveillance and nearly unbelievable strictness and censorship regarding her lesson plans. In our review, we noted how Kim effectively “directs the lights of emotion and intelligence on a country where ignorance is far from bliss.”

Paul Fischer’s A Kim Jong-il Production, publishing Feb. 3, tells the bizarre story of the Kim Jong-Il–sanctioned abduction of a pair of well-known South Korean filmmakers in order to boost the North Korean film industry, essentially just a propaganda factory for the leader and his government. Kirkus called it a “meticulously detailed feat of rare footage inside the DPRK’s propaganda machinery.”

Though neither provides a straightforward history of North Korea or fully makes sense of its government’s lunacy, both books illuminate some of the darker corners of the regime (and if you’re really intrigued by North Korea, there’s another book, Blaine Harden’s The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, coming out in March).

—E.L.

AFTER THE TALL TIMBER Collected Nonfiction

Adler, Renata New York Review Books (528 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-59017-879-9 A collection of articles by an outspoken writer.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff (The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, 2008, etc.) gathers 20 pieces of Adler’s nonfiction, published between 1965 and 2003, which serve as a witness to history and evidence of her hard-hitting journalism. In the 1960s and ’70s, Adler was prominent, opinionated and often controversial. Her career, Wolff writes, went “wrong, or at least astray...primarily for not being able to hold her tongue.” In 1968, working as a book reviewer for the New Yorker, she “no longer saw the point of reviewing other people’s books” unless they were important.

When the New York Times offered her a post as movie critic, she took that, only to become irritated by the obligation to review movies she thought unworthy of attention, her editors’ stylistic strictures and the newspaper’s objection to her “excessively scathing” reviews. She quit after 14 months, returning to the New Yorker, where she continued as a staff writer for 40 years.

Articles on the Six-Day War; the 1965 civil rights march in Selma; a Black Power march in Mississippi, with deft cameo portraits of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King; and Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court represent some of her work there. When the New Yorker changed ownership in 1985, Adler made enemies by writing a book that was harshly critical of its new editors and several prominent writers. She made more enemies after publishing an 8,000-word article in the New York Review of Books excoriating Pauline Kael’s When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews. Adler deemed the book “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler’s nonfiction has been available in other collections, whose introductions are included in this one.

Although this volume amply reveals the author’s attention to language and commitment to politically engaged journalism, many pieces seem dated, and a few are tediously long.

FORTUNE’S FOOL The Life of John Wilkes Booth

Alford, Terry Oxford Univ. (464 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 2, 2015 978-0-19-505412-5

The “first full-length biography” of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin offers much nuance and complexity to the killer, bordering on the downright sympathetic.

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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Reams have been written about John Wilkes Booth (18381865), who was shot in the ensuing manhunt on April 26, 1865, at the age of 26, yet much of the anecdotal claims have been tempered by hysteria over the assassination and don’t hold up to the light. Alford (History/Northern Virginia Community Coll.; Prince Among Slaves, 1976) sifts through the more balanced, credible sources of those who knew Booth before the assassination to flesh out a surprisingly engaging portrait of the brilliant young actor and deeply riven sympathizer to the Southern cause. The product of a British-born actor father (and bigamist) who settled his family in Virginia and grew alcoholic and erratic, young Booth was, by all accounts, a winning personality and a favorite of his mother and his numerous siblings. Agreeing early on not to bring her grief by enlisting in the Army when the war broke out, Booth worked at various stages in Northern cities during the conflict at the behest of his older, more seasoned actor brother, Edwin. He essentially stifled his true anti-abolitionist feelings, which had been radicalized with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. (A clue to Booth’s increasingly obsessive behavior was the fact that he attended Brown’s hanging.) Alford portrays a young man who was delighted by the applause, riches and fame he gained in his brief, meteoric rise as a dramatic actor yet alarmed by the national disintegration and tormented by his uselessness: Did his obsessive plotting about Lincoln grow out of his sense of duty to his beleaguered South, or was it a fantastic “self-conscious performance with himself as star”?

Alford paints some intriguing shades of gray in this elucidating portrait.

Lincoln boys. Algeo reports on Honest Abe’s whiskers as well as his milking and marketing chores, and he notes how Lincoln bought medicine for Fido even as he ruminated about slavery.

The author reintroduces us to a familiar cast of supporting players: good friend Josh Speed, Billy the Barber and law partner Bill Herndon. When it became apparent his master would run for president, “Fido’s carefree life would be forever changed,” and the 1860 campaign “would be sheer misery for Fido.” The dog remained in Springfield when the family moved to the White House. Not long after his former master was assassinated, Fido was killed by a knife-wielding drunk.

This lightweight book is all about the dog, and though more entertaining than the allegorical ALDD might be, it remains Lincoln-lite. (22 b/w photos)

ABE & FIDO Lincoln’s Love of Animals and the Touching Story of His Favorite Canine Companion

Algeo, Matthew Chicago Review (176 pp.) $22.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-55652-222-2

Yet another trickle in the constant flood of Lincolniana, this book reports on the qualities of the quadruped that filled the job of Lincoln family dog.

It is an old publishing yarn that the most salable books deal with the 16th president, medical practitioners or dogs. To guarantee a best-seller, title a book “Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” or, in the trade, ALDD. Reporter and pop historian Algeo (Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport, 2014, etc.) eschews the services of the doctor but tracks the dog’s life from the day in 1855 when Lincoln picked him up on a street in Springfield. The future president had engaged in hunting as a boy, but he soon gave up the practice. He was, it seems, an animal lover, while Mary Lincoln, on the other hand, had a bit of canine phobia. The lucky dog, no longer prey to dog catchers, was named Fido and became the prototype of all subsequent faithful Fidos, ministering to his master’s bouts of melancholy and frolicking with the |

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“There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas.” from becoming a mountain

BECOMING A MOUNTAIN Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime

Alter, Stephen Arcade (288 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-62872-510-0

With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s pen, a victim of violence looks to the

Himalayas for healing.

When Alter (Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking, 2007, etc.) and his wife, Ameeta, were viciously attacked in their home in the Himalayan foothills in 2008, the prolific writer didn’t know if he would ever put pen to page again. He wasn’t even sure he would be able to walk. With clarity and lyricism, Alter tells how he managed to do both. He also convincingly brings to life the culture, terrain, flora and fauna of the Himalayas. This is not a navel-gazing memoir in which the answers to life’s questions are resolved on a long, meditative walk. Instead, Alter offers a multifaceted consideration of life’s tough truths and stunning splendors.

The author aptly describes his approach as “taking dashan” on India’s Bandarpunch and Nanda Devi and Tibet’s Mount Kailash as he travels in the presence of these earthly teachers, observing and absorbing their lessons. Although Alter is by nature a solitary seeker, one senses that he is accompanied not only by the porters he must employ, but also by the diverse group of writers he quotes, ranging from Tenzing Norgay’s take on yeti folklore to Thoreau’s meditation on the virtues of walking. Alter’s own writing is subtle and specific, conveying his shifting perceptions in a way that no sweeping generalizations ever could. A self-professed atheist, the author’s writing is nonetheless deeply spiritual, as when he writes about the prayer flags he would design to hang from the Himalayan hemlocks: “a deconstructed rainbow, cross-referenced by the breeze.” The combination of realism and mysticism makes this a rich, satisfying memoir that plumbs the depths—and acknowledges the limits—of both man and mountain.

There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas. (5 b/w photos)

THE BILL OF RIGHTS The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties

Berkin, Carol Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $27.50 | May 1, 2015 978-1-4767-4379-0

Though we often take the Bill of Rights for granted, it took a monumental fight to get it approved. Berkin (History/ Baruch Coll.; Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, 2014, etc.) deftly examines its passage.

Of the states that initially ratified the Constitution, many included amendments and cries for a second Constitutional Convention. Replacing the restrictive Articles of Confederation, the Constitution addressed the continuing postwar economic depression and attempted to improve the cooperation of the 13 states. Many states, which had their own currencies and import duties, viewed the power to tax and regulate commerce as tyranny. To those, the checks and balances in the Constitution were not enough to preserve the states’ liberties, and the question of states rights vs. federalism was threatening to dissolve the union. As the new Congress met in New York in 1789, James Madison set about presenting a distillation of the hundreds of amendments requested by the ratifying states. It was a way to secure the loyalty of citizens who had fought for representation on a local level but were still wary of central government. Madison feared not an oppressive government but rather abusive practices of social majorities against minorities. He felt that the Bill of Rights was merely a “parchment barrier,” but he hoped it had the potential to become a standard of behavior. Even though passage was assured in the Federalist-dominated Congress, the author ably shows how difficult and obstructionist the House debate became as nerves frayed in the summer heat. With constant demands for a new Convention, Madison feared for the Constitution and knew that this Bill of Rights would distract attempts at rewriting it.

A highly readable American history lesson that provides a deeper understanding of the Bill of Rights, the fears that generated it and the miracle of the amendments.

RAISING GENERATION RX Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality

Blum, Linda M. New York Univ. (320 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 13, 2015 978-1-4798-7154-4

Blum (Sociology/Northeastern Univ.; At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States, 1999 etc.) addresses how demands on women have escalated and increasing numbers of maladjusted children are diagnosed with mental disabilities.

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Though gender roles are changing, mothers, writes the author, are still assigned “primary responsibility for child-care and the major share of blame when things go wrong.” This often places mothers in the position of navigating between educational and medical authorities as they seek help for their children. Overcrowded, underfunded schools have little tolerance for disruptive behavior, and insurers are unwilling to approve payments for counseling when medications are available at lower cost. Diagnoses of brain malfunction are frequently made after the fact. If taking a prescription drug such as Ritalin improves a child’s behavior, the thinking goes, then he has ADD; if not, perhaps he is bipolar, and new prescriptions become available.

The author interviewed a few dozen mothers who were faced with trying to get help for their disturbed children while navigating medical and educational bureaucracies. The social and economic backgrounds of the author’s interviewees range from upper-class stay-at-home moms to lower-class single mothers who serve as the sole support for their families and struggle to make ends meet. Despite their differences, their worries about overmedicating their children or seeing them fail in school are

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similar. Blum provides a wider social context, placing blame on “the neoliberal ideology...[that] values individual over public responsibility.” The growing number of children who are “medicalized” is a reflection “of anxieties about an uncertain world in which boundaries of privilege within and outside the United States are being redrawn,” raising the bar for success to include only the children with the highest levels of emotional and intellectual functioning.

A valuable contribution to the national dialogue on health care and education, told through the voices of the mothers whose children’s futures should be of concern to all of us.

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“This erudite work will take some effort to follow and understand, but it’s well-worth the effort for a glimpse into the world-shattering effect of the birth of the telescope.” from galileo’s telescope

WORK RULES! Insights from Inside Google that Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Bock, Laszlo Twelve (416 pp.) $30.00 | $16.99 e-book $35.00 Audiobook | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-4555-5479-9 978-1-4555-5480-5 e-book 978-1-4789-8087-2 Audiobook

The head of “People Operations” at Google discusses how the company grew into a world leader in its field and why economics was not necessarily the primary driver of its development.

Bock’s account of the company’s origin and growth challenges traditional top-down business models based on monetary incentives and bonuses to mobilize and motivate employees in pursuit of corporate goals. As the author tells it, “Googlers” have built a self-replicating culture of continuous innovation and improvement, from the eponymous search engine to Android phones and operating system and self-driving cars. Trust is at the company’s core. Each of their highly qualified employees is free to contribute their best and help others solve problems, transparently, with research supported by rigorously tested data.

“Inside Google,” writes the author, “we don’t have a lot of rule books and policy manuals.” Nonetheless, Bock offers his own interpretation in the form of 10 work rules that can help transform a workplace into a “high freedom environment.” These include giving your own work meaning, focusing on turning overperformers into teachers and working with underachievers to do better, not confusing development with managing performance, and being both frugal and generous. Bock insists that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and he dismisses the “up or out model of management” associated with former GE head Jack Welch—this scheme rigorously ranks workers annually and dumps the bottom 10 percent. As Bock shows, Google couldn’t afford the luxury of wasting one of its largest investments: the associates. Compensation, promotion policy, management practices and performance management are all designed to foster associates’ contributions to building a “learning institution.” A perfect example is Google, writes the author, which is “twenty five times” more exclusive than Harvard and “profoundly suspicious of power.”

An intriguing profile of an innovative company that continues to shake up the world.

GALILEO’S TELESCOPE A European Story

Bucciantini, Massimo; Camerota, Michele; Giudice, Franco Translated by Bolton, Catherine Harvard Univ. (344 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 23, 2015 978-0-674-73691-7

Italian professors of the history of science Bucciantini (Univ. of Siena), Camerota (Univ. of Cagliari) and Giudice (Univ. of Bergamo) explore the geographical dispersion of the telescope and the radical change its “new sky” produced.

The first mention of a telescope was in 1608, when a spectacle maker presented a tube with a convex lens at one end and a concave lens at the other. So great was the interest that before a patent could be granted, spyglasses were re-created all across Europe. The best, of course, was Galileo’s, and he elaborated on his ideas in his short book, Sidereus nuncius, which radically changed the world of science and religion, introducing a new order of the heavens. Galileo noted his discovery of the lunar mountains, the true cause of the Milky Way and the four satellites of Jupiter. More importantly, he stated that Venus orbited the sun, confirming Copernicus’ theory. This innovative look at some of the most important few years in scientific history is consistently illuminating, as the authors show the connections among the enlightened, scientifically minded courts of Europe.

Their research is vast and their findings, remarkable; they discovered new letters and little notes Galileo made on the backs of envelopes, often part of shopping lists. The communication among Brussels, Prague, London, Venice and Madrid that took place in the first year shows the importance of the findings generated by the simple instrument. By 1611, the Collegio Romano had approved Galileo’s work, except for heliocentricity; they still claimed that while other planets revolved around the sun, Earth was central and immobile. Contemporary works on Sidereus nuncius cited by the authors prove its broad effect.

This erudite work will take some effort to follow and understand, but it’s well-worth the effort for a glimpse into the world-shattering effect of the birth of the telescope. (25 halftones; 5 maps)

PRINCES AT WAR The Bitter Battle Inside Britain’s Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII Cadbury, Deborah PublicAffairs (368 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-61039-403-1

A spirited historical lesson that traces how the fallout from the abdication crisis of Edward VIII in 1936 ultimately aided England in its finest hour.

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What if Edward VIII, the pro-German Duke of Windsor, had not abdicated to marry twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and instead compelled his country to accept appeasement with Germany? British author Cadbury (Chocolate Wars: The 150Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, 2010, etc.) explores the many layers involved in the abdication crisis of 1936, which ceded the British crown to the seemingly least prepared of the four sons of George V, George VI, aka Bertie, who revealed himself in the subsequent crisis of war the most suitable and stalwart of all. Not only was Bertie plagued by the famous stutter, but he always played second fiddle to his older brother—the dazzlingly charming and smart David. Bertie had little confidence in himself, living “with the constant unspoken reproach of failing to live up to people’s expectations of royalty.”

Even Winston Churchill, a great friend of David, wondered if the monarchy shouldn’t skip over the other two sons and settle on the youngest, the Duke of Kent (Prince George), who was most like his oldest brother, dashing and capable. Nonetheless, the coming clash with the Nazis would sift the dynastic wheat from the chaff: While David and his new bride wallowed in

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France, traitorously visited Hitler, curried favor with high-ranking Nazis and seriously entertained fantasies of being replaced on the British throne once the Germans conquered Britain, the other three brothers plunged into the war effort. Wonderfully sympathetic to George VI in his defining moments (while excoriating the Windsors), Cadbury weaves an engaging portrait of a king resigned to his fate yet honorably resolute, gaining the cooperation of his two loyal brothers, Gloucester and Kent, and keeping his wayward brother at arm’s length and out of trouble.

A lively tale of monarchical machinations, more familiar to American readers since The King’s Speech. (b/w photos)

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“Richly layered and vibrant, Chen’s stirring tale of bravery and perseverance in the face of oppression is a moving call to arms for the ideas of human dignity and the rule of law.” from the barefoot lawyer

A DEATH ON DIAMOND MOUNTAIN A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment Carney, Scott Gotham Books (320 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-59240-861-0

A diffuse tale of spiritual misadventure.

A supposed holy man, camped with cultish followers in a remote corner of Arizona, dallies with a student/colleague. In a Clinton-esque twist, he maintains that he has not had sex with her, a mortal, but with the goddess she embodies and thus remains celibate. The student/goddess leaves him to take up with a coreligionist. The two leave the community for exile in the nearby mountains, where he dies of exposure.

That’s just the barest outline of a tale that becomes stranger with each added detail. Heavily reported in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and other outlets, the story was yet another in a long list of cautionary examples about the dangers of cults. Bringing little new to the account and underemphasizing the guru’s outlier status in the topography of Buddhism in the West, Carney (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, 2011) adds value mostly in his considerations of what motivates people to yield to the will of potentially dangerous leaders: “Looked at from one perspective, his plunge toward enlightenment is an obvious case of madness.

Yet lurking in the shadows of the cave where he died are clues about the idiosyncratic reasons Americans have adapted Eastern mysticism to their own ends.” It’s a potentially fruitful path, but Carney stumbles around on it, the narrative becoming a loosely connected set of observations on how meditation works and how weird true believers can be.

One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer’s sense of insight into what drives people in their quest of something beyond.

THE BAREFOOT LAWYER A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China Chen Guangcheng Henry Holt (352 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-8050-9805-1

Secretive government agents pursue a blind dissident who scales the walls of his prison in the dead of night. No, it’s not the next Hollywood thriller but rather the story of Chen’s life.

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people in his region. Instead, through his intelligence and force of will, he finished university—in Chinese medicine, then one of the only degrees open to blind students—and built an international reputation as a human rights crusader. His first book recounts his unlikely rise to fame, his constant harassment by the authorities and his prolonged imprisonment following a quixotic campaign against the one-child policy. Chen’s lawyers chartered a bus to see him in jail, but “it was pulled over by two unmarked cars. A group of men boarded the bus and beat the two attorneys with metal clubs. Both were badly injured, with [one] sustaining a skull fracture.” After serving his time, Chen was immediately locked up with his family in a sort of draconian house arrest, where his dozens of guards competed to see who could shout the most colorful insults at his wife and children. Tense and tightly written, the book is a suspenseful window onto Chen’s struggle, with disaster constantly on the horizon. His courageous escape attempt began inauspiciously, but it ended thousands of miles away with his family safely ensconced in New York. The memoir ends with his arrival in America, omitting mention of how he’s since alienated many of his friends and supporters with his deepening ties to ultraconservative organizations.

Richly layered and vibrant, Chen’s stirring tale of bravery and perseverance in the face of oppression is a moving call to arms for the ideas of human dignity and the rule of law. (16-page photo insert; 2 maps)

KING JOHN And the Road to Magna Carta Church, Stephen Basic (320 pp.) $29.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-465-09299-4

Reigning from 1199 to 1216, King John’s villainy remains a mainstay of popular media. Church (Medieval History/Univ. of East Anglia; The Household Knights of King John, 1999) does not downplay his defects in this scholarly but readable biography.

John’s father, Henry II (1133-1189), was a tough act to follow. Competent and pugnacious, he vastly expanded the realm but could not control John’s elder brothers, who regularly fought their father and among each other. After Henry’s death, Richard I seized the throne and proclaimed his nephew, Arthur, his successor. Church’s account of John’s 10 years under Richard is an often numbing series of political intrigues, wars, betrayals and negotiations, during which he won his brother’s trust. After Richard’s sudden death, John prevailed over Arthur’s supporters and seemed secure in an empire that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

Unfortunately, he faced a French king, Philip Augustus, who was determined to regain his English-ruled provinces. He quickly succeeded in Normandy, and John’s talent for offending French allies made matters worse. He returned to England in 1203, spending the next 10 years trying to recover these lands while also fighting the |

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“Both a gripping personal story and an insightful historical-cultural study.” from off the radar

Scots, Irish and Welsh and his increasingly hostile barons opposed to foreign service, high and perhaps illegal taxation, and his highhanded methods. Their rebellion resulted in John signing the iconic Magna Carta in 1215. However, neither John nor the barons made much of an effort to honor the peace accord, and civil war was raging when John died the following year.

Church sticks close to the evidence, almost all government records and surviving chronicles devoted to the deeds of great men. The result is not a page-turner but an insightful, likely definitive, biography.

OFF THE RADAR A Father’s Secret, a Mother’s Heroism, and a Son’s Quest Copeland, Cyrus Blue Rider Press (356 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-399-15850-6

Copeland (editor: A Wonderful Life: 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit, 2006, etc.) explores the mystery surrounding his father’s controversial persecution in revolutionary-era Iran.

The author attempts to reclaim his family’s pre-revolutionary past and uncover the mysterious life and death of his father, American Max Copeland, who was married to (and eventually represented by) the first female lawyer of the Islamic Republic. “I would come to understand that I am the by-product of the two most ethnocentric cultures on the face of the earth,” Copeland writes. “Cultures tend to perceive the world through their own unique lenses, of course, but Iran and America are fairly exceptional in this regard.”

In a narrative that alternates among the differing perspectives of his father, his mother, Shahin, and himself, Copeland paints a lucid portrait of chaotic late-1970s Tehran, the last days of the shah’s reign and the beginnings of a repressive Islamic state. During the early days of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Copeland’s father was caught illegally selling radar equipment for Westinghouse, which, like most other Western-run companies, was shutting down and liquidating their Iranian assets subsequent to the Islamic takeover in 1979. Max was accused of spying for the CIA and was tried in an Islamic court for trading with the enemy, among other things. Having no way to defend himself in the courtroom, Shahin was permitted to take up his case in court. Although Copeland doesn’t solve any big mysteries surrounding his father’s life and alleged connections to the CIA, he does concoct an engaging narrative, however fragmented, that highlights his family’s resilience in the face of challenging, unforeseen political circumstances. Along the way, the author’s personal immersion in his family’s history helps him come to terms with his Iranian heritage and allows him to build a much-needed figurative bridge between two very different but equally misunderstood cultures.

Both a gripping personal story and an insightful historical-cultural study.

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THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES A Toolbox for the Extreme Present

Coupland, Douglas; Obrist, Hans Ulrich; Basar, Shuman Blue Rider Press (128 pp.) $15.00 paper | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-399-17386-8

“There’s no shopping in Star Wars.” But then, where does Luke Skywalker get all his cool gear? That’s a question that this provocative book never fully answers.

Novelist Coupland (Worst. Person. Ever., 2014, etc.) takes a cue from fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan in serving up stern little sound bites, starkly illustrated sometimes as blackand-white graphics, sometimes as captions to jarring, even apocalyptic photographs: “Healthy people are bad for capitalism.” “In the future everywhere will be Detroit.” “Rodney King was the YouTube of 1993.” Swiss curator and futurist Obrist (Ways of Curating, 2014) joins the fun, content to keep things oracular and, well, McLuhan-esque. If you have a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy to hand, you’ll have the idea, save for this book speaks to a future that may not be entirely pleasing, especially to the older set, whose minds have not been remade, courtesy of the Internet and such, into latticework things. The future is unevenly distributed: In much of the world Coupland and company present, chaos and total, constant war hold sway, people are bored (which favors the outbreak of war), disconnected and Internet-addicted, and the hive mind rules. And then there are those Fukushima-style cataclysms to worry about: “The Earth begins to quake and quake and our planet is converted into a perpetual jiggling smoothie....” Slogans are useful, but they beg for discussion even as they preclude the possibility of discussion. Thus a statement such as “Technology often favors horrible people” goes unelaborated. It may be true, but lacking an example to hang the idea on, readers are forced to take things on faith—and the best vision of the future allows for evidence and trust with verification, courtesy of search engines and smart people.

Strange, unusual in form and dislocating—especially if you have an older-model linear mind. For those qualities alone, this is worth a look, though its hipper-than-thou selfsatisfaction runs close to the surface of a superficial book.

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RECAPITULATIONS

Crapanzano, Vincent Other Press (304 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-59051-593-8

A book of memories about the act of remembering.

In this memoir, anthropologist Crapanzano (Comparative Literature and Anthropology/CUNY Graduate Center; The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals, 2011, etc.) uses all the tools of his trade, approaching his memories skeptically and psychoanalytically, as a set of data where the truth is wrapped in self-protective layers.

He considers all the key events of his life: growing up on the grounds of a New Jersey mental institution—where his father was a psychiatrist— then losing his father at an early age, which led to estrangement from his mother; a peripatetic foreign and domestic education at Harvard, followed by marriage to New Yorker writer Jane Kramer and a long career at CUNY. Crapanzano knew Margaret Mead and Jacques Lacan, and he saw the rise and fall of Paul de Man—the literary theorist later outed as a Nazi collaborator—but the book is more concerned with what he’s learned along the way. Memoirists, he writes, always want the big picture; they “have to give their life a raison d’etre that transcends it.” He never takes the straight route. Like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, Crapanzano becomes unstuck in time, recalling events as they occur to him, casually going from present to near present to far past to many places in between, always weighing what he felt then against what he knows now. He can be rough (or ruthlessly honest) regarding old friends, but he never stops interrogating himself. “What was my style? What were my styles?” he asks of his younger self. “Was I like everyone else at Harvard?” Later, he questions his desire to settle old scores: “Am I being discreet in writing this? Am I avenging myself?”

Crapanzano’s self-conscious, self-analytical style makes this a unique and interesting search for lost time.

WHAT STANDS IN A STORM Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South’s Tornado Alley

Cross, Kim Atria (304 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4767-6306-4

A wind-swept re-creation of a deadly meteorological catastrophe conveyed through the perspectives of those who survived it.

Describing the 2011 three-day, multistate superstorm as “the biggest tornado outbreak in the history of recorded weather” could be considered an understatement to journalist and |

Southern Living editor Cross, who spent a year researching and documenting it. Building on a foundation of interviews, video records, frantic text messages and personal memorabilia, she intricately details the entire ordeal, from the formation of the first of hundreds of ferocious funnel clouds to the sheer destruction and human anguish left in their wakes. Springtime in the South means tornado season, an ominous period that “hovered like an unspoken question” over Southern states like Mississippi and Alabama, which suffered the greatest wrath from the disastrous superstorm that created over 350 tornadoes over a three-day period. Cross chronicles this historic weather event through the eyes of an affecting assortment of residents whose lives were touched by the natural disaster unfolding in their own backyards, interspersed with accompanying documentation of the storm’s increasing ferocity, which, in the end, created a “mile-wide swath of emptiness” where once-thriving neighborhoods stood. The author profiles promising University of Alabama students, families, fearless storm chasers, dedicated disaster responders and weathermen with their eyes on the blackened skies. Though topographical media and photographs aren’t included, Cross journalistically illustrates the storm’s unrelenting fury, heartbreaking aftermath and organized recovery efforts through dramatic firsthand stories, putting a human face on a tragic chain of events that claimed a devastating 348 casualties in 72 hours. The author also includes an “In Memoriam” section that lists the “Alabamians who lost their lives and... the people who face a world without them.”

Armchair storm chasers will find much to savor in this grippingly detailed, real-time chronicle of nature gone awry.

CUCKOO Cheating by Nature

Davies, Nick Illus. by McCallum, James Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 26, 2015 978-1-4088-5656-7

Davies (Behavioral Ecology/Univ. of Cambridge; Cambridge Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats, 2000, etc.) chronicles his 30-year attempt to solve what he calls “an enduring puzzle: how does the cuckoo get away with such outrageous behavior?”

During his years at Cambridge as a student and a faculty member, the author became fascinated by the cuckoos that frequented a nearby wetland during nesting season. This is an account of his and his collaborators’ efforts to solve the mystery.

Davies’ special interest as an ornithologist has been to try to understand how they were able to trick the unwitting host species into accepting foreign eggs—particularly after the fledgling cuckoo emerged from his egg and set about to ruthlessly destroy the host’s remaining eggs. One of their earliest discoveries was that the eggs laid by different subspecies of European cuckoos have evolved to closely mimic those of different host kirkus.com

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“A dark triumph—a meticulous geopolitical narrative and gripping tale of an American son lost to evil.” from american warlord

species (warblers, pipits and wagtails) in size, color and markings. Not only do they foist their eggs on other species; they also ruthlessly destroy the host eggs to make a place for their own. A female cuckoo will time her egg-laying to that of the host female, removing a host egg and replacing it with her own. The faster-maturing cuckoo will hatch first and destroy nest mates that are potential rivals and then mimic their calls begging to be fed. Relieved of parenting duties, the adult cuckoos conserve energy for an early return to their winter habitat.

While host birds do attempt to destroy the intruder’s eggs, they are confused due to the variability of their own eggs. A battle for survival ensues between the aggressor cuckoos and the defending hosts, involving genetic and behavioral shifts.

“My hope is that this reads like a nature detective story,” writes Davies. He has achieved his goal and more in this fascinating study of “an evolutionary arms race.”

AMERICAN WARLORD A True Story Dwyer, Johnny Knopf (368 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 10, 2015 978-0-307-27348-2

Shocking page-turner about Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s Americanborn son, Chucky, the first U.S citizen to be federally prosecuted for torture.

Journalist Dwyer’s debut impresses as both old-fashioned immersive journalism and a grisly narrative using the Taylors’ rise and fall as an unforgiving lens through which to view recent West African history. Charles Taylor’s transformation from a leftist bureaucrat to a destructive warlord was one of the persistent political nightmares of the 1990s, but few knew at the time that he’d recruited his estranged teenage son. “Liberia,” writes the author, “presented to Chucky the possibility that he was heir to something larger.”

Chucky had already shown attraction to “gangster” culture during his suburban Florida adolescence. Immersion in his father’s court led him to evince sociopathic tendencies, and he was once tasked with developing a new paramilitary force, the Anti-Terrorist Unit. Initially, his depredations were merely urban legend against the larger backdrop of his father’s cynical promotion of proxy wars. Once Taylor was elected president, Dwyer writes, “[h]e could not be called a criminal, because he had legalized all the rackets.” Yet things fell apart for Taylor in 2003, when he was both deposed by rebels and indicted by the U.N.’s Special Court for Sierra Leone. Chucky fled to Trinidad, but after two years, he attempted to re-enter the U.S. and was immediately arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Prosecuting torture was complicated,” writes the author. “It had simply never happened.” Yet the government assembled a damning case against Chucky, eliciting testimony from several torture victims, resulting in a 97-year sentence. Dwyer deftly captures both the larger implications of Taylor’s reign and the human-scaled horror of his son’s descent: “Chucky’s story had 58

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been improbable and at times surreal, but its brutality was real.”

A dark triumph—a meticulous geopolitical narrative and gripping tale of an American son lost to evil.

DREAMS OF EARTH AND SKY

Dyson, Freeman New York Review Books (312 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-1-59017-854-6

A collection of reviews and essays first published in the New York Review of Books, from Dyson (The Scientist as Rebel, 2006 etc.), a celebrated elder statesman of modern science.

The themes here are similar to those in the author’s previous volume of reviews, which covered his contributions to the NYRB from 1996 to 2006. Although Dyson is a physicist, he predicts that advances in biology will trump those in physics over the next 50 years and that biotechnology will usurp the role presently played by computers. Peering into the future, the author imagines that solar collectors will be made obsolete by highly efficient, genetically engineered black-leaved plants that substitute silicon for chlorophyll. More controversially, he suggests that the computer models on which predictions of global warming are based are too high by a factor of five. These simplifying assumptions, he writes, “neglect some messy processes that they cannot calculate such as the variable input of high energy particles from the sun and the detailed behavior of clouds in the atmosphere.” Reviewing a recent book about Manhattan project Director Robert Oppenheimer, whom Dyson knew during his tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the author suggests that Oppenheimer lost his security clearance because he advocated developing tactical nuclear weapons rather than big bombs, an issue then hotly contested between the Air Force and the Army.

One of the charms of this book is Dyson’s openness to criticism of his reviews, which he excerpts along with his responses. He especially welcomes justified factual corrections—e.g., a reference to “David” rather than Daniel Kahneman.

Readers who enjoyed the first volume of reviews will be pleased with this follow-up, and new readers will be delighted by the fascinating insider’s view of the scientific community and its intersection with the political establishment.

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NOT WHAT I EXPECTED Help and Hope for Parents of Atypical Children

THE SECRET GAME A Basketball Story in Black and White

Eichenstein, Rita Perigee/Penguin (264 pp.) $16.00 paper | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-399-17176-5

As a pediatric neuropsychologist, Eichenstein tries to answer all of the questions parents ask when their children are diagnosed with dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, OCD and other brain differences that affect learning and development.

The questions include: Is this a lifelong disorder? Will she get better? What interventions should we try? In addition, the author attempts to answer some of the questions they don’t ask: How could this be true? Is this my fault? Am I a bad parent? Drawing on the emotional stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—Eichenstein makes the case that parents of atypical children often go through a similar process, the “five stages of acceptance,” when facing their children’s diagnoses. In occasionally repetitive chapters, the author addresses each phase and provides definitions of various disorders, as well as a sprinkling of composite case studies. There’s a lot of useful information here and a clear intention to acknowledge parents’ struggles, but it often reads more like a clinical—and sometimes-critical—assessment of the parents. For instance, Eichenstein dismisses parental attempts to search for alternatives to conventional advice as evidence that they are in a denial or bargaining phase. To those who want to research the diagnoses themselves, she writes, “[m]ost people do not have the time... and even if they did, they would not understand what they were reading.” Leave it to the professionals, she seems to be saying, a message that may put off many readers. The author’s suggested remedies include a menu of self-help therapies like meditation, self-compassion and cognitive reframing. The author provides support, with a side of scolding, for parents facing a child’s diagnosis with a neuropsychological disorder.

Clinical distancing undercuts Eichenstein’s otherwise compassionate advice for parents of atypical children.

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Ellsworth, Scott Little, Brown (400 pp.) $27.00 | $12.99 e-book $24.98 Audiobook | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-316-24461-9 978-0-316-24463-3 e-book 978-1-61969-874-1 Audiobook

An account of a little-known basketball game in which the opponents played as much against Jim Crow as each other.

One morning in March 1944 in the segregated South, an all-white team from the Duke University Medical School played an exhibition against the Eagles of the North Carolina College for Negroes. The game occurred in a mostly empty gym behind locked doors; even key school officials were left unawares. Most other facts about the game are less than clear, as no known documents survive. From the kindling of surviving participants’ memories, Ellsworth (African-American History and African Studies/Univ. of Michigan; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, 1982) constructs a book heavy in historical context and biographical sketches but noticeably short on the particulars of the game referred to in the title. It’s not the author’s fault that the only reporter to witness the game tore up his notes or that the game registers and score sheets of Eagles coach John McLendon were lost by a former player.

However, the brevity of the game account, which comes deep into a detail-laden narrative, would have benefited by greater disclosure of sources (it’s not always enough to tuck a note at the back). In order to get to the game, readers must travel distant byways (overseas with James Naismith, for instance), as the author gives significant space to an assemblage of characters that aren’t easily understood as significant. Many sports books bog down in play-by-play detail, but that’s not the problem here.

Even so, like many sports books, the prose contains heightened language—e.g., “a juggernaut of speed and finesse that left opponents demolished, referees exhausted, and fans in awe”— and mentions of “revolution” and a “new kind of basketball.”

Given the game’s clandestine nature, there’s little evidence that it changed societal perceptions. Again, no foul there.

An intriguing sports tale more suited to a magazine piece than a book.

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“...Ferling employs his extensive knowledge to relay a tremendously complicated and multilayered story of the gradual embracing of ideas of independence by the once-loyal colonists.” from whirlwind

WHIRLWIND The American Revolution and the War that Won It Ferling, John Bloomsbury (416 pp.) $30.00 | May 5, 2015 978-1-62040-172-9

From servants to citizens: a nuanced study of the American Revolution focused on how the war changed the way Ameri-

cans saw themselves.

Having written abundantly about the Revolutionary War, accomplished scholar Ferling (Emeritus, History/Univ. of West Georgia; Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation, 2013, etc.) employs his extensive knowledge to relay a tremendously complicated and multilayered story of the gradual embracing of ideas of independence by the once-loyal colonists. Economic incentives drove the colonists to question the relationship with the mother country. They were offended by having to pay for Britain’s chronic warfare, furnish soldiers and then endure England’s “coldhearted indifference” to matters of the colonists’ “vital interests.” Attempts by Britain to enforce imperial trade laws—by the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, one-third of England’s trade was with the colonists—only led to more alarm that Britain was scheming to take away liberties.

Little by little, the colonists began to react, and Ferling takes note of certain important early firebrands, e.g.—Virginia’s Patrick Henry, Boston’s Samuel Adams, John Dickinson and his “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” Others, such as Benjamin Franklin, emissary to London, played both sides until they were sure which way the wind was blowing. Ferling effectively shows how the colonists’ sense of themselves changed from the very bottom up. From deep in the provincial hamlets, they were organizing, training their militias and accepting more egalitarian proclivities and self-governing practices, such as freedom from the Anglican yoke. Hostilities against Britain provoked a “rooted hatred” for the mother country and a “growing sense of identity as Americans,” although the outcome was in no way certain. In fact, for many years, it looked quite bleak. Ferling impressively demonstrates how the military reality eventually galvanized the fledgling country.

A first-rate historian’s masterful touch conveys the profound changes to colonists’ “hearts and minds.”

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A TASTE FOR CHAOS The Art of Literary Improvisation

Fertel, Randy Spring Journal Books (500 pp.) $32.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-935528-68-5

An inquisitive examination of the impulse that yields literary improvisation—which is to say, literature itself.

A writer, Samuel Johnson observed, will devour a whole library in order to make a book. Certainly literary scholar and philanthropist Fertel (The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, 2011) did just that, to judge by his 30-page bibliography, a tour de force of reading in the fields of literary theory and history befitting a George Steiner or Erich Auerbach. Fertel is not as straight to the point as those two predecessors, and his narrative sometimes wobbles on an unsteady axis built on the premise that improvisation “is the trace that is always already there, anticipating and in part belying Derrida’s profound originality.” The text is shot through with ideas Derrida-ean and Jungian, establishing that improvisation—the creative spirit that leads not just to such transgressive works of literature as Tristram Shandy, but also to the Trojan horse and similarly spectacular cons—is itself an archetype, a “kind of dark disruptive version ever in dialogue with the mainstream” and “a state of being where fundamental polarities of our being contend.” As such, improvisation is naturally a slippery thing to pin down but also easy to pin on whomever one wishes: Herman Melville is an improvisational writer as much as Jack Kerouac, and as for Shakespeare, well, he’s as versatile as Odysseus. Though the terms of argument beg for more precise definition, Fertel’s field bears plenty of fruit, particularly when he gets down to particulars, as when, fairly early in the book, he enumerates the stylistic conventions of improvisation: simplicity, free association, formlessness and the like. By that measure, Kerouac fits but formula-bound Homer doesn’t, but that’s the headache-inducing stuff that only a good analysis can cure.

A smart blend of psychology, philosophy and literary history, well-written if sometimes obscure; of broad interest to students of contemporary literary theory.

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THE GREAT PARADE Broadway’s Astonishing, Never-to-Be-Forgotten 1963-1964 Season

WATERLOO

Forrest, Alan Oxford Univ. (224 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-0-19-966325-5

Filichia, Peter St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $27.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-250-05135-6

An exuberant look at one year on Broadway.

In this chatty, gossipy history, former Newark Daily Ledger theater critic Filichia (Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals that Did Not Win the Tony Award, 2013, etc.) looks back exactly 50 years and insists that the 1963-64 Broadway season—June 1, 1963, to May 31, 1964—was the greatest ever.

That season, however, seems no greater than many others. In 1956, to take one example, there were many iconic Broadway openings, including Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell; Bells Are Ringing, with Judy Holliday; Long Day’s Journey Into Night, featuring Fredric March; and My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. The season Filichia examines in overwhelming, sometimes-hyperbolic, detail had its hits, to be sure: Hello, Dolly!, Barefoot in the Park, 110 in the Shade and Funny Girl, starring one of the author’s favorites, Barbra Streisand.

Filichia offers abundant evidence to support his view, summarizing plots, citing actors, directors, producers, playwrights, choreographers, composers and lyricists, critics, ticket sales and losses, and analyzing the contents and covers of every Playbill for, it seems, every show. He knows which directors turned down scripts and why and which actors didn’t get which parts and why. After Nanette Fabray stubbornly refused a chance to audition for the role of Dolly Levi, Carol Channing campaigned aggressively to get the part and made Hello, Dolly! a smash hit. Filichia is especially interested in the politics behind Tony nominations, winners and losers. He deems Carol Burnett’s failure to win a nomination as best actress in a musical for the now-forgotten Fade Out—Fade In “one of the greatest insults a Broadway musical has ever endured.”

To call Filichia a devotee of Broadway is an understatement; this book will interest only die-hard fans like himself.

Despite the title, this book is less about the battle than its legacy.

Readers of Gordon Corrigan’s superb 2014 history will not regret opening another book on the same subject, but they may safely skip the first 50 pages during which British historian Forrest (Emeritus, Modern History/Univ. of York; Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire, 2003, etc.) delivers a workmanlike account of the run-up and fighting before settling down to describe its aftermath. Victory produced celebration throughout Britain, and—unlike similar celebrations after both World War I and II—the glow never faded. It was the only nation to make the battle “a centerpiece of national memory...one of the great military turning-points of modern history and presented it as a victory for British arms, British resolve, and a specifically British national character.” Germans outnumbered Britons even within the Duke of Wellington’s army, and historians agree that the arrival of the Prussians late in the day tipped the balance. While Prussian (and later, German) writers grumble at Britain’s neglect of their role, they have never given Waterloo the same obsessive attention, preferring the 1813 Battle of the Nations, which involved far more troops, took place on German soil, and crushed Napoleon’s forces, leading to his first abdication. Waterloo occupies a lesser role in French tradition, but Napoleon remains a national idol, so no one ignores it. Suppressed during the Bourbon restoration, Napoleon worship exploded after the 1830 revolution, energized by Napoleon III’s rule and still more by France’s humiliation of 1870, which may have added pathos and poignancy to the Napoleonic legend, “an element of Shakespearean tragedy that helped illuminate his very existence.”

A modest but valuable addition to a vast genre.

LENS OF WAR Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

Gallman, J. Matthew; Gallagher, Gary W.—Eds. Univ. of Georgia (256 pp.) $32.95 | Apr. 15, 2015 978-0-8203-4810-0

A pictorial guide to the changes in our historical views of the Civil War, curated by Gallman (History/Univ. of Florida; Northerners at War, 2010, etc.) and Gallagher (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Union War, 2012, etc.).

Though these iconic photographs of the war were often included in scholarly works, the authors realized that few actually took the time to analyze the pictures themselves. This book opens a new page of considerations of the people, victims |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Jill Leovy

The Los Angeles Times reporter has seen a lot of one particularly bleak subject: homicide

By Walter Heymann

Photo courtesy Jill Connelly

Bryant Tennelle was shot dead on May 11, 2007, as he walked with a friend down the south side of West 80th Street in South Central Los Angeles. He was an 18-year-old black man, just recently graduated from high school, and he was wearing the wrong hat.

Tennelle’s murder was one of 845 that year in Los Angeles, most of them concentrated in a few neighborhoods and many of which involved black men shooting other black men. It’s a pattern of violent crime that pockmarks urban areas across the country, particularly in the South. In the United States, black men make up only about 6 percent of the population but are almost 40 percent of those murdered, the overwhelming majority by other black men.

Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, tells the story of the police investigation of 62

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Tennelle’s murder and uses it as a jumping-off point to explore the seemingly endemic high rates of blackon-black homicide in South Central. A journalist at the Los Angeles Times, Leovy was embedded in the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street Division starting in 2002. Her book is as important as it is difficult, especially now.

In the United States, the conviction rate for intraracial homicide involving black men is shockingly low. In South Central, witnesses’ fears of retribution, violence, and distrust of the police and the judicial system make solving these crimes especially difficult. Leovy notes that in the early 1990s, the conviction rate for homicide in Los Angeles County was just 36 percent. Like so many others, Tennelle’s case initially went cold, too.

Ghettoside details the working lives of a number of remarkably dedicated homicide detectives in the 77th, which covers South Central. Leovy describes their work as a “craft.” “They have very strong opinions about who’s good and who’s bad and what good work is and what bad work is and what the standard of craftsmanship should be,” she says. Some four months after he was shot dead—and his case increasingly unlikely to be solved—Tennelle’s case found its way to Detective John Skaggs.

Skaggs, himself the son of a Long Beach homicide detective, is the star of the book. A hardworking perfectionist, he considered a case clear rate of over 80 percent to be respectable, even disdainfully referring to other detectives as “forty percenters.” When he was tapped to become a homicide detective in the LAPD, his father had only one thing to say about it: “Be careful,” he told his son. “Because nothing else matters after working murders.”

The story is reported largely from the point of view of the police investigation and focuses on Skaggs’ un|

canny ability to bulldoze his way forward until a seemingly dead-end case opens up. Leovy focuses on the facts—on the events leading up to and following the murder, on the backgrounds of the police and the victim and his family. She is a reporter, and she reports what she sees. But the facts invariably lead the reader to reflect on issues of race, justice and inequality, which it almost goes without saying are deeply contentious.

Which is why they are worth discussing. Leovy notes in her introduction that when former LAPD Chief William Parker pointed out that “black neighborhoods suffered higher levels of crime, liberals condemned him on the grounds that merely making such a statement was ‘inflammatory.’ ” And she writes, “The topic is, for many black people, one that inflames an abiding sense of vulnerability that lurks at the edge of consciousness.…Why emphasize what seems sure to be used against them?”

Throughout the book, Leovy returns to her central observation that “the state’s inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of violence,” that “the system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.”

“Violence is different,” she says. The high rate of black-on-black homicide—that of violence itself— becomes a system unto itself, like that of the rule of law. In her words, “lawlessness is its own kind of order.”

And, left unchecked, this violence becomes self-sustaining. “This book is about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic,” she writes.

What necessarily follows is Leovy’s argument for the importance of bringing homicide offenders quickly to justice; by doing so, the state demonstrates to its citizens that it values their lives. At the same time, Leovy is critical of other proactive police work, often policies handed down from higher echelons of the force, such as having squad cars drive around with their lights flashing just to indicate their presence.

“The LAPD is so vast and so complex that you almost can’t be on the street and in the higher echelons at the same time, and there’s a great distance between the two,” she says.

While events of the past few months have called simple prescriptions for police work into doubt, there are no easy answers here, either. Leovy doesn’t set out to offer them. It’s easy to step on toes when no less |

than people’s lives are at stake, and Leovy focuses on telling her story, painting a portrait of a community and a handful of dedicated cops, the value of whom she argues is underappreciated. “I never think of myself as a nonfiction writer. I don’t even think of myself as a writer,” she says. “I think of myself as a homicide person. That’s my thing. I’ve just been into homicide.”

Leovy’s expertise on the subject allows her to make arguments that run against the grain. “If you punish all sorts of things other than violence, there’s no credibility to the system,” she says. She writes in Ghettoside that “to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception.” The American criminal justice system “hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”

Walter Heymann is a freelance writer and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles.

Ghettoside was reviewed in the Nov. 15, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

Ghettoside A True Story of Murder in America Leovy, Jill Spiegel & Grau (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-385-52998-3 kirkus.com

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“Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his own, radically new musical language.” from words without music

and ruins; the home front, slaves, women, guerrillas and “the Destructive War.” Gallman and Gallagher asked a wide network of professors, authors and independent researchers to choose their favorite photo from the Civil War and write an essay about it. The result will awaken new awareness, but the rawness of the war may upset some readers. One author kindly warns animal lovers that his essay about a picture of a dead horse may be tough going. This isn’t just a coffee-table book to pick up randomly, as the authors suggest; it can be read in a few hours, and each essay naturally moves readers on to the next. Though many of these photos have been “staged,” in that bodies were moved or guns and survivors placed to improve composition, that doesn’t reduce their power. These Civil War writers, experts and teachers each explain their reasons for choosing a photo; often, it harkens back to seeing it as a child and using that experience as a launching point for a career. The essays freely challenge the ethics of war photography; one asks, “When is it not all right to take an image of something?” When must we leave death alone? Pictures are natural entrees into imagination, but we must understand the difference between history and memory. Particularly noteworthy contributors include Harold Holzer, Joseph T. Glatthaar and Elizabeth R. Varon.

A brilliant starting point for truly understanding the Civil War. As the authors point out, there is still much to explore. (31 b/w photos)

COURSE CORRECTION A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX Gilder, Ginny Beacon (272 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-8070-7477-0

How one woman overcame numerous obstacles to become an Olympic silver medalist in rowing.

Two years after Title IX was passed in 1974, 16-year-old Gilder stood on the shores of the Charles River in Boston watching rowing sculls move across the water. Though she’d never been in a shell before, she was instantly attracted to the idea of skimming across the water in fluid motion. As a freshman at Yale, she was finally able to experience rowing firsthand; by the end of the year, she had “stumbled into its demanding embrace, succumbed to its brutal glamour, and accepted its preeminence in my life. I was in a full-blown love affair with the sport. I wanted it all. I would do whatever it took to be great.” Filled with lyrical descriptions of rowing on the water and detailed portrayals of the workouts she endured to build up her strength and stamina, the narrative flows with the passion the author feels for her sport. She unabashedly discusses the physical and emotional traumas she battled as she worked her way from rowing in college to national and international competitions, forever looking toward an Olympic medal to crown her career. Having seen her mother come unhinged when her 64

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father left her for a younger woman, Gilder’s deepest fears centered on becoming just like her mother, but through rowing and a personal tragedy, she was able to persevere. She also openly examines her ambiguities about her sexual preferences at a time when being lesbian was not discussed in public. The author’s ardent story is one of struggle and triumph, of shrugging off the naysayers to follow a dream to its end, whether good or bad, and of following the heart.

A passionate memoir of a woman rower who battled numerous odds in search of becoming the best in her sport.

WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC A Memoir Glass, Philip Liveright/Norton (400 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 6, 2015 978-0-87140-438-1

An engaging memoir of an adventuresome, iconoclastic career.

The composer of 25 operas, 30 movie soundtracks and scores of other works, Glass (b. 1937) reflects on friendship, love, fatherhood and more than 70 years in music. Growing up in Baltimore, he played the flute; by the age of 15, he was the classical music buyer for his father’s record store. As a high school sophomore, he took an early-entrance exam to the University of Chicago. To everyone’s surprise but his, he passed and spent the next four years in that rich intellectual community, reveling in the city’s major, and diverse, musical venues. One question obsessed him: “Where does music come from?” Composing, he decided, might help him find the answer. When he graduated, Glass submitted a small portfolio of compositions as application to Juilliard. Although not admitted immediately because he lacked academic preparation, after a few years as a nonmatriculated student, he earned a scholarship to the school’s small department of composition. Like Chicago, New York opened up a thrilling aesthetic world. To support himself as a student and long after, Glass worked as a furniture mover, sheetrock installer, studio assistant to artist Richard Serra, selftaught plumber and taxi driver. He composed much of his opera Einstein at the Beach, he writes, “at night after driving a cab.” In the 1960s and ’70s, Glass became deeply interested in Eastern culture: hatha yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoist qi gong and tai chi, all of which influenced his music. Equally crucial were his teachers, especially the imperious Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris, and Ravi Shankar. Undaunted by critics who called his music “nonsense,” Glass aimed to create an emotional experience for his listeners, with music that felt “like a force of nature...organic and powerful, and mindful, too.”

Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his own, radically new musical language. (16-page photo insert)

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“Wonderfully lyrical, historically nuanced exploration of the irruption of this Romantic hero.” from bonaparte

MOTHERLAND Growing Up with the Holocaust

HOW I SHED MY SKIN Unlearning Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood

Goldberg, Rita New Press (368 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-62097-073-7

Grimsley, Jim Algonquin (288 pp.) $23.95 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-61620-376-4

A daughter revisits her mother’s harrowing past.

Goldberg (Comparative Literature/ Harvard Univ.; Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot, 1984) grew up knowing that her parents had survived the Holocaust through a combination of luck, agonizing struggles and selfless acts of heroism. Her emotionally shattering memoir focuses on her mother’s experiences, as the author seeks to understand a parent she felt had distanced herself from her children and to explore the legacy of the Holocaust on her own identity. “I have never known what to do with this history,” writes Goldberg. “It makes a better tale than anything that has happened in my own life, and it has to some extent paralyzed me.” She and her sisters felt they “had to live up to the myth we inherited...[of] our grandparents’ martyrdom, on the one hand, and our parents’ exceptional courage, on the other.” They felt inadequate and inconsequential in comparison. Surely, Hilde Jacobsthal emerges as heroic in Goldberg’s sensitive recounting, documented by material from the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies; histories and memoirs; and probing interviews with her mother, father and uncle. Living with her parents and brother in Amsterdam, Hilde was best friends with Anne Frank’s older sister, Margot; after the war, Otto Frank became Rita Goldberg’s godfather. Hilde happened to be away from Amsterdam when the Nazis made a sweeping arrest of Jews, including her parents. The 15-year-old returned home to find the Nazi seal on her door and her parents gone. She fled to Belgium and spent the war years in hiding, fearful always of betrayal. After the war, she served tirelessly and devotedly as a nurse, child care center director, and liaison with the British Red Cross in BergenBelsen, the American Joint Distribution Committee, and the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Goldberg writes eloquently of the “volcanic pressures” that shaped her family’s story and continue to haunt her own. (16-page b/w insert)

After a court decision, children struggled to enact integration.

In 1966, Grimsley (Creative Writing/Emory Univ.; Jesus Is Sending You This Message: Stories, 2008, etc.) was an elementary school student in rural North Carolina when three black girls joined his formerly white classroom. He did not know then what caused the change from the Freedom of Choice system that had maintained racially separated schools, and he did not know how to behave or what to think, except to mimic adults’ racism. “I was raised,” he writes, “to keep black people in their place and to see to it that they stayed there.” His new classmates, however, convinced of their civil rights, had no intention of being subjugated. In this sensitive memoir, Grimsley probes the past to discover what and how he learned about race, equality and democracy “from the good white people” in his family and community. Interacting with black children for the first time, he felt he was at a crossroads: “I would either learn to be a better bigot, or I would learn to stop being a bigot at all.” Evoking in vivid detail his school and social environments as he moved through the grades, he recalls that by high school, many white families were sending their children to a private institution, and the author was outnumbered by black classmates. Being part of a minority, though, was not new for him; throughout childhood, he felt different from others because he was a hemophiliac who could not participate in sports or roughhouse with other boys; he also began to realize that he was gay.

The author, returning for his 40th high school reunion, saw little change in the South, where people “still teach racism to their children without a second thought.”

Although proud that he and his classmates made history, the culture of hatred he recounts in this revelatory memoir still, he notes sadly, persists.

BONAPARTE 1769-1802

Gueniffey, Patrice Translated by Rendall, Steven Belknap/Harvard Univ. (992 pp.) $39.95 | Apr. 13, 2015 978-0-674-36835-4 Wonderfully lyrical, historically nuanced exploration of the irruption of this Romantic hero.

In this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume biography of the “magician” who was Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), French scholar Gueniffey (Director of Studies/L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

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places the patriot and dictator squarely at the center of unprecedented historical events—not for hagiographic purposes but for the sheer fascination of examining this self-willed character. In his first book in English translation, the author carefully delineates Napoleon’s humble upbringing in Corsica to the declaration of Consulate for Life in 1802, from canny officer and negotiator for his extended family’s benefactors to single-minded workhorse and consolidator of centralized power. Throughout the book, Gueniffey allows the countless authors before him to range about the narrative—Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Taine, Emerson, Jacques Bainville and many more. For Gueniffey, there is an obvious joy to the historiographic journey. Having witnessed the excesses of the Revolution, Napoleon came down on the side of “law, tranquility and all the established authorities”; having pressed for Corsican emancipation, he and his family were banished in 1793. Marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1796 was a way to establish French nationality that education could not afford him. His defeat of the British at Toulon set him on his course; as the author astutely observes, Napoleon was “born in war.” In search of a future, he worked tirelessly and imaginatively, often ill, and he was frugal, solitary and bourgeois. Across a consistently illuminating narrative, Gueniffey sifts his subject’s defining achievements of this period—e.g., concord with the Catholic Church (after the rupture of the Revolution) and establishment of a civil code, which confirmed his reputation as a legislator.

A masterful portrait, staggeringly complete and contradictory and fluently translated—a delight to read. (22 color illustrations; 8 maps)

EINSTEIN’S DICE AND SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

Halpern, Paul Basic (288 pp.) $27.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-465-07571-3

The history of a grand theory—the theory of everything, aka the unified field theory—that never achieved flight and the two household names that kicked the fledgling theory from the nest before its time.

This is a solid story of how scientific progress is achieved, or not, incorporating the mindsets Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger brought to the creation and elaboration of their various theories in physics. With verve, Halpern (Physics/Univ. of the Sciences in Philadelphia; Edge of the Universe: A Voyage to the Cosmic Horizon and Beyond, 2012, etc.) explores the fragile nature of scientific collaboration—especially when two substantial egos are involved, compounded by one of them being subject to spells of braggadocio and overreaching—and throws light upon the sometimes-murky worlds of determinism and probabilism. The author is generally clear when dealing with the unified theory and the quest to bring together the fundamental 66

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forces of nature, but physics in general is a gnarly topic to make clean and simple for the outsider: “Therefore, the cat would be in a zombielike quantum superposition of deceased and living,” is difficult enough to grasp, let alone “the square root of the negative of the determinant of the Ricci tensor.” But give Halpern serious credit for melding the wealth of math and physics that influenced both Einstein and Schrödinger’s work into a coherent whole—symmetry rules, cosmological constants, non-Euclidean geometry. In addition, the author imbues the story with issues that touched the personal lives of both men.

Einstein’s life feels familiar and true; Schrödinger emerges as someone scarred by envy and not a little opportunistic—e.g., when he composed a “statement of support for the Anschluss.”

Halpern ably explores the clashing personalities and worldviews that had physics in churning ferment during the early part of the 20th century.

BENEATH THE SURFACE Killer Whales, Seaworld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish

Hargrove, John with Chua-Eoan, Howard Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-137-28010-7

A former SeaWorld killer whale trainer dispenses serious allegations against the company and the industry at large.

In Hargrove’s unnerving opening sequence, he writes of being antagonistically nudged into the center of a performance pool by an aggressive, 6,000-pound orca. It is with this same unique amalgam of “dread and wonderment” that Hargrove characterizes both his longtime, highranking professional relationship with orca whales and his astonishment at how broken the performance animal arena has become—particularly at SeaWorld. He writes of a lifelong affinity for whales, an adoration that began as a boy on his annual trips to SeaWorld in Orlando and continued with an apprenticeship in Texas and, ultimately, years spent as a senior instructor at SeaWorld San Antonio and in France. Though his appreciation for and understanding of the species are abundantly clear, the author addresses the inherent dangers these oversized mammals can pose to even seasoned instructors while calling out SeaWorld’s misdeeds and cruel methods employed to obtain, control and artificially breed their stable of whales. The public performances can be treacherous, he writes, and leave little margin for error since the whales, while fully trained, can still exhibit aggressive behavior and attack without warning, as chronicled in the lethal assault and corporate obfuscation case seen in the independent documentary Blackfish (2013). Hargrove divulges some of the lesser-known, more insidious facts about marine parks: the ways whales are artificially impregnated, how boredom can become their undoing, and that these virtual “prisoners in the park” are subjected to secretive fooddeprivation tactics to ensure that they understand “that it is best to cooperate.” Hargrove believes the basis of SeaWorld’s |

LISTENING TO STONE The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi

bottom-line corporate strategy was to treat the whales as a “company asset on the ledgers” and “a matter for spreadsheets.”

The author left the industry in 2012 after an “intellectual conversion” in which he realized the lives of trained whales were a living hell.

A shocking, aggressively written marine park exposé.

(8 pages of color photos)

WASHINGTON’S CIRCLE The Creation of the President Heidler, David S.; Heidler, Jeanne T. Random House (560 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-4000-6927-9

An elegant study on the shaping of the first presidency through the excellent people he chose to serve with him.

The Heidlers (Henry Clay: The Essential American, 2010, etc.) create a fully fleshed portrait of the first great Founder by comparison to and contrast with the many complicated personalities he had around him. Summoned out of his happy retirement in Mount Vernon to preside as the first president of the fledgling American government, because, in the compelling words of former aide Alexander Hamilton, “a citizen of so much consequence as yourself...has no option but to lend his services if called for,” Washington was painfully aware of creating appropriate precedents. These included resisting a pompous title, not appointing his relatives to office, paying for his own personal comfort and maintaining a rather kingly formality. Washington was well-served by those loyal subordinates, including his wife, Martha, who burned all but four letters written between them, thus leaving little clue to their relationship aside from the fact that she provided a perfect, “stoic” complement to his gravity and taciturnity; his closest adviser and fellow Virginian James Madison, who helped Washington write his inaugural address and acted as the president’s “indispensable bridge between budding executive wishes and developing congressional policy”; the irrepressible John Adams, who was deadly bored by the office of vice president but cast the important deciding vote in the first Senate to allow presidential prerogative in choosing the Treasury secretary; and Hamilton, who would, by his sheer brilliant brazenness, wield ambitious economic plans for the new republic. Moving the capital from New York to Philadelphia, quelling sectional differences and confronting the first foreign policy crisis with England, Washington relied on a host of other unsung colleagues, including Henry Knox, Edmund Randolph and Tobias Lear.

A fluid work of historical research and engaging biography. (16-page photo insert)

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Herrera, Hayden Farrar, Straus and Giroux (580 pp.) $35.00 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-374-28116-8

A comprehensive biography of a sculptor of stone and space.

Art critic Robert Hughes called Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) “the pre-eminent American sculptor...the chief living heir, not only to his teacher [Constantin] Brancusi, but also to the classical Japanese feeling for material and nature.” In this meticulously researched biography, Herrera (Joan Snyder, 2005, etc.) chronicles the long, productive career of the acclaimed 20th-century modernist. Born to an unconventional American mother and a Japanese father, a famous poet who neglected him, Noguchi spent his early childhood in Japan; at 13, his mother sent him to school in America, alone. “Banished” to another culture, he claimed throughout his life that dual identity made him feel like an outsider. As an artist, he drew on both cultures, and his precocious talent attracted teachers and mentors: Brancusi, for whom he worked in Paris; and Buckminster Fuller, who taught Noguchi about “the new technology of space and structures.” Although Noguchi began his career making busts of celebrities (Thornton Wilder, George Gershwin, Lincoln Kirstein), he soon moved to sculpture, stage sets (he designed for Martha Graham for decades), and public plazas and gardens (for UNESCO, Yale’s Beinecke Library and others), earning a reputation “as a sculptor of space.” Herrera allows colleagues and lovers to characterize Noguchi’s personality. “He was elegant and flirtatious,” a close woman friend disclosed. “He was a seducer and a charmer.” He pursued women who were usually decades younger and dazzled by his attentions and his fame; he married one, an actress, but that relationship ended in divorce after a few years. Short-tempered and egotistical, he could be difficult. One colleague said he was “stubborn as a mule” and an astute politician. “Noguchi was a genius in knowing how to use people,” said another.

Although reticent about putting forth her own insights about her subject’s mind and heart, Herrera gives readers an ample, thorough analysis of his estimable art. (132 b/w illustrations)

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“...a highly useful reference for those seeking to understand the geopolitics of a region often in the news for outbreaks of violence.” from the longest august

THE MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR A Biography

THE LONGEST AUGUST The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan

Hicks, Michael Univ. of Illinois (240 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-252-03908-9

Hiro, Dilip Nation Books/Perseus (560 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-56858-734-9

A history of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, an institution that keeps most of its controversies behind closed doors.

Composer, performer and scholar Hicks (Music/Brigham Young Univ.; Henry Cowell, Bohemian, 2003, etc.) documents plenty of intrigue in the leadership, mission and repertoire of “America’s choir,” while acknowledging the considerable challenges of his endeavor: “The Tabernacle Choir is a close-knit family. And close-knit families often stiffen their ranks against outsiders. The current handbook of the Choir may not be shown to anyone who is not a member of the Choir.

Choir members are not to write about the Choir in blogs. And they are required to secure permission from the Choir President before speaking to ‘the media.’ ” Yet music has been integral to the image of Mormonism practically since the beginning of the religion, through a 19th century when making a joyful noise in church was spiritually suspect to Protestant evangelicals. As the success of the choir “more than any other institution...domesticated the image of Mormonism,” offsetting the association with polygamy and other moral curiosities, it kept pace with the times by attracting a devoted following through radio, TV and a series of best-selling recordings that mixed the secular and the spiritual. By the 21st century, “the Tabernacle Choir sold out Denver’s Pepsi Stadium—fifteen thousand seats—three days before the Rolling Stones, another major brand name, sold just thirteen thousand seats in the same venue.” It also adapted to the hightech spectacle that modern performance seemed to demand.

Yet the hundreds of choir members remained unpaid and all but anonymous, serving as musical missionaries, and the institution become more closely associated with conservative political partisanship as it continued to struggle with what one leader called “the colored problem.”

Though much of the writing is academically dry, this history is more provocative than readers may suspect. (24 b/w photos)

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An explanation of the intractable enmity of two South Asian peoples and nations.

It comes down to a matter of gods, of course, and cows, as well. “Hinduism is polytheistic and centered around idol worship,” writes London-based journalist Hiro (A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East, 2013, etc.). “Islam is monotheistic and forbids graven images.” And then there’s the pork-shunning Muslim habit of eating beef, killing cows being a capital offense in some ancient kingdoms of India, avenged in less deadly and more modern climes by “desecrating a mosque by a stealth depositing of a pig’s head or carcass at its entrance.” Against these secular demonstrations are arrayed the powerful forces of two states with nuclear capability that have come very close to using it—and that now are playing out some of their rivalries, born long before the partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947, in Afghanistan, another place whose leaders are skilled in playing both sides against the middle. Helpfully, Hiro notes that India is the second place where the British government imposed partition as a solution to civil strife, the first being Ireland, also divided by a deadly blend of politics and religion. As the author documents, this sideshow in the great game has had ugly results, such as the involvement of the Pakistani secret police in the attack on a Mumbai hotel in 2008 and India’s funding of Taliban attacks inside Pakistan, which “could be rationalized as Delhi’s quid pro quo to Islamabad’s involvement in stoking the separatist movement in Indian Kashmir.” On and on it goes, and though Hiro argues effectively that it is unlikely for the political tensions to disappear, ordinary Indians and Pakistanis enjoy many of the same things and may be reconcilable to each other on at least a cultural level.

Though dense and occasionally arid, a highly useful reference for those seeking to understand the geopolitics of a region often in the news for outbreaks of violence.

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EXPLORING LINCOLN Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President

Holzer, Harold; Symonds, Craig L.; Williams, Frank J.—Eds. Fordham Univ. (300 pp.) $24.95 paper | Mar. 2, 2015 978-0-8232-6563-3

Noted historians reflect on the life and presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

“Thousands of works have been written about Lincoln, and almost any Lincoln you want can be found in the literature,” writes contributor Eric Foner, and his contention is borne out by these recent papers from the Lincoln Forum, an annual scholarly event. Co-editors Holzer (Lincoln and the Power of the Press, 2014, etc.), Symonds (Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings, 2014, etc.) and Williams (Judging Lincoln, 2002, etc.) have gathered authoritative views of Lincoln as a leader whose many facets—military strategist, savvy politician, man of exceptional character, among others—have earned him admiration as our greatest president. Contributors examine Lincoln’s relationships, actions and beliefs; his views on slavery and race; and his deft politicking to win the 1860 presidential campaign. Many papers focus on issues of concern to specialists. Others will have far broader appeal: Michael J. Kline offers a detailed account of the so-called Baltimore Plot to kill the president-elect (and finds no convincing evidence for it); Barnet Schecter traces the complexities of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots, the largest civil insurrection in U.S. history (where emotions over the first federal conscription law and fears over the Emancipation Proclamation exploded in five days of arson, looting and lynching); and Jason Emerson describes his discovery of Mary Lincoln’s long-lost sanitarium letters, which confirm her serious mental illness. John Stauffer tells the fascinating story of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” an anthem that began as an early-19th-century Southern camp meeting spiritual and later became the theme song for Billy Sunday’s revivals. Catherine Clinton’s contribution on mourning is a moving portrait of grieving mothers, many of whom turned to mediums to communicate with the dead.

A thoughtful treat for the Lincoln and Civil War crowds.

THE PORCELAIN THIEF Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

Huan Hsu Crown (400 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-307-98630-6

A former journalist and current professor searches for the rare porcelain buried by his great-great-grandfather in 1938, when Japanese invaders approached his property in Xingang, China. |

We don’t learn until near the end what (if anything) Hsu discovered on his remarkable odyssey, which took lots of time and required confronting some tricky, even ominous, forces. His search involved the interpretation of a number of stories coming from family members—some, like a grandmother, were very reluctant to talk about certain aspects of the past—descendants of former neighbors, museum employees, experts in ancient porcelain, and local and regional authorities. The author traveled to Shanghai to begin his search, gaining employment with a relative and facing the frustrating knowledge that his understanding of Chinese language and custom was not sufficient for his needs. So he embarked on various plans of study and eventually became more or less competent. As he tells his story, he has to bring us along carefully, for he (correctly?) assumes that most readers do not know much about Chinese history and geography, and so he tells us a lot about the former, especially, often to the eye-glazing point. He also interweaves much family history—again, sometimes to an excessive degree. What fascinates him about his family will not always transfer to his readers, but his persistence in the face of numerous obstacles is beyond admirable. He journeyed to a host of remote locations—including, of course, the very much changed family property, where he eventually figured out how he could dig without too much official interference—and endured all sorts of reluctance and doubt from a variety of relatives and strangers. He offers plenty of intriguing information about Chinese history and culture, from wild Shanghai traffic to family dynamics.

Some first-rate detective work sometimes obscured by excessively thick historical shrubbery. (8-page full-color insert; 3 maps)

JOHN PRINE In Spite of Himself

Huffman, Eddie Univ. of Texas (224 pp.) $24.95 | $24.95 e-book | Mar. 15, 2015 978-0-292-74822-4 978-0-292-77244-1 e-book

A guide to the troubadour’s career lacks access to the artist himself but benefits from a subject who is as intriguing as his songs.

In his first book, Greensboro News & Record staff writer Huffman proves an amiable companion as he leads readers though the musical development of an artist whose songwriting uniqueness has prevailed over a decided lack of ambition and decades of commercial indifference. If it weren’t for his close friend and fellow troubadour Steve Goodman, who “had enough ambition for both of them,” Prine might have been happy to remain the singing mailman from suburban Chicago. The author shows just how little Prine enjoyed the business side of the music business and how the strength of his songwriting offset raw indifference as a singer and guitarist in his early studio recordings. More than once he was willing to chuck his career for something different. He never believed the critical claims made by others on kirkus.com

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“Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate, reveal recurring depression and anxiety....” from the folded clock

his behalf: “If I’m a genius, how come it took me five years to get out of high school?” he told an AP reporter in 1978. “If I’m a genius, how come I don’t have three Cadillacs?” It might have seemed that Prine was destined to be known primarily from the songs on his 1971 debut album—“Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” “Angel from Montgomery”—with subsequent efforts doing little to raise his profile as he bounced from one record label to another. Yet he amazingly rebounded in 1991 with “The Missing Years,” his most popular album ever and a return to critical acclaim. By then, Prine had started his own label and found domestic bliss with his third wife, and he has subsequently survived a couple bouts with cancer. If he’s lost the inspiration to write songs, that doesn’t seem to bother him much.

It’s difficult for Huffman to establish much stylistic continuity when he relies so heavily on quotes from other journalists, but the unlikely success of the reluctant performer makes for fascinating reading.

COUNTRY SOUL Making Music and Making Race in the American South

Hughes, Charles L. Univ. of North Carolina (264 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 23, 2015 978-1-4696-2243-9

Exploration of the racial politics that defined the country and soul music scenes during the 1960s and ’70s.

Perhaps nothing better represented the racial divide in American culture in the wake of desegregation than country and soul music. The racial tension embodied by these dueling cultures was perpetuated by the “musical color line” separating black soul and white country. The crux of Hughes’ (History/Oklahoma State Univ.) analysis is the “country-soul triangle” represented by music communities in Memphis and Nashville, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and epitomized by the Stax label and FAME and American Studios. The musicians who traversed this triangle, both white and black, recorded for artists as disparate as Aretha Franklin and Hank Williams Jr. However, Hughes deftly notes the contradiction represented by country and soul studios as racially integrated workplaces whose music would only reinforce racial divides, despite the musicians themselves championing their music as symbols of interracialism and christening it the “Memphis sound” to reflect their progressive relationship. However, the idealism of this arrangement was not so perfectly enacted.

Hughes corrects the misrepresentation of this narrative, which heralds white musicians as stewards of racial progress in the South but often downplays or outright avoids the contributions of black artists, such as Arthur Alexander. Moreover, black musicians saw their white counterparts not as “freedom fighters” but potential collaborators and competitors whose whiteness threatened their livelihood. Rich with anecdotes of major artists like the Osmonds, Willie Nelson and Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, Hughes dissects the racial interplay that defined the 70

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triangle against the conservative “New Right,” whose reactionary politics were embodied by traditional country music. As the scenes continued to meld and the musical divide between country and soul became less noticeable and more commercialized, it was clear that white musicians benefited far greater than their black counterparts, while racial disparity continues to linger today in songs like the bungled collaboration “Accidental Racist” by LL Cool J and Brad Paisley.

An essential piece of Southern musical history.

THE FOLDED CLOCK A Diary Julavits, Heidi Doubleday (320 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-385-53898-5

Reflections on being and becoming.

Novelist, Guggenheim Fellow and co-founder of the Believer magazine, Julavits (Writing/Columbia Univ.; co-editor, The Vanishers, 2012, etc.), now in her mid-40s, noticed that the smallest unit of time she experiences is no longer a minute, a day, nor even a week, but years. That disquieting perception inspired this book: “Since I am suddenly ten years older than I was, it seems, one year ago, I decided to keep a diary.” Time is much on her mind in gently philosophical entries that do not appear chronologically but instead are disrupted and reordered, recounting two years of her life in New York, where she and her husband teach; Maine, where she grew up yearning to leave and now spends joyful summers; and Germany, where the family lived during her husband’s fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Admitting that she is a “sub-sub-subtextual” reader of the world, Julavits analyzes her marriage; the needs and growing independence of her young son and daughter; her visits to a psychic, with whom she discusses the mystical power of objects and synchronicity (“My life seems marked by a high degree of coincidence and recursion,” Julavits confesses); former lovers; her aspirations as a writer; and such guilty pleasures as watching the reality series The Bachelorette, whose “love language” she and her husband gleefully parse. Other pastimes include shopping on eBay, which, she writes, “has immeasurably improved my quality of life more than doctors or drugs”; succumbing to temptation at yard sales; and swimming, despite her overwhelming fear of sharks. Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate, reveal recurring depression and anxiety, “alternate states of being” to which she gratefully returns: “When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back.”

An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful.

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MASTER THIEVES The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist

HAPPINESS A Philosopher’s Guide Lenoir, Frédéric Translated by Brown, Andrew Melville House (208 pp.) $23.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-61219-439-4

Kurkjian, Stephen PublicAffairs (272 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-61039-423-9

A reporter investigates a notorious art heist.

In 1990, two thieves made their way into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and fled with 13 artworks, worth $500 million. Despite the FBI’s ongoing investigation, the thieves were never caught, and the art remains missing. Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Globe investigative reporter Kurkjian worked on the story when it first broke, and in his fast-paced, though sometimes repetitious, debut book, he recounts the heist, the official investigation and his own probing into the case. Security was lax at the museum, making it possible for two men, dressed in police uniforms, to gain entry, secure the guards with duct tape and invade the galleries. Shattering protective glass, they cut paintings from their frames and left without detection. The FBI took control immediately, refusing to involve the Massachusetts State Police or the Boston police, which the author sees as a crucial mistake. Mob involvement was suspected from the start, and local authorities, as one Boston policeman put it, “knew every wise guy in the city and had some reliable informants.” As the case grew colder, the handful of FBI men assigned to it was reduced; three months after the heist, only one agent supervised. The author reveals the “Hollywoodstyle deal-making” used by the FBI to try to get mobsters to talk, but their efforts repeatedly failed. In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, the head of the FBI’s Boston office tried to get the public’s help in identifying artwork they may have seen or tips on the perpetrators, but nothing emerged.

Based on interviews with scores of mob bosses, gang members, their wives, girlfriends, family members and lawyers, as well as with policemen and other reporters, Kurkjian believes he knows who did it. He has shared his findings with the FBI, and they come as the climax to this engrossing real-life crime story.

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A philosopher’s exploration of all the angles of happiness.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those are the unalienable rights of all Americans, but we don’t have a monopoly on the elusive hunt for happiness. Thinkers have long found the subject to be a difficult one to consider, French philosopher Lenoir (The Oracle of the Moon, 2014, etc.) notes in the prologue, and while many modern books proclaim to bequeath the recipe for happiness, it’s rarely that simple. Cynics may raise their eyebrows at the author’s slim entry into the canon, but as a guide to various approaches taken by philosophical and religious figures, it serves ably. Lenoir considers Voltaire, Socrates, Schopenhauer and others alongside their (often contradictory) views on happiness, which leads into further questioning and reflection: Do all people wish to be happy? Is there truth for anybody except the wealthy that money cannot buy happiness? As social creatures, is it possible to attain happiness without other people in our lives or despite those other people? What can be done, Lenoir asserts, to increase our capacity for happiness is to sharpen our attention toward the happiness we experience in day-to-day life. One can also keep various sociological studies in mind, with research indicating that our aptitude for happiness is 50 percent genetics, 40 percent from our personal efforts toward increasing our happiness, and a mere 10 percent from our surroundings and other external factors. Lenoir also explores disciplines beyond philosophy and religion, taking into account the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, the essays of Michel de Montaigne and the fiction of Michel Houellebecq. Throughout the book, Lenoir writes economically, devoting only enough words to particular thoughts and approaches as are necessary to stir questions in the minds of readers.

A brief though well-considered guide to a wide range of the many schools of thought regarding contentment, joy and happiness.

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“Earnest and convoluted, Lindberg’s story awards patient, adventurous readers.” from the end of the rainy season

THE END OF THE RAINY SEASON Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past in Brazil

Lindberg, Marian E. Soft Skull Press (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-59376-602-3

The shadowy disappearance of the author’s grandfather into the jungles of Brazil spurs a literary and emotional

investigation.

The sinking of the luxurious American passenger ship Vestris in November 1928, bound for Brazil but sunk mysteriously off the coast of Virginia, killing more than 100 people, forms the first clue as to why the New York engineer Walter Lindberg might have abandoned his family. The second husband to the author’s grandmother, Walter did not sail on the Vestris, although his partners and equipment did; instead, he made his way separately to Brazil and was supposed to have been killed soon after by cannibals while trekking through the Amazon jungles on a treasure hunt. This was the official version of her grandfather’s death that the author gleaned from her circumspect father, “through stealth, research and careful observation.” Working as a journalist and a lawyer in New York, author Lindberg became more interested in pursuing Walter’s real story in her mid-30s, after a harrowing surgery to remove a tumor. Moreover, she and her longtime boyfriend broke up over negotiations about whether to have a child. Lindberg discovered that Walter and his partner, Otto Ulrich—who had been on the Vestris and sued for damaged and loss property—were going to meet up in Rio de Janeiro and lead an adventure party in the Amazon in search of a valuable tree. Yet Walter was delayed not because of quality time spent with his wife and child, but to be with his stenographer. Following this string of clues took Lindberg to Brazil to dig around, and she unearthed a pattern of coverups about Walter’s true identity that led to many of the abandonment issues her father later suffered from, passed down to her.

Earnest and convoluted, Lindberg’s story awards patient, adventurous readers.

CURIOSITY

Manguel, Alberto Yale Univ. (372 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-300-18478-5 An erudite analysis and exploration of curiosity through the author’s own works and those of countless others.

Manguel (A Reader on Reading, 2010, etc.), an Argentina-born Canadian essayist, translator, critic and editor, tackles a variety of difficult questions: Who am I? What is language?

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happen? What can we possess? What comes next? In each of his 17 chapters, the author focuses on a different question posed by a curious mind, and each begins with a brief and sometimespoignant anecdote from the author’s youth. Chief among the curious minds that fascinate Manguel is that of Dante, whose quest in The Divine Comedy is spiritual and who serves here as the author’s constant companion. It is worth noting that one of the book’s charms is the presence of numerous unusual illustrations, including many woodcuts from a 15th-century edition of Dante’s work. Among the fictional or mythical characters that readers meet on this journey through the history of mankind are Eve, Pandora, Ulysses and Ebenezer Scrooge, as well as a host of real scholars, religious figures, authors, poets, artists, philosophers and even economists. Human beings are, Manguel notes, self-conscious animals, capable of experiencing the world by asking questions and putting our curiosity into words, then turning those words into stories that lead to further questions.

A fair sample can be found here. The author’s personal library is said to contain more than 30,000 volumes, and the wealth of references in this book demonstrates that he is indeed a voracious reader.

For casual readers, the brief personal passages may provide welcome pauses in what is a highly literate and demanding text perhaps best appreciated by followers of Manguel’s previous works.

THE MADMAN AND THE ASSASSIN The Strange Life of Boston Corbett, the Man Who Killed John Wilkes Booth Martelle, Scott Chicago Review (240 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-61373-018-8

Martelle (The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones, 2014, etc.) explores the troubled life of a key yet little-known character in the Abraham Lincoln assassination drama.

A journeyman journalist and author whose historical interests range far and wide, the author here conjures the spirit of an English-born hatter and Union soldier, Thomas “Boston” Corbett, who thanked Providence for guiding his fatal shot to the neck of John Wilkes Booth after the manhunt in April 1865.

As a young apprentice plying his trade in Manhattan, Corbett was most likely exposed to the mercury-based compounds used in the felt at the time, which might explain some of the classic symptoms of paranoia he later exhibited (and which gave rise to the expression “mad as a hatter”). After the death of his young wife and a descent into heavy drinking, Corbett was redeemed by temperance Christians and moved to Boston to become a proselytizer and street preacher for the Methodist Church. He followed a bizarre self-castration with his baptism in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1858, when he took the first name |

Boston. A fervent abolitionist, Corbett signed up for New York’s 12th Regiment in 1861, then later joined the 16th New York Cavalry, based in northern Virginia, an important spot in the manhunt for Lincoln’s assassin. (Unfortunately, there is no map to elucidate the geography of the manhunt.) At the right place at the right time, Corbett shot Booth through the slats of the tobacco shed where the assassin was hiding, apparently drawing his rifle to fire at the Union soldiers. Corbett won fame rather than censure for the shooting, allowing him a small slice of the reward and an Army pension. He eventually slipped into delusional behavior, and his death is shrouded in mystery.

A curious portrait of a celebrity nonentity caught up in the throes of history. (12 b/w photos)

SALTWATER COWBOY The Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire

McBride, Tim with Berrier Jr., Ralph St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-250-05128-8

A saga of big risk and big reward within the romanticized pirate life of marijuana smugglers along the Florida Coast.

Wisconsinite McBride had no big plans or schemes when he followed a buddy to Florida and started working on a crab boat. However, he discovered that the moonlighting part of boat work could be unbelievably lucrative. “I got paid $50,000 for each of those hauls,” he explains of his early days as something of a pot-smuggling flunky. Such a sum soon seemed like chump change, as he became a conduit between Colombian sellers and Cuban buyers. This memoir, ghostwritten a couple decades after the fact, alternates adventures from the marijuana smuggling trade with life in prison, where McBride was sentenced to 10 years but served only four due to some cooperation and research in the law library. With marijuana now legal in some states and possession decriminalized in many others, the author seems to be writing of a whole different era, when smugglers made so much money that their main problem seemed to be where to spend or hide it all. “You can’t let all that money pile up,” he writes. “You’ve got to do something with it. Anything.” He relates how he once stashed $500,000 in the attic, only to discover that mice had eaten their way through half of it. McBride makes his business seem fairly benign compared to the more violent cocaine trade, as well as the Mexican drug wars that would follow the Florida crackdown. He was one of a few hundred who went to prison, sent in part by others who had sold them out for lighter sentences. He made his millions and he paid the price. He still doesn’t see anything wrong in what he did, and society now seems to agree that the war on this particular drug was likely misguided.

An up-and-down true story about a time and place that has inspired plenty of fiction.

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BETTING THE FARM ON A DROUGHT Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change

McGraw, Seamus Univ. of Texas (192 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 15, 2015 978-0-292-75661-8

Environmental journalist McGraw (The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone, 2011) engages a handful of citizens—scientists and outdoorsmen, conservative and liberal— to gain a sense of our understanding of climate change.

It comes as no great surprise that climate change remains a contentious issue, drawn as it is from party lines rather than investigation, and the author examines what “may be the most consequential [issue] of our time.” McGraw is an aw-shucks reporter who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and he makes use of hyperbole to make a point, not as a position statement, as do the partisans who have hijacked and stymied the debate.

The author may have found that there is reason to despair on the legislative level, but fortunately, he also found more openness to finding common ground among common folks and those who are in the trenches trying to decipher climate change. There is reason to be impressed by the grass-roots response, from evangelical Christians (“our Christian values— to love others as Christ loved us, to love our neighbors as ourselves and to care for creation—demand that Christians take action”) to New Jersey fishermen who have experienced “the increased acidity” of the sea, which is making “oyster shells weaker, while the carbon that caused it seemed to be making the oyster’s deadly enemy, the crab, grow to monstrous size.” Whether it is a freethinking Montana sportsman, a man who has farmed in southern Illinois for the last five decades or scientists—drawn mostly from Pennsylvania State University—who are gathering the data necessary to make informed decisions about how best to proceed, the author provides plenty of reasons for optimism because it is clear that people are not ignoring the issue.

McGraw discovers that the respectful middle of the road is the most likely place to find a bridge to a sustainable energy future. (13 b/w photos)

SYRIA A History of the Last Hundred Years McHugo, John New Press (304 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-62097-045-4

Sober-minded history of a nation that has existed in its present form for less than a century, one “predestined to descend into chaos and civil war.” kirkus.com

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“If you weren’t worried about climate change before, this is just the book to kindle your angst. A promising debut.” from fire and ice

What is Syria? Like so many political entities in the Middle East, it is the product of lines on colonial maps drawn according to the tenets of division and conquest. However, warns Londonbased Arabist and attorney McHugo (A Concise History of the Arabs, 2013), it would be a mistake to think that simply redrawing the map could redress that country’s terrible problems, one of them being the fact that some 40 percent of the population has been displaced to some degree or another in the last three years of civil war. Repartitioning the country, he warns, carries numerous drawbacks: “This is an outbreak of the old Western disease of drawing pretty lines on maps and then expecting the peoples of Greater Syria to step neatly into the zones marked with the particular color chosen for them.” Those colors are widely varied, for Syria contains numerous kinds of people: Christians and Muslims in various strains, Jews and Zoroastrians, Kurds and Palestinians, and many more. McHugo charts the slowly building tragedy that has set these peoples far apart, beginning when the country’s first ruler “recognized no distinctions between the three monotheistic religions, and that all were equal and entitled to the same rights and subject to the same duties.” Sadly, that ecumenical view disappeared with the rise of Ba’ath party nationalism, which blended elements of Arab revanchism and Western socialism in an uneasy alliance that would yield the likes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, both of which played proxy roles in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and continue to play roles in the struggle between the West and Russia today.

Scholarly but accessible and of much interest to those with an eye on geopolitical matters.

FIRE AND ICE Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World

Mingle, Jonathan St. Martin’s (464 pp.) $28.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-250-02950-8 978-1-250-02951-5 e-book

A searching, sobering, sometimesscary look at an overlooked carrier of climate change.

Since time immemorial, humans have been burning fires.

As science journalist Mingle notes in this earnest first book, at some point during the day, each of us will spark a fire of some kind, burning coal and other substances to fuel our cellphones and cook our food. “We can turn wood, coal, and even our own waste into gas that becomes heat and light and motion and the thrumming binary dreams of supercomputers,” he writes, or overwrites; the narrative sometimes has the onrushing quality of a melting glacier. All these fires produce black carbon, something that, Mingle writes, is very real and very dangerous; the melting glaciers are liquefying in good measure because of the soot that is its measurable and visible manifestation. The best parts of the book are the on-the-ground reports, beginning in a 74

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remote Himalayan village and ending in the halls of the Capitol. It’s not for nothing that James Inhofe, the leading climate change skeptic in the U.S. Senate, has co-sponsored legislation to study and police the world’s rising mountains of soot, acting as “simultaneously a flagrant climate [change] denier and a black carbon hawk.” Conversely, the weakest parts of the narrative are obvious and too-long bits of filler: We don’t really need another retelling of the myth of Prometheus, for instance, to know that fire can have adverse effects. Still, Mingle is a solid interpreter of complex science, explaining, for example, how soot generated far away has deleterious results at the North Pole—says one of his sources, “reducing Arctic black carbon concentrations sooner rather than later is the most efficient way that we know of to retard Arctic warming”—and the workings of the Asian monsoon, which is also feeling the weight of too much particulate pollution.

If you weren’t worried about climate change before, this is just the book to kindle your angst. A promising debut.

THE WILDERNESS OF RUIN A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America’s Youngest Serial Killer Montillo, Roseanne Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-06-227347-5

A lively, evocative reinvigoration of Boston’s Gilded Age and the psychopathic young stalker who threatened public safety.

Previously fascinated by the literary constructs of Mary Shelley, Montillo (The Lady and Her Monsters, 2013, etc.) explores a dark period in 19th-century Boston when a notorious serial torturer attacked young boys. At the center of the author’s historical tapestry is Jesse Pomeroy, whose relentlessly abusive childhood may have inspired the many beating and torturing rages against youth in the Boston area in the 1870s when he was 14 years old. He became known as both the “Red Devil” and one of America’s youngest serial killers. With cinematic narration, Montillo retraces Pomeroy’s sadistic crime spree involving the vicious persecution of boys along the Chelsea, Massachusetts, waterfront and, later, in South Boston, after his mother relocated the family. Once his conviction and sentencing to reform school was completed, however, Pomeroy was released into his mother’s custody only to resume his crimes with murderous intensity. The author shares these bloody details with grisly accuracy through the deft interpretation of journals, newspaper articles, books and Pomeroy’s own autobiography. Though this morbid decade in Boston’s history could stand on its own, Montillo effectively incorporates divergent narrative threads profiling the lives of novelist Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Melville was fascinated by Pomeroy’s crimes and enlisted Holmes to explore the nature of madness and the psychological unraveling of Pomeroy who, in 1875, as the area |

still recovered from the Great Boston Fire, was handed a death sentence by hanging (after much official deliberation, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment). Montillo creatively revives this tarnished New England era with the meticulous focus of a seasoned archivist and the graphic descriptive powers of a historical novelist.

A chillingly drawn, expertly researched slice of grim Boston history. (b/w illustrations throughout)

KALEIDOSCOPE CITY A Year in Varanasi Moore Ede, Piers Bloomsbury (224 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-1-60819-868-9

A British travel writer’s account of an extended stay in the northern Indian city of Varanasi, a 5,000-year-old “experiment in human cohabitation” on the banks of the Ganges River.

Moore Ede (All Kinds of Magic: A Quest for Meaning in a Material World, 2010, etc.) first traveled to Varanasi en route to Nepal. He had very little idea of the place “other than it was supposed to be interesting.” It was only after he returned to live there for a year and interview its inhabitants that he was able to appreciate Varanasi’s amazing, and bewildering, complexity.

Revered by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus, Varanasi was known as the “Holy City” because of the mythic promise of spiritual transcendence it offered believers. Yet its morally conservative surface belied darker realities. Drug dealing and human trafficking were serious problems, just as they were elsewhere in India. Heroine traders did brisk business in the city, as did brothels, which made use of services provided by homeless, widowed or kidnapped women. Corruption existed at every possible level. But as Moore Ede discovered, Varanasi was also a city of many delights. These included its famous sweets, which encompassed everything from “simple fudge-like creations to the most extraordinary concoctions of spice, dried fruit and cottage cheese.” Music was another glory. The author learned how Varanasi was not only home to the meditative rhythms of Vedic chanting; it was also an important center of north Indian classical music. Flowing eternally through the city was the river. “Tired and over-burdened” from being used in the past as a depository for cremated bodies, waste and, in the present, industrial effluvia, the once-magnificent river reigned supreme as the most contaminated river on the planet. For Moore Ede, however, the meaning of the river went even deeper. Like Varanasi itself, the Ganges was ultimately a symbol of India’s destructive “tryst” with modernity.

A thoughtful and incisive memoir/travelogue.

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AMERICAN VANDAL Mark Twain Abroad

Morris Jr., Roy Belknap/Harvard Univ. (236 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-674-41669-7 The story of the beloved American novelist’s nearly 12 years abroad.

Peripatetic Mark Twain (1835-1910) traveled the world, beginning in 1867 with a five-month, 20,000-mile journey to 15 ports in eight countries. That adventure resulted in his first travel book, Innocents Abroad (1869), which introduced its irreverent, insouciant narrator, the American Vandal: “a brazen, unapologetic visitor to foreign lands, generally unimpressed with the local ambience—to say nothing of the local inhabitants—but ever ready to appropriate any religious or historical trinket he or she could carry off.” In this vibrant, fresh look at the venerable writer, historian Morris (Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America, 2013, etc.) traces Twain’s journeys and his evolving perspective on world politics and peoples. More than a decade after his first trip, Twain, his wife and two of their daughters embarked on a European adventure to gather material for A Tramp Abroad (1880). Despite the jaunty title, Twain found that he was no longer an American Vandal but “a well-tailored, respectable middle-aged Easterner... who now confronted European culture on his own relatively sophisticated terms.” His self-image changed more dramatically during a long journey that included India and Africa, chronicled in Following the Equator (1897). “Twain, for all his joking facade, was a keen and sensitive observer,” the author contends, “and his recent world tour had brought him face to face with the myriad horrors of power politics.” As one scholar put it, Twain saw that the “vandals have evolved into oppressors.” Returning from another trip in 1904, he joined the Anti-Imperialist League. Morris sets Twain’s travels in the context of his financial problems, family tensions and wrenching loss: He and Livy were in Europe when their beloved daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis; Livy died in Florence; and as he aged, Twain lost many dear friends.

A brisk narrative and sensitive insights make this book a delight.

DAUGHTERS OF THE SAMURAI A Journey from East to West and Back Nimura, Janice P. Norton (352 pp.) $27.95 | May 4, 2015 978-0-393-07799-5

Through her fascinating tapestry of history and biography, New York scholar Nimura weaves the strange, vibrant tale of an insular nation coming to terms with currents of modernism it could no longer keep out. kirkus.com

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With the shogunate abolished and the “restoration” of 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito to the Meiji throne in 1868, Japan recognized that it would need to embrace Western ideas and technology in order to compete in the civilized world, and that would include a Western education for both men and women. Japan required educated mothers to raise standards, and thus the first batch of girls to be sent to study in America for an allotted period of 10 years was recruited from highranking samurai families who had fallen out of favor and could spare some mouths to feed at home. Of these five young women sent across the seas in 1871, the two eldest, at 14, did not fare well and were sent back within a few months. The remaining three experienced transformative home-sharing and education opportunities in America and became fluent speakers of English. Nimura concentrates on the stories of these three singular young women: Sutematsu Yamakawa, at 11, lived with the prominent Bacon family in New Haven and eventually attended Vassar; Shige Nagai, who had arrived at age 10, also attended Vassar and ended up marrying a fellow Japanese who had studied at Annapolis Naval Academy; Ume Tsuda, at barely 7, grew up in Georgetown and graduated from Bryn Mawr. All returned to Japan to marry, yet they carried on teaching and even founded an English school for girls. From clothing to manners to speech to aspirations, Nimura shows how the meeting of East and West transformed these select young women.

An extraordinary, elegantly told story of the beginning of Japan’s education and emancipation of its women. (8 pages of illustrations; map)

VISIONS AND REVISIONS

Peck, Dale Soho (224 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-61695-441-3

Witness to a transformative decade in gay history.

By the time novelist and critic Peck (The Garden of Lost and Found, 2012, etc.) came out in 1987, a potent drug cocktail had emerged that controlled the course of HIV, lessening its likelihood to lead to full-blown AIDS and certain death. He recounts the effect of that discovery on gay culture, on America’s attitudes toward homosexuality and on his own experiences. Woven through the book are references to serial killers of gay men, about whom Peck reported early in his career. Cobbled together from revised essays and articles, the memoir sometimes lapses into repetition and shows its seams. The author, who has honed a reputation for scathing critiques, offers a withering indictment of Andrew Sullivan, whose revisionist gay history demonized pre-AIDS gay culture “as a nonstop party” that he believed would be reincited by the development of combination therapy. Peck also dismisses some queer theorists whose “performative modalities...often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie.” He effusively praises Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham and Tony Kushner, whose 76

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Angels in America (2003) contributed to making gay activists “more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level.” As a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power when he was in his early 20s, Peck stood proudly among those activists, attending meetings and marches, helping out with mundane office work, preparing clean needles for addicts, and reading everything he could find written by a gay man, lesbian or transgendered person. Literature, he writes, “happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while,” since it reflected the visceral rage and despair of the time. He is despondent, though, about a tendency to normalize and distance AIDS. Instead, he calls for narratives that force readers “to find the existence of the epidemic unbearable.”

Raw and heartfelt—though uneven—Peck’s hybrid memoir contributes to that goal.

HISSING COUSINS The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth Peyser, Marc; Dwyer, Timothy Talese/Doubleday (352 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-385-53601-1

A journalist and the CEO of an education advisory company unite to tell the story of the famous first cousins who occupied very different positions on the continuum of political belief.

Former Newsweek and Budget Travel deputy editor Peyser and School Choice International CEO Dwyer have quite a story to tell, one that drips with the intrigue of political power and the venom of personal jealousy, copious tears, regret, loss and betrayal. The more famous of the Roosevelt cousins (now and then) is, if course, Eleanor (1884-1962), who married FDR, tolerated his various romantic liaisons, helped with the treatment of his polio and outlived him to become a liberal icon. Alice (18841980), a daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was friendly and affectionate with Eleanor early on, but they both flirted with Franklin, and the more attractive Alice did not take the loss lightly. Though she married Nick Longworth, Alice remained as sexually frisky, and otherwise mischievous, as a libidinous teen, engaging in multiple affairs over the years. Alice also was “ever the guttersnipe,” write the authors, who seem sometimes uncertain of their ultimate opinion of her: Was she a jerk? An opportunist? A happy hedonist? When FDR began his rise, Alice was not aboard. She planted herself firmly on the other side, as a moderately popular newspaper columnist and a highly quotable critic. (Readers might imagine an Ann Coulter with more self-restraint.) The authors’ admiration for Eleanor is patent, and they fully chronicle her human rights advocacy, her tireless travel to experience the lives of others, her prodding of FDR to do something about civil rights and her own popularity (far beyond Alice’s) as a newspaper columnist. The authors, understandably, have occasional trouble shoving aside the looming men to let us see the women. |

“Required reading for policymakers and students, and general readers will finish the book realizing they actually understand what sustainable development is all about.” from the age of sustainable development

THE AGE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

An entertaining retelling of a forgotten story, written for political junkies who enjoy the naughty and the nice.

Sachs, Jeffrey D. Columbia Univ. (544 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-231-17315-5

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe Pye, Michael Pegasus (400 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 15, 2015 978-1-60598-699-9

Novelist, journalist and historian Pye (The Pieces from Berlin, 2004, etc.) challenges all our notions of the Dark Ages and shows the vast accomplishments completed long before the Renaissance.

The author chronicles the enormous impact of the countries bordering the North Sea, showing how the light shining out of those dark years changed our attitudes about art, mathematics, engineering, science, society and even women’s rights.

This book must be ranked right up there with the works of Mark Kurlansky and Thomas Cahill as a primer of the steps that led to modern civilization. Pye begins with the Frisians, who inhabited the areas along the border of the Netherlands and Belgium.

They drained the salt marshes with dikes, ditches and windmills and created pastures for grazing. Their wide trading prompted the reintroduction of money and, most importantly, shared ideas. Learning was widespread during the Dark Ages, and countless universities were formed. The Venerable Bede wrote on nature and the tides and eventually became known as the “father of English history.” Throughout this time period, books were borrowed and copied, and the independent thoughts contained within often made them worth burning. As Pye demonstrates, the Vikings had the widest impact on the area. As the first to be able to tack into the wind, they could travel and trade to Iceland, through the Baltic and down the Volga River, bringing back food, slaves and goods. The laws of the North Sea communities were actually quite liberal. Women were allowed to inherit, which led to later, and consensual, marriages, as well as the institutions of pensions and annuities. Also common were béguinages, religious houses for women who moved to the cities where they could safely work, earn and learn.

A brilliant history of the Dark Ages showing the growth and development of science, business, fashion, law, politics and other significant institutions—a joy to read and reread.

(8 pages of color illustrations)

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A leading economist offers a brilliant analysis of the worldwide need to balance economic development and environmental sustainability.

Sustainable development is “the greatest, most complicated challenge humanity has ever faced,” writes Sachs (Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management/ Columbia Univ.; To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, 2013, etc.). In an important, comprehensive and remarkably accessible book—a standout in a sea of jargon-laden titles that fail to explain and vivify this enormously complex topic—the author writes lucidly about a staggering array of intertwined challenges, including poverty, overpopulation, species extinction, overextraction from oceans, urbanization, social mobility and climate change. Sachs stresses that sustainable development is “inherently an exercise in problem solving,” and he calls for a holistic approach and new ideas to produce “prosperous, inclusive, sustainable, and well-governed societies.” He explains the history of world economic development, the factors that help make some nations more impoverished than others (such as the landlocked nature of much of Africa), the science of climate change, how technical advances have fostered the depletion of ocean fisheries, the “unfinished business” of social mobility, and the pressing need for sustainable technologies and higher farm yields (especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). In each instance, the author offers telling details and anecdotes accompanied by useful charts, maps and photographs that drive home his points. Two photos of Shenzhen, China, taken three decades apart, convey the astonishing growth of that major southern city. Examining each aspect of his topic in detail within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals formulated at the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, Sachs argues that solutions are feasible and affordable, despite strong opposition by vested interests and the inaction of governments.

Required reading for policymakers and students, and general readers will finish the book realizing they actually understand what sustainable development is all about.

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DEMOCRACY IN THE DARK The Seduction of Government Secrecy Schwarz, Jr., Frederick A.O. New Press (352 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-62097-051-5

An exploration of the growth of American government secrecy.

Since the 1940s, a “secrecy culture” has developed in the federal government, abetted by administrations from both parties. Beginning with the paranoia of the Atomic Age and exacerbated by fears of terrorism following 9/11, government decisions and actions have been increasingly hidden from the electorate, from Congress and even from other agencies that need to know about them.

Attorney Schwarz (co-author: Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, 2007, etc.) first grappled with secrecy issues as chief counsel to the Senate’s Church Committee in 1976, and he explores the “seductions” that drive the secrecy culture. These include the ego boost that comes with limited access to secrets, the desires to protect turf and cover up incompetence, misconduct or controversial actions, and incentives that severely sanction disclosures but encourage overclassification. He also reviews at length the familiar arguments about the disadvantages and abuses of government secrecy: Too much information is classified, much of it for the wrong reasons, compartmentalizing information keeps it from people who need it, etc. The executive branch and Congress have consistently been complicit in ignoring the problem, hiding behind plausible deniability for anything that goes wrong. Ultimately, warns Schwarz, secrecy infantilizes the electorate and freezes them out of critical decisions and meaningful evaluations of decisions after they have been taken. It breeds cynicism when the secrets come out, as they generally do, too often leaked for self-serving political advantage. The author’s concerns are certainly timely, given the recent release of the Senate report critical of CIA interrogations following 9/11. While Schwarz insists correctly that this is a long-standing and bipartisan problem, he clearly prefers examples from Republican administrations— even though many journalists and experts regard the Obama administration as the most opaque since Richard Nixon’s.

A thorough, if sometimes discursive and loosely organized, presentation of a complex problem that is unfortunately lacking specific suggestions for solutions beyond a call for a general change in attitudes.

HOW TO CLONE A MAMMOTH The Science of De-Extinction Shapiro, Beth Princeton Univ. (232 pp.) $24.95 | May 1, 2015 978-0-691-15705-4

MacArthur fellow Shapiro (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) considers the nature and prospects of “de-extinction,” the return of creatures gone the way of the dodo.

Although the author goes to great lengths to demystify the art and science of cloning, it requires access to a preserved living cell. So we can forget visions of Jurassic Park. Well, almost, for it is very likely that, eventually, we will be able to resurrect the traits and behaviors of bygone animals, if not Dolly-like replicas. However, Shapiro is quick to add, the de-extinction of, for instance, the passenger pigeon or the woolly mammoth would require not only enormous amounts of money—to both create and to monitor—but also minute attention to a mare’s-nest of needs for the animal. Consider those creatures that we didn’t kill to extinction but that disappeared as a result of habitat loss. Consider that most animals are social and would require a cohort to exist with any form of natural circumstance. There is also the question of whether it would be better to achieve the near product via selective breeding or through the highly complex process of genetic synthesis. In the case of the mammoth, writes the author, “[l]ess than 2 percent of the elephant genome would need to be edited, but 70 million changes is a lot of changes to make.” Furthermore, how would the newly created creatures fraternize with existing animals, and how would they alter the environment? As with certain forms of genetically engineered plants, we may not know the consequences until it’s too late. We also don’t want these animals to be freaks but to exist in their natural states—“the resurrection of ecological interactions”—at a time when extinction barely scratches people’s consciousness.

Extinction is still forever, writes Shapiro, but fashioning a first cousin—with all its intriguing and alarming possibilities—possessing the same behavioral quirks is within reach. (16 color illustrations; 2 halftones; 9 line illustrations)

BECOMING MADISON The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father Signer, Michael PublicAffairs (384 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-61039-295-2

An attorney and author looks at the early life and career of our fourth president.

Though he’s the principal architect of our constitutional form of government, James Madison (17511836) remains, for most Americans, the least distinct of all the 78

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Founders, better known as Hamilton’s and Jay’s co-author, as Jefferson’s lieutenant, as the beguiling Dolley’s husband. In this highly readable and often insightful treatment, Signer (Demagogue: The Fight to Save America from Its Worst Enemies, 2009, etc.) colors in the portrait, finding the essential Madison in the young man as he charts the diminutive Virginian’s “evolving character and his emerging ideas.” A remarkably intense, indefatigably hardworking youth, Madison mastered self-control in part to mask his raw sensitivity and frail health. Signer convincingly diagnoses his infirmity—contra Madison biographer Lynne Cheney—as “severe anxiety-driven panic attacks that made him ill.” Despite this weakness, he consciously set out to become a statesman, regularly asserting himself in the public, rough-and-tumble world of politics, using, oftentimes anonymously, the power of his ideas and the elegance of his pen to shape the debate. With a character influenced by his father, his tutor, and especially his college president, the Presbyterian cleric John Witherspoon, Madison drew ideas from his voluminous reading and all-encompassing scholarship. Finding the Socratic method distasteful and inadequate, he fashioned his own search for truth and developed it into a singular political strategy. Signer describes Madison’s method as an “interlocking set of nine tactics” that primarily emphasized ideas, preparation, timing, and, most of all, the quelling of passion in oneself and one’s opponent. The author offers some dramatic set pieces demonstrating Madison’s method in action—the 1784 fight against religious assessments in Virginia, the Constitutional Convention, the Virginia ratification battle, etc.—illustrating its effectiveness against more conventional tactics and politicians. He’s particularly good at showing how Madison’s discipline, relentless logic and faith in reason allowed him to triumph over his in-state antagonist, Patrick Henry.

A perfect introduction to a deeply private and immensely important man.

COMMUNION Essays

Smith, Curtis Dock Street Press (156 pp.) $16.00 paper | Apr. 30, 2015 978-0-9910657-3-8 An essayist muses on faith and fatherhood.

As the title suggests, Smith (Beasts and Men, 2013) writes often of communion, though in an expansive sense that is not specifically religious nor narrowly Christian. Of hiking with his son, he writes, “[h]ere is my communion, the intersection of this beauty and the pulse and awareness that is mine alone. Here waits a brand of grace I seldom achieve in the workaday world—the sublime recognition of a moment’s happiness.” Neither the style nor the tone varies much within these essays, with diction that is straightforward and precise and a placidity that rarely expresses torment or achieves transcendence. Most of the pieces concern a father’s relationship with his son—never named (nor is his |

wife, generally a bit player)—and they read like secular sermons.

The author writes often of faith but is not a believer; he experiences value from prayer without knowing to whom or what he prays; he reads the Bible as literature and because so many others find inspiration in it. He teaches troubled students at a secondary school, where he sees colleagues retire or die, and he ponders his own mortality and the inevitability that the bond he feels with his son will loosen. In preparing to speak at a close friend’s funeral, he writes, “I am not a poet, but this morning I feel the poet’s burden of weighing each word before committing it to the final draft.” As plainspoken as the writing is, it seems to share that burden, of the dutiful, decent man who has revised any spontaneity or unreflective emotion out of his work. Of another hike with his son, he writes, “[w]e will talk about anything he wants, and when he asks his questions, I will answer honestly. I will provide a mirror in which he can see himself clearly. I will do my best to be a good human for him.”

Other good humans may find inspiration in these humanist homilies.

EPIC MEASURES One Doctor, Seven Billion Patients.

Smith, Jeremy N. Harper Wave/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-06-223750-7 Smith (Growing a Garden City, 2010) a freelance journalist who covers health and environmental issues for Discover, the Chicago Tribune and other leading publications, chronicles an ambitious project to collect comparative data on global health issues.

In 2013, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation— sponsored and funded by the Gates Foundation—issued its groundbreaking report on world health, The Global Burden of Disease, a “meticulous decades-long creation...measuring the impact of 235 causes of death, 289 diseases and injuries, and 67 risk factors for men and women in 20 age groups.” The author compares the study to the Human Genome Project in its scope and potential benefits, and he identifies the impacts of health issues and available treatments on the duration and quality of life. Smith profiles the vision of director Christopher Murray, a man with a powerful desire to revolutionize the treatment of health on a global scale. Murray’s passion began with summers spent assisting his parents in the operation of a mobile hospital in the African desert. Smith’s formal education in health issues began in the 1980s, when he studied biology at Harvard and earned a medical degree. He also received a doctorate in international health economics from Oxford. In 1998, he became the director of a short-lived World Health Organization project to issue an independent, evidence-based report on world health, a report that was a predecessor of the 2013 study. Murray was struck by the conflicting data from international health agencies on global life expectancy, infant mortality, the incidence of kirkus.com

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“Besides appealing to fans, the book ably captures the lost milieu of independent rock, which Nirvana’s moment irretrievably transformed.” from i found my friends

WATER TO THE ANGELS William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

chronic disease and more. The boy who had seen poverty firsthand in Africa became a man with a mission “to measure how we sicken and die in order to improve how we live.”

A fascinating account of a charismatic visionary who successfully battles the convoluted politics of international health bureaucracies.

Standiford, Les Ecco/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-06-225142-8 978-0-06-225144-2 e-book 978-0-06-237384-7 Audiobook

I FOUND MY FRIENDS The Oral History of Nirvana Soulsby, Nick St. Martin’s Griffin (368 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-250-06152-2

You-are-there narrative of Nirvana’s rise, focused on the trio’s comrades at the dawn of Alternative Nation.

Soulsby (Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide, 2012) builds his second book concerning Nirvana’s brief run and long shadow through the recollections of Nirvana’s fellow musicians, most (though not all) of whom remained obscure. This is in line with the most positive aspect of how Nirvana’s success transformed the regional American musical underground: “Nirvana never felt it was above the many bands they befriended; they always felt they were part of the community who tell this tale rather than of the celebrity world they joined.” Formed four years prior to 1991’s chart-topping “Nevermind,” the band’s core was the fragile, artistic Kurt Cobain and the less-enigmatic rocker Krist Novoselic. Benefitting from the communal, low-budget vibe in the Pacific Northwest music scene, their nascent band quickly evolved into an efficient, hard-driven touring machine, alongside other avatars of grunge like Tad and Mudhoney. As one musician observed, early Nirvana was “definitely still grunge but with better venues comes better sound and all things better.” Naturally, Cobain’s spirit hangs over the storytelling; he’s remembered as withdrawn and clearly overwhelmed by health issues and controlled substances but also for kindness and humor. In an improbable moment, as they were taken under Sonic Youth’s wing and added powerhouse drummer Dave Grohl, all the elements aligned for a major cultural shift. As “Nevermind” broke big, the band “brought the communal spirit of the underground to whatever strange land was opening up for them,” engaging social causes and booking confrontational bands as opening acts. As Soulsby notes, “Nirvana saw fame as valuable only if it stood for something.” Yet the rockers’ reflections become increasingly poignant as the band’s denouement approaches.

Besides appealing to fans, the book ably captures the lost milieu of independent rock, which Nirvana’s moment irretrievably transformed. (8-page b/w photo insert)

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Dutiful story of a man who, not having finished high school, “let alone set foot in an engineering class,” designed a metropolitan water system that is still in use today.

Irish immigrant William Mulholland’s (1855-1935) construction of a water grid centered on the Los Angeles River, which captivated him when he arrived in 1877, inarguably made the LA of today possible, for better or worse; more than 10 million citizens depend on it to some degree or another. Yet Mulholland was nearly condemned to oblivion after a dam collapsed in 1928 in the mountains above the city, an event considered by some to be the worst engineering failure in American history.

Standiford (Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War, 2012, etc.) examines the events of Mulholland’s life up to that disaster, praising him for squarely accepting responsibility: “Devastated by the event that refashioned him from civic hero to villain in an eye-blink, Mulholland would at one point confide to a reporter, ‘I envy those who were killed.’ ” There are better books on the politics and history of water in Southern California, and sometimes it seems that Standiford is generating words just to fill space as he plumbs his topic—e.g., turning Edward Abbey’s stirring aperçu on the visual splendor of the West into the lame observation, “in the elemental landscape of Jawbone Canyon, no such problem presents itself.” The portrait that emerges is of a determined public servant who was in the right place at the right time, demonized by later generations for his role in removing water from other parts of California in order to shape a metropolis. The added value of Standiford’s book largely comes in its closing pages, in which he examines the now-canonical script for Chinatown and separates history from fiction.

Generally sympathetic to its subject and well-written but to be consulted only after William Kahrl’s Water and Power (1982) and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (1986).

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YEAR OF THE COW How 420 Pounds of Beef Built a Better Life for One American Family Stone, Jared Flatiron Books (320 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 28, 2015 978-1-250-05258-2

Debut author Stone, Emmy-winning TV producer, wrangles a lively, informative, sometimes-intimate tale from his family’s adventure eating a freezer full of beef over two years of culinary and lifestyle change.

The author wanted to feed his family in the most environmentally and ethically responsible way without becoming a caricature of a fad-following New-Age epicure. Solution: whole foods; a whole cow, to be precise. Why beef? Partly as an homage to a Midwestern childhood “near the cattle trails of the High Plains.” But mainly because he wondered how the experience of eating the entire grassfed animal—free of antibiotics and growth hormones—might affect his mind and body. Cooking it respectfully, learning the vagaries of each individual cut, would also make him more than a passive consumer. It would reacquaint him with where his food actually came from, with ancestral foodways in eclipse, and maybe even help him find a “doorway to a more soulful life.” Stone provides a primer on prime beef (choice, etc.), as well as a cattle history lesson stretching back nearly 9,000 years and a cautionary tale about how the post– World War II obsession with convenience and processed foods not only has deflected us from healthier and more fulfilling means of feeding ourselves, but infected all areas of life with a ticking-clock mentality. More, the author braises his book in his family’s values.

Most “charming domestic scenes” one is subjected to are anything but, but Stone’s revealing set pieces are warm, winning and welcome.

Readers will feel like guests in their home, privy to private fears and joys as well as gastronomic triumphs and catastrophes.

Though Stone engages in a few meandering asides and perhaps tries to extract too much meaning from rather prosaic subjects, he nonetheless offers provocative thoughts on our carnivorous history and contemporary options, adding some tantalizing snout-to-tail recipes.

THE THIN GREEN LINE The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy Sullivan, Paul Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4516-8724-8

Want to get rich? Stay in school and save your money.

New York Times financial columnist Sullivan (Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Other Don’t, 2010) has a deeper, more sophisticated take on money management than all that, but the point |

remains: Most wealthy people place a premium on education, have voted on that with their wallets, and have learned the fine art of deferring gratification with an eye to building a portfolio.

Writing sometimes too breezily but always engagingly, Sullivan distinguishes between “rich,” meaning simply having a lot of money, and “wealthy,” meaning “having more money than you needed to do all the things you wanted to do.” That distinction— the thin green line of the title—is important, since it gauges financial well-being on one’s tastes and requirements. In that sense, a person without encumbrances who has $100,000 can be wealthier than one leveraged to the hilt and worth 10 times that on paper. So being rich does not translate to being financially secure. Nor does it necessarily mean having successfully captured huge swaths of the market; by Sullivan’s account, the top 1 percent of earners in this country had “just about the same percentage they had in 1936.” Of course, since that time, the 1 percent has become adept at rent-seeking. All the same, they distinguish themselves in other ways, including spending less money eating out and putting more into retirement accounts.

“Over years,” Sullivan notes, “those differences become enormous.” Other subtle differences come into play, as well. There’s a reason employers are reluctant to hire workers with GEDs, for instance, and why being rich doesn’t always equate to having good taste. Still, as one of Sullivan’s chapter titles puts it by way of summary and slogan, “It’s better to be wealthy than rich, even if you’re poor.” Therein lies the secret to security.

There’s good how-to stuff here, but Sullivan’s added value is his gentle insistence that wealth and money aren’t synonyms.

HEADSTRONG 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World

Swaby, Rachel Broadway (272 pp.) $16.00 paper | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-553-44679-1

Minibiographies of women and their accomplishments in science.

Freelance journalist and Longshot magazine senior editor Swaby presents brief histories of 52 women who have been recognized for their accomplishments and contributions to a wide variety of scientific fields, including medicine, biology, genetics, physics and astronomy, among others. Although many of these women may not be familiar names outside their courses of study, the author’s spadework should bring them to the forefront, allowing the general public to learn about the females who pushed beyond sexist attitudes to undertake and achieve success in a male-dominated arena. Covering a few hundred years, from the 1600s to the 1950s, Swaby only includes those women whose “life work has already been completed.” Many of the women were pioneers, breaking gender barriers to attend famous schools, like France’s École de Médecine, in order to pursue their dreams of becoming doctors, scientists and kirkus.com

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“A comprehensive, encyclopedic work that should be included in the collections of libraries, schools and other institutions.” from kl

other professionals. There were also those who fought against religious persecution to continue their experiments. Among Swaby’s subjects are Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, Stephanie Kwolek, the American who invented Kevlar, and Inge Lehmann, the Dane who discovered Earth’s inner core. “By treating women in science like scientists instead of anomalies or wives who moonlight in the lab,” writes the author, “we can accelerate the growth of a whole new generation of chemists, archaeologists, and cardiologists while also revealing a whole hidden history of the world.” These short accounts should inspire girls who want to study science to follow their dreams and would be useful to teachers who wish to include more information about successful women in their curriculums.

Readers may argue over the selections, but Swaby provides succinct and informative narratives on some of the women who have made important contributions to the realm of science.

CHILDREN OF THE STONE The Power of Music in a Hard Land Tolan, Sandy Bloomsbury (480 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-1-60819-813-9

Musicians who play together break down the barriers separating them.

Veteran journalist Tolan (Communication and Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, 2006, etc.) finds in the determined career of a Palestinian musician a chance for enduring harmony between Palestinians and Israelis. The poster boy for the First Intifada (1987-1993)—literally; a 1987 photograph of him as a young boy hurling stones at Israeli soldiers from his refugee camp became an iconic international image—Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan was a “child of the stones” growing up near Ramallah, West Bank, under the thumb of Israeli occupation. His mother abandoned him when he was 5, and Palestinian gangs murdered his father in 1990 due to his suspected collaboration with the Israelis. Raised by his grandfather, Ramzi absorbed the collective hatred and despair harbored by the Palestinians against their Israeli enforcers. After the Oslo Accord of 1993, many long-exiled Palestinians were allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza, including a violinist trained in musical therapy, Mohammad Fadel, who started the Palestine National Conservatory of Music as part of an effort to infuse new life into Palestinian cultural institutions. Ramzi was chosen to play the viola, and he won a “playing for peace” scholarship to study in America and France. Eventually, he was swept into a grand friendship project between Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said and Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim in the form of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, Spain, that would promote peace through an Arab-Jewish musical partnership. Ramzi also 82

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started his own association in the West Bank, finding ways to support young Palestinian musicians while also making a political stand against Israeli occupation.

A resolute, heart-rending story of real change and possibility in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse.

KL A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Wachsmann, Nikolaus Farrar, Straus and Giroux (880 pp.) $40.00 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-374-11825-9 A harrowing, thorough study of the Nazi camps that gathers a staggering amount of useful and necessary information on the collective catastrophe.

In a tightly organized, systematic narrative, Wachsmann (Modern European History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, 2004, etc.) presents an “integrated” treatment of the Konzentrationslager of the title that moves beyond any attempt to endow the camps with universal meaning. He looks at forces both inside and outside the camps, from Hitler’s ascension in early 1933 to the liberation by the Allies in the spring of 1945. The author tries to move away from looking at the camps as occupying “some metaphysical realm” and stick to primary sources that reveal the voices of the prisoners and the perpetrators. To deal with the mass arrest of Hitler’s enemies in the spring and summer of 1933, the earliest camps morphed from existing workhouses and state prisons located all over Germany (Wachsmann provides maps of the camps as they evolved over the years), housing mostly political prisoners and communists, with Jews constituting only a small percentage, to a template fixed at Dachau, which SS leader and Munich police president Heinrich Himmler established as the “first concentration camp.” Schooled in brutal, bloodthirsty methods, the guards were encouraged to treat the prisoners as animals, running the camps in relentless military fashion, employing routine terror, forced labor and euphemisms regarding the murders of inmates as “suicides” and “shot trying to escape” for PR purposes. The camp system grew with the purge of SA leader Ernst Röhm and other “renegades” in July 1934 and took off with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, after which Jews numbered predominately. As the war progressed, so did the methods of mass extermination, from mass shootings to the Auschwitz gas chamber: first weak prisoners, then Soviet POWs, then Jews.

A comprehensive, encyclopedic work that should be included in the collections of libraries, schools and other institutions.

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STUFFOCATION Why We’ve Had Enough of Stuff and Need Experience More Than Ever

Wallman, James Spiegel & Grau (320 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-8129-9759-0

A reasoned and passionate argument for culling the clutter and plugging into the joys of experiential living.

Incredible as it may now seem, Americans once had to be taught to be conspicuous consumers. As Wallman skillfully points out, we used to be quite thrifty, the product of hard-calloused generations who understood the need to make scarce things last. The rise in consumerism required a revolution in advertising and the invention of an entire new industry whose sole purpose was to create want and desire in the citizenry, turning time-honored frugality into a seemingly endless desire to consume more. But the fantastic success of all those mid-20th-century “Mad Men” has come with hidden costs that are only now being fully understood. Mountains of junk have risen in the midst of the “throwaway” culture, and it’s not only altering people’s psyches and making them increasingly unhappy. It’s also making them—and their flammable hoarders’ dens—dangerous to the neighbors. “Even in full, heat-resistant firefighting gear,” writes the author, “a fire that has flashed over will kill you in less than two seconds.” The perilous nature of these developments has prompted many to try and escape the clutches of overconsumption before it’s too late. Some try the minimalist route, restricting their possessions to the bare essentials. Others attempt to take a page out of Walden. Still others try to “chill out” and cut back on their consumption. After careful consideration, however, Wallman finds none of these earnest efforts to be effective remedies for rampant materialism. Instead, he proposes a revolutionary new shift in which consumers begin to value real-life experiences—those that expose them to other people and generate stories—more than all that junk piling up in the garage. The author is no zealot, and he freely acknowledges that things can be cool, even advantageous. In the end, however, experiences must trump stuff.

A provocative, challenging discourse likely to spur some to action.

A DISEASE CALLED CHILDHOOD Why ADHD Became an American Epidemic

Wedge, Marilyn Avery (272 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-58333-563-5

An astute examination of the ADHD epidemic, what’s causing it, and how a radical, nonmedicinal treatment approach may help. |

Author and longtime family therapist Wedge’s industryshaking 2012 Psychology Today article “Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD” challenged the American psychiatric industry to reframe the way classic ADHD-associative behaviors are understood. The article also questioned whether medication should be the first approach to treating it and asked why diagnosis rates in America so greatly differed from those in European cultures.

To Wedge, ADHD is not biological but psychosocial; in the U.S., it has become substantially “overdiagnosed and overmedicated” with powerful pharmaceutical stimulants prescribed to children. With direct aim at parents open to alternative therapies, the author discusses dietary (food dyes, processed sugar), situational and stressful familial causes for behavioral disruptions and offers nonmedical interventional treatment plans—e.g., stricter parenting, educational reform and even exercise—to counter behaviors traditionally deemed as ADHD markers. She makes impressive use of referential cases from her own practice, yet instead of the more typical rapid-fire diagnosis, Wedge, while agreeing that stimulant drugs like Adderall and Ritalin do work, insists on exploring the drug-free avenues available to children instead. She is concerned about the changing landscapes and parameters of what “normal childhood” behaviors are and that those falling outside of them are rashly diagnosed and swiftly buffered with psychiatric medication. Chapters detailing how modern medicine came to the conclusions it has about ADHD, the pharmaceutical industry’s influential omnipresence in medicine, rickety research studies and why diagnosis rates continue to mushroom are consistently startling and distressing. While Wedge offers options not every medical professional or concerned parent will swallow willingly, her affable approach and compassionate universal concern for the wellness of children are evident throughout.

In an important read for open-minded parents, Wedge offers fresh perspectives and practical approaches to the continuing ADHD conundrum.

TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD The Discovery of Modern Science

Weinberg, Steven Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-06-234665-0

Histories of science celebrate great thinkers of the past. In this ingenious account, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Weinberg (Chair in Science/ Univ. of Texas; Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, 2012, etc.) celebrates generously but gives equal emphasis to why they often missed the mark.

Many people assume that pre-Enlightenment societies were ignorant, but they didn’t think so. In ancient China, Greece, Rome and the medieval world, wise men observed, thought deeply, and pronounced on a wide variety of subjects, sometimes correctly, usually not. They not only didn’t know what kirkus.com

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“...Wood’s quickly paced, informative biography is a welcome primer for anyone interested in learning more about one of film’s most important figures.” from alfred hitchcock

they didn’t know; they also didn’t know how to learn it. They often mixed metaphysics and reality. The work of Aristotle, the quintessential ancient scientist, was suffused with teleology, the belief that everything has a purpose. Thus, objects fall because their natural place is the center of the universe. Much early science was actually philosophy, but since nothing in the laws of nature “corresponds to ideas of goodness, justice, love, or strife...we cannot rely on philosophy as a reliable guide to scientific understanding.” Despite today’s scientific orthodoxy, we also should not rely solely on observation and experiments.

Copernicus and Kepler argued for a heliocentric solar system based on mathematical simplicity, not accuracy, and prediction of planetary movements was no better than Ptolemy’s. Unlike some academics, the author has a keen understanding of the precise details of his subject, and he makes good use of them throughout the book. “Some historians of science make a shibboleth of not referring to present scientific knowledge in studying the science of the past,” he writes. “I will instead make a point of using present knowledge to clarify past science.”

While Weinberg confines most mathematics to a 95-page appendix, readers will strain to comprehend some of the lengthy nuts-and-bolts explanations, but those who persist will come away with a stimulating view of how humans learn from nature.

THE FUTURE OF VIOLENCE Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat

Wittes, Benjamin; Blum, Gabriella Basic (336 pp.) $29.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-465-08974-1

Ambitious yet dry treatise regarding a particular terror of modern life: the increasing ubiquity of potential harm spawned by technological transformations.

Brookings Institution senior fellow Wittes and Blum (Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law/Harvard Law School; Islands of Agreement: Managing Enduring Armed Rivalries, 2007, etc.) begin by articulating the many ways in which our fundamental connectedness, along with related advances in computing, biotechnology, 3-D printing, gene synthesis and other awe-inspiring technologies, could easily go awry or be turned to evil ends by lone sociopaths or wannabe jihadi: “Technologies that put destructive power traditionally confined to states in the hands of small groups and individuals have proliferated remarkably far,” write the authors. They initially focus on the destructive possibilities of technologies that have quickly become familiar, hypothesizing, for example, that ordinary people will soon be able to harass their rivals with tiny drones. In our transformative moment, “distance does not protect you...you are at once a figure of great power and great vulnerability.” Yet much of the authors’ discussion focuses on the changing nature of the state itself, weighing Hobbes’ concept of 84

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the “Leviathan” in the face of new and diverse threats. They first focus on how technology has “distributed” both vulnerability and the capacity to cause harm widely: “[W]e live in a fishbowl even as we exploit the fact that others live in a fishbowl too,” a principle embodied by recent “sextortion” cases. This inevitably forces a reconsideration of privacy and liberty on many levels, as revealed by events ranging from the Boston Marathon bombing investigation to hacker attacks on Israel and Iran. The authors raise fascinating questions but discuss them utilizing a formal legalistic framework. Ironically, they illuminate the coming age of “many-to-many” threats via a language few laypeople will find comprehensible.

A thoughtful yet obscure Cassandra warning of great vulnerabilities disguised as gifts.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK The Man Who Knew Too Much

Wood, Michael Amazon/New Harvest (144 pp.) $20.00 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-544-45622-8

A brief portrait of cinema’s most iconic silhouette, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980).

The director’s work has the rare privilege of being equally acclaimed by critics and popular audiences. As such, Hitchcock’s films have become part of the collective imagination, and “Hitchcockian” is a common idiom used to describe films that parrot his signature style. With such vast influence, Wood (Emeritus, Comparative Literature/Princeton Univ.; Film: A Very Short Introduction, 2012, etc.) offers an entry-level study of the famed auteur, unpacking the ways in which Hitchcock “can change the way we see.” Besides showing off his talent for close reading as he dissects scenes from Hitchcock’s classic films and personal life, Wood also provides vital contextualization to the films he analyzes, such as his “British” films and those with political overtones made during wartime. What is most remarkable about Hitchcock’s films is his insistence on chance meetings, serendipity and mistaken identity. For Hitchcock, who was famously distrustful of authority, the ordered world, and its reliance on reason, was misleading. He found more truth in happenstance, in which the impossible was made ordinary, and he crafted a world in which the improbable was not only accepted by viewers, but expected.

Wood gives special attention to Hitchcock’s most famous films, like Vertigo and North by Northwest, but the author also analyzes many of the early, less-recognized films. For all his celebrated artistic sensibility, Wood is clever to point out that Hitchcock was always dependent on the help of others, most importantly his wife, Alma, whom he outwardly relied on for artistic council— and without whom he may not have been so prolific or revered.

The breadth of Hitchcock’s career and personal life defies easy summation, but Wood’s quickly paced, informative biography is a welcome primer for anyone interested in learning more about one of film’s most important figures.

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children’s & teen EAT, LEO! EAT!

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adderson, Caroline Illus. by Bisaillon, Josée Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-77138-013-3

INFANDOUS by Elana K. Arnold.......................................................87 THE TRAP by Steven Arntson..............................................................87 SMALL ELEPHANT’S BATHTIME by Tatyana Feeney....................... 99 THE DOOR IN THE MOON by Catherine Fisher...............................100 THE GIRL AT MIDNIGHT by Melissa Grey.......................................105 THE IMAGINARY by A.F. Harrold; illus. by Emily Gravett............106 THE TRUTH COMMISSION by Susan Juby.......................................109 SEE YOU NEXT YEAR by Andrew Larsen; illus by Todd Stewart..........................................................................110 SIDEWALK FLOWERS by JonArno Lawson; illus by Sydney Smith..........................................................................110 MARCH by John Lewis; Andrew Aydin; illus. by Nate Powell........ 112 A WORK OF ART by Melody Maysonet............................................. 115 MY PEN by Christopher Myers.......................................................... 117 P. ZONKA LAYS AN EGG by Julie Paschkis......................................119

Nonna’s tales about the stelline, chiancaredde and other shapes of pasta she serves entice a reluctant ragazzo to the dinner table.

Everyone gathers at Nonna’s house on Sunday afternoons, but only after urging will little Leo sit down. “Not hungry for stelline? Not hungry for little stars? Hmm,” says Nonna—and then begins a tale about a boy going to see his Nonna on a dark night. The next Sunday the pasta is chiancaredde, “paving stones,” and after that occhi di lupo. With each week Nonna adds an element to the boy’s journey. Soon, not only is Leo first to the table, but everyone wants to hear what comes next. “Buon appetito!”

Leo calls to all at the end, and “Altrettanto, Leo! You, too!” they answer. Though there is definitely not enough food on the table in Bisaillon’s mixed-media collages, the smiling faces and closely grouped figures of Leo, parents, cousins and other relatives glow with warmth. On alternate spreads, views of an apprehensive lad making his way through a shadowed woodland beneath shining stelline give way at sunrise to a climactic hug in a garden aflutter with farfalle (butterflies). A closing page about pasta only hints at its many possible ingredients and shapes.

Food, family, stories: delizioso! (glossary) (Picture book. 5-8)

THIS STRANGE WILDERNESS by Nancy Plain.............................. 121

SALSA Un Poema Para Cocinar / A Cooking Poem

OCTOPUSES! by Laurence Pringle; illus by Meryl Henderson......... 123 A TALE OF TWO BEASTS by Fiona Roberton...................................124

Argueta, Jorge Illus. by Tonatiuh, Duncan Translated by Amado, Elisa Groundwood (32 pp.) $18.95 | $16.95 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-55498-442-8 978-1-55498-443-5 e-book

BONE GAP by Laura Ruby................................................................126 EVERYBODY SLEEPS (BUT NOT FRED) by Josh Schneider............126 THE ALEX CROW by Andrew Smith ................................................128 THE WALLS AROUND US by Nova Ren Suma................................ 131 THE UNLIKELY HERO OF ROOM 13B by Teresa Toten..................... 133 THE BOY WHO LOST FAIRYLAND by Catherynne M. Valente; illus.

by Ana Juan........................................................................................ 133 WE ALL LOOKED UP by Tommy Wallach......................................... 135 LIKE A RIVER by Kathy Cannon Wiechman..................................... 136 |

Music, dancing and food unite in this giddy bilingual whirl.

Ingredients are also elements in Argueta’s “salsa orchestra”: “Cloves of garlic are trumpets, / and the cilantro is the orchestra conductor / with his shaggy, green hair.” Moreover, “For the music to be really spicy, / it’s important to use chilies”—red ones in particular, though hot chilies also come in green (“One bite and we turn into fireflies”), purple, yellow and “even little round chilies like green pearls.” Though the amount of each

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want to read nonfiction? just wait till you’re older.

The question came at the very end of a characteristically stimulating weekend colloquium offered by Children’s Literature New England. Having spent the past two days discussing historical writing, primarily fiction, the presenters for the weekend lined up for a final Q-and-A. It was something of a who’s who of children’s-literature luminaries, and numbered among them were National Book Award, Newbery and Caldecott winners. The question came from an audience member who observed that most of the discussion had been of fiction; in a world where David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Laura Hillenbrand feed the literary needs of adult readers, why is there so relatively little nonfiction for kids?

The result was pandemonium. Panelists started talking over one another; audience members (a number of whom were writers of nonfiction themselves) practically levitated in their desire to contrib- One of January’s ute. Clearly the subject could have filled few, fine nonfiction at least another day, but the colloquium books for kids was over, and participants had to content themselves with thinking it over on their drives home.

Although there is no consensus as to why there’s this underrepresentation, there’s little question that it exists.

In 2014, Kirkus reviewed over 1,800 traditionally published works of nonfiction for adults, the vast majority of which were literary nonfiction, memoir or biography. In that same period, Kirkus reviewed only about 160 traditionally published works of nonfiction for middle graders or teens—and over 1,400 works of fiction for the same age group. (We reviewed over 1,900 traditionally published works of fiction for adults, so the proportions in the adult world are not nearly so lopsided.)

As a reader who came late to nonfiction—there being even less for middle graders and teenagers in my day than there is now—I have found myself returning to this question, and I have no answers. But it is puzzling as all get out.

Where do these adult readers of nonfiction come from? Do newly minted grown-ups suddenly find themselves browsing the adult nonfiction stacks hankering for some reality?

Or, as seems more likely, are those child readers who want just the facts, ma’am, getting by with the very fine, very sparse nonfiction works available to them?

They shouldn’t have to wait till they grow up. —V.S.

ingredient is not specified, Tonatiuh’s dancing figures—rendered in his digital collages in ancient Mixtec style with oversized hands and big, swiveling heads—demonstrate each step in stylized but easily followed ways. Components are diced (with adult help required, not suggested), smushed together in a lava molcajete with a thick tejolote, then stirred with a “saxophone spoon” while Mamá warms up the tortillas. “Ummmm, qué rica / esta salsa. / Salsa roja, / sabor de amor.” There is no glossary, but English translations have been placed beneath the Spanish free verse and follow it closely.

Ummm, a delicious companion to Argueta’s Tamalitos (2013, illustrated by Domi), Guacamole (2012, illustrated by Margarita Sada) and his other poemas para cocinar. (Picture book. 5-8)

EMPIRE OF NIGHT

Armstrong, Kelley Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-06-207127-9 978-0-06-207129-3 e-book Series: Age of Legends, 2 Twins Moria and Ashyn may have left the Forest, but they aren’t out of the woods yet in this romance- and politicsfilled sequel to Sea of Shadows (2014).

With Edgewood destroyed by shadow stalkers, Keeper Moria and Seeker Ashyn are reluctant guests at Emperor Tatsu’s court. No longer tasked with settling ghosts in the Forest of the Dead, they wrestle with their own restless spirits. Moria eagerly accompanies bastard prince Tyrus to negotiate with the disgraced Alvar Kitsune, hoping to rescue the missing children of Edgewood, and Ashyn reluctantly follows, fearing further separation from her sister. But Alvar is crafty like his namesake, and the trio and their traveling companions soon face political intrigue, ruinous rumors and legendary monsters. Martial, feminist Moria trades narrative duty with her studious, sentimental sister, yet political maneuvers often render both powerless. Obligatory romantic entanglements abound, with Moria dueling with double-agent Gavrila Kitsune and playboy Tyrus, and Ashyn confused by thief Ronan and scholar Simeon. Animal companions Tova and Daigo and unruly spirits provide comic relief and frequent rescues. Armstrong’s foray into noncontemporary fantasy via a vaguely Japanese world and mythology develops unevenly but with brio.

Cliffhangers and morbid humor balance out too many plot twists and slow pacing in this unnecessarily complicated sequel. Readers will have to wait for resolution. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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“This riveting science-fiction mystery is much more than an exciting read.” from the trap

INFANDOUS

Arnold, Elana K. Carolrhoda Lab (200 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-3849-1 The summer before senior year gives Sephora Golding time to surf, work on her found-object works of art and reflect on the turn her life has taken.

Seph shares a low-rent apartment in Venice Beach, California, with her stunningly gorgeous mother, Rebecca, who Seph used to imagine was a mermaid. Left by Seph’s father and shunned by Rebecca’s family, the two have always been unusually close. Last year, Seph had a brief fling with an older man; now Rebecca’s having a summertime romance with a younger one. Seph relates her summer tale of self-discovery in a matter-of-fact, occasionally foulmouthed teen voice. She intersperses her account with hardhitting yet sumptuous versions of fairy tales and myths, from “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Rape of Lucretia” to “Demeter and Persephone.” From her vantage as narrator and storyteller, she points out that “[t]hings don’t really turn out the way they do in fairy tales. I’m telling you that right up front, so you’re not disappointed later.” She calls one of her sculptures Infandous, meaning “something that’s too terrible to be spoken aloud.”

Hers is a world of raw physicality, underscoring the contrasts between beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, light and shadows that play out as secrets unfold.

A coming-of-age story consciously reminiscent of Lolita, this multifaceted portrayal of family bonds surprises with its nuanced and sometimes-searing emotional gravity. (Fiction. 14 & up)

mystery is much more than an exciting read. The subtle world may be dangerous, but Henry and his friends find that the real world poses its own challenges. Together, they grapple with racism, poverty and alcoholism, all while nursing their first crushes and dealing with the angst of the upcoming fall formal. Arntson folds all of these elements into his narrative without compromising pacing or characterization one bit.

An amazing blend of mystery, romance, science fiction and social commentary. (Science fiction. 9-12)

THE TRAP

Arntson, Steven HMH Books (256 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-547-82408-6 It is 1963 in Farro, Iowa, where not much happens—at least until the school bully goes missing and four seventhgraders find a book that allows them to literally have out-of-body experiences.

Following the directions in the book, Henry Nilsson, his twin sister, Helen, and their friends, Chinese-American Nicki and part–Nez Perce Alan, travel through the “subtle plane,” where they are both invisible and invincible. They quickly discover that they are not the only ones with this amazing ability. In addition to the creepy man who keeps appearing out of nowhere, a violin-playing ghost and the missing school bully, there is a whole organization dedicated to policing the subtle plane. But it is up to Henry and his friends to thwart the evil schemes of a crazy genius and see if they can rescue Carl, Alan’s troubled brother. This riveting science-fiction |

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“Avi builds Pete’s story…with page-turning tension and memorable characters that will leave readers with a strong sense of the insidious power wielded by the FBI and McCarthyites.” from catch you later, traitor

CATCH YOU LATER, TRAITOR

Avi Algonquin (304 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-61620-359-7

How does loyalty to country, to family and to the local baseball team define one’s life?

Pete is a typical seventh-grade Brooklyn boy until the Red Scare of the early 1950s upends his life. Instead of just playing punchball and fervently following the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, Pete finds himself trying to unravel the politics of his family history, one filled with Communist Party joiners and sympathizers. The FBI labels his father a red sympathizer and is trying to find his missing grandfather, who went to Russia in the 1930s, by turning family members into informers. Pete’s teacher, as easily swayed as so many others, turns the class against him, and his best friend, a girl, is forbidden to talk to him. In an act of rebellion, he embraces New York’s other National League baseball team, the Giants. He also enjoys reading Dashiell Hammett’s novels about Sam Spade and thinks in the detective’s voice, hoping that someday he, too, will be a “hard-boiled detective.” Avi builds Pete’s story, told in the first person, with page-turning tension and memorable characters that will leave readers with a strong sense of the insidious power wielded by the FBI and McCarthyites.

A thought-provoking story about suspicion, trust and a memorable pennant race from a one-time Brooklyn boy. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-12)

THE BULLIES OF WALL STREET This Is How Greedy Adults Messed Up Our Economy Bair, Sheila Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-4814-0085-5 978-1-4814-0087-9 e-book

An insider’s perspective on the causes of America’s recent financial crisis and its ongoing consequences.

The financial crisis that began in 2008 resulted in thousands of families losing their homes, millions losing their jobs and life savings, and over 100,000 businesses going bankrupt. During her five-year tenure as head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the author was intimately involved in the government’s efforts to avert a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. economy. She chronicles the many ways in which a broken economic system led families into financial trouble and explains how the terrible decisions made at the time by CEOs of multinational banks and heads of government regulatory committees led to the Great Recession. She paints a graphic, disturbing portrait of privileged power brokers who, even in the face of national disaster, 88

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put themselves and their cronies ahead of the common good.

Prefacing each chapter, in which she explains clearly and concisely such difficult economic concepts as “mortgage originators” and “securitization,” are fictional vignettes showing how young people’s lives are affected. Losing a home forces one family to surrender a beloved pet to a shelter. Another family struggles to pay for food and medicine. These vignettes are the weakest parts of the book, sometimes even distracting from the important factual information.

Nevertheless, Bair offers young readers an informed, insightful look into a crisis that continues to affect millions of citizens of all ages. (financial terms, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

I WILL FIGHT MONSTERS FOR YOU

Balmes, Santi Illus. by Lyona Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-9056-0

A young girl learns to fight her nighttime fears by conquering a mirror world of monsters—and a little pink monster learns to do the same.

Martina, ponytailed and blank-faced in striped pink-andblue pajamas, worries every night that monsters just under the floor might drag her down into their world, “where she would have to learn to live upside down.” After a pep talk from her father, Martina falls asleep and dreams of a little pink monster named Anitram who is just as scared of the human world as she is of the monsters’. Anitram’s world is far from terrifying. The monsters are little horned fuzzballs with sharp but sparse teeth.

Cleverly, text is placed upside down in the monster world, and scenes of Martina in bed are flipped to mirror Anitram in her bed. Blue and pink hues are reversed when the story moves from Martina’s world to Anitram’s. After Anitram is reassured by her own father, she falls asleep as well, leading to a beautiful moment when the two characters’ hands meet through the imagined hole in the floor. Unfortunately, much of the story is presented as a dream of Martina’s, which seems unnecessary; it would work just as well, and perhaps even more magically, without that extra layer of distance.

Dream or no, Martina’s monster story makes for lovely storytelling. (Picture book. 4-8)

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THE SCHNOZ OF DOOM

Beaty, Andrea Illus. by Santat, Dan Amulet/Abrams (192 pp.) $12.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-4197-1051-3 Series: Fluffy Bunnies, 2

Can Earth again be in peril from extraterrestrial bunnies?

Last summer, at Camp Whatsitooya, twins Joules and Kevin Rockman foiled the Fierce, Large, Ugly and Ferocious Furballs’ attempt to take over the world (Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies, 2010). The Fluffs, who resemble nothing so much as adorable white bunnies (except for the swirly eyes), thrive on sweet scents, so the Rockman twins were able to knock them out with stench. It’s no surprise, then, that when Joules and her brother see a news story about a rocket crashing near the abandoned Snottie’s Tissue factory, they fear the worst. When their loopy science teacher, Mr. H, brings a white

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bunny with a huge schnoz and swirly eyes to class, the twins suspect that “the worst” might be a sunny vacation compared to what’s in store for their school, the town and the world. Since all the adults are dunderheads, it’s up to the twins now that the Fluffs have come again—or could these creatures be something even more evil, more dangerous, more...smelly? Beaty propels her second bad bunny book with deadpan slapstick and sarcasm.

Santat’s occasional illustrations extend both story and humor, especially the short graphic-panel sequences (which are sorely lacking in the second half). The flatulent climax is a bit flat, but it sets up another volume nicely enough.

Armageddon-averting fun for fans of Jon Scieszka’s Spaceheadz and M.T. Anderson’s Pals in Peril. (Adventure.

8-12)

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MIGLOO’S DAY

Bee, William Illus. by Bee, William Candlewick (38 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7374-1 Doing Richard Scarry considerably more than one better, a peripatetic beagle sails through teeming cartoon seekand-find scenes featuring over 65 named characters.

Migloo is silent but wags his uncommonly expressive tail to signal responses from “Yes, please!” to “I do love sausages— ever such a lot!” The cheery pup hitches rides to the market and town square, a factory, a school and other populous locales.

Viewers hoping to make sense of all the busyness on each crowded spread would be well-advised to study the comprehensive opening gallery of Sunnytown’s human and animal residents. Though most look like Lego versions of Charlie Brown, the author gives the cast members a wide variety of skin tones, names from Eric and Molly to Amit and Mrs. Luigi, distinctive dress and pleasantly nonsexist occupations. Along with burying sly jokes in the horde, such as town physician Dr. Whom and a recognizable Mr. Dickens, the author himself walks the streets bearing signboards with challenges like “Can you find the pink knitting?” Happily, the townscape views alternate with pages of somewhat-less-dizzying scenes that offer both plot continuity and visual relief. A closing spread of matching games and other quizzes invite children to test their memories—mercifully, upside-down answers are adjacent—before bidding goodbye to the winsome Migloo.

Whew. There’s definitely a new “Busytown” in town.

(Picture book. 4-6)

CANNED AND CRUSHED

Belford, Bibi Sky Pony Press (208 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-63220-435-6

In this never-a-dull-moment debut, pride and stubborn enterprise carry a brash young immigrant through both school and family troubles, as well as embarrassing errors in judgment.

“Cheese Whiz, I’m only eleven, and my life is a mess.” Such down moments are rare for Sandro, though, despite being severely overscheduled. He helps out his Zapotec father, an undocumented resident with multiple jobs and a bad back; he does his schoolwork and makes it to soccer practice; and he single-handedly runs a recycling operation on school grounds as (he mistakenly thinks) a private business to fund heart surgery his little sister, Girasol, needs. As mother and sister are in Mexico waiting for the procedure, he also has to do housework (not too well) while Papi’s on a night shift, and in school, he plots revenge on Abiola, a Pakistani classmate who 90

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has deviled him since an incident in third grade. Sounding only a little less manic than Joey Pigza, the exhausted young narrator struggles to keep these and other balls in the air as consequences and mishaps pile up. But both Abiola and a teacher pegged as mean turn out to be surprise allies, and his father’s “Be the better man, Sandro” proves a steady principle in adversity. Though Belford has her narrator utter both his favorite expletive (see above) and variations on “nothing is as it appears on the surface” with monotonous frequency and packs more issues into the tale than it can comfortably carry, readers will be happily swept along to the buoyant close.

Overstuffed, as many first novels are, but fitted with an admirable, funny protagonist. (Fiction. 10-12)

THE PENDERWICKS IN SPRING

Birdsall, Jeanne Knopf (352 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-375-87077-4 978-0-307-97459-4 e-book 978-0-375-97077-1 PLB Series: Penderwicks, 4 A new and darker installment in the acclaimed series about the loving and bustling family.

Several years have passed since the events of the third title, The Penderwicks at Point Mouette (2011). This latest stars Batty, nearly 11 and youngest of the four original sisters, and two newer siblings—Ben, son of Mr. Penderwick’s second wife, whom he married at the end of Book 2, and Lydia, the 2-year-old born of this marriage. Batty studies piano passionately, and a new music teacher at school discovers that she sings beautifully, too, so the girl undertakes a dog-walking business to earn money for voice lessons. Then Batty overhears a sister’s comment that, shockingly, betrays long-held, deeply festering anger and resentment toward her. Sensitive Batty keeps the new revelation to herself and takes an emotional nose dive. How or whether this is resolved will keep readers turning pages. Newcomers to the series are assisted by explanations of characters and past events.

Longtime fans will enjoy it, too, while feeling Batty’s pain and rooting for her recovery. They’ll also forgive what have become stock series trademarks: some improbable turns of events; almost-too-perfect familial and neighborly relationships; and nonchildlike dialogue issuing from the mouth of the babe. Not only is toddler Lydia’s speech beyond her years (as was Batty’s in the earlier books)—save for referring to herself in the third person—but she effortlessly communicates in several languages.

Not without some flaws, but overall, another charmer that will generate smiles, tears and fuzzy feelings. (Fiction.

8-12)

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“Mixed in with the bleak reality are adventure-novel goodies to maintain the pace: organized crime, prostitution and cocaine.” from conspiracy of blood and smoke

CONSPIRACY OF BLOOD AND SMOKE

Blankman, Anne Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-06-227884-5 978-0-06-227886-9 e-book A former intimate of Adolf Hitler returns to prewar Germany to save her beloved, all while fighting the rising power of the Nazi Party.

In this sequel to Prisoner of Night and Fog (2014), 18-yearold Gretchen returns to her native land in 1933, as the Nazis become ever more firmly entrenched in German politics.

Gretchen and her Jewish beau, Daniel, seek the truth about the (real-life) Reichstag fire in order to discredit Hitler and the National Socialists. If only they can prove Hitler is lying about the arsonists, surely they can prevent him from gaining a stranglehold on German politics. The tight interweaving of

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Gretchen’s journey with historical events lends a sense of the genuine—and results in the fascinating experience of following a quest readers know is doomed to fail. As Gretchen winds ever closer to the inevitable confrontation with her formerly loving “Uncle Dolf,” it becomes increasingly unclear what she can salvage from the rising horror of Nazism. Mixed in with the bleak reality are adventure-novel goodies to maintain the pace: organized crime, prostitution and cocaine. Gretchen’s too inwardly focused to see danger in Hitler’s rise beyond the risk to herself and her friends, but Daniel provides rare if vital perspective.

Suspenseful and clever, intertwining historical truth with action-packed shootouts. (author’s note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 13-16)

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“In manic cartoon illustrations, Chaud propels the disheveled but determined student through a series of hilariously surreal situations….” from a funny thing happened on the way to school…

RANDOM BODY PARTS Gross Anatomy Riddles in Verse

Bulion, Leslie Illus. by Lowery, Mike Peachtree (48 pp.) $14.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-56145-737-3

Poetry + anatomy and physiology = an unusual combination.

Bulion has taken a series of poetry styles—sonnet, limerick, haiku, concrete poem, cinquain—as well as various rhyming schemes and uses them to provide brief, riddlelike descriptions of various organs of the human body. Although the first poem tells readers, “Some riddles will seem cinchy, / Some challengingly tough,” the answers are revealed on the same pages as the poems appear, making the guessing quite simple all the way through. Some of the spreads include humorous, cartoony illustrations, while others feature close-up or even microscopic photographic images, none of which are explicitly identified.

Detailed “Poetry Notes” provide useful explanations of the styles and rhyming patterns of the poems. She relates each of them to the works of Shakespeare, although the audience that might most enjoy the hyperbole of the poems and images and the riddle format is unlikely to have yet acquired much knowledge of the Bard. The poem on teeth says, “A full set’s eight and twenty more,” although the explanation at the bottom of the page correctly identifies the number of permanent teeth as 32. While it’s hard not to admire the ick factor of couplets like, “Spuds unearthed from mud, then fried, / Mucus oozed from deep inside,” to describe the workings of the stomach, the audience for this effort may be limited.

Better suited to poetry classrooms than science labs.

(Poetry. 9-12)

ANYWHERE BUT PARADISE

Bustard, Anne Egmont USA (288 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-60684-585-1 978-1-60684-586-8 e-book As far as Peggy Sue is concerned, Hawaii is no paradise.

The seventh-grader is already unhappy about moving from Texas to Hawaii in 1960, halfway through the year and with her cat, Howdy, stuck in quarantine for 120 days, when an eighth-grader at her new school calls her a “stupid haole” (white), warning that the last day of school is “Kill Haole Day.” Despite Peggy Sue’s efforts to make peace, the bullying continues. Learning how Queen Liliuokalani was deposed and her kingdom taken over by American businessmen helps Peggy Sue understand anti-haole sentiment, but it still hurts. Despite being befriended by Malina, a classmate whose mother teaches Peggy 92

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Sue’s hula class, Peggy Sue’s miserable—plus Howdy’s losing his fur and has stopped purring. How can she feel at home in a place where native Hawaiians are prejudiced against whites and devastating tsunamis take lives? By sewing outfits for the upcoming hula recital, she can earn airfare back to Texas. Hawaii born and raised, Bustard brings this early statehood era and its racial tensions to life effectively. However, Peggy Sue’s portrayal as indifferent to race distinctions and free of racial bias herself feels anachronistic at best for a white adolescent from Texas, where, in 1960, desegregation was vigorously opposed by whites and barely touched public institutions, schools and businesses.

Why is only cruel Kiki a child of her time?

Despite concerns, this coming-of-age tale offers a vivid, accessible portrait of a fascinating time and place. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-13)

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL...

Cali, Davide Illus. by Chaud, Benjamin Chronicle (44 pp.) $12.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4521-3168-9

In the grand tradition of John Burningham’s John Patrick Norman McHennessy, the Boy Who Was Always Late (1987), a tardy lad spins exciting if unlikely excuses to a skeptical teacher.

Considering that giant ants ate his breakfast, and then, among other distractions, he was assaulted or kidnapped on the way by ninjas, mole people, elephants and “a sea of scary majorettes,” had to help sort out a milling mass of sheep and ducks, almost forgot his backpack and accidently rode his uncle’s time machine back to the age of dinosaurs, it’s not so surprising that he’s a bit late. In manic cartoon illustrations, Chaud propels the disheveled but determined student through a series of hilariously surreal situations—fetching him up at last in school, looking shocked that his teacher (who hasn’t caught sight of the dinosaur leaning in at the window) doesn’t believe him.

Wouldn’t you? She may have cause, though, as he had already spun a similar skein of yarns in the preceding I Didn’t Do My Homework Because... (2014).

A well-traveled premise, but like all of its ilk, a fertile source of inspiration for similarly dilatory students.

(Picture book. 6- 9)

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JESSICA’S BOX

Carnavas, Peter Illus. by Carnavas, Peter Kane/Miller (32 pp.) $11.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-61067-347-1

A little girl who is new to school uses a cardboard box to make friends.

As soon as she is noticed on the first day, Jessica lifts her teddy bear out of her box—but the children either laugh or walk away. On the second day, she fills her box with cupcakes, but as soon as the other children snatch them up, they leave without even a “thank you.” Her dog, Doris, goes to school in the box on the third day; she is an instant hit—but the groundskeeper takes Doris back home: “Can’t bring dogs to school.” On the fourth day she brings her box, empty, then puts it over her head.

“She just wanted to disappear.” But a little boy spots her and begins a game of hide-and-seek: She’s made a friend at last. Carnavas tells his story with a minimum of words, counting on his spacious cartoons to fill in the gaps. Most notable among these is Jessica’s use of a wheelchair, a fact that is never concealed but that is nevertheless de-emphasized in favor of Jessica’s emotions.

It’s not quite clear how old Jessica is, and readers may feel that her bringing a teddy bear to school is as silly as her classmates do, but that won’t stop them from empathizing with the lonely little girl. Carnavas’ Bob Graham–esque cartoons use color and humor in equal measure to create a winning protagonist.

The message is clear: Just be yourself, and friends will come. (Picture book. 4- 7)

WOMEN HEROES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 20 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Defiance, and Rescue

Casey, Susan Chicago Review (240 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-61374-583-0

A compact but dense book supplies facts and legends surrounding approximately 20 women in the American Colonies who furthered the cause of the Revolutionary War. The book’s layout is not unlike a history textbook from the 1960s, with its small, black-and-white photographic reproductions and the sidebars of black print on gray background.

Whether readers are skimming for information about several women or concentrating on one individual, the best approach is to first read the excellent author’s note, which briefly explores women’s widely varying involvement in the American Revolution and the difficulties inherent in the research, and the introduction, which quickly summarizes the lead-up to the war. There are many fascinating stories, carefully described as possibly true, including the outrageous but persistent tale of |

“Mammy Kate” rescuing a condemned soldier—her slavemaster—by carrying him out of prison in a covered basket balanced on her head. The stories are often weighed down by facts that would be better as footnotes and sidebars: some source explanations; names of all the children in large broods; unnecessary lineage details; the code numbers for every individual in a spy ring.

Helpful, sometimes-humorous touches include explanations of archaic activities, lifestyles and social mores; well-documented primary and secondary sources; and clear instructions on how to read a political cartoon.

A good starting point for further research. (glossary, notes, bibliography) (Collective biography. 12-16)

SUN ABOVE AND BLOOMS BELOW A Springtime of Opposites

Chernesky, Felicia Sanzari Illus. by Swan, Susan Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-3632-2

The team of Chernesky and Swan rounds out the four seasons with this look at springtime opposites (Cheers for a Dozen Ears, 2014, etc.).

Miss Ava’s class takes a field trip to a local farm to see some chicks hatch. Along the way, they experience lots of opposites, which are highlighted in the text in bold and a larger font. As in Chernesky’s other seasonal books, the verse sometimes limps along, the lines often divided for rhyme at the expense of rhythm: “ ‘The white cat’s name is Whisker Jack,’ / the farmer said. ‘And Buster’s black.’ ” Other times, the pairs chosen seem odd and don’t strictly match the illustrations: “We giggled with our field trip buddies. / The ground below our boots was muddy. / Above, a sky of cloudy gray / drizzled on our sunny day.” The sun indeed hides behind a mass of dark clouds, but in no way could this be called a sunny day, save possibly attitudes.

Swan’s busy mixed-media illustrations are rich in textures, the chickens especially colorful and patterned. Aside from the new chicks and the brilliant yellow daffodils, though, this could take place in almost any season (and indeed, the corn is tall enough to be late summer), weakening the seasonal theme.

Not a strong choice for either springtime explorations or opposites, though teachers may reach for this in preparation for a farm field trip. (Picture book. 4- 7)

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ELVIS The Story of the Rock and Roll King

many imitators. However, Cora, possessing both her own powers and a fierce determination to protect those she loves, is no shrinking violet. New enemies emerge, and new alliances are forged as the death toll rises. Passion and power are the driving forces behind this series that continues to deliver.

A solid if not terribly original sequel to Scintillate (2014).

(Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

Christensen, Bonnie Illus. by Christensen, Bonnie Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-8050-9447-3

Brief poems present the childhood and youth of the King of rock ’n’ roll.

Readers learn immediately that Elvis grew up in another time: “Things were different back then. / One door for blacks, another for whites.” Free verse describes how Elvis lived a tough life and soaked up the music that was all around him—gospel, country, blues. His family was poor and moved often. A shy kid, Elvis found his voice through music, first at church, then at a talent show and later as a recording artist. Once he began working with Sam Phillips of Sun Records and his version of “That’s All Right” hit the radio, there was no turning back; he was on the road to becoming a legend. Christensen lauds Elvis as a musical hero, the pioneer who bridged the worlds of black and white music. It is interesting to note, however, that AfricanAmericans appear only on a single page, in photographs on the walls of the recording studio. Christensen’s technique, painting on scanned photographs, helps tell the story by creating distinctive images that feel like glimpses back in time. The flow of the presentation is occasionally interrupted by the switch between single-page illustrations and double-page spreads.

Despite some missteps, adult Elvis fans will be thrilled to share this book with children. (author’s note, timeline) (Picture book/biography. 6-11)

DEVIATE

Clark , Tracy Entangled Teen (356 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 5, 2015 978-1-62266-523-5 Series: Light Key Trilogy, 2 As a member of the Scintilla, 17-yearold Cora possesses the rare ability to see people’s auras, making her both an object of desire and a target for harm.

A showdown between the few remaining Scintilla and the Arrazi, a group capable of feeding on people’s auras, leaves Cora’s father dead. She also discovers that Finn, her “rock-star poet,” is a member of this vampirelike group. Chapters bounce between Finn’s attempts to deny his murderous heritage and Cora’s discovery of her latent powers. Thankfully, in addition to her addled mother, Cora also has the support of fellow Scintilla Giovanni and Mari and Dun, friends from America. Following clues left in Dante’s Paradiso, they begin to unravel the history of the two races as well as to research ways of possibly defeating the Arrazi. The love triangle among Cora, Finn and Giovanni echoes that of Twilight and its 94

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JANINE.

Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Illus. by Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-3754-1 A slightly new twist on the kid-getting-bullied story.

Janine is certainly her own girl. She sings loudly on the bus, talks to her imaginary friend, and remembers unusual things like the number of steps from here to there and classmates’ phone numbers. While everyone else is playing, Janine reads the dictionary or eavesdrops. One day, while she appears to be making a list, she overhears a classmate who is passing out a party invitation. She is quickly told that the party is “only for COOL kids!” (Among the depicted “cool kids” are an Asian-American girl, an African-American girl and a boy whose skin is relatively dark.) The birthday girl mocks Janine’s style, insulting everything from her fancy vocabulary to her choice of friends: “Janine, you are STRANGE! You have to CHANGE!” In the background, the “cool kids” become progressively more uncomfortable with the birthday girl’s meanness, so when Janine invites all the kids to a party of her own, they are poised to accept eagerly. It’s nice to examine how a group can choose kindness and thus take away a bully’s power.

Charming illustrations highlight Janine’s independent style and unfailing optimism. Teachers looking for a positive solution should reach for this one. Children will enjoy knowing that Janine is actually the author’s daughter.

An optimistic but nevertheless real solution to a common school problem. (Picture book. 5-9)

THE SECRETS OF ATTRACTION

Constantine, Robin Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-06-227951-4

When relationships get complicated, Madison faces two choices: keep everything the same or risk everything for a chance at greater happiness.

Madison is good at keeping her life compartmentalized. She’s got her mom, her friends, the hot guy, Zach, she chooses to hang out with, her mom’s friend, Paul, who brings doughnuts whenever he

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“Molly’s emotional growth is the strong propeller of the plot; she’s a totally engaging, multifaceted character.” from 99 days

visits—all these parts coexist in an orderly and satisfying way.

But when pieces of her life overlap, things get crazy and amazing. She discovers that opening up to new experiences is worth doing, even if it is scary. The biggest risk is when the barista who makes her usual after-yoga chai drink becomes something more than a friend. Constantine returns to the scene of her first novel, The Promise of Amazing (2013), to explore the lives of different characters, all of whom fit into similar molds: cute, smart teenage girls with well-honed fashion senses and cute, smart teenage boys who shift easily between broody and romantic. She has a knack for believable romantic scenes with enough heat to stay interesting, but her characters rely too much on stereotypes and convenience to steer them down the well-worn paths of new love, love lost and family drama.

Romantic school dances, crooning live bands and plenty of cozy cafe time await those readers who crave easy familiarity. (Romance. 15-18)

WISH

Cordell, Matthew Illus. by Cordell, Matthew Disney-Hyperion (48 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4847-0875-0 A much-wanted child arrives as fulfillment of his parents’ dearest wish.

Neither a where-do-babies-come-from book nor one about sibling adjustment to a new baby, this fanciful treatment of parental longing for a baby seems aimed at adults more than children. The text is delivered in direct address to an unnamed “you” who’s at first absent from the would-be parents’ lives. Perhaps in an attempt to tilt the story toward child-friendliness, the adults in question are an anthropomorphic elephant couple. As they begin to notice others with babies (birds in a nest, another elephant pushing a stroller), they start to wish, plan, learn and build. Pictures eschew crib-assembly or other traditional baby-planning preparations to show the couple building a boat and setting sail, as if for some island cabbage patch where they might find an elephant’s child. In a poignant twist, the journey doesn’t immediately fulfill their baby wish, and they return home saddened but resilient. When a baby does arrive, suddenly parting the seas like a tiny pachyderm Moses in a sailboat, the parents are thrilled that their baby is “HERE.” The metaphorical use of boats and journeying to find a baby could lend itself to interpretations of the story as an adoption narrative, but this isn’t clearly indicated. Instead, cartoony art and spare text alike are most concerned with communicating longing and love.

Wish fulfilled, if a tad inscrutably. (Picture book. 3-5)

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99 DAYS

Cotugno, Katie Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-06-221638-0 978-0-06-221640-3 e-book A teenage girl spends the summer doing penance for her romances with two boys. The problem was—and still is—they’re brothers.

Molly’s summer of 99 days looks bleak. Because of her indiscretions, her relationship with her best friend is strained, she’s ostracized by her peers, and she feels like she’s lost her second family, the Donnellys. She’s also resentful of her fiction-writer mother, who spilled the beans by making a best-seller out of Molly’s confession of impropriety to her. And now, after her senior year away at a boarding school, Molly’s back in her hometown, trying her best to hide out before she leaves for college. The first night back, Julia Donnelly, protective sister of Molly’s love interests, brothers Gabe and Patrick, eggs her house. Molly soon runs into Gabe and tentatively starts seeing him while trying her best to avoid run-ins with Patrick, whom she left brokenhearted. But when she sees Patrick with a girlfriend, she is discombobulated by her own feelings; she struggles with twin guilts: from hurting him as well as her own desires. Molly’s emotional growth is the strong propeller of the plot; she’s a totally engaging, multifaceted character. Kind and with a quirky sense of humor, she’s also precociously stalwart in the face of Julia’s unrelenting torment and others’ constant scrutiny. Drama-filled flashbacks fill in the dots of the back story.

A fascinating story of adolescent love and betrayal.

(Romance. 13 & up)

DEATH MARKED

Cypess, Leah Greenwillow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-222124-7 978-0-06-222126-1 e-book A sorceress without magic navigates lies, treachery and despair in this thoughtful conclusion to the fantasy duology that began with Death Sworn (2014).

Betrayed by her people and honed as a weapon, Ileni has left the Assassins’ Caves to investigate the tyrannical Empire for herself...before she agrees to destroy it. Accepting a doubleedged offer from the Imperial Academy, she falls into tentative friendships with her fellow students of magic, but she can no more forget that their power is fueled by cruelty and death than she can resist its seductive allure. Meanwhile, both assassins and sorcerers have their own plans. Readers expecting glorious triumphs and love-conquering-all climaxes will be disappointed,

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“Danneberg has taken an incident Muir described twice in articles about Yosemite...and turned it into a surprisingly suspenseful survival story for a 21st-century audience.” from john muir wrestles a waterfall

as such tropes of epic fantasy are brutally demolished in spare, restrained prose. If the expanse of a vast Empire is only hinted at and the secondary characters barely sketched, the narrow focus on Ileni’s internal struggles is mesmerizing. While not entirely likable—she can be arrogant, judgmental and self-pitying—Ileni remains painfully sympathetic. She longs for righteous certainty in a noble cause, aches to achieve a heroic destiny through some great good deed, but she’s confronted on every side with ambiguity, complexity and nothing but bad options. Yet rather than being crushed by her shattered ideals, Ileni embraces compromise and learns to reach for the grace of tiny victories.

Somber and disquieting but alight with flickers of hope.

(Fantasy. 12 & up)

SEAVER THE WEAVER

Czajak, Paul Illus. by The Brothers Hilts Mighty Media Kids (32 pp.) $15.95 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-938063-57-2

A web designer of the eight-legged sort experiments with geometric shapes in the face of pressure from his many conformist sibs.

Being an orb spider, Seaver should weave round webs—but patterns in the starry sky inspire him to try out in succession a triangle, a square and a hexagon. Sitting on their perfect but empty round webs, the other spiders make critical comments as Seaver’s open-centered creations quickly (if counterintuitively) snag a series of bugs. “I will try harder next time,” he promises repeatedly. “But first I must tend to my guest.” The illustrations, which resemble paper collages on unevenly colored backdrops of either dark blue or mustard brown, feature spiders with faces human enough to include a view of Seaver smiling and licking his chops as he goes to “tend” an insect “guest.” After Seaver’s latest web, a combination of shapes, snags a swarm of mosquitoes, starvation brings the other spiders around to asking Seaver to teach them how to weave “such marvelous shapes,” and the episode closes with a buggy banquet. Though the patterned prose is stiff as a board (“I like my web. It is unique”), young readers with artistic visions of their own will applaud Seaver’s successful paradigm change.

A salutary tribute to the benefits of thinking outside the orb. (Picture book. 6-8)

JOHN MUIR WRESTLES A WATERFALL Danneberg, Julie Illus. by Hogan, Jamie Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-58089-586-6

A noted naturalist nearly loses his life exploring a waterfall.

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In April 1871, when explorer and early environmentalist John Muir was living in Yosemite Valley, he decided to climb up to and under its falls with near-disastrous results. Danneberg has taken an incident Muir described twice in articles about Yosemite for the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, in 1890 and 1912, and turned it into a surprisingly suspenseful survival story for a 21st-century audience. There are two parallel texts at the beginning—one that works for reading aloud and another, in a slightly smaller font, that provides more explanation and background. But at the climax, it becomes one story, and a very scary one at that, as the falling water shifts and pins Muir against the granite wall. The rough strokes of the pasteland–colored-pencil illustrations emphasize the texture of the rock, water and wood of the natural world Muir loved. Though sometimes dark (this was an evening adventure), these images show nicely at a distance. Pictured at the beginning and the end are quotations from Muir’s writings, penned in script that will probably stump young readers, emphasizing his steady habit of journal-keeping. A final author’s note explains more about Muir’s life and work, as well as about Yosemite.

A welcome addition to the modern collection of John Muir’s adventures. (Internet resources, bibliography, citations) (Informational picture book. 4-9)

RED

De Kinder, Jan Illus. by De Kinder, Jan Translated by Watkinson, Laura Eerdmans (32 pp.) $16.00 | Mar. 9, 2015 978-0-8028-5446-9 A girl moves from instigator to bystander to hero in this anti-bullying picture book originally published in Belgium.

Neither text nor art (rendered in a limited, multimedia palette of neutral tones, black and red) reveals why Tommy blushes, but the narrator notices and thinks it’s funny that his cheeks are red, and she laughingly points at him. This exacerbates his embarrassment, which only grows as the girl laughs and whispers about his red cheeks with other children. A boy named Paul is particularly vicious in his taunting, and the narrator soon grows uncomfortable with how she and the others are behaving, especially as they crowd around and Paul pushes Tommy. Fearful about becoming Paul’s next target, the girl stays quiet even when the teacher asks the class if anyone saw what happened.

Repeated entreaties work, however, and she finally raises her hand, spurring other classmates to join her. The narrative skips over how the teacher handles the situation and instead shifts to show Paul confronting the narrator on the playground. His bullying ways are thwarted when other children stand with her, and his face grows green as he skulks away. The story then concludes, not with Paul learning a lesson, but with the girl and Tommy reconciled and playing soccer. Expressive art outshines the text, which, while heartfelt, gets weighed down by message.

Moral trumps story here. (Picture book. 5-8)

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NIGHT CIRCUS

Delessert, Etienne Illus. by Delessert, Etienne Creative Editions/Creative Company (32 pp.) $19.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-56846-277-6 A modern master of surrealism presents an astonishing traveling circus.

A man is walking his dog along the highway at night. Coming toward them is a car pulling 10 flatbeds, each with a performance piece taking place upon it. The car is driven by the man’s cat, Pluto. The man is astonished and intrigued as he watches all the cars pass by and they then all move from the dark into the golden light of a desert mirage. It is all surreal, and Delessert is a master of visual absurdity. The human-sized cat who is driving the car looks more like a rat in cat’s clothing. The three clowns, named for Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, sport their namesakes’ signatures: Franz is turning into a cockroach, and Eugene wears a rhinoceros’ horn. On another car, angels play chess with pieces that look familiar but not quite identifiable. The three little pigs (actually quite large) are about to cut into a wolf pie—the crust of which looks more sheeplike than anything else. A snow globe is filled with butterflies. The whole is neither dreamlike nor nightmarish but resides somewhere in that state where new words and old words and images come together and collide.

Children who have not yet gained a sense of irony will particularly enjoy the seemingly random but carefully delineated juxtaposition of image and idea. (Picture book. 5-8)

A TICKET AROUND THE WORLD

Diaz, Natalia; Owens, Melissa Illus. by Smith, Kim Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 15, 2015 978-1-77147-051-3 Rather than a comprehensive trip around the world, a quick expedition to 13 far-flung countries.

A nameless, stateless Caucasian boy introduces friends from some countries not often mentioned in books of this ilk: Botswana, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Morocco, Jordan and Greece. Other countries are the usual suspects: the United States, Canada, Brazil, France, China, India and Australia. An introductory double-page world map includes pages numbers for each country. The cheery narrator proceeds to each place and provides similar facts. Each double-page spread shows a map, the flag and the climate in a little oval. A sight such as the Great Wall of China or the Parthenon is often included, favorite foods (but no recipes) are described, and a celebration is sometimes mentioned. The children the boy meets live in both urban and rural settings, but they take their “friend” to other regions to show that people live in different ways. There is no |

index or bibliography. All in all, the book, with its upbeat quiz at the end (“In Costa Rica, what volcano did Alberto and I visit?”), resembles an expanded magazine article more than a thoughtful global tour. Pictures such as those found in Music Everywhere (2014) and Maya Ajmera’s other photo essays with Cynthia Pon and other collaborators serve children better than the busy, retro cartoony illustrations here.

Young readers need to know about their peers in other countries, but this looks like a book their grandparents might have read. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

WHISTLE-BLOWERS Exposing Crime and Corruption

Doeden, Matt Twenty-First Century/Lerner (96 pp.) $33.32 PLB | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-4209-2 PLB Doeden makes the effort here to bring whistleblowing out of the seamy shadows and describe its role.

It may be a new word, but whistleblowing is no new phenomenon; the Continental Congress acknowledged the citizen’s duty “to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds and misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.” Of course, this brings up the age-old question of who is spying on the spies or, even more vital: to whom does a whistleblower give the information? Doeden makes it clear that whistleblowing is a selfless deed, one that may well have implications for the whistleblower down the road, including exile, as those in Washington wrangle over whether Homeland Security trumps the First Amendment when it comes to “misconduct, frauds and misdemeanors.” As Doeden shows, nearly one-third of the states do not have laws protecting whistleblowers’ “rights to report illegal activity [as] part of a philosophy of social obligation...when it could prevent or reduce harm of suffering.” To illustrate his case, he draws a number of sharp vignettes (accompanied by photographs) of whistleblowing importance: Enron, the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Watergate, FBI withholding of crucial 9/11 information; Edward Snowden’s story leads everything off.

A keen challenge to received opinions for high schoolers to chew long and hard upon. (Nonfiction. 13-18)

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TRAGEDY AT THE TRIANGLE Friendship in the Tenements and the Shirtwaist Factory Fire

to see the baby turtles emerge. They, in turn, seem to imprint on him: The closing image of Gus with the babies riding on his back and head as he swims across the water amends the statement that Gus is a gosling “who likes to be by himself ” to say that this is true “[m]ost of the time.” As surely as there’s room in the series for Gus, there’s room in his contemplative little life for companionship after all.

Good to meet you, Gus. (Picture book. 3-6)

Doman, Mary Kate History Press (96 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 9, 2015 978-1-62619-645-2

A large section of period photos complements a partly fictional account of the 1911 New York City fire that killed

146 factory workers.

Recently arrived on the Lower East Side with her immigrant family, 15-year-old Cecelia Napoli becomes fast friends with Rose Mehl, a Jewish teen who lives in the tenement apartment below. When Cecelia’s father contracts tuberculosis and is sent to a sanatorium, not only does Rose help Cecelia find a job at the Triangle Waist Company, but she heroically comes to her aid in the vaguely described fire. A few thin slices of Lower East Side life and a cast largely composed, except for the Napolis, of historical figures (including Rose, one of the fire’s youngest victims) do little to bring this rudimentary plot to life. Moreover, along with a mistaken claim that the fire was the city’s worst disaster before 9/11 (that “honor” goes to the sinking of the General Slocum, 1904), the author’s afterword simply summarizes information readily available in encyclopedias and recent nonfiction accounts for young readers. The photos do present telling scenes of crowded tenements, city streets and the fire’s aftermath, but two images of newspaper pages (one in Italian) are illegible except for the headlines. Four pages of discussion questions are appended, but there are no reading lists or other leads to further sources of information or pictures.

A roughly stitched-up alternative to Deborah Hopkinson’s more developed and informative hybrid, Hear My Sorrow (2004). (index) (Historical fiction. 10-13)

GUS

Dunrea, Olivier Illus. by Dunrea, Olivier HMH Books (32 pp.) $9.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-547-86761-8 Series: Gossie & Friends

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Gosling siblings explore their world in this latest offering from Dunrea’s Gossie & Friends series.

A small trim size and generous use of white space lend a quiet intimacy to the series’ simple barnyard stories. In this title, Gus (who sports a pot on his head, its handle sticking out like a visor), trails along behind his sister Gemma. She holds a pair of binoculars and wears a pith helmet, but it’s quickly apparent that she doesn’t want to lead Gus around on her adventures.

“Don’t keep following me!” she honks. Expert use of the gutter isolates the tiny Gus on the recto while Gemma looms above him from her superior position atop the dog Molly’s head on the verso. The intrepid Gus is unfazed by his sister’s outburst and carries on by himself. Lo and behold, Gemma ends up following him around, her curiosity piqued by his activities.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she demands. “EXPLORING!” he honks in reply. A name now given to her own penchant for wandering about and observing the world around her, Gemma happily joins her brother, and a concluding image shows them both intently gazing at a little bat hanging above them.

A just plain ducky addition to this excellent picturebook series. (Picture book. 3-6)

FORK-TONGUE CHARMERS

Gus is a welcome addition to the Gossie & Friends series.

Sporting a cooking pot on his head with its handle turned to the front like a visor, little “Gus is a small yellow gosling who likes to be by himself.” He quietly observes the world around him in pen-and-ink–and-gouache illustrations that embrace open white space to achieve focus on the very things that Gus spies—a spider, mice and a turtle. After watching the turtle dig in the sand and then return to the water, Gus goes to investigate the place where the turtle was digging. There, he finds three small eggs, and he decides to sit on them to keep them warm.

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Dunrea, Olivier Illus. by Dunrea, Olivier HMH Books (32 pp.) $9.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-547-86851-6 Series: Gossie & Friends

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Durham, Paul Illus. by Antonsson, Pétur Harper/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-06-227153-2 978-0-06-227155-6 e-book Series: Luck Uglies, 2 Book 2 in the middle-grade Luck Uglies trilogy (The Luck Uglies, 2014) continues the adventure in the fantasy world of the Shale.

The despicable Earl Morningwig Longchance has hired a new Constable who is clamping down on Village Drowning and especially the O’Chanter family. Twelve-year-old Rye O’Chanter, her mother, Abby, younger sister, Lottie, and Rye’s

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“[U]nderstated, deadpan facial expressions (achieved through minute adjustments to tiny eyes, eyebrows and trunks) make a familiar no-bath picture book effortlessly amusing.” from small elephant’s bathtime

two best friends, Folly and Quinn, flee to the Isle of Pest, where Abby was raised. On Pest, life seems safe as Rye meets her longlost grandfather and makes friends with village children, but she is troubled by the black stones she keeps finding—earlier in her shoe at Village Drowning, then in her pocket and again on her windowsill on Pest. Curiosity leads Rye to the notorious Wailing Cave and the unwelcome discovery of the dark side of her father’s Luck Uglies brotherhood—a splinter group called the Fork-Tongue Charmers. Durham’s ambitious plot is chock-full of twists but is occasionally hard to follow due to inconsistencies and the addition of too many characters, who divert readers’ attention. As in Book 1, Durham shades his main characters with plenty of nuance, but the crowded plot leaves little space for readers to absorb it.

Generally successful, this adventuresome second installment entertains and leaves dangling ends to set up the third.

(Fantasy. 9-13)

THE BOY WHO LOST HIS BUMBLE

Esberger, Trudi Illus. by Esberger, Trudi Child’s Play (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 22, 2015 978-1-84643-662-8

A little boy who loves the bees that visit his garden becomes concerned when rain and then snow drive them away.

The unnamed boy loves flowers and trees, “but most of all, he love[s] the bees.” He keeps a bumblebee diary, naming each bee and describing it (Amir “likes pink flowers”; Bob is “very fuzzy”; Seb “loves dancing”). He is distressed when it rains and the bees “los[e] their bumble.” He dresses in a giant bee suit and opens a “bee hotel” with “free Wi-Fi” to lure them back, to no avail. It’s even worse when the snows come, and he is stuck inside. His devotion to the insects is evident in his pictures on the wall and his bee-focused library. Happily, when spring comes, the bees return, and the boy “[gets] his bumble back.” Esberger’s forms resemble Oliver Jeffers’ in their childlike appearance, and her sunny palette modulates to gray when the rain drives the bees away. As stories go, it’s rather slight and potentially confusing: Surely rainy days alternate with sunny ones before winter comes, but the storyline compresses seasons drastically. Still, the boy is a sweetly likable character, and his strength of focus is entirely believable. An appendix provides bumblebee facts, including the importance of bees to pollination and threats to bees.

Children are often afraid of bees; this unassuming book may well soothe those fears effectively. (Picture book. 3-5)

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NOAH’S ARK

Falken, Linda—Adapt.

Illus. by Metropolitan Museum of Art Abrams (32 pp.) $17.95 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-4197-1361-3 A wide variety of works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection and those of other museums serve as the illustrations in this retelling of the Old Testament tale of Noah and his Ark. An introductory page explains the significance of the story, describing how it is found in many cultures and is a part of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions. The serviceable text for this retelling is adapted from the book of Genesis in the King James Version of the Bible. Text blocks are set off on tan, textured backgrounds that suggest parchment and are surrounded by attractive, patterned gold borders. Each spread features a different style of illustration, ranging from tapestries to oil paintings and lithographs to engravings. Concluding pages offer thumbnails of the illustrations with complete information about the artists and current locations of the works, along with interesting comments about the artists’ styles and the eras represented. This wide range of artistic interpretations is a relatively sophisticated approach to retelling Noah’s tale, and the intriguing, high-quality reproductions ranging from the 15th to the 20th centuries are both a visual delight and a minicourse in art history.

Children may need an adult’s help to understand the significance of the illustrations, but this thoughtfully designed book deserves attention and a place on the crowded shelf of Noah’s Ark retellings. (Picture book/religion.

5-9)

SMALL ELEPHANT’S BATHTIME

Feeney, Tatyana Illus. by Feeney, Tatyana Knopf (32 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-553-49721-2 978-0-553-49723-6 e-book 978-0-553-49722-9 PLB Small Elephant loves water—most of the time.

But Small Elephant loathes bathtime, even when his mommy adds extra bubbles and toys. His boxy body, dot eyes and wideset ears all telegraph absolute opposition to watery fun in the tub. Bright, bleach-white backgrounds and a limited palette of primary reds, blues and graphite grays make Small Elephant’s flat pencil-outlined form and his fierce refusal of bath quite vivid. Scarlet text with large letters and arresting placement on the page contributes to the artwork’s success, while understated, deadpan facial expressions (achieved through minute adjustments to tiny eyes, eyebrows and trunks) make a familiar

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“The lush prose highlights precise, sensory details….” from the door in the moon

no-bath picture book effortlessly amusing. Watercolors occasionally appear (on shower curtains, as a roiling red tantrum backdrop, on flapping ears), adding appropriately watery depth and undulation to the starkly one-dimensional illustrations—so perfect for a story about a binary bath experience. After Daddy squeezes himself into a much-too-small tub, Small Elephant happily hops in and promptly refuses to get out.

Charming, brilliant in color and execution, and funny to even the most indignant foot stompers, NO! screamers and bathtime boycotters. (Picture book. 2-6)

THE DOOR IN THE MOON

Fisher, Catherine Dial (352 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-8037-3971-0 Series: Obsidian Mirror, 3 Past, present and future collide; science fiction melds with fantasy and historical thriller in the third volume of this genre-blending quartet.

It’s Midsummer Eve, and as Wintercombe Abbey is under siege by the Shee and their heartless faery queen, Jake and Sarah are snatched by a gang of time-traveling thieves and thrust into the chaos of the Reign of Terror. Meanwhile Janus, the tyrant of a dystopian future, is reaching back through the magical, inscrutable obsidian mirror to secure his power. After the cluttered excess of the previous volume, The Slanted Worlds (2014), Fisher regains her sure hand on the narrative, juggling a dozen major players through three distinct yet entangled storylines, winding through a single night to converge in an exuberant payoff. The lush prose highlights precise, sensory details to portray worlds from the overripe fecundity of the Summerland to the fetid prisons of revolutionary Paris to the stark beauty of an illusory moonscape. None of the characters are “nice,” exactly; but with their wry humor and plucky audacity, their complex motivations and conflicting agendas, every one engages readers’ sympathies. They endure loyalty and loss, bravery and betrayal, triumph and terror; but the hard-won victory of the final pages is clearly only a brief respite before they must put aside differences and distrust to unite against their formidable enemies.

Engrossing and addictive. (Science fiction/fantasy. 12 & up)

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THE DARK WATER

Fishman, Seth Putnam (288 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-399-15991-6 Series: Well’s End, 2

The sequel to The Well’s End (2014) takes the action into a mysterious underground city.

Mia and her friends seek the miraculous water that cures all ills, hoping to stop the rapidly spreading virus that radically—and fatally— accelerates aging. Mia’s found the elusive well hidden deep in a cave where her father and mad-scientist Sutton had been conducting research. Now she dives into the well, followed by her friends Jo and Rob. They emerge in a marvelous underground city called Capian, where Keeper Randt, one of its three leaders, admits Mia’s father is being held hostage. Randt treats the trio well, however, and they meet his daughter, who longs to go Topside and immediately agrees to help them. However, the city is reeling from the death of one of its leaders, and civil war looms.

Can Mia rescue her father and find the mysterious source of the water, then escape back to the surface? Fishman sets most of the action in Capian but doesn’t forget that Jimmy and Odessa are still on the surface, trying to escape Sutton’s minions and find a way to help the infected. This concluding adventure deemphasizes the mad-scientist plotline in favor of the newly imagined underground world, opening the adventure up some.

Standard-issue present-tense narration is unsubtle but gets the job done.

Those who started with the first should be satisfied with this conclusion. (Fantasy. 12-18)

DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN

Fixmer, Elizabeth Whitman (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-8370-8

A girl slowly realizes that she must escape the religious cult in which she has grown up.

Fourteen-year-old Eva was named by the Rev. Ezekiel, leader of the Righteous Path, when she and her mother joined it 10 years ago. Under commandment of God, Ezekiel marries all the women—most of the cult members—and forbids biological mothers and children from acknowledging any special relationship. He doles out frequent severe physical punishments for the slightest infractions and controls the lives of the cult members completely. However, the cult needs money, and Eva makes excellent jewelry. Ezekiel allows her and another cult member to go to town, where Eva buys beads and sells her jewelry, providing most of the group’s income—which Ezekiel spends on guns, not food. In town, Eva meets Trevor, who becomes her kirkus.com

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only hope when Eva’s mother faces death from a dangerous pregnancy. Finally exposed to the outside world, Eva begins to question her faith. Leaving the cult would mean an actual escape, however, and she knows she can’t abandon her fragile mother. Fixmer illustrates the inner workings of a cult, illuminating Eva’s psychological progress while exposing the leader as a con artist. Eva’s doubts and fears as well as her growing courage are communicated clearly in her first-person, present-tense narration. The action and the psychological realism combine to make an intriguing story, with believable characters and events.

An absorbing treatment of a fascinating subject. (Fiction.

12-18)

BE NOT AFRAID

Galante, Cecilia Random House (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-385-37274-9 978-0-385-37277-0 e-book 978-0-385-37275-6 PLB Agirl finds herself unwillingly connected to her classmate’s spiritual possession.

After Marin’s mother’s suicide— a source of survivor’s guilt—Marin started seeing people’s pain, manifesting as colorful lights and shapes revealing information about the nature of the malady. To avoid being overwhelmed, she’s purposefully aloof, wearing sunglasses indoors and always looking down. At a Mass at her Catholic school, a popular classmate shrieks at the holy host and has a classic Exorcist-style seizure before stopping directly in front of Marin with a message. Marin knows it has to do with the time Cassie invited her over, months ago, trapping Marin into helping with a ritual she desperately wants to forget. Not letting her forget is Cassie’s hot older brother, who has noticed his sister’s decline and wants to know its cause so he can help her. Despite her dislike for Cassie and her terror over the afternoon they shared, Marin’s feelings for Dominic—and compassion for Cassie’s suffering as he describes it—pulls her into their family’s supernatural horror. The classic possession is well-executed and decorated with some top-notch horror elements; readers who don’t love this sort of suspense will find refuge in the romantic and realistic familial (Marin’s new family dynamic and the siblings’ family drama) subplots. The quick pacing may cause occasional confusion but provides ample reason to keep reading to the end, which is sweeter than conventional for the genre.

A quick, freaky read. (Horror. 13 & up)

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IN TODD WE TRUST

Galveston, Louise Razorbill/Penguin (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-59514-679-3 This sequel to By the Grace of Todd (2014) sees the return of the title character and his acolytes.

There’s no question this duology is based on a brilliant premise. Todd accidentally created a race of tiny people, the Toddlians, who worship him as a god. They grew out of one of his dirty socks. Nothing here is quite as ingenious. The plot revolves around a standard-issue bully, who wants to kidnap the Toddlians and use them as a science-fair project. Meanwhile, the Toddlians experience a crisis of faith, and a schism threatens. Fortunately, a few of the supporting characters offer readers something to engage with. There’s Todd’s younger sister, whose baby talk turns out to be fluent Toddlian and who has complex theories about art. And there’s Charity, the prettiest girl in school, who’s obsessed with “Dragon Sensei” games and cartoons. She seems to have a crush on Todd, surprising everyone. But too many characters are simply annoying, like Persephone, a Toddlian dissenter, who speaks in cowgirl clichés, including “dadgum” and “sick as a sow’s ear.” The premise might have inspired a religious allegory or a satire, but Galveston just doesn’t seem to want to go there.

Instead of satire, readers get a zany adventure, which would be perfectly satisfactory—if it were zany enough.

(Fantasy. 8-12)

ENDANGERED

Giles, Lamar HarperTeen (288 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-06-229756-3 978-0-06-229758-7 e-book A teen vigilante finds the tables turned when a mysterious correspondent uncovers her secret identity.

During the day, Lauren Daniels, better known at school as Panda, tries to stay unnoticed. At night, she becomes Gray, a skilled and daring photographer who captures incriminating or humiliating pictures of high school bullies and posts them to her anonymous website. (Regrettably, the homophobic undertones of two of Gray’s posts go largely unremarked upon.) Furious that popular Keachin Myer attacked a disabled classmate, Panda follows Keachin and hits photographic pay dirt. That night, she receives an email from someone called SecretAdm1r3r with incriminating photos of Panda herself photographing Keachin.

From then on, the game’s afoot: SecretAdm1r3r’s taunting messages at first dare Panda to take risky photographs but quickly move into more sinister territory. When SecretAdm1r3r hints |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Jennifer Niven

The writer never makes it artificially easy for her characters to overcome some serious issues

By Megan Labrise

Photo courtesy Louis Kapeleris

In an arresting author’s note at the end of her teen novel All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven discloses her status as a survivor of a loved one’s suicide.

“Several years ago, a boy I knew and loved killed himself. I was the one who discovered him,” Niven writes. “The experience was not something I wanted to talk about, even with the people closest to me. To this day, many of my family and friends still don’t know much, if anything, about it. For a long time, it was too painful to even think about, much less talk about, but it is important to talk about what happened.”

All the Bright Places is a bold testament to that belief. Indiana high school senior Theodore Finch lives with debilitating depression, a blackness that seeps through his mind. “One minute I was spinning, and the 102

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next minute my mind was dragging itself around in a circle, like an old, arthritic dog trying to lie down. And then I just turned off and went to sleep, but not sleep in the way you do every night. Think a long, dark sleep where you don’t dream at all,” she writes.

When Finch emerges from the darkness, he experiments with self-endangerment. He drives his overwhelmed mother’s Saturn minivan at suicidal speed and climbs the six-story campus bell tower to enhance fantasies of jumping off. But on one fateful ascent, he discovers he’s not alone: Pretty, popular Violet Markey appears beside him on the ledge.

“It’s the eyes that get me. They are large and arresting, as if she sees everything. As warm as they are, they are busy, no-bullshit eyes, the kind that can look right into you, which I can tell even through the glasses,” Niven writes.

Violet is mourning her sister, Eleanor, who died in a car accident last year. Deeply intrigued, Finch helps talk her down and subsequently finagles a history class partnership. Their assignment is to visit and report on a number of Indiana attractions, from John Ivers’ backyard roller coasters to the World’s Largest Ball of Paint. (All but one of these wonderfully weird places in the novel actually do exist.) In exploring their state together, Violet and Finch will come to know one another in unforetold ways.

Niven is the author of four adult novels and three nonfiction books, including the memoir The Aqua Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town, about growing up in—yes—rural Indiana. All the Bright Places is her first work for a YA audience and her first time writing from a male point of view.

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book that fast before,” says Niven, who finished the first draft in six weeks.

“I loved the challenge of writing a male character, and Finch’s voice came out strong, right from the getgo. I’ve known many people who have dealt with his issues—one boy in particular who was always trying to change himself outwardly because inwardly he felt so not at home, so out of place—and I was thinking about that when I started writing him,” she says.

Violet’s voice took Niven more time to find. An aspiring writer with a sarcastic sense of humor, she’s as distinctive and compelling as her counterpart.

“Do I feel I should be punished? Yes. Why else would I have given myself bangs?” Niven writes.

At first, Violet’s highly skeptical of Finch—as many are. “Some people hate him because they think he’s weird and he gets into fights and gets kicked out of school and does what he wants. Some people worship him because he’s weird and he gets into fights and gets kicked out of school and does what he wants,” Niven writes.

But he’s a bright boy, and they may have more in common than seems at first glance. “[Violet] doesn’t quite feel at home, either, in many ways. All these things are kind of thrown at her,” Niven says. “She’s coping with loss, adrift in ways that she never was before. That’s something that teens—that all people—deal with at some point.”

One major difference between Violet and Finch is in their support systems. Violet’s parents are exceptional: supportive without being overbearing, encouraging and loving. Finch’s mother is overworked and emotionally unavailable to him and his two sisters. His famous-athlete father lives in a new home with a new wife and son and is emotionally and physically abusive.

These are serious issues—and Niven never makes it artificially easy for her characters to overcome them.

“As I’m writing, [I] begin to think of the characters as people you can’t control. They’re real people to whom these things just had to happen,” she says. “As odd as it sounds, I felt like there was nothing I could do to fix or change that.”

Violet can’t fix or change Finch’s depression, but she does her best to give her love and support. For readers facing analogous situations in their lives, Niven includes a list of suicide-prevention and related resources, also in the author’s note. |

For survivors of a loved one’s suicide, “the waves from that one event are many and enormous. There’s just no getting away from the guilt; you still can’t help but blame yourself,” she says. “You feel almost as if you’re not allowed to grieve someone who died in that way, because no one wants to acknowledge that or talk about it. You have to grieve in private.”

If visibility is the key to normalization, All the Bright Places has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the conversation. In addition to hitting bookstore shelves on Jan. 6, it’s been optioned as a movie by producers Paula Mazur and Mitchell Kaplan (the owner of Books & Books and the co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International), with Elle Fanning set to play Violet.

“I do think public awareness is improving, thankfully so, but we still do have a ways to go,” she says.

“I’ve always marveled at the fact that a lot of people believe that [depression] is something shameful that someone is doing, more of a behavior than an actual illness, like it’s a choice.”

Megan Labrise is a freelance writer and columnist based in New York.

All the Bright Places received a starred review in the Oct. 15, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

All the Bright Places Niven, Jennifer Knopf (400 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-38-575588-7 978-0-385-75589-4 PLB

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that something will happen to Keachin and Keachin turns up dead the next day, Panda cuts ties, at her own cost. “We’re all something we don’t know we are,” Panda tells readers, and though the mystery takes center stage, Panda also learns important truths about her own shortcomings. The cast is refreshingly racially diverse (Panda herself is mixed-race and looks it on the cover), and though some of the attempts at misdirecting sleuthing-inclined readers are more successful than others, frequent plot twists and short, fast-moving sentences keep tension high.

Suspenseful and often wise. (Thriller. 14 & up)

FLOWERS ARE CALLING

Gray, Rita Illus. by Pak, Kenard HMH Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-544-34012-1

Verse alternates with facts about pollinators, depicted with their preferred flowering plants.

Gray establishes a playful pattern: In each of three successive double-page spreads, she pairs a nonpollinating animal and a pollinator. “Flowers are calling a little black bear. / No, not a bear! He doesn’t care. // They’re calling a butterfly / to dip from the air.” Next, an anchoring spread gathers and names the three preceding plants, providing prose nuggets about their pollinators’ preferences. Regarding the trumpet honeysuckle, “Hummingbirds use their long tongues to reach the nectar hidden in deep tubular flowers, and hover as they drink.” The magnolia garners this revelation: “Beetles have been visiting flowers for more than 100 million years.”

Verse sections can be uneven. Often lovely couplets—rhyming or near-rhyming—bump up against lines that don’t scan well; in one case, the rhyme pairs a plural subject with a singular object: “Flowers are calling a rabbit to stop. / No, not a rabbit! It’s not their habit to call a rabbit. / He might grab it! // They’re calling a bee fly to visit their spot.” Pak’s pretty, digitally worked watercolors achieve equilibrium between stylized reduction and naturalistic verisimilitude.

Two spreads visit flowers with nighttime pollinators—a nice touch. Concluding prose invites children to examine flowers for elements like pattern, shape and smell, explaining how pollinators utilize these attributes.

Although it has some textual flaws, this quiet, introspective work beckons readers to keenly observe. (fact page, website) (Informational picture book. 4-8)

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SURVIVING BEAR ISLAND

Greci, Paul Move Books (192 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-9854810-9-4

A fateful kayaking trip forces Tom to grow up fast while he faces dangers he only ever dreamed about.

When his mother died in a biking accident three years ago, Tom had to struggle to find his way back to a normal life. Dad was no help, as he reacted to the loss of his wife by shutting down and shutting out the rest of the world. But a kayaking trip in Alaska’s Prince William Sound seems to be a turning point for the two of them, a chance to start living the rest of their lives as a family again. Unfortunately, a choppy sea and a bad accident rip them apart, and Tom is forced to struggle for his own survival on Bear Island. Facing starvation, injury and the eponymous bears, Tom relies on the hope of finding his father to get him through his ordeal. Greci delivers a compelling narrative that manages to keep a quick pace despite being built around one character alone in the wilds. Flashbacks to the moments before the accident and memories of life before the trip work well to explain certain plot points and to add texture and meaning to the first-person narrative. The tension is wellcrafted and realistic.

Bear Island is a challenging environment to survive but a terrific thrill on the page. (Adventure. 9-14)

HALF WILD

Green, Sally Viking (432 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-670-01713-3 Series: Half Bad, 2 After he’s abandoned once again by his infamous Black Witch father (Half Bad, 2013), Nathan grapples with his new, unruly magical gift and risks everything to save his true love.

Nathan hides in the woods outside Mercury’s cottage, waiting for his friend Gabriel to return and ever watchful for the Hunters nearby that seek to kill him. Though he’s quite sure Gabriel is dead, he can’t bring himself to leave. Instead, he daydreams of Annalise, who is trapped in a deathlike sleep, and he wrestles with the gift his father, Marcus, gave him: Nathan can transform into an animal, a bloodthirsty, uncontrollable animal that feels entirely separate from himself when he’s changed.

When a stranger appears offering to help him, Nathan’s luck suddenly turns. Soon, he’s reunited with old friends and introduced to a new alliance of all witches—Black, White and Half Blood—determined to bring down the monstrous leader of the Council, Soul O’Brien. As Nathan embraces the newfound wildness of his gift, he changes in visceral, satisfying ways. But kirkus.com

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“Grey’s energetic debut offers a strong protagonist with a delightfully snarky voice.” froms the girl at midnight

reuniting with the ones he loves the most provides the most shocking catalyst of all. Green delivers vibrant characters, and Nathan’s relationships arc in thrilling highs and lows. The start of his journey feels slow and too safe, but the climax ushers in a bloody, unforgettable cliffhanger.

A character-driven page-turner offering both emotional depth and gory thrills. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

NONE OF THE ABOVE

Gregorio, I.W. Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-06-233531-9 978-0-06-233533-3 e-book Cross-country runner Kristin Lattimer is devastated when an OB-GYN diagnoses her with androgen insensitivity syndrome, an intersex condition.

Exuberant after being voted queen at the homecoming dance, Kristin decides she’s finally ready to have sex with her boyfriend, Sam. Their attempt at intercourse, however, turns out to be prohibitively painful, and Kristin promptly schedules an appointment with her best friend’s gynecologist. Her pelvic exam and a series of follow-ups reveal that Kristin has AIS. After she confides in two friends at a party, rumors about Kristin’s condition spread, and she is ostracized. The particulars of AIS are explained in matter-of-fact detail and filtered effectively through Kristin’s point of view. Kristin and her bullies use the word “hermaphrodite,” but the author is careful to note that the term is widely considered derogatory and that “intersex” and “disorder of sex development,” or DSD, are preferred. Discussions of Kristin’s gender strike an equally appropriate balance: Kristin worries that her diagnosis means she’s “not exactly a girl,” and Sam rejects her as a “faggot,” but other voices express kinder views. A supportive and warmly drawn group of side characters rounds out the story, and the figure of Caster Semenya, a runner speculated to have AIS herself, serves as a role model and figure of hope.

Sensitive, informative and a valuable resource for teens in Kristin’s shoes. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE GIRL AT MIDNIGHT

Grey, Melissa Delacorte (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-385-74465-2 978-0-385-39099-6 e-book 978-0-375-99179-0 PLB Seventeen-year-old Echo is an odd bird, but she soars in this urban fantasy.

Echo lives by two rules—don’t get caught, and if caught, run—but breaking them brings lifechanging adventures. Ten years ago, when the Ala caught Echo |

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picking her pocket, she brought the young thief into the underground world of the Avicen—a race of long-lived, partly feathered people. Echo now flits among the Avicen, trading favors, learning magic, and even snagging a boyfriend, Rowan, but she never feels like part of the flock. Splitting time between her illicit home/book hoard in the New York Public Library and travel around the world via magic powder and portals, Echo is rarely at rest, as if aware of her mortality. When she gets caught again, this time by the dragonlike Drakharin—the opponents of the Avicen in a long-running war—she undertakes a perilous journey to find the legendary firebird and, hopefully, peace. Grey’s energetic debut offers a strong protagonist with a delightfully snarky voice. Echo’s street-honed burglary skills and survival instincts are well-balanced by her (typical) teenage hormones and boundless enthusiasm. Her companions, Avicen Ivy and Jasper and Drakharin Caius and Dorian, are also entertaining, gaining depth by sharing the narrative spotlight— though the initial ping-pong switches between Echo and Caius are disorienting.

The well-built world, vivid characters, and perfect blend of action and amour should have readers eagerly seeking the sequel. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

A DAY IN CANADA

Gürth, Per-Henrik Illus. by Gürth, Per-Henrik Kids Can (32 pp.) $15.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-77138-125-3 Gürth adds to his series of books about Canada with this look at time.

Beginning in Newfoundland and Labrador and moving west through a single day, readers greet the sun at 6 a.m. and then are introduced to a single location and activity for each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories (a map is provided on the endpapers). A bull moose pedals along Confederation Trail at 8:30 a.m. A bit later, a moose calf dances a jig at the Miramichi Folk Festival. The text is framed in a series of gentle imperatives: Explore an old fort, have a picnic, smell the flowers in Assiniboine Park, kayak Lake Louise, hike, pan for gold, barbecue on the beach. Many of these can be done almost any place, though two particularly tempting activities are difficult to do just anywhere: sleep beneath the northern lights and “2:45 p.m. / Slide down the Athabasca Sand Dunes.” An old-fashioned alarm clock in the bottom left corner displays each time in whole hours and 15-minute increments. Gürth’s digital illustrations feature thick black outlines filled with brilliant colors.

Simple details and animal characters will attract the youngest lapsitters, who may want to try some of the activities depicted, even if they can’t do them in the specific Canadian environs described. (Picture book. 3- 7)

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“Harrold offers an appealingly childcentric world with hefty doses of scare and malevolence to explore the possibilities of imaginary beings with feelings of their own.” from the imaginary

THE SPIRIT OF THE SEA

Hainnu, Rebecca Illus. by Lim, Hwei Inhabit Media (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-927095-75-1

A popular Inuit cautionary legend, featuring a haughty young woman and a gruesome climactic twist.

Arnaq will accept no suitor, until a shaman sea bird disguised as a handsome young man sweeps her away with glittering promises to a wretched, reeking tent on a distant shore.

When her father arrives to rescue her, the shaman raises such a storm that her terrified dad casts her overboard—and cuts off her fingers to keep her from holding on to the boat. Those fingers are transformed into whales and seals, and she, into a testy spirit named Nuliajuq, who calls up storms on all who “disrespect the land or the sea.” This and other modern-sounding lines (“Eventually Arnaq succumbed to complete depression”) give the otherwise formal narrative a playfully anachronistic air that may or may not be intentional. Lim illustrates the tale in a realistic rather than stylized way, using flowing lines and brush strokes to depict natural settings, faces, Arnaq’s lustrous locks (and, though seen only from a distance, fingerless hands), and a range of accurately detailed arctic and sea animals. In an afterword, the author explains that the sea spirit goes by several regional names; a pronunciation guide to Inuktitut words in this version is also included.

A fresh, if not quite as seamless, alternative to Robert D. and Daniel San Souci’s Song of Sedna (1981). (Picture book/ folk tale. 7-9)

PETLANDIA

Hannan, Peter Illus. by Hannan, Peter Scholastic (144 pp.) $8.99 | $8.99 e-book | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-545-16211-1 978-0-545-47041-4 e-book Petlandia: utopia or P-U-topia?

Madame Wigglesworth the cat was tolerant of her humans, the Finkleblurts, until they brought home a puppy named Grub. Now they are much more interested in rubbing his belly than in worshipping her. The grumpy feline hatches a plan to get rid of the humans by exploiting Grub’s extreme stupidity. Telling him the family will withhold all belly rubs, she tricks Grub into ejecting the family from the house while they sleep. After the humans are gone, Madame Wigglesworth thinks she will again be queen, but a democratic vote among the pets, including love-struck Honeybaked Hamster and Clowny, the depressed clown fish, does not go her way. She enfranchises the rats who live in the basement for another vote. Honeybaked then invites the attic bats into the community...and so on, until the house is destroyed, and the Petlandians take refuge from the rain with 106

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the humans in the doghouse. The action takes place amid a mix of unfunny jokes, forced bad grammar and uber-dim characters, making this spin on the eternal conflict between cats and dogs a tedious one. Hannan is the creator of CatDog, Nickelodeon’s Ren & Stimpy knockoff, and his reliance on such aural devices as Honeybaked’s Brooklyn accent and Grub’s baby talk just do not work in print.

Nick Bruel’s books about Bad Kitty and Puppy are far better treatments of the theme than this tired outing.

(Humor. 6-9)

PAINLESS

Harazin, S.A. Whitman (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-6288-8 A teen who can’t feel physical pain goes through some significant emotional trauma.

As one of the few people on the planet with this unusual sensory disorder, David is blessed and cursed with the ability to not feel heat, cold or pain. Of course, the elements still take a toll on his body, and most people with his condition don’t live very long. Sooner or later, they all mess up and miss a sign that something’s amiss. David’s a lucky one. He lives with his ailing grandmother and is on the cusp of adulthood, getting ready to set off on his own with as few personal assistants as he can manage. When his grandmother’s dementia gets the best of her, David suddenly finds himself free and rudderless, save for his new friend and nurse, Luna. Harazin effectively combines typical teen angst with actual life-threatening consequences.

The heightened emotions David experiences are felt all the more when considering they may be his last. Not so successful is the fleshing-out of the tertiary characters. Everyone is on hand to serve David’s emotional and physical journeys, so much so that they feel like toys tucked away in a box whenever the author isn’t using them. Coupling this with a fairly cookiecutter coming-of-age story makes this a book that will certainly have a few fans but no die-hard supporters.

A tad predictable but emotionally engaging nonetheless. (Fiction. 12-16)

THE IMAGINARY

Harrold, A.F. Illus. by Gravett, Emily Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $16.99 | $11.99 e-book | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-8027-3811-0 978-1-61963-670-5 e-book What happens to the imaginary friends we make when we are so little we can’t remember them later on? kirkus.com

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Amanda’s friend Rudger simply appears one day in Amanda’s wardrobe and becomes her constant companion—and hers alone. He finds that sharing in Amanda’s rich and adventurous imagination has its rewards but some significant dangers and challenges. There’s the creepy Mr. Bunting, an ancient man in Hawaiian-print shirt and shorts who, it turns out, stays alive by devouring children’s imaginary friends. There’s the possibility of being forgotten, when age or injury—or death?—causes the bond to weaken. When Amanda is hit by a car, Rudger is able to take refuge in a library, the one place apart from children’s company where sufficient imagination dwells to keep imaginary companions from fading. Rudger’s attempts to connect with a boy too young to enjoy his unexpected appearance and to one of Amanda’s less versatile friends are ill-starred. A harrowing hospital scene is satisfyingly gruesome though not disastrous. Harrold offers an appealingly childcentric world with hefty doses of scare and malevolence to explore the possibilities of imaginary beings with feelings of their own. Gravett’s several double-page, full-color illustrations, along with lively margin drawings, sweetly blend the real with the imaginary, giving Amanda and Rudger appealing personality—and deliver chills in the form of Mr. Bunting and his own dreadfully spooky imaginary companion.

Wonderfully entertaining. (Fantasy. 9-13)

ZOOLOGY FOR KIDS Understanding and Working With Animals, With 21 Activities Hestermann, Josh; Hestermann, Bethanie Chicago Review (144 pp.) $18.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-61374-961-6

A pair of enthusiastic animal lovers provide a comprehensive introduction to zoology, a description of potential careers and suggestions for hands-on activities for learning or practicing.

This useful title begins with an in-depth look at the basics of the study of animal life: animal forms and functions, animal behavior, and the relation of animals to their environments.

The second section describes the many different roles animal lovers can play: as workers (and even volunteers) in zoos and aquariums, veterinarians, wildlife researchers and “conservation warriors.” The accompanying activities are appropriate for middle school students alone or in groups. They include baking an edible “animal cell” and making a salad from fruits commonly pollinated by bats, molding tiger teeth, making a stethoscope and taking vital signs, and playing various games. The extensive text, though a bit daunting at first, reads smoothly and often directly addresses the audience. It’s broken up and made to look more accessible with plentiful pictures (a wide range of animals and animal workers) and text boxes. Some of these breakout sections discuss zoological concepts such as metamorphosis and animal classification, while others introduce figures in the history of animal study, from Aristotle to the chief scientist at Polar Bears International, and still others describe particular animal encounters. |

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A convincing invitation to the wide world of working with animals. (glossary, resources, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 11-15)

WINNIE & WALDORF

Hites, Kati Illus. by Hites, Kati Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-231161-0 A little girl named Winnie narrates a story about humorous interactions with her huge dog, Waldorf.

In addition to her big dog, Winnie has a big sister named Sara, who is preparing for a violin recital that evening in their home. Winnie and Waldorf sneak into Sara’s off-limits bedroom and knock over Sara’s violin, breaking one of the strings (astonishingly, the instrument itself is fine). Sara is angry at Waldorf and suggests he be replaced with a cat. But later at the concert, Waldorf ’s antics with some cupcakes help Sara overcome her nervousness. A satisfying conclusion shows the family enjoying a story together on the couch, with Waldorf happy in the middle. The story is simple and accessible, and both Winnie and Waldorf are likable characters with a variety of appealing expressions. Digitally produced mixedmedia illustrations create the look of watercolor paintings, with a soft focus and muted palette. One culturally insensitive detail mars the overall success of the illustrations, as Winnie wears a Plains Indian–style feather headdress to the concert with accompanying text stating “We dress up in our most formal attire....”

As characters, Winnie and Waldorf are a winning pair, but Winnie’s unfortunate choice of costume reflects a sadly out-of-step approach to cultural understanding.

(Picture book. 3- 6)

HOW TO SPY ON A SHARK

Houran, Lori Haskins Illus. by Marquez, Francisca Whitman (32 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-3402-1

Houran invites readers along as a group of marine biologists tracks and follows a juvenile mako shark.

The marine biologists use a net to catch the young shark, attaching a tag to the pup’s pelvic fin. They then use a robot to track and monitor the shark, keeping tabs on its movements and eating habits. At the end of the day, the scientists (two women and one man, one Caucasian and two of indeterminate ethnicity) pull up the robot and wave goodbye to the sharks.

Unfortunately, the author misses the mark in choosing to write in second person. “Take a boat ride / out to sea / until you spy a fin. // Get all set / to get all wet / and splash! / go diving in.”

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they are being given orders and instructions, and many will feel uncomfortable or not up to the task. The simple illustrations bring readers up close to the action, but they are not part of it, as the text suggests. Backmatter gives a little more information about the topics presented—sharks fall asleep when they are turned belly up; makos can swim up to 35 mph—but this would have captured more interest within the body of the text.

The dichotomy between the adult tasks and the simply worded rhyming text makes this one to skip. (Informational picture book. 4-6)

LOST IN THE BACKYARD

Hughes, Alison Orca (144 pp.) $9.95 paper | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4598-0794-5

TETHER

Lost in the woods for three long, cold days, Flynn makes several mistakes that hinder his rescue and survival.

Flynn abhors anything not involving television or his cellphone; he particularly loathes the outdoors and the Outdoor Education class at his school. At the onset of winter and while visiting some former neighbors who have moved off the grid, Flynn wanders into the woods, quickly becoming frightened, confused and lost. Why hadn’t he paid more attention in his class or read the books assigned? Flynn is a 13-year-old with a cocky attitude, eyes that are quick to roll and a flip brashness.

Canadian author Hughes neatly captures Flynn’s junior-high obnoxiousness in his narration. Although Flynn shows some glimpses of warmth toward his younger sister, he is not a particularly likable kid. While his continued wisecracking during his ordeal makes empathy difficult to muster, the insights he gains during his three-day adventure as he is injured, faces wild animals and becomes hypothermic are satisfying.

A simple, predictable survival adventure. (Adventure.

8-12)

DISAPPEAR HOME

Hurwitz, Laura Whitman (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-2468-8

A teen growing up in an out-of-control hippie commune in Oregon in 1970 discovers what it’s like to have a stable home when she’s transplanted to rural California.

After months of conspiring, 14-yearold Shoshanna, her younger sister, and their mother, Ella, flee “the hunger, the violence, the drugs, [and] the chaos” of Sweet Earth Farm, where they’ve lived like prisoners for five years. Desperate to escape an abusive, addicted father, they “disappear” to San Francisco, arriving 108

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penniless and homeless in Haight-Ashbury, where Ella reconnects with her friend Judy, who moves them to a rural, coastal town where a kind man gives them a place to live in exchange for working on his farm. Afraid her father will follow and knowing she’ll “have to work hard to keep her mother going,” Shoshie flourishes with a safe place, nourishing food and earth-mother Judy’s care. When Ella becomes gravely ill, once again Shoshie’s future’s uncertain, until she realizes she has a new community supporting her. Details of the free-spirited, hippie lifestyle and attitudes provide authentic cultural context for Shoshie’s troubling, urgent journey from desperate victim to hopeful survivor.

This realistic debut inspires with a grounded heroine who comes of age as she “disappears home.” (Historical fiction. 12-15)

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Jarzab, Anna Delacorte (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-385-74279-5 978-0-307-97726-7 e-book 978-0-375-99078-6 PLB Back on Earth and discontented after the events of Tandem (2013), Sasha returns to Aurora for the boy she left behind.

Sasha can’t stand not knowing whether or not Thomas is well, and after Aurora, Earth just doesn’t feel right anymore.

She receives a message that Thomas is alive, investigates her parents’ connection to the alternate worlds and returns. There, she meets a third analog, Selene, the last oracle of a dying world in a different universe. It is prophesied that Selene may save her world, but she needs her two analogs, Sasha and Princess Juliana, to do it. While the addition of Selene (and a handful of others) draws focus away from the characters of the first book, it creates an interesting dynamic for the analogs. Sasha and Selene bond quickly, but their psychic connection to Juliana is weaker because of the tension between her and Sasha. Sasha and Selene must escape the villainous General to find the missing princess and convince her to go save Selene’s world. Meanwhile Juliana, held captive by rebels, is given complexity and a romantic storyline of her own in occasional third-person sections. The exposition’s better consolidated in this outing than before, coming in short bursts, then cutting back to the action, but sometimes feels like infodumps. After a chaotic climax, the ending predictably sets up the next book.

Despite predictability and second-book syndrome, a generally fast and enjoyable read of interpersonal drama and rescues. (Science fantasy. 12 & up)

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“Hilarious, deliciously provocative and slyly thought-provoking, Juby’s welcome return is bound to ignite debate.” from the truth commission

THE TRUTH COMMISSION

Juby, Susan Viking (320 pp.) $18.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-451-46877-2 When curiosity leads three students at a Nanaimo, British Columbia, art school (“Serving oddballs in grades ten through twelve since 2007”) to ask a classmate why she had “renovations done,” her surprisingly positive response prompts the trio to form the Truth Commission, an experiment in bringing hidden truths to light.

Unlike fellow commissioners Dusk and Neil, Normandy has understandable misgivings about the endeavor even after an inquiry into a school administrator’s legendary crabbiness turns out well (ostriches are involved). For years, Normandy and her parents have served as source material for her prodigy sister Keira’s wildly successful graphic-novel series. While Normandy acknowledges fragile Keira’s extraordinary gifts, knowing she owes her own school scholarship to Keira’s status, she hasn’t bought into the family myth that Keira’s vicious ridicule is OK. Now Keira’s returned home from college without explanation, ending the family’s brief respite from meeting her many needs. The more lives the Truth Commission touches, the more ambivalent Normandy feels about its mission, which threatens her own passive acceptance of her family’s status quo. In a tellall, socially networked world, balancing the right to know (and use) “the truth” against the right to privacy is both confusing and challenging. Readers will root for these engaging characters to chart a successful course through these murky waters.

Hilarious, deliciously provocative and slyly thoughtprovoking, Juby’s welcome return is bound to ignite debate.

(Fiction. 14-18)

CATALYST

Kang, Lydia Kathy Dawson/Penguin (400 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-8037-4093-8 In a dystopian future, a breed of genetically altered humans struggles for freedom and survival.

In this engrossing sequel to Control (2013), the safe house for a small group of genetically altered teens is invaded.

Eighteen-year-old Zelia and a handful of others barely escape the police raid. In order to go into hiding again, Zelia and her boyfriend, Cy, volunteer for a breeding program called Inky.

Instead of finding safety, however, they are imprisoned there with other experimental humans. Inky is controlled by a sadistic scientist with a split personality—literally—who wants to profit from their DNA. Unknowingly, Zelia is the keeper of the |

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secret list of genetic codes, the recipe of every child made by her father, making her a most treasured captive. Like futuristic Frankenstein’s monsters, these fugitives are outcasts, their DNA stitched and switched to create better humans. She herself has the longevity trait, and Cy can cause pain psychokinetically. Once again they make a run for it, and the group dashes from hardscrabble place to place, always hunted and hated. Kang spins an evenly paced and thought-provoking story, employing symbolism deftly: Narnia-like, greenery re-emerges as the genetic misfits stop running to take a stand.

Kang wraps up her duology neatly and satisfyingly, but the intrigue lingers—which is also satisfying. (Dystopian suspense. 12-18)

THE GLORKIAN WARRIOR EATS ADVENTURE PIE

Kochalka, James Illus. by Kochalka, James First Second (128 pp.) $19.99 | $12.99 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-62672-133-3 978-1-62672-021-3 paper Series: Glorkian Warrior Silliness reigns supreme as the Glorkian Warrior finds himself on another goofy illustrated adventure that revolves around food and fart jokes.

After successfully delivering a pizza to himself in The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza (2014), the Glorkian Warrior and his trusty, sunshine-hued companion, Super Backpack, are back, battling a pie-factory–destroying, candy-colored space snake only to be beaten to the kill by a rival warrior, the daffily nefarious Buster Glark, who has a freeze-ray–shooting backpack. The Glorkian Warrior returns home to lick his wounds, rearrange his furniture and recharge Backpack. There, they are greeted

by Gonk, a salmon-colored minidoppelganger of the Glorkian Warrior, and the lime-green Baby Alien. When the group finally realizes that the Baby Alien has been sucking out the Warrior’s brains (readers will be way ahead of them, thanks to the “suck suck” sound effects), they must help revive him with energy crackers—which are promptly stolen by Buster Glark. Madcap whimsy runs rampant, and jokes about nothing, everything and flatulence abound against a vibrantly colored backdrop that would make even Willy Wonka’s eyes hurt. Kochalka’s intensely zippy and quirky humor never misses a beat and rolls fluidly from one wisecrack to another; maybe this isn’t everyone’s brand of comedy, but for those readers who enjoy silly for silly’s sake, this will surely delight.

Kooky, bubble-gum fun. (Graphic science fiction/humor. 5-10)

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“Smith’s control of both color and perspective is superb, supporting a beautifully nuanced emotional tone.” from sidewalk flowers

IN MARY’S GARDEN

Kügler, Carson Illus. by Kügler, Tina HMH Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-544-27220-0

A portrait of Wisconsin folk artist Mary Nohl (1914-2001) and her sculptures.

As a child, “[w]hile the other girls [take] cooking classes,” Mary learns woodworking and makes an airplane. She helps her father build a house on Lake Michigan’s shore and realizes that she loves to create things with her hands. Collecting driftwood, feathers and rocks, Mary employs her building skills—mixing cement with beach sand, as her father showed her, and spreading it over a support of wood, wire and piping—to create a massive, playful-looking creature. The Kuglers use watercolor, digital painting, collage and vintage papers to portray Mary’s world and sculptures. Some of the illustration has a stylized folkart feel, blocky and angular in mild colors, while Mary’s dogs have rounder lines. Mary’s sculptures vary in scale, so the illustrations play with scale too. In one example, Mary and her dogs discover “a marvelous creature washed up on the sand.” The purple, wavy-limbed object looks enormous—until the following spread reveals it to be a small, beige piece of driftwood. That driftwood becomes an antler on Mary’s huge, sculpted creature.

An author’s note explains Mary’s eccentricities—melting silverware, painting on indoor carpeting—and the controversy of her neighborhood’s refusal to allow public visitors into her garden of odd, fantastical creatures.

A friendly chronicle of an offbeat artist. (author’s note, photos) (Picture book/biography. 6-9)

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR

Larsen, Andrew Illus. by Stewart, Todd Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 15, 2015 978-1-926973-99-9

The annual summer vacation reveals familiar patterns and the joy of continuity and tradition.

A girl sets off for her annual summer trip with her family.

They travel a familiar route, and she sees the same old sights.

However, rather than sounding bored or sullen, the narrator embraces the return to roads less traveled though highly recognizable. Once at the beach, the girl relates the happenings, small and large, of the week; the most important thing is that “[n]othing changes. That’s why I like it.” The charm of Larsen’s book is the lack of gimmickry. Simple type against a plain, white background is paired with beautifully straightforward artwork.

In his picture-book debut, Stewart captures the sparseness of Larsen’s words and creates images both childlike and sophisticated. His color choices are magnificent as he depicts a bonfire with bright orange flames licking against a black backdrop or in the way he interprets daylight as the narrator sits on her front 110

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porch or stands on an early-morning beach. Larsen’s storytelling feels honest, and the book will work just as well for a young person taking those first steps toward independent reading as it will for shared reading with an adult.

Taken as a whole, the book affectionately captures the nostalgic air of vacations past, seashells gathered and summer friends left behind—a great book for the car ride.

(Picture book. 3- 6)

SIDEWALK FLOWERS

Lawson, JonArno Illus. by Smith, Sydney Groundwood (32 pp.) $16.95 | $14.95 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-55498-431-2 978-1-55498-432-9 e-book A child in a red hoodie and a man on a cellphone navigate an urban landscape, the child picking flowers from cracks and crannies along the way.

Best known for his nonsense verse, Lawson here provides a poignant, wordless storyline, interpreted by Smith in sequential panels. The opening spread presents the child and (probably) dad walking in a gray urban neighborhood. The child’s hoodie is the only spot of color against the gray wash—except for the dandelions growing next to a sidewalk tree, begging to be picked.

The rest of their walk proceeds in similar fashion, occasional hints of color (a fruit stand, glass bottles in a window) joining the child and the flowers she (judging by the haircut) plucks from cracks in the concrete. Smith’s control of both color and perspective is superb, supporting a beautifully nuanced emotional tone. Though the streets are gray, they are not hostile, and though dad is on the cellphone, he also holds the child’s hand and never exhibits impatience as she stops. Once the child has collected a bouquet, she shares it, placing a few flowers on a dead bird, next to a man sleeping on a bench, in a friendly dog’s collar. As child and dad draw closer to home, color spreads across the pages; there is no narrative climax beyond readers’ sharing of the child’s quiet sense of wonder.

Bracketed by beautiful endpapers, this ode to everyday beauty sings sweetly. (Picture book. 4- 7)

DANNY

Le Bec, Yann; Le Bec, Gwendal Illus. by Le Bec, Yann; Le Bec, Gwendal Flying Eye Books (40 pp.) $14.95 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-909263-42-0 A lesson in heeding the biased advice of strangers takes an unexpected turn.

Danny the hippo is indulging in an underwater tooth scrub when he overhears a conversation among the “cleaner fish” about the gap between his teeth: He must have a lisp with teeth like that. kirkus.com

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When he consults with some snakes to determine if he speaks strangely, the lisping reptiles agree that there’s something wrong. Off to the city Danny goes, where he acquires a handsome set of braces—and a brand-new lisp. He recommends the procedure to a crocodile friend, who meets with the dentist, promptly devouring him and taking his job. Now the croc is a well-established dentist, and Danny couldn’t be happier.

There is much to enjoy in the easy lines and retro tone of the illustrations. Simple forms and bright colors pop off the page, lending the entire enterprise a jaunty, joyful feel. Up until the sudden plot shift to the crocodile, the story has much to say about heeding the advice of others over your own common sense. Unfortunately, the sudden interjection of the croc turns the tale from The Bear Who Wasn’t (1946) to Sweeney Todd for no particular reason.

Pleasing art hampered by occasionally overblown storytelling and an ungainly plot twist. (Picture book. 4- 7)

HOW TO CATCH A MOUSE

Leathers, Philippa Illus. by Leathers, Philippa Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-7636-6912-6

Ginger kitten Clemmie keeps her house mouse-free...or does she?

Smiling Clemmie is certain she is a brave and fearsome hunter of mice. She can stalk; she can chase; she can be patient and alert. She knows a mouse has a pink tail, whiskery nose and two round ears. She’s sure all mice are afraid of her. She thinks she sees a mouse’s tail. She stalks and attacks. It’s only a hat string. Of course! There are no mice in her house. The round ears under the bed? A teddy bear. That whiskery nose on the bathroom counter? A spider’s legs. But when she settles down for a nap, sounds draw her to the kitchen, where something strange is nibbling cookies. Under the sock on its head: round ears. Behind the fake nose: whiskers. Under the blue fluffy pom-pom: a pink tail! It’s a mouse, and it gets away...but it’s given Clemmie an idea that just might help her catch it! British author-illustrator Leathers’ overconfident kitten will easily win hearts. Storytimers and lap-sit listeners will enjoy spotting the sneaky, smart mouse, who’s always just ahead of the appealing feline heroine, disguising each physical feature as the kitten chases the look-alike.

Clemmie in a trench coat, using what she’s learned, is worth the price of admission alone. (Picture book. 2-6)

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PEACE IS AN OFFERING

LeBox, Annette Illus. by Graegin, Stephanie Dial (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-8037-40914

A list of small lessons that, when added up, have a great impact.

Peace is so abstract that it’s a difficult concept to grasp. LeBox tries to make it concrete, encouraging children to practice small acts of giving, sharing and understanding every day. She follows a diverse group of friends as they find tiny moments of peace in the world around them. “Peace is an offering. / A muffin or a peach. // A birthday invitation. / A trip to the beach.” Peace is also found in the answers to some potentially scary questions: “Will you stay with me? / Will you be my friend? / Will you listen to my story / till the very end?” The pencil-andwatercolor illustrations are muted and comforting, often with a glow of warmth even on the rainy-day pages. LeBox then offers direct, child-friendly advice: “So offer a cookie, / walk away from a fight. / Comfort a friend // Through the long, dark night.” Even in tragedy (the text hints at the 9/11 attacks), peace can be found.

Affecting and heartfelt. (Picture book. 3- 7)

HOLD ME CLOSER The Tiny Cooper Story Levithan, David Dutton (208 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 17, 2015 978-0-525-42884-8

Finally, Tiny Cooper gets his own story: the musical.

Semifresh (four years later) off the heels of his uber-gay and hilarious collaboration with John Green, Will Gray-son Will Grayson (2010), Levithan bites the bullet and pens the actual musical script that his 16-year-old large-and-in-charge gay hero created as a centerpiece for the original novel. Tiny’s coming-ofage musical includes his loving parents, his BFF Phil Wrayson (a cautiously disguised straight Will Grayson), a lesbian babysitter named Lynda, the ghost of Oscar Wilde and 18 ex-boyfriends— including the second Will Grayson. There are Barbra Streisand and Idina Menzel references. There are potentially naughty locker-room tableaux. There are debunked stereotypes in the form of song (“OH! What a Big Gay Baby”). There are multiple moments in the spotlight, including solos and addresses to the audience, where Tiny will have readers falling out of their chairs laughing. It’s probably wrong to call this a novel since it’s written as a script complete with acts, dialogue, musical verse and staging instructions, but whatever it is, it’s just as downright ridiculous as its precursor. Shy readers should be warned: Don’t read this in a public place unless you’re very comfortable chortling out loud.

It’s big. It’s gay. It’s outrageous and hilarious. (Fiction.

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MARCH Book Two

Lewis, John; Aydin, Andrew Illus. by Powell, Nate Top Shelf Books (192 pp.) $19.95 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-60309-400-9 Heroism and steadiness of purpose continue to light up Lewis’ frank, harrowing account of the civil rights movement’s climactic days—here, from cafeteria sitins in Nashville to the March on Washington.

As in the opener, Powell’s dark, monochrome ink-andwash scenes add further drama to already-dramatic events.

Interspersed in Aydin’s script with flashes forward to President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, Lewis’ first-person account begins with small-scale protests and goes on to cover his experiences as a Freedom Rider amid escalating violence in the South, his many arrests, and his involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s formation and later internal strife. With the expectation that readers will already have a general grasp of the struggle’s course, he doesn’t try for a comprehensive overview but offers personal memories and insights—recalling, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr.’s weak refusal to join the Freedom Riders and, with respect, dismissing Malcolm X: “I never felt he was a part of the movement.” This middle volume builds to the fiery manifesto the 23-year-old Lewis delivered just before Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech and closes with the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The contrast between the dignified marchers and the vicious, hate-filled actions and expressions of their tormentors will leave a deep impression on readers. Lewis’ commitment to nonviolent—but far from unimpassioned—protest will leave a deeper one. Backmatter includes the original draft of Lewis’ speech.

“We’re gonna march”—oh, yes. (Graphic memoir. 11 & up)

BUG DETECTIVE

Li, Maggie Illus. by Li, Maggie Sterling (28 pp.) $14.95 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4549-1516-4

Curious facts about familiar invertebrates are packaged with a magnifying glass for extended observations.

Spread by spread, this cheery collection of infobits describes the creepy-crawlies of the world: butterflies, stick insects, beetles, ladybugs, worms, centipedes, snails, spiders, flies, ants and bees. The arrangement of facts on a spread is nearly as quirky as the assortment of (unsourced) information the author, a London-based illustrator and art director, has chosen. The background is a stylized illustration suggesting an environment where the creature might be found: the leaves of a 112

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tree for ladybugs, a table full of sweets for flies, beehives inside and out. A short introduction to the group appears at the top right-hand corner of the page followed by a circular illustration of the three or four stages of its life cycle. After that, factoids are scattered around the pages, each with a quick headline: “dinosaur playmates”; “slow snail race”; “spider soup.” There are occasional humorous additions that might just help youngsters remember facts about species differences. Each page also includes a suggestion for further exploration in the real world using the surprisingly effective plastic magnifier embedded in the cover.

For readers who can get beyond the use of the generic “bug,” this could be an engaging invitation to explore the world of small creatures. (Nonfiction. 7-10)

HAVE YOU SEEN MY MONSTER?

Light, Steve Illus. by Light, Steve Candlewick (48 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 8, 2015 978-0-7636-7513-4

A little girl searches for her monster in every corner of the county fair.

She asks readers to help her locate her not-very-frightening, curly-haired monster as she visits and enjoys exhibits, rides, games, food vendors and more. Hiding sometimes in plain sight and sometimes more obscurely, he is everywhere she goes. He rides the carousel, flies a kite, indulges in snacks and marches in a parade. Of course she finds him just in time to go home. Light follows up on the techniques employed in his earlier Have You Seen My Dragon? (2014). Busy, black, pen-and-ink line drawings set the scene, capturing all the details of a county fair. Although the monster is purple and the girl is in full color on the cover, they are depicted in black line throughout the work. Simple sentences in large print are prominently placed within the illustrations, and a black banner with white lettering announces the names of brightly colored shapes. A square, rectangle, triangle and circle each make an appearance, along with other familiar shapes. But watch for a quatrefoil, trapezium, nonagon and curvilinear triangle as well. Young readers will be happily engaged in searching for the monster, and finding and identifying the shapes, all the while enjoying the excitement and fun of the fair.

Gently educational and greatly entertaining. (Picture book. 3-6)

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“Scientific facts (puffins have heavy bones; their predators include gulls) are woven neatly into the brief, just-dramatic-enough narrative.” from little puffin’s first flight

WORK AND MORE WORK

Little, Linda Illus. by Pérez, Óscar T. Groundwood (32 pp.) $18.95 | $16.95 e-book | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-55498-383-4 978-1-55498-384-1 e-book A young traveler discovers a world of wonders hidden in a seemingly ordinary word.

Though assured by his industrious parents that there is nothing beyond their rural cottage but “work and more work,” Tom sets out to see for himself. Odd jobs eventually lead him to sail off to encounter tea in China, indigo in a busy Indian marketplace and cinnamon in tropical Ceylon. Years later he returns to tell his parents that all over the world “people are busy making beautiful things.” “I told you so,” responds his mother. “Wherever you go—just work and more work.” The narrative is a bare recitation of events, but in her afterword, Little explains that she visualizes Tom as starting out near Liverpool around 1840, then goes on to describe in some detail his parents’ occupations and how tea, indigo and cinnamon were harvested and prepared for export at that time. Showing technical dazzle but a fussy sensibility, Pérez renders foliage, architectural features and period dress in precise, superfine detail but gives human figures oversized heads, studied gestures, and tiny hands and feet. Moreover, though Tom is supposedly gone long enough to become “a young man and quite different from the boy who had left,” in the illustrations he ages not at all, greeting his parents wearing the same clothes he set out in.

Stylized and idealized but with some potential as a discussion starter. (Picture book. 7-9)

FROGGY’S BIRTHDAY WISH

London, Jonathan Illus. by Remkiewicz, Frank Viking (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-670-01572-6

Predictable fare to be sure, but series fans will likely follow Froggy wherever he goes. (Picture book. 3-6)

LITTLE PUFFIN’S FIRST FLIGHT

London, Jonathan Illus. by Van Zyle, Jon Alaska Northwest Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 2, 2015 978-1-941821-40-4

A horned puffin hatches, grows and flies for the first time on the Alaskan coast.

London’s characteristically lyrical, clipped free verse describes the meeting of two puffins, followed by nesting, tending their single egg and the hatching of their “hungry gray fuzzball.” Taking turns to guard the chick and hunt, Mother and Father Puffin raise Little Puffin to fledging. One night, spectacularly foregrounded against the rising moon by Van Zyle in three successive spreads, Little Puffin makes his way to the edge of the cliff and then jumps, first falling and then flying—to find his own mate four years later. With the exception of naming his puffin family, London largely avoids anthropomorphizing his subjects even as he uses figurative language his preschool audience will understand: “Dressed in her life jacket / of carefully fluffed feathers, / Mother Puffin bobs like a cork / in the icy cold ocean.” Scientific facts (puffins have heavy bones; their predators include gulls) are woven neatly into the brief, just-dramaticenough narrative. Van Zyle keeps his palette realistically limited to cold grays and blues except for that tremendous yellow moon and the puffins’ beaks, relying on shifts in perspective and scale to maintain visual interest. In one humorous image, three herrings droop comically from Father Puffin’s beak. A two-page author’s note provides further information.

A bracing nature adventure for animal-loving preschoolers. (Informational picture book. 2-6)

PARTY CROC! A Folktale from Zimbabwe

In his 24th adventure, Froggy finally celebrates a birthday.

Froggy cannot wait. He starts the day off right by singing “Happy birthday to meeeeeeeee!” while bouncing excitedly on his bed. But when he sees his family at the breakfast table, no one seems to remember that it is his special day. So he flops over to all of his friends’ houses, but no one is home. Has everyone forgotten Froggy’s birthday?! Of course not—there’s a surprise party waiting for him at home. The story arc then shifts to Froggy’s presents (all providing fodder for Froggy’s wild antics and zany sound effects) before finally settling on Froggy’s birthday wish—a piñata, given to him by none other than Frogilina. The story plods, er, flops along with no real momentum. Remkiewicz’s expressive characters do their best to add energy, and the extra zings and bonks help, but as the subject suggests, Froggy just may be getting old. |

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MacDonald, Margaret Read Illus. by Sullivan, Derek Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-6320-5

A jolly Zimbabwean folk tale teaches the importance of keeping promises.

Zuva wishes for something to catch fish with when a friendly crocodile offers to catch some for her. But he wants something in return. Zuva promises the crocodile a food-filled party in town on Saturday if only he will get her some fish today. She figures the crocodile will forget the promise and won’t know when Saturday is. But this is a party croc, whose enthusiasm for the promised party will not let him forget it. Zuva shares the crocodile’s fish with the village but does not give proper credit. Each |

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“The first-person narration describes the spectacle of toad migration from a child’s point of view but includes adult dialogue that weaves in information neatly.” from toad weather

day, the excited crocodile checks in to see which day of the week it is, the patterned text lending itself to audience participation in MacDonald’s trademark style. When Saturday arrives, he is ready to roll. Surprised, Zuva tries to keep the crocodile quiet by feeding him, but the croc is not satisfied and disturbs the village, uncovering Zuva’s omission. Digitally stylized villagers, their mouths painted to the sides of their faces, meet the jolly crocodile’s questions with confusion, allowing readers to be in on the joke. Details add to the fun: He is dolled up with fish bracelets and a leaf bow tie! A brief author’s note details the origin of the tale.

The importance of keeping promises is delivered with a hearty dose of humor, making this a book to return to.

(Picture book/folk tale. 4-8)

LOOK!

Mack, Jeff Illus. by Mack, Jeff Philomel (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-399-16205-3 Even an ape knows books can be better than TV. An inquisitive ape finds a book. Not knowing what it is, he puts it on his head and tries to attract the attention of a boy watching TV. “Look,” says the ape. The boy ignores him. The ape tries balancing the book on his nose, saying “Look. Look.”

The boy brushes him aside, telling him to “Look out.” The ape keeps trying, but when he nearly knocks over the boy’s TV, he triggers a curt “Out.” Shortly, he returns, riding a tricycle and juggling several books. Seven iterations of “Look” are scrawled in what looks like crayon across the page. “Look out!”—there goes the TV. “Out! Out! Out!” goes the ape. TV broken, the boy starts reading one of the fallen books. “Look,” he says, calling the ape back: It’s the tale of a boy and an ape in the jungle! Mack skillfully uses two words and their various meanings, integrating them with the digitally manipulated mixed-media illustrations to tell his tale. Bright, mostly monochrome page backgrounds evoke clothbound book covers and distressed old pages; minimal set dressing (a door, a stool, the TV) keeps the focus on the zany interaction. The personalities and emotions of the chunky, fluffy ape and the TV-entranced boy nearly vibrate off the page.

Look, indeed! An energetic invitation to the joys of books. (Picture book. 2-5)

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DOG EAT DOG

Marcionette, Jake Illus. by Villa, Victor Rivas Grosset & Dunlap (194 pp.) $11.99 | $11.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-448-46693-4 978-0-698-19880-7 e-book Just Jake, 2 Wunderkind Marcionette returns with another tale about his gifted pre-

teen, Just Jake (2014).

After a rocky start, Jake Mathews finally feels at home among the other gifted “misfits” in Mrs. Pilsen’s sixth-grade class at Kinney Elementary. But just as he gets his groove back, Jake’s teacher goes and delivers a baby in the middle of the year, leaving Jake and the rest of the class in the hands of Ms. Cane, a pink-haired, tattooed, ex–prison guard substitute. Even his older sister, Alexis, who has yet to lose or shy away from a battle, pales in comparison to Ms. Cane. In this sequel, Marcionette allows a well-developed and engaging cast of secondary characters to share the spotlight with Jake as he struggles to survive twin antagonists: the maniacal substitute, who plots to use her students to launch a pet-grooming business in order to fund her retirement, and his evil sister, who’s determined to exact revenge on him for blowing her cover at the dinner table.

Things grow even more interesting when his worlds collide and Alexis and Ms. Cane join forces. This high-concept novel is laugh-out-loud funny and filled with collaged-in illustrations, screen shots and even a few rap lyrics, not only adding to the humor, but also breaking up the text in a way that may attract less-confident readers.

Jake Mathews’ “AWESOMENESS” is legit, and fans will be clamoring for more. (Fiction. 9-12)

TOAD WEATHER

Markle, Sandra Illus. by Gonzalez, Thomas Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-56145-818-9 At the end of a walk in the rain on a gloomy March evening, Ally and her grandmother find the surprise Mama promised: a street full of migrating toads that need their help.

Based on an actual annual occurrence in Philadelphia and other places around the world where toads have been cut off from their preferred egg-laying ponds by human roads, this appealing story celebrates a human–natural world connection. The first-person narration describes the spectacle of toad migration from a child’s point of view but includes adult dialogue that weaves in information neatly. Markle builds suspense nicely through Grandma’s reluctance to leave her warm, dry apartment and her lack of enthusiasm for the interesting sights offered by the rainy evening in the city: colorful umbrellas, water spouting from a manhole, an earthworm crawling across kirkus.com

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the sidewalk. Mama is enthusiastic about everything, and Grandma comes around when they reach the TOAD DETOUR sign. “Cool!” Ally exclaims. Grandma says, “You can say that again.” And all three join other volunteers carrying toads across the street to the ponds they seek. Gonzalez’s airbrushed pasteland–colored-pencil illustrations show close-ups of the family and shimmery, wet nighttime scenes. Ally’s polka-dot galoshes are a nice touch, helping readers find her in the dark.

A fine addition to the sense-of-wonder shelf. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

CHILI QUEEN Mi Historia

Martinello, Marian Texas Christian University Press (192 pp.) $22.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-87565-613-7 paper Selling chili on the plaza with her mother and sister at night, Lupe wonders why her family is barely getting by: The quality of their food rivals that of any competitor on the square, so why do other stands bring in crowds of customers while her family serves only a steady trickle?

Lupe has a natural entrepreneurial spirit. She learns to notice what people want and to offer it better than the competition. She takes risks and tries new ideas—some work, some flop. When she observes the other chili queens entertaining customers with stories, she does the same and excels. Twirling her exquisite rebozo for dramatic effect, she keeps customers captivated, returning each night for more stories and plates of food. Threaded through the growth of the business and the yarns that Lupe spins is the story of coming of age as a young Mexican-American woman in San Antonio in the 1880s. Lupe and her older sister, Josefa, both dip their toes into the waters of romance and find that love is fraught with consequences. Recipes for traditional Mexican dishes are interspersed throughout the book, as are superfluous replicas of historical documents and photographs—these serve to make the book look like an uncomfortable hybrid of fiction and nonfiction and detract from the story.

Martinello’s storytelling is compelling and will engage particularly voracious readers of historical fiction, but due to the essentially bland subject matter and the unfortunate design, it lacks broad appeal. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 14-17)

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A WORK OF ART

Maysonet, Melody Merit Press (240 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 18, 2015 978-1-4405-8254-7

When confronted with a devastating reality, one girl reaches deep into her own art to surround herself with both truth and beauty.

After Tera Waters’ father is arrested for possession of child pornography, the only thing she can focus on is helping him prove the whole thing a mistake. She uses the money that was meant to send her to a famous art school in Paris to pay a lawyer’s retainer, despite her mother’s conviction that her father is guilty. After getting a job waiting tables, she meets Joey, a cool-looking guy who works in the kitchen. When Joey asks her out, it seems like her luck might be changing, but she can’t shake the feeling that his motives might be less than honorable. With all the people in her life proving to be disappointments, she can trust only her own painting, but maybe even that won’t be enough. Maysonet’s debut novel places Tera’s inner monologue in sharp relief against the trauma of a dysfunctional relationship. Her prose is unflinching as it illuminates one girl’s traumatic experience with deeply felt compassion and brutal honesty, inviting readers into a very dark place that nonetheless has edges gilded with resilience and hope.

An important book about endings, beginnings and the choice to move on. (Fiction. 15-18)

MY WILDERNESS An Alaskan Adventure

McGehee, Claudia Illus. by McGehee, Claudia Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-57061-950-2

“When I was nine years old, I lived one winter on Fox Island, with my father, an old trapper named Olson, six blue fox, a family of angora goats, and Squirlie. This is what happened.”

So begins an imaginary memoir, based on the records of Rockwell Kent III and his artist father. Artwork reminiscent of Mary Azarian’s graces pages that begin with the son noting that his father wanted to go to Alaska to paint. “We pleaded with Mother until she said yes. Squirlie came too.” In September 1918, father, son and toy squirrel travel by train, steamship and rowboat to get to the remote island, where they renovate an old shed. Now the outdoor adventures begin. Three well-calculated pairs of suspenseful rectos followed by a harmless, concluding page turn keep readers riveted while meting out facts. As the boy heads down a trail, he hears noises that he knows could be a grizzly bear. The page turn reveals a beautiful black-inked portrait of a porcupine. The woodcuts capture the joys of playing in |

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the snow, the warmth of stories by lamplight, occasional loneliness and the hazards of a storm at sea. Readers may be forgiven for thinking that Rocky is a girl before they reach the author’s note, as he looks androgynous in the illustrations.

A taste of wilderness of yore to whet the appetites of future fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louise Erdrich and Kirkpatrick Hill. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

THE HAUNTING OF SUNSHINE GIRL

McKenzie, Paige; Sheinmel, Alyssa Weinstein Books (304 pp.) $16.00 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-60286-272-2 Series: Haunting of Sunshine Girl, 1 Paranormal activity threatens to consume the life of a not-so-average teenage girl.

In the wake of her 16th birthday, Sunshine and her mother move to the Pacific Northwest to start fresh. Spooky doings begin in the pair’s new house almost immediately, but only Sunshine is able to truly feel the spirit’s presence. With the help of her cute and artsy school chum, Nolan, Sunshine works to unravel the specter’s mysteries before it’s too late. In doing so, Sunshine discovers some things about her past that set her on a path she could never have imagined. The author’s adaptation of her popular YouTube series successfully translates the bumps and thrills fans will be looking for. The tone of the novel is neither grotesque horror nor cheap thrills but the sweet spot in between. It’s important for a horror novel to be equal parts scary and fun, and the author achieves an excellent balance here. The book’s final pages plant seeds for sequels, but if readers were to stop here, they would find themselves feeling quite satisfied, though further reading will be hard to resist. Sunshine’s adventure is filled with bumps in the night and shadowy figures, alluding to a larger mystery and larger world that has plenty to offer imaginative readers who grew up on Goosebumps and the like.

Suspenseful, exciting and endlessly entertaining. (Paranormal suspense. 12-16)

LITTLE SLEEPYHEAD

McPike, Elizabeth Illus. by Barton, Patrice Putnam (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-399-16240-4

After a full day, the very young appreciate a hushed yet lively bedtime book to prepare for the evening ritual.

Lilting rhymes and charming, soft-edged illustrations in muted tones depict a variety of happy multiethnic and intergenerational families in this gentle ode to sleepyheads everywhere.

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Adorable, rosy-cheeked crawlers and new walkers of both genders are shown having a jolly, busy and very tiring day with an array of significant others, including loving pets; each body part has become totally exhausted by the day’s many activities. The warm text is easy enough for parents, older siblings, grandparents and other caregivers to memorize and dramatize; indeed, the text practically demands it. Try holding still while reading “Tired little arms, stretching up so high, // Tired little hands, waving bye, bye, bye.” Acting out these lines and, additionally, “Tired little toes, wiggling one to ten,” for example, will promote language development and prove great fun for babies and young toddlers to mimic.

While the line “Tired little tummy, full of yum, yum, yum” sounds a tad twee, tiny listeners will love it and understand completely.

In the crowded field of bedtime books, this is a very sweet nighttime send-off for the littlest yawners. (Picture book. 9 mos.-2)

DRIVE ME CRAZY

McVoy, Terra Elan Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Apr. 28, 2015 978-0-06-232243-2 978-0-06-232245-6 e-book New cousins Lana and Cassie embark upon a road trip with their recently married grandparents and with very different attitudes.

Lana is excited to accompany her Grandpa Howe and his new wife on their honeymoon excursion and get a chance to befriend Cassie. However, Cassie would far prefer to stay home and foster her social connections with the ultracool Kendra.

Initially, Cassie rebuffs Lana’s eager overtures, going so far as to make rules for the trip governing their interactions. Still, there are moments when Cassie lets go of her superior attitude, and the girls begin to forge a connection. McVoy’s tale examines the nature of friendship. Alternating chapters give each girl’s perspective on the journey, delving into their personal struggles and revealing their vulnerabilities. Cassie’s increasing desperation as she attempts to maintain her social standing with Kendra’s clique highlights the pressure and intensity of middle school social issues. McVoy also thoughtfully explores the impact of a parent’s health problems on a child. With compassionate insight, she addresses Lana’s feelings of abandonment and anxiety as her parents attempt to shield her from her mother’s serious illness. When their trip culminates in a visit to the aptly named “End of the Road,” both girls discover the support and strength found in friendships.

A trek across the continent evolves into a journey of personal growth in this affecting book. (Fiction. 10-14)

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“Highly sophisticated concepts and art invite the long and close examination of older readers.” from my pen

DIARY OF A WAITRESS The Not-So-Glamorous Life of a Harvey Girl

Mullen’s smooth debut, written primarily in dialogue with very short chapters, often feels like a verse novel without the limitations of that form. His first-person narration is characterized by clipped, often incomplete sentences that capture his restlessness. Liam’s reluctance to take chances feels authentic, given his past, and the exploration of graffiti as serious art, with links to Picasso and Basquiat, intrigues.

A solid, interesting novel. (Fiction. 12-16)

Meyer, Carolyn Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (348 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-62091-652-0

Although more than a year too young for the position, almost-17-year-old Kitty takes a job as a Harvey Girl, one of the well-trained waitresses that staffed a national restaurant chain serving rail passengers from the late19th to mid-20th centuries.

Frustrated that her father no longer has the money to send her to college, budding journalist Kitty applies on a whim, defying family expectations, to become a Harvey Girl. She’s chosen along with outgoing flapper Cordelia, and after a month of rigorous training, they’re sent to work at the Harvey House in Belén, New Mexico. Kitty records her experiences in her diary, sometimes in too-extensive detail. In New Mexico, she slowly develops a romantic relationship with a railroad worker, Gus, and gets to know the Latino culture of the area. As her writing skills improve, she begins to sell articles—included in the text—to the local newspaper. Kitty does a good job of describing the personalities of her co-workers, and because she is so descriptive, the era—the late 1920s—is also neatly depicted.

This effort is most likely to appeal to readers who have enjoyed but outgrown the Dear America and American Girl series, but other readers may find the tale lacks sufficient tension to sustain interest through the extended narrative. A smattering of period photographs add flavor.

A slowly paced and occasionally even tedious depiction of a small slice of American railroad history. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

TAGGED

Mullen, Diane C. Charlesbridge (288 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-58089-583-5

MY PEN

Myers, Christopher Illus. by Myers, Christopher Disney-Hyperion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-4231-0371-4 A boy describes everything his pen can do, from the literal to the metaphorical.

A thoughtful boy wearing a fedora opens with a pensive, poetic assertion. “There are rich people who own jewels and houses and pieces of the sky,” there are people who are famous worldwide, and sometimes he feels small in comparison— “[b]ut then I remember I have my pen.” This extraordinary nib pen hides an elephant in a teacup and X-rays the boy’s chest, revealing a butterfly with a pen body. It has tender abilities (“My pen makes giants of old men / who have seen better days”) and cryptic qualities (“My pen is smart as a snowflake”). Myers uses nib pen for his excellently skilled, shaded and detailed drawings in black ink on white background. The boy’s pen “draws [him] a new face every morning,” shown only partially finished.

When text says the pen “wears satellite sneakers” or “tap-dances on the sky,” illustrations show the boy doing so; when the pen “worries about all the wars in the world,” the boy shelters from tanks and warplanes. This pen is the boy’s tool but also his heart, self and strength, and maybe it’s not so unusual: “There are a million pens in the world / and each one has a million worlds inside it.” Highly sophisticated concepts and art invite the long and close examination of older readers.

Poignant, vulnerable, wise. (Picture book. 7-12)

A 14-year-old graffiti artist spends a summer away from his inner-city home.

Fearful that Liam will follow his older brother into gang-influenced crime, his mother sends him from Minneapolis to a small resort town in Michigan to spend the summer with her artist friend, Kat. Liam’s had a rough year, having been kicked out of the private school where he’d won a scholarship and threatened with a gun for painting graffiti over a gang sign. At first Liam dislikes Lakeshore; he even vandalizes the town beach house in a cross between artistic expression and boredom. Gradually, with Kat’s help, he begins to see himself as a serious artist. Kat invites him to stay, but he knows that at home, his younger brother is befriending gang members. |

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IF YOU PLANT A SEED

Nelson, Kadir Illus. by Nelson, Kadir Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-229889-8 Nelson spins a gardening metaphor about kindness.

“If you plant a tomato seed, a carrot seed, and a cabbage seed,” that’s what will grow. A rabbit and a mouse garden together and delight in their harvest—but a mourning dove, crow, blue jay, cardinal and sparrow come begging. “If you plant a seed of selfishness”—here Nelson depicts the gardeners refusing to share—“it will grow, and grow, and grow // into a heap |

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“This updated version includes new illustrations by the commercially successful Cornell, which supply humor and avoid lesbian stereotypes that dogged earlier versions.” from heather has two mommies

of trouble.” A monumental food fight leaves all the combatants splattered with tomato. Amid the debris, the mouse offers possibly the last intact fruit—and the birds respond with an airlift of seeds that sprout into an astonishing garden, proving that “the fruits of kindness // ...are very, very sweet.” To this spare, fablelike text Nelson pairs stunningly cinematic oils, modulating palette and perspective to astonishing effect. The tomatoes gleam red against blue sky and green leaves, and it’s easy to see why the circling birds descend in hopes of a meal. Wordless spreads convey drama and humor; a double-page close-up of all five birds depicted from the front, each head a-tilt and silhouetted against blue sky, is hysterical. The animals are slightly anthropomorphized; they read books but wear no clothes, communicating joy, dejection, anger and contentment in every bone.

Though the message is as old as time, its delivery here is fresh and sweet as August corn. (Picture book. 4-8)

HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES

Newman, Lesléa Illus. by Cornell, Laura Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-6631-6

Heather has two mommies—and a new look!

Newman’s picture book about Heather and her mommies first appeared 25 years ago as the product of desktop publishing and a determination to create a story reflecting family diversity.

This updated version includes new illustrations by the commercially successful Cornell, which supply humor and avoid lesbian stereotypes that dogged earlier versions. In keeping with prior, small-press revisions, the updated text omits reference to alternative insemination, and the story resists focusing on angst Heather feels over having two mommies. No one teases her or otherwise makes a big deal of her particular family’s configuration. Instead, validation is the order of the day, and when a circle-time conversation about families arises on the first day of school, Heather’s teacher has her pupils draw family pictures.

Although Heather is initially worried that she might be the only child without a daddy, the artwork reveals diverse family constellations—one child has two daddies, one has a mom, a dad and a stepfather, some have siblings, one depicts a grandmother and pets. “Each family is special,” Ms. Molly affirms. “The most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other.” When Heather’s mommies pick her up at school, they delight in seeing her picture.

Welcome back to Heather and her mommies. (Picture book. 3-6)

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UNCLE ELI’S WEDDING

Newman, Tracy Illus. by Sernur, Isik Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-8293-0

A young nephew must relinquish some of his valued soccer practice time to attend his favorite uncle’s wedding

and is rewarded.

Chafing at being stuck at the wedding instead of doing soccer drills, Daniel expresses his discontent while kicking a ball across the lawn before the day’s festivities begin. The boy is willing to be a part of the day’s event yet is concerned that marriage may change the way Uncle Eli spends time with him. Hoping to get his uncle’s attention (and unfamiliar with the many rituals involved in a Jewish wedding), Daniel offers to help by signing the marriage contract known as a ketubah or by holding one of the chuppah poles of the wedding canopy only to be rebuffed.

Finally, the much-anticipated promise of a special role is fulfilled when Eli requires some help with the traditional breaking of glass at the end of the nuptials. Daniel duly complies with some extra-strong foot stomping. Thin-lined watercolor caricatures in a muted palette present a droll though somewhat unflattering atmosphere for this Judaic setting. Daniel’s two grandmothers, Bubbe Tillie and Bubbe Millie, make up a rather grating Greek chorus with their singsong, rhyming commentary: “A simcha! So sweet”; “Such nachas! Let’s eat!”

An author’s note and glossary of key Jewish wedding vocabulary round out this saccharine introductory story for youngsters attending their first ceremony. (Picture book.

5-8)

LIZZIE AND THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

Noble, Trinka Hakes Illus. by McLeod, Kris Aro Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-58536-895-2

A girl’s love for school is more than evident in this latest from Noble.

Lizzie loved everything about school in preschool and kindergarten, from the smell of the books to her school supplies. She even spent all summer playing school with her baby sister, Lulu. Now it’s her “first year of school.” She can’t wait for a whole year of school! The seasons turn, and Lizzie’s class does all sorts of things: read books, move to music, plant a garden. Lizzie shares each thing with Lulu. But then comes the day when books are collected, field-day events take place, and desks are cleaned out. Lizzie feels cheated of several months of school.

But she’s not the only one—her first-year teacher is just as sad.

Luckily, though, Miss G.’s picked to teach summer school, and Lizzie joins her to make and fly kites, take nature walks, visit a kirkus.com

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local farm and take swimming lessons. While summer school here sounds more like camp, Noble clearly gets across Lizzie’s love of school. McLeod’s round-headed, rosy-cheeked characters share their every emotion, especially Lizzie and Miss G. on the final day.

Many may get the wrong impression about summer school from this offering, but here’s hoping Lizzie’s joy in school is infectious. (Picture book. 5- 7)

is looking for something that isn’t phony, but while the story more or less achieves its goal of evoking a modern-day, English The Catcher in the Rye, it’s still not very engaging. Only Michael and Charlie are likely to engage readers’ sympathies, while Tori’s unpleasantness makes it hard to see why Michael and Lucas are so fixated on her.

Still, Oseman’s novel will be popular with those who worship Holden. (Fiction. 14-18)

BABY PARTY

BUTTERFLY COUNTING

O’Connell, Rebecca Illus. by Poole, Susie Whitman (32 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-0512-0 A party of rosy-cheeked, bigheaded, ethnically diverse babies encourages baby readers to clap and identify shapes.

A group of mothers and a token dad gather their babies for a party with triangle hats, square gifts, rectangular blocks, oval balloons and a star-shaped toy to share. The tots play, sing, smooch, smile and eat healthy snacks before their parents gather them up for the walk or stroll home, most asleep before leaving the white-picket-fenced yard. Unlike virtually every real-life party with this age group, there’s nary a tear nor a sad face in sight. Indeed, the babies’ faces are rather static and all show basically the same cheery expression, though that doesn’t detract from their cuteness. Bold patterns and bright colors will attract and hold young ones’ attention, and the clapping won’t hurt, either: “Clap for the baby holding an oval.”

Light but sweet. (Picture book. 1-3)

SOLITAIRE

Oseman, Alice HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 30, 2015 978-0-06-233568-5 978-0-06-233570-8 e-book This debut novel evokes a classic to present a girl searching for something true.

Tori Spring is a disaffected teenager: She can almost never finish a film in one sitting, she’s smart but can’t care about school anymore, and she dislikes her friends but is unwilling to forgo their company. About the only thing she cares about is her brother Charlie, who’s recovering from an eating disorder.

When a mysterious blog called Solitaire starts triggering pranks at her school, Tori isn’t too interested, even if strange new boy Michael Holden tries to make her be. Tori’s too trapped in her head, too convinced the whole world sucks, to care about Michael’s overtures of friendship or the arrival at her school of an old friend, Lucas. But when Solitaire’s pranks cross lines and people start getting hurt, Tori will be forced to discover if the world has anything good in it. Like Holden Caulfield, Tori |

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Pallotta, Jerry Illus. by Bersani, Shennen Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-57091-414-0 978-1-57091-415-7 paper An unusual butterfly book introduces facts about the insects, portrays 24 different species, gives the word for “butterfly” in 27 languages other than English, and counts up from zero to 25.

While the numeration provides the organization, this is far more than a counting book. Beginning with the fact that there are no butterflies in Antarctica, the author goes on to surprise readers with a spread of 20 colorful moths, highlighting the confusing similarities between the two species, although not explaining their actual differences. Then the proper count begins, with each page presenting a different species, an interesting fact and a word for “butterfly” in another language, including Mandarin, Finnish, Navajo, Tagalog and sign. From one to 10, each species is also a different solid color; Nos. 11 through 19 are multicolored, and the 20th shows eggs. Then there’s a surprise: 21 different caterpillars. To finish, there are chrysalises and more butterflies. The counting, particularly in the larger groups, takes enough effort to make this interesting to the likely audience. The facts feel arbitrarily presented but they are accurate, and the illustrations, done with colored pencil and digitally manipulated, are colorful and true-to-life. Sadly, there’s no index.

This welcome reworking of the author’s earlier Butterfly Counting Book (1998) and board book Butterfly Colors and Counting (2013) offers learning opportunities galore. (Informational picture book. 4-7)

P. ZONKA LAYS AN EGG

Paschkis, Julie Illus. by Paschkis, Julie Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-56145-819-6

Hen P. Zonka annoys the other chickens in the yard: Instead of laying eggs, she spends her time carefully observing, and marveling at, the natural world around her. |

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At the start, readers learn the egg-laying habits of hens Maud, Dora and Nadine. Only Gloria is exempt from egg-laying expectations, “because he turned out to be a rooster. It was his job and he did it well.” When the other hens press P. Zonka to explain why she won’t lay an egg, a particularly vibrant doublepage spread illustrates her poetic list of reasons: “I will tell you why,” it opens, ending with, “the orange cat with one blue eye, the shining center of a dandelion, the sky at midnight.” Unconvinced, her feathered cohorts pressure P. Zonka to at least try to lay an egg, and she finally does—with a result that surprises and delights everyone. Every page turn reveals a stunning new composition of fowls with personality, baskets of eggs and floral design elements evocative of...of course...the beautiful folk art found on a Ukrainian decorated egg, also known as a pysanka.

Even those who do not appreciate the play on words are sure to enjoy this tale of the dividends of daydreaming, beautifully enhanced by colors and designs that shout “Spring!” to a winterweary world.

Charming, unusual and sure to induce smiles. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3- 7)

COMPLETELY CLEMENTINE

Pennypacker, Sara Illus. by Frazee, Marla Disney-Hyperion (192 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4231-2358-3 Series: Clementine, 7

Antic third-grader Clementine faces her biggest challenge yet: looming change.

It’s the last week of school before summer, and everyone is excited except for Clementine, who definitely does not feel ready for fourth grade. Whenever her beloved Mr. D’Matz tries to talk about it, Clementine avoids the subject. Fortunately, she’s got a few things to keep her occupied. Classmates Maria and Rasheed are planning their wedding, and Clementine is deeply involved, acting as proxy wedding planner since her bossy upstairs neighbor, Margaret, is an expert. Her mother is expecting a new baby, “nesting” in ever more comical fashion, and Clementine is working hard on a good name for the tyke. Perhaps hardest of all, vegetarian Clementine is subjecting her father to the silent treatment, since he will not give up meat. While it’s gratifying to see how much Clementine has grown—much as Clementine might herself suspect she hasn’t—this outing doesn’t pack the punch of previous books. The wedding subplot in particular feels superfluous, and both Clementine’s apprehension about change and her insistence on the moral high ground feel deserving of center stage.

Still, her ebullience will likely carry readers past this to the valuable understanding that change will come and sometimes the best you can hope for is a compromise.

Though looser in weave than previous appearances, still this provides the emotional honesty readers have come to expect. (Fiction. 6-10)

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RODEO RED

Perkins, Maripat Illus. by Idle, Molly Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-56145-816-5 Old West lingo gives voice to the old story of sibling rivalry sparked by a new baby.

Rodeo Red is a child who loves all things cowgirl, especially her hound dog, Rusty, who’s depicted as a floppy-eared stuffed toy. When a baby brother, called Slim, enters the scene, she smells trouble even though her parents—“the Sherriff and her Deputy”—seem “smitten.” Red is frustrated when her brother interferes with her things, especially when Rusty goes missing and she finds him held in the sleeping Slim’s grip. Although necessary for plot progression, it seems a poor parenting move when the Sherriff and Deputy let Slim keep Rusty and punish Red for trying to retrieve him. A more understanding adult, Aunt Sal, mails a plush cat as a replacement, and Red sees an opportunity to pull a switcheroo and successfully retrieves Rusty. Happily reunited with her trusty toy, the closing picture shows Red astride a rocking horse, her beloved dog clutched by her side, and free of interest in bonding with her brother. Idle’s background in animation is apparent in her deft handling of the story, and such details as Red’s lassoing Slim when she tries to get Rusty and the use of the bars of the back of a chair to depict “the holding cell” (a timeout chair) make the text more believable with regard to the parents.

Giddy-up, big sisters! (Picture book. 3-6)

TIGER BOY

Perkins, Mitali Illus. by Hogan, Jamie Charlesbridge (144 pp.) $14.95 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-58089-660-3 When a Bengali boy finds and saves a tiger cub from a man who wants to sell her on the black market, he realizes that the schoolwork he resents could lead to a career protecting his beloved Sunder-

bans island home.

When the not-yet-weaned cub escapes from a nearby reserve, Neel and many of his neighbors join the search. But some are in the pay of greedy Gupta, a shady entrepreneur who’s recently settled in their community. Even Neel’s father is tempted by Gupta’s money, although he knows that Gupta doesn’t plan to take the cub back to the refuge. Neel and his sister use the boy’s extensive knowledge of the island’s swampy interior to find the cub’s hiding place and lure it out so it can be returned to its mother. The Kolkota-born author visited the remote Sunderbans in the course of her research. kirkus.com

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“…Plain’s writing—drawing largely on Audubon’s own— is lively and colorful, perfect for describing the swamps, forest, rivers and prairies Audubon so loved.” from this strange wilderness

She lovingly depicts this beautiful tropical forest in the context of Neel’s efforts to find the cub and his reluctance to leave his familiar world. While the conflicts resolve a bit too easily, the sense of place is strong and the tiger cub’s rescue very satisfying. Pastel illustrations will help readers envision the story.

A multicultural title with obvious appeal for animalloving middle graders. (author’s note, organizations, glossary) (Fiction. 8-11)

MILAYNA

Pickett, Michelle K. Clean Teen (287 pp.) $10.95 paper | Mar. 17, 2015 978-1-63422-038-5 Series: Milayna, 1 Yet another half-angel book, this one focuses more on physical combat than on supernatural warfare.

Milayna, 17, has just learned that she’s a demiangel, and she’s angry at her family for keeping the secret from her. Even her best friend already knows all about it. That’s fortunate, because until Milayna turns 18, she will be vulnerable to the demon Azazel, who will try to absorb her powers and conquer the world. Demidemons, many of which populate her high school, threaten her. A goodly number of demiangels also go to her school, and these unite to protect Milayna. Chay, a demiangel with supermodel looks, takes charge of Milayna’s defense and provides romantic heat.

Despite the constant mortal danger, Milayna continues going to school and to the mall. To protect her, the team accompanies Milayna everywhere, except when they don’t. Milayna knows taekwondo, and the frequent fight scenes all rely on punches and kicks rather than paranormal abilities. Suspense builds when Milayna’s allies begin to switch sides. Sadly, the childishly angry Milayna doesn’t come across as an attractive character. Pickett does add some comic relief with the hobgoblins that tease Milayna throughout the book, but the arbitrary, unimaginative plotline and the writing style remain resolutely at amateur levels, with, for example, frequent use of one-word sentences to indicate emphasis.

At least it has hobgoblins. (Paranormal suspense. 12-18)

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THIS STRANGE WILDERNESS The Life and Art of John James Audubon Plain, Nancy Univ. of Nebraska (136 pp.) $19.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8032-4884-7

John James Audubon’s 1838 masterpiece, The Birds of America, “marked the beginning of modern ornithology,” and this volume dramatizes the life and times of the man who devoted his life to creating it.

Audubon’s life was a high-risk adventure story set in the early days of the United States, when Lewis and Clark had completed their explorations, settlers were beginning to head west, and the Trail of Tears—witnessed by Audubon—was an American tragedy. Audubon suffered the deaths of two baby girls and business failures, and he put his marriage at risk to do what he loved more than anything—tramp across the country and paint birds. In an age before photography, he created detailed, lifelike paintings of 489 species of birds, each bird looking real enough “to hop off the page and fly away.” The beautifully designed volume includes many reproductions of Audubon’s paintings, from the owls on the cover to the many full-page, full-color interior illustrations. Though occasionally florid, Plain’s writing—drawing largely on Audubon’s own—is lively and colorful, perfect for describing the swamps, forest, rivers and prairies Audubon so loved. Like Audubon’s paintings, this volume “glow[s] with life.”

A superb introduction to the life and times of a great American artist and naturalist. (appendix, glossary, source notes, bibliography, illustration credits, index) (Biography.

9-14)

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BAH! SAID THE BABY

Plecas, Jennifer Illus. by Plecas, Jennifer Philomel (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-399-16606-8

A baby’s first word sends mother, brother and sister rushing around to fig-

ure out what it means.

Baby, hands up high, triumphantly says, “Bah!” for the very first time. But nobody knows what Baby wants. Mom offers a possible solution: “What is it, Baby? Book? Do you want my book, Baby?” Brother hastens to add, “Ball!...I think Baby wants the ball!” Sister thinks Baby wants her bow. But as each family member expectantly holds out his or her item, Baby just looks puzzled. Then Baby says it again. “Bah!” The family offers another round of possibilities: bunny? Brother? A lamb that says, “baa?” In a particularly brilliant spread that must capture how babies feel all the time, shadows of family members loom, while the poor baby is simply baffled. Why can’t they understand? The family keeps guessing—there are many common |

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“Primitive, fantastical, surreal watercolor-and- ink illustrations that are reminiscent of Chagall visually contrast the older sister’s highly imaginative suggestions with her little sister’s persnickety perspective.” from tell me what to dream about

TELL ME WHAT TO DREAM ABOUT

baby items that start with the letter “b”—until Baby finally says, “Bah-bah!” With visual context clues—Baby’s arms are always outstretched, and someone is always in the doorway—careful readers just might realize what Baby is really trying to say.

A nifty romp that doubles as a guessing game (with some phonics tied in), this has appeal for large read-aloud crowds as well as siblings who seek a lighter new-baby tale.

(Picture book. 3-6)

WHERE IS RUSTY?

Posthuma, Sieb Illus. by Posthuma, Sieb Translated by Nagelkerke, Bill Gecko Press (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-927271-45-2 In a city populated entirely by dogs of all breeds—pups are in collars, but all adult dogs are in human clothes—one youngster who must have some beagle in him has an adventure when he wanders away from his mother and his two friends at a department store.

The whimsical, cartoonish dogs bustle around one another against a detailed urban environment rendered in ink and colorful watercolor. It’s an enjoyable romp, with simple, well-paced text. Before Rusty’s group of canines enters the department store—adorned with plaster bone-and-heart motifs over the doors—Mother reminds her charges of a safety rule. “ ‘It’s very busy inside,’ she says. ‘So what do we do?’ ‘We all stay together!’ chant Rusty, Henrietta, and Toby.” Rusty’s nose, however, soon lures him to the fourth floor, where a lady dog in an apron is demonstrating a dog-biscuit machine for “picky guests and hungry pups.” Rusty realizes he is lost at the same time that he overhears two watchdogs, with fierce-looking uniforms and menacing equipment, discussing their plan to catch stray pups and literally impound them. After fleeing through a marvelous labyrinth of ventilation pipes, Rusty hides in various departments—in plain view to astute readers—until a salesperson observes, “I’m sure we don’t have a lamp in our collection with hairy feet.”

The skillful blend of human and canine characteristics in this romp will make for many a chuckle. (Picture book. 3- 7)

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Potter, Giselle Illus. by Potter, Giselle Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-385-37423-1 978-0-385-37424-8 PLB When a little girl asks her older sister to tell her what to dream about, the big sister’s creative suggestions seem to fall on deaf ears.

Begging her big sister to help her fall asleep, a little girl proceeds to criticize and reject every dream idea the patient older sister offers. Dream about having waffles for breakfast? No way. How about dreaming about “teeny-tiny waffles with teenytiny animals?” Absolutely no little animals crawling on waffles.

Dream she’s a giant with pockets full of “cute, furry pets” singing in “funny squeaky voices”? No furry pets singing in pockets. Nonplussed, the big sister suggests dreaming about living in a “furry world” or in a fluffy cloud world or in a treehouse town or in a tiny moss house under a tree, describing the joys of each. More rejects. Eventually, the older sister’s worn out, and they come full circle. Primitive, fantastical, surreal watercolorand-ink illustrations that are reminiscent of Chagall visually contrast the older sister’s highly imaginative suggestions with her little sister’s persnickety perspective. While the pajamaclad sisters in adjacent beds appear in dim, nighttime blues, the dream images explode in boisterous color above their heads or onto double-page spreads, transporting readers from one fanciful scenario to the next.

Playful bedtime treat for wee ones. (Picture book. 3- 7)

FINDING PARIS

Preble, Joy Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-06-232130-5 978-0-06-232132-9 e-book Paranormal author Preble (The A-Word, 2014, etc.) crosses over to straight teen fiction with this drama wrapped in a mystery.

Studious Leo and artistic older sister Paris live in Las Vegas with their mother and stepfather (“Tommy Davis, who shouldn’t be anybody’s idea of permanent, only our mother married him anyway”). Leo studies for the SAT and dreams of her escape; “eventually I will be something...maybe even a surgeon. Surgeons don’t hesitate once they’ve decided what they need to do.” For now, the sisters watch out for each other—at least they do until Paris sets Leo up with Max and then drops out of sight, leaving behind a scavenger hunt of worrisome clues that draws Leo and Max together. A road trip (complete with analysis of the metaphorical content of country songs and the sharing of life-altering secrets) ensues as messages from Paris increase in urgency. With her lodestar AWOL, Leo kirkus.com

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is forced to consider whom to trust and who is really protecting whom. Adults are somewhat clichéd (waitress-with-a-heart-ofgold, creepy stepdad, distracted mom), but the teens have character and complexity to spare. Leo’s heart may pound, hop, race, skip, skitter and thud, but her straight-A, Stanford-bound personality has depth, and the more mercurial—and mostly absent— Paris remains engaging and believable.

Fast-paced with intriguing teen characters, a budding relationship and a bit of mystery—curiosity will keep those pages turning. (Fiction. 13-17)

ENCHANTMENT LAKE

Preus, Margi Univ. of Minnesota (200 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 15, 2015 978-0-8166-8302-4 Series: Northwoods Mystery, 1 Preus, author of the Newbery Honor– winning Heart of a Samurai (2010), is known for her engrossing historical fiction. Now she changes pace and offers a mystery set in the present.

Francie, 17 and fresh off a television gig in which she played a teen detective, is frantically called back to her lakeside childhood vacation home in northern Minnesota. Her two greataunts, flaky but endearing, who own the isolated cottage, believe someone is murdering their neighbors in an effort to gain access to a large tract of real estate. They’ve represented Francie as a real New York detective, a lie the townspeople somewhat implausibly buy into, and she begins a halfhearted investigation. Effectively combining some mildly scary treks through the dark woods, a growing sense of peril and a dash of romance in the form of handsome Nels, this mystery will keep readers engaged even though it lacks the punch of previous works. The body count is high, but the actual deaths aren’t depicted, minimizing their potential menace. When the truly malevolent surprise perpetrator is finally revealed from among a group of red herrings, the threat is swiftly eliminated; a minor mystery remains unsolved, suggesting the potential focus of the sequel.

Francie may not be a real detective, but she is so confident that there’s never really any doubt of her eventual success, making her good company but perhaps not riveting reading for hard-core mystery fans. (Mystery. 11-16)

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OCTOPUSES! Strange and Wonderful

Pringle, Laurence Illus. by Henderson, Meryl Boyds Mills (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-59078-928-5 Series: Strange and Wonderful

A veteran science writer introduces the most intelligent invertebrate of all, the octopus, master of camouflage.

These shape-changing, ink-squirting, ocean-dwelling cephalopods are “strange and wonderful” in many ways. Their lives are short, culminating in a one-time mating after which neither adult will eat, though the female stays alive to guard her eggs.

In captivity, they reveal particular personalities and surprising intelligence. The author covers the basics of size and shape, habitat, feeding, relations with humans, survival mechanisms and reproduction in a smooth narrative that flows from page to page, carrying readers along. Like most titles in the Strange and Wonderful series, this inviting introduction is graced with Henderson’s detailed and accurate watercolor illustrations. A spread describing octopus relatives reinforces the distance among their connections, showing a variety of hard-shelled mollusks on the left-hand page and the octopuses’ closest kin—the nautiluses, cuttlefish and squids—on the right. Another double-page spread asks readers to find six octopuses camouflaged in various ways on a reefscape. (Answers are in back.) Even the octopus on the back cover is not obvious at first look. A glossary, index and suggestions for further reading and Web research conclude this stellar example of nonfiction for middle-grade readers.

Pringle inks another winner in a long series of engaging, informative invitations to explore the natural world.

(Informational picture book. 5-10)

IN THE NEW WORLD A Family in Two Centuries Raidt, Gerda Illus. by Holtei, Christa Translated by Woofter, Suzi Charlesbridge (40 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-58089-630-6

This import offers a straightforward account of the reasons why a German family immigrates to America and how they fare initially, along with a brief look at the lives of their descendants.

Raidt’s conversational text begins with a brisk summary of the economic situation in Germany in the 1850s. This explains why the Peterses choose to leave behind family, farm and friends in 1869 in search of a new life in the United States.

Blocks of text are accompanied by Holtei’s delicately lined and colored illustrations; they are not etchings, but they recall Arthur Geisert in perspective and detail. These vignettes and double-page spreads add detail and assist in imparting information while also bringing characters and setting to life. |

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Together, words and pictures outline the family’s journey in the steerage section, their trip overland to Nebraska and their subsequent prosperity. Skipping several generations, their contemporary descendants are introduced in the final fourth of the book. Motivated by a school project, they reverse the trip and return to Germany to seek out the house from which their ancestors emigrated. Children are part of both families, and the present-day Peterses are a multiethnic family, both elements adding interest and appeal.

While social studies teachers and/or those of German heritage seem likely to be the most enthusiastic audience, the narrative style, informal tone and attractive artwork broaden it significantly. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

A TALE OF TWO BEASTS

Roberton, Fiona Illus. by Roberton, Fiona Kane/Miller (32 pp.) $12.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-61067-361-7

What really happened in the woods?

Roberton tells her story in two parts.

Part 1: A little girl, in a jaunty red beret and matching sweater, is walking home from Grandma’s house when she spots a strange little creature hanging upside down from a tree branch. (It’s a furry critter with a striped tail. A raccoon? A ring-tailed lemur?)

She wraps him in a green scarf, names him Fang and takes him home. Though she gives him a bath, a cute outfit like hers, a bowl of nuts and a little house made from a cardboard box, he doesn’t look very happy. When she opens a window to get some cool air, her strange creature rips off his new clothes and runs to freedom in the dark woods. But late one night, he appears in her bedroom window, and they frolic in the woods. Part 2 of the book tells the scary story of an innocent little critter who’s minding his own business when he’s ambushed by a “terrible beast”—a little girl in a jaunty red beret and matching sweater.

And readers know the rest. Roberton’s premise is as sublime as it is simple, with a subtle message. Brilliantly, the illustrations vary just slightly from one version of the story to the next; it’s their juxtaposition with the radically different textual perspective that generates the laughs.

Totally delightful. (Picture book. 3- 7)

FIRST THERE WAS FOREVER

Romano, Juliana Dial (389 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-8037-4168-3

The best of friends chart new territory during their sophomore year.

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virginity to an anonymous beach bum over summer break, she’s got nothing on her mind but school hottie Nate and hanging with the cool kids. Lima finds herself increasingly left behind, hanging with the so-called “dangerous” crowd to fill Hailey’s absence. Complications grow even larger once it’s made clear Nate’s got a thing for Lima and couldn’t care less for Hailey.

Some of the drama may be contrived, but the novel’s heart is in the right place: beating hard and fast as the author examines the implosion of a long-term friendship. The emotional jump from middle school to high school is handled expertly here, creating a strong platonic love story between the two girls. Less interesting are some of the tertiary characters: The cool kids and alternative kids are both drawn pretty thinly, but that’s almost beside the point. The two groups are used as provocative bits of narrative tissue, needling both of the protagonists and eliciting emotional, intellectual and sexual awakenings. By novel’s end, both young teens are closer to the women they will eventually become. Whether or not their friendship endures is up to readers to decide.

An emotionally rich coming-of-age love story. (Fiction.

14-16)

THE BUS IS FOR US

Rosen, Michael Illus. by Tyler, Gillian Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-0-7636-6983-6

There are so many ways to ride; some are flights of imagination.

Various young children express their travel preferences in easy, rhyming text, beginning with “I really like / to ride my bike.” A teddy bear is safely lashed to the back of the bike, and a red balloon trails behind. Other choices include a horse, a little boat, a big ship and an even bigger fish. Of course, that one’s just a dream: “Sometimes I wish / I could ride on a fish.” There’s also a car, a train, a sleigh and a balloon to the moon. Maybe the strangest of all is the big polar bear, which a smiling little girl rides “for a dare.” As diverse as these forms of transportation are, the children are even more so, first depicted standing in a line on the title page spread. An Asian girl licks a big puff of cotton candy; similarly dressed Caucasian siblings hold hands; a black girl holds her dog’s leash. Each of the children appears in the transportation scenarios within. As the title indicates, the best ride of all is the bus, which adds passengers between the other descriptions of rides. The reason is clear: Everyone can ride together. Rosen’s rhyming text has a relaxed, unforced feel, and his story is a nice mix of the practical and the fanciful.

Tyler’s warm watercolors add a dreamy layer of imagination to the story.

A lovely treatment of a perennially popular topic. (Picture book. 2-5)

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“Colors are matte, depending for their effectiveness on contrast and the judicious use of Day-Glo pink—an artistic choice that works with the striking compositions to create some images that reach abstraction....” from beautiful birds

RITA’S RHINO

Ross, Tony Illus. by Ross, Tony Andersen Press USA (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-6315-8 Both Rita and her new pet rhinoceros—an escapee from the local zoo— learn that it’s not so easy for a rhino to

be a city girl’s pet.

Rita is rightfully annoyed when she requests a pet and Mom and Uncle Eric offer her, respectively, a flea and a tadpole. Off she goes to the zoo, where the rhino gratefully squeezes through his bars when he learns that Rita’s apartment is waterproof. The wry humor continues as tiny Rita leads away the rhino without concern of discovery, as she has tossed her hat and coat over his voluminous mass. The artwork of David Small and Quentin Blake come to mind, as droll characters play out absurd situations against lively backdrops. There is no doubt that the “rhino poop” problem will elicit giggles. Perhaps the funniest scene occurs when Rita leaves the rhino outside her school, “horn stuck firmly in the ground to stop him rolling over.” When asked, “Is that a rhinoceros?” she tells her nearsighted teacher, “That’s my bouncy castle.” Then again, it’s equally funny to see the reactions of her classmates—and the rhino—to that statement. The ending, like the rest of the story, is gentle, satisfying and, of course, funny.

Children’s bookshelves can always use another picture book that combines a clever, well-meaning child with an animal hero and hilarious artwork. (Picture book. 3-8)

BEAUTIFUL BIRDS

Roussen, Jean Illus. by Walker, Emmanuelle Flying Eye Books (56 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-909263-29-1 An alphabetical album of birds flies in from the U.K. From albatross to “zos-ter-o-pi-dae,” the images in this slightly oversized import consistently stun with their composition and use of color. A squadron of the aforementioned albatrosses glides serenely across the page, wings outstretched at a 45-degree angle to the page edges; in between the birds, slightly smaller jets leave perfectly horizontal contrails across a pearly gray sky.

On the verso of one double-page spread, a Canada goose leads a brood of gray goslings in a semicircle against a snowy backdrop; across the gutter, a domestic white goose leads squawking yellow goslings in a mirroring pattern across a sandy barnyard. A lark perches on an old-fashioned radio microphone and sings serenely in the spotlight, framed by diagonal curtains of black.

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works with the striking compositions to create some images that reach abstraction, as in a layered congregation of cockatoo crests. The slight couplets are significantly less distinguished, often struggling for both rhyme and scansion, but they are easy to overlook as readers’ eyes glide over the luscious pages. The image of a nightingale, framed in an open, circular window beneath a crescent moon, is alone worth the purchase price.

With pages that beg to be sliced out and framed, a positive feast for the eyes. (Picture book. 3-8)

DENTON LITTLE’S DEATHDATE

Rubin, Lance Knopf (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-553-49696-3 978-0-553-49698-7 e-book 978-0-553-49697-0 PLB

A young man lives out his last hours in this comedic novel set at a time in the near future in which people grow up knowing when they will die.

When 17-year-old Denton wakes up with a hangover in the bed of his best friend’s sister with only some groggy memories of what happened the night before, he’s horrified that it seems he may have cheated on his girlfriend. Adding urgency to the whole situation is that, due to information gleaned from an improbable quasi-scientific formula, he knows he is just a day away from the date that will be his last. The details surrounding what seems to be a covert tug of war between entities involved in Denton’s projected death are vague, remaining so even as the 300-plus–page story concludes, which is sure to frustrate some readers. Yet the novel features warmly real characters. Denton’s funny, self-effacing genuineness will keep readers rooting for him. Vivid secondary characters include his goofy, pot-smoking best friend, Paolo, who helpfully urges Denton to “own that shit” in regard to following his heart as well as his quirky, loving family; even the brief snapshots provided of Denton’s schoolmates are believable and engaging.

The planned companion novel might provide some of the answers missing here, and those who have been charmed by the winsome characters will look forward to it. (Fiction. 14-18)

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“Schneider’s deadpan delivery, combined with his ability to populate a world of realistically rendered animals in fanciful settings or situations, is a comedic win.” from everybody sleeps (but not fred)

BONE GAP

gender expectations: Archie has blue-and-white striped jammies, and Olive wears a pink romper. The clever ending adds a humorous surprise.

Well-done new sibling books are always welcome, and this one is as cozy as being swaddled. (Picture book.2-4)

Ruby, Laura Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-06-231760-5 978-0-06-231763-6 e-book A teenage boy wrestles against forces real and imagined in a small, rural town named Bone Gap. Finn was the only one to witness the kidnapping of brother Sean’s beautiful girlfriend, Roza, at the spring festival. But when he looks at mug shots, all the faces look frustratingly similar. Meanwhile, a tall man with eyes like ice who demands her love traps Roza in an ever changing netherworld. But Roza is determined to find her way back to Sean and Finn’s backyard, no matter what the cost. Told from the viewpoints of multiple Bone Gap citizens, this inventive modern fable whimsically combines elements of folklore, mythology, romance and feminism. Finn starts out as a daydreaming cipher, but when he discovers he has a condition called “face blindness,” his vague character comes into sharp focus, and his mission to battle the tall man becomes clear. Both Roza and Finn’s love interest, Priscilla, develop over the course of the magically real journey into strong women to be reckoned with, while the secondary characters, including a sassy beekeeper, wise chicken farmer and self-aware horse, are charming and memorable. And if the transitions between reality and fantasy are a little rocky and the worldbuilding occasionally a little thin, it can be forgiven due to the sheer ambition of the refreshingly original plot.

Cleverly conceived and lusciously written. (Fantasy. 13 & up)

OLIVE MARSHMALLOW

EVERYBODY SLEEPS (BUT NOT FRED)

Schneider, Josh Illus. by Schneider, Josh Clarion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-544-33924-8

Master staller Fred meets his match (poetry!) in this hilarious not-yet-readyfor-bed tale.

Fred greets readers on the title page, utterly benign in appearance as he bathes and brushes teeth, seemingly earnest about the bedtime routine. But these innocuous scenes are a perfect juxtaposition for what’s in store, for this egg-shaped boy upends the rhyming animal lullaby with a creative exuberance sure to leave readers in stitches. Schneider’s deadpan delivery, combined with his ability to populate a world of realistically rendered animals in fanciful settings or situations, is a comedic win. Fred’s journey from home across spreads that become more and more fantastical as they incorporate elements from previous scenes is reminiscent of “Little Nemo in Slumberland.”

Ultimately, a book of poetry lulls Fred to sleep, as the narrator implores readers not to “make a peep.” An additional “WARNING” at the end to not wake Fred lest he start up again cleverly begs the opposite—promoting repeat visits, during which readers will surely find more silliness in store.

Ingenious. (Picture book. 3-7)

Saunders, Katie Illus. by Saunders, Katie Little Bee (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-4998-0019-7

WHAT WAITS IN THE WOODS

Another new-baby story joins the cribfull of titles told from the big-sibling angle.

Archie isn’t sure he wants a new baby in the house, and he is “ABSOLUTELY sure he doesn’t like fluffy, frilly, very pink things.” When his mom leaves for the hospital, she promises to bring back a surprise. Surprise, yes, but not a toy—a “fluffy, frilly, very pink bundle” named Olive. Laughing, Archie remarks that she looks just like a marshmallow. Soon, life with Olive becomes rather a lot of fun, as there are twice as many toys as before, plus Archie has someone to play with. He proclaims, “Little sisters are actually really great.” It’s the cartoon-style illustrations reminiscent of Lauren Child’s that create the buoyant spirit.

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Scott, Kieran Point/Scholastic (288 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-545-69111-6 978-0-545-69112-3 e-book

A camping trip turns deadly for a group of friends as a cackling stalker creeps among the trees, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

City girl Callie Valasquez agrees to go camping only to impress her new, popular girlfriends, Lissa and Penelope. After moving from Chicago to upstate New York, she’s hoping to foster new friendships like the ones she left behind. Inviting her new boyfriend, Jeremy, doesn’t hurt either.

As the group surrounds a glowing fire, Lissa relates the tale of the Skinner, a murderer who committed atrocities in the very woods they sit in and was never found. Of course, it isn’t long before things begin to go awry. Jeremy and Penelope topple off kirkus.com

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a bridge into a river, losing their supplies and barely making it out alive. Then a charming stranger appears, offering to help.

But can he be trusted? As the group falls apart, and trust begins to crumble, a watcher in the woods creeps in. Callie and her friends teeter on the clichéd, with Lissa acting as the over-thetop alpha and Callie as the frightened new girl finding her footing. But Scott weaves palpable tension and masterfully ramps it up toward a truly thrilling conclusion. Cinematically paced, it’s tough to put it down.

Readers will be kept up late, shocked to discover the depth of the darkness that lies in the woods. (Suspense. 12-18)

WHAT IF I’M AN ATHEIST? A Teen’s Guide to Exploring a Life Without Religion Seidman, David Beyond Words/Aladdin (256 pp.) $19.99 | $12.99 paper | Mar. 10, 2015 978-1-58270-407-4 978-1-58270-406-7 paper

From veteran journalist Seidman comes a straightforward guide for the teen interested in contemplating atheism.

Through an impressive amount of research that encompasses case studies, polls and interviews with teens, the author explores the process of becoming an atheist and the many difficulties that some “unbelievers” might face. Stories demonstrate the myriad reasons teens turn to atheism: discomfort with perceived religious intolerance, the guilt and shame associated with “immoral” acts, unforgiving doctrines—even the downright boredom some feel attending church. Seidman gives voice to teens who, because of their atheism, have faced bullying, ostracism and threats—but he’s also careful to include those whose nontheist beliefs have been met with tolerance and respect.

Practical tips include when and where to tell parents and/or relatives and friends about atheist beliefs as well as how to calmly and respectfully handle religious arguments. Teens discuss how atheism can coexist with spirituality, morality and even religious holidays. There are quotes from famous unbelievers, including Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Daniel Radcliffe.

Seidman also includes a list of U.S. universities where atheists are likely to feel welcome as well as those that are explicitly religious. Appropriately included are examples of teens who turned from being unhappy, unfulfilled atheists to contented believers.

A superbly written, smart and sensitive guidebook.

(Nonfiction. 12-18)

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THE CURIOUS CAT SPY CLUB

Singleton, Linda Joy Whitman (250 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-1376-7 Series: Curious Cat Spy Club, 1

Three children from disparate social groups at middle school team up to solve a mystery, becoming friends in the process, in this series kickoff.

Kelsey Case, a budding spy, is shy and quiet; Becca Morales, whose mom runs an animal sanctuary, is bubbly and popular; and Leo Polanski—well, he’s just weird. But also brilliant and much better characterized than the two more generic girls. The plot is set in motion when Kelsey rescues Becca’s runaway zorse (a horse/zebra cross) and hears mewing coming from a dumpster.

Big-brained Leo is able to figure out how to move the heavy top, and the children find three kittens in a bag along with a clue, a receipt from a pet supply store. Determined to save the kittens and find the culprit, the three unlikely compatriots form a secret group, the titular Curious Cat Spy Club. Unfortunately, after the engaging setup, a long dry spot ensues as the children work the mystery and get to know each other, and the story doesn’t catch fire until the suspenseful final quarter. Although the novel clearly ends with the mystery solved, it leaves enough relationship questions unresolved to hopefully start the next installment at a gallop.

Although readers may have to push through the slowmoving middle, this enjoyable mystery has a satisfying ending and a neatly calibrated level of suspense for middle school readers. (Mystery. 8-12)

DANCE OF THE BANISHED

Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk Pajama Press (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-927485-65-1

World War I separates a betrothed Anatolian couple—leaving one to witness the Armenian genocide and sending the other to a prison camp…in Canada.

Cast as letters and journal entries, the double narrative records the experiences of Zeynep, a villager transplanted to the “mighty city of Harput,” and Ali, who is swept up with other supposed enemy aliens and shipped to a remote camp in central Ontario before he can send for Zeynep. Neither is of Turkish descent: They are Kurds practicing the ancient, indigenous Alevi faith. These distinctions make no difference to Canadian authorities in Ali’s case, but they do give Zeynep some protection as she records a rising tide of atrocities committed against her Armenian (Christian) friends and neighbors. The characters often come off as mouthpieces (“The minorities must stick together or we’re all dead”), and the brief insertion of a young Cree woman |

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into the cast so that she and Ali can compare lifestyles and religious beliefs is an awkward interpolation. Nevertheless, both parts of the author’s tale being based on actual incidents, readers may come away with enhanced awareness of the multiplicity of smaller ethnic groups, both in other countries and their own.

An eye-opening exposé of historical outrages committed in two countries, with intriguing glimpses of a minority group that is not well-known in the Americas. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 11-14)

HICCUPOTAMUS

Smallman, Steve Illus. by Grey, Ada Tiger Tales (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-58925-171-7

off along with his adoptive brother, Max, to stay at Camp MerrieSeymour for Boys, a free perk his family receives for the work done by their inventor father for a research group. A multitude of strange and grimly funny characters populates the camp, including Mrs. Nussbaum, a prim therapist whose forced cheer is at one point hilariously described as being “about one-half-octave above ‘drunkenly enthusiastic’ and just below the sound baby dolphins make” and who offers the first hint that all may not be as it seems.

Two other narrative threads—one involving a ship called the Alex Crow stuck in the ice during the 1800s and the other detailing the madness of a character called the “melting man,” who hears various voices urging him to commit acts of violence—are juxtaposed against Ariel and Max’s story, smartly weaving their ways into it right up to the surprising conclusion.

Magnificently bizarre, irreverent and bitingly witty, this outlandish novel is grounded by likable characters and their raw experiences. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

By a bubbling creek in the jungle, Mouse squeaks out a musical beat. Who

else wants to join in?

A little bird asks to tweet along, and a centipede begins thumping out a rhythm with his feet. One by one, other animals want to add their own hip sounds to the toe-tapping jingle. The warthog offers to bang “on his belly like a big bass drum.” The grinning crocodile uses a bone to play his teeth like a xylophone.

The jubilant song builds and repeats as the gathering grows, encouraging readers to join in on the chorus: “Tip-tap-a-tippytappy, / Tweet-tweet-tweet. / Squeak, squeak, bubble, bubble, / squeak, squeak, SQUEAK!” With vibrant close-ups of the animals’ faces, the colorful pages burst with the excitement of jamming with friends. Even with simple dots or lines for eyes, every animal exudes its own personality, from the sniffing mouse to the monkey with rubbery arms. Smallman, wielding the rhythmic words like a conductor’s baton, stops the cumulative syncopation cold when the previously unseen Hippopotamus takes credit for their catchy song. The musicians are incredulous, but readers who note the title of the story and the “bubble, bubble” in the refrain may have a clue.

Though there’s not much to the story, the energetic wordplay coupled with cheery images makes this an easy crowd-pleaser. (Picture book. 3- 7)

THE ALEX CROW

Smith, Andrew Dutton (432 pp.) $18.99 | Mar. 5, 2015 978-0-525-42653-0

HOW TO DRAW WITH YOUR FUNNY BONE

Smith, Elwood H. Illus. by Smith, Elwood H. Creative Editions/Creative Company (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-56846-243-1 Sage instruction for would-be cartoonists from a veteran, self-billed “Trained Professional Artist.”

As the introduction suggests, this is more an overview of Smith’s personal approach than a systematic guidebook. He mixes standard starting points—looking analytically at photos or clip art, working from basic 2-D and 3-D shapes—with pages of sample caricatures and cartoons that interpret images in goofy ways or add comical details. Photos of pigs, mostly, but also pictures of an old car, a goat skull and other promising items serve as inspiration for the galleries of quick sketches.

Many of these come with hand-lettered comments: “Light-bulb pig”; “Here’s a picture of an old sofa.” These complement the breezy main text: “Even food you think is yucky can be fun to draw.” He also describes—though doesn’t actually illustrate— using a lightbox, and he closes by urging readers to develop their own styles, providing a pair of blank pages as encouragement to limber up those artistic “funny bones.”

Smith’s pictures are always good for a hoot, though tyros will get a truer start from Ed Emberley’s classic manuals. (Picture book. 6-9)

Three stories wind round one another in unexpected ways in this science-fiction offering peppered with recurring symbols.

Fifteen-year-old Ariel Burgess survived a nightmarish attack on his home village by hiding in a refrigerator. He was taken in by a family in Virginia, and to his chagrin, he has now been packed 128

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“A pervading dread, disorientation and paranoia thoroughly soak [the] believable voice.” from skandal

SKANDAL

Smith, Lindsay Roaring Brook (336 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-62672-005-3 Series: Sekret, 2 In 1964, a psychic Russian teen works with the CIA to prevent war with the Soviet Union.

Yulia Andreevna Chernina has defected to the United States to escape the KGB’s psychic espionage program. Her old handlers groomed her ability to read thoughts and memories in order to crush dissidents and provoke a war between the USSR and the USA. In the freedom and creativity of America, she joins with other psychics to defeat the plans of the KGB psychic team—a team that is led in part by Yulia’s mother. Yulia develops her psychic skills at the CIA’s behest, but she doesn’t think she can defeat the tyrannical Russians’ powerful thought scrubbers. A pervading dread, disorientation and paranoia thoroughly soak her believable voice.

The magnitude of her reasonable fears is most apparent from outside; when Yulia psychically thrusts her emotions into other characters, the external glimpse of her deep anxiety is troubling even to her. Smith’s Washington, D.C., is dense with 1960s flavor. Though some of the well-researched historical events and people are sprinkled in without context or explanation, the colorfully described clothing, music and even racial tensions bring the era to light. As Yulia fights to save her family and prevent a war in a world filled with psychic powers and political maneuvering, she has to reach beyond passivity if she’s to succeed.

Well-paced action and mystery for an appealing heroine, complete with Cold War attitudes. (Science fiction. 12-15)

KISSING TED CALLAHAN (AND OTHER GUYS)

Spalding, Amy Poppy/Little, Brown (320 pp.) $18.00 | $9.99 e-book | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-316-37152-0 978-0-316-37151-3 e-book So many boys, so little time; what’s a rock girl to do?

Music-obsessed Riley and Reid, a writer, are shocked to find out that their fellow band mates, Lucy (Riley’s once–best friend and former confidante) and Nathan, have not only been secretly dating, they’ve also been doing it. Feeling glaringly inexperienced, Riley and Reid decide to keep a handwritten notebook—nicknamed the Passenger Manifest from the TV show Lost—chronicling all of their experiences with love, dating and sex. To Riley’s surprise, she becomes involved with three guys: science-loving Garrick, who once dated a celebrity; Ted Callahan, her longtime, irresistibly floppy-haired crush; and Milo, a fellow band geek and tuba player. Riley and Reid carefully record every detail of their |

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dating foibles, but when the Passenger Manifest turns up missing, what are they to do? Narrated mainly by Riley, the story provides small snippets of Reid’s dating life—and, regrettably, little else about him—in the entries from the Passenger Manifest that appear between prose chapters. Riley’s approach to sex is a long way from Forever...; losing her virginity seems to be more an item on her to-do list than a milestone moment.

A not-so-fluffy chick-lit offering rife with angst, rock ’n’ roll and lots of kissing. (Romance. 13-18)

MABEL AND ME Best of Friends

Sperring, Mark Illus. by Warburton, Sarah HarperCollins 360 (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-0-00-746836-2 A small mouse with delusions of grandeur strolls down a vaguely Parisian street with his best friend, Mabel.

He affirms to her that she is his “bestest, bestest friend,” although he cannot think of a single reason why this should be.

The mouse is a bit of a Debby Downer. Referred to only in the first person (he even labels his initial appearance “me”), he is so self-centered that he assumes every compliment received by the pair is addressed to him and, conversely, that every insult is directed to Mabel. Thinking that Monsieur Famous French Photographer is calling Mabel a “strange little creature thing,” he refuses a picture. He then gets all huffy at the Señora Prima Ballerina when she improbably tries to recruit Mabel to ballet school (he thinks her rejection of “your friend[’s] scrawny, hairy rodent legs” is directed at Mabel). Even when Mabel tells him that people really “think of me as a strange little creature thing with scrawny, hairy rodent legs,” he refuses to believe it; she must be joking. And that’s it. While the illustrations are attractively done in graceful pencil and watercolor wash, and there is plenty of eye-catching detail, there is too little story, and the book ultimately feels derivative of other classic Francophile picture books.

A pretty package but lacking in substance and storyline.

(Picture book. 3-6)

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“It’s hard not to cheer for Cody, with her sunny disposition and penchant for optimistic similes.” from cody and the fountain of happiness

CODY AND THE FOUNTAIN OF HAPPINESS

Springstubb, Tricia Illus. by Wheeler , Eliza Candlewick (160 pp.) $14.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-0-7636-5857-1 Series: Cody, 1

Well-meaning Cody is excited about the first day of her summer vacation.

First Cody communes with her beloved ants, and then she wakes her 14-year-old brother, Wyatt, with her special rendition of “You are My Sunshine.” But Wyatt’s no fun—if he can’t sleep, he would rather think about science or his crush on popular Payton Underwood. Meeting visiting Spencer and his grandmother’s deaf cat, MewMew, brightens Cody’s mood. Spencer is younger than Cody and glum that his parents are away, but he is drawn to sunny Cody and her promise to hypnotize the cat. Cody wants to help everyone, but things go awry. Her mother’s trial promotion to Head of Shoes is threatened when her boss finds Cody’s thoughtless note; Cody gets in the middle of her brother’s romantic life; and MewMew goes missing, all because of Cody. It’s hard not to cheer for Cody, with her sunny disposition and penchant for optimistic similes. Frequent black-and-white illustrations show a short-haired Cody and her bespectacled, curly-haired, brown-skinned friend enjoying the joys and sadness that summer friendships bring.

Secondary characters are fully fleshed, allowing for a deep, satisfying reading experience for children ready for longer books.

Cody is sure to make friends with many readers, who will cross their fingers and hope for further adventures.

(Fiction. 7-10)

MEDITATION IS AN OPEN SKY Mindfulness for Kids

Stewart, Whitney Illus. by Rippin, Sally Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-4908-7

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SPECTACULAR SPOTS

Stockdale, Susan Illus. by Stockdale, Susan Peachtree (32 pp.) $15.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-56145-817-2

In this companion to the animal gallery in Stripes of All Types (2013), Stockdale focuses her spotlight.

Clustered in big, flat, cleanly drawn scenes reminiscent of Nancy Tafuri’s, creatures from leopard to sea slug, fawn to ladybug pose in artfully variegated natural settings that suggest how spots can be useful as either camouflage or (for poisonous animals) a bright warning display. The accompanying rhyme, split into just a phrase per page, offers general identifications— “Spots on snakes / and gliding snails. // Swimming turtles, / singing quails”—that are backed up at the end by specific (if spotty) notes on names, habitats and distinctive features. Stockdale chooses not to explain what functions the spots on Dalmatians, Holsteins, hogs and some other animals here may serve, nor does she provide a speck of a lead to further information. Still, she does round off with a visual pop quiz (over upside-down answers) that will prompt young viewers to revisit the illustrations for closer looks.

Despite a blotch or two, a spot-on animal gallery for budding naturalists. (Informational picture book. 2-6)

BIGGIE

This primer on visualization techniques uses a monkey and an elephant to introduce children to mindfulness and meditation.

There’s no story in this Australian import. Instead, an introduction directly addresses readers, describing meditation as a technique for managing one’s feelings. Opening text counsels, “Meditation won’t take away your problems, but it will help you deal with them,” and appears alongside an illustration of an elephant relaxing in a bathtub and imagining “feelings pop[ping] up and disappear[ing] like soap bubbles.” This prescriptive approach to meditation seems a bit reductive, but ensuing spreads that prompt specific visualization exercises move beyond using meditation to help one “deal with” problems. Throughout, the elephant can be seen 130

meditating to relax, achieve focus, feel secure and so on. The monkey appears in some spreads as part of the elephant’s visualization exercises. A closing section, “Questions about Meditation,” advises readers about what to do if they feel bored, wiggly, sleepy, scared or frustrated, or if they have sore legs when they try to meditate. Ultimately, this will work best as a guide for an adult to use with a child in specific scenarios that might call for mindfulness and meditation.

Keep this in mind as a possible introduction to meditation for children. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

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Sullivan, Derek E. Whitman (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-8075-0727-8 In Sullivan’s debut novel, an obese and lonely high school boy dreams of love, pitching a perfect game and finding his place in the world.

Funny how a boy who stands 6 foot 2 and weighs “north of three hundred pounds” can be invisible. But that’s how Henry “Biggie” Abbott likes it. He has discovered that the bigger he gets, the less fellow students make fun of him. He sits in the backs of classrooms, rarely speaks, and relies on Yahoo and Facebook to accumulate a massive friends list. Trouble is, he dreams of kissing Annabelle kirkus.com

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Rivers, and invisible boys don’t get the beautiful girls. When Biggie happens to pitch a perfect Wiffle ball game in gym class, he thinks maybe he could pitch a perfect game for his school’s baseball team. Younger brother Maddux says he would be the first player in school history to do so, and not even his father, a member of the Iowa Baseball Hall of Fame, threw one in his day.

The first-person point of view works well here, demonstrating Biggie’s lonely self-absorption and his earnest forays in seeking connections. Though the pacing is sometimes slow, Biggie’s story will resonate with all those students who feel invisible and alone.

A bighearted story that will have readers rooting for Henry “Biggie” Abbott. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE WALLS AROUND US

Suma, Nova Ren Algonquin (336 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-61620-372-6 The intertwined stories of two teenage girls: a convicted killer and a Juilliardbound ballerina.

Amber’s an inmate at Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center, with a story to tell about the night the doors all opened at the prison.

Violet’s a dancer bound for New York City and artistic success.

The girls have secrets, and each takes the chance to let tidbits of truth slip into her narrative, each using her own unique and identifiable voice in alternating chapters. Amber rarely speaks only for herself, identifying almost exclusively with the other prisoners. “Some of us knew for sure,” she solemnly explains, speaking collectively. “Some of us kept track of days.” Violet, on the other hand, is deeply self-absorbed, worried over the three-years-past death of her incarcerated best friend but only for how it affects her and her chance at Juilliard. As the girls’ stories unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that Amber’s and Violet’s musings occur three years apart—yet are nonetheless intimately connected. The wholly realistic view of adolescents meeting the criminal justice system (with a heartbreaking contrast portrayed between the treatment of a wealthy girl and that of her poor multiracial friend) is touched at first with the slimmest twist of an otherworldly creepiness, escalating finally to the truly hair-raising and macabre.

Eerie, painful and beautifully spine-chilling. (Super natural suspense. 15-17)

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FUNNY FACE, SUNNY FACE

Symes, Sally Illus. by Beardshaw, Rosalind Nosy Crow/Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7606-3

What are we going to do today?

“Bunny face, sunny face, wake up... / with a funny face!” Brief, catchy rhymes feature basic body parts (hair, hands, noses and feet, to name a few) with a touch of whimsy. They team nicely with bright, cheerful images centered on children and their animal friends to describe some of the ins and outs of being a toddler in this light stroll through a typical day, from morning to night. Toddlers will bounce along to the rhythm and giggle at the onomatopoeic wordplay as the friendly, multiethnic youngsters that populate the pictures nicely illustrate the text with warmth and energy. The vocabulary is on target, and it’s easy to imagine children joining in with the warm, songlike wording. The pattern established by the page turns will encourage participation and guessing at the rhymes. A nice choice for those learning how to name the parts of the body, an enjoyable read and, of course, a proper goodnight book: “Nosy heads, cozy heads, all tired out... / and dozy heads.”

A simple, lively rhyme describing a toddler’s day, with warm, joyful images that tykes and their caregivers will happily embrace. (Picture book. 1-3)

AN EMBER IN THE ASHES

Tahir, Sabaa Razorbill/Penguin (464 pp.) $19.95 | Apr. 28, 2015 978-1-59514-803-2

A suddenly trendy trope—conflict and romance between members of conquering and enslaved races—enlivened by fantasy elements loosely drawn from Arabic tradition (another trend!).

In an original, well-constructed fantasy world (barring some lazy naming), the Scholars have lived under Martial rule for 500 years, downtrodden and in many cases enslaved. Scholar Laia has spent a lifetime hiding her connection to the Resistance—her parents were its leaders—but when her grandparents are killed and her brother’s captured

by Masks, the eerie, silver-faced elite soldiers of the Martial Empire, Laia must go undercover as a slave to the terrifying Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy, where Martials are trained for battle. Meanwhile, Elias, the Commandant’s not-at-all-beloved son, wants to run away from Blackcliff, until he is named an Aspirant for the throne by the mysterious redeyed Augurs. Predictably, action, intrigue, bloodshed and some pounding pulses follow; there’s betrayal and a potential love triangle or two as well. Sometimes-lackluster prose and a slight overreliance on certain kinds of sexual violence as a threat only |

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slightly diminish the appeal created by familiar (but not predictable) characters and a truly engaging if not fully fleshed-out fantasy world.

Bound to be popular. (Fantasy. 13 & up)

SPORT-O-RAMA

Tardif, Benoit Illus. by Tardif, Benoit Kids Can (56 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-77138-327-1

Illustrator Tardif’s picture-book debut is a collection of terms related to 23 different sports, all illustrated with stylized people, brilliant colors and a touch of humor.

Unfortunately, eye-catching though the graphics are, they are not always particularly communicative. At times, it is unclear what is being labelled in the pictures. For example, on the spread devoted to fencing, a competitor’s white bodysuit is divided without comment into eight regions—“tierce,” “quinte,” etc.—leaving readers to wonder exactly what the point is. In the judo entry, two opponents face each other (they either have shoulders in the centers of their torsos or they are holding pool noodle–like objects); the label reads simply “kumi kata.” A red card and a yellow card are depicted on the soccer pages but not explained.

(These last three are defined in the glossary but not the mysterious “lame” in the fencing entry.) Dialogue balloons help readers decode some activities or show competitive spirit: The speed skater calls out “Catch me if you can!” But at other times, it’s as though the author is just yelling “Squirrel!” A “real alligator” on a green results in an “unplayable ball,” and an “impressed bird” says “Wow!” at the height of the pole vaulter. A lover of sports in childhood, Tardif explains in his author’s note that his illustrating leaves little time for sports, but he enjoys drawing while watching hockey on TV. Maybe he was distracted?

While readers will be introduced to sports they may never have heard of before (rowing, cricket), the rudimentary entries will likely leave them frustrated rather than intrigued. (Informational picture book. 3- 7)

THE LOST TRIBES

Taylor-Butler, C. Move Books (368 pp.) $18.95 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-0-9854810-8-7

A boy, his sister and their three friends discover that their parents—and they themselves—are not what they seem.

When their uncle challenges seventhgrader Ben and his little sister, April, to beat a special computer game in a week, they employ the help of their neighborhood friends: Grace, Carlos and Serise. Together, 132

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the kids race against time to decode hieroglyphics, avoid booby traps and collect ancient artifacts. But as the game continues, it becomes strange, as does their parents’ behavior. They begin to feel they’re actually in the projected images of far-off locations—and sometimes they see their parents while there. But that doesn’t make sense....Though the mystery is spoilered by the flap copy, the fact that the characters don’t figure things out immediately makes sense within the context of the story. While the real action comes toward the last half of the book, the first half should keep readers (at least those who avoid the spoiler) engaged as the game is so interesting. And while Ben is likable, he’s no fearless leader but a fallible boy who does his best to be courageous in frightening situations. That the main characters are of diverse ethnic origins is laudable and a breath of fresh air, as is the lack of stereotypes and clichés.

Well-written and well-paced: a promising start to what should be an exciting and unusual sci-fi series. (Science fiction.

10-14)

THE DAY NO ONE WAS ANGRY

Tellegen, Toon Illus. by Boutavant, Marc Gecko Press (80 pp.) $19.99 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-927271-57-5

Dutch writer Tellegen explores the psychology of anger in 12 vignettes featuring a society of animals.

In short, dialogue-rich tales, animals grapple with anger’s many manifestations, struggling to understand its presence and absence. The hyrax rants at the sun for setting nightly, his anger so deep that it lasts all through sundrenched days. A lobster with a suitcase full of the “right kind of anger” visits a mouse, revealing everything from a mild red anger to a “white fury.” The mouse spies a light blue melancholy and drapes it, scarflike, over his shoulders, sighing over a lovely summer day. In a particularly poignant tale, an ant schools a toad in the many ways to banish anger. Eventually deciding to “throw it away,” they “[share] some sweet dried nettles and [talk] about happiness, which, according to the ant, you never have to do anything about.” Is anger a necessary emotion? A wellversed beetle teaches a cricket how to locate his anger, and the last, titular story portrays the animals’ odd disequilibrium on a day devoid of ire. On thick, creamy pages, Boutavant’s charming pictures evoke the mid-20th-century illustrations of Feodor Rojankovsky and Roger Duvoisin and invite close scrutiny.

(One quibble: Where gender’s specified, it’s male.)

Pleasantly lacking moral-mongering, this fresh collection will appeal to parents and children who enjoy sharing stories as springboards to discussion and speculation. (table of contents—in the backmatter) (Short stories. 6-9)

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“Every page of this book contains at least one stunning sentence.” from the boy who lost fairyland

THE UNLIKELY HERO OF ROOM 13B

Toten, Teresa Delacorte (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Mar. 10, 2015 978-0-553-50786-7 978-0-553-50788-1 e-book 978-0-553-50787-4 PLB What would it feel like to wake up normal? It’s a question most people would never have cause to ask—and the one 14-year-old Adam Spencer Ross longs to have answered.

Life is already complicated enough for Adam, but when Robyn Plummer joins the Young Adult OCD Support Group in room 13B, Adam falls fast and hard. Having long assumed the role of protector to those he loves, Adam immediately knows that he must do everything he can to save her. The trouble is, Robyn isn’t the one who needs saving. Adam’s desperate need to protect everyone he loves—his broken mother, a younger half brother with OCD tendencies, and the entire motley crew of Room 13B—nearly costs him everything. Adam’s first-person account of his struggle to cope with the debilitating symptoms of OCD while navigating the complexities of everyday teen life is achingly authentic. Much like Adam, readers will have to remind themselves to breathe as he performs his ever worsening OCD rituals. Yet Toten does a masterful job bringing Adam to life without ever allowing him to become a one-dimensional poster boy for a teen suffering from mental illness.

Readers be warned: Like Augustus Waters before him, Adam Spencer Ross will renew your faith in real-life superheroes and shatter your heart in equal measure. (Fiction. 12 & up)

WILLY MAYKIT IN SPACE

Trine, Greg Illus. by Burks, James HMH Books (208 pp.) $13.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-544-31351-4

Willy Maykit is not an ordinary kid.

Although his scientist father was lost on an expedition to the Amazon, that hasn’t blunted Willy’s sense of adventure one bit. When a class field trip to Planet Ed comes up, Willy convinces his mother to put aside her worries and sign the permission slip. All goes well on the trip to the faraway planet, but Willy goes off to explore on his own, and when threatening weather leads to the hurried return of the spacecraft back to Earth, he is left behind. At first Willy believes he is the only one, but he soon discovers a green extraterrestrial named Norp along with Cindy Das (described as “the prettiest girl in class” and depicted as dark-skinned with long, dark hair; Willy is blond and fair-skinned). So the trio find themselves |

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trying to survive attacks from huge hairy, hungry monsters (that sometimes wear sunglasses) until they are rescued. Trine keeps the outlandish plot and dialogue moving along at a speed-oflight pace. Some comic touches are employed a bit too often, such as android pilot Max’s overenthusiastic responses to a few well-known knock-knock jokes. For those still appreciative of a well-placed illustration to set the scene, Burks’ cartoon images won’t disappoint.

Readers new to chapter books and who like to laugh often will most likely find Willy’s story peppered with just enough silly humor (monster poop!) to keep the pages turning. (Adventure. 7-10)

THE BOY WHO LOST FAIRYLAND

Valente, Catherynne M. Illus. by Juan, Ana Feiwel & Friends (240 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-250-02349-0 Why live in Kansas when you can stay in Oz? Valente may well have wondered at Dorothy’s inexplicable decision.

At the end of The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), 14-year-old September ran away from home to live in Fairyland. It was one of the best cliffhangers in recent fiction. Readers hoping for resolution will need to wait a little longer, as September hardly appears in this novel at all. As the title hints, it’s the story of a Changeling named Hawthorn, who takes the place of a human boy in Chicago. The book is full of Changelings of all stripes: trolls and humans and a girl made of wood. All of them, like September, feel out of place and far from home. Their stories are so sad and astonishing that even September—when she finally appears— may not be able to help them. If the ending feels a little abrupt, it’s because the story is so rich and complex that no book could resolve it. Even the minor supporting characters deserve novels of their own. Every page of this book contains at least one stunning sentence. Valente’s descriptions of the human world make it sound like an exotic place, even when she just lists things to see: “diamonds and dinosaur bones and Canadian geese and the Cathedral of Notre Dame and ballpoint pens.”

Readers may wish the words were food, so they could eat them up. And they may keep reading this series for just as long as people have been arguing about Oz. (Fantasy. 10-14)

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“Occasional offbeat visual details, such as tiny Emily’s adult features and huge butterfly hair ornament, add flair to the very simple plotline.” from roger is reading a book

ROGER IS READING A BOOK

Van Biesen, Koen Illus. by Van Biesen, Koen Translated by Watkinson, Laura Eerdmans (42 pp.) $16.00 | Mar. 2, 2015 978-0-8028-5442-1

A noisy neighbor can make reading a bit of a challenge—but there’s a clever solution.

Little Emily’s fondness for bouncing a basketball, wailing away on drums and other sudden high-volume activities repeatedly sends Roger, his equally startled basset hound and his book flying into the air. The irritated gent’s increasingly vigorous pounding on the apartment wall quiets her—but only for a while. Following several frustrating rounds, he stalks off to get and present her with a package that contains (you guessed it) another book, and peace is restored. Using the gutter as a standin for the separating wall, Van Biesen creates minimalist rooms and figures with a mix of unfilled outlines and small washes of color or pattern against white backdrops. Occasional offbeat visual details, such as tiny Emily’s adult features and huge butterfly hair ornament, add flair to the very simple plotline. The text is a combination of outsized sound effects and smaller patterned commentary: “SHHHH! Quiet. / Roger is reading. / Roger is reading a book. // BOING BOING / Emily is playing. / Emily is playing a game.” But a hushed spread that fades to black suddenly gives way with a page turn to a blast of frenzied barking from the poor dog, who, thanks to the continuing distractions, hasn’t been walked all day. Both Roger and Emily do the deed, and a scene of sweet relief against a lamppost further cements the sense of resolution.

A slight but tongue-in-cheek import with a mischievous twist. (Picture book. 5- 7)

SO, YOU WANT TO BE A DANCER? The Ultimate Guide to Exploring the Dance Industry van der Linde, Laurel Beyond Words/Aladdin (208 pp.) $19.99 | $11.99 paper | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-58270-451-7 978-1-58270-450-0 paper

programs, and related careers in costume design, dance therapy and photography. She even encourages couch potatoes to try social dancing. Librarians should note that some of the activities, such as a word search and matching ballet scores with the composer, are write-ins. The book is copiously illustrated with line drawings, although curiously, only text is used to describe the five ballet foot positions and hip-hop steps. Readers may well feel the absence of diagrams.

Teens interested in any and all aspects of a career in dance will find useful and entertaining information here. (resources, glossary, notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

ARROW TO ALASKA A Pacific Northwest Adventure

Viano, Hannah Illus. by Viano, Hannah Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 14, 2015 978-1-57061-949-6 A boy named Arrow recounts his journey from Seattle to Alaska to visit his grandfather.

Six-year-old Arrow longs for seagoing adventures, “playing captain of the cedar stump in the backyard.” He receives an invitation from Grampy Lightning and travels to Alaska on his aunt’s salmon tender boat, learning about the fishing boat and its crew during their travels. Arrow and his grandfather return to Seattle together aboard a friend’s seaplane. The longish story is told in a lyrical style, full of rich vocabulary and evocative phrases. Striking illustrations in muted blues accented with shapes of deep black have the look of woodcuts but are actually cut-paper designs in the artist’s distinctive style. A recipe for “Cast-Iron Skillet Brownies” (like those served on the salmon boat) is included on the final page. This space would have been better utilized for descriptions of the Seattle locations mentioned in the text (the Locks and Lake Union), though a map is located on the endpapers. It shows Puget Sound and Vancouver Island, marking Seattle and indicating Alaska with a directional arrow; it is too bad there is no greater specificity than that.

This intriguing and delightfully illustrated story will be of particular interest to young readers in Washington state and Alaska, who are least likely to notice the skimpiness of geographical detail. (Picture book. 5-8)

From ballet to Broadway and from Hollywood to hip-hop: a how-to.

Brief histories of different dance forms are interspersed with frequent boxed highlights, sidebars, and profiles of current and former members of the dance world. Van der Linde begins by stating her belief that “[e]arly people did not consider dance as entertainment but as an essential form of expression.” Dance as religious ritual in India, Japan and Thailand receives mention as does dance as court entertainment in France and in Italy. She moves on to the realms of ballet, Broadway and Hollywood musicals, contemporary dance, sports dance squads, college 134

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ROSARIO’S FIG TREE

Wahl, Charis Illus. by Melanson, Luc Groundwood (32 pp.) $18.95 | $16.95 e-book | Mar. 17, 2016 978-1-55498-341-4 978-1-55498-342-1 e-book Old Rosario is a magician, though not the kind that pulls rabbits out of hats.

The unnamed little girl who lives next door to Rosario thinks he is a magician because he grows everything. She helps him dig the soil and lay the seeds for many vegetables, some of which she does not even recognize. But one spring he takes a pot out that has a tree in it. They live in a place that is too cold for figs, but this is a fig tree, and Rosario loves it.

And it does grow figs, which are “kind of squishy, but they are as sweet as peaches.” In late fall, Rosario does a strange thing—he buries the fig tree! The girl wonders if it is dead, but Rosario is not sad: He is a magician with growing things. An unusual but still-used method for overwintering a fig tree is described (children of Italian or Latino ancestry might be more familiar with their grandparents’ practice of wrapping the entire tree in cloth), and the joy of growing things is well-delineated. The digitally produced images are bright with summer colors, and the figures have elongated bodies and funny ovoid heads with vivid expressions.

A child’s wonder at the care it takes to make things grow and the joys of fresh figs make an engaging story.

(Picture book. 4-8)

WE ALL LOOKED UP

Wallach, Tommy Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 24, 2015 978-1-4814-1877-5 978-1-4814-1879-9 e-book The end of the world turns into a life-changing opportunity for four high school seniors.

High school is all about labels. In this stunning debut set in present-day Seattle, there’s Peter the athlete, Andy the slacker, Anita the overachiever and Eliza the slut. Just as each notices a strange blue star in the sky one night, the president announces that the star is actually an asteroid with a path that is 66.6 percent likely to hit and destroy the Earth in two months. Told from the teens’ alternating viewpoints, sometimes with cleverly overlapping details, this edgy story follows how each copes with impending doom with brilliant imagery and astounding depth. Knowing that all life will probably end in just weeks, the four teens abandon their labels and search for meaning in the time they have left. Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, they forge a “karass”—an unbreakable, and indeed life-changing, bond—as they explore purpose, evil, faith, independence, friendship, sex |

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and love together. In the background there is also social commentary to be gleaned as the world becomes a dangerous place and martial law becomes a farce. But just like the asteroid that dots the night sky, Wallach pierces his darkness with tenderness and humor.

A thought-provoking story that will bring out readers’ inner philosophers. (Fiction. 14 & up)

LITTLE PUPPY LOST

Webb, Holly Illus. by Harry, Rebecca Tiger Tales (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2015 978-1-84895-909-5

A picture book about a lost puppy’s adventure, ultimately finding friends and home.

Harry, a tiny puppy, is brought to the park by his best friend, Emma. Overexcited, he chases after a ball and then is himself chased by two large dogs. Escaping them, he becomes lost. A friendly stray cat named Ginger leads him back to the park, but darkness has fallen, and Emma is gone. Ginger leads Harry to town, where, as they are raiding garbage cans in an alley for dinner, a large cat threatens Ginger. Tiny Harry finds his voice and barks, scaring it away. Then Harry smells home, and the two friends make their way there. Reunited with Emma, Harry remembers Ginger, and the final illustration shows both Harry and Ginger on Emma’s lamp, fed and warm and home. The simple story is heartwarming, especially for animal lovers, and the final double-page spread is a treasure. But too many of the other illustrations lack a liveliness of line, so successfully rendered in Marc Simont’s lost-dog story, The Stray Dog (2001). Readers will appreciate the clever endpapers, but they may puzzle over the title page illustration, which shows the puppy ensconced in its round, safe bed—positioned center page (a design placement of stability)—with no hint of any tension to come.

Pleasant and heartwarming but with somewhat sluggish illustrations. (Picture book. 3- 7)

BLACK DOVE, WHITE RAVEN

Wein, Elizabeth Hyperion (368 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-1-4231-8310-5

Wein returns to Ethiopia, the setting of her Arthurian adventures, for a highflying novel about the 1935 Italian invasion.

Emilia Menotti and Teodros Dupré share no DNA, but they are otherwise as close as siblings could be. Their aviator mothers had performed together as barnstormers Black Dove and White Raven until a bird strike killed Teo’s mother as the two women were preparing to immigrate to Ethiopia, |

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where Teo’s father had come from. Alone, Momma raises them on a remote coffee cooperative, an idyll cut short as tensions rise between the independent African nation and Italy, whose colonies border it. Wein does again what she did so beautifully in Code Name Verity (2012) and Rose Under Fire (2013): She plaits together the historical record, her passion for flying and ferociously vivid characters to create a heartbreaking adventure that grounds readers in the moment even as geopolitical complexity threatens to knock them off their feet. The story is pieced together from a combination of documents; Emmy’s opening begging Haile Selassie for help is followed by a collection of the two teens’ writings, including childhood stories, themes written for the cooperative school and long, diarylike flight logs. This device does not create as seamless a narrative as in her previous two books, and Emmy’s and Teo’s voices are often hard to tell apart, but Wein’s forceful prose will carry readers past any sense of contrivance.

Unforgettable. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

THE MAD APPRENTICE

Wexler, Django Kathy Dawson/Penguin (336 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 21, 2015 978-0-8037-3976-5 Series: Forbidden Library, 2 Still searching for her missing father, 12- or 13-year-old Alice Creighton finds a formidable enemy in Torment, a wildly dominating magical creature, in this second book in the Forbidden Library series.

Alice has spent the last six months as a Reader’s apprentice, during which she learned to do magic and nearly died twice.

Full-fledged Readers ultimately can enter into stories and use their energy to bring creatures out of their “prison-books.”

Alice hopes that gathering all of this insight and experience will help her to find her father. When sent by Geryon, her master, on a dangerous mission to find a wayward apprentice who is believed to have killed his own master, Alice finds out just how nuanced this world’s politics really are, with some masters teaching their apprentices to be rivals with one another.

Meanwhile, she continues her gentle interest in Isaac, another apprentice, who seems just as interested in her. While the story gets a bit protracted at times—like a movie with too many special effects—Wexler is an able builder of magical worlds and creatures, with labyrinths, an enchanted library, and a feisty, swashbuckling heroine at the center.

A story rich in action and allegory—fantasy fans will want to hang on for what comes next. (Fantasy. 10-14)

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WHERE I BELONG

White, Tara Tradewind Books (112 pp.) $12.95 paper | Mar. 15, 2015 978-1-896580-77-7 A Mohawk girl adopted into a white family gets in touch with her heritage against the backdrop of the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec.

Carrie has always felt different. The “only black-haired, dark-skinned girl” in her small Ontario town, she even feels out of step with her parents. Both doctors, they expect her to study hard, avoid boys and excel in science. She also has strange, vivid dreams; these are becoming more frequent and violent, featuring a teenage boy with a long, black braid. When she sees that boy at a youth-hockey tournament, she feels an instant connection. In short order, she learns that her biological father is a Mohawk who lives with his mother and her twin sister on the Kahnawake reserve, where Indians are protesting the building of a golf course on a burial ground. When she goes there to spend a week with her newfound family, she becomes caught up in the protests. A Mohawk herself, White’s story suffers from its brevity. Carrie’s adoptive parents are two-dimensional caricatures, and Carrie’s acceptance of her new identity is achieved with a speedy placidity that readers will find hard to believe. Still, her sister’s resistance to Carrie is believable, giving the narrative a badly needed edge as Mohawk-army tensions escalate. Frustratingly, although the story ends with the resolution of the crisis, readers never learn what actually happened.

Though stories of contemporary Indian youth are badly needed, this one fails to engage. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

LIKE A RIVER A Civil War Novel

Wiechman, Kathy Cannon Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills (336 pp.) $17.95 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-62979-209-5 The stories of three teens intersect in the later years of the Civil War in this debut novel.

Fifteen-year-old Leander Jordan runs off to war from Ohio to prove he’s a man.

“Working in the foundry wasn’t something to admire, not like being a soldier in uniform, a soldier who’d risk his life facing enemy guns. Pa had to see he was doing a manly thing.” But he lands in a Southern hospital, where he befriends Paul Settles, another young Union soldier, who tends to his wounds. When they’re separated, Paul ends up in hellish Andersonville Prison, where smallpox, scurvy and hunger plague the prisoners. There, Paul’s friendship with Given McGlade, a fellow prisoner and Leander’s neighbor from back home, helps keep them both alive. Though the prose is a bit florid early on, the stories are kirkus.com

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effectively related in twinned third-person narrative, and Wiechman’s abundant research is unobtrusively folded into the tale. An excellent author’s note provides further information about the times. Though the horrors of Andersonville and various Civil War–era events such as the Battle of Atlanta, Lincoln’s assassination and the explosion of the steamboat Sultana provide wartime context, it’s the secrets woven into the well-paced tale that will pull readers eagerly to the tearful conclusion.

A superb Civil War tale of friendship, loyalty and what it means to be a man. (bibliography) (Historical fiction. 9-14)

TRASH MOUNTAIN

Yolen, Jane Illus. by Monroe, Chris Carolrhoda (184 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-1234-7

continuing series SPRING’S SPARKLE SLEEPOVER

Allen, Elise; Stanford, Halle Illus. by Pooler, Paige Bloomsbury | (128 pp.) $15.99 | $5.99 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-61963-296-7 978-1-61963-269-1 paper Jim Henson’s Enchanted Sisters, 3 (Fantasy. 6-9)

SNIFF A SKUNK!

When young Nutley’s parents are attacked and killed by the violent members of an invading “inferior race” living nearby, Nutley must leave his babyhood home and learn to make it on his own.

Nutley is a red squirrel, while the assailants are gray squirrels—brutish, feisty and larger than red squirrels. His escape leads him to refuge in the town dump, where he encounters rats and sea gulls and negotiates several brushes with death while hanging on to his innate kindness. Violence and death, and the threat of both, are constants in the form of aggressive gray squirrels, nighttime predators and the swift-moving People Carriers (which roll over and crunch a gray squirrel or two at one point). Nutley longs to be Dangerous, as he characterizes the gray squirrels, yet at nearly every turn, another quality is demanded of him—something that one of his new friends calls courage. Conversational, nature-oriented sections titled “This you should know” address readers before each chapter. Monroe’s black-and-white drawings help to make this small world familiar, while Yolen charmingly creates a believable interior life for Nutley, complete with squirrel appetites and the worries of a youngster just a bit unready for survival.

Though there’s a suggestion the story is meant as fable, Nutley’s adventure stands alone as a satisfying animal fantasy. (Fiction. 8-11)

Amato, Mary Illus. by Jenkins, Ward Egmont US | (128 pp.) $14.99 | $4.99 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-60684-598-1 978-1-60684-599-8 paper Good Crooks, 3 (Mystery. 7-9)

GLITTER BEACH

Banks, Rosie Scholastic Paperbacks | (128 pp.) $4.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-53558-8 paper Secret Kingdom, 6 (Fantasy. 7-10)

ZOMBIFIED

Gallardo, Adam KTeen | (352 pp.) $9.95 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-61773-100-6 paper Zombie Apocalypse, 2 (Horror. 14 & up)

TEXAS HISTORY FOR KIDS

Lone Star Lives and Legends, with 21 Activities Gibson, Karen Bush Chicago Review Press | (144 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-61374-989-0 paper …For Kids (Nonfiction. 8-12)

SUPER SASQUATCH SHOWDOWN

Harper, Charise Mericle Illus. by Harper, Charise Mericle Christy Ottaviano/Holt | (176 pp.) $13.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8050-9622-4 Sasquatch and Aliens, 2 (Science fiction. 7-10) |

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SLEEPING BEAUTY DREAMS BIG

SPLAT THE CAT AND THE HOTSHOT

Holub, Joan Illus. by Williams, Suzanne Scholastic Paperbacks | (192 pp.) $5.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-78393-4 paper Grimmtastic Girls, 5 (Fantasy. 8-12)

Scotton, Rob Illus. by Scotton, Rob Harper/HarperCollins | (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-229416-6 978-0-06-229415-9 paper Splat the Cat (Picture book. 4-8)

THE HUMAN BODY

EDISON’S ALLEY

Jennings, Ken Illus. by Lowery, Mike Little Simon | (160 pp.) $18.99 | $7.99 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4814-0174-6 978-1-4814-0173-9 paper Ken Jennings’ Junior Genius Guides (Nonfiction. 8-10)

Shusterman, Neal; Elfman, Eric Disney Hyperion | (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4231-4806-7 Accelerati Trilogy, 2 (Science fiction. 10-14)

ICE PLANET ADVENTURE

SUNNY SWEET CAN SO GET LOST

Stilton, Geronimo Scholastic Paperbacks | (128 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-74619-9 paper Geronimo Stilton Spacemice, 3 (Adventure. 7-10)

Mann, Jennifer Ann Illus. by Christy, Jana Bloomsbury | (208 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-61963-505-0 Sunny Sweet, 3 (Fiction. 6-9)

A NIGHTMARE ON CLOWN STREET

Stine, R.L. Scholastic Paperbacks | (160 pp.) $6.99 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-62774-0 paper Goosebumps Most Wanted, 7 (Horror. 8-12)

LILA AND MYLA THE TWINS FAIRIES

Meadows, Daisy Scholastic Paperbacks | (192 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-70825-8 paper Rainbow Magic Special Edition (Fantasy. 7-10)

I SURVIVED THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, 1871

Tarshis, Lauren Scholastic | (112 pp.) $4.99 paper | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-65846-1 paper I Survived, 11 (Historical fiction. 7-10)

PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY FISH

O’Connor, Jane Illus. by Glasser, Robin Preiss Harper/HarperCollins | (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-226976-8 978-0-06-226975-1 paper Fancy Nancy (Early reader. 4-8)

THE SABOTAGE

Probst, Jeff; Tebbetts, Chris Puffin | (208 pp.) $6.99 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-14-751389-2 paper Stranded Shadow Island, 2 (Adventure. 9-12)

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indie THE TIME HUNTERS

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Ashmore, Carl Addlebury Press (238 pp.) $9.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Mar. 23, 2012 978-0-9568595-0-1

THE TIME HUNTERS by Carl Ashmore.............................................139 A DOG NAMED ZERO AND THE APPLE WITH NO NAME

by T.C. Bartlett.................................................................................. 140

The first volume in a YA series featuring siblings who help their time-traveling uncle locate ancient artifacts.

Thirteen-year-old Becky Mellor is spending the summer with her younger brother, Joe, and their reclusive inventor uncle, Percy Halifax. From their home in Manchester, England, the siblings head for Bowen Hall and what will probably be a dull vacation. Upon meeting Percy, however, the siblings find him charmingly eccentric; his Jacobean mansion comes with rare miniature horses and a brilliant archer named Will, who lives in a treehouse. Then, one night, Joe drags Becky out of bed to witness Percy catering to a sick sabertoothed tiger. This leads to the revelation that it’s possible to travel backward in time, which the Global Institute for Time Travel regularly does. After a jaunt to the Pleistocene epoch (in a 1963 Volkswagen camper van), Percy and the kids return to find Bowen Hall ransacked by the murderous Otto Kruger, who may well be hunting for the legendary Golden Fleece. In Percy’s possession are the mysterious Theseus Disc and a note from deceased friend and fellow time traveler Bernard Preston.

Following these leads, the heroic trio ventures to the island of Crete in the year 1634 B.C.—but are they prepared to face the myths handed down by history? Author Ashmore kicks off his series with a sustained burst of narrative ingenuity and wit. His characters are wonderful company, especially Becky, an endearing smart aleck who calls Percy’s housekeeper, Maria, a “human skittle.” The clever rules of Ashmore’s world will also hook readers; the Omega Effect, for example, governs certain events that time travelers can’t alter. Then there’s the problem of Otto Kruger, a Nazi who’s somehow gone forward in time. When danger threatens, Ashmore channels Doctor Who through madcap Percy: “Guns are for amateurs.” Best of all, the audience is treated to moments that are beautiful (Becky crying at the sight of woolly mammoths) and transcendent: “No matter when or where you are, the sea remains the same—wonderful, elegant, dangerous and vast.” From every angle, it’s an excellent work.

This series couldn’t ask for a more vibrant opening chapter.

BLUE SUN, YELLOW SKY by Jamie Jo Hoang................................ 144 THE LITTLE MOUSE SANTI by David Eugene Ray.........................152 Captain No Beard and the Aurora Borealis

by Carole P. Roman............................................................................. 153 CITIZEN SIM by Michael Solana.......................................................154

BLUE SUN, YELLOW SKY

Hoang, Jamie Jo Hey Jamie (236 pp.) $2.99 e-book Dec. 11, 2014

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creating a community of writers, on the page and in person A DOG NAMED ZERO AND THE APPLE WITH NO NAME

Remember, if you take your nose out of your book and your thumb off your Kindle, you can go out in the world and meet authors, not just read them. Reading, as we all know, doesn’t have to be a pastime of solitude. Sometimes, though, while we’re reviewing hundreds of books a month and interacting with authors primarily through email and phone, we lose sight of the fact that these are people; men and women are behind the words and voices, not book-writing machines. That’s why it’s always refreshing to meet indie authors and industry folks, to be reminded that writing and publishing—self-publishing in particular—are human endeavors. In late fall for each of the last three years, Kirkus Indie has manned a booth at the Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York, where authors and self-publishing service providers gather to see what’s new in the industry. (Note that Google still considers the Society of Parrot Breeders and Exhibitors to be the supreme SPBE.) On the floor and in the seminars, the level of passion remains the same as the last few years, while the number of options for self-published authors is robust and increasing—reviewing publications, editorial services, cover designers, publishing services, etc. Throughout the day, indie authors and industry folks came up to our booth to ask questions, get answers, talk books, talk reviews, gripe, praise—all the things people do. A feeling of community was there, and we were all happy to put faces to names. —R.L.

Bartlett, T.C. Over the Edge Studios

An entertaining, original take on counting from children’s book author and illustrator Bartlett (Tuba Lessons, 2009).

This counting lesson quirkily begins with “a Dog named Zero who lived in Hawaii for almost twenty years—but doesn’t live there anymore” and a nameless, “juicy red Apple” hanging tantalizingly high on a very tall tree. Little Zero, it seems, has a hankering for the yummy fruit, but how to reach it? On each succeeding page of this cumulative, giggle-inducing tale, assorted creatures (whose names happen to be One through Ten) arrive and offer to help Zero ascend high enough to pluck the apple by stacking themselves on top of one another. They raise the hungry dog higher and higher until success is in reach, and then, “out of the deep blue sky, a Bee named Charlie buzzed by...in the worst mood ever,” with predictable, tumble-down results. Never fear; the book ends happily for all (although the apple and bee might disagree); the apple, by unanimous consent, finally receives a very apt name. Bartlett’s humorous text, colorful pencil drawings and complementary book design propel this adventure forward with delightful silliness. The helpful, big-eyed creatures range from the ordinary (“A Chicken named One and a Pig named Two”) to the unexpected (“an Inch Worm named Ten...the strongest worm in the observable universe”).

Another plus is the book’s smart use of vocabulary and clever wordplay; for example, a cow named Five and a bull named Six ask Zero, “If you can’t count on us, then moo can you count on?”

Overall, this exercise in counting is a downright charmer.

Smart, witty text matched by fine design and illustrations make this kids’ book a tasty, offbeat treat.

SLEEPING IN TREES True Tales of Boyhood Adventure in the 1960s Brown, Keith Ballard Amazon Digital Services Jul. 31, 2014

A debut memoir about growing up amid the mosquitoes, intense heat and boredom of suburban South Miami in the 1960s.

In this work, Brown tells the story of his pre-adolescent years. First, he introduces his “crew” of fellow mischievous young boys, whose nicknames included Dork, Lobster, Junkle, Butler, Cricket and Ding. In more than 50 short, sometimes-hilarious stories, he describes the occasionally dangerous pranks they committed in their neighborhood near Biscayne Bay. Each chapter describes one of their many acts of malfeasance, such as blowing up a mailbox with an oversized, homemade bomb; leaving broken Coca-Cola bottles under the brand

Ryan Leahey is an Indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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new tires of Brown’s father’s Lincoln; and shooting at unsuspecting hermit crabs on the beach with high-powered slingshots. “[O]ur young lives were a twenty-four-hour assembly line of bumps, cuts and bruises,” Brown writes. But these acts, as he describes them, were never done with malice and were only the result of the severe boredom the boys endured as they rode their Sting-Ray bicycles around their neighborhood with little parental supervision. Other chapters tell of a stay at a disastrous summer camp in Tennessee where prunes were part of the required diet and of a time when the author took his friend’s father’s new MercedesBenz for a spin. Brown ends the book, however, on a somber note, as he returns to his old neighborhood after living with his family for a year in Seattle, only to find everything and everyone irrevocably changed. The most appealing aspect of this memoir is that it will surely rekindle some of its readers’ own memories of misguided childhood adventures. Brown keeps his short tales moving at a brisk pace, relating them in a casual narrative voice without contrived dialogue to slow the stories down. Throughout, his humorous chapter titles, such as “Monkey House,” “The Inconvenient Shrub,” and “The Lincoln Gets New Treads,” will likely keep readers guessing about the upcoming adventure.

An easygoing, funny and nostalgic debut.

is too moving to be formulaic. Amy’s struggle through her grief is touching, as is her feeling of being trapped. “Being demoted from independent working woman to dependent unemployed spouse can freak out a person” she says. “I want to get away from this life that has somehow become my life.” Her attempt to escape never stops being an absorbing adventure—not until the gratifying final moments, when we find out whether she succeeds.

A lovely ode to Paris, friendship, spontaneity and forks—both on the plate and in the road.

CHAD

Chapman, Gary Xlibris (188 pp.) $52.41 paper | $4.99 e-book Sep. 11, 2014 978-1-4990-1046-6 The inspiring true story of a beloved son taken too soon and the life he packed into his 33 years.

As devout Christians, the Chapmans don’t believe in coincidences but rather in miracles, many of which are detailed in this biographical tribute to Chad Chapman.

His father, Gary, notes the many similarities between his son, born just two days shy of Christmas, and Jesus’ own challenges and triumphs from birth to death as he searched for, and found, meaning in tragedy. From the moment of his birth, Chad symbolized the miracle of birth and a difficult lesson that “[c]hildren belong to God and are given as gifts to Parents.” Chad’s family soon perceived him as a vehicle for miracles, whether he was healed suddenly and unexpectedly from a malaria-driven coma or rescued from social and spiritual difficulties in high school. Skilled in construction and eventually a successful builder, Chad married Lauren, a woman he chased from Toronto all the way to England.

Together, they had two boys, Jonas and Keelan, and involved themselves extensively in the local church. But an intense stomachache in his mid-20s turned out to be cancer of the appendix that had gone undiagnosed and spread to more of his body. Burdened with a dire prognosis, Chad struggled to maintain his faith in God and a cheery disposition as life slipped away from him. He died at the same age that Jesus was crucified, and in this, and in many other ways, Chad’s father took comfort that his son carried out God’s wishes. Filled with photographs and memories, Chad’s story is one of determination, tenacity and faith. As told by his father, this account isn’t only of Chad’s accomplishments and strength of character throughout his short life; it’s also about the lessons he left behind for his family to learn. Chad’s work ethic, honesty and commitment to God inspired each of his siblings as well as his parents, and this is the legacy he left behind. By documenting Chad’s short but full life, his father allows for more than just sadness in the aftermath of his loss. Celebrating life and its challenges, the poignant collection of anecdotes and lessons paints a picture of an admirable and courageous family finding strength in the harshest of challenges.

A tragic yet uplifting account of a young man’s spiritual growth despite adversity.

Rules for the Perpetual Diet

Burns, K. S. R. Booktrope Editions (240 pp.) $15.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Dec. 10, 2014 978-1-62015-626-1 In Burns’ (The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl, 2009) novel, a perpetual dieter decides, after her best friend dies, to follow through on “The Plan” they had

made to go to Paris.

Recommendations for writing a can’t-put-down book: Make your protagonist funny, introspective or complicated—better yet, all three—as well as someone whom readers will immediately recognize and feel compassion for. That compassion has to hold up no matter how dubious the protagonist’s choices. For 29-year-old Amy Brodie, the decision to go to Paris is hardly questionable, but how she goes about it is. While her engineer husband is away on business, she sneaks away from their Phoenix home and boards a plane, intending to use cash she has stored away and to lie to her husband during daily phone calls. “Kat’s death, William’s wanting to start a family, the siren song of food—I traveled ten thousand miles...to get away from those things,” she says. Food, or the avoidance of it, controls every aspect of Amy’s life. She lives by a set of dieting rules. Rule No. 11: “abstention is easier than moderation”; rule No. 25: “feast your eyes first.” Of course, Paris isn’t exactly the best place to avoid carbs; neither is it a great place to avoid selfawareness. The Plan doesn’t go quite according to itself, and before long, Amy is trekking through Paris’ underground with a ragtag team of Frenchmen and sampling buttery croissants. Although Burns excels at the “rules” of good writing, her well-crafted novel |

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“...Crooke explores what it means to love but also what it means to endure—what life throws our way, as well as the choices we make.” from the chastened heart

THE CHASTENED HEART

Much of the book deals with information that applies to businesses in any locale—the basics of certification, establishing a project’s scope and timeline, budgeting for all necessary elements, etc.—and it does so in clear prose that is mostly free of excessive acronyms and specialist jargon. Davies goes beyond these basics through examples from his own work with telecommunications companies, public-private partnerships and nongovernmental organizations, providing concrete examples of specific issues project managers must address while working in Africa. The overall theme of the book’s Africa-specific advice is the importance of developing knowledge of the factors that determine success in a given location. For instance, a telecommunications project in Lagos, Nigeria, suffers substantial disruptions when managers fail to realize that the city’s gangs play a role in the construction industry; they should have been counted among the stakeholders whose needs were addressed.

Davies also addresses the challenges of project funding in African countries, as well as the inapplicability of standard risk management techniques. The book takes a pragmatic approach to the continent’s challenges, providing guidance for accommodating them without veering into indictments of corruption or prescriptions for reform. Readers will not find specifics—e.g., the names of officials who can get building permits approved in Nairobi or average cost overruns of website development projects in Mbabane—but they will finish the book with an understanding of how vital such local information is to the success of any major business or public undertaking in Africa. Most importantly, they will understand how to incorporate it into the crucial planning and evaluation phases.

A well-written handbook that provides an overview of management basics and may prove a useful tool for project managers preparing to work in African countries.

Crooke, Robert iUniverse (320 pp.) $19.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Oct. 23, 2014 978-1-4917-4988-3

A novel of hope, fiction, love and duty, set in a time of great uncertainty.

In 2007, Alice Winslow, a professor at a small liberal arts university, has done what few before her have been able to do: She’s published a deeply moving piece of literary fiction that’s also a New York Times best-seller. What should be a grand achievement for Alice, however, is quickly compromised when an accidental run-in with a political activist at a television studio thrusts Alice, quite literally, into the spotlight. She’s already in hot water with some people in her department, so this new association threatens to shatter the fragile life she’s built. Things aren’t much easier for Alice’s husband, Tom, a newspaperman who’s facing not only devastating cuts following a corporate buyout, but also the legacy of a decision he made long ago. Her son, Will, likewise struggles in a relationship. In fact, the whole social fabric of the town seems to be wearing thin, creating an atmosphere ready for a crisis. Crooke expertly weaves together the various plot strands, drawing on the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks and the economic collapse of 2008 to tell a richly detailed, poignantly observed story. At one point, for example, Alice reflects on the message of a novel that a colleague shared with her: “[L]ife is a tenuous balance of love and fate...hope is a fiction made plausible by our choices.” It’s an observation that sums up the overall tone of the novel: Crooke explores what it means to love but also what it means to endure—what life throws our way, as well as the choices we make. As Alice’s story unfolds in the public eye, readers witness one person’s struggle for clarity, compassion and the truth, but they also see the machinations of a society wrestling to come to terms with a new, unfamiliar world. It’s a struggle that transcends the page and has implications for contemporary society.

A human story about truth, beauty and the limitations of love.

TRUTH INSURRECTED The Saint Mary Project Douglas, Daniel P. Geminid Press, LLC (468 pp.) $19.95 paper | $5.99 e-book Oct. 16, 2014 978-0-9907371-0-0

THE AFRICAN PROJECT MANAGER Managing Projects Successfully in Africa

In Douglas’ debut sci-fi thriller, an anonymous source puts a former FBI agent on the trail of a government conspiracy involving aliens.

Private investigator and ex–federal agent William Harrison doesn’t know who’s sending him postcards signed “Echo Tango.”

But whoever it is, “ET” claims that there’s been a long government coverup, starting in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, where two UFOs crashed. Five military policemen who witnessed the event died soon afterward in supposed accidents. Now the same thing may be happening again, as a UFO sighting mere months ago seems to have resulted in similar mishaps. Harrison teams up with his old FBI partner, Art Holcomb, and Nick Ridley, a Las Vegas cop whose brother-in-law may have fallen prey to the coverup. Once they find ET, the small group plans to bring

Davies, H. ’Tomi CreateSpace (140 pp.) $70.00 paper | $45.00 e-book Sep. 19, 2014 978-1-4942-8534-0 A clear, concise overview of project management best practices, with a particular focus on what leads to project success in Africa.

For this guide to working effectively in Africa, Davies (co-author: Cracking the Success Code, 2012) draws on his years of experience managing technology projects on the continent.

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down the Saint Mary Project, a government initiative to keep aliens a secret by any means necessary. This energetic thriller leans much more toward espionage than sci-fi, but its sprinkling of fantastical elements makes it a standout. Readers aren’t privy to any information about the aliens that the heroes don’t have, and this uncertainty generates a high level of suspense. At the same time, there’s enough sci-fi material to keep fans engrossed; for example, the (human) villains are aware of four alien species, but a largely unknown fifth one has them on edge. There are also a couple of alien-human hybrids, and at least one of them is working for the baddies. A bit of romance between Harrison and Janice, the new intern at his PI office, pales in comparison to the camaraderie among the men, who band together like soldiers. Readers will cheer when one of them saves another and become anxious when one of them disappears. There’s a definite resolution to the story but nary a break in the action until the end.

A multigenre espionage tale that’s unquestionably entertaining.

never resorts to stereotypes. At times, the action can grow a bit repetitive, and the forward momentum sometimes stalls in favor of dialogue-heavy scenes. However, these scenes and character dynamics are so strong that it’s easy to forgive. Creating full-bodied characters is as important to Erickson as sci-fi philosophizing, which is crucial to the book’s success.

A truly original sci-fi series with strong ideas and even stronger characters.

MEDITERRANEAN JOURNEY A Young Woman’s Travels Through 1970s Europe Eyerman, Ann Dex Press (150 pp.) $14.95 paper | Aug. 12, 2014 978-0-9938679-0-3

A woman recounts her youthful years traveling and living in Europe.

Inspired by a shoebox of old letters she’d written to her mother, Eyerman (Women in the Office: Transitions in a Global Economy, 2000) recalls her footloose years during the 1970s and early ’80s in Europe and North Africa as a young woman escaping a childhood in Columbus, Ohio. She mainly went to places where she had some sort of personal connection, however tenuous, so that acquaintances could help her stay on the cheap. After a visit to Yugoslavia, she headed to Italy for three months and then moved on to France, where she found lodgings with the help of a friend’s sister and tried to get on the good side of a haughty French matriarch named Madame Gravois. From there, it was off to Spain, where a woman from Brooklyn unexpectedly appeared on her doorstep and moved in, then to Morocco, where Eyerman found a bare apartment on the Rue d’Amour above two women who turned out to be prostitutes. Soon, she departed that noisy, hot and hellish country: Young boys sifted through garbage for profit and tortured cats for fun, and she endured bad plumbing that “did not make for regular bowel movements,” especially after she contracted worms. Then it was on to Greece, including Olympia, “home of the gods and athlete’s foot” and misunderstandings and mix-ups with the locals, till finally she returned to Spain and bought a run-down, rat-infested house for a low price. Though little of import occurs in this tale, Eyerman’s eye for detail and remorseless sense of humor help her weave a funny story about the joys and complications of travel abroad.

The landscape, the characters who inhabit it, and the American expats and tourists who infest it all come alive under Eyerman’s acerbic, cynical but nevertheless forgiving eye. Like an entomologist preserving beetles in a bottle, she catalogs national quirks and peculiarities as she passes through each country and on to the next. For many readers, this pleasurable read will beat the expense and hassle of actually traveling.

A keen eye combines with an easy writing style in these chronicles of fish-out-of-water exploits and cultural misunderstandings, all seasoned with plenty of salty wit.

FUTURE PROMETHEUS II Revolution, Successions & Resurrections Erickson, J.M. Outskirts Press Inc. (482 pp.) $26.95 paper | $5.99 e-book May 29, 2014 978-1-4787-3477-2

Erickson’s (Future Prometheus, 2013) dystopian, militaristic sci-fi saga continues the adventures of a male lieutenant who awakens from cryogenic freezing in a world run by women.

In the first book (not recapped in this volume), scientist Lt. Jose Melendez found in 2019 that he was one of the few adult men on Earth who wasn’t struck by a strange pandemic that made most of them brutal and violent. Due to his rare status, he submitted himself for medical testing and, in the process, was accidentally frozen for 150 years, finally waking up in a corrupt matriarchal society—a country called Nemericana—that continued to kill and/or banish all male children despite the pandemic having been wiped out years ago. Events proceed in the same vein in the second set of novellas, which tracks, among other things, a series of military actions between the various sides; Melendez’s capture at the hands of Aurora, the head of a cybernetic army; and the relationships between various characters, such as Maj. Mare Sade Singh and her human son, Roberto, who, to her surprise and dismay, has impregnated a woman. Melendez had been rescued by a number of cybernetic women who had also been cast out due to their beginning to achieve sentience, and their revolution against the government continues with Melendez’s help. Erickson has crafted a fascinating series with complex characters and an incredibly rich premise. It’s rare and refreshing to find such female-driven drama—particularly in the context of militaristic sci-fi—that |

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“...Hoang’s characterization is so impressive that the novel reads like a memoir.” from blue sun, yellow sky

STONE BLOOD

the small coastal town of Manzanita, Oregon, he’s burdened by memories of war, a lost love and the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church, taking to regular bouts of drinking and occasional periods of despair—“I’m good for nothing but bein’ a punchin’ bag.” Nevertheless, though his parish is small, he does all he can for the community. For instance, after confronting a man guilty of beating his family, Theo is physically beaten himself; he gets the man sentenced to jail but hardly realizes the difficulty he is sowing. In jail, the man strikes up a friendship with a seedy, pseudo-religious figure named Genghis. After taking the man under his wing, Genghis hatches a plot that, he imagines, will be too much for Theo to handle. Can Theo stop such a diabolical figure while confronting the many demons of his own? While creating a truly burdened figure, the novel is heavy on the many troubles in Theo’s past, not the least of which involves trying to save orphans in Korea: “The faces of the orphans passed through me again; an eternal, far-reaching shadow.” Likewise, Genghis’ despicable past proves to be one of morbid interest.

Many characters in between, however, often fall to stereotypes. From trusty quarterback-turned-sheriff Bud to the allwise Native American Solomon (“Pictures of [Solomon] in his headdress and suede clothing were proud and striking—it was another world”), the supporting characters can be unimaginative. Readers intrigued by a rugged Oregon town and its warrior priest may not mind as Theo confronts his many enemies and confides in his many friends.

A worthwhile read for those interested in finding out how a man with a mind full of bad memories can serve both God and man in his quest for redemption.

Green, R.M. Big Buddy Publishing (288 pp.) $34.95 | $16.00 paper | $2.99 e-book Aug. 18, 2014 978-1-941877-01-2 Green’s debut novel is a peculiar meditation on the natures of art and creation, well-paced with a singular character at its center.

The oddness of Green’s tale is immediate and at first a little disorienting. “In the beginning there was nothing. Then there was me,” says narrator Tilman Burbeck. “I appeared fully formed and whining, six years old and probably sick.” In the first dozen pages, he reveals his father is a statue, his mother having been raped at the Berlin Museum of Fine Art by a sculpture of the artist Tilman Riemenschneider, and his blood is made of stone. It’s tough to get a bead on Burbeck and whether, now looking back on his life as a 70-yearold, he means the things he’s saying metaphorically or literally.

That confusion lingers, but it soon becomes part of the book’s charm as it establishes the logic of its world. Burbeck left behind a family that doesn’t quite understand him to navigate his way through art school, make friends, fall in love and deal with his muse, which in quiet moments appears to him as a kind of demon: “I will find her again. My Muse said I will. It may be half demon and speak in half-truths, but my Muse doesn’t lie.

I’ll just have to be patient.” The first woman he devoted himself to was Lila Thornton, whom he met on a trip to Europe searching for his father. In his latter days, he says he is happily married to a different woman, tipping the fact that his relationship with Thornton, which spans the bulk of the book, ended at some point. Burbeck is torn between his devotion to his art and to other people, which leads to long passages of philosophical musing that threaten to kill momentum but don’t. This is a novel of search and discovery, the kind of thing that could easily be fatally precious. Yet Green’s characters are compelling, and the plot marches along subtly.

A well-crafted story hiding under its more esoteric elements.

BLUE SUN, YELLOW SKY Hoang, Jamie Jo Hey Jamie (236 pp.) $2.99 e-book | Dec. 11, 2014

In Hoang’s assured debut, a young artist makes peace with a crushing diagnosis and takes a stab at reinvention.

What would you do if your very identity were about to be erased? That’s the fundamental question Aubrey Johnson must answer—quickly. At the novel’s outset, the young, talented painter is handed a damning diagnosis: retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that will blind her in six to eight weeks. As Aubrey tries to wrap her head around her condition, she runs into an old friend, Jeff Anderson. Jeff and Aubs had been best friends in high school before life took them on separate paths. Now Jeff is back, suggesting Aubrey accompany him on a trip around the world. Aubrey grabs at the chance to pack as many life-altering experiences as she can in a few weeks, while Jeff in turn is seeking some clarity in his own personal life. The novel’s central premise—a gifted painter losing her vision—might seem too neat a hook on which to hang a story, yet Hoang successfully prevents the narrative from spiraling into cliché. Insights that Aubrey slowly gathers— “Maybe the question you should be asking yourself is why you

RETURN TO SENDER

Halleck, Mindy Booktrope Editions (392 pp.) $20.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Oct. 23, 2014 978-1-62015-439-7 A novel about a rough-and-tumble priest and his quest for justice, from debut author Halleck.

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feel like what you have isn’t enough”—sometimes come across as trite life lessons, but they are more than made up for with flashes of inspired writing. Aubrey narrates the story, which has touches of romance, in the first person, and Hoang’s characterization is so impressive that the novel reads like a memoir.

Readers see the world (China, India, Jordan, Israel, Brazil, Peru) through Aubrey’s artistic point of view, the result of which is often refreshing. She describes the Dead Sea, for example, as a place with “a lack of visual noise.” Despite having been dealt a cruel hand, Aubrey still has a lot going for her, including caring friends and a career that blossomed early. Her imagination first flourished after a visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, known for its dark, somber modern art. In contrast—and reassuringly—Aubrey’s artistic vision continues to shine plenty of light even as the natural world around her slowly fades to black.

A touching exploration of identity and reinvention painted with gentle yet precise brush strokes.

gets repetitive: travel, yearn for the wrong person, repeat. Eventually, her “thoughts zeroed in on one thing—a baby.” But multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization failed. She then found some pleasure through painting and mindfulness meditation. Ultimately, she says the “love that I was always seeking had to be found in me first. It was never out there.”

An intimate, funny, painfully perceptive self-portrait that’s bloody good, mate.

SHENANDOAH Daughter of the Stars

Johnson, Nancy eFrog Press (146 pp.) $9.95 paper | $3.99 e-book | May 13, 2014 978-0-9894356-4-2 In this book for young readers, three children grow up in a hurry as the U.S. Civil War rages.

Hannah, 13, lives on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She, her younger brother, Willy, and their friend Charlie, who is sweet on Hannah, have always spent their time helping on their farms and playing cards with Crazy, a hermit who lives in a nearby cave.

But it’s the middle of the Civil War, the effects of which everyone is feeling. Charlie’s older brother died at Gettysburg, his father is an invalid thanks to war wounds, and Charlie is a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, yearning to get into the fight.

Now, the Yankee Army is moving through Virginia, burning farms as they go, and though Hannah’s family is against slavery, they know the federal troops will not spare their farm. Hannah finds herself left behind with her parents as Willy joins Mosby’s raiders and Charlie and his fellow cadets are conscripted into the Confederate army under Gen. John Breckinridge. Hannah’s formerly idyllic country childhood is shattered, and now her courage and ability to survive are tested as the ravages of war arrive on her doorstep. In this, her third book for young people about the Civil War, author Johnson shows war from an adolescent’s point of view. The emotional development comes through for engaging and believable characters as they experience not just war, but also the normal changes that children experience during their teenage years. The writing flows well, with enough detail to be informative without seeming didactic.

There’s one minor bump, however, when Willy runs off, with no mention of whether his parents were worried, which seems odd.

But overall, the story is a convincing one, presenting the realities of a war zone well, though with a light touch appropriate for a young audience.

A well-told story of coming of age in war-torn Virginia.

Need Big Love Need It Now

Jackson, Sharley CreateSpace (216 pp.) $16.27 paper | $4.49 e-book Oct. 10, 2014 978-1-5027-3153-1 In this lively, candid memoir, an avid traveler and 30-something Aussie at first wants to find a man to love, later a woman instead, but ultimately wants to

discover herself.

In her debut book, blogger Jackson appears to love drama, which is good, because her life is rich in it. She is most entertaining as she describes her many escapades, desires and disappointments. As a young girl, she wanted a love that was “silk and sky and sophisticated kindness,” but the Australian singer/social worker wasn’t finding it in her homeland. So the self-described “cheeky little red headed chubster” set her “love compass” toward the Americas for what she hoped would be a five-month passionate sabbatical. She flew from Brisbane to LA before arriving “smack bang in the middle of Brooklyn,” where she lived for two weeks on a Home Stay program as she explored “a haughtily glamorous Manhattan.” When she later joined a travel group that went to various must-see destinations, Jackson had a series of unrequited crushes on her tour guides—first the male ones, then on “girl-next door” Hannah. Jackson, who previously had relations with guys, struggled with her feelings for Hannah and with the idea of “coming out.” Hannah, however, was straight, so nothing ensued. Once home in Australia, Jackson quickly felt the need to travel again, this time to Asia. On that trip, she became besotted with a German traveler named Astrid. A friend told Jackson that her personal slogan should be “NEED BIG LOVE, NEED IT NOW!” and she desperately wanted that love with Astrid, who failed to reciprocate because, like Hannah, she too was straight. Jackson continued traveling to faraway places and having unsuccessful love relationships. Like her life, the memoir |

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Interviews & Profiles

Paul Carter

If small-town life seems idyllic in the doctor’s memoir, that’s because it is

By Poornima Apte daughter. The change was not enough to put the tragedy in the rearview mirror; Carter’s marriage dissolved in short order. Life in Melbourne ran on autopilot until a sign Carter saw outside a “rundown weatherboard church” really hit home: “Unless you change direction,” it said, “you will end up where you are going.” Taking that message to heart, Carter decided it was time for a reboot. A move to the country seemed like the perfect prescription. Enter Woongarra, a rural community just an hour’s drive from Melbourne, where Carter decided to make a new home.

It’s a decision he has never regretted.

After decades of practice in a town where everybody knows your name, Carter decided to write about his experiences as a rural general practitioner.

He says that while the memoir is “about real people with real conditions,” names and timelines have been changed. “We went to a lot of trouble to make sure that this didn’t turn into an exercise where people got upset. It’s about having fun, not upsetting people,” Carter says, adding that when he published the sequel, Further Tales of a Country Doctor, many of his patients requested that he use their real names. “In the first book, everyone was a little nervous about where this was going. Then when they realized it’s a nice thing to do, everyone got a lot more confident, saying ‘OK, if there’s a story about me in the second book, I’ll just be who I am.’ ” Carter decided to self-publish as a way of making his work more readily accessible to the public. His publisher, Xlibris, priced the book reasonably, he says, and promoted it heavily through social media. On the downside, “you get presented with a large number of people in slightly different roles, and there’s a confusion of names, and not everybody understands boundaries,” Carter points out, adding that much of

After 28 years practicing medicine in Australia’s backcountry, it’s safe to say that Dr. Paul Carter has pretty much seen it all. Yet each day is studded with memorable moments. Carter remembers treating a 4-yearold boy who had been brought in because of severe constipation. A week later, on a follow-up visit, when Carter was asking the boy’s mother about his progress, he felt a tug at his shirt sleeve. “The child interrupted, looked at me with large brown eyes and said, ‘Doctor Carter, I have never seen so much shit in all my life.’ So I guess the treatment worked,” Carter says. Carter’s wry sense of humor is on full display in his debut memoir, Tales of a Country Doctor, which is peppered with similar anecdotes.

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named Isobel in Tales of a Country Doctor—she’s both a patient and a friend—affected him deeply, he says.

“She was unbelievably crippled but never once uttered a negative thought or complaint. I felt ashamed for grumbling about something minor. I learned hugely from her,” he says. Another gratifying experience? Performing a prenatal check on a woman whom he had delivered as a baby years ago. “That kind of a thing really makes it all come full circle,” Carter says.

Poornima Apte is a Boston-based freelance writer and editor and can be found at wordcumulus.wordpress.com.

Tales of a Country Doctor received a starred review in the Sept. 1, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

TALES OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR CARTER

this can be eliminated if just one or two people had their fingers in the pie.

Carter acknowledges that the book makes smalltown life seem a little too idyllic. In Further Tales, he displays more courage writing about the town, “warts and all.” Nevertheless, Carter is quick to defend Woongarra. “I have to say that the community is almost overwhelmingly idyllic; it’s about an hour’s drive away from Melbourne, it’s self-contained without being too isolated, and it’s where everybody likes to work hard and to help everybody else, so to me, I have written about a community as I have found it,” Carter says. “I think communities such as this one are under threat because they’re less self-contained than they were. I am worried that small rural communities will lose their special nature, and I wanted to record that before it was lost.”

Since attracting qualified doctors to the countryside is a problem, Carter serves as a stellar role model for younger doctors to emulate. He has been asked to lecture medical undergraduates “because they want people like myself who are very passionate about doing primary care to attract young doctors to follow in our footsteps,” he says. “I am hoping that my books winter night, on my way to have dinner with friends, might be One justcoldone step in that journey,” Carter adds.

I got stuck in traffic. There had been an accident at the lights ahead.

As I sat there in the dark and the of wet, the waitingmemoir for One of the many striking aspects is the mess to be cleared, I glanced across the road. There on a just how many house calls Carter has made.

“The innoticeboard outside a rundown weatherboard church was a message ‘Unless you change directionhe you says. will end“You up wheresee peosight it gives you is invaluable,” you are going’. ‘It’s a sign,’ I said, ‘Ha ha!’ But I had already ple as people rather than just as patients in your clintaken the message to heart. ic. It givesPaulyou a much more holistic approach, and Carter was a successful doctor with a thriving practice that helpsinenormously clinical Melbourne but his in personal life had management.” reached a crossroads and the buzz of the city had turned to a grey and grimy Shortlydrudge. after his first book was published, Carter The answer to his problems he decided, was to move to the countryaccosted to a house on by a hillaoverlooking lake.Woongarra Tales remembers being womana in of A Country Doctor are Paul’s stories of adjusting to life in a who said she had a bone to pick with him. “She said small town, and how he came to meet his best mate Hardy, Compelling, and surprising, ‘My sistertheisMunsterlander. in your book butdelightful I’m not,’ ” Carter rethese charming stories of life, loss and healing in a country members.town When the doctor promised he would make will transport you and renew your faith in humanity. it up by featuring her in the second volume, she was only somewhat pacified. “Yeah, OK,” she grumbled, “but my sister will always have been in the first one.”

Carter admits that life as a doctor in a small town can be intrusive at times, but it doesn’t bother him anymore. “It is very much like living in a fishbowl, and your every movement is well-known. That does take some getting used to,” he says. “When my wife first moved up here she found that quite disconcerting, but you just learn that 99 percent of it is pretty harmless.”

Yet it is in this small town that Carter has learned many valuable life lessons. Featuring a teenager

Tales of a Country Doctor Carter, Paul Xlibris (256 pp.) $14.95 | Apr. 14, 2014 978-1-499-00012-2 |

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“Mincer and Kramer...present a likable cast of lawyers and an amusing group of interesting (and frequently crazy) clients.” from the brockhurst file

Lelani and the Plastic Kingdom

for college, Myra wakes up to her other child Susan’s screams of “Get him off!” Derek says he was comforting the 14-year-old during her nightmare, yet he also oddly remarks how the girl looked “so beautiful, laying there in the moonlight.” Myra asks Derek to leave and brings in the police and a therapist. The latter concludes that Susan is exhibiting characteristics of having been sexually abused, even if there’s no evidence of penetration.

Derek then disappears, and the novel jumps 12 years. Susan, now married to a man met in group therapy, has a new baby. Myra has turned her animal illustrations into a successful cartooning career. Then Susan thinks she’s spotted Derek’s car, and Myra senses her house was broken into. Peter, who never believed his father was an abuser, tells Myra that Derek created a new life in a nearby California town. Derek, who still protests his innocence, tells Myra that he retrieved his birth certificate from her house to deal with his family’s legal matters. Informed that Derek’s stoic, also cheated-upon mother, Eleanor, is dying, Myra, now in a relationship with policeman Randy Larson, agrees to a family reunion at Derek’s family home, where Susan recovers a more complete memory of her abuse, prompting the unfolding of a series of tragic yet revelatory events. Kirscht (The Inheritors, 2012, etc.), a retired university lecturer, brings grace and flair to this third effort. She quickly establishes Myra, a Minnesota native who has always been a bit insecure in the rather enigmatic Derek’s world, as a sympathetic heroine who must now face up to what she may have been enabling in her marriage. Kirscht also plants just enough seeds in her smooth-flowing narrative so that its rather surprising finale doesn’t seem too far out in left field.

Well-wrought female empowerment tale with a dramatic twist ending.

Johnston, Robb N. Self (48 pp.) $18.95 | Sep. 25, 2014 978-1-935356-41-7

In Johnston’s (The Woodcutter and the Most Beautiful Tree, 2011) latest environmentally conscious tale, a young girl is inspired to become an activist after visiting an island made of plastic refuse.

Lelani is a carefree child who spends her days paddleboarding in the bright ocean. One day, she finds a message in a plastic bottle summoning her to visit an island called New Flotsam.

Intrigued, she ventures out on her paddleboard to the mysterious locale. After a long journey, she finds herself on “[a]n entire continent made of waste from all the other continents.” There, she meets Big Sam, a boy who presides as emperor of the wasteland.

He shows Lelani animals tangled in plastic and a forest made of plastic straws. Johnston’s pastel illustrations sensitively depict the beautiful natural world as it’s threatened by the growing trash problem. Like Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, Big Sam explains to Lelani that human pollution is destroying the wildlife. Big Sam explains the rapid growth of the island, thanks to other places’ waste: “Decisions made in the Fast Lands, no matter how tiny and small, can have a big effect in New Flotsam, which is why I have answered the call.” Through Big Sam’s words, Johnston conveys his message in a clear manner that young readers will fully comprehend. Also, the sadness of the animals tangled in the garbage is likely to evoke readers’ sympathy. Big Sam implores Lelani to return to the mainland as an ambassador of change. She takes her mission to heart, creating reusable alternatives to plastic products for her friends and family, and she passionately educates everyone around her.

Her impassioned approach is likely to inspire children to action, and the measures she takes are entirely accessible for young readers. Overall, this book is highly recommended for educators or caregivers looking for a way to educate children and inspire them to be environmentally conscientious.

A sensitive, thoughtful book that effectively conveys the impact each person has on the environment.

THE BROCKHURST FILE A Mat Ladies Novel

Kramer, Lynne Adair; Mincer, Jane Diloff Wellsmith All’s fair in love and war in Kramer and Mincer’s witty new novel.

Lucy Bennett is a tough, no-nonsense divorce lawyer. Her firm, Bennett & Birnbaum, is filled with smart and tenacious women who go the extra mile for their clients, even the high-maintenance ones. And Skippy Brockhurst, a wealthy divorcée, is about as demanding as they come. Lucy represented Skippy in her divorce from Everett Brockhurst, a rich yet troubled playboy. This time around, Skippy fears their young son, Beau, is in danger. Her former lover Gary believes Beau may be his and demands a DNA test to confirm his suspicions. Lucy reluctantly wades into the complicated lives and politics of the affluent Brockhurst family once more, assuring Skippy that they’ll protect Beau from any outside threats. Yet a sudden accident changes the nature of the custody battle, and Lucy finds herself representing the charming and sincere Gary in a messy family dispute. The powerful Brockhursts stand behind Everett despite his clear incompetence as a father. Skippy’s sister Georgina has troubles of her own at

HOME FIRES

Kirscht, Judith New Libri Press (264 pp.) $16.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Dec. 17, 2013 978-1-61469-043-6 In this women’s fiction/thriller novel, Myra Benning contends with a cheating husband who may also have sexually abused their teen daughter.

Myra’s professor husband, Derek, has just confirmed her suspicions that he’s been having affairs with his students. In this tense environment, just after son Peter leaves 148

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home. The situation is made more complicated by a meddling housekeeper and the scores of other challenging clients Bennett & Birnbaum must manage in between dealings with the Brockhurst family. Mincer and Kramer, who clearly know the ins and outs of matrimonial and family law, present a likable cast of lawyers and an amusing group of interesting (and frequently crazy) clients. Lucy comes across as genuine, honest and determined, the type of idealized lawyer that often appears in the world of fiction. She adeptly handles her clients and colleagues at work, though the demands in her professional life present a challenge to maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Those juggling career and family can relate to the missed lunches, last-minute shopping trips and mad dashes to make tipoff at a youth basketball game. Kramer and Mincer’s narrative of money, power and politics feels ripped from the headlines, leading readers down a twisty plot path that keeps everyone guessing until the very end.

Engaging characters and snappy dialogue make for a fun, amusing day in court.

and Holland the next weekend. Lewis is no mere cultural crank, however, and he offers some excellent tips on “zapping” the energy drainers in our lives. Limit TV. Journal. Find beauty in creativity. And limit media oversaturation if you want to be truly wise, he writes. It’s a good reminder for a tech-addicted world.

Sage advice for creative souls and those who long to be.

UNBELIEVABLE ME A 5-Step Program for Shifting to a Powerful Mindset & Experiencing True Success in All Areas of Life Lowell, David W.; Lola, Gertrud L. Practical Manifestations, LLC (338 pp.)

Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-9908057-0-0

Debut authors Lowell and Lola’s thoroughly researched, compelling selfhelp work focuses on undoing “fixed mindset thinking.”

From Isaac Newton to the Nazis to the unbounded potential of the 21st century, this hybrid of self-help guide and historical document explores the concept of the “fixed mindset”—the cultural, intellectual and emotional forces that encourage people to limit themselves from growing in their accomplishments, abilities and self-esteem. Lowell and Lola frame two camps: those who assume a fixed mindset approach toward life and whose intelligence and abilities are therefore inherently unchangeable and those who embrace the notion of personal growth. The authors explain: “Instead of accepting difficult challenges, learning from their failures, and sometimes being pleasantly surprised when they succeed, people with the fixed mindset only undertake challenges at which they are sure they will be successful. By doing so, they continuously confirm the level of ability they believe they have, and further reinforce their beliefs about their lack of talent.” The book elegantly transitions from scientifically documented studies and historical anecdotes to exercises designed to help participants understand the psychological blockages they carry within themselves.

The penultimate section, a workbook, includes prompts that encourage readers to write down ideas that will help them break through their self-imposed barriers. The clearly written text is engaging both as a self-help guide and as a striking compendium of facts. Nazi Germany, for example, began involuntarily sterilizing people only after finding precedent in American practices of the period. The unusual perspectives on geniuses such as Einstein, Newton and others provide a welcome change from typical portraits.

An inventive, entertaining mix of history, research and self-help.

BREAK FREE To Reboot With Confidence, Playfulness and Adaptibility Lewis, Robert E. CreateSpace (168 pp.) $15.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 4, 2014 978-1-4996-2435-9

Society has conspired to conform us to its image, and we need to fight back to reclaim our individuality, according to this well-reasoned cultural critique and self-help book.

Lewis comes out of the gate swinging and ready to rumble with any reader who doesn’t agree that many of us need to be freed from our “conforming and cultural conditioning.” A former university art professor and department chairman at the University of Memphis, he includes schools, organizations and families among those he says have conspired to make us buy into their beliefs and act like everyone else. The remedy? In order to regain independence and a sense of playfulness, you must “force quit, demagnetize yourself and reboot to have fresh awareness,” he writes. As he diagnoses society’s ills, Lewis argues that TV, the Web and video games have become the world for many people. “Lost is wonder and the curiosity to independently explore, discover and objectify an experience within the real-time specificity of place and occasion,” he writes in academic, peopleless prose. Fortunately, he gets his venting out of the way quickly and begins to sound much more human. The “hyper-reality” of the information age is frequently a target for Lewis, who argues that instead of doing things, we now watch things. On a trip to Rome, he stayed at a hostel, where two fellow travelers made an impression on him. One was a young woman whose glowing cellphone screen wakened him at 3:30 a.m. as she texted someone back home. The other was a young Indian man who aimed to speed-travel Europe, checking off the popular sites of Rome in a day and planning to conquer Belgium, Luxembourg |

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“MacDonald...gives an unflinching portrait of dealing with a debilitating chronic illness...especially the brutal, exhausting, undignified truths of nursing.” from montpelier tomorrow

SONG OF THE WILD A Story about a Coyote Pup and a Young Girl

Kindergarten teacher Colleen Gallagher, 53, is glad to help out when her daughter Sandy’s husband, Tony, gets a fatal diagnosis: ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. With a newborn, a toddler, a high-pressure job and Tony’s medical procedures to manage, Sandy needs all the help she can get. Colleen is all too familiar with being a young widow left to raise small children on her own; her husband died in a car accident when Sandy was 5.

Though Tony’s family and friends start out with optimism and good intentions, tempers are soon frayed and patience worn out by the constant demands of caretaking. Sandy is often angry and resentful; Colleen feels like a slave. In the end, the survivors will have to go on with their lives. MacDonald (co-author: The Quiet Indoor Revolution, 1992) gives an unflinching portrait of dealing with a debilitating chronic illness: the expense, the logistics, the red tape, and especially the brutal, exhausting, undignified truths of nursing: “None of the caregivers’ manuals mentioned the orange shit that oozed out Tony’s rectum only half-way so that I had to dig out the rest as I wiped his butt.” The characters have a maddening way of making things more difficult for themselves; despite Tony’s wealthy parents, all the household DIY chores—scraping plaster, sewing drapes, cleaning gutters—for some reason fall to Colleen. But it’s really health care that doesn’t make sense. Tony’s doctor recommends a life-prolonging feeding tube. Why? “Because doctors love technology.

Also, she doesn’t have to live here,” a nurse explains. Commenting on Tony’s feeding chair, she continues, “When I started in this profession, you never would have seen equipment like that in a home. It doesn’t belong here.” MacDonald saves her debut novel from being too didactic by her well-rounded characters and Colleen’s complex, thoughtful responses to the untenable situation.

An affecting, deeply honest novel; at the same time, a lacerating indictment of our modern health care system.

MacAfee, M.A. Manuscript

A young coyote tries to find his place in the world and develop his unique howling ability in the fourth children’s tale from MacAfee, the mother/daughter writing team.

Romer is a young male coyote who wants to be a dog, and his dream apparently comes true when he’s adopted

by Belinda, a girl whose family has just moved to the area.

Friendless, she doesn’t know the difference between dogs and coyotes. Initially, Romer is happy as a dog with Belinda and her family, but as he matures, he begins to have feelings of aggressiveness and disobedience he can’t control. Meanwhile, his coyote pack is being hunted by panicky humans who feel threatened by them. Under siege, the coyotes must decide whether to stay or go—a decision that is complicated by the death of the pack’s aged leader (Romer’s father, the Chief) and the resulting leadership vacuum. Romer runs away while he ponders things, and Belinda goes looking for him and gets lost. The authors have crafted a delightful yet meaningful story about needing to belong and not denying who you are—things to which kids in middle grades can surely relate. The writers display impressive knowledge of a coyote’s behavior, especially its song, but wisely don’t let it dominate the story; instead, they sprinkle bits of information throughout the book: “The average coyote can travel forty miles a day. In two days, your average coy could be out of this territory, and beyond the foothills. In five to six days, he could be in the high country.” The novel also contains an environmental message about man’s destruction of Earth as well as some fascinating Native American lore about how they viewed the coyote. Elsewhere, it sparkles with sly humor, as when the coyotes—who speak in English to each other—refer to their information source as the Coyote News Network. Maybe an old dog can’t learn new tricks, but in the authors’ capable hands, a young coyote certainly can.

Underneath this gentle tale is the powerful message of staying true to yourself.

Lionheart The Diaries of Richard I Manson, Chris—Ed. Spiffing Covers (408 pp.) $14.49 paper | $3.99 e-book Oct. 2, 2014 978-1-910256-56-5

A legendary medieval warrior king fights, jousts, plots, wallows in kinky sex and has his heart broken in this entertaining book.

Debut author Manson insists that he’s edited and translated (from the Latin) these long-lost 12th-century diaries of Richard, King of England, Duke of Normandy, as dictated to Richard’s amanuensis, the monk Armande. If true, they will greatly revise humanity’s understanding of medieval intellectual history: Richard, for example, talks about being “paranoid”; divines the germ theory of disease—ascribing “influenza” to a “bug”—without benefit of microscopes; and uses the phrase “some ten minutes later” centuries before clocks with minute hands had been invented. Historians will also thank the good monk for having

Montpelier Tomorrow

MacDonald, Marylee All Things That Matter Press (318 pp.) $18.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Aug. 21, 2014 978-0-9907158-1-8 After a woman’s son-in-law contracts amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, she tries to help the family, but the burdens of caregiving take her relationships to the breaking point.

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improbably recorded Richard’s many bedroom conquests in such lascivious detail (“She took her hand away, brought it to her mouth and licked all the way round the forefinger and middle finger before resuming the rubbing”). That said, these episodic diaries mainly tell a well-attested, engaging story of family dysfunction on an epic scale. Richard’s tyrannical father, Henry II, faces multiple revolts from his redoubtable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and three headstrong sons, resulting in a decadeslong maelstrom of Oedipal tensions and sibling rivalry, acted out on the battlefield. Later, the story follows Richard’s crusade to the Holy Land, where the Saracens are a minor nuisance compared to his ally, King Phillip of France—the very embodiment of arrogance, treachery and cowardice. Along the way, Richard turns from a hard-bitten rake to a sappy swain over Princess Berengaria of Navarre, the last virgin in Christendom; their blissful marriage is replete with pagan couplings before it’s darkened by ghastly villainy. Manson’s depiction of this melodrama expertly conveys the mix of haughty manners, gross squalor, brute force and subtle scheming that modern readers love about the Middle Ages. Apart from the dialogue and the sex, the period details, particularly of warfare and court life, are rich and well-observed.

Richard’s voice may sometimes sound anachronistic, but he relates his saga in energetic prose in a book with brisk pacing, vivid characters and nuanced psychology.

A somewhat soapy but vigorous and engrossing view of a historical hero.

predators, as prisoner deaths at the institution mysteriously increase. Despite the dangers, Priddy still manages to educate himself and compare notes with other inmates, such as Champ Burnett, an intimidating prisoner he tutors in math in exchange for protection inside the jailhouse. Middleton, a prisoner whose own incarceration has produced college degrees, textbooks, a memoir and a self-help book, crafts an atmospheric, semiautobiographical tale. In it, he effectively captures the prison experience, complete with panicked lockdowns, riots, bittersweet visitations from friends and family, and the unquenchable passion of becoming a self-made intellectual while living life permanently behind bars. Overall, it’s a story about the power of positive thinking and hard work, and Priddy’s story shines with hopefulness throughout.

A searingly honest novel of determination and redemption that’s also an emotionally rewarding reading experience.

THE BELTWAY BEAST How Two Tribes in D.C. Are Stealing from Our Children, Violating Our Privacy and Destroying the Middle Class Moon, Munir Rare Bird Books (280 pp.) $15.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-940207-48-3

EUREKA MAN

A political treatise that laments how America’s democracy inadequately represents its citizens and calls for the creation of a third party.

In his debut effort, Moon catalogs a host of familiar ailments that he believes currently infect the body politic, including corruption, fiscal irresponsibility, a chronically underperforming educational system, monumental debt and partisan stalemates. However, he unconventionally identifies the principal political challenge of our time as the disenfranchisement of citizens, particularly neglected minorities. He marshals impressive statistical evidence in favor of his thesis that government aggrandizement has come at the expense of voter power. His argument’s seductiveness is partially a function of his consistent bipartisanship. For example, it’s not often that one finds a book that argues for increased teacher compensation while also sharply criticizing public teachers’ unions or that advocates health care reform by competitively pitting private and public programs against each other. The argument’s scope is also dizzyingly wide-ranging, addressing such topics as the government’s response to cyberthreats and a plan for reforming the structure of the United Nations. Sometimes Moon issues overzealous, sweeping generalizations; at one point, for example, he declaims that “[l]obbyists are synonymous with corporations” and then contradicts himself, saying that they “represent labor unions, trade groups, foreign governments, and nonprofits, among others.” His vision for a third party, “The People’s Party of America,” is also a touch quixotic, as it “envisions a nation where every person has access to education, affordable

Middleton, Patrick CreateSpace (270 pp.) $11.50 paper | $3.99 e-book Oct. 15, 2014 978-1-4942-2420-2 A debut novel about a decade in the life of an incarcerated man who attempts to vindicate himself through higher education and enlightenment.

Oliver Priddy, as the story opens, is a teenager sentenced to do time in a Pennsylvania boys’ reform school for assaulting his abusive stepfather and committing a robbery. When he becomes the focus of school bully Jimmy Six’s bloody violence, he exacts vengeance by killing Jimmy with a baseball bat—which lands him in Riverview Penitentiary in 1977 to serve a life sentence for murder, with no possibility of parole. But although Middleton keeps his protagonist firmly under lock and key, he also spins Priddy’s seemingly hopeless situation into a tale of strength and perseverance, revealing Priddy’s abusive family history along the way. The inmate radically changes his self-destructive course of conduct after some much-needed introspection and after receiving visits from his brother, his biological father, and his new love, Penelope. He also gets kind words from his fellow inmate Early Greer, who counsels him to “[g]o to school, learn a trade.” He busies himself in the ward’s education department, under the guidance of a volunteer professor. He also faces challenges from sexual |

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Sarah in the City of Moon

healthcare, and job opportunities; poverty is eradicated and the tax system is fair for all; and our elected leaders term themselves out.” Still, armed with an MBA, Moon presents a pragmatic business plan for establishing this party and reflects with estimable acuity on the history of third-party success in the United States. For a self-professed “average American,” he offers a measured, serious diagnosis of today’s political difficulties, coupled with a wealth of provocative potential solutions.

An engaging critique that sees the two-party system as the source of the United States’ political travails.

Qutob, Fida Fayez; Qutob, Dalia Silverwood Books (28 pp.) $14.49 paper | Nov. 30, 2014 978-1-78132-272-7

A picture-book friendship between two little girls provides a lesson in global peace and understanding.

Sarah, 5, accompanies the other children in her class on a field trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, also known as Ariha and the City of Moon.The park they visit is lush and fragrant with orange blossoms, like paradise on Earth. But when Sarah strays from the group in order to feed a starving cat, she gets lost and afraid. Ultimately, she finds her way to a mosque near the park, where a friendly older man reassures her and introduces her to his granddaughter, Raya.

Before too long, Sarah’s teacher comes to the mosque to get her.

By now, Sarah and Raya have become fast friends, and as the book, the Qutobs’ first, winds down, readers come to understand that the pair’s friendship has endured for 30 years, with frequent adventures in the City of Moon. The message here isn’t difficult to understand: Raya is clearly Muslim, and by Sarah’s Hebraic name and the fact that she lives only a bus ride away from Jericho, we can assume that she is Jewish or perhaps one of the Christian minority in Israel. If these children can share kindness and friendship in this beautiful oasis, why can’t everyone else? Though some may take exception to such a simplistic moral, it’s difficult to argue with the observation that tensions and prejudices are usually taught, not innate. Retaining a sense of this troubled region’s loveliness and the potential for kindness among its varied people is, in the end, a purely positive message for the children for whom this book was written. (Some proceeds from the book will support orphans from areas of political strife.) One wishes, however, for more artful illustrations; the ones here are disappointingly of a generic, cartoony, computergenerated type that does little to illustrate the subtext of finding peace, in part, through an appreciation of beauty, both physical and spiritual. The printed edition includes a soundbox tool, a thoughtful addition for children who may not always have someone to read to them.

A timeless message for a good cause; a good choice for a multicultural, multiethnic audience.

The Music Parents’ Survival Guide A Parent-to-Parent Conversation

Nathan, Amy Oxford University Press (282 pp.) $99.00 | $19.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Jun. 12, 2014 978-0-19-983712-0 Almost everything a parent needs to know about the challenges and rewards of children’s music lessons.

Nathan (Round and Round Together, 2012, etc.) offers the flip side of her 2008 book, The Young Musician’s Survival Guide, and looks at parents’ experiences with their children’s music study, including its delights, dilemmas, expenses and intangibles. Inspired by her own experience but primarily drawing from interviews with other parents, she offers 12 chapters, each carefully labeled so that harried readers can turn directly to the most pertinent information. Every parent who pays for music instruction, ferries children to lessons, provides instruments and listens to his or her kid practicing exercises asks similar questions: Which instrument? Is there life after lessons?

Can they make a living at it? Parents of now-famous musicians reveal in interviews that there’s no one right way to begin, or even know to begin, a child’s musical career. Shirley Bell, the mother of world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell, discovered her son’s talent when the 2-year-old created his own musical instrument from rubber bands and drawer knobs, but she says that she “never anticipated that it would be a career.” Other parents share effective, sometimes indirect ways to encourage practicing in two useful sections. One chapter is devoted to finding a teacher and offers wise tips: Attend kids’ concerts and check nearby colleges, local orchestras and summer programs. The interviewees’ consensus is, unsurprisingly, that it’s all worth it, even if children don’t turn into professional musicians; it gives them a lifelong source of delight, and as parent Theresa Chong affirms, it can forge “a close connection...through our shared passion for music.” There’s also a handy bibliography for further research, a source list and an index.

A concise, positive, practical and highly recommended source of advice and solace for anyone guiding a young musician’s life.

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THE LITTLE MOUSE SANTI

Ray, David Eugene Illus. by Germano, Santiago Bienville Ray LLC (32 pp.) $14.99 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-692-25225-3 A mouse who wants to be a cat has a conversation that leads to an unexpected outcome in this delightful picture book by debut author Ray, featuring illustrations by Germano (The German King, 2013).

Young mouse Santi is envious of the farm cats who drink cream, take naps and receive pets from the farmer’s wife. He |

“Roberts is a gifted storyteller with an appreciation for eccentric personalities and life’s ironies.” from letters to his children from an uncommon attorney

eagerly wants to take part in these cat activities and be included in the feline community. To that end, he practices doing what cats do: swishing his tail, bathing himself, meowing and ignoring everyone; the last turns out to be a convenient skill when his friends mock him for his behavior. Eventually, he gathers his courage and approaches a real-life cat, hoping to get an introduction to the rest of the farm felines. What happens next will surprise young readers and adults alike in a turn of events that supports the book’s theme that a mouse, cat or kid can become whatever he or she truly wants to be. Ray’s text is spare and approachable, with repetitious phrases (“He would practice strutting across the floor, swishing his tail”; “He would practice taking cat baths”; “He would practice his meows all day and night”) that will be accessible to beginning, independent readers. Santi has an admirable devotion to his dream and a realistic fear that he won’t be accepted by the felines that he admires most. The clever text is elevated to a true delight by Germano’s wonderful, cartoonish images, which look like they wouldn’t be out of place in a Studio Ghibli animated film. Many of the illustrations are spread out across two pages: For example, the opening tableau shows Santi approaching a yarn ball, and his shadow on the wall is that of a cat’s, which sets a perfect tone for the story to come. Germano also deeply captures Santi’s expressions—happiness, longing and fear—in a style that’s full of kid appeal.

A clever picture book with an unexpected punch line that will delight young readers.

Charlotte Islands in the ’70s and watching birds in Hong Kong in the ’80s. Perhaps the most captivating letters describe the author’s clients when he was a defense attorney in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Eddie Silver,” for example, was a small-time hustler who figured out an ingenious way to scam coins from public pay phones; “Real Carrier” was a schizophrenic French Canadian who decapitated a man and might have killed Roberts, too, if some cautious jailers hadn’t prevented the lawyer from entering his cell. Overall, the book is a pleasure to read thanks to the author’s genial prose and lively wit. Roberts is a gifted storyteller with an appreciation for eccentric personalities and life’s ironies. The book’s disjointed format, however, makes it difficult to assemble a complete profile of the author, as basic autobiographical data are scattered throughout. Roberts explains, somewhat apologetically, that he’s cursed with a “magpie mind” that’s constantly roving and easily tempted to stray. This trait may have irritated his schoolteachers, but here it makes for a meandering but thoroughly delightful memoir.

An engaging life story, as told through a whimsical collection of fatherly musings.

Captain No Beard and the Aurora Borealis

Roman, Carole P. CreateSpace (42 pp.) $9.99 paper | $1.99 e-book Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-4961-3870-5

Letters to His Children from an Uncommon Attorney A Memoir

Captain No Beard leads his spunky crew north in this latest installment of Roman’s (The Crew Goes Coconuts: A Captain No Beard Story, 2014) charming series of pirate picture books.

Mongo the monkey is shivering his timbers as Captain No Beard directs his trusty ship into the frigid seas. Despite the cold, his crew delights in an iceberg sighting, until Cayla gets a piece of it stuck to her tongue in a hilarious exchange with first mate Hallie. The splashy illustrations are vibrant with colorful personality, including Fribbet the frog’s moment of panic when they are heading into cold territory and Captain No Beard’s cocky stance while he explains his mission to the crew. A pirate may be loyal, but when the crew discovers Captain No Beard plans to take “something” (eventually, he admits it’s the aurora borealis) home with him, they are very upset. They huddle together in deep discussion about how taking things without permission is wrong. Their conviction to not steal shows kids that it’s OK to stand up to friends who are asking you to do something you feel is wrong. When Hallie finally approaches Captain No Beard and gently asks “What did you want to take home, Captain?” her nonjudgmental approach is a great lesson in reminding kids (and adults!) to get all the facts before reacting. When their beloved captain shows them the aurora borealis, they are all in awe of its beauty, basking in the magnificence of nature. As they discuss the fact that taking the aurora borealis is wrong—plus, he can’t do it anyway because it only works in that particular sky—the crew subtly educates the reader with

Roberts, David FriesenPress (312 pp.) $37.99 | $24.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Aug. 22, 2014 978-1-4602-3339-9 In this debut memoir, a father reminisces about notable people and places in

his eventful life.

The dying art of letter writing isn’t lost on Roberts, a British-born attorney who practiced law in Canada. His charmingly unconventional memoir takes the form of 83 “letters” to his four children, but this description hardly does them justice. Each is an artfully composed essay that not only reveals much about the author himself, but also often contains a pearl of worldly wisdom. Roberts begins with a series of missives about growing up in bomb-scarred England during World War II. In “A Child’s History of the Battle of Britain,” he describes how his ears were always alert for incoming aircraft—both the “powerful, friendly, protective sound” of the British Spitfire and the “deadly drone” of German warplanes. Although the author loosely groups the letters by subject, he also playfully hops from decade to decade and continent to continent. He writes of sipping café au lait in Paris in the 1950s, meeting a native Haidu on the Queen |

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THE CHINA PANDEMIC

some facts about the amazing phenomenon. The clever solution to Captain No Beard’s dilemma is creative and fun, showing that sometimes you can get everything you want if you just take a moment to figure things out. The text is filled with the same cleverness that populates all the Captain No Beard books, and the intense loyalty of good friends is heartwarming, even as Roman teaches children about the boundaries of friendship.

A fantastic addition to any young pirate’s library.

Shaw, A.R. CreateSpace (278 pp.) $11.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Dec. 4, 2013 978-1-4943-6855-5

In the near future, 98 percent of the Earth’s population has been wiped out by a virus developed by the Chinese and inadvertently unleashed on the world.

In the Pacific Northwest, one man, math professor Graham Morgan, finds the will to live. Having lived through the nightmarish experience of watching his pregnant wife wither away and die, Morgan is now faced with the task of burying his beloved father. All alone in a world increasingly ruled by wild animals—and ruthless human predators— Morgan’s goal of making it to an old family cabin deep in the wilderness near a secluded lake is complicated when a woman leaves her 5-year-old son at his feet just before she dies. Morgan’s journey with the boy takes more than a few unexpected turns as they travel through the dangerous wasteland of what was once civilization. By the time they reach their destination, his group (which now includes 15-year-old twin girls whom Morgan courageously saved from the clutches of a madman) must come to grips with their new reality: Winter is coming, supplies are running out, and there may be a gang of killers living across the lake. Powered by adept character development and relentless pacing, this post-apocalyptic novel, the first in a series, doesn’t exactly have a particularly innovative storyline, yet the strength of characterization makes for a page-turning, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it reading experience. Still, some aspects of the novel could’ve been much stronger: The description of the post-apocalyptic world is largely superficial, the expected horrific imagery and overall dark ambiance noticeably absent. On a larger scale, there’s no real thematic profundity.

Nevertheless, readers will find Morgan to be an endearing hero at world’s end.

The beginning of what could be a riveting apocalyptic saga.

IN BETWEEN DREAMS Rooks, Erin Kerr CreateSpace (260 pp.) $11.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Oct. 16, 2014 978-1-5006-2712-6

In Rooks’ psychological thriller, a Seattle journalist struggling with apparent narcolepsy and vivid dreams realizes there may be more to her subconscious than she knows.

Bailey lives in two worlds: her “real” life as a busy reporter for an urban newspaper, fighting deadlines for her intense yet charismatic editor, Sierra, and her “dream” life as a victim-rescuing heroine. Bailey struggles with an enigmatic sleep disorder. When she falls asleep, she imagines herself in a hotel room in Hong Kong with a benevolent task force of secret agents: Daniel, a bad-boy Australian; Sam, a fashionable translator; and Halene, a young Southern logician. The team is deeply flawed, and in their effort to save a girl named Mei from her Mafia family, Bailey tries to deny the affections of both Daniel and Sam, who constantly vie for her attention. The drawn-out arguments and soapy romance become tedious, but Rooks’ central question intrigues: If you divide your time equally between a delirious reality and a crystal-clear dream life, don’t they become equally authentic? Bailey starts to see parallels in each existence.

For example, she hears the same reference to a Chinese don; she indulges in two similar drinking binges; and her best friend, Jason, starts referring to Daniel and Sam as credible love interests, even though he assumes they are imaginary. The final twist requires a lot of exposition, but it adds a metaphysical layer to an already clever storyline. Rooks organizes her story well, ensuring that the reader is never confused, and she describes details and emotions that such thrillers often gloss over. In the end, Bailey is passive and naïve but also intelligent and strong, and she bears a bigger burden than she realizes. While she doesn’t do much in the novel—she’s wounded by a shooter, pursued by men and told difficult secrets—Bailey has been primed for an inevitable sequel.

A provocative fusion of suspense and sci-fi; as the mystery unravels, the reader learns that dreams may be as vital as reality.

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CITIZEN SIM Cradle of the Stars

Solana, Michael Thought Catalog Books/Prospecta Press (292 pp.) $16.00 paper | $7.99 e-book Nov. 25, 2014 978-1-63226-013-0 In this YA sci-fi debut, a young man mysteriously gets smarter while dreaming and invents a life-changing device.

Fifteen-year-old Johnny Clark of River City, New Jersey, loves junk food and the Internet as much as he loathes school.

He’s a mediocre student (who barely passed algebra), and yet |

he’s somehow built a small, battery-powered device from scratch; what the electronic device does, he’s not sure. When Johnny realizes that the knowledge to create it has come from his dreams, his slacker friend, Billy, notices his anxiety. He tries to cheer Johnny up with the latest headline about Citizen Sim, a hacker/prankster who’s targeted Google and Times Square. It also occurs to Johnny that he’d dreamed accurately about Citizen Sim before the anonymous hacker even appeared. Soon, Johnny’s reality starts to become dreamlike when his trigonometry class is briefly interrupted by four nearly naked strangers.

Later, as he’s called to the principal’s office at the request of two detectives, fearsome skeletal creatures begin stalking him. A message from Citizen Sim appears on a television screen telling him to “ENTER THE CODE.” He types furiously into the device, and it displays the word “Gone.” Johnny, without immediately knowing it, turns invisible, and everything about his life changes. Debut author Solana crams enormous detail into setting up a delicious, go-anywhere plot. His narrative thrives on showing readers the unexpected, doing so in a giddy, winking tone. “The Clarks,” for example, “were the most dreadfully ordinary people.” Solana also revels in numerous geeky nods to superheroes (such as the Fantastic Four’s Susan Storm) and video games. As the book becomes more of a cyberspace action/ love story, it expands into gorgeously rendered terrain (especially the overgrown Penn Station as a “living jewel”). Solana’s cliffhanger ending is perfect, too.

An utterly sublime debut and a must for pop-culture fans.

train tunnel and visiting ancient battlefields. Seb wonders why he’s been chosen for this special education, and Tumbler explores this mystery in this imaginative, heartfelt tale. At one point, Seb cheekily wonders if he and his classmates will be “used as slave labour by Sombrella,” but when the kids use futuristic gizmos such as a gravity-defying phaser, it becomes clear that the children’s education is Sombrella’s top priority. Frequently, Tumbler’s teachers go on historical or technical tangents that younger readers may have trouble following; the Buster Cruster machine, for example, is said to filter rocks’ “pulverised and chemically-separated components into segregated containers.”

The author combines such passages with an easygoing plot that has no true central conflict, which makes the narrative feel as if it’s aimed at both adult and middle-grade audiences. Nevertheless, its noble messages of environmentalism and empathy ring loudly throughout its second half.

A loose sci-fi adventure that often wanders, but always into delightful territory.

WATER LESSONS

Wall, Chadwick Violet Crown Publishers (436 pp.) $15.20 paper | Aug. 26, 2014 978-1-938749-20-9 In Wall’s debut novel, a young man survives a hurricane and moves to Massachusetts to plot a new future for himself.

When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, Jim Scoresby refuses to evacuate and stays behind to look after his grandfather’s house. He does so in the company of his friend, elderly jazz musician Freddy Beasley. Right before the hurricane, Jim had a confrontation with his father, who feared that Jim, who’s nearing 30, would never amount to anything. After Katrina, Jim ends up moving to Boston, where he finds success selling investments at the firm of Henretty & Henretty. There, he comes to the attention of its chief executive, Commodore Walter Henretty, and even begins to date the boss’s daughter, Maureen. When Walter decides to put him in charge of his yacht brokerage business on Cape Cod, Jim jumps at the chance but finds that the spoiled Maureen is unhappy; she wants him to stay with her in Boston. All the while, Jim misses New Orleans and wonders if he’ll ever move back home or if he’ll make a new life for himself in New England. Things come to a head when Jim agrees to accompany Walter for a test drive of his recently overhauled schooner, and an encounter with a white squall leads to tragedy. Wall delivers a full-blooded, old-fashioned novel about love, ambition and money that’s reminiscent of the works of Richard Powell, Vance Bourjaily, James Gould Cozzens and other midcentury American authors. From Boston’s Beacon Hill to New Orleans’ Frenchman Street, the book does an excellent job of evoking a sense of place and contains any number of memorable scenes, particularly the two storms that bookend the story. Even though, as a character, Jim seems a little too good to be true, the author surrounds him with an engaging cast

SEB CAGE BEGINS HIS ADVENTURES

Tumbler, Terry Palace Park Press (342 pp.) $14.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-909121-77-5 In Tumbler’s (The Inlooker, 2014, etc.) middle-grade fantasy novel, a group of teens receives special training from a mysterious race of dwarfs.

Thirteen-year-old English boy Sebastian and his younger brother, Bart, have come to Costa Blanca, Spain, to spend the summer with their grandparents. The rambunctious boys are a handful for Terry and Sandra, even with tennis, swimming and soccer available for the kids’ enjoyment. Terry, a former police detective, decides to occupy Seb with a research project on UFOs and then reveals to his grandson his belief that people less than 5 feet tall are related to space aliens. Seb begins trailing short people and eventually befriends one named Skip, a representative of the secret Sombrella Syndicate. Skip recruits Seb to join a small group of students studying exotic subjects in classes with names such as “Rocking and a’bonding” and “What Goes Around Comes Around.” The teen quickly learns that the Sombrella teachers are telepathic and that his fellow students, including the lovely Maisie, come from all over the world. Their hands-on courses involve flying UFOs, digging a high-speed |

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“[Weatherly] accomplishes the tricky task of supplying enough detail for hard-core military aficionados without derailing casual readers.” from sheppard of the argonne

of New England types. Unfortunately, at over 400 pages, the narrative seems somewhat padded, and even the most patient readers will grow tired of its many digressions.

A novel with many positive attributes but not enough conflict to justify its length.

against the Japanese after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

He’s now recovering from a serious leg injury from that assault and keeps blaming himself for the deaths of his crew members that day. The Navy finds him fit for duty again, but his unspoken doubts remain: “Now that his physical injuries were healing, the Navy assumed that Sheppard was still that confident leader...but they were wrong.” McCloud soon finds himself in command of the battle cruiser Argonne, part of a battle group tasked with an important mission to secure shipping lanes from German U-boats, ships and planes so that badly needed supply convoys can reach the beleaguered British.

The question is whether he’s up for the challenge and whether he can outrun his ghosts: “He had to become the confident leader again for the sake of his new command. He knew that if he failed, the men would doubt him and more sailors—his sailors—again...would die.” Weatherly does a masterful job of describing the American, British and German soldiers who will eventually take part in the battle, and most importantly, he makes readers become invested in these characters. He also accomplishes the tricky task of supplying enough detail for hard-core military aficionados without derailing casual readers. Overall, he successfully brings the world of naval warfare to life in all its sound and fury. However, he never glorifies it, as he also paints the sobering aftermath in somber tones.

A creative addition to the annals of fictional naval warfare.

Sheppard of the Argonne Weatherly, G. William iUniverse (352 pp.) $30.95 | $20.95 paper | $4.99 e-book May 29, 2014 978-1-4917-3192-5

This inventive debut wartime novel transports military buffs right into the heart of the action.

Weatherly, a pen name for a retired U.S. Navy captain who commanded three ships over 30 years of service, has chosen an intriguingly flawed protagonist for this World War II–set story. In 1942, Capt. Sheppard McCloud is lauded as a national hero. He commanded the USS Shenandoah in a failed counterattack

This Issue’s Contributors

ACTS OF FAITH

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Wynn, Patricia Pemberley Press (379 pp.) $29.95 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-935421-07-8

Adult Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Adam benShea • Amy Boaz • Jeffrey Burke Tobias Carroll • Lee E. Cart • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Allison Devers Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Kristy Eldredge • Lisa Elliott • Jordan Foster • Peter Franck Mia Franz • Bob Garber • Devon Glenn • Julia Ingalls • Rebecca Johns • Robert M. Knight Megan Kurashige • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Lisa Levy • Peter Lewis • Georgia Lowe Rachel Mack • Joe Maniscalco • Virginia C. McGuire • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee Brett Milano • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Jennifer Morell • Sarah Morgan • Liza Nelson Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim • Derek Parsons • Jim Piechota • Gary Presley • Benjamin Rybeck • Lloyd Sachs • Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Michael Sandlin Marthine Satris • Gene Seymour • William P. Shumaker • Linda Simon • Arthur Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Rachel Sugar • Tom Swift • Bill Thompson • Matthew Tiffany • Sheila Trask • Claire Trazenfeld • Pete Warzel • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Kerry Winfrey • Marion Winik • Alex Zimmerman

An addictively readable mystery steeped in the history of 18th-century England.

In 1716, an Anglican, a Quaker and a young Catholic get into a carriage. That’s not the start of a bad joke but the opening of this very fine historical novel. There’s someone else in the coach as well: Hester Kean, a lady-in-waiting who’s headed to York to assist her cousin as she prepares to join the royal court. Making the best of the long journey, Kean befriends a young traveler who introduces himself as Charles Fenwick; he’s returning from France to his father’s estate. Yet when this sundry band arrives in York and finds Charles’ father murdered, Kean is quickly drawn into the mystery—and religious foment—surrounding his death. She won’t have to investigate this crime alone, however; she’s quickly joined by her longtime fellow sleuth (and love interest) the Viscount St. Mars, better known to his fans as “Blue Satan.” This is the fifth book in a series featuring these ingeniously matched detectives, and although readers will surely want to go back and read the first four, they needn’t: This book is so fully conceived and carefully plotted that it stands on its own. Furthermore, it’s historical fiction of the best kind; the period detail isn’t window dressing— it’s intricately woven into the very fabric of the novel. Readers will sense that for every historical detail Wynn mentions, she

Children’s & Teen Alison Anholt-White • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Louise Brueggemann • Connie Burns • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Faye Grearson • Melinda Greenblatt • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Joan Malewitz Hillias J. Martin • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • Lisa Moore • R. Moore • Deb Paulson John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mindy Schanback • Katie Scherrer • Dean Schneider • Hillary Foote Schwartz • Stephanie Seales John W. Shannon • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Rita Soltan • Edward T. Sullivan Jennifer Sweeney • Bette Wendell-Branco • Kimberly Whitmer • S.D. Winston • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko Indie Alana Abbott • Paul Allen • Poornima Apte • Kent Armstrong • Robert Berg • Stephanie Cerra Lynne Heffley • Justin Hickey • Julia Ingalls • Robert Isenberg • Ivan Kenneally • Laura B. Kennelly • Grace Labatt • Isaac Larson • Maureen Liebenson • Daniel Lindley • Dan Lopez Collin Marchiando • Dale McGarrigle • Angela McRae • Ingrid Mellor • Joe Moszczynski Timothy Niedermann • Margueya Novick • Joshua T. Pederson • Jim Piechota • Judy Quinn Sarah Rettger • Russ Roberts • Jessica Skwire Routhier • Stephanie Rowe • Ken Salikof • Emily Thompson • Nick A. Zaino

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leaves another five unsaid. Much of this quality derives from the fact that the author has herself traveled in the regions she writes about—and dug through their libraries. Last and best, Wynn’s prose is elegant and focused; when she describes her hero Blue Satan as one who weighs every word, she could just as well be writing about herself. This is her 15th novel, and from its first lines, readers will feel safe in the hands of a seasoned author who’s honed her skills with decades of work.

Mystery fans, history buffs and romance aficionados alike will devour this fast-paced adventure, which is packed with goodies for everyone.

ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT ONLY Zimmerman, Jane Self (291 pp.) $9.99 e-book | Oct. 8, 2014

In Zimmerman’s debut novel, two American women, a doctor and a lawyer, try to improve Afghan women’s lives even as they and their local allies find themselves in constant danger.

Cousins Catherine and Alyse have had a long-standing interest in social-justice issues dating back to their days volunteering at Berkeley, California, soup kitchens. Working together for over 20 years, they’ve developed a system for helping people in developing countries: Catherine provides training in midwifery and reproductive health, while Alyse encourages and educates women to build their legal competence. In 2003, they organize a dual medical and legal clinic for Afghan women, though Alyse has doubts about their effectiveness in a “culture that virtually squeezes the life out of females” and is still at war. This novel, spanning the years 2006 to 2013, describes the effort from various points of view, including those of each of the cousins; Nina, Catherine’s son David’s partner; and Rashina, a young Afghan woman who comes to work with them. Rashina’s story lies at the center, because her family becomes embroiled in a vindictive warlord’s power grab— one that eventually touches the Americans’ lives. The resulting danger and heartbreak raise questions about whether it’s possible, without excessive cost, for an outside country to make a dent in Afghanistan’s entrenched cultural, social, economic and religious problems. Zimmerman, who worked for the Peace Corps and in Afghanistan for six years, uses her firsthand knowledge to present an authentic, telling, detailed and well-rounded picture of these issues and tells of the hard-won rewards of battling against seemingly impossible odds. After reading this novel, it’s hard not to conclude that international development in countries like Afghanistan is futile, which can make this earnest, statistic-laden novel an even more difficult read. “The human brain can only take in so much... emotionally charged and depressing information,” warns Catherine, for good reason; that said, Rashina, and other young Afghan women like her, still holds out hope for a better future.

An honest and eye-opening, if sometimes overly didactic, account of what it takes to try and make a difference in the world.

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 Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 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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Books of the Month THE BALLOON IS DOOMED

BITTER WATERS Chaz Brenchley

A fine collection that imbues fantasy, action and horror with real literary depth.

AMERICAN BOYS An intriguing, wellwritten and poignant work that transcends its historical genre.

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With gentle wit, this engaging picture book takes an original look at the value of appreciating what is rather than what might be.

BRIEF EULOGIES AT ROADSIDE SHRINES

Louise Esola

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Christopher Eyton Illus. by A.M. Mundt

Mark Lyons

An engrossing collection giving ordinary people their due.

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Appreciations: Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 40 Years Later B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE

Once upon a time, long ago—in the late 1960s, that is—there lived a young woman who, a recent college graduate, was on her own for the first time. She liked sex with men. She may have gauged it as a kind of validation, a stage for playing out childhood issues and sibling rivalries. Or there may not have been much thought to it at all.

We will never know. We can only guess at how Roseann Quinn sorted out these matters in her mind, how she adjusted herself mentally to transform from the gentle caretaker and teacher of deaf children by day to reputedly promiscuous barfly by night. We can be sure that she was troubled, and we do know that sometimes the men she met beat her. On Jan. 2, 1973, one of them killed her. A few months later, her presumed murderer hanged himself.

Judith Rossner Judith Rossner, like countless New Yorkers, had followed Quinn’s terrible story as it unfolded in the papers (New York Daily News: “Teacher Victim of Sex Slaying: Battered With Statue of Self ”). She had published three novels, and though none were successful, she was a talented writer, so much so that an editor at Esquire approached her to write for the magazine. Rossner suggested a story about the Quinn case, which had by that time acquired layers of sub rosa complication and implication.

The editor approved the story, but the magazine’s lawyers killed it. Rossner had painted a nuanced portrait of Quinn that, fully acknowledging her sexual habits, refuted any argument that she deserved her fate. Rossner’s Quinn was certainly no saint, but she was a creature of her time, an empowered woman who knew what she wanted. Had she been a man, she might have been admired for her free-wheeling ways, but as a woman, she was condemned for acting on her desires.

The lawyers may have worried about incurring a lawsuit over the frank portrayal, though they told Rossner and her editor that they did not want to influence the conduct of a trial that would never occur. So Rossner took her manuscript and transformed it into a very thinly disguised novel, adding still more complications to the story of Quinn, now called Theresa Dunn. There is no doubt about what happens to the young woman: The novel, bleak and despairing, now called Looking for Mr. Goodbar, opens with a confession to Theresa’s murder. In the narrative that follows, Rossner worked in deft character sketches of various types of men who figured in Quinn’s life, some determined to save her, some clearly dangerous, all motivated by sex and power, all carrying the threat of violence.

Rossner’s novel, published 40 years ago, sold more than 4 million copies. Two years later, it became a hit film starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere. Rossner turned to writing full-time, but she did not recapture its lightning in her subsequent novels, most of which also turned on questions of sexuality and relationships between men and women that almost never worked out. (“My abiding theme is separations,” she said.) She died 30 years after her book appeared, having added a catchphrase to the language that remains current, and sadly so.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews. |

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appreciations

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15 january 2015

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