from the editor’s desk:
We Kick Off the Best Books of 2014 Coverage B Y C la i b orne
Smi t h
Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter
Even at the generous numbers of books our editors have selected for their various Best Books of 2014 lists (in this issue alone, which features the Best Fiction Books of 2014, Best Picture Books of 2014 and Best Middle-Grade Books of 2014, there are 210 titles chosen), the selection process our editors enact is daunting. Since we review approximately 8,000 books a year, whittling that number down to the 460 we will have chosen by the final issue of our Best Books of 2014 coverage (the Dec. 15 issue) is a little excruciating. The Dec. 1 issue will contain our lists of Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and Best Teen Books of 2014; the Dec. 15 issue will feature the Best Indie Books of Claiborne Smith 2014 and Best Book Apps of 2014. As valuable as the lists in our Best Books of 2014 coverage are as a recognition of writers and illustrators who have created memorable, lasting books, they are also useful as a more basic document of just what happened in books this year. I always feel a little guilty when I meet someone who asks what I do and then quizzes me about which book I’ve read recently that I like. Like many of you, I move so quickly from reading one book to the next that remembering what I read not very long ago is depressingly difficult. Interviewing the witty talk show host Dick Cavett recently for Kirkus TV made me feel better, though: Cavett told me that when he was in his heyday, there were days when he would get home at night after taping an episode and not be able to remember who he had just had on the show earlier in the day. In his new book Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks, a collection of his online columns from the New York Times, he remembers (sort of) the death of Eddie Fisher: “Had I had him on a show and forgotten? (Anyone who’s done five 90-minute shows a week for even one year can tell you that that can happen. As when you bump into a celebrity and say, ‘I’m sorry we never did a show together’—and his face falls, and…it’s too awful to think about.)” So reading this first Best Books of 2014 issue has been both comforting and jarring. Comforting because, despite the fact that no single novel has galvanized readers’ attention like The Goldfinch did soon after it was published last fall, 2014 was an abundant, rich year for fiction. Readers often agreed with our assessments (we starred Tana French’s mystery The Secret Place, a best-seller), but the Kirkus Star also shined a spotlight on small press titles like The Author and Me by Éric Chevillard and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante. Reading through the fiction list brings to mind a few regrets, though: I never read Will Chancellor’s A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, for example, and there’s the review on Page 13 in the Best Fiction Books of 2013 pages, taunting me, reminding me of everything else I haven’t read that I want to. As Vicky Smith, our kid’s and teen editor, points out in her columns in the picture-book and middle-grade sections, picture-book creators kept astounding us this year with offerings that are changing the idea of what a picture book can be, and the fact that middle-grade books seem to have been neglected this year, but that’s not to say that there weren’t any standouts. And, oh yeah, if the 210 reminders of excellent books in this issue’s Best Books of 2014 pages aren’t enough for you, there are 320 reviews in our Nov. 15 issue, reviews that are already tackling what will become the big ideas of 2015.
for more re vi e ws and f eatures, vi si t u s on l i n e at kirkus.com. 2
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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 JIM SPIVEY jspivey@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 special issue: best books of 2014
15 november 2014 issue
The 2014 Kirkus Prize..................................................................4
fiction Index to Starred Reviews...................................................... 97
best fiction books of 2014
REVIEWS........................................................................................... 97
REVIEWS............................................................................................. 7
Mystery........................................................................................ 128
Editor’s note.................................................................................. 8
Science Fiction & Fantasy.....................................................136
Best Quips from the Best Fiction writers of 2014...... 10
Romance.......................................................................................139
Interview: Roxane Gay............................................................ 12
nonfiction
Interview: Lev Grossman....................................................... 18 Interview: Helen Oyeyemi...................................................... 22
Index to Starred Reviews.................................................... 143
Interview: Elizabeth McCracken....................................... 26
REVIEWS......................................................................................... 143
Interview: Jeff VanderMeer................................................. 30
children’s & teen
best picture books of 2014
Index to Starred Reviews.....................................................175
rEVIEWS............................................................................................53
REVIEWS..........................................................................................175
Editor’s note................................................................................ 54
interactive e-books................................................................211
Interview: Arun Gandhi & Bethany Hegedus................ 56
continuing series................................................................... 212
Interview: Peter Sís.................................................................. 58
indie
Interview: Duncan Tonatiuh...............................................60
Index to Starred Reviews.....................................................213
best middle - grade books of 2014
REVIEWS..........................................................................................213
REVIEWS............................................................................................77
Appreciations: The Wizard of Oz & the Promise of
Editor’s note................................................................................ 78
Better Times ...............................................................................231
Interview: Christopher Paul Curtis................................. 80 Interview: Naomi Shihab Nye............................................... 82 Interview: Kenneth Oppel.....................................................84
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The 2014 Kirkus Prize this splendid catalog of customized beaks, wings and other bird parts, readers can assemble glorious avian creations of their very own. Judges’ statement: “Aviary Wonders Inc. is a picture book that widens the definition of the genre. While truly a picture book, it was created for readers ages 10 and up with well-developed sensibilities and senses of humor. Confronting environmental issues in a clever and whimsical way, it is original, highly unexpected, beautiful and thought-provoking. Aviary Wonders Inc. is by far one of the most creative books we have ever encountered.” The winners of the 2014 Kirkus Prizes with their trophies: (l-r) Kate Samworth, Lily King and Roz Chast (represented by Gillian Redfearn)
On Thursday, Oct. 23, the 2014 Kirkus Prize finalists, judges, Kirkus Reviews staff and their guests gathered at the home of Lynn and Tom Meredith, the penthouse of the Four Seasons Residences in Austin, Texas, to learn which of the Prize’s finalists would become the three winners of the Prize (recipients of $50,000). The Prize’s categories encompass fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. Congratulations to the winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature, Aviary Wonders Inc.: Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual by Kate Samworth! Published by Clarion, Aviary Wonders Inc. is Samworth’s debut book. She has studied and taught painting at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. Modeled on mail-order catalogs of the past and present, Aviary Kate Samworth after learning Wonders Inc. presents solid that her picture book, Aviary Wonders, Inc., is the winner of informational content and the 2014 Kirkus Prize for Young a thoughtful environmenReaders’ Literature. tal warning—all leavened with snarky humor—in stunning visual spreads. Bird species are going extinct at a great rate, but why worry? With
Samworth tears up holding her trophy as senior Indie editor Karen Schechner and editor in chief Claiborne Smith look on.
The 2014 Young Readers’ Literature finalists are The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans); El Deafo by Cece Bell (Amulet/Abrams); The Key that Swallowed Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston (Carolrhoda Lab); and The Freedom Summer Murders by Don Mitchell (Scholastic). The 2014 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature judges are Claudette S. McLinn, executive director at the Center for the Study of Multicultural Children’s Literature; author Linda Sue Park; and Kirkus critic and children’s librarian John Edward Peters. On P. 5, (l-r) are Vicky Smith, the children’s Continued...
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The winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction is Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast, published by Bloomsbury. The graphic memoir is a revelatory, groundbreaking and often hilarious memoir by the New Yorker cartoonist on helping her parents through their old age. Chast couldn’t attend the ceremony because she was on book tour, so Bloomsbury sales rep Gillian Redfearn attended on her behalf. Below, Redfearn reads a statement from Chast as Kirkus Reviews publisher Marc Winkelman and editor in chief Claiborne Smith look on.
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Judges’ statement: “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a vital, significant wonder. Chast ingeniously combines cartoons, family photos, sketches, documents and text to explore a profoundly human issue: the deaths of one’s parents. In the hands of an author whose facility in two mediums—illustration and prose—is unparalleled, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? encourages anyone who reads it to face the grim and ridiculous reality of the human condition in all its heartbreaking beauty. One can’t help but finish this book with a sense of gratitude that Roz Chast has shared her memoir with the world. It is as imperative as it is moving.” The 2014 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction judges are: Sarah Bagby, owner of Watermark Books & Café in Wichita, Kansas; author Sloane Crosley; and Kirkus critic and author Gregory McNamee. Below are, l-r, nonfiction judge Sloane Crosley, fiction judge Stephanie Valdez and nonfiction judge Sarah Bagby.
and teen editor at Kirkus Reviews, judge Claudette McLinn, Young Readers’ Literature winner Kate Samworth, and judges John Edward Peters and Linda Sue Park.
The nonfiction finalists are Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press); The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (Holt); The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi (Viking); Capital in the TwentyFirst Century by Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press); and Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegel & Grau). Continued... |
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2014 Kirkus Prize for Fiction judges are author Kate Christensen; Stephanie Valdez, co-owner of Community Bookstore and Terrace Books in Brooklyn; and Kirkus critic and author Marion Winik. The fiction finalists are: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (Simon & Schuster); All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf); Florence Gordon by Brian Morton (Houghton Mifflin); The Remedy for Love by Bill Roorbach (Algonquin Books); and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Riverhead). Below is Kirkus Prize recipient Lily King with fiction finalist Dinaw Mengestu at the award ceremony.
Kirkus Reviews publisher Marc Winkelman, nonfiction finalist Armand Marie Leroi, Jerry Hall and Suzanne Winkelman.
The 2014 Kirkus Prize for Fiction was awarded to Euphoria by Lily King, published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Set in Papua, New Guinea, in the 1930s, Euphoria is a brilliant, astonishing and deeply moving novel inspired by the life of Margaret Mead and her passionate entanglement with two fellow anthropologists. Judges’ statement: “Lily King has written the fiction book of the year. Euphoria stands out for its perfect construction, its economy and originality, and its fearlessness. This lushly imagined novel offers a thrilling exploration of the interplay between character and culture, between the darkness of humanity and the tenderness of the human heart. It’s going to be a classic.” Below, King accepts the Prize as Chief Operating Officer Meg Kuehn looks on.
Thank you to all the 2014 Kirkus Prize judges and Kirkus staff members who worked hard to make the Prize’s first year a spectacular success!
All photos courtesy of Leah Overstreet. 6
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THE FEVER
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The lives of teenage girls are dangerous, beautiful things in Abbott’s (Dare Me, 2012, etc.) stunning seventh novel. At Dryden High School, 16-year-old Deenie Nash and her best friends Lise Daniels and Gabby Bishop are an inseparable trio. The daughter of Tom, a popular teacher, and younger sister of hockey star Eli, Deenie radiates the typical teenage mixture of confidence and vulnerability. When Lise suffers an unexplained and violent seizure in the middle of class, no one is quite sure how to react. Until another girl and then another exhibit the same symptoms. The rumors seem to spread as fast as the mysterious affliction, which is blamed on everything from a rotten batch of vaccine to female hysteria. Abbott expertly withholds just enough information to slowly ratchet up the suspense until the reader is as breathless as Deenie at the arrival of each new text message or cryptic phone call and the school vibrates with half-formed theories and speculations. Finding herself becoming slowly more isolated with each incident, Deenie must not only sort through the infinitely complex social and emotional issues ignited by the events—she’s also dealing with her first clumsy sexual experience—but also the very real fear that something in the town is causing the fits, and it’s only a matter of time before she’s next. Nothing should be taken at face value in this jealousyand hormone-soaked world except that Abbott is certainly our very best guide.
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memoir, while his 2008 breakthrough, The Hakawati, nests stories within stories lush with Arab lore. This book has a similarly artificial-seeming setup: Aaliya is an aging woman who for decades has begun the year translating one of her favorite books into Arabic. (Her tastes run toward the intellectual titans of 20th-century international literature, including W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Joseph Roth, Vladimir Nabokov and Fernando Pessoa.) Though, until its climax, there’s little action in the course of the day in which the novel is set, Aaliya is an engagingly headstrong protagonist, and the book is rich with her memories and observations. She’s suffered through war, a bad marriage and the death of a close friend, but most exasperating for her are her pestering mother and half brothers, who’ve been lusting after Aaliya’s apartment. As she walks through the city, she considers these fractures in her life, bolstering her fatalism against quotes from writers and the tragic histories of her beloved composers. Her relatively static existence is enlivened by her no-nonsense attitude, particularly when it comes to contemporary literature. (“Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany.”) And though Aaliya’s skeptical of redemption narratives, Alameddine finds a way to give the novel a climax without feeling contrived. Aaliya is an intense critic of the human condition, but she never feels embittered, and Alameddine’s storytelling is rich with a bookish humor that’s accessible without being condescending. A gemlike and surprisingly lively study of an interior life. (Agent: Nicole Aragi)
Abbott, Megan Little, Brown (320 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 17, 2014 978-0-316-23105-3 978-0-316-23102-2 e-book
SONG OF THE SHANK
Allen, Jeffery Renard Graywolf (584 pp.) $18.00 paper | Jun. 17, 2014 978-1-55597-680-4
AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN
One of America’s most gifted novelists projects dark and daring speculations upon the incredible-but-true 19th-century story of a child piano prodigy who was blind, autistic and a slave. In the waning years of antebellum slavery, a rapidly fracturing America was introduced to a stunning musical phenomenon: Thomas Wiggins, a young black slave from Georgia known only as “Blind Tom,” who “sounded out” his first piano composition at age 5 and, five years later, was famous enough to play before President James Buchanan at the White House. What made Tom even more remarkable was that he was both blind and autistic, thus compounding audiences’ astonishment at his extraordinary ability to not only perform
Alameddine, Rabih Grove (304 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2214-8
A 72-year-old Beiruti woman considers her life through literature in an intimate, melancholy and superb tour de force. Alameddine has a predilection for highly literary conceits in his novels: I, the Divine (2001) is constructed out of the discarded first chapters of its heroine’s |
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the year the walls came down
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classical works, but to spontaneously weave startling variations on American folk ditties into original musical tapestries. Because most of the details of Wiggins’ story have been lost to history, there are many blank, enigmatic spaces to fill. Chicagoborn Allen (Holding Pattern, 2008, etc.) assumes the imaginative writer’s task of improvising shape and depth where elusive or missing facts should be. What results from his effort is an absorbing, haunting narrative that begins a year after the Civil War ends when Tom, a teenager, and his white guardian, Eliza Bethune, arrive in a nameless northern city (presumably New York), where they are contacted by a black man who intends to reunite Tom with his newly liberated mother. The story rebounds back to Tom’s childhood, during which he struggles to feel his surroundings despite his compromised senses and finds his only warmth (literally) beneath the piano belonging to Eliza’s slaveholding family. Allen’s psychological insight and evocative language vividly bring to life all the black and white people in Tom’s life who, in seeking to understand or exploit Tom’s unholy gifts, are both transformed and transfixed by his inscrutable, resolutely self-contained personality. If there’s any justice, Allen’s visionary work, as startlingly inventive as one of his subject’s performances, should propel him to the front rank of American novelists.
Photo courtesy Mark Hillringhouse
This might be remembered as the year the literary walls began crumbling. On Twitter, hashtags including #ReadWomen2014 and #WeNeedDiverseBooks showed readers’ eagerness to sample fiction from a broad range of writers. Novelists got into the act by imagining the lives of people different from themselves. Brian Morton and Colm Tóibín wrote psychologically astute novels named after their female protagonists, Florence Gordon and Nora Webster, while Judith Frank (All I Love and Know), Kathy Page (Alphabet) and other women wrote from a male perspective. J.K. Rowling published a second novel under the male pseudonym Robert Galbraith and seems to be settling into the mystery genre for a long run after making her mark with fantasy. Harry who? Other writers didn’t let genre constrain them, either. David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks) and Lydia Millett (Mermaids in Paradise) put elements of the supernatural in seemingly realistic stories. Some authors of historical fiction based their books on real-life characters such as Thomas Wiggins, a blind, autistic slave who was a brilliant piano player (Song of the Shank by Jeffery Renard Allen), or Petronella Oortman, a wealthy 17thcentury Dutch woman whose elaborate dollhouse is in the Rijksmuseum (The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton). In Euphoria, Lily King focused on a few Jeffery Renard Allen months in the lives of anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second and third husbands (narrating in the voice of one of the men, by the way), but she changed some substantial facts. Two European novelists published their third books melding autobiography with fiction: Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) and Elena Ferrante (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay). Lev Grossman published the last book in his Magicians trilogy, the long-awaited The Magician’s Land, while Jeff VanderMeer tried something different by publishing all three parts of his Southern Reach trilogy in one year (Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance). Among our Best Fiction of 2014 selections, you’ll find career-spanning short story collections from Jane Gardam, Paul Theroux and Tove Jansson, and exciting works from newer voices like Rivka Galchen and Julia Elliott. This year has provided enough great reading to last a decade, and I look forward to seeing what next year has to bring. —L.M. Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews.
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STELES OF THE SKY
Bear, Elizabeth Tor (432 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 8, 2014 978-0-7653-2756-7 978-1-4299-4768-8 e-book Series: Eternal Sky, 3
Wrapping up Bear’s complex and beautifully rendered historical-fantasy trilogy (Shattered Pillars, 2013, etc.). Necromancer and blood-sorcerer al-Sepehr, head of the Nameless assassin cult, arranged to have his daughter Saadet impregnated by Qori Buqa, Khagan of the nomad horse-warrior Empire, whom he then murdered. Re Temur, Qori Buqa’s nephew and the true heir to the Khaganate, decides to raise his banner at Dragon Lake, site of the Khagan’s vast abandoned palace—but how to reach it? Perhaps his companions, the wizard Samarkar, Hrahima, a huge humantiger Cho-tse warrior, and the silent monk, Brother Hsiung, can find a way through the magic doorways created by the extinct Erem Empire. But Erem magic is deadly poisonous— Brother Hsiung is already half-blind from attempting to study it. Edene, Temur’s woman, escaped from al-Sepehr by stealing a green Erem ring, which gave her command of the ghuls, a slave race created by Erem, and control of the toxic Erem magic and all poisonous creatures, but an evil presence within it whispers to her—and she’s carrying Temur’s child. She must also deal with a djinn who, appearing sporadically and unpredictably, sometimes offers help while admitting he’s bound, against his will, to al-Sepehr. Various other groups—wizards, warriors, empresses, survivors of the civilizations broken by |
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al-Sepehr’s treachery—converge on Dragon Lake. These and other narrative strands progress and interact through fully realized characters whose personalities and motivations arise from the dazzlingly detailed cultures and landscapes from which they derive. If there’s a disappointment, it’s the bipedal tiger Hrahima, a vigorous presence whose background and motivations remain largely unexplored. Notably, apart from the hero and his antagonist, all the leading characters are women. It all adds up to an eminently satisfying conclusion. Considering the trilogy as a whole, the overused term masterpiece justifiably applies. (Agent: Jennifer Jackson)
Billingham, Mark Atlantic Monthly (400 pp.) $26.00 | Jun. 3, 2014 978-0-8021-2248-3
BROKEN MONSTERS
Beukes, Lauren Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (448 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-316-21682-1 978-0-316-21683-8 e-book
special issue: best books of 2014
A genuinely unsettling—in all the best ways—blend of suspense and the supernatural makes this a serial-killer tale like you’ve never seen. Set in a crumbling contemporary Detroit, Beukes’ fourth novel (The Shining Girls, 2013, etc.) seamlessly alternates between the points of view of a single mother homicide detective; her 15-year-old daughter; a wannabe journalist; a homeless man; and an artist with deep-seated psychological issues. At the scene of the crime, Detective Gabriella Versado can’t remember the last time she’s seen something so brutal: The top half of 11-year-old Daveyton Lafonte is fused with the hind legs of a fawn in a hideous display of human taxidermy. While it’s obvious that the five storylines will eventually join together, Beukes never takes the easy route, letting each character develop organically. Versado’s daughter, Layla, cautiously navigates high school in the digital age; homeless scavenger Thomas “TK” Keen warily patrols the streets; Detroit transplant Jonno Haim tries to make a name for himself by chronicling first the city’s art scene and then the hunt for the killer dubbed the Detroit Monster; and sculptor Clayton Broom’s creations begin to take on lives of their own. Versado’s dogged pursuit of the killer, under the glare of the media spotlight, is as compelling a police procedural narrative as Broom’s descent into madness and the horrors of his dream world are a truly terrifying horror story. Beukes gave us a time traveling serial killer in The Shining Girls, and the monsters in her latest tale, whether they’re real or imagined, will keep you up all night.
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DI Tom Thorne escorts a convicted serial killer to a remote Welsh island with predictably eventful results. Twenty-five years after teenage car thief Simon Milner disappeared from Tides House, a facility for young offenders on Bardsey Island, his mother still doesn’t know what happened to him. Now she has a chance at the closure she craves. Stuart Nicklin, a notorious murderer who put in his time at Tides House along with Simon, says he killed the boy he befriended and that he knows where he buried him. Since the topography of Bardsey—a real-life island reputedly home to the graves of countless saints—is tricky, Nicklin can’t just tell the coppers the location of Simon’s last resting place; he has to lead them to it, and he insists on taking along both Thorne, who put him away, and a more recent friend, history teacher Jeffrey Batchelor, who’s been imprisoned along with Nicklin for killing the young man who jilted Batchelor’s teenage daughter, which led to her suicide. The staff of Long Lartin prison takes all possible precautions in transporting the two prisoners to Bardsey, but Thorne knows that something will go terribly wrong, and of course, he’s right. Like the manipulative Nicklin, Billingham (The Dying Hours, 2013, etc.) delights in toying with his audience, and most readers’ nerves will be shredded long before the sadistic import of Nicklin’s deep-laid plot finally becomes clear. Thorne’s 12th is a tour de force of suspense that dares you to guess the secrets of a magician who’s made his intentions perfectly clear from the very beginning. (Agent: Sarah Lutyens)
DO OR DIE
Brockmann, Suzanne Ballantine (448 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-345-54379-0 Series: Reluctant Heroes, 1 Attorney Phoebe Kruger is tasked with negotiating client Ian Dunn’s prison release, against his will, so he can rescue two kidnapped children, not realizing that doing so will set events in motion that will threaten dozens of lives—and a few hearts. Considering his reputation as a former Navy SEAL and a suspected international jewel thief, Phoebe finds it a little odd that Ian is in jail for getting drunk and losing control of his car. But when an accident incapacitates Ian’s usual attorney, Phoebe is sent in his place. As a recent hire at the respected firm that represents Ian, she isn’t surprised when he’s hesitant to work with her. She is shocked, however, that he’s unwilling to accept a sweetheart deal designed |
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Best Quips From the Best Fiction Writers of 2014 Photo courtesy Marion Ettlinger
Authors often move us with their written words, and their speech can be just as powerful. Here are some of our favorite quotes from the writers included in our Best Fiction of 2014 lineup that address everything from writing tips to bravery, gender, identity—and the benefit of having a first-reader spouse. —Megan Labrise
Siri Hustvedt
“Acting is very much in the moment when you’re performing, and if you get it wrong, the moment’s past, whereas a book is present continually. The first page, third chapter is all still there in your hands.” —The Miniaturist author Jessie Burton in Kirkus Reviews
“I wanted to know what magic would feel like for adults and alongside sex, drinking and confusion. I wanted to write that story. A story about people who discover power they didn’t know they had, who find themselves in a world they didn’t know existed. Not children, but people who had my problems.” —The Magician’s Land author Lev Grossman in Kirkus Reviews Photo courtesy Bryan Derballa
“I think that there are certain experiences that change you, which is different for every person who experiences trauma, but there is no closure. We like to believe the characters in these kind of narratives find peace...but what if you don’t?” —An Untamed State author Roxane Gay in Kirkus Reviews
Photo courtesy Wolf Marloh
“The whole notion of ‘write what you know’ is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I’m a boring person, but I’m a writer with a relatively vivid imagination.” —Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award nominee for An Unnecessary Woman, in Guernica
Jessie Burton
“I started asking myself questions like improvisational comedians do [about the protagonist], like what does he do for a living? What does he wear? Who are his friends?...That performative element is how I wrote the book....” —John Darnielle, National Book Award nominee for Wolf in White Van, on NPR
Eloisa James
“The middle child always tries to make peace in the family where there is none, and always fails, and that’s what my work is about.” —Kill My Mother author and illustrator Jules Feiffer in Kirkus Reviews
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“Let me first say that I met my Italian knight husband on a blind date at Yale, and he did not want to meet me. He was only interested in a fling, and I had just come off a 10-year relationship.” —Romance novelist Eloisa James, author of Three Weeks With Lady X, in Kirkus Reviews
“All the people I know who write or make films, there’s something wrong with them. Disorder is a good word. If you don’t have that, you don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.” —My Struggle: Book Three author Karl Ove Knausgaard in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.” —famously private Italian author Elena Ferrante (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay), by email, in Entertainment Weekly
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“Writing as a woman is always to some degree writing from the side of the culture, not the very heart of it.” —Siri Hustvedt, Kirkus Prize, Man Booker Prize and National Book Award nominee for The Blazing World, in Kirkus Reviews
“Anything that makes the world feel ‘off ’ to a character is a way of raising the stakes.” —Those Who Wish Me Dead author Michael Koryta in Kirkus Reviews
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Photo courtesy Edward Careyy
“[W]hen I finished it, I handed it to my wife, and I said, ‘I think I just wrote something incomprehensible about four women wandering aimlessly on a hiking trail in North Florida. Could you please check for me?’ She read it and thankfully gave it the stamp of approval and said it was actually a novel and actually made sense.” —Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer in Clarkesworld Magazine
“You have to be strong to descend into the darkness of your mind.” —Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage author Haruki Murakami in the Guardian
Phil Klay
“ ‘It will make you a man.’ ‘It’ll destroy you.’ ‘It’ll make you an animal.’ ‘It’ll turn you into a monster.’ ‘It will make you sadder but wiser for the rest of your days.’ ‘You’ve touched the heart of darkness.’ In fact, it’s a complicated mix of an incredible range of experiences.” —Phil Klay, U.S. Marine Corps veteran and National Book Award nominee for Redeployment, in Kirkus Reviews
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Photo courtesy Hannah Dunphy
“Some characters take a long time to come into focus, and some sort of knock on your door and come in.” —Brian Morton, Kirkus Prize nominee for Florence Gordon, in Kirkus Reviews
Photo courtesy Paul Stuart
special issue: best books of 2014
Megan Labrise is a freelance writer and columnist based in New York.
“I sometimes get asked: ‘How come the men in your stories don’t have such strong characters?’ And I’m like: ‘I don’t care.’ ” —Boy, Snow, Bird author Helen Oyeyemi in The Observer
David Mitchell
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“If I’m a dark and twisty person—and actually, I don’t think I am—it’s that I’m much more likely to put my dark fears into work than conversation. I’m essentially writing my nightmares, which don’t take up much waking life.” —Elizabeth McCracken, National Book Award nominee for ThunElizabeth McCracken derstruck & Other Stories, in Kirkus Reviews
“A book that’s solely [metaphysical] can be didactic, but a book without ideas is like a diet without vitamin C. I like a book that has motion and people I care about.” —David Mitchell, Man Booker Prize nominee for The Bone Clocks, in Kirkus Reviews
“Even when there’s sadness engrained in my stories and in the characters’ revelations I want the plot to suggest an enlargement of life, a means of defeating despair.” —The Tao of Humiliation author Lee Upton in Late Night Library
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2014: the year of roxane gay Roxane Gay is one of the most prolific writers of our time. Even an abbreviated list of her publication credits is enough to make most writers sleepy: She edits for the Rumpus and PANK. She has edited a series of essays on Salon about feminists of color and written recently for the Nation about writers of color. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. She has published her essays everywhere from the New York Times Book Review to Necessary Fiction. Ayiti, a collection of her fiction, poetry and nonfiction, was published in 2011. This year, she published two books: An Untamed State in May and Bad Feminist in August. An Untamed State, her harrowing and beautiful debut novel, received a starred review for good reason. It centers on Mireille Duval Jameson, who is undone by graphic, unspeakable torture at the hands of a greedy man who is only referred to as The Commander. Her father has the power to pay her ransom, but he waits instead, sending Mireille’s husband, Michael, into a seething despair that is matched in intensity only by The Commander’s cruelty. “I think that there are certain experiences that change you, which is different for every person who experiences trauma, but there is no closure,” Gay says. “We like to believe the characters in these kind of Roxane Gay narratives find peace... but what if you don’t? What if you find something close, but not what you crave? I don’t like neat endings. Mireille does find something, just maybe not what you would expect. It’s just that raggedness of an ending that I like.” —Joshunda Sanders
by the government to get him out of jail scot-free in exchange for rescuing two kidnapped kids without causing an international incident. What neither Phoebe nor Martell—the attorney working on behalf of the government—knows is that Ian has his own agenda for being in prison, and if he leaves, for whatever reason, it will threaten the people closest to him. So once they spring him, Ian takes Phoebe hostage, then must rescue his brother and his family from the mob, assemble a team, connect with the FBI, work out a rescue plan with limited resources, deal with the devil in the form of an international assassin and work through long-standing family issues while navigating a sizzling-yet-unwelcome attraction to his new, unasked-for attorney. As outlandish as the plot sounds on paper, Brockmann effortlessly and expertly tosses hundreds of details into the air and juggles them with brilliance. The first in her Reluctant Heroes series, the novel will captivate readers with its intense, action-filled plot, alpha-and-a-half hero, and his smart, perfect-for-him heroine, as well as secondary characters who contribute pathos and humor. Enthralling and breathtaking. (Agent: Steve Axelrod)
NIGHT HERON
Brookes, Adam Redhook/Orbit (352 pp.) $26.00 | May 27, 2014 978-0-316-39983-8
Photo courtesy Jay Grabiec
Against all odds, Prisoner 5995—a former professor wrongly convicted of murder—escapes a high security Chinese facility after 20 torturous years. Having concocted a plan to flee China and establish a new identity, he finds an unlikely ally in Mangan, a veteran British journalist based in Beijing. In his former life, the escapee was employed by British intelligence under the code name Peanut. After he finds a place to lay low and recover from the physical abuse he suffered at the prison camp, he tracks down a one-time fellow academic and spy who is now a well-off military researcher; he forces his old colleague to make copies of secret documents by threatening to expose his past—and by beating him to a pulp. When he hears about Mangan, a famous British reporter who lives in the area, Peanut passes the documents to him and asks that Mangan give them to his contacts in the British Embassy. Though he thrives on danger, the last thing Mangan wants is hot papers in his possession; he’s already under close scrutiny by state security for a story he wrote on a cult after sneaking into the blockaded town it was occupying. After Mangan is talked into working for British intelligence, all manner of reversals, betrayals, arrests and killings have him and Peanut running for their lives. Brookes, a one-time China correspondent for the BBC, knows this turf exceedingly well and translates that knowledge into a novel that is as strikingly different as it is thrilling. In hinting at China’s capabilities as a cyberenemy, the author may be giving us a clue about the subject of his next novel. One can’t wait to read it. One of the best and most compulsively readable spyfiction debuts in years.
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“With its oblique storytelling, crescendo of female empowerment and wrenching ending, this novel establishes Burton as a fresh and impressive voice....” from the miniaturist
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THE MINIATURIST
A talented new writer of historical fiction evokes 17th-century Amsterdam, the opulent but dangerous Dutch capital, where an innocent young wife must navigate the intrigues of her new household. “Every woman is the architect of her own fortune,” reads 18-year-old Nella Oortman in a message that will gather meaning like a rolling stone as this novel progresses. It comes from the peculiarly knowledgeable artisan who is creating miniature objects for a dollhouse-sized version of her new home, which Nella received as a wedding gift. Hastily married to a wealthy older merchant, Johannes Brandt, after her father’s death left her provincial family struggling, Nella arrives alone in Amsterdam, readying herself for her unknown husband’s demands. Instead, she finds herself sleeping by herself, ignored by Johannes and dismissed by his brusque sister, Marin, who rules the house and influences the business, too. Distracted by the wedding present, Nella commissions a miniaturist to supply tiny items of furniture; but these exquisite objects and their accompanying messages soon begin to bear a chilly, even prophetic relationship to people and things— suggesting their maker knows more about the family and its business than is possible or safe. In a debut that evokes Old Master interiors and landscapes, British actress Burton depicts a flourishing society built on water and trade, where women struggle to be part of the world. Her empathetic heroine, Nella, endures loneliness and confusion until a sequence of domestic shocks forces her to grow up very quickly. Finally obliged to become that architect of her own fortune, Nella acts to break the miniaturist’s spell and save everything she holds dear. With its oblique storytelling, crescendo of female empowerment and wrenching ending, this novel establishes Burton as a fresh and impressive voice; book groups in particular will relish it.
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The first book in a new series by Cain captures the age of the Amber Alert with hard-edged insight. All these years removed from her ordeal, Kick is the most viewed subject on porn sites. Still struggling with psychological baggage, she’s dedicated herself to martial arts and marksmanship (she packs a Glock). She also is working at perfecting skills her abductor taught her, including picking locks. When the mysterious John Bishop, a wealthy former gun dealer working with the FBI, drops into Kick’s life and demands that she go with him to the site of the latest abduction, she fiercely resists. But she slowly learns to trust him. Except for her tech-geek friend James, with whom she was held captive, she doesn’t care about anyone else. Her mother, who wrote a best-seller about her daughter’s abduction, is still milking the story as an expert on TV. With Bishop, a taciturn stud with his own painful secrets (and a private plane and helicopter at his disposal), Kick returns to places she was held as “Beth.” Her unnerving confrontation with her abductor exposes a horribly complicated relationship. Distinguished by a wealth of details about how child porn rings operate, this is a gripping thriller in which Kick must apply everything she’s learned, and things she’s forgotten, to survive again. An unsettling, near-perfect effort by Cain (Let Me Go, 2013, etc.) that leaves you eagerly awaiting the next installment. (Agent: Joy Harris)
Burton, Jessie Ecco/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-06-230681-4
A BRAVE MAN SEVEN STOREYS TALL
special issue: best books of 2014
Chancellor, Will Harper/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 8, 2014 978-0-06-228000-8 A father searches for his vanished son in this edgily comic first novel, which has fun with the worlds of art and academia. California athlete Owen Burr loses an eye in a college water polo match and his berth in the Athens Olympics. He impulsively goes to Berlin to become an artist and gets embroiled in the drug-fueled machinations of an art-world star. Back in the U.S., Owen’s widowed father, classics professor Joseph Burr, has heard nothing from or about Owen until he receives a disturbing hospital report. His efforts to rescue his son start with a lecture he gives near the site of the games that is meant to signal Owen. But when a provocateur runs onstage and hands Joseph a Molotov cocktail, the stunned academic’s effort to throw it safely away from the audience ends in a fiery explosion, and a riot ensues. More violence at Art Basel, a hungry polar bear in Iceland, the theories of Laminalism and Liminalism, and a helpful Siren named Stevie are part of the Continental odyssey during which Burr père et fils manage to constantly stay out of touch with each other. Yet sometimes, unknowingly, they’re in sync: Each finds himself challenged by camping equipment in separate, humorous scenes. Chancellor, in a rare misstep, has Owen kick down a 60-pound German door the same day he leaves a hospital barely able to walk. That aside, the author maintains an almost
ONE KICK
Cain, Chelsea Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 19, 2014 978-1-4767-4978-5 Abducted by a child pornography ring when she was 6 and held captive for five years, Kick Lannigan, 21, has turned herself into a lean, mean fighting machine. When a boy named Adam is reported missing, she springs into action to save him. |
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MONDAY, MONDAY
thrillerlike pace while taking well-aimed shots at academic and art-market fads and helping two lost souls through essential transformations. It’s a bracingly rich mélange of a novel in which scholarship spotlights Al Pacino’s Scarface and plain exposition suddenly turns into prose that might be noirish or downright strange: “Everything of value stretched and shrapneled, lapping the circular walls in lethal vorticity.” Some readers may stumble over the Latin, argot and allusions, but these are minor challenges in Chancellor’s polymorphous entertainment.
Crook, Elizabeth Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pp.) $26.00 | May 13, 2014 978-0-374-22882-8 An almost-forgotten massacre at the University of Texas propels an intergenerational tale marked by vivid moments of connection and disconnection, fear and courage. Framing a story in the context of calamity—in this instance, mass murder—invites both sensationalism and sentimentality; there have been few memorable successes, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed among them. Add Crook’s latest to the plus side of the list. Its opening finds Shelly, a 4.0 student, outside on that fateful day in August 1966 when a former Marine named Charles Whitman opened fire from atop the university’s tower, killing 17 people and wounding many more. Shattered by a bullet—and Crook’s account of that mayhem is both gruesome and perfectly pitched, emotionally speaking—Shelly is rescued by two cousins who are forevermore bound up in her life and she in theirs. One, Wyatt, is on the cusp of the rising new Austin of hippies and Willie Nelson; the other, Jack, is apparently more conventional. Wyatt is rebel enough to admit to not much liking chicken-fried steak; but then, neither does Shelly, and that’s not the only way their tastes will intersect, either. Wisely, Crook allows her characters to change in believable ways over the course of four decades, but the novel—with its moments of love, loss and conflict—is always pointing back to that terrible past. Crook (The Night Journal, 2006, etc.) gets the period details just right, not least the bittersweet song of the title, which was wafting from radios as Whitman was firing. And she delivers beautifully turned lines, as when, at the end of their long, bumpy ride, Shelly says to Wyatt in parting, “[d]on’t say anything I won’t be able to forget.” Shelly reflects that “[s]he had never come anywhere near perfection, but had come close to a rightness with herself, through her losses.” So it is with this novel, which, though not quite perfect, is just right: confident and lyrical as it smartly engages terror and its aftermath.
THE AUTHOR AND ME
Chevillard, Éric Translated by Stump, Jordan Dalkey Archive (170 pp.) $15.95 paper | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-62897-075-3
An attempt to map the distance between novelist and character goes awry in this peculiar, funny and intellectually rich romp by Chevillard (On the Ceiling, 2000, etc.). The veteran French novelist opens with a brief foreword declaring his intention to address the intentional fallacy, inventing a wild fiction that he will occasionally interrupt with footnotes. Enter the narrator, who seems distinct not just from Chevillard, but from rational humanity: Buttonholing a young woman at a cafe, he fumes at length about how he turned murderous when his expected lunchtime meal of trout almondine proved to be cauliflower gratin, a dish he loathes with absurd intensity. This at first seems like flimsy material, but the interplay between the text and the footnotes thoughtfully distinguishes the thought patterns of the author and his invention. Audaciously, Chevillard doubles down on this provocative setup by embedding a brief novella within one of the author’s footnotes—a 40-page footnote that’s hard on the eyes but oddball fun, casting the hero in to a slow-moving chase of an ant that also makes room for a love affair and a circus. This isn’t bizarreness for bizarreness’ sake; much of what Chevillard (or at least the “Chevillard” of the footnotes) is addressing is the difficulty of corralling one’s inventions, making them adhere to reality while being singular and not simply mouthpieces for the writer’s own opinions. As the author’s lament for the state of literature mirrors his creation’s lament for being served a bad meal, it’s clear we’re deep into an allegory of the frustrations of making original art. But on this score, Chevillard needn’t worry—this is accessible, surprising and satisfying metafiction. A curious, cleverly constructed matryoshka doll of unreliable narrators.
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“The novel’s closing pages...highlight the book’s theme of finding things worth living for within physical and psychological despair.” from wolf in white van
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ROMANCING THE DUKE
Izzy Goodnight has long given up on fairy tales, so she is shocked to learn that she has inherited a castle and must figure out what to do with the wounded duke who lives there. As the daughter of a scholar famous for penning a series of tales about knights and maidens, Izzy knows a thing or two about fairy tales. However, she also knows hunger and financial desperation thanks to the same father, who never took the time to ensure she was cared for after his death. In fact, Izzy has spent her life looking after her father and supporting his career, so his betrayal in this manner is even more crushing. Learning she has inherited a castle from one of her father’s advisers sends her fleeing to the property, only to find a dilapidated building and the wounded duke who used to own it—and who is quite surprised and angry to learn he no longer does. Since Izzy has no money and the duke needs help, they agree she will stay on and help him get his affairs in order, and he will pay her for her services. Getting to the bottom of the mystery forces them to work closely together, and both are stunned when a strong attraction flares between them. But Izzy is the beloved daughter of a famous author, and her father’s adoring public comes calling, causing tension in the household. Add in Izzy’s selfconsciousness regarding her plain appearance, the continued dispute over the castle and various quirky secondary characters, not to mention a few secrets and dangers along the bumpy path to the couple’s happily-ever-after, and you have the recipe for an effervescent, heart-tugging romance. Dare starts her new series with a unique storyline, a sweet, fun nod to literary fandom, and two main characters who are perfect for each other yet never would have met if they weren’t each at a nadir in life’s journey.
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flights of fancy. (Similarly, Darnielle’s first novel was a consideration of the Black Sabbath album “Master of Reality” as told by an institutionalized teenage boy.) We know early on that Sean makes a modest income as the inventor of Trace Italian, a role-playing game conducted through the mail about a postapocalyptic America; and we know that he was implicated in the death of a woman who obsessively played the game with her boyfriend. The novel shifts back and forth in time as Sean recalls a geeky boyhood of Conan the Barbarian novels, metal albums, and other swords-and-sorcery fare; its tension comes from Darnielle’s careful and strategic withholding of the details behind the woman’s death and Sean’s disfigurement. In the meantime, the mazelike paths of Trace Italian serve as a metaphor for the difficulty (if not impossibility) of finding closure, and they also reveal Sean’s ingenuity and wit. The book’s title refers to a diabolical subliminal message on a metal record, a topic Sean is particularly interested in. (The novel seems partly inspired by a teenager’s failed suicide attempt in 1985 that led to reconstructive facial surgeries and a lawsuit against the band Judas Priest.) Sean is a consistently generous and sympathetic hero, and if the novel’s closing pages substitute ambiguity for plainspokenness, they highlight the book’s theme of finding things worth living for within physical and psychological despair. A pop culture–infused novel that thoughtfully and nonjudgmentally considers the dark side of nerddom.
Dare, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-06-224019-4
special issue: best books of 2014
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Doerr, Anthony Scribner (448 pp.) $27.00 | May 6, 2014 978-1-4767-4658-6
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect. In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio
WOLF IN WHITE VAN
Darnielle, John Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-374-29208-9 A man badly disfigured in a gun accident ponders gaming, heavy metal, family, love and the crazed emotions that tend to surround our obsessions. As the singer-songwriter of the band the Mountain Goats, Darnielle specializes in impressionistic, highly literate lyrics delivered in a stark, declamatory voice. Much the same is true of Sean Phillips, the narrator of Darnielle’s second novel, who has been largely housebound since his accident at 17 and is prone to imaginative |
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transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major. Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Farah, Nuruddin Riverhead (320 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 30, 2014 978-1-59463-336-2
A domestic drama is a prism illuminating the often conflicting cultural and social temperaments of contemporary Africa. Set primarily in Nairobi, this 12th novel by Somali-born Farah (Crossbones, 2011, etc.) sifts through the personal and emotional fallout of a terrorist attack in Mogadishu that kills a U.N. official who emigrated from his native Somalia decades before. His grief-stricken sister Bella, a model-turned–professional photographer, decides to leave behind her own expatriate life in Europe and resettle in Kenya, where she will honor her brother’s wishes by caring for his teenage son, Salif, and daughter, Dahaba. Saying the least, this arrangement does not please their brash, self-centered mother, Valerie, who arrives in Nairobi with her lesbian lover, Padmini, to stake her claim upon the children, who prefer their more worldly and levelheaded aunt as a legal guardian. With delicacy and compassion, Farah, whose own sister was killed earlier this year in a terrorist bombing while working for UNICEF, fashions a domestic chamber piece where motives, yearnings and regrets intersect among these complex, volatile personalities against a wider backdrop of religious and cultural conflict, social and political upheaval, and even “family values” in post-millennial Africa. Even the most offhand conversations Bella and the other major characters have with Nairobi citizens of varied ages and genders throw unexpected and necessary light upon aspects of a society that the rest of the world knows, or cares, relatively little about. (It’s a solid bet that most readers outside Africa aren’t aware of Kenyans’ bigotry toward the Somalis choosing to live in their country.) Throughout this novel’s big and small incidents, Farah maintains a narrative composure that shuns typecasting, reserves judgment and keeps his readers alert to whatever hidden graces emerge from even the most difficult characters. An unassuming triumph of straightforward, topical storytelling that both adds to and augments a body of work worthy of a Nobel Prize.
THE WILDS
Elliott, Julia Tin House (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-935639-92-3 Robots may search for love, but there’s nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott. Elliott (English and Women and Gender Studies/Univ. of South Carolina) takes the definition of “wild” and runs with it in stories which leap from Southern gothic to dystopian science fiction and sometimes blend both together. A robot with silicone lips explores permutations of love; an Alzheimer’s patient regains her memory in a futuristic nursing home; and a woman goes on a Neanderthal retreat to lose weight. Sharp and funny, the stories are dark satires on the fad diets and self-absorption of modern life. Elliott shines when it comes to worldbuilding; her details are so dense and vivid the sticky heat of the deep South rises off the page, blending with the hipster neurosis of one of her Zen-crazed protagonists. She cartwheels from the sublime—“the sky in pink turmoil”—to the grotesque—“hormones spiked his blood...and fed the zits that festered on his sullen face”—but prefers to spend most of her time on the grotesque. At times it’s hard to follow the lush twisting vines of Elliott’s plots because they’re so entangled in the worlds she creates. But no matter: Even if the stories end abruptly, without enough of a road map to let you know where you are and why you’re there, there’s always a delicate image or an emotional jolt that leaves you wanting more. This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren’t quite sure you want to stay, but you won’t regret the journey.
KILL MY MOTHER
Feiffer, Jules Liveright/Norton (160 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 25, 2014 978-0-87140-314-8 Award-winning cartoonist/illustrator/ author/playwright Feiffer (Backing into Forward, 2010, etc.) delivers his first graphic novel, a sprawling, kinetic noir of giant women, jumbled identities and warped relations.
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Annie Hannigan hates her mother. The resentment—and teenage Annie’s incessant acting up—stems from her sense that mom Elsie has abandoned her since the murder of Annie’s father, an honest cop who ran afoul of the mob during Prohibition. Lately Elsie has been busy working as the secretary of alcoholic, abrasive private eye Neil Hammond, an associate of her late husband’s who promised to solve the murder, though he’s made little progress for two years. When a towering, classy blonde steps into Hammond’s office and hires him to track down an equally tall, equally blonde woman, it sets off a series of events that will pepper the subsequent decade with bullets, beatings and betrayals. Mixed in is a prizefighter who is light on his feet but down in the mouth; Annie’s milquetoast partner in crime who comes into his own while serving in WWII’s Pacific theater; fleshy scandals of golden-age Hollywood; a mysterious bat-wielding giant of a woman who communicates only through song; and Feiffer’s twistedly comic take on humanity. Things come to a head during a USO show in the jungles of Tarawa, where parties bristle with cross-purposes and secret agendas until gunfire lays the truth bare. The story is wickedly imagined and deftly plotted, drawing on numerous classic noir influences while including charmingly unique flourishes like Elsie thwarting a pack of street toughs (one of whom wears a crown à la Jughead) after appropriating a pistol from a disagreeable communist liquor-store clerk. Feiffer’s illustrations have a rough-hewn quality, with the jumbled lines of his figures and faces clumping evocatively like Giacometti sculptures, while his human forms move with the fluidity of Degas’ horses across open panels of dancing and boxing. The entire work feels pulled from an earlier time yet explosively modern, a madcap relic animated by an outrageous mind. An unusual, unforgettable, incomparable pulpy punch.
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and growing corruption in Naples as well as in a culture where women’s desires almost never direct the course of family life. The domestic balancing acts performed by both women—one leading a life of privilege, one burdened by poverty and limited choice—illuminate the personal and political costs of selfdetermination. The pseudonymous Ferrante—whose actual identity invites speculation in the literary world—approaches her characters’ divergent paths with an unblinking objectivity that prevents the saga from sinking into melodrama. Elena is an exceptional narrator; her voice is marked by clarity in recounting both external events and her own internal dialogues (though we are often left to imagine Lila’s thought process, the plight of the non-narrative protagonist). Goldstein’s elegant translation carries the novel forward toward an ending that will leave Ferrante’s growing cadre of followers wondering if this reported trilogy is destined to become a longer series. Ferrante’s lucid rendering of Lila’s and Elena’s entwined yet discrete lives illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts.
Named to KIRKUS REVIEWS’ Best Books of 2014 An INDIE NEXT Great Read, 2014
special issue: best books of 2014
ALPH A BET a novel by Kathy Page
“Powerful...simply an epiphany.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS
THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY
“Gritty and illuminating... fascinating from the first page.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ferrante, Elena Translated by Goldstein, Ann Europa Editions (416 pp.) $18.00 paper | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-60945-233-9
“An emotional read without sentimentality or easy, pat answers... Recommended.” —LIBRARY JOURNAL
This third volume of the Neopolitan trilogy continues to chronicle the turbulent lives of longtime friends Lila and Elena, as begun in the enigmatic Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013). With Naples and the looming specter of Vesuvius once again forming the ominous background to the girls’ lives, Elena travels from the city of her childhood, first to the university in Pisa, and then beyond upon her marriage to Pietro, the intellectual heir to an influential Milanese family. Lila’s existence in Naples follows a more brutal and mundane course, but both young women are confronted with the social and political upheavals that echoed across Italy (and the world) during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Always rivals as well as friends, Lila and Elena struggle to assert themselves in a landscape of shifting alliances
“A gut-wrenching reminder of the atrocities that can be held within institutional walls and the lengths to which we are willing to go in order to protect our innermost selves.” —SHELF AWARENESS | Distributed in the U.S. by Consortium. BIBLIOASIS www.biblioasis.com
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finding magic, even amid the confusion of adulthood, in lev grossman’s magicians trilogy ALL I LOVE AND KNOW
After 10 years of work, three best-selling and critically acclaimed novels, and nearly 1,000 pages, Lev Grossman’s groundbreaking Magicians trilogy drew to a close this year with the August publication of The Magician’s Land. “I started the first book in 2004,” Grossman says. “I really do feel a lot of pride and a sense of accomplishment. This is the best thing I’ve done in my life. Well, other than my kids.” As a lifelong fan of authors such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Grossman was thrilled by the rises of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. “I was aware of how incompletely Narnia had prepped me for the challenges of adult life,” Grossman says. “I wanted to know what magic would feel like for adults and alongside sex, drinking and confusion. I wanted to write that story,” Grossman emphasizes. “A story about people who discover power they didn’t know they had, who find themselves in a world they didn’t know existed. Not children, but people who had my problems.” Grossman is already halfway through his next novel, although he’s not sure if it’s fantasy or not. Either way, Grossman knows that there’s something special about magic that will likely keep him coming back for more. “Magic is a metaphor for a lot of things,” Grossman says. “The escape into Narnia was so resonant for me as a child because it’s…how you disappear into a novel. In Lev Grossman my world there isn’t any magic; but, if there is, it’s in books.” —Richard Z. Santos
Frank, Judith Morrow/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $26.99 | $15.99 e-book | Jul. 15, 2014 978-0-06-230287-8 978-0-06-230228-5 e-book
Photo courtesy Mathieu Bourgois
Frank chronicles the difficult adjustments of a gay family formed by tragedy in her compelling follow-up to Crybaby Butch (2004). As the novel opens, Matthew Greene, a self-described “normal, young, shallow queen,” is on a plane to Tel Aviv with his devastated partner, Daniel Rosen, whose twin brother, Joel, and sister-in-law, Ilana, have just been killed by a suicide bomber. It’s been four years since Matt fled the New York City whirl of drugs and casual sex to move in with the older, more sober Daniel in Northampton, Massachusetts, and both men are still slightly stunned by their opposites-attract relationship. The news that Joel and Ilana named Daniel guardian of 5-yearold Gal and baby Noam appalls her parents, devout Holocaust survivors, nor are the secular, American elder Rosens very happy about their grandchildren being raised by Matt, whom they don’t really like. But the real problems, once Gal and Noam are settled in Northampton, stem from the overwhelming grief that makes Daniel a virtual specter in his new family. He’s emotionally distant and critical of Matt’s more relaxed parenting style; their conflicts are exacerbated by the volatile Gal, understandably given to acting out in the wake of hideous loss and traumatic relocation to a new nation, culture and language. It seems quite possible the men’s relationship will not survive these stresses, which Frank explores in depth and without reassuring sentimentality. She also excels at the social backdrops for her characters’ drama, from the fraught political climate in Israel (Daniel and Matt are both leftwing proponents of the peace process) to the cozy, gossipy world of gay and lesbian life in Northampton. Daniel isn’t always very likable, but his disabling sorrow and controlling ways are believable impediments to his love for Matt and make it all the more moving to watch them work through to reconciliation. Strong storytelling driven by emotionally complex characters: first-rate commercial fiction.
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THE SECRET PLACE
French, Tana Viking (464 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-0-670-02632-6
A hint of the supernatural spices the latest from a mystery master as two detectives try to probe the secrets teenage girls keep—and the lies they tell— after murder at a posh boarding school. The Dublin novelist (Broken Harbor, 2012, etc.) has few peers in her combination of literary stylishness and intricate, clockwork plotting. Here, French challenges |
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herself and her readers with a narrative strategy that finds chapters alternating between two different time frames and points of view. One strand concerns four girls at exclusive St. Kilda’s who are so close they vow they won’t even have boyfriends. Four other girls from the school are their archrivals, more conventional and socially active. The novel pits the girls against each other almost as two gangs, with the plot pivoting on the death of a rich boy from a nearby school who had been sneaking out to see at least two of the girls. The second strand features the two detectives who spend a long day and night at the school, many months after the unsolved murder. Narrating these chapters is Stephen, a detective assigned to cold cases, who receives an unexpected visit from one of the girls, Holly, a daughter of one of Stephen’s colleagues on the force, who brings a postcard she’d found on a bulletin board known as “The Secret Place” that says “I know who killed him.” The ambitious Stephen, who has a history with both the girl and her father, brings the postcard to Conway, a hard-bitten female detective whose case this had been. The chapters narrated by Stephen concern their day of interrogation and investigation at the school, while the alternating ones from the girls’ perspectives cover the school year leading up to the murder and its aftermath. Beyond the murder mystery, which leaves the reader in suspense throughout, the novel explores the mysteries of friendship, loyalty and betrayal, not only among adolescents, but within the police force as well. Everyone is this meticulously crafted novel might be playing—or being played by—everyone else.
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sent it out for consideration. Rowling has great fun with the book industry: Editors, agents and publishers all want to meet the detective, but only over lunches at fancy restaurants where he’s expected to foot the bill. It’s no big surprise when Strike finds the writer’s dead body—though it’s certainly gruesome, as someone killed him in the same extravagantly macabre way he disposed of the villain of his unpublished book. As Strike tries to figure out who murdered Owen, the writer is splashed across the front pages of the tabloids in a way he would have loved when he was alive, while the detective tries to play down his own growing fame. Rowling proves once again that she’s a master of plotting over the course of a series; you can see her planting seeds, especially when it comes to Robin, which can be expected to bear narrative fruit down the line. It will be a pleasure to watch what happens.
AMERICAN INNOVATIONS Stories
Galchen, Rivka Farrar, Straus and Giroux (192 pp.) $25.00 | May 6, 2014 978-0-374-28047-5
THE SILKWORM
Galbraith, Robert Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (464 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 19, 2014 978-0-316-20687-7 In her second pseudonymous outing as Galbraith, J.K. Rowling continues her examination of fame—those who want it, those who avoid it, those who profit from it. Cormoran Strike, Rowling’s hard-living private eye, isn’t as close to the edge as he was in his first appearance, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). His success at proving supermodel Lula Landry was murdered has brought him more clients than he can handle—mostly businessmen who think their lovers are straying and divorcing wives looking for their husbands’ assets—and he’s even rented a small apartment above his office near Charing Cross Road. His accidental temp–turned-assistant, Robin Ellacott, is dying to stretch her investigative muscles, but she has to deal with her fiance, Matthew, who still wishes she’d taken that better-paying job in human resources. Then odd sad-sack Leonora Quine comes in asking Strike to find her missing husband, Owen, a fading enfant terrible novelist. Strike soon discovers that Owen had written a baroque fantasy novel in which he exposed the secrets of everyone he knows—including his editor, publisher and a famous writer with whom he had a falling out years earlier—and his agent had just |
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In this story collection—which follows her debut novel, the well-received Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)—Galchen, one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, continues to plumb the unbelievable and unknowable mysteries of existence. These are literary short stories, but there’s a detective lurking in their author, who peels back fine layers of life with close observation to uncover clues about the physics of daily living and how we process the world. In the title story, a woman wakes one morning to discover a third breast has grown on her back; she has to wrestle with societal expectations of beauty and identity. In “Once an Empire,” the narrator says, “I’m a pretty normal woman...,” which immediately cues the reader to wonder what isn’t normal about her, or the story; soon she’s watching the contents of her apartment—furniture, utensils and objects—get up and walk out. Do these things represent her life, and if they’re so important to her, why is she willing to watch them leave? And things get stranger in “The Region of Unlikeness”: A woman discovers that her crush, a man she met at a cafe, is supposedly a time traveler, and his friend, whom she doesn’t much care for, is his father—and maybe her potential future husband. Not all the stories venture into the fantastic, though; many poke and prod at the challenges of the everyday, as in “Sticker Shock,” which compares the finances of a mother and daughter and is written in the tone of an accountant’s review, and “The Lost Order,” in which a woman obscures the fact that she’s lost her job from her husband and ponders what her life will be like as “a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed....” Galchen’s stories feel remarkably believable, despite their suggestion of alternate worlds and lives. This is a collection to read and keep on the bookshelf. It will stand the test of time. 19
THE STORIES OF JANE GARDAM
and his resistance to paying ransom baffles Mireille’s U.S.-born husband, Michael; meanwhile, she’s repeatedly beaten and sexually assaulted by her captors. Gay’s characters are engineered to open up conflicts over gender, class (Mireille’s family is wealthy in a poor country) and race (Mireille is black and Michael is white). But Gay’s dialogue complicates rather than simplifies these issues. As a prolific essayist and critic, Gay (Writing/Eastern Illinois Univ.) has developed a plainspoken, almost affectless style, which serves her heroine’s story well: The more bluntly Gay describes Mireille’s degradations, the stronger the impact. Gay’s depiction of Mireille’s emotional trauma after her release is particularly intense, precisely capturing her alienation from her own identity that followed the kidnapping and the self-destruction that spilled out of her sense of disconnection. The novel alternates between past and present, and flashbacks to Mireille’s childhood and marriage underscore the intelligence and emotional ferocity she accessed to survive her ordeal. (She persistently supported in-laws who were initially inclined to dismiss her.) The closing chapters suggest that Mireille is on the path to recovery, but it’s also clear that a true recovery is impossible; many of Gay’s scenes deliberately undermine traditional novelistic methods of resolution (baking bread, acts of vengeance, acting out sexually). Among the strongest achievements of this novel is that Mireille’s story feels complete and whole while emphasizing its essential brokenness. A cutting and resonant debut. (Agent: Maria Massie)
Gardam, Jane Europa Editions (336 pp.) $24.95 | Jun. 3, 2014 978-1-60945-199-8
Gathered from six earlier collections, spanning more than three decades, 28 stories from the redoubtable English writer. A youngish mother on a faraway beach. Staring into the water, a stranger with a familiar back. It’s Heneker! Ten years before, in London, Hetty had been his art student and mistress. Now she’s happily married and Heneker is a famous painter. Together they explore a painful paradox, leavened with humor: They’re soul mates but incompatible (“Hetty Sleeping”). Nancy and Clancy are soul mates, too, but there’s no humor attending these childhood sweethearts, for their future is darkened by heartbreak (“The Boy who Turned into a Bike”). Gardam’s stories range widely. She’s as good with the very old (“Old Filth,” a postscript to her same-titled novel) as the very young (“Swan”). The upper classes, observed with a beady eye, come off unattractively: mean-spirited, oblivious to suffering (“The Tribute” and “Miss Mistletoe”). Gardam doesn’t fare as well with the deeply depressed: “Rode by all with Pride” and “Damage” are uncharacteristically labored. She writes ghost stories with flair (“A Spot of Gothic,” “Soul Mates”) but is less successful with fantasy (“The Green Man,” “The Zoo at Christmas”). One exception is her delightfully mischievous sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic, in which the Little Mermaid’s littlest sister decides to check out the prince for herself. Her verdict? “Men aren’t worth it” (“The Pangs of Love”). In somewhat different territory there’s “Grace,” about a man with a diamond under his skin; it’s a tall tale that’s markedly less tall by the end. The most attention-getting story is “The Sidmouth Letters”: A hustling American academic is hot to buy correspondence which may provide a peek into Jane Austen’s private life, but a relative of the woman who owns the letters beats him to the punch. What happens next will thrill some Janeites and appall others. A rich haul from a well of talent.
THE WORD EXCHANGE
Graedon, Alena Doubleday (400 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 8, 2014 978-0-385-53765-0
Language becomes a virus in this terrifying vision of the print-empty, Webreliant culture of the 22nd century. Students of linguistics may run screaming from this dystopian nightmare by Brooklyn-based debut novelist Graedon, but diligent fans of Neal Stephenson or Max Barry will be richly rewarded by a complex thriller. In fact, the novel is as much about lexicography, communication and philosophy as it is about secret societies, conspiracies and dangerous technologies. Our heroine is Anana Johnson, who works closely with her father, Doug, at the antiquated North American Dictionary of the English Language. The dictionary is an artifact in a near future where most of the populace uses “Memes”—implantable devices that feed massive amounts of data to users in real time but also monitor their environments to suggest behaviors, purchases and ideas. The devices, marketed by technology behemoth Synchronic, have become so pervasive that the company has enough clout to create and sell language itself to linguistically bereft users in their online Word Exchange. If that sounds creepy, it is, and it gets worse. One evening, Doug gives Ana two bottles of pills and a code word, “Alice,” to use if danger should
AN UNTAMED STATE
Gay, Roxane Black Cat/Grove (368 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 6, 2014 978-0-8021-2251-3
A harrowing and emotionally cleareyed vision of one woman’s ordeal during and after her kidnapping in Haiti. Gay’s remarkable debut novel is mostly narrated by Mireille, who, as the story opens, is visiting her native Haiti from Miami with her husband and infant son when she’s forcibly abducted by a gang and held for 13 days. She was a target because her father heads a highly profitable construction firm, 20
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A hugely entertaining, surprising and perhaps prophetic package that, without seeming to, raises profound questions about the human mind and the nature of perception.
enter their loquacious lives. When Doug disappears, Ana and her comrade Bart must navigate the increasingly treacherous world behind the clean lines of Synchronic’s marketing schemes, complete with chases through underground mazes and encounters with the subversive “Diachronic Society,” which leads the resistance against the Meme vogue. The danger explodes when the world is engulfed by “word flu,” causing widespread, virulent aphasia. “As more and more of our interactions are mediated by machines—as all consciousness and communications are streamed through Crowns, Ear Beads, screens and whatever Synchronic has planned next, for its newest Meme—there’s no telling what will happen, not only to language but in some sense to civilization,” warns the resistance. “The end of words would mean the end of memory and thought. In other words, our past and future.” A wildly ambitious, darkly intellectual and inventive thriller about the intersection of language, technology and meaning.
THE MAGICIAN’S LAND
Grossman, Lev Viking (416 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 5, 2014 978-0-670-01567-2
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AFTERPARTY
Gregory, Daryl Tor (303 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-7653-3692-7 An eye-popping glimpse of a near future when designer drugs are commonplace, from the author of Raising Stony Mayhall (2011, etc.). It’s a future where anybody with a chemjet printer and a recipe from the Internet can create designer drugs. In Toronto, biochemists Lyda and her genius wife, Mikala, IT whiz Gil, finance specialist Edo and lab tech Rovil start a company dedicated to developing a drug that would combat schizophrenia. They achieve success with Numinous, but the drawbacks, alas, become apparent too late: It’s addictive, the effects are permanent—and those who take it gain the unshakable conviction that a personal deity accompanies them. Worse, after taking a massive overdose— how this all comes about emerges only gradually—Lyda stabs a now-estranged Mikala to death, or so it appears. Gil takes the blame; Edo goes hopelessly crazy; Rovil seems functional. Declared insane, Lyda’s locked up along with her invisible companion, a guardian angel called Dr. Gloria. While incarcerated, Lyda learns that a drug very much like Numinous has hit the street in the form of a sacrament dispensed by a new church. To prevent an epidemic of psychotic zombies, she must escape, locate the other survivors of the original five and put a stop to it. She’ll need the help of Ollie, a brilliant but drug-ravaged intelligence analyst. Among the obstacles they’ll negotiate are a drug-dealer gang of Afghan women; Native American cigarette smugglers who take great delight in outwitting the U.S. Border Patrol; and Vincent, a psychotic assassin who farms miniature buffalo in his living room. This taut, brisk, gripping narrative, dazzlingly intercut with flashbacks and sidebars, oozes warmth and wit. |
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Deeply satisfying finale to the bestselling fantasy trilogy (The Magicians, 2009; The Magician King, 2011). After being dethroned and exiled from the magical kingdom of Fillory for helping his friend Julia become a demigoddess, Quentin returns to Earth to teach at his alma mater, Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. But when his student Plum stumbles across the school’s resident malevolent demon, which Quentin refuses to kill because it was once his lover Alice, they’re both thrown out and forced to take a risky freelance magic job. This involves stealing a suitcase that once belonged to Plum’s great-grandfather Rupert, one of the five Chatwin siblings whose adventures in Fillory were the subject of best-selling books Plum thinks are fictional—until she opens the suitcase to find Rupert’s memoirs. They fill in some blanks about what really happened to the Chatwins in Fillory and provide clues that will help Quentin’s old comrades Eliot and Janet, still ruling over Fillory, who have been warned by the ram-god Ember that the land is slowly dying. As in the previous novels, Grossman captures the magic of fantasy books cherished in youth and repurposes it to decidedly adult ends. He slyly alludes to the Harry Potter series and owes a clear debt to J.K. Rowling’s great action scenes, though his characters’ magical battles have a bravura all their own. But his deepest engagement remains with C.S. Lewis, as Narnia is the obvious prototype for Fillory; the philosophical conclusion Grossman draws from his land’s narrowly averted apocalypse is the exact opposite of that offered in Lewis’ overbearing Christian allegory. Human emotions and desires balance unearthly powers, especially in the drama of Alice’s painful return. A beautiful scene in Fillory’s Drowned Garden reconnects Quentin with the innocent, dreaming boy he once was yet affirms the value of the chastened grown-up he has become. The essence of being a magician, as Quentin learns to define it, could easily serve as a thumbnail description of Grossman’s art: “the power to enchant the world.”
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helen oyeyemi’s trouble with mirrors yields a vibrant novel TIGERMAN
As Helen Oyeyemi tells it, the trouble with mirrors began once upon a time in a flat she kept in Prague—which, for whatever reason, happened to have a lot of them on its walls. “I must have felt a bit bullied by all my reflections, because I became hostile toward them,” Oyeyemi, who was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists last year, says via email from Prague. “And then I remembered that one of my biggest problems with ‘Snow White’ is the way everyone just believes what the mirror says. A more modern heroine, say post-1920s, would be asking a few questions about the ‘fairest of them all’ statement. For instance, on what criteria is the mirror basing this judgment, and what’s the source of the mirror’s authority?” The trio of modern heroines in Oyeyemi’s fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, asks many such questions, making for an inventive—and socially engaged—retelling of “Snow White.” “The characters in ‘Snow White’ keep trying to read each other and deciding friend or foe based on inevitably superficial surfaces,” Oyeyemi says. “What Boy, Snow and Bird seem to have in common is that they either have or want other criteria for deciding where their loyalties lie.” The tendency to be surprised by her characters seems to delight Oyeyemi, who writes with a lively curiosity about her world’s hidden possibilities. Oyeyemi, like Bird, merely allows magic, in narrative and language alike, to happen on its own and seems to see her role as mostly reportorial. “I don’t separate their experiences into fantastic or realisHelen Oyeyemi tic elements,” she says of the characters in Boy, Snow, Bird. “They’re simply saying what happened. Except,” she adds impishly, “for the times when they’re lying.” —Jenny Hendrix
Harkaway, Nick Knopf (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 29, 2014 978-0-385-35241-3
Photo courtesy Piotr Cieplak
Imagine Superman in Grand Fenwick and you’ll have some idea of Harkaway’s (Angelmaker, 2012, etc.) brilliantly imagined latest romp. “It’s amazing being a superhero,” says Lester Ferris as the action winds down at the end of Harkaway’s latest. “It’s totally mad.” Ferris, aka the Sergeant, hasn’t been on Mancreu for long, but he’s lived 10 lifetimes there. Posted to a supposedly quiet patch of earth after long, soul-shattering duty in Afghanistan (“the Americans called it a Total Goatfuck”) and Iraq, he’s found himself on a spit of land out in the Arabian Sea that, thanks to climate change, is in danger of receding under the waves—but until that time is a convenient entrepot for drug dealers, arms smugglers, pirates, spies, defectors, flimflam artists, multinational corporatists and all the usual suspects, not least of them numerous powers NATO and otherwise: “[V]arious interests,” writes Harkaway, “were making use of the lawless nature of the Mancreu waters for things they might not otherwise be able to do.” Mancreu’s hub is a cafe owned by a fine fellow named Shola, who’s mowed down by gunmen for no apparent reason. The Sergeant, aided—or perhaps not—by shadowy figures flying the stars and stripes and the tricolor, is at a loss until, visited of a night by a tiger, he takes on the superhero guise of the title, suggested to him by a comic-book–loving, lonely teenager helpfully named Robin. The ensuing showdown is full of in-jokes, knowing nods to the headlines and miscreant Belgians, which will please fans of Monty Python if not necessarily the good burghers of Antwerp. The cast of characters is straight out of a Milton Caniff cartoon, with names like Bad Jack, White Raoul and the Witch, but the burdens poor Mancreu has to bear, from land rape and gang war to toxic dumping and international intrigue, are thoroughly modern millstones. A hoot and a half, and then some: hands down, the best island farce since Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle half a century ago.
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IN YOUR DREAMS
Higgins, Kristan Harlequin (480 pp.) $7.99 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-373-77931-4 When Emmaline Neal needs a date for her ex-fiance’s wedding, Jack Holland volunteers, eager to escape to Malibu from freezing Manningsport, New York, and the community that’s branded him a hero. After rescuing four local teens from a car accident, Jack feels stifled by his sudden celebrity, especially since he feels unworthy. Hearing that friendly local cop Emmaline needs a |
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date for a wedding in sunny California, Jack jumps in. Emmaline is the most down-to-earth person he knows, and helping her save face with an ex seems like a fair trade-off for some warm weather and a respite from his town’s suffocating admiration. For Emmaline, Jack is the last man in the world she wants to take since she has a huge crush on him but knows he’s way out of her league. “Jack Holland was ridiculously gorgeous....Tall and blond with eyes that were so clear and perfect and pure that they made a person think of all sorts of ridiculous synonyms for blue.” However, with no one else on the horizon, she agrees, then falls for him even more when he poses as her lover and defends her to the awful ex and his bridezilla, not to mention the oblivious psychologist parents who are convinced she’s gay. Sleeping together only complicates things, and back home, they fumble their relationship. Jack’s exquisite ex-wife is determined to get back together with him, while he’s suffering from a case of PTSD he refuses to acknowledge. While Emmaline knows Jack is attracted to her, he never shows any signs of fighting for her when it matters. Wounded and unsure, Jack and Emmaline examine their hearts and decide to fight for their unexpected yet perfect-for-each-other happy ending. Higgins returns to her popular Blue Heron series, creating two appealing, authentic characters who take a staggering emotional journey cushioned by humor and love. Higgins exhibits her storytelling artistry with another stunning romance that includes her trademark touches of laugh-out-loud humor and tear-jerking pathos.
and the farm; guilt-ridden Wendy moves to the farm to help. In this superb allegorical tale, Matt wanders through bar fights and ranch work and then settles in with Roland Jarms, a dissolute but good-hearted gambler. There, adrift in his great odyssey, Matt stays, and during his exile, he re-forms himself—“I believe I’m safe for people now”—before returning to Wendy bearing a motherless child he’s named Angel. From the great flat land where “[w]ind gusted from the north and geese sliced ahead of it through the sky,” Holbert’s powerful work echoes the romance of America’s Western experience. A masterpiece.
THE BLAZING WORLD
Hustvedt, Siri Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4767-4723-1
An embittered female artist plays a trick on critics that goes badly awry in Hustvedt’s latest (The Summer Without Men, 2011, etc.). An “Editor’s Introduction” sets up the premise: After the 1995 death of her husband, art dealer Felix Lord, Harriet Burden embarked on a project she called Maskings, in which she engaged three male artists to exhibit her work as their own, to expose the art world’s sexism and to reveal “how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” Readers of Hustvedt’s essay collections (Living, Thinking, Looking, 2012, etc.) will recognize the writer’s long-standing interest in questions of perception, and her searching intellect is also evident here. But as the story of Harry’s life coheres—assembled from her notebooks, various pieces of journalism, and interviews with her children, the three male artists and other art-world denizens—it’s the emotional content that seizes the reader. After a lifetime of being silenced by the powerful presences of her father and her husband, Harry seethes with rage, made no less consuming by the fact that she genuinely loved Felix; the nuanced depiction of their flawed marriage is one of the novel’s triumphs, fair to both parties and tremendously sad. As in her previous masterpiece, What I Loved (2003), Hustvedt paints a scathing portrait of the art world, obsessed with money and the latest trend, but superb descriptions of Harry’s work—installations expressing her turbulence and neediness—remind us that the beauty and power of art transcend such trivialities. If only art could heal Harry, who learns the risks of entrusting others with your own unfinished business when the third of her male “masks” refuses to play her endgame. She dies less than a year later (no spoiler; we learn this from the opening pages), and the book closes with a moving final vision of her art: “every one of those wild, nutty, sad things...alive with the spirit.” Blazing indeed: not just with Harry’s fury, but with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity. (Agent: Binky Urban)
THE HOUR OF LEAD
Holbert, Bruce Counterpoint (400 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 15, 2014 978-1-61902-292-8
Holbert’s (Lonesome Animals, 2012) second novel is a tale of the American West as faithful to the legends as McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Holbert’s work rings out with the hard, clean truths of love and loyalty, family and friendship, all flowering from thickets of poetic language, some simple (“work was praying the same prayer everyday”), some gut-wrenching (“When he finally took the baby from her and held her bloody stillness in his hands, he wept”). Matt and Luke Lawson are twins, born to the rich land and open skies of eastern Washington. In 1918, as they journey home from school one day, they’re trapped in an epic blizzard; their father leaves the farmhouse to search for them. Of the three, only Matt survives. Everything else that unfolds is set in motion by that tragedy. Matt’s mother turns inward. Still a young teen, Matt runs the farm while obsessively searching for his father’s body; he’s accompanied by Wendy, a storekeeper’s daughter, to whom he feels devotion. But Matt’s also angry, frustrated and simmering with violence. He’s the quintessential Western hero—taciturn and strong as iron with an unbreachable moral center. Rejected by Wendy, he abandons his mother 24
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“Emotionally rewarding and elegantly written... this is James at her best.” from three weeks with lady x
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THE HUNTING GUN
special issue: best books of 2014
Inoue’s first book, published in Japan in 1949, recounts a tragic love triangle from the different perspectives of those affected. The book begins with a framing device that feels old-fashioned yet contemporary in its self-consciousness. The “author” explains that he recently received a mysterious letter from a man named Misugi Josuke, who claims to be the subject of a poem published by the “author.” Josuke thinks the poem captured the “desolate dried-up riverbed” within him. He encloses three letters that came to him, asking that the “author” read and then destroy them. The first, addressed to Uncle Josuke, comes from a woman named Shoko, whose mother, Saiko, has recently died. Saiko divorced Shoko’s father for adultery when Shoko was 5. Josuke and his wife, Midori, have been close family friends for as long as Shoko can remember, and Shoko has always felt a special closeness to gentle Midori. The day before Saiko’s death, Shoko was supposed to burn her mother’s diary, but she read it and was shocked to learn that Saiko and Josuke have been having an affair for 13 years and that Saiko has been wracked with guilt. While thanking Josuke for his support, Shoko tells him she never wants to see him or Midori again. She also sends along a letter Saiko left for him. But the second letter is from Midori, who writes that she wants to end their marriage, which has been a sham all along. While appearing to involve herself with other men, she’s always pined for Josuke, who’s remained coolly aloof. She knows he thought he was protecting her from knowledge of his affair, but she discloses her own secret: She has always known. Saiko’s letter is a farewell. About to die, she tells Josuke her own guilty, passionate secret, one that Josuke has never suspected. Nor will the reader, although it makes complete sense. This slight but elegant and moving novella is a lovely introduction to a prolific Japanese writer (1907-1991) largely unknown in the West.
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Amina Eapen was born in New Mexico, but her older brother, Akhil, was born in India before the family moved to America. Amina and Akhil chafed against their parents’ evident unhappiness—their mother, Kamala, clung to impossible dreams of returning to India; their father, Thomas, disappeared into his medical practice—while also enjoying the extended Christian Indian community to which the Eapens have always belonged. Now in her mid-30s and unmarried, Amina is working as a wedding photographer in Seattle, having dropped her career in photojournalism after a picture she took of a suicide went viral. Then Kamala, who has become a Baptist, manipulates Amina into a visit by claiming Thomas is acting strangely. Amina arrives in New Mexico reluctant but soon realizes that something may actually be wrong with her father; not only is he talking to dead relatives on the front porch, but he’s exhibiting odd behavior at work. By the time Thomas is diagnosed with a physical disease, Amina is feeling a bit haunted by the past herself—she can’t escape from memories of growing up with the gifted but troubled Akhil, whose death as a high school senior was a blow from which no one in the family has recovered. Amina also finds a lover she avoids introducing to her parents for good reason: He’s the brother of Akhil’s high school sweetheart, and he isn’t Indian. Amina’s romance, as well as mouthwatering descriptions of Kamala’s cooking, leavens but does not diminish the Eapens’ family tragedy. Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; Lahiri may be more overtly profound, Jacob more willing to go for comedy, but both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.
Inoue, Yasushi Translated by Emmerich, Michael Pushkin Press (112 pp.) $16.00 paper | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-78227-001-0
THREE WEEKS WITH LADY X
James, Eloisa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-06-222389-0 When Lady Xenobia is hired to restyle Thorn Dautry’s country estate to help him win a perfect bride, they’re both loath to admit they’ve met their perfect matches. The illegitimate yet beloved son of the Duke of Villiers, Thorn has made his own successful way in the world through his cleverness and entrepreneurial spirit. Rich beyond imagining, he’s now turning his energy toward finding a wife. He has his eyes on Laetitia Rainsford, a quiet beauty with a harridan for a mother. The Rainsfords are short on cash, and Laetitia’s father is holding out for a huge dowry, despite Lady Rainsford’s disdain for the illegitimate, untitled Dautry. Thorn buys a country estate previously owned by a debauched lord, and he must completely refurbish the buildings and land before inviting his family and the Rainsfords to a house party that he hopes will end in an engagement. On the advice of his stepmother, Thorn hires Lady Xenobia—known
THE SLEEPWALKER’S GUIDE TO DANCING
Jacob, Mira Random House (512 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jul. 1, 2014 978-0-8129-9478-0 978-0-8129-9479-7 e-book Jacob’s darkly comic debut—about a photographer’s visit to her parents’ New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middleclass Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance. |
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a little humor with a lot of darkness in elizabeth mccracken’s stories Elizabeth McCracken doesn’t consider herself to be a particularly dark and twisty person. “I love my husband, I love my kids, I don’t find life difficult and fraught,” says McCracken, author of National Book Award finalist The Giant’s House. And yet in her latest, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (also a finalist for this year’s National Book Award in fiction), children disappear. Mothers go missing. Library patrons murder and are murdered, and the children’s room rabbit dies and lies in state awaiting deposition by a Department of Public Works shovel. By day McCracken holds the James A. Michener Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, “and boy are her arms tired,” reads her website. Therein lies the rub: Each Thunderstruck story features an indomitable sense of humor that rends sinisterness smilingly awry. Take, for example, “The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston,” in which a boy turns truant when his grandfather padlocks the kitchen cabinets. “Once upon a time—specifically, Tuesday, September 7, 1982—Asher Blackbird, last year’s straight-A student, got caught trying to shoplift frozen French bread pizzas,” McCracken writes, invoking the saddest of all possible groceries. “I’d like to be one of those people that says I just want to tell a good story,” she says. “I think what readers really want is a good story, but I’m not sure I’m any good at that, so I feel most satisfied with something when I feel like the language is doing something interesting—language and probElizabeth McCracken ably psychology afterward. I’m happiest when I feel like I’ve written some sentences that get at the heart of characters.” —Megan Labrise
to her friends as India—to manage the overwhelming project, and she executes every detail with grace and elegance. India is the daughter of a marquess, and Thorn knows she is above his reach, so he at first tries to ignore their flaming attraction, then gives in to it but clings to the idea of biddable, easygoing Laetitia as an appropriate bride. India and Thorn each have deepseated insecurities and strong personalities, and their secretive courtship is intense and explosive. They are clearly perfect for each other but blinded by their own uncertainty and society’s expectations. Star romance author James revisits her bestselling Desperate Duchesses series with this compelling and passionate book. India and Thorn (aka Tobias, first met in This Duchess of Mine (2009) as a youth) are complex, intriguing and endearing, and their romance enchants. Secondary characters enhance the emotional stakes, and fans will enjoy another peek at popular hero Villiers and his wife, Eleanor. Emotionally rewarding and elegantly written, with textured characters and a captivating plot, this is James at her best. (Agent: Kim Witherspoon)
THE WOMAN WHO BORROWED MEMORIES Selected Stories of Tove Jansson
Jansson, Tove Translated by Teal, Thomas; Mazzarella, Silvester New York Review Books (400 pp.) $16.95 paper | $10.99 e-book Oct. 21, 2014 978-1-59017-766-2 978-1-59017-793-8 e-book
Photo courtesy Edward Carey
Twenty-six spare, slyly off-kilter stories collected from the life work of Swedish-speaking Jansson, who wrote 11 works of adult fiction (The Summer Book, 1972, etc.) as well as a series of children’s books (Moominpappa’s Memoirs, 1994, etc.) before her death in 2001. Written between 1971 and 1998, these stories consider loneliness, family, aging and creative experience, sometimes all together as in the opening story, “The Listener,” about an elderly woman who creates an elaborate chart of her memories. In “Black-White” and “The Other,” artists find themselves erasing the line between art and life, while “The Cartoonist” expresses artistic ambivalence as a man hired to carry on someone else’s cartoon becomes obsessed with understanding why his predecessor quit. “The Doll’s House,” concerning a retired upholsterer who builds a miniature world for himself and his uninterested lover, asks who ultimately owns the finished creation. In “A Leading Role” and “White Lady,” actresses juggle artificial roles and reality. In “The Wolf,” one of several stories with animal titles, a woman wonders if the Japanese artist she’s hosting will draw the caged animal they see together at the zoo or the one he imagines. In one of the volume’s most disturbing stories, it isn’t clear if a woman writer living purposely alone on an island allows a squirrel to terrorize her or if “The Squirrel” is
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BROADCHURCH
her creation. Other stories use travel to consider relationships, memory and isolation. Most, like “A Foreign City” and “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories,” feature characters whose lives go out of kilter. But a few—“The Summer Child,” about a rural family and the difficult boy they take in for the summer; “The Garden of Eden,” about a woman negotiating between warring expat neighbors in Spain; “Travelling Light,” about a man who can’t escape his own generosity—offer slivers of gently sweetened optimism. Windows crop up often in Jansson’s stories, reflecting the transparent wall between her lonely characters and their worlds but also Jansson’s expression of intangible thoughts and feelings with lucent prose.
Kelly, Erin Minotaur (448 pp.) $25.99 | $11.99 e-book | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-250-05550-7 978-1-4668-5851-0 e-book
A MAP OF BETRAYAL
Jin, Ha Pantheon (320 pp.) $26.95 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-307-91160-5
special issue: best books of 2014
A plainspoken, even reticent narrative illuminates the complex loyalties of a Chinese-American spy, who considers himself a patriot of both countries. As a novel of espionage, the latest from the prizewinning author (Waiting, 1999, etc.) satisfies like the best of John le Carré, similarly demystifying and deglamorizing the process of gathering information and the ambiguous morality that operates in shades of gray. But it’s plain that this novel is about more than the plight of one spy, who must forsake his Chinese family in order to embed himself as a master translator for the CIA, becoming “China’s ear to the heartbeat of the United States.” In the process, he starts a second family, which knows nothing about the first, raising a daughter with his Irish-American wife. He also has a mistress, a Chinese-American woman to whom he relates and responds in the way he can’t with his American wife and to whom he entrusts his diaries. Thus, the issues of love and loyalty that permeate the novel aren’t merely political, but deeply personal. Narrating the novel is Lilian Shang, a scholar and the adult daughter of the late Gary Shang, convicted of treason in America, abandoned by his Chinese handlers, who receives the diaries from his lifelong mistress. Chapters in which Lilian learns about her father’s first family in China and attempts to connect with them and bridge their related pasts alternate with chapters from Gary’s perspective, in which he leaves his homeland and his family and earns (and betrays?) the trust of his adopted country, one in which the freedom of jazz and the mournful tone of Hank Williams speak to him deeply. “The two countries are like parents to me,” he insists at his trial. “They are like mother and father, so as a son I can’t separate the two and I love them both.” Lilian ultimately discovers that such conflicting loyalties run deep in the bloodlines of her extended family. Subtle, masterful and bittersweet storytelling that operates on a number of different levels.
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Against all odds, Kelly’s novelization of the eponymous British TV series, now being remade for U.S. television as Gracepoint, works as both a classic puzzle and an unnerving portrait of a little English town wracked by a young boy’s murder. No one in Broadchurch can imagine why anyone would have wanted to kill Danny Latimer. No one can even imagine what the 11-year-old was doing out on his own in the middle of the night when he was strangled to death. His murder is a particular blow to DS Ellie Miller, whose son Tom was Danny’s best friend. Ellie’s just returned from a Florida vacation to find that the promotion she’d assumed would be hers has actually gone to DI Alec Hardy, an outsider whose last case, another child killing, ended with the presumed murderer going free—something he’s not exactly eager to advertise. What he is eager to do, it seems, is model a frigidly disengaged attitude and lecture Ellie about her need to do the same, even though she’s known everyone involved in the case forever. Clearly, the killer is someone she doesn’t know nearly as well as she thought. Suspicion falls in turn on Danny’s father, Mark, a plumber who can’t give a convincing alibi for the night his son was killed; phone engineer Steve Connolly, who hears voices that provide clues to the mystery; newsagent Jack Marshall, who employed Danny as a paper boy; young vicar Paul Coates; truculent Susan Wright, who’s got Danny’s missing skateboard hidden away; and Mark’s helper and would-be alibi Nige Carter. As journalists circle Hardy ready to expose his connection to his scandalous last case, Ellie reels under the sickening sense that each new suspicion is more devastating than the last. Kelly (The Burning Air, 2013, etc.) folds a loving portrait of rural Dorset and a well-made whodunit into a painstaking account of the grief and unimaginable pain that follow in the wake of one child’s murder.
THE LAST ILLUSION
Khakpour, Porochista Bloomsbury (288 pp.) $26.00 | May 13, 2014 978-1-62040-304-4
An audaciously ambitious novel that teeters along a tightrope but never falls off. Following her well-received debut (Sons and Other Flammable Objects, 2007), this Iranian-American novelist returns with what on the surface is a coming-ofage story about a boy who was raised as a bird, based on a myth |
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“A small gem, disturbing and haunting.” from euphoria
from the Persian Book of Kings (which finds its way into the story within this story) about an Icarus who becomes a great warrior and hero. The protagonist of this novel is neither. His name is Zal (it rhymes with “fall,” which is what happens to those who cannot fly), and he was born in Iran, very pale and blond in a country of darker skins, to a mother who considered him a mistake and a “White Demon.” His birth sparked his “mother’s disintegration into a crazy bird lady,” and she raised him in a menagerie, as a bird. The tone then shifts, or slides, from onceupon-a-time fable into something closer to American realism, as the setting shifts to New York City around the turn of the millennium. Zal has been adopted by a behavioral analyst who wants to help him develop the human side of his adolescent personality and guide him into adulthood. Zal learns to “keep the bird in him, any bird in him, so deep within himself that it resurfaced only rarely”—though he does retain an appetite for insects and develops a crush on a particularly comely canary (“tiny but still voluptuous, round in all the right places”). In a coincidence that strains credulity, he happens to meet an artist who works with dead birds, who becomes his first love and is something of a strange bird herself. She suffers from anorexia, panic attacks and premonitions, the last of which proves crucial and tragic. And he encounters an illusionist who sparks the novel’s title, planning to make New York disappear: “Not New York, exactly, but the New Yorkness of New York.” Plot summary fails to convey the spirit of this creative flight of fancy; farce meets disaster in a novel that illuminates what it means to be human, normal and in love.
tribe to study to keep them nearby. Soon the couple is happily ensconced with the Tam, whose women surprise Nell with their assertiveness. While the attraction, both physical and intellectual, between Bankson and Nell is obvious, Fen also offers Bankson tender care, which threatens to go beyond friendship, when Bankson falls ill. At first, the three-way connection is uniting and stimulating. But as Nell’s and Bankson’s feelings for each other develop, sexual tensions grow. So do the differences between Fen’s and Nell’s views on the anthropologist’s role. While Bankson increasingly shares Nell’s empathetic approach, Fen plots to retrieve an artifact from the Mumbanyo to cement his career. King does not shy from showing the uncomfortable relationship among all three anthropologists and those they study. Particularly upsetting is the portrait of a Tam who returns “civilized” after working in a copper mine. A small gem, disturbing and haunting.
MR. MERCEDES
King, Stephen Scribner (448 pp.) $30.00 | Jun. 3, 2014 978-1-4767-5445-1 In his latest suspenser, the prolific King (Joyland, 2013, etc.) returns to the theme of the scary car—except this one has a scary driver who’s as loony but logical unto himself as old Jack Torrance from The Shining. It’s an utterly American setup: Over here is a line of dispirited people waiting to get into a job fair, and over there is a psycho licking his chops at the easy target they present; he aims a car into the crowd and mows down a bunch of innocents, killing eight and hurting many more. The car isn’t his. The malice most certainly is, and it’s up to world-weary ex-cop Bill Hodges to pull himself up from depression and figure out the identity of the author of that heinous act. That author offers help: He sends sometimes-taunting, sometimes–sympathy-courting notes explaining his actions. (“I must say I exceeded my own wildest expectations,” he crows in one, while in another he mourns, “I grew up in a physically and sexually abusive household.”) With a cadre of investigators in tow, Hodges sets out to avert what is certain to be an even greater trauma, for the object of his catand-mouse quest has much larger ambitions, this time involving a fireworks show worthy of Fight Club. And that’s not his only crime: He’s illegally downloaded “the whole Anarchist Cookbook from BitTorrent,” and copyright theft just may be the ultimate evil in the King moral universe. King’s familiar themes are all here: There’s craziness in spades and plenty of alcohol and even a carnival, King being perhaps the most accomplished coulrophobe at work today. The storyline is vintage King, too: In the battle of good and evil, good may prevail—but never before evil has caused a whole lot of mayhem. The scariest thing of all is to imagine King writing a happy children’s book. This isn’t it: It’s nicely dark, never predictable and altogether entertaining.
EUPHORIA
King, Lily Atlantic Monthly (272 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 3, 2014 978-0-8021-2255-1 King (Father of the Rain, 2010, etc.) changes the names (and the outcome) in this atmospheric romantic fiction set in New Guinea and clearly based on anthropologist Margaret Mead’s relationship with her second and third husbands, R.F. Fortune and Gregory Bateson—neither a slouch in his own right. In the early 1930s, Nell and Fen are married anthropologists in New Guinea. American Nell has already published a controversial best-seller about Samoan child-rearing while Australian Fen has published only a monograph on Dobu island sorcery. Their marriage is in trouble: Nell holds Fen responsible for her recent miscarriage; he resents her fame and financial success. Shortly after leaving the Mumbanyo tribe they have been studying (and which Nell has grown to abhor), they run into British anthropologist Bankson, who is researching another tribal village, the Nengai, along the Sepik River. Deeply depressed—he’s recently attempted suicide—Bankson is haunted by the deaths of his older brothers and his scientist father’s disappointment in him for practicing what is considered a soft science. Also deeply lonely, Bankson offers to find Nell and Fen an interesting 28
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REDEPLOYMENT
special issue: best books of 2014
A sharp set of stories, the author’s debut, about U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and their aftermaths, with violence and gallows humor dealt out in equal measure. Klay is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, and the 12 stories reveal a deep understanding of the tedium, chaos and bloodshed of war, as well as the emotional disorientation that comes with returning home from it. But in the spirit of the best nonfiction writing about recent U.S. war vets (David Finkel’s Thank You For Your Service, for example), Klay eschews simple redemptive or tragic narrative arcs. The discomfiting “Bodies” is narrated by a Mortuary Affairs officer whose treatment of women back home is almost as equally coldhearted as he had to be when collecting remains, while “Prayer in the Furnace” is told from the perspective of a chaplain forced to confront a battalion that’s been bullied into a hyperviolent posture. Klay favors a clipped, dialogue-heavy style, and he’s skilled enough to use it for comic as well as dramatic effect. “OIF,” for instance, is a vignette that riffs on the military’s alphabet soup of acronyms and how they emotionally paper over war’s toll. (“And even though J-15 left his legs behind, at least he got CASEVAC’d to the SSTP and died on the table.”) The finest story in the collection, “Money as a Weapons System,” follows a Foreign Service Officer tasked with helping with reconstruction efforts in Iraq. His grand ambition to reopen a water treatment plant is slowly undone by incompetence, internecine squabbling and a congressman’s buddy who thinks there’s no problem in Iraq that teaching kids baseball won’t fix; Klay’s grasp of bureaucracy and bitter irony here rivals Joseph Heller and George Orwell. The narrators sound oddly similar throughout the book, as if the military snapped everybody into one world-wise voice. But it does make the book feel unusually cohesive for a debut collection. A no-nonsense and informed reckoning with combat.
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unearth deep insights from humdrum acts. But where Proust is philosophical, Knausgaard is more plainly descriptive, and part of his books’ magic is how they gather strength, snowballing small detail upon small detail until he’s captured life’s fullness in a way traditional storytelling arcs fail to. This volume centers on Karl Ove roughly from the ages of 6 to 12, and it’s masterful on a number of fronts. Most prominently, it gets at the roots of the dysfunctional relationship with his father that Knausgaard detailed in the previous two books. Karl Ove was a sensitive boy who could do little to please dad, an emotionally closed-off teacher, and though the boy was rarely physically abused (My Struggle’s provocative title has always been a touch satirical), Karl Ove’s evolution from eager to please to contemptuous feels justified, exact and natural. Knausgaard reimagines boyhood in general with similar precision; at the time, his family lived in a remote Norwegian town, and the book is filled with forest treks, games, squabbles with friends and an overall sense of an identity coming together. That’s particularly acute in the closing pages, as puberty strikes and Karl Ove fumblingly tries to understand girls. (One early victim is subject to his insistence that they break a 15-minute kissing record, and he’s befuddled when she breaks things off soon after.) Candor and fearlessness are the hallmarks of the books: Knausgaard will share anything, not for shock value or self-indulgence, but to show that plainspoken honesty gets to the heart of the human condition. Halfway through, this series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece.
Klay, Phil Penguin (304 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-59420-499-9
THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD
Koryta, Michael Little, Brown (400 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 3, 2014 978-0-316-12255-9 978-0-316-27996-3 e-book Hiding a teenage murder witness among a bunch of delinquent kids in a survival-training program in Montana seemed like a good idea. But when two coldblooded killers track him there from Indiana, everyone’s life is at grave risk. The program is run by Air Force veteran Ethan Serbin, who lives with his wife, Allison, in a mountain cabin. She distrusts Jamie Bennett, a federal marshal and former trainee of Ethan’s who shows up in the middle of the night, having recklessly driven into a blizzard, to plead for their help. Jamie says the boy, Jace Wilson, is too hot for even a witness protection program. When Jace arrives, it’s anonymously, under the name Connor Reynolds. He’s badly lacking in confidence but proves adept in handling himself outdoors. Just as he’s settling in, though, the killers—two brothers with a creepy way of conversing with each other even as they’re about to commit an atrocity—infiltrate the mountain community. Knowing what they’re capable of, Jace/Connor drifts away from the pack, teams up with a female fire ranger who feels responsible for her boyfriend’s accidental
MY STRUGGLE Book Three: Boyhood
Knausgaard, Karl Ove Translated by Bartlett, Don Archipelago (427 pp.) $27.00 | May 27, 2014 978-1-935744-86-3
The narrator of the third volume of Knausgaard’s epic of the everyday recalls the frustrations and curious joys of boyhood. It’s common to see My Struggle, Knausgaard’s six-volume set of heavily autobiographical novels, compared to Proust. With some reason: Both books are bulky, highly personal and |
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jeff vandermeer confronts the inexplicable (three times in 2014 alone) Set in a dystopian future where something unknown has begun to infest the Eastern Seaboard of the country, Philip K. Dick Award–winning author, essayist and all-around master of the literary head trip Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is simply unlike anything you’ve read before. It gnaws away at your nerves with a slow-building sense of dread and impending madness that could be a shade of H.P. Lovecraft’s less purple prose, and Annihilation is just VanderMeer’s opening salvo in what he’s dubbed his Southern Reach trilogy. The less the reader knows going in, the more dreadful surprises await. Suffice it to say that an expedition comprised of four women is sent into “Area X” to document the dread (and increasingly unnatural) flora and fauna. They are the 12th group to risk the journey; the other 11 expeditions have vanished, committed suicide or returned only as husks of their former selves. VanderMeer chose to release the story as a trilogy instead of in a single volume (Authority and Acceptance are the titles of the other two volumes). “I don’t like to write the same book twice,” VanderMeer says, “and I like looking at something from a lot of different angles. So each of the three novels feels very selfcontained and its own separate thing.” The metaphysical-meets-science aspect of Annihilation is extremely compelling, made even more so by the fact that this first entry in the trilogy is narrated in the first person, via the protagonist’s written journals. Was that a conscious choice on VanderMeer’s part, or did that aspect of the book simply evolve as he was writing it? “Over a century ago,” VanderMeer explains, “the English nature writer Richard Jeffries wrote, ‘To me, everything is supernatural.’ I know what Jeff VanderMeer he means, and I think everyone has had at least a few moments like that: where the world opens up to reveal something unexpected, perhaps even inexplicable.” —Marc Savlov
death and fervently hopes an escape route he devised as part of his training will lead them to safety. Having joined the ranks of the very best thriller writers with his small-town masterpiece, The Prophet (2012), Koryta matches that effort with a book of sometimes-unbearable tension. With the exception of one plot turn you’ll likely see coming from a mountain pass away, this novel is brilliantly orchestrated. Also crucial to its success is Koryta’s mastery of the beautiful but threatening setting, including a mountain fire’s ability to electrify the ground, radiate a lethal force field—and create otherworldly light shows. Summer reading doesn’t get better than this.
VALOUR AND VANITY
Kowal, Mary Robinette Tor (320 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Apr. 29, 2014 978-0-7653-3416-9 978-1-4667-0839-3 e-book
Photo courtesy FrancescaMyman
Renowned glamourists Lord and Lady Vincent become the victims of an elaborate scam that leaves them in dire straits until they conceive of a daring strategy to strike back. After an extended voyage with her family, Jane and Vincent are anxious to find some time to themselves, traveling to Murano. They have a letter of introduction from the prince regent and hope to work with an artisan to experiment on infusing glamour—magical illusions of sight, sound and light— into glass. On the way, they’re waylaid by pirates, then rescued by a fellow passenger who takes them under his wing in the city. Without papers or money and with Vincent suffering a concussion from the attack, they’re grateful for the gentleman’s help. Once they make progress on their revolutionary glamour process, however, they’re detained by the local police and accused of fraud. Realizing their “friend” is a con man who has disappeared with all their notes and finished work, Jane and Vincent are left broke, in debt and under suspicion: “They had no funds and no friends at all. The only resources they had were the clothes upon their backs, and even those they owed money for.” Unable to find employment, Vincent becomes dispirited, especially when he must depend on the meager salary Jane manages to secure from a nearby convent. Things look up when a chance sighting of one of the crooks enables Vincent and Jane to turn the tables on them: “[S]he could see his mind working and putting together pieces of a plan, as surely as if he was plotting a glamural.” Kowal continues her creative Regency-set Glamourist Histories series with a clever, captivating plot that culminates in a magical heist storyline. Before we get there, though, we are treated to a touching examination of a loving marriage under duress and the connections and collaborations these extraordinary partners must create and reaffirm with each other and those around them in order to thrive. Combining history, magic and adventure, the book balances emotional depth with buoyant storytelling. (Agent: Jennifer Jackson)
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THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT
NEVER JUDGE A LADY BY HER COVER
Lalami, Laila Pantheon (336 pp.) $26.95 | $13.99 e-book | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-307-91166-7 978-0-307-91167-4 e-book
MacLean, Sarah Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-06-206851-4
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After she’s spent the last decade incognito, posing as the most enigmatic (male) casino owner in England, a ruined lady re-enters society to secure her daughter’s rightful place in the beau monde, attracting suitors, enemies and the attention of a handsome newspaper magnate. Lady Georgiana Pearson has been happily free of the strictures of Victorian society since she ruined herself at the hands of a man she thought she loved and bore a daughter, scandalizing polite society and setting herself firmly beyond the pale. Since then, she’s partnered with three other titled social pariahs to create The Fallen Angel, the most successful gaming club in London, which deals in scandal and secrets as much as gambling. Under the guise of the mysterious “Chase,” who works in the shadows and is represented by yet another alter ego, Anna— whom every assumes is Chase’s mistress—Georgiana is secretly one of the most powerful figures in England, though none but her partners know her true identity. Blissfully disreputable, she is suddenly aware of her limitations when society’s scorn turns toward her beloved daughter, and she decides to seek an aristocratic husband to raise her daughter’s social standing. However, her return to society draws more than a few eyebrows, as well as the interest of all the scandal sheets, including one published by newspaper magnate Duncan West. Understanding there are layers to this story, West digs into Georgiana’s past and realizes Georgiana and Anna are one and the same, then misreads the hold “Chase” has on her, even as he finds himself falling for her. West has dangerous secrets of his own, ensuring he can never offer her the security or respectability she wants, but he intends to free her from Chase’s influence and pave the way for her happiness, realizing too late how misguided that plan is. MacLean wraps up her popular Rules of Scoundrels series with the clever plotting, exquisite writing and lush sensuality she is known for. A worthy conclusion to an extraordinary series.
special issue: best books of 2014
Assured, lyrical imagining of the life of one of the first African slaves in the New World—a native, like Lalami (Secret Son, 2009, etc.), of Morocco and, like her, a gifted storyteller. The Spanish called him Estebanico, a name bestowed on him after he was purchased from Portuguese traders. That datum comes several pages after he proudly announces his true name, “Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori,” and after he allows that some of the stories he is about to tell may or may not be quite true owing to the vagaries of memory and—well, the unlikelihood of the events he describes. The overarching event of this kind is, of course, the shipwreck that leaves him, with a body of Spanish explorers whose number will eventually be whittled down to three, to walk across much of what is now the American Southwest. Led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, “my rival storyteller,” the quartet encounters wondrous things and people: cities of mud brick, maidens draped with turquoise, abundant “skins, amulets, feathers, copper bells,” and always the promise of gold just beyond the horizon. They provide wonders in return: Estebanico is a source of exotic entertainment (“It was harmless fun to them, but to me it quickly grew tiresome”), while his fellow traveler Andrés Dorantes de Carranza sets broken bones and heals the sick. Lalami extends the stories delivered by Cabeza de Vaca himself in his Naufragios, which has been rendered in several English-language editions (e.g., We Came Naked and Barefoot; Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America; Castaways), but hers is certainly the most extensive telling of the tale from “the Moor’s” point of view. As elusive as gold, she tells us, is the promise of freedom for Estebanico, who provides the very definition of long-suffering. She has great fun, too, with the possibilities of a great historical mystery—namely, whatever became of him? Adding a new spin to a familiar story, Lalami offers an utterly believable, entertainingly told alternative to the historical record. A delight.
BIRD BOX
Malerman, Josh Ecco/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $25.99 | May 13, 2014 978-0-06-225965-3 In Malerman’s chilling debut, an apocalyptic reality befalls a Michigan river community—and who knows how much of the rest of civilization—in the form of creatures that cause people who merely look at them to go mad and kill themselves. |
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“A man separated from his family for years reckons with his isolation in Manko’s debut, a superb study of statelessness.” from the invention of exile
Having lost her sister to this horrific fate, a young woman, Malorie, finds sanctuary with a group of strangers in a small house with covered windows. Like her co-inhabitants, she learns to perform essential outdoor tasks and even travel distances blindfolded. After discovering she’s pregnant, she’ll do anything to find a safer place to live. The novel (named after a collection of caged birds that coo whenever anything approaches) cuts back and forth between Malorie’s life in the strangers’ house, where only an analog phone promises contact with the outside world, and her escape four years later with her unnamed Boy and Girl. In both parts, she lives in fear. At any moment, one or both of the kids could remove their blindfolds and perish. And who’s to say whether one of the men, upon returning from an expedition for food or supplies, was exposed to a creature or will usher one into the house? Malerman, leader of the appropriately named rock band The High Strung, keeps us tinglingly on edge with his cool, merciless storytelling. Just when you think he’s going to disappoint with a Twilight Zone–like twist, he douses his tale in poetic gloom. One especially unsettling scene involves blasts of lightning, a dog barking wildly at the night, footsteps on creaky attic stairs and two women giving birth, unattended. An unsettling thriller, this earns comparisons to Hitchcock’s The Birds, as well as the finer efforts of Stephen King and cult sci-fi fantasist Jonathan Carroll.
of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth— a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future. Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
THE INVENTION OF EXILE
Manko, Vanessa Penguin Press (304 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 18, 2014 978-1-59420-588-0 A man separated from his family for years reckons with his isolation in Manko’s debut, a superb study of statelessness. In 1920, Austin (born Ustin) Voronkov was a Russian immigrant working as an engineer in Connecticut, married to an American woman and preparing to raise a family. But the Russian Revolution prompted a wave of red-menace paranoia in the United States, and Austin is deported after he’s bullied into saying he’s an anarchist. By 1948, when much of this novel is set, he’s living alone in Mexico City and scraping out a living doing odd-job repairs for the locals. His wife and three children, whom he hasn’t seen in 14 years, are back in the States, while Austin is all but drowning in the paperwork he believes will secure him passage out of Mexico: letters to ambassadors and legislators and patent applications for inventions he’s only dimly aware are outdated. A story framed around so much waiting and bureaucratic listlessness ought to feel drab and slow, but Manko brings plenty of energy to this tale. That’s partly due to the fact that she cannily shifts back and forth in time, recalling the fleeting moments of joy and togetherness Austin had, particularly a brief stint in Mazatlan running a lighthouse. (A bit metaphorically unsubtle, perhaps, but Manko uses light and glass metaphors in rich and complicated ways throughout the book.) Just as important, Manko is a tremendous stylist, using clipped, simple sentences to capture Austin’s mindset as his confidence in escape erodes but never entirely fades; Manko’s shift in perspective toward the end of the book reveals just how much the years of exile have weathered him. She deeply explores two complicated questions: What is the impact of years of lacking a country? And how much does this lack reside in our imaginations? A top-notch debut, at once sober and lively and provocative.
STATION ELEVEN
Mandel, Emily St. John Knopf (320 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-385-35330-4
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness. In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic— who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web 32
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“Best known for historical novels...Mantel proves herself a skilled practitioner of short fiction as well.” from the assassination of margaret thatcher
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THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER Stories
Mantel, Hilary Henry Holt (256 pp.) $27.00 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-62779-210-3 978-1-62779-211-0 e-book Best known for historical novels such as Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012), Mantel proves herself a skilled practitioner of short fiction as well. “In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house.” So opens the first story in Mantel’s slender collection. Like the title story, and indeed like several others, it has a certain claustrophobic, reticent feel to it, its protagonist a retiring type thrust into discomfort by the larger events at play in the street outside. All of the pieces are worthy of our attention, but the title story is a true tour de force: A house-proud suburbanite has a kitchen window that opens onto a view of a hospital where Margaret Thatcher, in 1983, has had eye surgery, and it is that kitchen window that an IRA sniper wishes to use in order to do the Iron Lady in. Or perhaps not the IRA; remarks the householder, “It crossed my mind then he might not be a Provisional, but from one of the mad splinter groups you heard of.” Can she dissuade the shooter? Will she come to take his view that it’s no crime to slay the killer of so many innocents? All will be revealed—but after a nice cup of tea, mind you. Mantel blows up very thin balloons by way of situations and then takes a needle to them: Another story concerns a case of misread intentions in an expat cloister in Saudi Arabia, one of its players described thus: “spiritless, freckled, limp, she was a faded redhead who seemed huddled into herself, unused to conversation.” You just know that great things aren’t going to come from her, and certainly not the history-changing murder of a world leader, just as most of Mantel’s characters are retiring, confused people without much of a clue but who muddle on all the same. “What would Anita Brookner do?” asks one of Mantel’s protagonists. The answer, we’d like to think, is this: She’d read Mantel’s latest, and she’d delight in it.
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Emma, Luca and Monica have recently lost their mother, and their father takes them to a Greek village for summer vacation and an opportunity to at least temporarily put aside their grief. There, they meet Nadia, a Greek teenager with an almost adultlike self-possession, as well as Jack and David, two adolescents from Britain. Over several summers as they all grow up, Emma becomes intrigued by David’s uninhibited mother and has her first sexual experience with David. The story ends with Emma bumping into Jack years later in Rome and finding out David’s tragic end. “Chanel,” the following story, introduces us to Caterina, a documentary filmmaker, and her gay friend Pascal, who persuades Caterina to buy an expensive Chanel dress, in part since she’s always lived a life in which self-indulgence is seen as a catalyst for guilt. Years later, she still has the dress— and still hasn’t worn it—but learns a deeper lesson about its true worth. “Big Island, Small Island” takes us to sub-Saharan Africa, where Stella, a scientist with an interest in biodiversity, meets Andrea, her expat ex-lover, and discovers how far apart they’ve grown. In “An Indian Soirée,” a couple’s marriage unravels in the space of a single day. And so it goes—each of Marciano’s stories is a gem, with fully realized characters wistfully and beautifully captured through dialogue that is both pensive and poignant.
THE KILLER NEXT DOOR
special issue: best books of 2014
Marwood, Alex Penguin (400 pp.) $16.00 paper | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-14-312669-0
Marwood’s second novel tells a taut, fascinating tale that’s not for the weak of stomach. Lisa, also known as Collette, is on the run after witnessing her shady boss, Tony, beat a man to death at the Nefertiti Men’s Club. Now her mother is dying in a nursing home and she wants to be nearby, so she rents a room in a boardinghouse that’s one step up from a homeless shelter. The shabby home, subdivided into apartments, is owned and managed by a grossly obese man who takes advantage of his down-and-out residents: Hossein, who’s seeking political asylum in England; Vesta, who’s lived in the basement apartment all her life; Cher, a 15-year-old who’s slipped the reins of social services; and two single men, Thomas and Gerard. While Collette uses the money she has left, about £100,000, to evade Tony and his henchmen, the residents are dealing with backed-up drains that smell awful. Unknown to the other residents, one of the men has been making a habit of killing young women, including Nikki, the former resident of Collette’s apartment, and what he does to them afterward is beyond horrible. Now the killer is looking for new blood; when something terrible happens to bring the boarders together, things only grow more dangerous. Marwood, a British journalist writing under a pseudonym, not only creates a cast of memorable characters, but also ratchets up the suspense, leaving readers to dread what might be around the next corner.
THE OTHER LANGUAGE
Marciano, Francesca Pantheon (304 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 8, 2014 978-0-307-90836-0
Nine closely observed stories of growing up, dislocation and family relationships. The first story in the collection gives the volume its title and presents a lovely reminiscence of childhood and adolescence, with all its fumbling awkwardness. |
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“In an uncomfortable but always eye-opening tale, McBride investigates the tensions among family, love, sex and religion.” from a girl is a half -formed thing
THUNDERSTRUCK & OTHER STORIES
Many writers shine at characterization or at creating tension; the trick is in successfully combining the two. In this case, readers will care what happens to Collette and the rest of the boarders while simultaneously waiting for the literary axe to fall. Marwood—whose first novel, The Wicked Girls (2013), won an Edgar Award—proves she’s got staying power in this addictive tale.
McCracken, Elizabeth Dial Press (240 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-385-33577-5
These nine stories from fiction and memoir author McCracken (An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, 2008, etc.) excavate unexplored permutations of loss and grief. The volume starts and ends with bookending wallops. The opener, “Something Amazing”—combining a not-quite-ghost story about a grieving mother “haunted” by her dead child with the unfolding story of a mother unaware she is about to suffer her own loss—taps into every parent’s worst fears. The final story, “Thunderstruck,” follows a family in which the mother and father react in very different ways after their joint efforts to be good parents disastrously backfire. The rest of the volume deals with various forms of sorrow and coping. “Property” considers the stuff of grief as a newly widowed man moves into a rental house full of what he considers junk left by the house’s owner. In “Some Terpsichore,” a woman remembers an abusive former lover with horror and nostalgia. Memory also plays tricks in “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston”: A store manager’s memory of helping a young boy he once discovered being starved by his grandfather sustains him through his own losses, but the boy, now grown, remembers the incident differently. In “Juliet,” the murder of a library patron causes a series of off-kilter reactions among the librarians, showing that guilt is not limited to perpetrators or sorrow, to those officially bereaved. In “The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs,” a foolhardy expat in rural France realizes his son, whom he’s raised with outrageous carelessness, has betrayed his trust and left him broke. “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey” describes a different kind of betrayal when a dying man attempts to visit the former friend who ruined his life. In the surprisingly tender “Hungry,” about a woman caring for her granddaughter while the girl’s father (the woman’s son) lies in the hospital, food and a patriotic speech serve as metaphors for the power and limitations of love. McCracken’s skewed perspectives make this a powerfully if quietly disturbing volume. (Agent: Henry Dunow)
A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING
McBride, Eimear Coffee House (240 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-56689-368-8
A fresh, emotionally raw debut from Irish-born, U.K.–based author McBride. Written in halting sentences, halfsentences and dangling clauses that tumble through the text like fleeting, undigested thoughts, the story follows the female narrator as she navigates an abusive upbringing—physical, sexual and psychological—and the lingering effects of her brother’s early childhood brain trauma. McBride opens with the young narrator in the hospital with her mother and brother, who is undergoing surgery (“You white-faced feel the needle go in. Feel fat juicy poison poison young boy skin. In your arteries. Eyeballs. Spine hands legs. Puke it cells up all day long. No Mammy don’t let them”). From there, the author follows her protagonist through her confused, angry adolescence, which is exacerbated by her mother’s piercing Irish-Catholic piety, and examines her struggle between appeasing her family and developing her own identity. Though the structure and events are roughly chronological and conventional—childhood; adolescence and experimentation with sex, drugs and alcohol; further confusing and liberating experiences in college; the deaths of loved ones—the style is anything but. McBride calls to mind both Joyce and Stein in her syntax and mechanics, but she brings her own emotional range to the table, as well. As readers, we burrow deep within the narrator’s brain as she battles to mature into a well-balanced adult amid her chaotic surroundings. In an uncomfortable but always eye-opening tale, McBride investigates the tensions among family, love, sex and religion. Lovers of straightforward storytelling will shirk, but open-minded readers (specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will be surprised, moved and awed by this original novel. McBride’s debut garnered the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction in 2014—and deservedly so. This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch.
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THE CHILDREN ACT
In the late summer of 2012, a British judge faces a complex case while dealing with her husband’s infidelity in this thoughtful, well-wrought novel. Fiona Maye, at 59, has just learned of an awful crack in her marriage when she must rule on the opposing medical and religious interests surrounding a 17-year-old boy who will likely die without blood transfusions. The cancer patient, weeks shy of the age when he could speak for himself, has embraced his parents’ deep faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses and their abhorrence of letting what the Bible deems a pollutant enter his body. The scenes before the bench and at the boy’s hospital bedside are taut and intelligent, like the best courtroom dramas. The ruling produces two intriguing twists that, among other things, suggest a telling allusion to James Joyce’s 17-year-old Michael Furey in “The Dead.” Meanwhile, McEwan (Sweet Tooth, 2012, etc.), in a rich character study that begs for a James Ivory film, shows Fiona reckoning with the doubt, depression and temporary triumphs of the betrayed—like an almost Elizabethan digression on changing the locks of their flat—not to mention guilt at stressing over her career and forgoing children. As Fiona thinks of a case: “All this sorrow had common themes, there was a human sameness to it, but it continued to fascinate her.” Also running through the book is a musical theme, literal and verbal, in which Fiona escapes the legal world and “the subdued drama of her half-life with Jack” to play solo and in duets. McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn’t done so well since On Chesil Beach (2007).
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to demand whatever they want from the weaker humans. The larger picture is primarily filtered through the perspectives of Kai, an orphan who inadvertently befriends Five, a wounded Luyten later captured by the U.S. government; Oliver, Kai’s eventual adoptive father, a socially awkward CIA operative who interrogates and becomes unduly influenced by Five; and Lila, Kai’s future wife, a clever, scientifically inclined young woman. As in his other work, McIntosh builds a believable universe with well-thought-out social dynamics—although the beginning of the novel does jump about in time somewhat confusingly. The genetically engineered soldier who can’t adapt to peacetime is a frequent figure in sci-fi, but most previous examples of the trope haven’t considered the implications quite so carefully. And, of course, the novel’s sharp commentary on the difficulties soldiers have fitting into civilian society after their service— and the struggles of civilians both during and after war—has a sadly contemporary relevance. There’s also a fascinating take on how political alliances shift over time: One’s bosom friend today can be one’s deadly enemy tomorrow, and vice versa. McIntosh has his finger on the pulse, again. (Agent: Seth Fishman)
McEwan, Ian Talese/Doubleday (240 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-385-53970-8
ALL OUR NAMES
Mengestu, Dinaw Knopf (255 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-385-34998-7
special issue: best books of 2014
What’s in a name? Identity of a kind, perhaps, but nothing like stability, and perhaps nothing like truth. So Mengestu (How to Read the Air, 2010, etc.) ponders in this elegiac, moving novel, his third. Himself an immigrant, Mengestu is alert to the nuances of what transplantation and exile can do to the spirit. Certainly so, too, is his protagonist—or, better, one of two protagonists who just happen to share a name, for reasons that soon emerge. One narration is a sequence set in and around Uganda, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a post-independence Africa. (We can date it only by small clues: Rhodesia is still called that, for instance, and not Zimbabwe.) But, as in a V.S. Naipaul story, neither the country nor the time matter much in a tale about human universals, in this case the universal longing for justice and our seemingly universal inability to achieve it without becoming unjust ourselves. The narrator, riding into the place he calls “the capital,” sheds his old identity straightaway: “I gave up all the names my parents had given me.” Isaac, whom he meets on campus, is, like him, a would-be revolutionary, and in that career trajectory lies a sequence of tragedies, from ideological betrayals to acts of murder. The region splintering, their revolution disintegrating, Isaac follows the ever-shifting leader he reveres into the mouth of hell. Meanwhile, Isaac—the name now transferred, along with a passport—flees to the snowy Midwest, where he assumes the identity of an exchange student, marked by a curious proclivity for Victorian English: “I remember thinking after that first afternoon that I felt like I was talking with someone out
DEFENDERS
McIntosh, Will Orbit/Little, Brown (512 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 13, 2014 978-0-316-21776-7 Abandoning the domestic sphere he explored so aptly in Love Minus Eighty (2013), McIntosh tells a more global yet still deeply personal tale about life during wartime and its aftermath. In 2029, the telepathic, starfish-shaped Luyten have just about conquered Earth—it’s tough to fight an enemy who knows everything you’re about to do. Pushed to the brink, humanity develops the defenders: brilliant, 16-foot tall, three-legged soldiers impervious to telepathy. But once the Luyten are defeated, there are millions of defenders who are ill-suited to anything other than war and who are in a position |
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“A Caribbean honeymoon turns into a media circus over a mermaid sighting....” from mermaids in paradise
MERMAIDS IN PARADISE
of an old English novel,” says the caseworker, Helen, with whom he will fall in love. Neither Isaac can forget the crimes he has witnessed and committed, and the arc of justice that each seeks includes personal accountability. Redemption is another matter, but both continue the fight, whether in the scrub forest of Africa or at a greasy spoon somewhere along the Mississippi River. Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.
Millet, Lydia Norton (288 pp.) $25.95 | Nov. 3, 2014 978-0-393-24562-2 A Caribbean honeymoon turns into a media circus over a mermaid sighting in this laser-focused satire from Millet (Magnificence, 2012, etc.). Deborah, the narrator of Millet’s smart and funny novel, her ninth, is an LA woman who’s snarky to the core: She’s skeptical of her fiance’s hardcore workout regimen, of the rituals of bachelorette parties, even of her best friend’s own snark. So when her new husband, Chip, proposes a honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands, she’s suspicious of tourism’s virtues. Deb’s early interactions seem to justify her defensiveness: One man gets the wrong idea when she accidentally brushes her foot against his leg over drinks: “He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes,” she tells her husband. “Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick’s of Hollywood.” The comic, unbelieving tone Millet gives Deb helps sell what happens next: Roped into a scuba dive by an aquatic researcher, she and a small group spot a bunch of mermaids at a nearby reef. Despite the group’s efforts to keep the discovery hidden, the resort gets the news and rushes to capitalize on it, while Deb and her cohorts are eager to preserve the sole example of unadulterated wonder the 21st century has offered them. The novel has the shape and pace of a thriller—Deb is held by corporate goons, the researcher goes mysteriously missing, paramilitary men are called in—and it thrives on Deb’s witty, wise narration. Millet means to criticize a rapacious culture that wants to simplify and categorize everything, from the resort profiteers to churchy types who see the mermaids as symbols of godlessness. The ending underscores the consequences of such blinkered mindsets without losing its essential comedy. An admirable example of a funny novel with a serious message that works swimmingly. Dive in.
ACCIDENTS OF MARRIAGE
Meyers, Randy Susan Atria (368 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-4516-7304-3 Meyers puts a Boston family overwhelmed by a tragic accident under the literary microscope. Maddy and Ben have been married for 15 years and have three children: smart-mouthed, somewhat bratty teen Emma; sensitive, intelligent Gracie; and Caleb, a quirky kid who can’t seem to keep his mouth closed. Their home in trendy Jamaica Plains appears to be in a constant state of flux, but Maddy, a social worker who’s in perpetual motion, doesn’t seem capable of taming the various components of her life. That’s driven a wedge between her and her short-tempered, controlling husband. An attorney with a father whose legacy proves impossible to live up to, Ben rages through life, while Maddy spends her time trying to put out the fires. The kids sap her energy, and the heat inside their big old Victorian—with ancient wiring Ben refuses to fix so the air conditioning can be upgraded—provides fuel for their fights. The morning after another argument, Ben has an angry encounter with a fellow driver and the resulting accident puts Maddy in a coma. Through most of the book, the family tries to adjust to their new normal, with mostly disastrous results. Meyers, who has a background working with victims of domestic violence, examines the effects anger and violence can have on family members, as well as the courage that can be born from a new perspective and the lack of happily-ever-after in these real-life situations. The characters labor under intense pressure, and some crack while others rise to the challenge, giving Meyers’ tale both realism and a bittersweet quality that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could have ended up simply maudlin and contrived. Beautifully written, poignant and thought-provoking, this novel refuses to succumb to stereotypical reader expectations, making it even more memorable.
THE RED ROAD
Mina, Denise Little, Brown (304 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | $28.00 Lg. Prt. Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-316-18851-7 978-0-316-23652-3 e-book 978-0-316-24001-7 Lg. Prt. Fourteen years after Princess Diana died in a Paris automobile accident, the date of her death still casts a long shadow over the Strathclyde Police, in the fourth book featuring detective Alex Morrow.
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Rose Wilson, already an experienced prostitute at 14, celebrates Diana’s death by killing two of the many males who’ve used her: Pinkie Brown, the boy she dreams about from another group home, and her pimp, Sammy McCaig. Despite her apathetic confession, she’s released after a short prison term to become the nanny to the household of Julius McMillan, the lawyer who schemed to shield her from a stiffer sentence for reasons of his own. The death of the long-ailing McMillan traumatically reopens his affairs. Rose, still in the family’s employ, grieves over the only person who’s ever shown her any kindness. McMillan’s son, Robert, convinced that paid assassins are hunting him, runs off and leases a castle to die in. And detective Alexandra “Alex” Morrow—after testifying against Michael Brown, who’s spent most of his life in prison ever since he was convicted of killing his older brother, Pinkie, in Rose’s place—has to deal with the discovery of Brown’s fingerprints at the demolition site where charitable organizer Aziz Balfour was killed three days ago, even though Brown, clapped up for months, has the best of all possible alibis. While fighting off the flirtatious advances of Brown’s defense attorney, Alex racks her brain over possible ways Brown could have left his prints at a murder scene miles from his prison, as Mina (Gods and Beasts, 2013, etc.), conscientious to a fault, casually dispenses further calamities, from clinical depression to Parkinson’s disease, among the cast. In addition to the usual indelible character studies, Mina provides the most compelling plot of Alex’s four cases to date, with a new round of revelations that makes the Glasgow cops the most corrupt since Philip Marlowe looked under all those rocks in Bay City, California.
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Marinus and, well, sort-of-neo-Cathars are having it out, invited into Holly’s reality thanks to a tear in her psychic fabric. Are they real? As one strange inhabitant of a “daymare” asks, “But why would two dying, fleeing incorporeals blunder their way to you, Holly Sykes?” Why indeed? The next 600 pages explain why in a course that moves back and forth among places (Iceland, Switzerland, Iraq, New York), times and states of reality: Holly finds modest success in midlife even as we bone clocks tick our way down to a society of her old age that will remind readers of the world of Sloosha’s Crossin’ from Cloud Atlas: The oil supply has dried up, the poles are melting, gangs roam the land, and the old days are a long way behind us. “We live on,” says an ever unreliable narrator by way of resigned closing, “as long as there are people to live on in.” If Thatcher’s 1984 is bleak, then get a load of what awaits us in 2030. Speculative, lyrical and unrelentingly dark—trademark Mitchell, in other words.
CROWN OF RENEWAL
Moon, Elizabeth Del Rey/Ballantine (528 pp.) $26.00 | May 27, 2014 978-0-345-53309-8 Series: Paladin’s Legacy, 5
THE BONE CLOCKS
Mitchell, David Random House (704 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-4000-6567-7
Mitchell’s latest could have been called The Rime of the Ancient Marinus— the “youthful ancient Marinus,” that is. Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell (Cloud
Atlas, 2004, etc.). As this long (but not too long) tale opens, we’re in the familiar territory of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006)—Thatcher’s England, that is. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that. At first it’s 1984, and Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old suburban runaway, is just beginning to suss out that it’s a scary, weird place, if with no shortage of goodwilled protectors. She wants nothing but to get away: “The Thames is riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, it’s 11:30 and the town’s a little model of itself, a long way behind me.” Farther down the road, Holly has her first inkling of a strange world in which “Horologists” bound up with one Yu Leon
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Final entry (Limits of Power, 2013, etc.) in the Paladin’s Legacy series. Once again, rather than a monolithic existential threat, multitudinous intrigues and designs move the story forward. Arian, wife of Lyonya’s King Kieri, poisoned by an iynisin (evil elf-mage) blade, languishes, while Kieri, warned by Dragon to release mages trapped in the past, needs to discover his innate Old Human magic. In neighboring Tsaia, iynisin attack and grievously wound King Mikeli’s brother, Camwyn; Dragon is willing to heal Camwyn, but the price is that Mikeli may never see his brother again. Mage powers continue to appear in both nobles and commoners—a development opposed so vehemently by traditionalists that they are prepared to murder children to stamp it out. Jandelir Arcolin finds himself preoccupied with the gnomes who have declared him their prince, their all-encompassing Law and their concern for the Law’s correct application. Mikeli wonders what the iynisin intruders were after and concludes they sought the mysterious sentient regalia that reposes in a box that none save former mercenary Dorrin, Duke Verrakai, may open or even move. The regalia itself orders Dorrin to take the box on a perilous quest to a distant land, a journey that Dorrin herself does not expect to survive. Moon offers convincingly realized characters persuasively shaped by the extraordinary richness, depth and texture of the world they inhabit and the low-key yet knotty problems they must confront. So mesmerizing is the narrative that it’s a sad surprise having to emerge into the mundane world at story’s end. While fully satisfying, this conclusion leaves ample scope for further embellishment or spinoffs: excellent news for all concerned. Such is the allure of an extremely talented writer at the height of her powers. 37
“What if a civilization that relied on magic was suddenly deprived of it?” from arcanum
ARCANUM
with her pregnant. Morgan writes page-turning historical fiction, hearth to farm to London, following Will, who is stringing “his soul along posts of dream and fantasy and invention and imitation.” Will’s a loyal son, devoted father and husband, but when a troupe of traveling players loses a member, he captures his dream, becoming a player and ending up in London. Will settles in “the great stinking trading-crowded roofed-over first place of the kingdom.” In the great shadow of Christopher Marlowe, Will begins to write for theaters, his scribbling less than respectable but popular nonetheless. First are collaborations, plays Will doctors so that he might find stages to act upon, but his writing soon evolves into individual genius built upon folk tales and legends and cooperative stews, Will believing “there is no such thing as originality, except the originality that comes from synthesis.” Soon, however, original comedies, dramas and tragedies flow swiftly, easily from his pen. Woven into the tapestry of Will’s story is the thread of Ben Jonson’s life, a London mason’s brilliant stepson denied a Queen’s Scholarship. Morgan writes masterful characters—royals, patrons and players; Marlowe, reckless rake; Jonson, arrogant, envious, but great loyal friend; Anne, earthy, passionate, loyal, fractured after the death of their son, lost and found again after Will’s dalliance with the troubled Huguenot widow Isabelle Berger; and most of all, Will himself, great, gentle genius behind a placid, circumspect exterior, implacable, unknowable, all effortless burning brilliance. In a layered narrative with a richness that rewards measured reading, Morgan recreates Shakespeare’s Elizabethan milieu, every place and person rendered with near-perfect realism. A tour de force.
Morden, Simon Orbit/Little, Brown (688 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-316-22010-1 Medieval fantasy from the author of The Curve of the Earth (2013), developed from a single question: What if a civilization that relied on magic was suddenly deprived of it? A thousand years after the fall of Rome, the German-speaking palatinate of Carinthia depends entirely on the magic provided by its hexmasters for trade and farming, defense, even lighting for the great library. In exchange, the hexmasters claim one-half of Carinthia’s wealth. Peter Büber, Prince Gerhard’s huntmaster, is disturbed by his discovery of not one, but two unicorn’s horns, with no sign of the beasts they were attached to; equally odd, he witnesses a band of wild giants defeat and kill an Italian wizard. Meanwhile, Teuton warriors demand passage across Carinthia; when Gerhard refuses, they move downriver to attack and occupy a town. As the princes have done for 1,000 years, Gerhard dons his magical armor, buckles on his magical sword and, not expecting to fight—an activity for which his forces are quite unsuited—summons the hexmasters, anticipating a blast of magic and an easy victory. Instead, only Nikoleta Agana, a mere adept, answers Gerhard’s call: Apparently, she is the only person still able to wield magic. Soon, wagons shudder to a halt; barges float with instead of against the current; and the lights go out. Only in the Jewish quarter, where magic is shunned, does life proceed normally. The stellar cast also features rebellious, extremely capable and unfortunately unwed Sophia Morgenstern, her despairing father, Aaron, librarian Frederik Thaler, usher-turned-spymaster Max Ullmann, and Felix, Gerhard’s 12-year-old son. The fading-magic scenario has become something of a trope, but Morden, against a gritty, utterly convincing backdrop, anticipates every consequence and wrings out surprise after surprise. An enthralling read for aficionados of intelligent, impeccably rendered fantasy.
BIG LITTLE LIES
Moriarty, Liane Amy Einhorn/Putnam (416 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 29, 2014 978-0-399-16706-5 After last year’s best-selling The Husband’s Secret, Australian Moriarty brings the edginess of her less-known The Hypnotist’s Love Story (2012) to bear in this darkly comic mystery surrounding a disastrous parents’ night at an elemen-
THE SECRET LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tary school fundraiser. Thanks to strong cocktails and a lack of appetizers, Pirriwee Public’s Trivia Night turns ugly when sloshed parents in Audrey Hepburn and Elvis costumes start fights at the main entrance. To make matters worse, out on the balcony where a smaller group of parents have gathered, someone falls over the railing and dies. Was it an accident or murder? Who is the victim? And who, if anyone, is the murderer? Backtrack six months as the cast of potential victims and perps meet at kindergarten orientation and begin alliances and rivalries within the framework of domestic comedy-drama. There’s Chloe’s opinionated, strong-willed mom, Madeline, a charmingly imperfect Everywoman. Happily married to second husband Ed, Madeline is deeply hurt that her older daughter
Morgan, Jude St. Martin’s (464 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-250-02503-6
Morgan (A Little Folly, 2013, etc.) draws restless young Will Shakespeare as he resists being trapped in apprenticeship to his glove-maker father. Will’s father, John, once respectable alderman and bailiff, has been disgraced by missteps into unlicensed wool trading. Will has no real prospects, but he will not be a glove-maker. At 18, he meets older Anne Hathaway and marries, 38
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Always a pleasure to read for his well-drawn characters, quiet insight and dialogue that crackles with wit, Morton here raises his own bar in all three areas. He also joins a sadly small club of male writers who have created memorable heroines.
wants to move in with her ex-husband and his much younger, New-Age–y second wife; even worse, the couple’s waifish daughter, Skye, will be in Chloe’s kindergarten class. Madeline’s best friend is Celeste, mother of twins Max and Josh. It’s hard for Madeline and the other moms not to envy Celeste. She’s slim, rich and beautiful, and her marriage to hedge fund manager Perry seems too perfect to be true; it is. Celeste and Madeline befriend young single mother Jane, who has moved to the coast town with her son, Ziggy, the product of a onenight stand gone horribly wrong. After sweet-natured Ziggy is accused of bullying, the parents divide into defenders and accusers. Tensions mount among the mothers’ cliques and within individual marriages until they boil over on the balcony. Despite a Greek chorus of parents and faculty sharing frequently contradictory impressions, the truth remains tantalizingly difficult to sort out. Deservedly popular Moriarty invigorates the tired social-issue formula of women’s fiction through wit, good humor, sharp insight into human nature and addictive storytelling.
FAMILY FURNISHINGS Selected Stories, 1995-2014
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Munro, Alice Knopf (576 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 13, 2014 978-1-101-87410-3
FLORENCE GORDON
Morton, Brian Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (256 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 23, 2014 978-0-544-30986-9 Unexpected celebrity and long-absent family members distract a heroically cantankerous 1960s-era activist in the summer of 2009 as she reluctantly confronts the challenges of age. Morton (Breakable You, 2006, etc.) returns to the world of writers with Florence Gordon, a feisty literary lioness of the U.S. feminist movement. At 75, she has a just-published book that’s languishing, and despite years away from the limelight, she’s embarked on a memoir only to learn that her longtime editor is retiring. No matter: She treasures her solitude and “having fun trying to make the sentences come right.” Yet fame befalls her in the form of a top critic’s review of her book in the New York Times. Family matters also intrude. Her ex-husband, a vicious burned-out writer, demands that she use her contacts to get him a job. Her son and his wife are back in New York after years in Seattle. Their daughter, Emily, helps Florence with research and almost warms up the “gloriously difficult woman.” Then the matriarch’s health begins to nag her with strange symptoms. While Florence dominates the book, “each person is the center of a world,” as Emily thinks, and Morton brings each member of the small Gordon clan to life at a time when there is suddenly much to discover about their world. He’s also strewn the novel with references to books and writers and the craft itself, which is appropriate for the somewhat rarefied setting—Manhattan’s historically liberal, bookish Upper West Side, where Morton’s characters often dwell—and a treat for anyone keen on literary fiction. |
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Top-shelf collection by Canadian Nobelist Munro, perhaps the best writer of short stories in English today. Certainly few, if any, narrators are less trustworthy than Munro’s; among many other things, she is the ascended master of quiet betrayals, withheld information and unforeseeable reversals of fortune. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven,” says the thoughtful narrator of “Dear Life,” the closing story, “or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.” Yes, we do, but not without torment. Fiona, the protagonist of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the stunning story that is the heart of Sarah Polley’s great film Away From Her, cannot be blamed for causing the pain she does: Dementia has overtaken her, but even so, her husband can’t help but wonder whether “she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.” People put on acts, of course, all the time, and Munro seems to be telling us (as at the very opening of the sly story “The Eye”) that we bamboozle each other from the moment we can understand language—and not necessarily for any malicious reasons. Munro packs plenty of compact but lethal punches, many of them hidden in seemingly gentle words: “I have not kept up with Charlene. I don’t even remember how we said good-bye.” Well, yes, she does, because “[y]ou expected things to end,” and all that catches up to the chief player in “Child’s Play” when she’s called upon to say goodbye again. As is true of so many of Munro’s tales, taken straight from the pages of quotidian life, its end is heartbreaking, tragic, not a little mysterious—and entirely unexpected. In fact, all that can be expected from these economical, expertly told stories is that they’re near peerless, modern literary fiction at its very best.
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“Naturally, this being a Murakami story, the possibilities are hallucinogenic, Kafkaesque, and otherwise unsettling and ominous.” from colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage
COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE
novel that plunges deeply into the religious allegory that has frequently framed his work (The Redeemer, 2013). In fact, the symbolism might initially seem laid on pretty thick for readers looking to solve a satisfying whodunit. Sonny Lofthus, the son of the title, is introduced as a prisoner with “healing hands,” one who was “prepared to take your sins upon himself and didn’t want anything in return.” Like Christ, he suffers for the sins of others and offers redemption. He is also a hopeless junkie. His back story suggests that Sonny was a boy of considerable promise, a champion wrestler and model student, proud son of a police officer. Then, when he was 18, he was devastated by the suicide of his father, who left a note confessing his corruption as the mole within the department, and the subsequent death of his heartbroken mother. After Sonny turned to drugs, he found himself in a web of evil; if he would confess to murders he hadn’t committed, the corrupt prison system would keep him supplied with heroin. Then a fellow prisoner comes to him for confession and reveals a secret that turns Sonny’s world upside down, inspiring him to kick his habit, plot an ingenious escape and turn himself into an “avenging angel,” delivering lethal retribution. The inspector obsessed with the case had a complicated relationship with Sonny’s father, and it remains uncertain until the climax (in a church, naturally) whether he wants to be Sonny’s captor or his collaborator. It’s a novel in which one character muses on “how innocence walks hand-in-hand with ignorance. How insight never clarifies, only complicates.” One of Nesbø’s best, deepest and richest novels, even without Harry Hole.
Murakami, Haruki Translated by Gabriel, Philip Knopf (352 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 12, 2014 978-0-385-35210-9
Murakami (IQ84, 2011, etc.) turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men. Poor achromatic Tsukuru. For some inexplicable reason, his four best friends, two males, two females, have cut him off without a word. Perhaps, he reckons between thoughts of suicide, it’s because they can pair off more easily without a fifth wheel; perhaps it’s because his name means “builder,” while all theirs have to do with colors: red pine, blue sea, white root, black field. Alas for Tsukuru, he “lacked a striking personality, or any qualities that made him stand out”—though, for all that, he’s different. Fast-forward two decades, and Tsukuru, true to both his name and his one great passion in life, designs train stations. He’s still wounded by the banishment, still mystified at his friends’ behavior. Helpfully, his girlfriend suggests that he make contact with the foursome to find out what he’d done and why he’d deserved their silence. Naturally, this being a Murakami story, the possibilities are hallucinogenic, Kafkaesque, and otherwise unsettling and ominous: “Gray is a mixture of white and black. Change its shade, and it can easily melt into various gradations of darkness.” That old saying about not asking questions if you don’t want to know the answers—well, there’s the rub, and there’s Tsukuru’s problem. He finds that his friends’ lives aren’t so golden (the most promising of them now hawks Lexuses and knowingly owns up to it: “I bet I sound like a car salesman?”); his life by comparison isn’t so bad. Or is it? It’s left to the reader to judge. Murakami writes with the same murky sense of time that characterized 1Q84, but this book, short and haunting, is really of a piece with older work such as Norwegian Wood and, yes, Kafka on the Shore. The reader will enjoy watching Murakami play with color symbolism down to the very last line of the story, even as Tsukuru sinks deeper into a dangerous enigma. Another tour de force from Japan’s greatest living novelist.
WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICITY
Nichol, Christina Overlook (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 26, 2014 978-1-4683-0686-6
A wise, funny debut novel that finds endless entertainment in cultural differences and clashing personality types. Part Candide, part Zorba, Slims Achmed Makashvili is a maritime lawyer in the mountainous nation of Georgia, where, as Nichol’s picaresque yarn opens, it is the last day of summer, when “everyone was trying to blacken their bodies before the weather changed.” Makashvili, though, has other things than beachgoing and the impending winter on his mind. Tired of living in a country where electrical power can’t be taken for granted, but still proud of living in a town that “looks like chipped paint,” he’s gotten wind of a U.S. State Department grant program designed to teach third-world types about the virtues of capitalism. He sends off a carefully written letter to Hillary Clinton, exulting, “As You can see, Batumi offers You and Your country great business opportunity!” In return, he wins a slot in an internship program in San Francisco, where he puts his avid mind to work concocting wild schemes to enliven his country’s livestock industry; writing to excuse himself from work one day, for instance, he avers
THE SON
Nesbø, Jo Translated by Barslund, Charlotte Knopf (416 pp.) $25.95 | May 13, 2014 978-0-385-35137-9 A deftly plotted novel that probes the deepest mysteries: sin, redemption, love, evil, the human condition. After he seemingly brought Harry Hole back from the dead in his last novel (Police, 2013), Norway’s Nesbø gives his popular protagonist a breather, shelving the detective in favor of a stand-alone 40
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ALPHABET
that he’s never sick at home because “we always drink the milk of the sheep,” though, in an aside to readers, he allows that it was really the milk of the goat: “But, as I learned, it is okay to lie in a commercial.” Makashvili is well-meaning and honest, but he can’t help but get into Borat-like mischief, and his stay in the golden land of America—which, he has discerned, isn’t quite so golden after all—doesn’t end well. Nichol writes with sharp, knowing exactitude of both Georgia (where she once taught English) and her native Bay Area, and though Makashvili is a figure of jape and jest, he’s by no means a caricature. Indeed, he’s one of the most fully realized characters in recent memory, and readers will take much pleasure in going along on his adventures—and misadventures.
Page, Kathy Biblioasis (304 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 21, 2014 978-1-927428-93-1
BOY, SNOW, BIRD
Oyeyemi, Helen Riverhead (320 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 6, 2014 978-1-59463-139-9
special issue: best books of 2014
Readers who found British author Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox (2011) an intellectual tour de force, but emotionally chilly, will be won over by this riveting, brilliant and emotionally rich retelling of “Snow White” set in 1950s New England. Despite her name, Boy Novak is a 20-year-old young woman when she arrives in Flax Hill, Mass., in 1953. She has run away from New York’s Lower East Side because her abusive father, Frank, a rat catcher by trade who has refused to tell her anything about her never-present mother, has threatened to treat her like one of his rats. In Flax Hill, Boy makes actual friends, like beautiful, career-driven Mia, and begins a relationship with Arturo Whitman, a former history professor and widowed father. Now a jewelry maker, Arturo lives with his little daughter, Snow, in close proximity to his mother, intimidating social matriarch Olivia. Not sure she loves him, Boy marries Arturo (whose quiet goodness is increasingly endearing to the reader and Boy) largely because she loves Snow, a fair-haired beauty who charms everyone she meets. But when Boy gives birth to her own daughter, Bird, the Whitmans’ deepest secret is revealed—Arturo’s parents are actually light-skinned African-Americans passing as white. Faced with how others view the difference between the sisters and influenced by some combination of overpowering maternal protectiveness and bad postpartum depression, Boy sends 7-yearold Snow to live with Arturo’s dark-skinned sister, Clara, whom Olivia banished years ago. Growing up apart, Bird and Snow tell their versions of how Boy’s decision impacts their lives. Then a startling revelation about Boy’s own identity makes all three confront who they are individually and together. Dense with fully realized characters, startling images, original observations and revelatory truths, this masterpiece engages the reader’s heart and mind as it captures both the complexities of racial and gender identity in the 20th century and the more intimate complexities of love in all its guises.
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A moving novel about knowledge, self-awareness and the power of words, set in the purgatory of prison. This young man’s life demands our attention and refuses to let go. Simon Austen is serving life imprisonment for the murder of his girlfriend in a fit of uncontrollable rage. It’s Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s England, but he is lost in time, attending sessions with institutional psychiatrists who might be able to help him gain parole. He learns to read with the aid of a prison volunteer and writes letters for his fellow inmates to lawyers, mothers and lovers, considering it his job. He also writes his version of his life story, tattooing his body with the words others have called him in spite and hate: “ARROGANT,” “WEIRDO,” “BASTARD,” “COLD,” “MURDERER.” Then “COURAGEOUS,” inspired by Bernadette “Bernie” Nightingale, a counselor he fantasizes about and works with to enter an experimental program that may move his parole forward. Page writes fiercely, drawing a fine portrait of a man who lives daily, routinely, fragilely in an environment that can erupt in violence at any time. It does, in a powerful scene where Simon is gangbeaten, has bleach poured down his throat, and is sent to a hospital, where all we’ve learned about him is dramatically, but tenderly, unsettled. Vic is his roommate in the prison hospital and an unforgettable character as he transforms into Charlotte, disrupting Simon’s view of life’s predictability and moving him to a greater understanding. Charlotte is freed, figuratively and literally, but writes letters and visits Simon, giving him strength and a vision of life outside the cement and steel of incarceration and the confinement of his own history. The words that are inked over Simon’s body are simply prologue to the next chapter of his life. Page doesn’t sentimentalize the cruelty of life in a prison system but manages to transcend it through Simon, who writes his own story in tattoo ink and letters. This powerful novel is simply an epiphany.
THE LONG WAY HOME
Penny, Louise Minotaur (384 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Aug. 26, 2014 978-1-250-02206-6 978-1-250-02207-3 e-book Armand Gamache, former chief inspector of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, is settling into retirement in the idyllic village of Three Pines—but Gamache understands better than most that danger never strays far from home. |
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“...Phillips takes a new and intriguing direction that reads like an homage to the classic gothic novel....” from heroes are my weakness
With the help of friends and chocolate croissants and the protection of the village’s massive pines, Gamache is healing. His hands don’t shake as they used to; you might just mistake him and his wife, Reine-Marie, for an ordinary middle-age couple oblivious to the world’s horrors. But Gamache still grapples with a “sin-sick soul”—he can’t forget what lurks just beyond his shelter of trees. It’s his good friend Clara Morrow who breaks his fragile state of peace when she asks for help: Peter, Clara’s husband, is missing. After a year of separation, Peter was scheduled to return home; Clara needs to know why he didn’t. This means going out there, where the truth awaits—but are Clara and Gamache ready for the darkness they might encounter? The usual cast of characters is here: observant bookseller Myrna; Gamache’s second in command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir; even the bitter old poet, Ruth, is willing to lend a hand to find Peter, an artist who’s lost his way. The search takes them across Quebec to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, toward another sin-sick soul, one fighting to claw his way out of jealousy’s grasp. Penny develops the story behind Peter’s disappearance at a slow, masterful pace, revealing each layer of the mystery alongside an introspective glance at Gamache and his comrades, who can all sympathize with Peter’s search for purpose. The emotional depth accessed here is both a wonder and a joy to uncover; if only the different legs of Peter’s physical journey were connected as thoughtfully as his emotional one. Gamache’s 10th outing (How the Light Gets In, 2013, etc.) culminates in one breathless encounter, and readers may feel they weren’t prepared for this story to end. The residents of Three Pines will be back, no doubt, as they’ll have new wounds to mend.
injured housekeeper with a tragic past; her mute daughter, Livia; and Theo himself, sexy as sin and, she realizes, completely different from the evil teen she remembers. The longer Annie stays, the more it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want her there, but for the first time in her life, she feels a sense of purpose and belonging, and she’s not going anywhere without a fight. Harp House and Moonraker Cottage both conceal a wealth of secrets, and finding the truth could offer the whole island a better future. Ventriloquist Annie, with her cozy puppets and emerging fierceness, might save everyone—especially Theo, whose past has convinced him he’s a villain but who is really a hero at heart. Romance star Phillips takes a new and intriguing direction that reads like an homage to the classic gothic novel yet maintains her typical pitch-perfect characters and compelling, complex plot. Heart-wrenching and uplifting, with witty dialogue, emotional depth, and details that give substance and texture to an already entertaining, engrossing story.
LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932
Prose, Francine Harper/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-06-171378-1 A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere, Prose’s latest takes place in Paris from the late 1920s till the end of World War II. The primary locus of action is the Chameleon Club, a cabaret where entertainment edges toward the kinky. Presiding most nights is Eva “Yvonne” Nagy, a Hungarian chanteuse and mistress of the revels. The name of the club is not strictly metaphorical, for Yvonne has a pet lizard, but the cabaret is also famous as a place where Le Tout-Paris can gather and cross-dress, and homosexual lovers can be entertained there with some degree of privacy. One of the most fascinating denizens of the club is Lou Villars, in her youth an astounding athlete and in her adulthood a dancer (with her lover Arlette) at the club and even later a race car driver and eventually a German spy in Paris during the Occupation. Villars and Arlette are the subjects of what becomes the era’s iconic photograph, one that gives the novel its title. This image is taken by Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, eventual lover (and later husband) of sexual athlete Suzanne Dunois. Tsenyi is also a protégé of Baroness Lily de Rossignol, former Hollywood actress, now married to the gay Baron de Rossignol, the fabulously wealthy owner of a French car manufacturing company. Within this multilayered web of characters, Prose manages to give almost every character a voice, ranging from Tsenyi’s eager letters home to his parents, excerpts from a putative biography of Lou Villars (supposedly written by Suzanne’s great-niece) entitled The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars, Lily de Rossignol’s memoirs and further reminiscences by Lionel Maine, Suzanne’s lover before she was “stolen away” by the photographer. Brilliant and dazzling Prose.
HEROES ARE MY WEAKNESS
Phillips, Susan Elizabeth Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $26.99 | $15.99 e-book | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-06-210607-0 978-0-06-210611-7 e-book Sick, broke and homeless, Annie Hewitt must retreat to the cottage her mother left her, even if it is on a remote island off the coast of Maine—and even if Theo Harp, the boy who tried to kill her when they were teenagers and who is now a best-selling horror author, is ensconced in the Gothic mansion next door. After making her narcissistic mother’s last days as pleasant as possible, Annie falls ill with pneumonia and bottoms out financially. Desperate, she makes her way to Moonraker Cottage, the small home Mariah loved and bequeathed to Annie, along with a deathbed promise of a valuable legacy hidden there. Annie has avoided the island since she was a teen, when she developed a huge crush on Theo—the psychopathic boy who played on her emotions and ultimately tried to kill her. She’d like nothing better than to never see him again, but once she arrives, in the dead of winter, she finds herself drawn into the lives of the people at Harp House: Jaycie, the 42
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THE RISE & FALL OF GREAT POWERS
Rachman, Tom Dial Press (400 pp.) $27.00 | $13.99 e-book | May 27, 2014 978-0-679-64365-4 978-0-812-99572-5 e-book
special issue: best books of 2014
Rachman follows his best-selling debut (The Imperfectionists, 2010) with the haunting tale of a young woman reassessing her turbulent past. In 2011, Tooly has washed up after a lifetime of wandering in a small Welsh village, where she uses the last of her money to buy a used bookstore. Twelve years earlier, in 1999, she’s a vagabond 20-year-old on the streets of New York City who talks her way into law student Duncan’s apartment by pretending it was her childhood home. Actually, her childhood was spent traveling around Asia with her father, Paul, until, in 1988, she’s scooped up in Bangkok by her feckless mother, Sarah, and falls in with a band of peripatetic misfits led by Venn, a coolly manipulative con man. The three storylines proceed along their separate time tracks to collectively explore how Tooly came to be the remote, hard-drinking young woman who seems to be marking time in Wales. We see that she’s been indelibly scarred by Venn: He imprinted her with his philosophy of relating to people only on the basis of how useful they can be to you; let her believe they had a special friendship as she followed him from country to country and scam to scam; then vanished just after she turned 21 in New York. The revelation of why he let her hang around for a decade forms the novel’s brutal climax, articulated by Venn with matter-of-fact cruelty after Tooly tracks him down. She does have gentler, more nurturing father figures: not just Paul, with whom she reconnects in a tender scene, but Humphrey, the elderly Russian émigré who tried to shelter her from Venn’s influence and softened her fall after he left—though she doesn’t realize this until years later. Still, the overwhelming emotions here are loss and regret, as Tooly realizes how she was alienated from her own best instincts by a charismatic sociopath. Brilliantly structured, beautifully written and profoundly sad.
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a Pakistani physicist, is fond of whiskey, his mother scornful of religious pieties (“[n]ot for her such opiates”). The story, though, turns on his mysterious friend Zafar; raised more modestly, he made a fortune as a derivatives trader yet has apparently acquired enough martial skills along the way to thrash a gang of ill-meaning neo-Nazis in a London mews. Now, as the book opens, he is back in London from a harrowing journey both geographical and metaphysical, his talisman being Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (“the world was foolish to ignore it in an age of dogma”), his life a scatter burst of fragments. Rahman’s narrative quickly takes flight, literally, moving from London and New York to Islamabad and Kabul and points beyond as the narrator comes to flourish, oddly, in a post-9/11 world where he and his South Asian compatriots are no longer merely local-color background. Rahman capably mixes a story that threatens to erupt into le Carré–like intrigue with intellectual disquisitions of uncommon breadth, whether touching on the geometry of map projections or the finer points of Dante; the reader will learn about Poggendorf illusions, scads of math and the reason flags fly at half-mast along the way. A betrayal complicates matters, but in the end, Rahman’s is a quiet, philosophical novel of ideas, a meditation on memory, friendship and trust: “Such regrets as I have are few,” says his narrator; “I am not an old man, but even if there had been time enough to accumulate regrets, I do not think my constitution works that way.” Beautifully written evidence that some of the most interesting writing in English is coming from the edges of old empires.
LILA
Robinson, Marilynne Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-374-18761-3 More balm in Gilead as Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson’s readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames’ wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she bear? It turns out that Lila has quite a story to tell, one of abandonment, want, struggle and redemption—classic Robinson territory, in other words. Robinson provides Lila with enough back story to fuel several other books, her prose richly suggestive and poetic as she evokes a bygone time before “everyone...started getting poorer and the wind turned dirty” that merges into a more recent past that
IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT WE KNOW
Rahman, Zia Haider Farrar, Straus and Giroux (544 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-374-17562-7 War can divide friends. But then again, so can peace and all that falls between, the spaces inhabited by this ambitious, elegiac debut novel by Bangladeshi-British writer Rahman. The unnamed protagonist is a brilliant 40-something math whiz–turned-financier who comes from privilege; his father, |
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“This is a mystery that depends less on action than on DCI Banks’ thought process. It’s well-plotted and satisfying right to the end.” from children of the revolution
THE REMEDY FOR LOVE
seems no less bleak, when Lila, having subsisted on cattails and pine sap, wanders into Gilead just to look at the houses and gardens: “The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of.” She never leaves, of course, becoming part of the landscape—and, as readers will learn, essential to the gradually unfolding story of Gilead. And in Robinson’s hands, that small town, with its heat and cicadas, its tree toads and morning dew, becomes as real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, just as charged with meaning if a touch less ominous, Lila’s talismanic knife notwithstanding. Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longer—and will surely look forward to the next.
Roorbach, Bill Algonquin (352 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-61620-331-3
A closely observed meditation on isolation and loneliness “in a world in which no social problem was addressed till it was a disaster.” Eric is a middle-aged “small-town lawyer with no cases,” struggling with separation and lost love, when he lays eyes on a young woman in the supermarket line who’s just such a disaster. Danielle is a hot mess brimming with suspicion and hostility, to say nothing of being hobbled by a bad sprain and no immediate prospects. When Eric helps her with her groceries—and then, episode by episode, with bits of her torn-up life—young Danielle responds mostly with cagey bitterness, dismissing the train wreck that is her existence with tossed-off observations like “[p]eople are complicated.” Yes, they are, and Danielle—if that is her real name, for, as she tells him, it’s “Danielle, for now”—is more complicated than most. Set against the backdrop of a howling Maine blizzard (“Storm of the Century, that’s what I heard,” says Eric. “Of course that’s what they always say”), Roorbach’s story never takes an expected or easily anticipated turn. Eric makes a project of Danielle, a project that brings some glimmer of meaning into his life. Danielle, in turn, resents being made into said project. She’s an exceedingly strange bird, but strange is better than nothing—maybe, for Danielle is harboring enough secrets to keep a National Security Agency agent busy for years. “I’m sure I lied,” she tells Eric, simply, in one typical exchange. And so she has, though she has her reasons, which we learn as Roorbach’s superbly grown-up love story unfolds. Lyrical, reserved and sometimes unsettling—and those are the happier moments. Another expertly delivered portrait of the world from Roorbach (Life Among Giants, 2012, etc.), that poet of hopeless tangles.
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
Robinson, Peter Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-06-224050-7 978-0-06-224055-2 e-book Robinson’s latest Inspector Banks novel is an English murder mystery sure to please lovers of the genre. The body of Gavin Miller shows up on a lonely pathway beneath a railroad bridge in the Yorkshire countryside. Was it an accident? Or suicide? Or murder? The dead man has £5,000 in his pocket, so robbery seems an unlikely motive. DCI Alan Banks heads the investigation, which leads him and his team to ask unwelcome questions of some rich and powerful people. Banks digs deeply, learning about radical political pasts dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, when people read Karl Marx, talked of revolution and did plenty of dope. Today they think that’s all in the past, and the past won’t return to haunt them. In any event, Miller had seemed like a shabby loser and a drunk—so what was he doing with all that money? Responding to outside pressure, Banks’ boss tells him to back off the investigation, which of course a good fictional detective doesn’t do. He and fellow detectives Cabbot and Winsome are smart and determined, with just the right amount of attitude to make them likable. Readers who grew up in the age of bands like The Doors and Led Zeppelin will appreciate the frequent references to the rock music of that era. Robinson’s descriptions are rich and beautifully done, although now and then the detailed scene-setting slows the pace too much. This is a mystery that depends less on action than on DCI Banks’ thought process. It’s well-plotted and satisfying right to the end. Robinson has won many awards for his Detective Banks novels (Watching the Dark, 2013, etc.), and with this latest, he demonstrates his mastery of the craft.
RECKLESS DISREGARD
Rotstein, Robert Seventh Street/Prometheus (347 pp.) $15.95 paper | $11.99 e-book | Jun. 3, 2014 978-1-61614-881-2 978-1-61614-882-9 e-book Now that he’s survived the dark forces that were arrayed against him in Corrupt Practices (2013), tongue-tied Los Angeles attorney Parker Stern is ready to defend the world’s most elusive client in
a libel suit. Like Rupert Murdoch, William H. Bishop, dubbed “the Conqueror” because he’ll do anything to get his own way, owns a chain of newspapers, television stations and media outlets that circle the globe. But he won’t be happy till he crushes 44
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Poniard, the pseudonymous video game designer whose latest production, “Abduction!,” recasts the 1987 disappearance of bipolar actress Felicity McGrath as a kidnapping at the hands of the Conqueror’s goons. Even though Parker is now working for Judicial Alternative Dispute Solutions, whose members try to resolve legal disputes through mediation, Poniard is determined to drag him back into the courtroom. And Poniard’s equally determined not to appear there himself. He doesn’t need to answer Bishop’s libel charge in person, Poniard airily assures Parker via email. In fact, Parker doesn’t even need to know his client’s real name or whereabouts. Understandably reluctant to represent such a will-o’-the-wisp, Parker changes his mind when Poniard threatens to make Parker’s past as a child movie star public knowledge and when he sees a chance to go up against his former girlfriend, ex–porn actress Lovely Diamond, in court. Although the suit is a civil action, Poniard’s defense—that “Abduction!” isn’t libelous because Bishop really did have Felicity McGrath killed—opens up a criminal dimension that produces more fresh corpses in the present the harder Parker looks into the past. Endless novelties, endless twists, endless complications, endless surprises in and out of the courtroom. Whatever you read legal drama for, it’s here, along with a whole lot of other stuff you never thought to ask for.
superweapons, the Americans. Almost as bad as the Germans.” Sansom’s scenario is all too real, and it has sparked a modest controversy among it-couldn’t-happen-here readers across the water. More important than the scenario is his careful unfolding of the vast character study that fascism affords, his portraits of those who resist and those who collaborate and why. That scenario, after all, is not new; Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and Philip Roth have explored it, too. What matters is what is done with it, and Sansom has done admirably. A rich and densely plotted story that will make Winston Churchill buffs admire the man even more.
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LOCK IN
Scalzi, John Tor (320 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-7653-7586-5
DOMINION
Sansom, C.J. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (450 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-316-25491-5 What did you do in the war, Pater— eh, Vater? Let’s suppose, as Sansom does in this long, engaging bit of speculative fiction, that the Nazis had won the war. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they had stared the British down, won concessions from Lloyd George (who had “spent the thirties idolizing Hitler, calling him Germany’s George Washington”) and effectively made the United Kingdom a satellite of the Third Reich. Winston Churchill, pressed to join the Quisling government, instead spearheads a vee-for-victory resistance movement, while German racial purity laws gradually come into effect on the streets of London, with most residents only too glad to be rid of the Jews; meanwhile, critics of the regime, such as W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster, have been silenced. To judge by his name and appearance, David Fitzgerald should have no trouble in the new Britain, but his bloodline tells a different tale: “He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews”—even halfJews, even Irish Jews. His wife, for her part, is content at first to keep her head down and her mouth shut until the Final Solution comes to the sceptered isle. If there is hope, it will come from America, where, as one dour Brit remarks, “they love their |
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In the near future, a meningitislike disease has killed millions and left a small percentage of survivors “locked in”—fully conscious, but unable to move any part of their bodies. Government-funded research has allowed the locked-in Haden’s syndrome survivors to flourish in a virtual environment, and to interact with the real world via humanoid robots known as “threeps.” They can also use the bodies of a small group of Haden survivors known as “Integrators,” who have found that they can allow their bodies to be controlled by others. Right before a major rally by Haden activists to protest a law cutting support for survivors, a series of murders and the bombing of a major pharmaceutical company suggest that someone has developed the ability to take over Integrators’ bodies against their will. Rookie FBI agent and Haden survivor Chris Vance and Vance’s new partner, troubled former Integrator Leslie Vann, must find the culprit before an even more devastating act is committed. There’s only one real suspect from the get-go, so most of the mystery lies in determining his motives and finding the evidence to make an arrest before his plan can be fulfilled; but the novel—which contains plenty of action, great character development, vivid and believable worldbuilding and a thought-provoking examination of disability culture and politics—is definitely worth the ride. This SF thriller provides yet more evidence that Scalzi (The Human Division, 2013, etc.) is a master at creating appealing commercial fiction.
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“In Sharma’s world, as in Leo Tolstoy’s, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways.” from family life
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
academic success in middle school and qualifies to attend the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Tragically, just before Birju is about to begin at his new high school, he has an accident— he hits his head in a pool and stays unconscious underwater for three minutes, leading to severe brain damage that lasts throughout his life. This accident changes the entire dynamic for the Mishra family. First, they have to determine how to take care of Birju, and they eventually decide to buy a new home and have live-in help, a situation made more feasible when the family gets a $1 million insurance settlement. But the father becomes an alcoholic, in part owing to the new stresses brought about by Birju’s medical needs, and the mother winds up taking a job in the garment industry for minor wages. Meanwhile, Ajay begins to feel some pressure to be the academic star, something he succeeds in by graduating first in his high school class—he eventually attends Princeton, studies economics and becomes an investment banker. Along the way, he becomes enamored with Ernest Hemingway and begins to write short stories about his family life in the reportorial and flat style of the author he so admires—a style Sharma also adheres to in the writing of his novel. A moving story of displacement and of the inevitable adjustments one must make when life circumstances change.
Shafer, David Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (432 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Aug. 5, 2014 978-0-316-25263-8 978-0-316-25264-5 e-book A droll, all-too-plausible contemporary thriller pulls a mismatched trio of stressed-out 30-somethings into underground guerilla warfare against a sinister conspiracy to own the information superhighway. On one side of the world, you have Leila Majnoun, an increasingly jaded operative for a global nonprofit agency struggling to do good deeds despite the brutal, stonewalling autocrats who run Myanmar (Burma). On another side is Mark Deveraux, a self-loathing self-improvement guru living a glamorous and debt-ridden lifestyle in the promised land of Brooklyn. Somewhere in the middle (Portland, Oregon, to be precise) is Mark’s old school chum Leo Crane, a misanthropic poor-little-rich-kid grown into a trouble-prone, substance-abusing and seedily paranoid adult. The destinies of these three lost souls are somehow yoked together by an international cabal of one-percenters who want to create something called “New Alexandria,” where all the information available (or even unavailable) online will be in their money-grubbing control, thereby making the recent reallife National Security Agency abuses of power seem like benign neglect. Shafer’s arch prose, comedic timing and deft feel for shadowy motives in high places are reminiscent of the late Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), only with sweeter, deeper characterizations. At times, you wish he’d move things along a wee bit faster and make his menace more tangibly scary than it is here. But it’s also possible that Shafer is remaking the international thriller into something more humane and thus more credible than what fans of the genre are accustomed to. An edgy, darkly comedic debut novel whose characters and premise are as up-to-the-minute as an online news feed but as classic as the counterculture rebellions once evoked by Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey.
SHIELD OF WINTER
Singh, Nalini Berkley (432 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 3, 2014 978-0-425-26401-0
As an Arrow, Vasic has been conditioned to remain even more detached than most Psy, so when he’s asked to guard Ivy, an empath who may hold the key to their society’s survival, he’s unnerved by her emotionalism and his long-buried desire to belong. The corrupt Psy-Council has fallen, and the remorseless regime of Silence—the enforced practice of remaining emotionally distant—has been lifted. The members of the elite Psy paramilitary group known as Arrows are independent now, loyal to no one but themselves. Forging a wary alliance with Kaleb Krychek, the de facto leader who caused the council to fall and has since stepped into its void, the Arrows must help staunch the spread of a deadly psychic contagion that threatens the lives and sanity of the Psy race. Krychek suspects that empaths may be the answer, though their emotional nature was brutally stifled under the Silence. Vasic, second-in-command of the Arrows, is assigned to find and protect empath Ivy Jane, who has been living beyond the grid after undergoing a devastating state-mandated “emotional reconditioning.” Vasic is a cold creature of the shadows, and he knows he can never be forgiven for the damage he’s done under the command of the Psy-Council. However, the more time he spends with Ivy, the more her honest emotions affect him, reawakening feelings he barely remembers. Somehow, under Ivy’s accepting and fascinated gaze, Vasic just might learn to feel again—emotions like hope, passion and
FAMILY LIFE
Sharma, Akhil Norton (192 pp.) $23.95 | Apr. 7, 2014 978-0-393-06005-8 In Sharma’s world, as in Leo Tolstoy’s, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways. In 1978, narrator Ajay’s father emigrates from Delhi to New York to take a job as a clerk in a government agency, and a year later, his family joins him. Ajay’s mother had been an economics teacher in India and must now adjust to lower career aspirations, while Ajay’s older brother Birju experiences some 46
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“After more than 40 years of publishing short stories, Theroux has become a master of the form, with a deep capacity to engage, enchant and unsettle.” from mr. bones
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THE RHESUS CHART
love. But first, Ivy and Vasic must vanquish the contagion and a life-threatening legacy from Vasic’s violent past. Paranormal author Singh continues her popular Psy-Changeling series with an emotionally intense and gratifying romance while advancing a new reality for her complex psychic society set on Earth a few generations hence. Shadowy Arrows make great redeemed alpha heroes, and pairing profoundly damaged Vasic with the blatantly empathic Ivy works brilliantly. Singh shines with elaborate, compelling worldbuilding and scorching sexual and emotional tension.
Stross, Charles Ace/Berkley (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 1, 2014 978-0-425-25686-2
HOW TO BE BOTH
Smith, Ali Pantheon (384 pp.) $25.95 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-375-42410-6 978-1-101-87046-4 e-book
special issue: best books of 2014
This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book. George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London’s National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book’s other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the Earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter’s own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George’s. He—though gender is bending here too—also loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editions—one begins with George’s half, and the other begins with the painter’s, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what’s around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith (There But for The, 2011, etc.) builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych.
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Fifth in the Laundry Files series (The Apocalypse Codex, 2012, etc.), Stross’ stunning incarnation of magic as a branch of applied mathematics. As always, of course, the devils are in the details. Literally, that is—since advanced computation attracts the interest of bloodthirsty entities from other realities. The British government’s countermeasure is known as the Laundry, a department so secret that anybody that stumbles upon its existence is (one way or another) silenced. Applied computational demonologist Bob Howard, whose boss is James Angleton (an Eater of Souls—and you really, really don’t want to know), has acquired some of Angleton’s occult powers. Bob’s wife, Mo O’Brien, also works for the department: She’s a combat epistemologist whose weapon is a demonic violin. Fasttracked into management after recent successes, Bob grows suspicious when a whiz-kid team of investment bankers which calls itself the Scrum discovers an algorithm that promises to make its members billions in profits but whose unfortunate side effect (via the aforementioned hyper-reality nasties) is to turn them into vampires. (The supreme irony of this will be lost on few readers.) An added complication for Bob is that the Scrum’s ringleader, Mhari Murphy, is an ex-girlfriend. More peculiar yet, why is everybody in the Laundry convinced that vampires don’t exist? Bob’s superiors take prompt action—and form a committee. Laundry regulars by now will be familiar with Stross’ trademark sardonic, provocative, disturbing, allusion-filled narrative. And, here, with a structure strongly reminiscent of Len Deighton’s early spy novels, the tone grows markedly grimmer, with several significant casualties and tragedies, perhaps in preparation for Angleton’s feared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Stross at the top of his game—which is to say, few do it better. Pounce!
MR. BONES Twenty Stories
Theroux, Paul Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (352 pp.) $27.00 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-544-32402-2
After more than 40 years of publishing short stories, Theroux has become a master of the form, with a deep capacity to engage, enchant and unsettle. There’s something almost quaint— and ultimately gratifying—about the manner in which Theroux’s stories rely on irony, circumstance and character motivation while retaining their inscrutability. It’s a quality shared by all the great modern storytellers, from Chekhov to Cheever, and |
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Theroux, better known for his witty, idiosyncratic travelogues, can claim their legacies as his own. What connect most of the 20 tales are characters getting even, getting back or just “getting theirs” at the expense of someone who may, or may not, deserve reprisals. In the case of “Rip It Up,” a chillingly prescient story of junior high outcasts collaborating on an explosive device to set off against their tormentors, the outcome yields disorienting, unexpected and ambivalent results. The same holds true for “I’m the Meat, You’re the Knife,” in which a writer returns home for his father’s funeral and uses the occasion to torment a former teacher, now a helpless patient in a convalescent center, with stories suggestive (but never explicitly so) about past abuses by the teacher against the student. Outside of “Our Raccoon Year,” a tale of an over-the-top war against nature that seems a miniature version of Theroux’s best-known novel, The Mosquito Coast, the macabre and absurd elements of Theroux’s stories are more affecting for being rooted in the commonplace and the plausible. Even the shoe salesman in the title story who appears to veer into the deep end by indulging in blackface minstrelsy is depicted as someone you might have known or heard about while growing up. Such characters seem so odd but true that, in the same way he makes exotic locales worth visiting, Theroux inspires you to wonder what you’re overlooking when encountering friends, neighbors and strangers alike. A versatile, prolific author asserts his pre-eminence in short fiction with an unassuming brilliance that almost makes you think stories will become popular again.
many breakdowns and longstanding depression. Yoli’s men are transient, leaving her with two children. Toews conveys family cycles of crisis and intermittent calm through recurring events and behaviors: Elf and her father both suffer from depression; Yoli and her mother face tragedy with wry humor and absurdist behavior; and two sisters experience parallel losses. Crisp chapter endings, like staccato musical notes, anchor the plot’s pacing. Elf ’s determination to end her suffering by dying takes the form of a drumbeat of requests for Yoli to help her commit suicide. Readers yearn for more time with this complex, radiant woman who fiercely loves her family but cannot love herself. “Sadness is what holds our bones in place,” Yoli thinks. Toews deepens our understanding of the pain found in Coleridge’s poetry, which is the source of the book’s title.
NORA WEBSTER
Tóibín, Colm Scribner (384 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-4391-3833-5
A subtle, pitch-perfect sonata of a novel in which an Irish widow faces her empty life and, incrementally, fills the hole left by the recent death of her husband. Tóibín’s latest serves as a companion piece to his masterful Brooklyn (2009), which detailed a young Irish woman’s emigration in the 1950s. Set a decade later, this novel concerns a woman who stayed behind, the opportunities that went unexplored and the comforts that support her through tragedy. Left with two young sons (as well as daughters on the verge of adulthood) by the death of her husband, a beloved teacher, Nora exists in a “world filled with absences.” Not that she’s been abandoned. To the contrary, people won’t leave her alone, and their clichéd advice and condolences are the banes of her existence. And there’s simply no escape in a village where everybody knows everything about everybody else. What she craves are people who “could talk to her sensibly not about what she had lost or how sorry they were, but about the children, money, parttime work, how to live now.” Yet she had lived so much through her husband—even before his unexpected illness and death— that she hadn’t really connected with other people, including her young sons, who now need more from her than perhaps she has to give. Without any forced drama, Nora works her way back into the world, with new priorities and even pleasures. There’s a spiritual undercurrent here, in the nun who watches over Nora, in the community that provides what she needs (even as she resists) and especially in the music that fills her soul. Explains a woman she would never have encountered, left to her own devices: “There is no better way to heal yourself than singing in a choir. That is why God made music.” A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject.
ALL MY PUNY SORROWS
Toews, Miriam McSweeney’s (330 pp.) $24.00 | Nov. 6, 2014 978-1-940450-27-8 A Canadian writer visits her older sister, a concert pianist who’s just attempted suicide, in this masterful, original investigation into love, loss and survival. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other,” Yolandi Von Riesen says of her sister, Elfrieda. Toews (Irma Voth, 2011, etc.) moves between Winnipeg, Toronto, and a small town founded by Mennonite immigrants who survived Bolshevik massacres, where the intellectual, free-spirited Von Riesen family doesn’t share the elders’ disapproval of “overt symbols of hope and individual signature pieces.” Yoli looks back over time, realizing that the sisters’ bond is strengthened by their painful memories. The girls’ father baffles neighbors by supporting Elf ’s creative passions and campaigning to run a library. His suicide and absence from their adulthood make him even more important to his daughters as their paths diverge. Elf travels around Europe, emptying herself into Rachmaninoff performances; Yoli writes books about a rodeo heroine, feeling aimless and failed. Elf ’s husband appreciates her singular sensitivity as a performer, but this capacity for vulnerability dangerously underpins her 48
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BARRACUDA
THE COLD SONG
Tsiolkas, Christos Hogarth/Crown (384 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-8041-3842-0
Ullmann, Linn Translated by Haveland, Barbara J. Other Press (352 pp.) $15.95 paper | Apr. 8, 2014 978-1-59051-667-6
Australian novelist Tsiolkas (The Slap, 2008, etc.) serves up a bracing poolside critique of Antipodean mores. The trope of athletic contest as coming-of-age backdrop is an old one, though more seen in film than literature since the days of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Tsiolkas’ latest takes an athletically gifted young man—Danny here, Dan there, Barracuda everywhere, thanks to his habit of churning up the water and devouring his opponents—across two decades. As we find him at first, Danny, a working-class scholarship student, is on the loutish side, swimming for a school that he calls “Cunts College,” a place for the rich and privileged and not the likes of him. Only dimly self-aware, Danny flourishes under the tutelage of a Hungarian-born mentor who had coached the team “to first in every school sports meet of the last seven years.” The fact of Coach Torma’s foreignness is important, because everyone in Australia, it seems, is from someplace else, and immigration and exile underlie the Greek-descended author’s story. In time, Danny, now a grown-up Dan, will be someplace else, too, for though he is Olympic material, he fails to live up to his promise for reasons that move the story along, taking him to far-off Glasgow and into the complexities of sexuality, so torn up about events that he can’t bring himself to enter the water. Dan’s struggle to resolve the too-abundant conflicts that beset him, including hinted-at legal trouble, makes us sorry to see the once-golden boy stumble and fall. Still, he finds redemption of a kind in his homeland, which remains welcoming even though Dan/ Danny has only an untutored, reflexive appreciation for its moderate politics; at the end, as Tsiolkas has one accidentally wise character note, “[w]e’re lucky here, Danny, this country just sails on, impervious to the shit that the rest of the world is drowning in. Jesus, no wonder any bastard who gets on a boat wants to come here.” A tough, unsparing, closely observed and decidedly R-rated look at the many challenges and disappointments that life brings, told against settings that American readers will find at once familiar and exotic.
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The fifth novel by an award-winning Norwegian author and critic deserves to win her a much larger stateside readership. The latest and best from Ullmann (A Blessed Child, 2008, etc.) resists categorization, except as a literary page-turner. It’s a murder mystery. It’s a multigenerational psychodrama of a dysfunctional family. And it’s a very dark comedy of manners. Yet the author’s command is such that it never reads like a pastiche or suffers from jarring shifts of tone. The plot focuses on the events of one day, the 75th birthday of Jenny Brodal, a cold and caustic woman who’s so resistant to the party being thrown in her honor that she ends her sobriety of almost 20 years and gets roaring drunk. Jenny’s daughter Siri, who throws the elaborate party, is a chef and restaurateur. Her husband, Jon, is a mostly forgotten novelist with the worst case of writer’s block since The Shining. He’s also a narcissistic lecher and the source of the novel’s comedy. He had “planned to write a hymn to everything that endures and everything that falls apart. But truth be told he wasn’t sure what he actually meant.” The couple’s two daughters remain on the novel’s periphery, though one of them is seriously and increasingly disturbed. The girls’ nanny, Milla—who has “breasts that men couldn’t help staring at’’— has developed a mutual attraction with Jon, which strains both of their relationships with Siri. Echoes of dead children, grieving parents, empty marriages and broken lives abound. The day of the party becomes both farce and tragedy, with Milla disappearing and Jenny’s drunken decline leaving questions until the very end. The author might be best known in this country as the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, but her accomplishment here merits more than recognition by association.
special issue: best books of 2014
THE TAO OF HUMILIATION
Upton, Lee BOA Editions (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | $9.99 e-book May 13, 2014 978-1-938160-32-5 978-1-938160-33-2 e-book Masterful stories by a writer of great lyrical gifts. Upton focuses on personal relationships, especially the immediacy and estrangement that emerge from the intensity of family life. The first story, “The Ideal Reader,” blends fact and fantasy as the narrator presents herself as the biographer of Malcolm Alfred Kulkins, a |
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“The Southern Reach is the secret government agency that dispatches expeditions across the border to monitor Area X, an ominous coastal no man’s land....” from annihilation
fictional literary lion and supposed friend of Truman Capote and other glitterati. Mysteriously, Kulkins had published almost nothing during the last 17 years of his life, a period dating from the suicide of Seyla Treat, one of his former lovers, with whom he had a daughter, Flame. The biographer ultimately learns that talent is passed across generations when she intuits that some priceless material supposedly left by Kulkins might have been forged by Flame instead. “The Tao of Humiliation” (which one character within the story mishears as the “cow” of humiliation) introduces us to Barry, Everett and Lucas, three men on a retreat in the woods who are forced to confront some unsavory moments of their pasts—and in their farcical misadventures, they don’t seem to have learned from their mistakes. One of the best stories is the wryly comic “You Know You’ve Made It When They Hate You.” Here, a community-theater drama critic continually savages the performances of Molly Crane, a hapless local actress, but by the end of the story, they literally find themselves in hot water when they share a hot tub, and she realizes that she’s “as miserable at being a wife as she was at being an actress.” Upton specializes in ending her stories with epiphanies that can be searing in their poignancy. These 17 tales explore personal and familial relationships with both pathos and humor—and all are well worth reading.
Leaving the hostile, ex-military surveyor behind, the biologist makes her way to the other interesting structure, the lighthouse, which she climbs in dread. VanderMeer is an expert fearmonger, but his strongest suit, what makes his novel a standout, is his depiction of the biologist. Like any scientist, she has an overriding need to classify, to know. This has been her lifelong passion. Her solitary explorations created problems in her marriage; her husband, a medic, returned from the previous expedition a zombie. What killed the anthropologist? The biologist’s samples reveal human brain tissue. Some organism is trying to colonize and absorb the humans with whom it comes in contact. Experiencing “the severe temptation of the unknown,” she must re-enter the tower to confront the Crawler, her name for the graffiti writer. Speculative fiction at its most transfixing.
THE PAYING GUESTS
Waters, Sarah Riverhead (560 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-59463-311-9
An exquisitely tuned exploration of class in post-Edwardian Britain—with really hot sex. It’s 1922, and Frances Wray lives with her mother in a big house in a genteel South London neighborhood. Her two brothers were killed in the war and her father died soon after, leaving behind a shocking mess of debt. The solution: renting out rooms to Leonard and Lilian Barber, members of the newly emerging “clerk class,” the kind of people the Wrays would normally never mix with but who now share their home. Tension is high from the first paragraph, as Frances waits for the new lodgers to move in: “She and her mother had spent the morning watching the clock, unable to relax.” The first half of the book slowly builds the suspense as Frances falls for the beautiful and passionate Lilian and teases at the question of whether she will declare her love; when she does, the tension grows even thicker, as the two bump into each other all over the house and try to find time alone for those vivid sex scenes. The second half, as in an Ian McEwan novel, explores the aftermath of a shocking act of violence. Waters is a master of pacing, and her metaphorlaced prose is a delight; when Frances and Lilian go on a picnic, “the eggs [give] up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats”—just like the women. As life-and-death questions are answered, new ones come up, and until the last page, the reader will have no idea what’s going to happen. Waters keeps getting better, if that’s even possible after the sheer perfection of her earlier novels.
ANNIHILATION
VanderMeer, Jeff Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $13.00 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-374-10409-2 Series: Southern Reach Trilogy, 1 After their high-risk expedition disintegrates, it’s every scientist for herself in this wonderfully creepy blend of horror and science fiction. This is the first volume of the Southern Reach trilogy from VanderMeer (Finch, 2009, etc.); subsequent volumes are scheduled for publication in June and September 2014. The Southern Reach is the secret government agency that dispatches expeditions across the border to monitor Area X, an ominous coastal no man’s land since an unspecified event 30 years before. This latest expedition, the 12th, is all-female, consisting of a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor and a biologist (the narrator). Names are taboo. Their leader, the psychologist, has hypnotic powers. They have no communication devices, but they do have firearms, which they will use; some earlier expeditions also ended bloodily. Close to base camp is “the tower,” a mostly underground structure that acts as tunnel, which they descend. On its walls are grim biblical admonitions, raised letters made of fungi. The biologist incautiously inhales tiny spores which, she will discover later, fill her with brightness, a form of ESP. Tension between the women increases when the anthropologist goes missing; they will discover her dead in the tower, discharging green ash. Next, the psychologist disappears. 50
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Weir, Andy Crown (368 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8041-3902-1
Winton, Tim Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 10, 2014 978-0-374-15134-8 An odd troika stumbles through the decadence of a world on the verge of collapse in Winton’s (Breath, 2008, etc.) resonant, oddly cheerful yarn. Tom Keely is a mess. A one-time environmental activist, he’s failed at that, and spectacularly. He’s failed at marriage, at fatherhood. Now, living high up in a seedy apartment tower on the farthest edge of western Australia, he has recurrent fears of falling out the window and off the face of the Earth—small wonder, given his staggering chemical diet. Winton’s narrative opens with a king-hell hangover, Keely lying as still as he can in the growing heat of morning, contemplating a stain on the rug: “He had no idea what it was or how it got there. But the sight of it put the wind right up him.” Things don’t promise to get much better for him in that hellish tower among the “stench of strangers” until, hitherto oblivious, he discovers that a neighbor is someone he vaguely knew in his younger days, way back when things were good and promised to get better. As with Tom, the years have not been kind to Gemma Buck, once quietly attractive, now guardian to her grandson, a spooky little kid given to apocalyptic visions and to saying things such as “The birds in the world will die....All of them, the birds. They die.” If young Kai’s dreams are haunted by extinction and doom, he’s got cause: Mom’s a jailbird, dad’s a thug, and they’re hitting Gemma up hard for money she doesn’t have. Dyspeptic in a way that would please a David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury, Tom unsteadily tries to help, finally given a mission to fill his idle, meaningless days. But is he Kai’s rescuer, or is Kai his? Sometimes brooding, always superbly well-written, Winton’s story studies family— even a family that is as postmodern and anti-nuclear as our hapless trio—both as anchor to keep the ship from drifting away and anchor to keep whomever it’s tied to submerged. Another exquisite portrait of troubled modern life from Winton, who solidifies his reputation as one of the best writers at work in Australia—and, indeed, in English—today.
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When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir. One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he’d lost pressure in his suit, and they’d seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars’ first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it’s set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive. Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
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MORRIS MICKLEWHITE AND THE TANGERINE DRESS
BURIED SUNLIGHT How Fossil Fuels Have Changed the Earth
Bang, Molly; Chisholm, Penny Illus. by Bang, Molly Blue Sky/Scholastic (48 pp.) $18.99 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-545-57785-4 Series: Sunlight
This fourth in Chisholm and Bang’s series about the sun’s relationship to life on Earth explores its ancient stores of fossil fuels and the effect of intense and rapid consumption of these in recent human history. |
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Young Morris definitely marches to the beat of a different drummer. He likes his mom and his cat and lots of school activities. He especially enjoys the dress-up center, where he chooses a tangerine-colored dress that reminds him of “tigers, the sun and his mother’s hair.” The dress also makes delightful sounds as he moves, and when he adds shoes that click, his joy is complete. None of this sits well with the other kids, who tease and ostracize him, leaving him isolated. One lonely Friday, hurt and upset, he pretends a tummy ache and stays home from school. Supported by his mother’s soothing, calming encouragement, he reads, dreams, and paints wild and wonderful adventures with blue elephants and spaceships. When he returns to school, tangerine dress and all, he wins over his classmates with his imaginative play and his new self-confidence. Baldacchino treats the tricky and controversial subject of expected gender behaviors and bullying with care and compassion, employing language and tone that avoid histrionics or preaching. Morris is a complex character whose creativity and personality shine. Malenfant’s lively and colorful illustrations, rendered in an unusual mix of charcoal, watercolor, pastel and Photoshop, are appealing and eye-catching and clearly depict Morris’ difficulties, dreams and triumphs. An opportunity for a cozy read-together and a lively discussion. Sensitive and reassuring. (Picture book. 4-8)
The sun’s first-person voice puts readers at the center: “Yes, living things—including YOU—need energy to stay alive and grow.” The explanation begins with plants and moves concisely through photosynthesis and the use of the resulting carbon chains and animal production of carbon dioxide. Bang’s edgeto-edge art in rich blues and greens is stippled with color suggesting, variously, energy in sunlight, microscopic life and the release of carbon gases. Reds and yellows convey the heat of the sun as well as that of cities and deserts. This lively diagram of the relationships among plant and animal, sunlight, CO2 production and the Earth’s “blanket” of atmosphere is pitched to somewhat older readers than the earlier books. The result of the relatively sudden excess of CO2 on what was formerly an ebb and flow of warmth and cooling is direct. “ ‘SO WHAT?’ some people say. / SO THIS:” precedes the description of how and why more heat is trapped under the Earth’s blanket and what climate changes are now being seen. Abundant backmatter provides a more detailed explanation of the science introduced earlier. Gorgeous illustrations and impressive, urgent scientific explanation. (Nonfiction.7-12)
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Baldacchino, Christine Illus. by Malenfant, Isabelle Groundwood (32 pp.) $16.95 | May 13, 2014 978-1-55498-347-6
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SAM AND DAVE DIG A HOLE
Barnett, Mac Illus. by Klassen, Jon Candlewick (40 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-7636-6229-5
When Sam and Dave dig a hole, readers get “something spectacular.” The boys, on the other hand, do not. Their quest to find the spectacular brings them painfully and humorously close to buried jewels as they spade their way into the ground, accompanied by an intrepid canine companion. Readers occupy a superior position as cross-section illustrations reveal those jewels buried just out of the shovels’ reach. Each time they near one, the increasingly grubby boys maddeningly change course. On they dig, tunneling in different directions, and each effort reveals (to readers) yet larger jewels evading them. Exhausted, they fall asleep, but the dog digs after a bone it senses below. In an unexpected turn, the ground gives way to nothingness, and the trio falls through empty space “until they landed in the soft dirt.” At first glance, it seems they’ve ended up where they began: A small tree stands on the recto, and a house with a porch is on the verso, as before. But careful readers will notice that the tree here bears pears, while the tree at the story’s start
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celebrating the best picture books of 2014
Photo courtesy ChristinaPabst
What a year it’s been for picture books. Sometimes it felt as though every single box I opened presented me with a newly inventive variation on this oh-so-important art form. Since most children encounter both fine art and letters for the first time in picture books, it’s heartening to see how robust this slice of the industry is. The metafictive picture book is still going strong, with such format-bending outings as Deborah Underwood and Claudia Rueda’s Here Comes the Easter Cat, Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky’s Circle, Square, Moose, and Jason Chin’s Gravity. These and others offer a satisfyingly mindbending experience that attracts attention to the book as artifact as well as deliverer of story or information. Perhaps its most amusing iteration this year is in Any Questions?, Marie-Louise Gay’s celebration of the artistic process, in which a bevy of imaginary schoolchildren prompt an increasingly gleeful and chaotic picture book within a book. Informational picture books continue to flex their muscles, presenting children with explorations of wildly varied topics, and I found biography to be an especially strong subcategory this year. Keith Richards and his daughter Theodora celebrate the legendary guitarist’s grandfather in Gus & Me; Katheryn Russell-Brown and Frank Morrison present the life of the pioneering jazz instrumentalist Melba Liston in Little Melba and Her Big Trombone; Peter Sís delivers an appropriately dreamlike celebration of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Pilot and the Little Prince. Possibly the most daring is Maira Marie-Louise Gay Kalman’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, which presents the man in all his complexity, her lyrically compressed text juxtaposed with painterly illustrations to confront the president as slaveholder as well as revolutionary. There were so many other wonderful picture books: K.G. Campbell’s yearning The Mermaid and the Shoe, Ashley Bryan’s totally joyful Ashley Bryan’s Puppets, and Bob Graham’s breathtaking Vanilla Ice Cream—which I guarantee will improve anybody’s day at least 200 percent—and so many more. Here’s hoping that 2015 is at least as rich. —V.S. Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor at Kirkus Reviews.
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had apples. Other differing details (a weathervane duck instead of a chicken; a blue flower instead of a red one; a blue cat collar instead of a red) suggest that they’ve unwittingly fallen into another dimension. Poor Sam and Dave. Lucky readers. (Picture book. 4-8)
BROTHER HUGO AND THE BEAR
Beebe, Katy Illus. by Schindler, S.D. Eerdmans (34 pp.) $17.00 | Apr. 4, 2014 978-0-8028-5407-0
Prepare to be charmed by a bear who loves words—or at least loves to eat them. Brother Hugo cannot return his book to the library of the monastery: A bear has consumed it. Enjoined to go to another priory to borrow a volume that he might copy to replace what the bear ate, he finds the bear follows him, snuffling hungrily. All his brother monks help him to prepare the parchment, make the inks, sew the pages and bind it shut. They even supply him with scraps of text to toss to the bear as Brother Hugo attempts to return the book he had copied. This does not work out, exactly. The rhythm of the text is antique but lucid and sweet, and the pictures, festooned with curlicues and decorated in shades of gold, gray and brown, echo the manuscript illuminations that inspired them. Rich backmatter gives all the historical background without detracting from the essential spark of the tale. The author, who holds a Ph.D. in medieval history, was inspired by a line from the 12th-century abbot Peter the Venerable about a precious volume eaten by a bear to make this lively story. This accurate (if abbreviated) delineation of the process of medieval manuscript bookmaking shines thanks to the fey twist of ursine longing for the written word. (glossary, author’s note, illustrator’s note) (Picture book. 5-9)
WEDNESDAY
Bertier, Anne Illus. by Bertier, Anne Translated by Bedrick, Claudia Zoe Enchanted Lion Books (48 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2014 978-1-59270-152-0 In the tradition of Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow (1959), this French import uses geometric shapes, color and size to explore compatibility and conflict. Big Square and Little Round play a game every Wednesday: “As soon as one of them says a word, they transform themselves into it.” Despite a few awkward turns of phrase, the narrative proceeds effectively. The blue square breaks apart to form a butterfly and a flower; the orange circle imitates the poses but displays its own curvaceous style. When the square gets carried away in pursuit of ever larger goals (a pine tree, a house), the circle retreats to kirkus.com
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“It is nearly impossible to look at without reading aloud, chanting aloud, and even tapping and stamping and sliding: extreme joyousness.” from i’m a dirty dinosaur
Bingham, Kelly Illus. by Zelinsky, Paul O. Greenwillow/HarperCollins (48 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB | Sep. 23, 2014 978-0-06-229003-8 978-0-06-229004-5 PLB
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This Australian import cries out for toddler participation, with parts for everyone. The little dinosaur—an outline sketch of a creature drawn with multicolored pencil—rejoices in total mudlusciousness with a vigorous chant. “I’m a dirty dinosaur / with a dirty face. // I never have a wash / I just shake about the place.” The winsome background to the dinosaur’s antics is painted with watercolor and smeared and splattered with actual mud. Opposite, in bold print with each letter a different color, is the refrain: “SHAKE, SHAKE, / SHAKE, SHAKE, / SHAKE ABOUT / THE PLACE!” The dinosaur goes on to mention a “dirty tum,” which it taps like a drum: “TAP, TAP,” etc. There is also stamping about the street with dirty feet and sliding that dirty tail “like a snail.” At the end, in deep realization of its yuckiness, the dinosaur decides to go to the swamp and “GIVE MYSELF A WASH!” Birds, flowers, dragonflies and a frog or two accompany the protagonist, who walks (dances, really) on two legs and sports little stegosauruslike spine plates and a belly button. It is nearly impossible to look at without reading aloud, chanting aloud, and even tapping and stamping and sliding: extreme joyousness. (Picture book. 4- 7)
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Moose is back! Hooray—unless you are a book about circles and squares. The simple concept book starts off well enough with a button representing a circle and a sandwich representing a square. And then mischief and mayhem erupt as Moose takes an enormous bite out of the sandwich. Admonitions from the book follow, and then it attempts to continue with a wedge of cheese and a slice of pie to illustrate triangles. Alas, Moose interrupts again, presenting a cat with triangular ears. Leave the book, they are told. More Moose antics ensue with rectangles and diamonds. The book grows ever more frantic, and fortunately Zebra arrives to salvage the exercise. Or does he? Zebra appears hopelessly tangled in ribbon (a curve) when Moose steps in to save the day with a circle that becomes a hole through which they escape the book. Moose then presents his friend with the last shape, a star. It is a great joy to watch Bingham and Zelinsky, who brilliantly collaborated on Z Is for Moose (2012), once more let Moose loose to naughtily and enthusiastically disrupt reading. Bingham’s text is both straightforward and filled with humorous speech bubbles. Zelinsky digitally manipulates his palette of bright colors to fill the pages with sly clues, fast-paced action, expressive typefaces and animals with winning personalities. Are further books in Moose’s future? Hilarious fun. (Picture book. 4- 6)
I’M A DIRTY DINOSAUR
Brian, Janeen Illus. by James, Ann Kane/Miller (22 pp.) $11.99 | Sep. 1, 2014 978-1-61067-296-2
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a corner. It eventually crosses the gutter and reaches out to its friend with the idea of working together. They make a clown’s face, a lovely bouquet, even abstract compositions “that then take shape” to form a dog and then other things. Readers familiar with tangrams might be disappointed that the transformations are not mathematically accurate, but the soft, cream-colored paper, complementary colors and clean design result in a harmonious balance nonetheless. Emotionally, the ups and downs of a day with a friend will ring true for young children. Bertier presents a marvelous springboard for using formal elements to create individual or collaborative narratives. (Picture book. 3-6)
MY TEACHER IS A MONSTER! (NO, I AM NOT.)
Brown, Peter Illus. by Brown, Peter Little, Brown (40 pp.) $18.00 | Jul. 1, 2014 978-0-316-07029-4
A behaviorally challenged little boy for whom paper airplanes are a particular weakness learns to see his teacher as a person when he meets her outside the classroom. Bobby’s teacher stomps, roars and takes away recess (not without reason). The little boy’s one refuge is the park—but so is Ms. Kirby’s. In a marvelously illustrated, wordless spread, Brown shows how both Ms. Kirby and Bobby feel when their private moments are interrupted by the other. But in a show of maturity, Bobby understands that running away (no matter how much he may want to) will only make things worse. Some painful small talk and a hat rescued from the wind slowly lead the two to deeper interaction. And when Bobby takes her to his favorite high overlook, Ms. Kirby, who has slowly been losing her green skin, spiky teeth, hippolike nostrils and hulking bulk, silently hands him a piece of paper. The flight is epic. Afterward, Ms. Kirby still roars and stomps and frowns upon paper airplanes in class, though she retains her human features (if not her
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an unlikely collaboration yields a striking introduction to a singular icon
Photo courtesy Wade Nomura
A few weeks after 9/11, Bethany Hegedus attended an event in New York sponsored by the Unity Church of New York. Arun Gandhi—the fifth grandson of the late Mahatma Gandhi—told stories about growing up under the prejudice of apartheid in South Africa and how his grandfather urged nonviolence as an answer to profound injustice. “When he got to the anger and electricity story,” says Hegedus, “I turned to my friend and whispered in her ear, ‘This would make a beautiful picture book.’ ” The story she’s referring to is one where the elder Gandhi tells young Arun that anger is like electricity: It can be like lightning that splits a tree in two or like flipping a switch on a lamp to illuminate a room. The idea of turning that concept into a picture book for children stayed with Hegedus, and a few months later, she summoned the courage to email Arun and pitch the idea to him. “I did have some concern,” says Arun, referring to his reaction when Hegedus’ email arrived out of the blue. “I said, ‘I don’t know who this person is.’ I was a little bit unsettled by it. But I was always very anxious to take these stories to younger children, so when Bethany came up with the idea, I wanted to move forward with it.” The end result of the duo’s unlikely collaboration is Grandfather Gandhi, the Kirkus-starred picture book that chronicles lessons that Mahatma Gandhi taught his then12-year-old grandson while Arun and his family lived with him at the Sevagram Ashram. In addition to the electricity story, Arun’s grandfather gave him Arun Ghandi various tools to turn his pent-up anger into positive action. “Kids don’t learn from being told what to do, they learn from modeling,” Hegedus says. “If you want your kids to learn these principles, you have to learn these principles. I think it’s important that in the book Gandhi doesn’t judge Arun when he wants to lash out. He listens. And in listening, he’s able to provide the information that Arun needs to make the choice for himself: lightning or lamp.” —Laura Jenkins 56
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skin color, at least not all the time). The digitally composited and colored India ink, watercolor, gouache and pencil illustrations use a palette of green, shades of tan and brown, aqua and salmon that suits the text’s tongue-in-cheek humor and monster theme, the colors brightening as Ms. Kirby loses her monster-ness. Here’s hoping readers who are similarly challenged in the behavior department will get both messages: Teachers are people, and they give back what they get. (Picture book. 4-8)
ASHLEY BRYAN’S PUPPETS Making Something from Everything
Bryan, Ashley Illus. by Bryan, Ashley Photos by Hannon, Ken Atheneum (80 pp.) $19.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jul. 8, 2014 978-1-4424-8728-4 978-1-4424-8729-1 e-book A riveting collection of puppets made from found objects at the seashore. Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement winner Bryan here presents the uncanny fruit of over 50 years of artistry and beachcombing. A child of the Depression, Bryan early on developed a penchant for collecting cast-off items from New York City sidewalks. As an adult, when walking the shores of Maine’s Little Cranberry Island, he does the same, now turning much of his seaside bounty into the more than 30 hand puppets captured here in exquisite detail by photographer Hannon. Not only do shells, sea glass and driftwood find new life in Bryan’s African folklore–inspired creations, but bits of net, marbles, thumbtacks, gloves, twine, all kinds of bones, watchbands, forks, fur and a bedpost—not to mention the occasional button—and more amazingly transform into appendages and accessories. As if his wildly fashioned creatures don’t have enough character, Bryan gives each of his puppets a name and poem describing both what it’s made from and its vision. Says the shamanlike Spirit Guardian: “We are born of cast-off pieces / And, like magic, brought alive / By your own imagination. / That’s the gift / By which we thrive.” A stunning work of creative genius sure to captivate the young and lend pure delight to beachcombers of any age. (Picture book/poetry. 4 & up)
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“Kelp-enclosed cameo close-ups of Minnow and her sisters with white, gossamer hair and golden-scaled tails alternate with luminous double-page spreads….” from the mermaid and the shoe
Bryant, Jen Illus. by Sweet, Melissa Eerdmans (42 pp.) $17.50 | Sep. 15, 2014 978-0-8028-5385-1
Burleigh, Robert Illus. by Minor, Wendell Henry Holt (40 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 19, 2014 978-0-8050-8752-9
Two masters of illustrated, brief biographies for young people reunite (If You Spent a Day with Thoreau at Walden Pond, 2012) for this accessible introduction to an iconic 20th-century American realist. Their careful, almost developmental approach quickly transcends the provision of objective biographical facts (though they are all there in abundance) by first presenting Hopper’s childhood pencil case—inscribed “Edward Hopper Would be Artist”: five words that summarize a life story. It is evident that |
THE MERMAID AND THE SHOE
Campbell, K.G. Illus. by Campbell, K.G. Kids Can (36 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-55453-771-6
Unlike her talented older sisters, a little mermaid feels disappointingly ordinary until her curiosity unveils her special skills. Each of King Neptune’s 50 mermaid daughters has a remarkable talent—except Minnow, who asks lots of questions, like why crabs don’t have fins, where bubbles go and what lies beyond their underwater kingdom. Her sister Calypso dismissively chides her to “stop asking useless questions...and be remarkable.” When Minnow discovers a mysterious object no one can identify, she’s determined to find out what it is. Her relentless curiosity carries her above water, where Minnow sees a girl wearing a pair of shoes similar to the mysterious object. With her questions answered, Minnow triumphantly returns to her underwater family, heralded as a “daring explorer.” Delicate, ethereal watercolor-and–colored-pencil illustrations rely on muted blue-gray washes accented with splashes of color to convey Neptune’s underwater kingdom, with its flora and fauna. Kelp-enclosed cameo close-ups of Minnow and her sisters with white, gossamer hair and golden-scaled tails alternate with luminous double-page spreads featuring diminutive Minnow, carrying a scarlet shoe and fearlessly ascending from the dark underwater world into the brilliant sun and sky, where she watches a “landmaid” reveal the secret of shoes. Although this luminous tale of self-discovery has echoes of “The Little Mermaid,” like Minnow, it sings its own strong song. (Picture book. 3-7)
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EDWARD HOPPER PAINTS HIS WORLD
Burleigh and Minor are determined that readers both understand and see “the artist’s process of discovery.” Their decision to avoid reproductions of Hopper’s work throughout reflects the essential understanding that Hopper’s own paintings were never exact representations of a specific place at a specific time. Minor helps readers acquire both the sense and the sensibility of a Hopper work via his own charcoal-and-pencil studies of the paintings under consideration in Burleigh’s thoughtful text. In this wonderfully illuminating way, they both help readers comprehend Hopper from the inside out: from the actual motifs, to the edited and combined studies, to the familiar, finished and admired paintings on the museum walls. Backmatter is particularly well-organized and inclusive. Well-researched and carefully paced, this is an enduring and inspiring book that will help kids to understand the why and the how of an artist at work. (Picture book/biography. 5-9)
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After award-winning collaborations about poet William Carlos Williams and artist Horace Pippin, Bryant and Sweet return to investigate the life of Peter Mark Roget. Born in London in 1779, Roget was plagued by lifelong setbacks. His father died early; his mother was unstable. Frequent moves and pronounced shyness engendered solace in books. Partial to classifying his knowledge and experiences, Peter composed his first book of lists by age 8. Inspired by the taxonomy of Swedish physician and botanist Linnaeus, teenage Peter studied medicine in Scotland, eventually establishing a practice in London, and he worked on a book of word classifications, completing it in 1805 for his own reference. Roget lectured, invented (the slide rule and the pocket chess set) and, inspired by the publication of several contemporary, inferior books of lists, returned to his own. His Thesaurus, published in 1852 and nurtured by his descendants, has never gone out of print. Bryant’s prose is bright and well-tuned for young readers. She goes gently, omitting Roget’s darkest traumas, such as witnessing his uncle’s suicide. Sweet tops herself—again!—visually reflecting Roget’s wide range as a thinker and product of the Enlightenment. Injecting her watercolor palette with shots of teal, scarlet and fuchsia, Sweet embeds vintage bits (ledger paper, type drawers, botanical illustrations and more), creating a teeming, contemplative, playfully celebratory opus. Exemplary backmatter includes a chronology, author’s and illustrator’s notes, selected bibliography, suggested reading, quotation sources, and a photograph of one of Roget’s manuscript pages. In a word: marvelous! (Picture book/biography. 6-10)
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THE RIGHT WORD Roget and His Thesaurus
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a revered children’s author/illustrator writes about his own hero GRAVITY
Chin, Jason Illus. by Chin, Jason Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 29, 2014 978-1-59643-717-3 After stunning explorations of the Galápagos Islands and California’s redwoods, Chin turns literally high-concept for a study of gravity’s pull. “Gravity // makes / objects // fall / to Earth.” This big idea spans three double-page spreads, as (in a bit of metafictive fun) the very book in hand falls to Earth. It lands on a beach, where a brownskinned boy plays with space toys, a half-peeled banana waiting nearby. What would happen without gravity? Chin ponders this visually, as (with the boy clinging to a rock) the book and toys soar into space to comingle, mysteriously, with the trappings of a lemonade stand. A series of panels goes even broader-concept, as shifts in perspective show the moon drifting away from the Earth and Earth untethered from the sun’s pull. The text tackles the role of mass in gravity’s relative force before rejoining the central visual arc by echoing the first sentence. That array of objects—beach ball, toy rocket, now-mottled banana—rains down on a group of Caucasian girls, who marvel at the sudden shower. Clearly, it’s their lemonade stand that’s endured Chin’s mischievous dabble with anti-gravity, as on the final spread, the boy juggles a sploshing pitcher, lemons and paper cups on the surrounding sand. With an elegant, spare text and playful, daring pictures, Chin’s latest opus exerts a powerful pull all its own. (“More about Gravity,” bibliography) (Informational picture book. 5-9)
TINY CREATURES The World of Microbes
Photo courtesy Palma Fiacco
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is Peter Sís’ favorite book. “When I got it from my father, he made a point that it’s a special book,” Sís recalls. “It was about secrets.” At the time, Sís was a child growing up in Prague under a totalitarian regime, and The Little Prince transported him outside of its walls. “This was a door through which I could go myself,” he says. “I could go to another place or another planet.” In a starred review of The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Kirkus echoed lines from this classic international tale: “What was essential about one golden-haired boy in love with flying becomes visible in Sís’ richly visual biographical portrait of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” The creation of this book became a personal journey for Sís, with discoveries of many parallels between Saint-Exupéry’s life and his own. Saint-Exupéry left his native France; Sís left Prague for America. “Exile is never temporary; he was caught between two countries,” says Sís. During one of his father’s visits to New York, he pointed to Central Park South and told Sís, “This is where SaintExupéry lived.” Once Sís realized that the Frenchman had written The Little Prince in New York, he reread the book. Sís has returned to The Little Prince at different stages in his life. “As a child, I thought, ‘Of course, he talks about how we children know it’s an elephant Peter Sís in a boa constrictor.’ ” These are the secrets Saint-Exupéry confides—that children understand what adults do not. “I remember coming to this country, it was a book of hope,” Sís continues. “Reading it to my children later, it was more melancholy and sad. Being older, you understand both worlds. Unfortunately, I became the adult.” —Jennifer M. Brown 58
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Davies, Nicola Illus. by Sutton, Emily Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-7636-7315-4
Invisible to the human eye, some of the tiniest creatures are known do some of the biggest jobs on Earth. Davies, who surveyed Extreme Animals (illustrated by Neal Layton, 2006) and encouraged readers to look Outside Your Window (illustrated by Mark Hearld, 2012), here presents examples of microbial life and the work that microbes do. This experienced science communicator makes an immediate connection to her readers, using their prior knowledge of big whales and small ants to convey how tiny microbes can be. She gives examples of their sizes and numbers, their varied shapes, their habitats, appetites and how they eat. Microorganisms slowly change food into compost, milk into yogurt and rocks into soil. They reproduce by dividing, and they’re very good at it. Luckily, only a few can make us sick; most are busily engaged in other vital tasks. They are “the invisible transformers of our world.” Sutton’s watercolor
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illustrations support and enhance the text. Thoughtful book design adds to the appeal, with generous white space, illustrative vignettes as well as paintings that fill a page or a spread, and an unusually legible type. This will show well when read aloud and intrigue emergent readers. Very little information is available for this age group about these microscopic creatures, making this an especially welcome introduction. (Informational picture book. 4-8)
GASTON
DiPucchio, Kelly Illus. by Robinson, Christian Atheneum (40 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jun. 3, 2014 978-1-4424-5102-5 978-1-4424-5103-2 e-book
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Gaston, an adorable pup, lives with his loving and proper poodle pack, until an outing reveals there’s more to family than meets the eye. Mrs. Poodle treasures her new puppies: Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh-La-La and Gaston (say them aloud, and there will be giggles!). Four white pups, so attentive and sweet. But upon second viewing, it’s clear not all are the same. Gaston—the one with the eager-to-please smile—is, well, different. His sisters are naturals at etiquette, while he is comical in his efforts. When a park visit establishes that puppies were mixed at birth, Gaston heads home with the bulldogs, while his counterpart, Antoinette, takes her place with the poodles. But it’s clear the two
IQ Alcatraz
Red Berries White Clouds Blue Sky
In the last installment of the bestselling I, Q series, readers join Q and Angela in one last pursuit to find the leader of the world’s most feared terrorist organization.
New York Times bestselling author Sandra Dallas shines a light on a dark period of American history in this moving story of a young Japanese American girl overcoming the prejudices of World War II.
Ages 10 and Up
Ages 9 and Up
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Stella Batts None of Your Beeswax Ages 7 and Up
In the latest addition to the Stella Batts series, Stella finds it is not easy or fun to keep secrets, especially from her best friend and little sister!
To order: 866-918-3956
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Mystery, History and Secrets!
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duncan tonatiuh’s separate is never equal: a civil rights struggle years before a landmark case Duncan Tonatiuh lives in-between in more than one way—he lives some of the time in Mexico and some in the United States (he has dual citizenship), and his published name is half-Anglo and half-Aztec (“Duncan” is, intriguingly enough, his great aunt’s name, and he shares Tonatiuh with the Aztec god of the sun). There is nothing in-between, however, about Tonatiuh’s bold, unforgettable picture book Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation, which was released in May. In it, Tonatiuh, who writes and illustrates the book, reveals the struggle that Sylvia Mendez’s parents endured to enroll their daughter in a public school near their farm in Orange County, California, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. Tonatiuh creates stark images that don’t just reference, but actually mimic pre-Columbian iconography: tear-shaped eyes, blocky arms and legs, a curl in his characters’ ears that we spy in Aztec art. In those images, Tonatiuh makes it clear in Separate Is Never Equal that the Mendezes’ fight for justice was an emotional, personal one. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tonatiuh has an opinion about the debate that’s been raging about the lack of diversity in children’s books. “I think we’re all responsible in different ways,” he says. Publishers—not necessarily his own—may say there’s not enough profit in publishing books for minority markets, but Tonatiuh disagrees. In 2013, he published Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale. “Teachers and librarians and kids really apDuncan Tonatiuh preciated it,” he says. “There’s definitely a market for them. I understand publishing is a business, but I think there is money to be made there, and I think it’s a matter of being courageous and trying things out.” —Claiborne Smith
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truly belong with their adoptive families. Once returned to the families who nurtured them, all feels and looks right as the dogs celebrate with joy. Now fast friends, the families meet and play; much later, when Gaston and Antoinette fall in love, the two allow their brood—who are a delightful mix of their parents— to be whatever they want to be. Robinson’s brilliantly designed acrylic paintings, done in an earth-tone palette, beautifully enhance DiPucchio’s clever and witty text. His simple, graphic style, reminiscent of M. Sasek, is full of energy and sophistication, and the interplay among type, text and compositions leads to humorous results. Gaston will win hearts, as will his story’s message of belonging and family. A perfect read aloud that will leave them begging for more—an absolute delight. (Picture book. 2-7)
TAKE AWAY THE A
Escoffier, Michaël Illus. by Di Giacomo, Kris Enchanted Lion Books (56 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 12, 2014 978-1-59270-156-8 Amid the flood of alphabet books, now and then one rises to the surface. This one is a prize catch. In a distinctive, refreshing approach, the text takes a word and subtracts one letter, turning it into a different word. “Without the A / the BEAST is the BEST.” The stylized illustration on the double-page spread gives form to the concept by depicting a photographer (a buzzard) focusing on the winners of a competition: A monster wearing a “Scariest and Hairiest” sash stands in first place, with a goose and fish in second and third. “Without the B / the BRIDE goes for a RIDE.” A worried-looking buck holding a balloon and a doe wearing a bridal veil are riding on a Ferris wheel. Now picture these: The chair has hair; the dice are ice; plants are pants; the crab hails a cab; and so on. All of the figures are animals fashioned with touches of humor; a white mouse pops in and out throughout the scenes. For Q, the word “faquir” (a turbaned tiger) attends a “fair”; for X, “foxes” become “foes.” The artwork is deceptively simple; subtle details betray its sophistication. Altogether, the fascinating illustrations, crafty composition and tall format give the book real flair. Without a doubt, these inventive images are imaginative and engaging—chock full of inspiration for kids to try their own wordplay and a boon to teachers. (Alphabet picture book. 7-10)
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“Using gouache and black pencil, Frazee—a virtuoso of mood and line—takes the surly farmer through bafflement, contemplativeness and true affection.” from the farmer and the clown
Frazee, Marla Illus. by Frazee, Marla Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-4424-9744-3 978-1-4424-9745-0 e-book
Gandhi, Arun; Hegedus, Bethany Illus. by Turk, Evan Atheneum (48 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-2365-7 978-1-4424-5082-0 e-book This first-person account presents Mohandas Gandhi through the eyes of his then-12-year-old grandson. Arriving at Sevagram, the ashram Gandhi lived in as an old man, young Arun and his family greet their famous relative and start participating in the simple lifestyle of morning prayers, chores and pumpkin mush. It is challenging for the boy, who misses electricity and movies and dreads language lessons. The crux of the story hinges on the moment Arun is tripped and injured during a soccer game. He picks up a rock and feels the weight of familial expectations. Running to his grandfather, he learns the surprising fact that Gandhi gets angry too. Grandfather lovingly explains that anger is like electricity: it “can strike, like lightning, and split a living tree in two....Or it can |
SHARE
Garland, Sally Anne Illus. by Garland, Sally Anne Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 15, 2014 978-1-77147-005-6 Mom says it’s important to share, but it’s not always easy. When a younger bunny cousin comes to visit, he wants to have everything his older cousin has and to do everything she does. Her mother keeps reminding her to share, so she lets him play, with disastrous results, as he is rough and careless. She tries to stay out of his way and play other games or read a book or watch television, but he follows her everywhere and gets involved in every activity until she just can’t stand it anymore. Won’t he ever stop plaguing her and leave? At the end of the day, when he hugs and thanks her, she realizes her mother is right: He copies her actions out of admiration. Morality tales are often pedantic and stiff, but Garland employs bouncy rhymes and a sweetheart of a bunny to get her point across. Even Mom’s offstage voice encourages rather than scolds. Visually appealing type winds its way through the largescale cartoon illustrations, which feature patterned background wallpaper and lots of pink and green eye-catching details. Bunny and her little cousin are full of life, with facial expressions and body language that match every emotion. Young readers will empathize with both characters and will want to read it over and over. A warm, cuddly tale and a total delight. (Picture book. 2-6)
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special issue: best books of 2014
GRANDFATHER GANDHI
be channeled, transformed....Then anger can illuminate. It can turn the darkness into light.” Turk’s complex collages, rich in symbolic meaning and bold, expressive imagery, contribute greatly to the emotional worldbuilding. Watercolor, gouache and cut paper set the scenes, while fabric clothes the primary players. Gandhi’s spinning wheel is a repeated motif; tangled yarn surrounding Arun signals frustration. Never burdened by its message, this exceptional title works on multiple levels; it is both a striking introduction to a singular icon and a compelling story about the universal experience of a child seeking approval from a revered adult. (authors’ note) (Picture book/memoir. 4-8)
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A solitary farmer on an empty plain receives the most unlikely visitor. A tall, scowling farmer labors with a pitchfork on an endless brown field. In the distance, surprisingly, a steam train crosses the horizon. As the train chugs off the edge of the spread, a jolt propels something off the caboose. The startled farmer sets out in that direction. He finds a small clown, wearing white makeup, a red-and-yellow costume and a broad smile. The clown deftly pantomimes having fallen off the train—action and emotion shine wordlessly—and the farmer takes him home. Silently they stare at each other, eat and wash their faces. Without makeup, the child-clown’s smile disappears; is he sad to lose that connection to his home-train, or had the smile been made of makeup all along? With growing tenderness, the farmer watches over his sleeping guest and, come morning, hops and dances to cheer him up. They juggle eggs and share real farmwork until the circus train returns along the distant tracks. Its shape and primary colors make it look like a toy, especially against the soft, textured grays and browns of the farm, skies and earth. Using gouache and black pencil, Frazee—a virtuoso of mood and line—takes the surly farmer through bafflement, contemplativeness and true affection. The beauty of an unexpected visit, done beautifully. (Picture book. 3- 6)
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THE FARMER AND THE CLOWN
ANY QUESTIONS?
Gay, Marie-Louise Illus. by Gay, Marie-Louise Groundwood (60 pp.) $19.95 | Aug. 12, 2014 978-1-55498-382-7 Gay introduces young readers to her craft as an author and illustrator of children’s books, simultaneously inviting their participation in creating the story. |
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“Desimini’s imaginative illustrations complement and extend the graphically flexible text.” from the great big green
In a spread at the beginning, the author is addressed by a heaving crowd of young fans, asking her questions in their own authentic voices: “Do you have a pet rabbit? I do” and “Can you write a story about me?” The author then takes some of these inquisitive young characters through her process, using both the illustrations and the narrative to demonstrate how a picture book comes to life. The process isn’t always easy. She experiments with many doodles and words. A number of ideas are tried and discarded, until the right setting and the characters finally reveal themselves; in this case, it’s a shy giant who lives in the forest. A metastoryline emerges, with the author asking the children she is still addressing to help her further develop the giant’s tale. The ideas blend together sweetly, with the children eventually finding themselves inside the story. The whimsical mixed-media illustrations invite exploration, and they include what appear to be handwritten, even cursive passages. The exceptional use of negative space allows readers to truly experience a story appearing in front of their eyes. A delightful and interactive step into the world of creating engaging picture books for children. (Picture book. 4-8)
THE GREAT BIG GREEN
Gifford, Peggy Illus. by Desimini, Lisa Boyds Mills (32 pp.) $15.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-62091-629-2
An abundantly illustrated puzzle poem provides a spectacular celebration of green in the world. The author of the Moxy Maxwell chapter-book trilogy offers something completely different in this lush tribute. An opening line sets the conversational tone: “The thing is, / the thing is green.” She goes on to provide examples of “mean green,” “dark and dangerous green” and “green things / that are good for you.” Her examples aren’t just things that grow; there are green socks, a green light for “go” and an old green door. The text reads aloud beautifully, building to the question, “Have you guessed yet?” and the final answer, revealed not in words but in a familiar image of Earth from space, with previous elements cleverly placed. Desimini’s imaginative illustrations complement and extend the graphically flexible text. Done with scanned textures and images combined into mixed-media collages, these are both realistic and imaginative, full of whimsy. Two young children, one dark-skinned, one light-, explore a world in which the range of green colors is remarkable and balanced with some surprises. There are the orange and tan of a green-eyed tiger, the red of a ladybug or a tree-frog’s eyes, and pink-purple skies. Readers will want to identify every fruit and vegetable and look for added elements (a snatch of “Greensleeves” in musical notation, for example). Two fertile imaginations grow a grand salute. (Picture book. 3-8)
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CALL ME TREE / LLÁMAME ÁRBOL
Gonzalez, Maya Christina Illus. by Gonzalez, Maya Christina Children’s Book Press (24 pp.) $17.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-89239-294-0 The author of I Know the River Loves Me / Yo sé que el río me ama (2009) offers a bilingual picture book that presents the triumphant journey from seed to tree, conveying a deep appreciation for nature. A seed, depicted as a little boy, nestles deep underground. He wakes up and grows into a strong tree, free yet rooted. When he awakens, he sees other trees, presented on the page as an array of ethnically diverse children, standing and moving in their own ways. The text is brief, lyrical, and equally expressive in both the English and Spanish. “Some sing songs / Some sing along / All trees have roots / All trees belong // Unos cantan canciones / Otros se unen al coro / Todos los árboles tienen raíces / Todos los árboles tienen un lugar.” Reading the text aloud invites the incorporation of creative movement, such as yoga or dance, and is sure to engage younger and older children alike. Visionary illustrations stretch vibrant colors across the pages, with details that encourage readers to sit with the book and explore. Most notably, the author/illustrator excels at using few words to evoke grand imagery, relaying a powerful message to children: We are all our own trees—equal, vital and free. An exquisitely crafted call to honor ourselves, one another and the natural world. (Picture book. 3-8)
VANILLA ICE CREAM
Graham, Bob Illus. by Graham, Bob Candlewick (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-7377-2
Everyday life conspires to change the world. Want to try an ice cream cone? For Graham, great events can have the most quotidian beginnings. To start: The weather is hot, and the ground is dusty—this is India in the summer. There is an open-air, roadside eatery—samosas, lassi, puri and muri—and a table with chairs under a few palms. A trucker stops his rig, filled with sacks of rice. Truck-stop sparrows are a bold breed, and one notices that one of the rice sacks is spilling its precious cargo. Time to feast, even as the truck pulls away: “Like all wild birds, he follows the food.” The text is minimal, as compressed as a prose poem, letting Graham’s spacious, impeccably placed and paced watercolors tell the tale. The truck drives to a port; the sacks are loaded on a freighter, which sails to a new city. Another day dawns. The sparrow finds another eatery in a city park. The weather is hot. A grandma and granddad are having ice cream cones. The sparrow drops onto the table to investigate, which
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Candlewick Press celebrates our Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 pictur e books
by Nicola Davies illustrated by Emily Sutton
by Jenny Broom illustrated by Katie Scott
HC: 978-0-7636-6229-5 • $16.99 ($19.00 CAN))
HC: 978-0-7636-7315-4 • $15.99 ($18.00 CAN)
HC: 978-0-7636-7508-0 • $35.00 ($40.00 CAN)
HC: 978-0-7636-5611-9 E-book: 978-0-7636-7035-1 $22.99 ($26.00 CAN) Also available in audio
by Gregory Maguire
by Paul Fleischman
by Celine Kiernan
HC: 978-0-7636-7220-1 E-book: 978-0-7636-7582-0 $17.99 ($19.00 CAN) Also available in audio
HC: 978-0-7636-7102-0 $17.99 ($20.00 CAN) PB: 978-0-7636-7545-5 E-book: 978-0-7636-7407-6 $9.99 ($11.00 CAN)
HC: 978-0-7636-7061-0 E-book: 978-0-7636-7409-0 $16.99 ($19.00 CAN) Also available in audio
by Timothée de Fombelle HC: 978-0-7636-7196-9 • $17.99 ($20.00 CAN) E-book: 978-0-7636-7583-7 Also available in audio
by Shannon and Dean Hale illustrated by LeUyen Pham
written and illustrated by Bob Graham
HC: 978-0-7636-6510-4 • $14.99 ($14.99 CAN)
HC: 978-0-7636-7377-2 • $16.99 ($19.00 CAN)
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agitates the dog, which bumps granddad’s arm, which dumps the cone in the baby’s lap: A new world is born. Heed Graham: Get up, get out of bed (drag a comb across your head, if you must), and go forth. (Picture book. 4-8)
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Grimm, The Brothers Illus. by Schenker, Sybille Translated by Bell, Anthea Minedition (44 pp.) $29.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-988-8240-79-1 As she did with Hansel and Gretel (2013), Schenker employs intricate die cuts, patterned prints, bold lines and basic colors to create a haunting journey through the familiar Grimms tale. Opposite the first page of text, Little Red Riding Hood poses in her cape against a thicket of die-cut vines, through which readers can discern a sun-dappled forest and the ominous black silhouette of a wolf. With the turn of the page, readers see on the recto the little girl’s back as she proceeds into the wood and the Wolf about to emerge from the trees; on verso, her promise to obey her mother is printed within the shape of her image from the previous page. As Little Red Riding Hood proceeds through the wood, subsequent, die-cut pages continue to lift and turn, creating a layered dimensionality. The sleeping grandmother can be glimpsed through the window of her cottage; as the page turns, she is revealed in her bed, while the wolf ’s menacing face can be seen through that same window from the interior. The “All the better to eat you with!” moment is suitably terrifying: Cuts in the black page evoke the snarling wolf by revealing the crimson page beneath, but the image is so stylized that it appears almost abstract, its impact emotional rather than graphic. Schenker’s illustrations and design combine with Bell’s graceful translation to take the breath away. (Picture book/ fairy tale. 5-10)
EXTRAORDINARY JANE
Harrison, Hannah E. Illus. by Harrison, Hannah E. Dial (40 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-8037-3914-7
Jane may not be the strongest or most fearless performer in the Barnaby Beluchi Circus, but she’s a really good dog. In this sparely written read-aloud, the pictures tell the story. Jane cowers in a corner, paws over eyes, while her six brothers are shot out of cannons. She scratches a possible flea while her ballerina mother dances atop a galloping horse. Not daring, not graceful, “Jane was just Jane.” Youngsters will relate to the fear of not living up to the expectations of others...but they will also 64
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recognize how treasured the loving puppy is: Adoration shines from the eyes of her dear friend the ringmaster. Harrison’s expressive, beautifully rendered acrylic-on-board paintings effectively capture Jane’s quiet role in the exciting, extravagant world of the big top. The colorful compositions are all the more striking due to the crisp white backgrounds and dramatically varied perspectives, from the dizzying high wire to circus ring– level, where Jane accidentally plows down her fellow performers with a giant red balancing ball. Small moments steal the show here, both heartrendingly cute ones, like the ringmaster toweling Jane off after her bath, and funny ones, such as the contrast of Jane’s blob painting of the ringmaster with the artistic elephant’s more refined portrait. A touching, delectably illustrated circus story that applauds the underdog. (Picture book. 3-5)
EYE TO EYE How Animals See the World
Jenkins, Steve Illus. by Jenkins, Steve HMH Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-547-95907-8
The evolution of the eye and the surprising ways animals see the world are displayed in a thoughtfully designed and engagingly illustrated album. The look of a Jenkins book is unmistakable: realistic cutand–torn-paper images set on a stark white background; short informational paragraphs; a helpful section of concluding facts with a pictorial index. But the content is always an interesting surprise. Here, he considers vision, the way animals link to their world using light-sensitive cells. Beginning with a description of the earliest, most simple eyes, he goes on to catalog four kinds, giving a representative example of each: eyespots (starfish), pinholes (giant clams), compound eyes (dragonflies) and camera eyes (birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, even octopuses). Then he offers 22 more—from sea slugs to Eurasian buzzards—each presented on a full page or spread across two. Each example includes a full-color thumbnail silhouette and a much larger close-up of the head and eye. Some of the papers are textured or varied in color. A surprising number of animals have hairy or bristly bits around their eyes, often depicted in individual tiny bits and pieces, suggesting incredible finesse on the part of the artist. A concluding section summarizes eye evolution, again from eyespots to camera eyes. A bibliography of suggestions for further reading and a glossary round out this intriguing introduction. Another impressive presentation from a master craftsman. (Informational picture book. 6-10)
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“Chu’s illustrations are rendered in clearly drawn lines and soft, harmonious colors.” from summoning the phoenix
Jiang, Emily Illus. by Chu, April Lee & Low (32 pp.) $18.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-885008-50-3
Johnson, Angela Illus. by Lewis, E.B. Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | May 6, 2014 978-0-689-87376-8 978-1-4814-0647-5 e-book
Johnson tells a tale of Juneteenth in Texas through the eyes of a child, while Lewis’ earth-toned watercolor illustrations capture the quotidian aspects of the way of life emancipation ended. The young female speaker who lives and works on the plantation with her mother, siblings and others takes personally the titular phrase, “all different now,” when freedom comes. Just before the Union general announces on the balcony of the big house that the slaves are “now and forever free,” rumors of this news has spread so quickly from the port to the countryside that Lewis includes an image with four vertical panels showing slaves engaged in many different types of work, passing the word and responding with surprise, shock and praise to |
THOMAS JEFFERSON Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything
Kalman, Maira Illus. by Kalman, Maira Nancy Paulsen Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-399-24040-9 Beautiful and a little sad: the complex, brilliant, flawed nature of the third U.S. president. Kalman’s rich, impressionist colors and lively lines offer glimpses: Monticello; the chamber where the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia; portraits of Jefferson’s wife and of Sally Hemings. The image of Jefferson on horseback riding along a lane at Monticello, redbud in bloom, seems both immediate and long past. Kalman’s poetic presentation conveys succinctly what a longer text might: Jefferson was a lover of books, an autodidact and an aesthete. His house was both functional and beautiful. His personal life was layered with sadness: Only two of six legitimate children survived past childhood; his wife died young. Kalman doesn’t speculate on the source of Jefferson’s passion for the ideals of democracy and liberty yet conveys clearly his contribution to the growing nation as founding father and president. But this intriguing man was a slave owner and father to children whose mother and aunts were severely oppressed. Kalman’s intimate address to listeners and readers works well here: A charming, earlier narrative acknowledgment that peas have their appeal (as they did for Jefferson the gardener) gives way to the thorny personal realization that someone admired fails profoundly to meet expectations: “Our hearts are broken,” is stated flatly next to a ledger of payments to enslaved residents of Monticello. Impressive complexity put artfully and respectfully within the grasps of young readers. (Picture book/biography. 7-11)
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ALL DIFFERENT NOW Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom
the news. The historical details that Lewis integrates into the images situate Johnson’s story historically and give young readers a sense of what cotton plantations in the mid-1860s looked like. In the backmatter, Johnson makes clear why this bit of history matters to her, and Lewis shares the impossibility of contemporary Americans’ reaching a true understanding of the lives of 19th-century slaves—but how important it is to try. The richness of this book’s words and images will inspire readers to learn more about this holiday that never should have been necessary…but was. (Web resources, glossary) (Picture book. 5-9)
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Thirteen young musicians of diverse ethnic background ready themselves to play their traditional Chinese instruments on stage in this informative and gracefully illustrated twin debut. Jiang, a composer, presents upbeat, free-verse poems in the children’s voices about their instruments or their mental states: “When I tune my erhu, / I only need to listen to / Two strings. So easy!” These are paired to sidebar historical and descriptive notes, associated legends and characterizations of the distinctive sounds each instrument makes. Chu’s illustrations are rendered in clearly drawn lines and soft, harmonious colors. They depict each musician in turn playing his or her instrument in rehearsals or solo performances with, often, imagined natural landscapes, animals or mythical beasts floating behind. The preparation culminates in a concert seen in an elevated view of orchestra and audience, followed by a final lineup to take a bow beneath a closing note on characteristics of classical Chinese music. From the booming paigu to the delicate strings of the ruan, the lutelike pipa and the yangqin, or hammered “butterfly harp,” a lively medley that will expand the musical boundaries of most young audiences. (bibliography) (Informational picture book/poetry. 6-9)
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SUMMONING THE PHOENIX Poems and Prose About Chinese Musical Instruments
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“Readers who attend to detail will delight in the Beast’s fierce animal topiaries and in a plethora of beastly faces found in unlikely places….” from beauty and the beast
KING FOR A DAY
Khan, Rukhsana Illus. by Krömer, Christiane Lee & Low (32 pp.) $17.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-60060-659-5 Set in Pakistan during Basant, “the most exciting day of the year,” this story focuses on the strength and resourcefulness of a child in a wheelchair as he navigates the skies at the spring kite festival. Perched on the rooftop and assisted by his brother and sister, Malik launches his small but swift creation, named Falcon, into the stratosphere, where it defeats both of the kites that belong to the bully next door. (Unlikely as that may be, it will undoubtedly please the intended audience.) Falcon sends many others to the ground, where “they’ll belong to whoever finds them. But at least they will have tasted freedom.” Silk, burlap, brocade, embroidery, ribbons and rice paper mingle with light brown figures outlined in black within exquisite and dynamic mixed-media collages. In one particularly successful scene, layered buildings and billowing laundry form a backdrop, the three siblings dominate the middle ground, and Malik’s white robe becomes a sky against which small figures cycle in the foreground. Pointed Moorish arches are a design element on almost every page, often framing the text and lending a cultural reference. Displaying another side of his personality, the “King” concludes his day of warfare with a secret act of kindness. Krömer’s inventive compositions are a visually exciting match for Khan’s introduction to an appealing event (originally published in Canada in 2001 with art by different illustrators). This story soars. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Lee, H. Chuku Illus. by Cummings, Pat Amistad/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-688-14819-5 A brown-skinned Beauty—what a refreshing change! Cornrows, braids and beads, Afro puffs and twists. No, it’s not an African-American hair magazine; these are some of the hairstyles that Beauty and her sisters sport in Cummings and Lee’s ethnically rich retelling of an old, typically Caucasian favorite. The Beast’s family crest, an intricate figure on the title page that strongly resembles a West African Adinkra symbol, sets the stage for this picture book’s all-black cast of characters. Though Lee recounts the familiar French version in the text, beginning with the cover image, the illustrations affirm the beauty of this lithe girl of African descent and even of her mean-spirited sisters. Cummings’ illustrations convey so much detail that even the pre-transformation Beast seems beautiful...in his own way. Because of these culturally specific visual 66
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dynamics, the handsome visage of Beast-turned-prince comes as no surprise. Readers who attend to detail will delight in the Beast’s fierce animal topiaries and in a plethora of beastly faces found in unlikely places such as the backs of chairs, masks hanging on the walls and the cedar chest in Beauty’s room. This lovely reimagining of an old tale affirms the browning of American’s contemporary young readership. (Picture book. 4-8)
THE IRIDESCENCE OF BIRDS A Book About Henri Matisse
MacLachlan, Patricia Illus. by Hooper, Hadley Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-59643-948-1
If indeed the “child is father to the man,” Newbery medalist MacLachlan’s poetic, careful and concentrated text captures the essence of Matisse’s childhood experiences and draws powerful parallels with his later life and work. In her second picture book, Hooper (Here Come the Girl Scouts, by Shana Corey, 2012) employs a relief-print process with digital enhancement, art that is a perfect match for the simple story’s vivid imagery. Effective page turns and the accretion of detail in both text and illustration take readers on a journey from perennially overcast northern France to the patterned interiors and lush exoticism of Matisse’s Provence while demonstrating the artistic beginnings of his fauvist palette. It modulates from spread to spread, from the “dreary town in northern France” where the skies and streets are gray, through the exciting, paint-filled pots of color in Matisse’s mother’s china-painting studio and the oranges and golds of fruit and flowers from the markets to the many shades of reds in the rugs his mother put on the walls and floors of their house. The title springs from Matisse’s love of pigeons. He was fascinated by their “sharp eyes” and “red feet.” And he particularly loved watching their colors change as they moved—the titular “iridescence.” Raising pigeons, it seems, was the perfect pastime for this quiet, colorloving boy who would become a brilliant painter. Glorious. (biographical note, artist’s note, further reading) (Picture book/biography. 4-8)
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Macy, Sue Illus. by Collins, Matt Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-8234-2923-3
A very young white whale swims into the wider world of the arctic seas, celebrating first adventures of the very young. Magoon’s digital art captures the colors and crisp, airy light of the Arctic setting; cartoon lines and wide eyes present creatures above and under the ice as friendly, rounded and smiling. Even the polar bear—seen against the sky through an ice hole as a dark shadow, possibly threatening—is fairly benign. The little whale (clearly a baby beluga but not named as such) is doing the work that toddlers do—exploring the world with mama nearby. The few words of the text speak both to whale baby and, by extension, to the listener: “Play all day // and swim, / and swim, / and swim. // Breathe.” This last (“Breathe”) |
MIGRANT
Mateo, José Manuel Illus. by Pedro, Javier Martínez Abrams (22 pp.) $17.95 | May 1, 2014 978-1-4197-0957-9 A family’s arduous journey from a farm in Mexico to a crowded dwelling in Los Angeles unfolds, literally, as a ribbon is untied and accordion-style pages open to reveal one continuous, aesthetically astonishing scene. The densely packed black-and-white composition painted on traditional amate (tree bark) paper conjures both the mystery and stylization of pre-Columbian codices and the imagery and political overtones of a Diego Rivera mural. Written in the first person (English on one side, Spanish on the reverse), the succinct but pithy paragraphs read vertically, paralleling the visual layers. Low buildings, pigs and vegetation surround the young narrator as he feeds roosters in the top scene. When the economy changes, his father searches for work across the northern border. Tension mounts as the family follows later, jumping onto moving trains and avoiding police so they don’t “disappear.” Mirrored actions heighten the drama: An early game of hide-and-seek contrasts with the subsequent need to escape detection by border patrols, for instance. Arriving to a world of skyscrapers and thruways, mother and children find cleaning jobs, but their future is uncertain, as is the whereabouts of their husband/father. Content and design coalesce in a handsome presentation that invites readers to decode intriguing images in a pastoral setting suggestive of folklore—and in the process, arouses empathy for the all-too-real risks surrounding migrants. Breathtaking. (author and illustrator notes) (Picture book. 6-12)
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BREATHE
Magoon, Scott Illus. by Magoon, Scott Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-4424-1258-3 978-1-4814-0533-1 e-book
appears on a double-page spread in which the young whale is surrounded by the vast sea, snowy mountains, and a pale, bright sun. Then a dive changes the palette from the pale blues and whites of the surface through greeny yellows and finally to dark: Here, what was perhaps an arctic whaler, stilled and slightly ghostly, sits on the seafloor. The simple adventure concludes with an anthropomorphic yet welcome invitation: “Most of all, love / and be loved.” Richly composed and sweetly appealing—just right for baby storytimes as well as one-to-one sharing. (Picture book. 6 mos.-3)
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As they did in Basketball Belles (2011), Macy and Collins offer a superb social study through a sports lens. In the days after World War II, when Rosie the Riveter was expected to go back to slinging hash at home, some girls took up a new sport slinging each other around a track. Roller derby had been developed, and a growing fan base, aided by the advent of television coverage, couldn’t get enough of the feisty free-wheeling queens. Collins’ dynamic, full-spread action “shots” emphasize the circular sweep of the track and the disappear-into-the-distance audience. They give readers the feeling they are not just ringside, but perhaps working the TV camera. The text replicates a sportscaster’s staccato and captures the pace of the competition. Macy seamlessly packs in the details that allow youngsters to understand the cultural revolution they are witnessing, including the changing role of women, the birth of TV sports programming, and the use of sports marketing that includes the cultivation of personas and manufactured rivalry—here between Toughie Brasuhn and Gerry Murray—to keep fans hooked. Even as these women battle it out, the mischievous glimmers in their eyes reveal their love of the sport and regard for each other. Children eager to see the two reallife queens need only turn to the backmatter to find photos and URLs for film clips. Positively riveting. (author’s note, timeline, sources, further reading) (Informational picture book. 7-10)
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ROLLER DERBY RIVALS
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WHEN AUNT MATTIE GOT HER WINGS
Mathers, Petra Illus. by Mathers, Petra Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Sep. 9, 2014 978-1-4814-1044-1 978-1-4814-1045-8 e-book Lottie the hen must say goodbye to her beloved aunt Mattie in this gentle story about loss, grief and friendship. When the hospital calls to say Aunt Mattie is getting weak, Lottie journeys to see her. On the long bus ride, happy memories surface—of shared picnics and jokes, and of Mattie herself, a bird full of humor and gusto, who found her calling as a nurse. But now Aunt Mattie is 99, ready to fly to the great beyond. For hours, Lottie sits with her aunt at the hospital. Descriptive details (the sound of Aunt Mattie’s breathing, the way she looks in the hospital bed, the feeling of day turning to night) are simply captured; yet in doing so, Mathers brings meaning to the clinical and unfamiliar. Here, these moments are precious and valuable. Throughout the tale, Lottie’s friend Herbie is a comforting presence. His innocent perspective allows even the very young to grasp complex concepts. As he drives Lottie to the bus station, meets her at the hospital and shares in her heartache, it’s clear his friendship and support make this difficult time bearable for Lottie. Together, the two scatter Aunt Mattie’s ashes in the ocean, so she’ll “always be near...mixed in with sand and sea.” Watercolor illustrations, painted in mostly square panels and organized like an old newspaper comic strip, are earnest and appealing. Lucid and insightful, Mathers presents death and grief as natural processes with compassion and great care. (Picture book. 3- 7)
SHOE DOG
McDonald, Megan Illus. by Tillotson, Katherine Richard Jackson/Atheneum (40 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-4169-7932-6 978-1-4169-8588-4 e-book An irrepressible dog can’t resist falling into the same type of mischief over and over again, until something surprising changes his pattern. This small, wiggly pup bounces upward as a silhouetted woman enters the animal shelter. He longs for a home “warm as soup / and cozy as pie,” full of nose kisses and tummy rubs. And oh, how exciting—the woman takes him home! “That very day, / Shoe Dog chewed through / five high heels, / four flip-flops, / three sneakers, / two boots, / one wing tip.” Scolding—“ ‘BAD DOG!’ / She, Herself said”—and punishment—no petting or access to the Big Bed—see him lying forlornly in a gray-blue space, subdued. But each time new shoes arrive, he tracks down and rips into the fresh box, chomping every shoe with gusto. 68
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Consequences ratchet up mildly, but Shoe Dog never learns impulse control as such; instead, unexpectedly, he meets a shoe he’d never, ever chew. Finally he’s welcome “on the Big Bed / in the Land of Upstairs,” curling up blissfully with his new shoelove. Tillotson uses thick black lines for Shoe Dog’s scribbly, coiled-spring body, smudging charcoal inside his shape to give him substance; scraps of pink and beige mark his pointy ears and muzzle. Motion lines show how he scampers and bounds. The visual angle varies, and shoe-box tissue paper flies through the air. Totally ebullient. (Picture book. 3-7)
THIS IS A MOOSE
Morris, Richard T. Illus. by Lichtenheld, Tom Little, Brown (48 pp.) $18.00 | May 6, 2014 978-0-316-21360-8
Moose is steadfastly determined to achieve stardom amid the stars. The “Mighty Moose” is the subject of a nature film—or so the director intends. The moose, however, has donned a space suit and persists in his intention to be an astronaut through multiple takes. His lacrosse-playing grandmother intrudes on the set as does a giraffe (the “Regal Giraffe”). Moose don’t play lacrosse, and giraffes belong in a safari film, according to the increasingly irate director. Grandmother, giraffe and assorted friends nonetheless launch the moose into space, allowing him to leave his natural habitat far behind. Director Waddler, evoking the spirits of Billy Wilder, Daffy Duck and Mo Willems’ Pigeon, finally gets the picture and resets and retitles his film as This Is an Astronaut. Morris’ story is filled with child-friendly humor that is cleverly matched by Lichtenheld’s comic ink, pencil and gouache paintings. The pair captures personality (lots of it), action and adventure, along with some old-fashioned filmmaking tropes. The blues and browns of the background craftily evoke both a natural and astral setting, while the literally colorful text, both typeset and hand-lettered, could adorn any traditional production set (or playground). And for a witty final touch, there is a Glossary of Filmmaking Terms. Certain to elicit gales of giggles. A humorous—make that hysterical—homage to movies and big dreams. (Picture book. 4-7)
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“The pictures, in pencil and digital color, fill the tall oblong shape of the book dramatically. Details are telling….” from at the same moment, around the world
Perrin, Clotilde Illus. by Perrin, Clotilde Chronicle (36 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4521-2208-3
Richards, Keith with Harris, Barnaby with Shapiro, Bill Illus. by Richards, Theodora Megan Tingley/Little, Brown (32 pp.) $18.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-316-32065-8
What makes music the heart and center of a life? In this case, it is a grandfather who lives in a house full of “instruments and cake.” When Keith visits his granddad Gus, they walk everywhere, and Gus hums tunes and symphonies as they wander through towns and villages—even all the way to London. In the workshop of a music store there, Keith is taken by the guitars. When he is tall enough, Gus promises, Keith can have the guitar that sits on top of the piano in his house. When that moment comes, Gus teaches Keith “Malagueña,” because then he “can play anything.” This is all told so naturally and with such sweet verve |
BLIZZARD
Rocco, John Illus. by Rocco, John Disney-Hyperion (40 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-1-4231-7865-1 Young readers will be tickled by a young boy’s resourcefulness in this story of how he and his family survive a monu-
mental blizzard. The first flake falls on Monday while the young narrator is at school, and by the time he and his sister make it home after being dismissed early, the snow is over their boots. On Tuesday, the family’s door won’t open, and the kids climb out the window to play outside (though it’s too deep for sledding and even walking). Wednesday, Dad shovels, but the snowplows don’t come (though the kids can now build snow tunnels and forts). Thursday. Still no plow, and supplies are running low. On Friday, armed with the knowledge gleaned from his Arctic Survival book, John prepares some tennis rackets and his sled and ventures out, stopping at each of the neighbors’ houses on his way to and from the store (a very funny map charts his journey and what he does on the way) and singlehandedly bringing everyone something they needed—from cat food and milk to coffee, candles and peanut butter. The Caldecott honoree’s pencil, watercolor and digital paint illustrations are reminiscent of Steven Kellogg in their light and line and detail, and readers will pore over the pages as they vicariously live through a blizzard. An author’s note explains that the story is based on his own experience in the New England blizzard of 1978. A kid is the hero in this tale of ingenuity and bravery. (Picture book. 4-8)
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GUS & ME The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar
that readers may not notice that this is the legendary guitarist of the Rolling Stones. The vibrant and evocative pictures are done by Richards’ daughter, named for her great-grandfather. Over swathes of rich color she lays pen-and-ink drawings of figures and instruments, architectural details, free-floating musical notes—and cakes and tea things—that brilliantly carry the power of love and music into visual imagery. A CD of the author reading the story and playing a bit of “Malagueña” is included, and it is pretty wonderful, too. A beautiful example of artistic bookmaking, a story of family love and lore, and the magic of music personified in a way that’s utterly accessible to children—and their dazzled parents. (biographical note, photographs) (Picture book. 4-10)
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Published first in French in 2011, Perrin’s elegant construction looks at children and young people around the globe eastward from the Greenwich meridian. At 6 a.m. in Dakar, Senegal, Keita is helping his father with his catch of fish. “At the same moment,” goes the refrain, it is 7 a.m. in Paris, and Benedict is drinking his hot chocolate before school. The moment unfolds with Yasmine in Baghdad, Lilu in the Himalyas, Chen in Shanghai, Allen and Kiana in Honolulu, and so on. The children range in age from newborn, like Diego in Lima, Peru, who is born there at 1 a.m., to teenagers, like Sharon and Peter kissing goodbye in San Francisco at 10 p.m. The pictures, in pencil and digital color, fill the tall oblong shape of the book dramatically. Details are telling: A little red-beaked bird appears on most of the pages; the Frenchman striding along with his briefcase is smoking a cigarette; in Dubai, Nadia is watching yet another huge building go up; Pablo’s dreams in Mexico City take shape with Aztec symbols. A lovely foldout world map places and names all these children. A brief but excellent description of time zones and timekeeping closes the volume. Who knew that India and China both have only one time zone across their huge expanses? A very fine working of story, information, art and culture. (Picture book. 5-9)
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“Chukfi is a trickster worthy of the name, and this fresh, funny tale makes an excellent addition to the genre.” from chukfi rabbit’s big, bad bellyache
THE GRUDGE KEEPER
Rockliff, Mara Illus. by Wheeler , Eliza Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-56145-729-8
“No one in the town of Bonnyripple ever kept a grudge. No one, that is, except old Cornelius, the Grudge Keeper.” So begins this original fairy tale that provides a literal illustration of the idiom “holding a grudge.” Three grudges are born in scene-setting vignettes: Minnie’s goat eats Elvira Bogg’s prizewinning zinnias. A schoolboy snatches the schoolmaster’s toupee. And tragically, clumsy Big Otto “stomp[s] on Lily Belle’s new shoes at the spring fling.” The grudges are actual pieces of paper that the angry, pinchfaced people hand over to a gentle old man named Cornelius. His house is jammed full with these scrolls, each one representing a hurt feeling. But one night, the wind begins to blow. Like a tornado, it rips through town, blowing out candles and flinging pies into the air. The next morning, the people of Bonnyripple storm up to Cornelius’ house with all their new complaints. But what has happened to all the grudges? More importantly, what has happened to Cornelius? Rockliff has created a clever fable characterized by ornate language, extraordinary characters and billowy atmosphere. “Tiffs and huffs, squabbles and quibbles— all the grudges had been tossed away, down to the last small scrap of pique.” Wheeler’s strong, witty ink-and-watercolor illustrations combine with the text to humorously demonstrate that “holding a grudge” is a bad thing. Wordplay and humor provide an effective vehicle for a valuable moral. (Picture book. 5-8)
CHUKFI RABBIT’S BIG, BAD BELLYACHE A Trickster Tale
Rodgers, Greg Illus. by Widener, Leslie Stall Cinco Puntos (40 pp.) $17.95 | $8.95 paper | $8.95 e-book Jun. 24, 2014 978-1-935955-26-9 978-1-935955-27-6 paper 978-1-935955-60-3 e-book
Like tricksters in traditions everywhere, “Chukfi Rabbit is lay-zeeee.” In a time long ago, the narrator tells readers in an assured voice, Ms. Shukata Possum organizes “an everybody-worktogether day to build her” a new house. Chukfi pleads prior commitments—until he hears that “fresh homemade butter” will be served with dinner. Well, that rotten rabbit shows up but disappears as soon as he can, going down to the spring where Ms. Possum is keeping the butter cool and eating it all up while feigning illness. Greedy Chukfi! When the workday 70
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is finished, he must pretend a great appetite, “even though his belly [is] great-big stuffed.” A giant, buttery belch betrays him, of course. Choctaw storyteller Rodgers invests the tale, found in the archives of the Oklahoma History Center, with plenty of humor and oral flair. From the spring, Chukfi hears the “saw-saw-sawing and the ham-ham-hammering”; as “they didn’t really have hammers back in those days, [the turtle] kindly agree[s]” to substitute. Choctaw illustrator Widener dresses her animal characters in a mélange of traditional and contemporary attire; Chula Fox and Luksi Turtle sport black, brimmed hats and tasseled belts, while Kinta Beaver wears a denim work shirt and a baseball cap. Both text and illustrations positively exude good humor. Chukfi is a trickster worthy of the name, and this fresh, funny tale makes an excellent addition to the genre. (author’s notes) (Picture book. 5-8)
THE NOISY PAINT BOX The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art Rosenstock, Barb Illus. by Grandpré, Mary Knopf (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-307-97848-6
This impressive biography of Vasily Kandinsky highlights the unusual connection between his art and the music that inspired it. As a young boy in Russia, Vasily—nicknamed Vasya—glumly studies “bookfuls of math, science, and history.” His heavy eyelids droop; he sits “stiff and straight” while adults drone on. Then his aunt gives him a paint box, and everything changes. As Vasya mixes one hue with another, he hears the colors making sounds. “Whisper” is set in a faux handwriting type; “HISS” is also set in a different type from the primary text. Vasya listens as “swirling colors trill...like an orchestra tuning up.” Rosenstock explains the mixing of Vasya’s senses—synesthesia, in contemporary terms—through the shapes he paints: “Crunching crimson squares,” “[w]hispering charcoal lines” and “a powerful navy rectangle that vibrated deeply like the lowest cello strings.” Using acrylic paint and paper collage, Grandpré mphasizes the blending of two arts by showing Vasya’s paintbrush-holding arms aloft as if he were conducting and by letting Vasya’s colors waft upward from his palette, making curlicues in the air, with music staffs and notes interwoven. As Vasya grows up, he faces resistance to his nonrepresentational work, including the repeated interrogation, “What’s it supposed to be?”—but his magnificent, abstract, sound-inspired paintings won’t be repressed. A rich, accomplished piece about a pioneer in the art world. (author’s note, painting reproductions, sources) (Picture book/biography. 5-10)
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Roy, Katherine Illus. by Roy, Katherine David Macaulay Studio/Roaring Brook (48 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 30, 2014 978-1-59643-874-3
Russell-Brown, Katheryn Illus. by Morrison, Frank Lee & Low (40 pp.) $18.95 | Jul. 1, 2014 978-1-60060-898-8
Bewitched by the rhythms of jazz all around her in Depression-era Kansas City, little Melba Doretta Liston longs to make music in this fictional account of a little-known jazz great. Picking up the trombone at 7, the little girl teaches herself to play with the support of her Grandpa John and Momma Lucille, performing on the radio at 8 and touring as a pro at just 17. Both text and illustrations make it clear that it’s not all easy for Melba; “The Best Service for WHITES ONLY” reads a sign in a hotel window as the narrative describes a bigotry-plagued tour in the South with Billie Holiday. But joy carries the day, and the story ends on a high note, with Melba “dazzling audiences and making headlines” around the world. Russell-Brown’s debut text has |
HANNAH’S NIGHT
Sakai, Komako Illus. by Sakai, Komako Translated by Hirano, Cathy Gecko Press (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-877579-54-7 A child wakes in the middle of the night and embarks on a quiet adventure. When little Hannah realizes it’s still dark, she decides to tiptoe downstairs with her trustworthy cat, Shiro. Upon realizing all are asleep, the charming child takes small liberties: feeding the cat milk, eating cherries from the fridge and carefully playing with her sister’s toys. Sakai’s evocative illustrations envelop readers in the stillness and silence of a hushed home. Done in paint and colored pencil, they perfectly capture a child’s innocent point of view. Hannah is incredibly appealing as she squats next to Shiro, gazes up at the moon and giggles that her sister— just in the next bed—does not notice that Hannah is borrowing her toys. Each pose is perfection; parents will achingly recognize a magical time in their own children’s development, and young readers will recognize themselves in the careful explorer. The simple and elegant artwork provides a rich environment for the text, whose translation is offered with a New Zealand accent. As dawn breaks, Hannah spots the “prettiest dove she’d ever seen” outside her window. Trusting in the hope and wonder of a light-filled, new day, Hannah finally falls asleep, curled up next to Shiro on the edge of her sister’s bed. Absolutely enchanting. (Picture book. 2-5)
special issue: best books of 2014
LITTLE MELBA AND HER BIG TROMBONE
an innate musicality, mixing judicious use of onomatopoeia with often sonorous prose. Morrison’s sinuous, exaggerated lines are the perfect match for Melba’s story; she puts her entire body into her playing, the exaggerated arch of her back and thrust of her shoulders mirroring the curves of her instrument. In one thrilling spread, the evening gown–clad instrumentalist stands over the male musicians, her slide crossing the gutter while the back bow disappears off the page to the left. An impressive discography complements a two-page afterword and a thorough bibliography. Readers will agree that “Melba Doretta Liston was something special.” (Picture book. 4-8)
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Every fall, great white sharks return to feed on the seals and sea lions that migrate to the Farallon Islands just off the San Francisco coast, providing an opportunity for scientific study. Combining informative text with expressive paintings, done in ink, pencil, watercolor and gouache, Roy explains how these apex predators function. The endpapers set the stage, looking out toward the distant islands through the Golden Gate Bridge in front and back at the California shoreline from high over the islands at the end. In an early series of stunning paintings, the shark’s meal is revealed in three spreads before the wordless fourth shows the strike; the water swirls, and the seal is captured in the shark’s toothy mouth. Bloody water surrounds the shark in the next picture. Subsequent pages explain why the seal is a perfect meal and highlight the shark’s streamlined body, warmed blood, superior vision, endless teeth, and projectile jaws that contribute to its success as a hunter. For this debut picture book, the author joined researchers who tag and follow these sharks, and she’s distilled their findings in a way that’s sure to attract young readers. The backmatter provides further information, sources and suggested reading. Full of the eww factor, up-to-date facts and kid appeal, this splendid, gory introduction is not for the faint of heart! (Informational picture book. 7-10)
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NEIGHBORHOOD SHARKS Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands
AVIARY WONDERS INC. Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual
Samworth, Kate Illus. by Samworth, Kate Clarion (32 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-547-97899-4
A catalog of bird parts and instructions for making your own in a sadly possible future in which living birds have nearly disappeared.
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Feathers, beaks, legs and feet, bodies, tails and even flight styles can be ordered from this enterprising company, whose motto is “Renewing the World’s Bird Supply Since 2031.” Written and illustrated (in oil, ink, graphite and colored pencil) in the style of traditional mail-order inventories, this weaves in a surprising amount of genuine bird information while displaying the variety of interchangeable parts. Body and wing shapes fit different purposes. Legs and feet are adjusted for habitat, and beaks must match potential food. There are decorative streamers, collars and crests. The illustrations reflect actual birds; in spite of decorative coloration, beaks and wings are recognizable as identified. If a model is based on a bird now critically endangered or extinct (such as the slender-billed curlew, great auk and passenger pigeon), the label points it out. The author also enumerates actual bird threats: insecticides, habitat loss, the exotic pet trade and cats. Finally, careful instructions for assembly and training are included. Don’t teach your bird a song you don’t want to hear over and over! For children and their bird-watching parents, who will appreciate the clever premise and the message of admiration. (Picture book. 10 & up)
A POND FULL OF INK
Schmidt, Annie M.G. Illus. by Posthuma, Sieb Translated by Colmer, David Eerdmans (34 pp.) $16.00 | Mar. 7, 2014 978-0-8028-5433-9
A dozen poems from the inimitable Dutch writer magnificently translated
and illustrated. Although she was the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in 1988, Schmidt’s work, while widely translated elsewhere, is largely little known to English speakers. But through the award-winning talents of Australian translator Colmer and Dutch illustrator Posthuma, this volume—first published in the Netherlands in 2011, 16 years after Schmidt’s death, and for which Posthuma nabbed his second Gouden Penseel prize for best illustrated children’s book—should change all that. Schmidt’s zany characters burst to life in Colmer’s florid translation. Between the ravishingly well-crafted verse, with its tight meter and lithe rhyme, and Posthuma’s stark, richly layered mixed-media illustrations, readers can spend hours savoring each page. Schmidt’s sympathies for the daring and slightly misbehaved shine through in these wry, whimsical sketches. The fairy-tale writer draws from his pond of ink; furniture with legs steps out of the house for a walk; the intolerant Isabella Caramella feeds her hungry pet crocodile, Crabbit; and so on. Seasoned bath avoiders and their kin will thrill at “Belinda Hated Getting Clean...”: From her ink-splotched aura, Medusa-like hair and creepy talons to full-blown leafiness, Posthuma delectably marks Belinda’s transformation from fauna to flora. Heartwarming creative genius abounds here, offering visual and aural pleasures aplenty: not to be missed. (Picture book/poetry. 6-14) 72
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PRINCESS SPARKLEHEART GETS A MAKEOVER
Schneider, Josh Illus. by Schneider, Josh Clarion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-544-14228-2
Schneider’s playful take on the beauty makeover upends expectations with comedic—and powerful—results. When Amelia receives Princess Sparkle-Heart, the girl and doll become fast friends. From dancing and tea parties to weddings and secrets, they share almost everything—much to the chagrin of the family dog. Growling and glowering his way across spreads, the canine has it in for the doll. So it’s no surprise when tragedy strikes and Sparkle-Heart is torn to shreds. But all is not lost, as Amelia and her mom make the doll anew. With extra stuffing for “protection,” a few extra button eyes (because it’s hard to choose “just two”), some “good teeth” and a comic-book–inspired outfit, the transformation is complete. After a suspenseful makeover reveal, it’s clear Amelia adores her now-monsterlike doll more than ever—and in that moment, Schneider redefines beauty and what is “princess.” Meticulous pen, ink and watercolor illustrations perfectly capture Amelia’s emotions; she is reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking, with her red, statement hairdo, blue denim overalls and plucky personality. Cinematic illustrations play with proportion and perspective, echoing the work of comic-book luminaries Geof Darrow and Moebius. A clever cover, with its curvy, bedazzled, pink title splashed across the page, acts as a beacon to the princessobsessed, while craft-licious lettering toward the bottom hints at the tale’s interior. A testament to the joy of creation and a celebration of a different kind of beauty—sparkling indeed. (Picture book. 4-7)
ANNA CARRIES WATER
Senior, Olive Illus. by James, Laura Tradewind Books (40 pp.) $18.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-896580-60-9
Anna, the youngest in a large family, desperately wants to carry her coffee can of water on her head. She doesn’t yet have this skill that all her siblings have mastered. Why, Karen can even read while she carries a water container on her head, a detail noted in the exuberant paintings accompanying the simple text, ideal for reading aloud. There is another problem. Anna is afraid of the cows in Mr. Johnson’s field, near the spring. One day, when she is trailing way behind the others, Anna just starts running away from her bovine enemies (very peaceful creatures, as depicted in the illustrations). Her whole family comes to find her, and they all witness a grand sight: Anna
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“…Allen’s intricate, unusual and exquisite illustrations take center stage.” from winter bees
Shea, Bob Illus. by Smith, Lane Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-59643-975-7
WINTER BEES & OTHER POEMS OF THE COLD
Sidman, Joyce Illus. by Allen, Rick HMH Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-547-90650-8
How do animals survive and thrive in the bitter cold of winter in the northern tundra? Sidman explains and celebrates their remarkable adaptations in a collection of carefully constructed and delightfully varied poems. The moose calf is naturally built for cold and brags about |
THE PILOT AND THE LITTLE PRINCE The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Sís, Peter Illus. by Sís, Peter Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (48 pp.) $18.99 | May 27, 2014 978-0-374-38069-4
special issue: best books of 2014
A young sheriff comes riding high—atop a tortoise—toward the troubled, “cumin-scented” town of Drywater Gulch. Just give him a minute. How to get the Toads—not the four-legged kind, but three lawless brothers saddled with a silly name and a yen to “steal your gold, kiss your cattle, and insult your chili”—into the hoosegow? Avowed dino-expert Ryan knows just the ploy: blame the big hole blasted into the bank on T. Rex and the stagecoach robbery on Velociraptors. The cattle-kissin’? Why, Triceratops, of course. Annoyed to no end at not getting proper credit for their crimes (“Why I smooched them beefy lips my own self!”), the Toads rudely occupy the clink: “HA! You can blow them dinersores out your nose Sheriff, this here jail is full up of real bonafide criminals!” “Hooray!” cheer the townsfolk. Sheriff Ryan just saddles up his reptilian steed and rides off into the sunset...over the next three days. The hulking Toads cut properly brutish figures in Smith’s angular, sand-and-brown Wild West scenes, while their pint-sized nemesis sports the requisite white chaps and a huge white hat. A crowd-pleasin’ knee-slapper that’ll have ‘em rolling in the aisles, yessirree. (Picture book. 5-8)
all his achievements in a lilting, rhyming verse. The tundra swans rest in the marshes and wait for the right time to migrate south as they dream lovely images of their flight. The winter bees huddle in a warm, humming mass. With lines repeated in the strict organization of a pantoum poem, the beavers dart about in complete silence in the watery space beneath the ice. In dual-voiced verse, the raven and wolf exhort each other to be watchful and successful in their hunting. Other animals, along with trees and snowflakes, take their turns in the stark beauty surrounding them. The final two poems hint at the coming of spring. Fascinating, detailed information about the subjects accompanies each poem. The poems appear on the left, with the factual material on the right of double-page spreads, while Allen’s intricate, unusual and exquisite illustrations take center stage. They are rendered in a combination of media, including large numbers of cut, inked and hand-colored linoleum blocks, which are then digitized and layered; the result is magic. A work to be savored by young artists and scientists. (glossary) (Informational picture book/poetry. 6-10)
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running with her full can on her head and not spilling a single drop! James, of Antiguan background, allows her bold acrylic paintings in tropical colors to sprawl across wide double-page spreads of lush Caribbean landscapes. The hummingbirds and butterflies add a bit of whimsy to Anna’s cover portrait. While not mentioned in the text, the Jamaican flag is seen on the wall of a country store, and the author was born there. When water easily comes out of a faucet, young readers rarely think about the difficult chore of carrying water, but they will empathize with Anna’s desire to reach an important milestone. (Picture book. 4-6)
What was essential about one golden-haired boy in love with flying becomes visible in Sís’ richly visual biographical portrait of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Sís covers the basics: Saint-Exupéry briefly studied architecture, then was a pioneer air mail pilot and began to publish his stories. Assigned to the mail station at Cape Juby in the Spanish Sahara, “he loved the solitude and being under millions of stars.” He spent two of the war years exiled in New York and finally returned to fly for France. Sís’ work invites readers to take time, to attend to the narrative in both the straightforward text and the nuanced, complex pictures. Antoine’s pilot friend Guillaumet advises him “to follow the face of the landscape”: A small plane flies over faces in the dunes (perhaps a nod to Saint-Exupéry’s Terres des Hommes). A desert fox greets one of Antoine’s several crashes, but instead of direct speculation about Saint-Exupéry’s inspiration for The Little Prince, Sís offers a multifaceted look at the author as adventurer and dreamer. Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the sea near Corsica in 1944: In Sís’ poignant illustration, the lines of the Lockheed P-38 become the wings and bicycle of a flying machine, a little like one Antoine made as a child. Extraordinary and wonderful. (Picture book/biography. 6-12)
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“Expressive charcoal drawings colored with layers of pastels and oil paints add to the dreamlike quality of the tale.” from sebastian and the balloon
THREE BEARS IN A BOAT
to the dreamlike quality of the tale. The sophisticated nature of the book requires readers to slow down and read the pictures as carefully as the text—and both carry equal, impressive weight. Stead does not disappoint, giving readers another beautifully rendered picture book full of whimsy, heart and delight. (Picture book. 3-7)
Soman, David Illus. by Soman, David Dial (40 pp.) $17.99 | May 20, 2014 978-0-8037-3993-2
Taking a break from Ladybug Girl, Soman uses his watercolors to paint a playful tale of responsibility. When Dash, Charlie and Theo—three sibling bears growing up by the sea—break their mother’s treasured blue seashell while attempting to get into the honey pot, they don’t ’fess up. They instead sail away in their boat, thinking maybe they can find another shell to replace the broken one before their mother gets home. An old, “salty bear” advises them to sail to a faraway island, but when they get there, there’s no shell. A sudden storm, conveyed in a brilliant page turn, helps the quarreling bears realize both their common vulnerability and their culpability, and they sail home, finding a blue shell on their own beach. They apologize to Mama Bear, offering the replacement shell. She forgives them, of course, but with a twist that will make readers smile as they remember another naughty adventurer and his “still hot” dinner. Filled with illustrations that insert lighthearted visual nods to classic books (a boat named Melville is filled with Moby Dick–ish bears, and a raft carries Huckleberry Finn–like bears), this tale is a treat for both eye and ear. Humorous and intelligent—and with watercolor seascapes so luminous that readers will want to jump in—this is a book to be treasured for years to come. (Picture book. 2-8)
SEBASTIAN AND THE BALLOON
Stead, Philip C. Illus. by Stead, Philip C. Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-59643-930-6 Sebastian, an Everychild from his plain, russet face and nondescript hair to his striped socks, creates a hot air balloon from his grandmother’s quilt scraps and goes on a joyous, never-ending journey. When Sebastian decides that he needs to see the world beyond his tired street of identical houses, he gathers “all the things he would ever need” and boards his huge hot air balloon. “He charted a course. He checked the breeze. He cut the strings... // and floated free.” Those last three words float over a large white moon, which in turn is suspended in a double-page spread of vast, textured, blueand-black sky. Against the moon is Sebastian in his colorful balloon, his faithful cardinal friend hovering nearby. This is the first of many frame-worthy pictures, as Sebastian and the bird form friendships with a winsome bear, a “very tall bird” and—yes, Shakespeare enthusiasts—three weird (but charming) sisters, all of whom eventually crowd into the balloon and advance the journey. Expressive charcoal drawings colored with layers of pastels and oil paints add 74
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RULES OF SUMMER
Tan, Shaun Illus. by Tan, Shaun Levine/Scholastic (48 pp.) $18.99 | Apr. 29, 2014 978-0-545-63912-5
One summer, two brothers live by mysteriously dire rules laid down by the older of the pair. The little one lists what he learned: “Never leave a red sock on the clothesline”; “Never eat the last olive at a party”; “Never ruin a perfect plan”—and so on. What if you break a rule? You risk facing monstrous red rabbits, crow armies, teetering robots, lumbering metal dinosaurs, large lizards, overgrown fungus and more. You’ll miss a chance to ride on that whizzing red rocket, to catch a shooting star, to visit that glowing, golden kingdom inside the gate. Vivid acrylics and oil paints depict a pretend world so surreal, so specific (and sometimes so downright disturbing) readers will spend hours poring over its subtleties and subtexts. They’ll puzzle over the brother’s urgent directives too, which vacillate between painfully obscure injunctions and specific commandments quick as a thunderclap. The attachment and tensions between the boys stream clear throughout, however, with the younger racing to catch up and worrying over trespasses he never knew to avoid. Amid the murky peril and bizarre cast of reappearing characters, the brothers’ relationship and its powerful emotional undertow remains the centrifugal force, holding each image—and the entire book—together. Evocative, enthralling and with absolutely astounding artwork so good readers will wish that, like summer, it would last forever. (Picture book. 4 & up)
SEPARATE IS NEVER EQUAL Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation
Tonatiuh, Duncan Illus. by Tonatiuh, Duncan Abrams (40 pp.) $18.95 | May 6, 2014 978-1-4197-1054-4
A little-known yet important story of the fight to end school discrimination against Mexican-American children is told with lively text and expressive art. Most associate the fight for school integration with the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. However, seven years earlier, Mexican-American students in California saw an end to
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Underwood, Deborah Illus. by Rueda, Claudia Dial (80 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-8037-3939-0
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Nancy is an elephant who has forgotten something, and she just can’t remem-
ber what it could be. She uses all the tricks she can as she struggles to come up with the missing information, but nothing works. She thinks of clothes, things with wheels, colors, things that fly, food, and all kinds of other odds and ends and ideas just out of reach. It is only when she relaxes and stops thinking about it that she remembers a play date at the park. The slight tale is charming, but it is merely the vehicle for a truly beautiful and unique visual tour de force. Young creates delicately worked, detailed illustrations of the things Nancy does remember and sorts them into a wide variety of categories shown within graphite-pencil outlines of Nancy’s elephantine body in front, back, overhead and sideways perspectives. She appears standing or rearing, sleeping or sitting. Things are remembered neatly or jumbled up; sights, sounds and smells are recalled, as well as places and objects, all in interesting juxtapositions. Each item is a tiny, intricate sculpture made with Japanese papers. Colorful shapes in abstract design and amazingly detailed, seemingly three-dimensional objects demand intense, close examination, and fingers will tingle with the wish to lift them off the page. It’s a work to be shared in wonderment and delight. Pure fascination. (Picture book. 3-10)
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An attention-seeking, nap-loving cat hatches a plan to become the Easter Cat so that he will be loved like the Easter Bunny. The text is arranged as a series of questions from an unseen authority figure. The silent main character, referred to only as Cat, answers the questions through gestures or expressions or by holding up posterlike signs. He magically produces signs, props, costumes and motorcycles in the manner of a cartoon cat, all in the service of his plan to become the Easter Cat. Eventually he meets the real Easter Bunny, who is exhausted from delivering all those eggs without any naps at all. Cat comes up with a new plan: He’ll drive a motorcycle (quite a spectacular Hog) with the Easter Bunny and a sidecar for deliveries and help deliver eggs while the bunny naps. Quirky colored-pencil illustrations complement the whimsical story, with a minimalist illustration on each spread facing a short question or comment from the narrator. The design uses an interesting, old-fashioned typeface and plenty of white space, creating a playful but sophisticated mood that plays on Cat’s contrary personality. After his success at assisting the Easter Bunny, Cat comes up with another idea for the final spread: He tries on a Santa Claus costume that just might predict a sequel. Utterly endearing. (Picture book. 3-6)
NANCY KNOWS
Young, Cybèle Illus. by Young, Cybèle Tundra (40 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 12, 2014 978-1-77049-482-4
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HERE COMES THE EASTER CAT
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discrimination there. The little girl at the center of that case, Sylvia Mendez, was the daughter of parents who looked forward to sending her to the school near their newly leased farm. When her aunt attempted to register the family children, they were directed to the “Mexican school,” despite proficiency in English and citizenship. No one could explain to Mr. Mendez why his children were not allowed to attend the better-appointed school nearby. Despite the reluctance of many fellow Mexican-Americans to cause “problems,” he filed a suit, receiving the support of numerous civil rights organizations. Tonatiuh masterfully combines text and folk-inspired art to add an important piece to the mosaic of U.S. civil rights history. The universality of parents’ desires for better opportunities for their children is made plain. The extensive author’s note provides context, and readers can connect with the real people in the story through photographs of Sylvia, her parents and the schools in question. Helpful backmatter includes a glossary, bibliography and index. Even the sourcing of dialogue is explained. A compelling story told with impeccable care. (Informational picture book. 6-9)
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cheers to a Star-Studded 2014! The Story of Owen
Perfectly Good White Boy
Beetle Boy
Carrie Mesrobian Ages 13 & Up • $17.95
Dragon Slayer of Trondheim E. K. Johnston Ages 11 & Up • HC: $17.95
Margaret Willey Ages 13 & Up • $17.95
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Water Can Be…
Laura Purdie Salas, illus. by Violeta Dabija Ages 5–8 • $17.95
Dear Wandering Wildebeest
And Other Poems from the Water Hole Irene Latham, illus. by Anna Wadham Ages 8–12 • $17.95
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Short Poems from the North Pole Bob Raczka, illus. by Chuck Groenink Ages 5–9 • $16.95
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THE FORBIDDEN STONE
Abbott, Tony Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-219447-3 978-0-06-219445-9 e-book Series: Copernicus Legacy, 1 Four precocious preteens and a distracted astrophysicist travel to Europe to unravel a mystery that has already claimed several lives. The arrival of a coded email reveals that 12-year-old Wade Kaplan’s antique star map is not just a beautiful artifact, but a key. Unfortunately, as Wade, his astrophysicist father and his stepbrother, Darrell, discover, the map is only the first of many clues. The three would-be adventurers are joined by Wade’s technophile cousin, Lily, and her bookish friend, Becca. The five follow the clues to Berlin, where Dr. Kaplan discovers that he is the only remaining member of the Asterias, a group run by his murdered mentor. The academic quest quickly becomes deadly as a ruthless group competes for the 12 hidden relics that can save the world and unlock the Copernicus Legacy. Filled with riddles and ciphers, this first of 12 installments will keep readers intellectually stimulated as well as entertained. The stepbrothers’ bond, a budding crush and a mystery that plays off of real historical figures and facts make this more than a pedestrian whodunit. With engaging characters, a globe-trotting plot and dangerous villains, it is hard to find something not to like. Equal parts edge-of-your-seat suspense and heartfelt coming-of-age. (Mystery. 8-12)
THE CROSSOVER
Basketball-playing twins find challenges to their relationship on and off the court as they cope with changes in their lives. Josh Bell and his twin, Jordan, aka JB, are stars of their school basketball team. They are also successful students, since their educator mother will stand for nothing else. As the two middle schoolers move to a successful season, readers can see their differences despite the sibling connection. After all, Josh has dreadlocks and is quiet on court, and JB is bald and a trash talker. Their love of the sport comes from their father, who had also excelled in the game, though his championship was achieved overseas. Now, however, he does not have a job and seems to have health problems the parents do not fully divulge to the boys. The twins experience their first major rift when JB is attracted to a new girl in their school, and Josh finds himself without his brother. This novel in verse is rich in character and relationships. Most interesting is the family dynamic that informs so much of the narrative, which always reveals, never tells. While Josh relates the story, readers get a full picture of major and minor players. The basketball action provides energy and rhythm for a moving story. Poet Alexander deftly reveals the power of the format to pack an emotional punch. (Verse fiction. 9-12)
NOT IN LOVE
The trouble with girls is that they are prone to falling in love—and then they want to get married. That can be a real issue if you are an early grade schooler like Jasper John Dooley, and an energetic, overbearing girl like Isabel decides she loves you. It makes it almost impossible to play dragon slayers during recess. The situation grows grimmer when Jasper’s mom arranges a play date for him at Isabel’s kirkus.com
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Alexander, Kwame HMH Books (240 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-544-10771-7
Adderson, Caroline Illus. by Clanton, Ben Kids Can (132 pp.) $15.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-55453-803-4 Series: Jasper John Dooley, 3
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house. While Isabel doesn’t want to sit around brushing her hair as he had expected, and her trampoline turns out to be great fun, his visits—he returns for the trampoline—further convince her that he’s in love, too. Instead, Jasper is embarrassed and frustrated. Based on a misguided story from his beloved grandmother, Jasper decides that if he dips Isabel’s hair in jam (since ink is unavailable), maybe she’ll lose interest. Unsurprisingly, the plan does not go well. Adderson perfectly captures the trials of early childhood, and with brief text and a simple vocabulary, she breathes full life into her cast of characters, from Paul C., new to the school and hiding behind a library book at recess, to Ori, Jasper’s best friend, whose common-sense approach is hilarious, and even to Isabel, a bit wild but fully recognizable. Another chapter book that will readily brighten the day of emergent readers—or adults offering an extended readaloud. (Fiction. 5-8)
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in a year when middle-grade books have been neglected, a few gems stand out HE LAUGHED WITH HIS OTHER MOUTHS
Middle-grade books have been neglected of late. Once the bread and butter of the children’s-book industry, they’ve been displaced by sparkly vampires and gloomy dystopias—but this lack of attention has allowed those practitioners remaining to create some truly remarkable books. No longer chasing “the next Harry Potter,” middle-grade fantasists are doing spectacular things. Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener takes orphans Molly and Kip to a deliciously creepy English estate with a tree that grants wishes— for a price. Kenneth Oppel’s The Boundless places young Will Everett on a spectacular 7-mile-long train in a Canada populated by sasquatch and muskeg hags as well as less exotic dangers. Kate Milford’s Greenglass House fills the titular inn with intruders to complicate— and enliven—Milo’s snowy Christmas vacation. Sadly, M.T. Anderson’s phenomenally weird Pals in Peril series concludes this year, but it does so in characteristically intelligent style, as Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, searches for his long-lost father in He Laughed with His Other Mouths. This renaissance of fantasy does not mean that the real world is getting short shrift, and it’s here that we see books by and about people of color. In The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond, Brenda Woods’ title character, a biracial preteen, finally gets to know her deceased, African-American father’s family. In The Turtle of Oman, Naomi Shihab Nye’s young Omani protagonist struggles to adjust to the idea of leaving home for three years in the United States with his university professor father. And Wilder and NewBrenda Woods bery winner Russell Freedman offers not one, but two nonfiction titles: Angel Island is a history of “the Ellis Island of the West,” where so many Asians first saw their new home, and Because They Marched celebrates the bravery of those who marched from Selma to Montgomery 50 years ago. Milford’s Milo is of Chinese descent; here’s hoping that next year, we see the richness of representation in fantasy that we do in realism and nonfiction. —V.S.
Anderson, M.T. Illus. by Cyrus, Kurt Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Aug. 5, 2014 978-1-4424-5110-0 978-1-4424-5115-5 e-book Series: Pals in Peril, 6 The thrills continue as Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, goes into the deepest regions of space in search of his long-lost father. Jasper is joined by Katie Mulligan and Lily Gefelty for another absurd adventure through time and space. This time, Jasper’s teleporter takes them deep within the Horsehead Nebula, the area of space that contains the secret of Jasper’s origins. Mysterious extraterrestrials travel the globe, abducting random civilians to ask them one question: “Where is Jasper Dash?” Meanwhile, in the footnotes, young Busby Spence reads classic Jasper Dash adventure novels and longs for the return of his own father, fighting in the Pacific theater during World War II. Anderson’s creative mixture of otherworldly adventure and heartfelt emotion is flawless. Nostalgic, hopeful and most importantly playful, the author has crafted a work that expresses all the pleasures of being young and getting lost in the realms of a great book. The novel doesn’t transcend the wacky sci-fi of old that inspired it but rather embraces it and dissects it, celebrating it and exploring why so many people fell in love with these silly worlds and gee-whiz heroes in the first place. Above all, this is a testament to the art of reading, a book that reminds you why you love reading in the first place. Layered, beautiful, smart and achingly funny. In a word, brilliant. (Science fiction. 12-16)
THE NIGHT GARDENER
Auxier, Jonathan Illus. by Arrasmith, Patrick Amulet/Abrams (384 pp.) $16.95 | May 20, 2014 978-1-4197-1144-2
Replete with engaging figurative language and literary allusions to works ranging from the Bible to Paradise Lost, Auxier’s creepy Victorian ghost story is an allegory on greed and the power of stories. Fourteen-year-old Molly and her younger brother, Kip, orphans fleeing the Irish famine, seek work in England. The destitute siblings become servants at the Windsor estate, at the center of which is a decrepit house entwined with a huge and sinister tree. Although warned that this place contains something ominous that changes people, they are unprepared for the evil they encounter. The master, mistress and their two children grow pale and thin; their eyes and hair blacken. Entering the forbidden room at the top of the stairs, Molly finds a knothole
Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor at Kirkus Reviews. 78
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“The third-person narration switches perspective smoothly, and it’s all related in a precise, flowing prose that easily places readers into the fantastic setting and catches them up in the story.” from the witch’s boy
Barnhill, Kelly Algonquin (368 pp.) $16.95 | $16.95 e-book | Sep. 16, 2014 978-1-61620-351-1 978-1-61620-433-4 e-book
AUDREY (COW)
Bar-el, Dan Illus. by Mai-Wyss, Tatjana Tundra (256 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-77049-602-6
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Move aside Wilbur and Babe. There’s a new farmyard hero in town, and she has no desire to end up hamburger. Audrey isn’t like the other cows. They might accept their lot as “food cows,” but she has other ideas. After her mother is taken away to a slaughterhouse, the feisty Charolais concocts an elaborate escape for herself using the expertise and help of her barnyard friends. However, the escape itself proves to be only half the battle, and Audrey’s experiences in the wild forest with its unpredictable denizens put both brains and moxie to the test. In a multiple-perspective, documentary-like format, each animal tells its part of the story with terrific humor and personality. From pompous Charlton the rooster, who considers his role in the story a moment of deus ex machina (“as the Romans would call it”), to a parliament of consensus-minded sheep to a thoroughly prejudiced squirrel, the many voices make the book an ideal read-aloud for a classroom and ideal fodder for readers’ theater. Bar-el is also unafraid to engage in truly lovely descriptive writing (one cow’s grief over losing her son is said to be akin to “a mist like we’d get on gray, foggy mornings that made the farm seem as if it were fading away along its edges”). Part Great Escape, part Hatchet, part Charlotte’s Web, all wonderful. (Animal fantasy. 8-12)
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Nine enormous boulders are awakened from their long sleep by the actions of a seemingly powerless boy and the daughter of the Bandit King. Since his identical twin’s death and his own near-drowning, Ned has spoken with a stutter, and villagers believe that “the wrong boy” survived. Ned doesn’t know that his mother, Sister Witch, in desperation, used the magic she holds and protects to join his brother’s soul to his, despite the fact that “[i]t was a dangerous thing, her magic. With consequences.” Áine, meanwhile, is growing up with a father whose behavior increasingly worries her, especially the way he fondles a pendant he’s begun wearing and the fact that he has been bringing home a frightening group of bandits. In fact, the Bandit King is after Sister Witch’s magic, and when she leaves town, he tries to force Ned to surrender it to him. Instead, Ned takes the magic upon himself, at a cost of great physical pain as the words burn into him and the magic keeps talking to him, and he is kidnapped. Barnhill skillfully interweaves the stories of Ned, Áine, Sister Witch and the stones, along with an intriguing group of secondary characters. The third-person narration switches perspective smoothly, and it’s all related in a precise, flowing prose that easily places readers into the fantastic setting and catches them up in the story. The classic fantasy elements are all there, richly reimagined, with a vivid setting, a page-turning adventure of a plot, and compelling, timeless themes. (Fantasy. 10-15)
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in the tree—a knothole that produces whatever one wishes for (money, jewels, sweets). The price is a piece of the petitioner’s soul. Muddy footprints and dead leaves in the house attest to an evil nocturnal visitor, the titular Night Gardener, who wipes the sweat of fear from their nightmare-ridden brows to water the tree. In a heart-stopping climax, Molly and Kip attempt to stop this specter and the ancient curse. Lots of creepiness, memorable characters, a worthy message, Arrasmith’s atmospheric drawings and touches of humor amid the horror make this cautionary tale one readers will not soon forget. (Fantasy. 10-14)
EL DEAFO
Bell, Cece Illus. by Bell, Cece Amulet/Abrams (248 pp.) $21.95 | $10.95 paper | Sep. 2, 2014 978-1-4197-1020-9 978-1-4297-1217-3 paper A humorous and touching graphic memoir about finding friendship and growing up deaf. When Cece is 4 years old, she becomes “severely to profoundly” deaf after contracting meningitis. Though she is fitted with a hearing aid and learns to read lips, it’s a challenging adjustment for her. After her family moves to a new town, Cece begins first grade at a school that doesn’t have separate classes for the deaf. Her nifty new hearing aid, the Phonic Ear, allows her to hear her teacher clearly, even when her teacher is in another part of the school. Cece’s new ability makes her feel like a superhero—just call her “El Deafo”—but the Phonic Ear is still hard to hide and uncomfortable to wear. |
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christopher paul curtis reveals unexpected monsters in the madman of piney woods There’s an expectation you have when reading a book by Christopher Paul Curtis. He tells a fictional story rooted in history, and the expectation is that he’ll bring depth, emotion and relevance to bear in a timeline that might otherwise be regarded two-dimensionally. His Elijah of Buxton put a spotlight on Buxton, Canada, and the first child born free in a town settled by former slaves. Like any enthusiastic writer fully entrenched in the lives of his characters, Curtis didn’t want to bid adieu to Elijah. Rather than revisit the character with a hard sequel, he’s publishing The Madman of Piney Woods. It is 40 years later, and Elijah is on the periphery of an adventure story centered on two boys, two monsters, and one point in history replete with Curtis’ signature heart, historical accuracy and vivid imagery. Madman is a dual narrative told from the perspectives of 13-year-olds Benji and Red. Benji, an aspiring journalist, is the eldest of three AfricanCanadian children growing up in Buxton. Red, a descendant of Irish immigrants, is an intellectual living in nearby Chatham with his father and tyrannical Grandmother O’Toole, who is more abrasive than affectionate. The boys, who don’t meet (and then forge an unlikely friendship) until Chapter 22, weren’t intended to share narrative responsibility. There’s a hidden monster too, one with whom both boys are familiar before they even meet: the Madman. Some say he has snakes for hair, others say he is 8 feet tall and shackled in gold chains. And yet, the Madman isn’t the mythical monster he’s made out to be at all. He is kind, gentle and calm. “It boils down to both of them [Grandmother O’Toole and the Madman] are suffering from post-traumatic stress,” says Curtis. “Different people are exposed to different situations and react in different ways. And GrandChristopher Paul Curtis mother O’Toole became bitter and angry about the things that she was exposed to, while the Madman of Piney Woods became more introspective. You can learn from the situation, or you can let it destroy you.” —Gordon West
Cece thinks, “Superheroes might be awesome, but they are also different. And being different feels a lot like being alone.” Bell (Rabbit & Robot: The Sleepover, 2012) shares her childhood experiences of being hearing impaired with warmth and sensitivity, exploiting the graphic format to amplify such details as misheard speech. Her whimsical color illustrations (all the human characters have rabbit ears and faces), clear explanations and Cece’s often funny adventures help make the memoir accessible and entertaining. Readers will empathize with Cece as she tries to find friends who aren’t bossy or inconsiderate, and they’ll rejoice with her when she finally does. An author’s note fleshes out Bell’s story, including a discussion of the many facets of deafness and Deaf culture. Worthy of a superhero. (Graphic memoir. 8 & up)
ANIMALIUM
Broom, Jenny Illus. by Scott, Katie Big Picture/Candlewick (112 pp.) $35.00 | Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-7636-7508-0 Series: Welcome to the Museum
Photo courtesy UM Photo Services,Lin Jones
Part oversized album and part encyclopedia, this “museum” of the animal kingdom showcases its variety and diversity with numerous examples from around the world. What distinguishes this collection from similar overviews is its presentation. The illustrations look like nature prints from long ago, but unlike those old engravings and lithographs, these fine-lined drawings began with pen and ink and were colored digitally. Each image is labeled with a number or letters keyed to a gloss that includes identification (including Latin name and size) and a general explanation, usually on the opposite page. Section dividers and the endpapers employ an intriguing reversal with groups of drawings shown as white silhouettes against a dark background. The use of “dissection” images, the groupings and the lack of environmental background contribute to the gallery effect. After introducing the tree of life and the theory of natural selection, this exhibition begins with invertebrates and continues through fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, pointing out evolutionary developments along the way. Each basic group includes several spreads offering examples from subgroups within the class as well as a spread with a connected habitat: coastal waters, coral reefs, rain forest, deserts, woodlands and tundra. No information sources are given, but there are good suggestions for general websites for further learning. Overall, this impressive survey will surprise and please its visitors. (index) (Nonfiction. 7-12)
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“…Cazet rolls out a tale equally rich in urbane innuendo and slapstick hilarity, cast in well-spaced lines of fluent prose and illuminated with lots of comical monochromatic ink-and-wash views….” from hooves of fire
Camper’s lighthearted, full-color graphic novel highlights lowrider culture. There is much that makes it stand out: Its theme is unique for this age group; Lupe Impala, the female protagonist, is a mechanic; and peppered throughout this crazy adventure are nifty factoids and colorful Chicano/Mexican-American slang. Lupe and her friends Elirio Malaria, the mosquito detailing artist (“Don’t be scared eses! Only lady mosquitos bite vatos for food!”), and El Chavo Blackjack, a bucket-dwelling octopus who’s an eight-armed, car-washing powerhouse, dream of one day owning their own garage. Spotting a poster for a car competition, they know the Golden Steering Wheel Award and a carload of cash are as good as theirs—if they can find a car. A field trip yields a junk pile on blocks—an Impala, natch—that “only” needs major, reconstructive body work, paint, an engine.... Some serendipitous rocket parts launch the trio and their newly souped-up lowrider on a wild ride through space: “I don’t think we’re in the barrio anymore!” observes El Chavo Flapjack cheerily. Raúl the Third’s crosshatched, ballpoint-pen–and-Sharpie artwork is highly detailed and dynamic, its black, blue and red lines on buff-colored paper depicting a street corner aguas frescas pushcart and the lowrider’s hydraulic suspension system with equal verve. A glossary of Spanish, slang and astronomical terms is appended, as is a note about lowriders for readers not in the know. A highly entertaining and culturally authentic romp. (Graphic adventure. 9-14)
A WOMAN IN THE HOUSE (AND SENATE) How Women Came to the United States Congress, Broke Down Barriers, and Changed the Country
Cooper, Ilene Illus. by Baddeley, Elizabeth Abrams (144 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4197-1036-0
HOOVES OF FIRE
In an extremely belated second chapter-book–length outing, Cazet’s bovine best buds kick up their heels in Red Tractor Farm’s “First Annual Hoot, Holler, and Moo Talent Festival.” From the outset, it’s a struggle to keep the audience and the scheduled performers in line—both groups being a mix of domesticated or thoroughly undomesticated sheep, chickens, wolves and weasels (plus Irene the rhino and a few four-legged vacationers from “Africa World”). Unsurprisingly, a steady string of minor disasters keeps things fizzing. A chorus of overexcited chickens lets loose a barrage of eggs (“Geeze Louize, girls!... kirkus.com
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It is no small task to create a book that summarizes over a century of U.S. history, gives a crash course in civics, and provides succinct, pithy biographies of numerous women who have served in the legislative and judicial branches of government. Cooper pulls it off. She sets her tone with the introduction: “Guess how many women served in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives from the first Congress in 1789 until the 65th Congress began in 1917. / 200? 100? 50? / Zero. Nada. None.... / What’s up with that?” Vigorous prose and well-chosen anecdotes, enhanced by elegant design, make for a continually engaging read. A double-page spread featuring a 1914 photograph of suffragists superimposed with a feisty Susan B. Anthony quotation precedes some general history of the suffrage movement, followed by short biographies of key women. Each subsequent chronological section similarly captures an era, with appropriate artwork. (Doves and flowers adorn the introduction to the 1960s). Throughout the cataloging of legislative triumphs—in a spectrum of issues far beyond women’s rights—there are documented anecdotes of struggles against racism and sexism, such as the day in the 1970s when a committee chairman insisted that the sole female representative and the sole African-American representative share a chair, as their votes “were worth only half of one regular Member.” Accessible, erudite, aesthetically appealing: a must-have. (foreword, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Cazet, Denys Illus. by Cazet, Denys Creston (208 pp.) $15.95 | Jun. 23, 2014 978-1-939547-08-8 Series: Minnie & Moo
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Couldn’t you use precautions?”); an impromptu port-a-potty race breaks out during intermission; the crowd enjoys much amateur poetry (“Getting milked / I find quite pleasin’. / I think it’s the way / They does the squeezin’ ”), and the money box repeatedly disappears. Despite all this, the two redoubtable ruminants carry the day to a weary but triumphant close. As in Minnie & Moo and the Seven Wonders of the World (2003), Cazet rolls out a tale equally rich in urbane innuendo and slapstick hilarity, cast in well-spaced lines of fluent prose and illuminated with lots of comical monochromatic ink-and-wash views that feature expressively posed animals in casual human dress or, in aptly named Elvis the rooster’s case, a “white luminescent jumpsuit.” Another romp with nary a dull nor serious moment; welcome back, girls. (Animal fantasy. 9-11)
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LOWRIDERS IN SPACE
Camper, Cathy Illus. by Raúl the Third Chronicle (112 pp.) $22.99 | $9.99 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4521-2155-0 978-1-4521-2869-6 paper Series: Lowriders in Space, 1
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a writer who retains childlike wonder, six decades later THE MADMAN OF PINEY WOODS
Naomi Shihab Nye often writes about people like herself, with a heart that beats using two different ventricles: one of an American and the other of a Palestinian. The Turtle of Oman tells the story of young Aref Al-Amri, who, before leaving Oman for Michigan, must say goodbye to everything and everyone he has known and loved, including his grandfather Sidi, his cat, Mish-Mish, and his rock collections. The novel explores the unique and wonderful relationship between a child and his granddad. Every day, Nye sits at her writing table with a notebook, little scraps of paper, pencils and a pencil sharpener. She writes in longhand and revises endlessly before typing it all up. “In those 13 drafts, the characters definitely stopped being my father and son,” says Nye. “It was as if they really took on a life as characters for me, beyond people that they just remind me of.” Nye made her literary debut at the young age of 6 and has remained childlike into her 60s. Even after half a decade of writing, she still takes pleasure in organizing her pens and pencils and markers. “I like those physical, tactile little swishy, whispery sounds that a pencil makes....Of all different kinds. Some are heavier, skinnier, and thicker and stuff. I just like them all being together. It was exciting just laying them out because I remember thinkNaomi Shihab Nye ing, ‘God, this is exactly like something I would have done when I was 10. I haven’t changed at all.’ ” —Mai Tran
Curtis, Christopher Paul Scholastic (384 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-545-15664-6 978-0-545-63376-5 e-book Forty years after Elijah Freeman’s exploits in Elijah of Buxton (2007), 13-yearolds Benji Alston and Red Stockard become friends as Curtis revisits Buxton, Ontario, in a fine companion novel. Benji and Red don’t meet for 200 pages, their separate lives in 1901 related in alternating first-person narratives. Benji, an African-Canadian boy in Buxton, and Red, a white boy of Irish descent living in nearby Chatham, have fairly ordinary and free lives. Benji dreams of becoming the best newspaperman in North America; Red mostly wants to survive his crazy Grandmother O’Toole. Echoes of history underlie the tale: Benji lives in a community settled by former slaves; Red is the grandson of a woman haunted by the Irish Potato Famine and the horrors of coffin ships on the St. Lawrence River. Both boys know the legend of a mysterious creature in the woods, called the Madman of Piney Woods by Benji, the South Woods Lion Man by Red. And, indeed, this “madman” and his woods ultimately tie the whole story together in a poignant and life-affirming manner. Humor and tragedy are often intertwined, and readers will find themselves sobbing and chuckling, sometimes in the same scene. Though this story stands alone, it will be even more satisfying for those who have read Elijah of Buxton. Beautiful storytelling as only Curtis can do it. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-13)
Photo courtesy Michael Nye
HIDDEN A Child’s Story of the Holocaust
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Dauvillier, Loïc Illus. by Lizano, Marc; Salsedo, Greg First Second (80 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-59643-873-6
The most moving scenes of this graphic novel have no words at all. Lizano draws people the same way that small children do: a giant oval for the head and two dots for the eyes. But his people always have complicated expressions on their faces. They never show just one emotion. They’re angry and perplexed or cheerful and bemused. (Colorist Salsedo supplies a sad, muted palette that complements the mood perfectly.) When the Nazis force the Jews to wear yellow stars, Dounia’s mother looks frightened and furious and bewildered. Her father looks surprisingly happy. He says, “This morning, I was at a big meeting. Some people suggested that we become a family of sheriffs.” He says it very calmly, and Dounia doesn’t realize for a long time afterward that he was telling |
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Freedman, Russell Holiday House (83 pp.) $20.00 | $20.00 e-book | Oct. 1, 2014 978-0-8234-2921-9 978-0-8234-3263-9 e-book
OUTSIDE IN
Ellis, Sarah Groundwood (208 pp.) $16.95 | $14.95 e-book | May 13, 2014 978-1-55498-367-4 978-1-55498-369-8 e-book
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“What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life?” There are times 13-year-old Lynn wishes she could do just that—like right now. Her feckless, New Age–y mom has just ended her relationship with solid, dependable Clive, lost her job and, worst of all, totally forgotten to get Lynn’s passport, so Lynn can’t go to Choirfest in Portland. Marooned without her BFFs, the Vancouver teen finds an unexpected friend in Blossom, a mysterious girl who saves her with the Heimlich at a bus stop. She leads Lynn down something of a rabbit hole to her home—a cozy, makeshift shelter in a park—where she lives with a dog, her two brothers and a man called Fossick, who is not her father legally or biologically but who is thoroughly devoted. Ellis tackles big themes—loyalty, legality, responsibility, family—with a sure, steady hand, allowing Lynn and readers to see the contrast between her situation and Blossom’s and to consider the many threads of relationship that make a family. Both girls’ homes and security are tenuous, though in very different ways, and both are effectively powerless. As Lynn falls in love with the magical, quasilegal underworld that Blossom inhabits, layers of betrayal threaten it, and everyone shares culpability. More than a thoughtful ode to found family, this slim, sweet novel challenges readers to look anew at the ones they have. (Fiction. 10-14)
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One of the most decorated nonfiction writers in the field brings his style to a well-told story of the struggle for voting rights in the American South. Fifty years ago, as the civil rights movement took hold, the attempts to ensure African-American access to the vote increasingly took center stage. A newly passed Civil Rights Act did not guarantee voting rights, so activists in the South continued to press for them at both the state and federal levels. The barriers to voting—poll taxes, literacy tests, limits on registration—were difficult to overcome. Physical abuse and financial intimidation also kept people from the polls. Activist churches were subject to firebombs and burning. Selma, Alabama, became a flashpoint. As Freedman begins his narrative, student activism had propelled teachers and other middle-class blacks to get involved. The death of an unarmed demonstrator drove organizers to plan a march from Selma to the state’s capital, Montgomery—an attempt that resulted in “Bloody Sunday,” one of the single most violent moments of the movement, and served to prod action on the Voting Rights Act in Congress. Freedman’s meticulous research and elegant prose brings freshness to a story that has been told many times. Familiar figures populate the account, but they are joined by many lesser-known figures as well. Richly illustrated, this deserves a place alongside other important depictions of this story. (timeline, bibliography, photo credits, source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)
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a comforting lie. This should be a sad story, but the family lives through the darkest moments of the war with determination and grace and even humor. Dounia doesn’t let her emotions fully register until years later, when she’s telling the story to her granddaughter. On the last pages of the book, in a few quiet, powerful panels, her face shows grief and guilt and fear and resignation. No book can sum up all of the Holocaust, but this graphic novel seems to contain every possible human emotion. Remarkably, most of the time, it does it with an oval and two dots. (Graphic historical fiction. 6-13)
ANGEL ISLAND Gateway to Gold Mountain
Freedman, Russell Clarion (96 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-547-90378-1
Writing with clarity, Newbery Medal winner Freedman (Becoming Ben Franklin, 2013, etc.) explores a lesser-known period in U.S. immigration history, when the San Francisco Golden Gate was anything but welcoming. Opened to enforce exclusion laws, the Angel Island Immigration Station, often called the Ellis Island of the West, served as the primary gateway to the Pacific Coast between 1910 and 1940. Over half a million people from more than 80 different countries were processed there, the majority of them from China. In telling the history of Chinese people in the U.S., the author doesn’t hold back on the racial discrimination these immigrants faced, including the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite that, immigrants came, but they faced interrogations and long periods of detention on Angel Island. Here, the experience is made most vivid and poignant when Freedman weaves in the recollections |
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a little fantasy goes a long, long way (about 7 miles) in kenneth oppel’s the boundless The Boundless is not just a formulaic chugging snake of metal cars. It’s the 7-mile-long fictional brainchild of factual Victorian-era rail baron Cornelius Van Horne. It’s also the setting for murder, deception, a traveling circus, and one ornery, captive sasquatch in Kenneth Oppel’s The Boundless. The adventure fantasy follows what should be the train’s celebratory maiden voyage across the Canadian Pacific Railroad line until Oppel upends the journey with the story of a disgruntled railway worker out to loot Van Horne’s treasureladen sarcophagal train car. “The kind of fantasies that I like to read and write often usually contain one fantastical assumption or object or phenomenon,” says Oppel. “And I like those kind of books as opposed to a hard-out, sword-and-sorcery fantasy where the world’s simply teeming with magic.” The 987 cars of the Boundless may not be teeming with magic, but the excitement they contain, inspire and propagate is magical. At the epicenter of the excitement is Will Everett, whose father was once a humble railroad worker and now commandeers Van Horne’s ever expanding industry. This translates to plush, pleasant surroundings for the Everett family and, inversely, Mr. Everett’s unpleasant intolerance of Will’s art school aspirations. Any one of Oppel’s plot points—a tainted maiden voyage, a traveling circus fronted by a mysterious ringleader, a string of sasquatch attacks— could have lived comfortably alone in one volume. Yet in The Boundless, they are all to be devoured in one, hearty steam-powered buffet. “The way I saw the world, there is magic in it, but it seemed to rise naturally from Kenneth Oppel the world of the late Victorian Age in the Americas, when the continent was opened up by the train,” Oppel says about writing the novel. “It was like unzipping the continent and letting loose all these wonders and marvels and folklore that had been contained in the landscape.” —Gordon West
of detainees, including “picture brides” and refugees, taken from books and videos. The historical photos of Angel Island life, notably the poems expressing frustration carved in Chinese calligraphy into the barracks walls (gracefully reproduced as design accents on front- and backmatter), bring depth and perspective to a dark period in American history. In this case, the walls do talk. As immigration continues to be a major issue in America, this introduction to the Angel Island experience is overdue and, most of all, welcome. (source notes, selected bibliography, acknowledgments, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 9-14)
HANSEL & GRETEL
Gaiman, Neil Illus. by Mattotti, Lorenzo TOON/Candlewick (56 pp.) $16.95 | Oct. 1, 2014 978-1-9351-7962-7
Photo courtesy Sophia Oppel
If this isn’t the definitive edition of “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s absolutely necessary. It would be easy for readers to believe that Mattotti drew these pictures while listening to a storyteller by firelight, as if he grabbed a piece of charcoal straight out of the ashes, because he needed to draw the characters right away. The truth may be even more amazing. The pictures were inspired by a Metropolitan Opera production of the Humperdinck favorite, and the thick patches of ink contain five different colors, though the effect is of enveloping blackness. The swirling lines look as though they might start moving if seen at just the right moment. The pictures have inspired Gaiman to write some of his most beautiful sentences, direct and horrifying: “If you do not eat,” says the woodcutter’s wife, “then you will not be able to swing an axe. And if you cannot cut down a tree, or haul the wood into the town, then we all starve and die.” The wordless double-page spreads alternate with text-filled spreads, with lines set generously apart and framed by delicate flowers. A deluxe version, about half again as big, features a diecut cover but is otherwise equally, spectacularly understated. The Grimm version is as frightening as a bedtime story gets, but this version will scare people in new ways, and some of those people may need to start drawing right away. (historical notes) (Picture book/fairy tale. 7-12)
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long before his hospitalization) is to solve a mammoth mystery. Even if Gavin didn’t disclaim his affinity for Sherlock Holmes, it would be abundantly evident; Darkus’ skill at deduction, perpetual observation and sang-froid are spot-on Holmes-ian. Don’t expect a puttering Watson, though. Darkus’ sidekick and stepsister, Tilly, is wrought with sass, intelligence and a neverending supply of hair dye. Heroes, villains and settings are all fully realized through proficient description, and contemporary technology gives way to sheer brainpower. A rousing page-turner with one fault: It ends. (Mystery. 10-14)
Gantos, Jack Farrar, Straus and Giroux (160 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 2, 2014 978-0-374-30083-8 Series: Joey Pigza, 5
THE GLASS SENTENCE
Grove, S.E. Viking (512 pp.) $17.99 | Jun. 12, 2014 978-0-670-78502-5 Series: Mapmakers, 1
KNIGHTLEY AND SON
Gavin, Rohan Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-61963-153-3 Series: Knightley and Son, 1
Heaps of mystery, dry humor and tweed abound in this exemplar of crime fiction à la Doyle. Since 13-year-old Darkus Knightley’s parents split, he sees his father, Alan—a detective of obsessive professional dedication—once a week. Darkus’ sponge of a brain has absorbed the details of every former case of his father’s, which fuel conversation during their visits. The conversations tend to be one-sided, though, as Alan has been comatose for four years. One evening, Alan miraculously wakes from his coma, ready to investigate a series of bizarre crimes. Alan is convinced that a powerful organization called the Combination is behind these and subsequent sprees. His records destroyed, Alan’s only chance to prove his case is to tap the brain of his son. And Darkus’ only chance to heal the relationship with his father (whose paternal nurturing was absent |
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In this opening volume of the Mapmakers trilogy, 13-year-old Sophia Tims travels into mysterious and uncharted lands in search of her kidnapped uncle and must save the world while she’s at it. In the Great Disruption of 1799, the world came apart. Continents were unfastened from time and flung into different Ages. Europe plunged into a remote century, the Spanish Empire fragmented, and the United States became an uneasy mix of adjoining Ages: the Baldlands in the West, Prehistoric Snows to the north, New Patagonia to the south—and Sophia’s Boston is now in New Occident. Sophia’s parents are missing in a different Age, and politicians are about to close New Occident’s borders, forever trapping them on the outside. When Sophia’s uncle, master cartologer Shadrack Elli, is kidnapped, her search for him sets her on an adventure with the fate of the whole world at stake. Grove’s intelligent and challenging debut is brilliant in concept, breathtaking in scale and stellar in its worldbuilding; this is a world never before seen in fiction. Sophia is a likable heroine, a girl with no sense of time who must use her wits and her uncle’s maps to save the world before time runs out. Wholly original and marvelous beyond compare. (Fantasy. 10 & up)
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Joey takes on his toughest set of challenges yet in this heart-rending, triumphant series finale. Challenge one: His manic depressive mom has hidden his meds. Challenge two: She’s abruptly checked herself into the hospital, leaving him in charge of a cluttered, roach-infested house and his baby brother, Carter Junior. Challenge three: His no-account dad (still with a Frankenstein face from the previous episode’s botched plastic surgery) is lurking about the neighborhood looking for a chance to snatch Carter Junior and run. Moreover, Joey’s brave efforts to stay “pawzzz-i-tive,” to be “the mature Joey, the think-before-you-speak Joey, the betterthan-Dad Joey, the hold-the-fort-for-Mom Joey, the keep-thebaby-safe Joey” are both aided and complicated by the return of Olivia—as he puts it, “the meanest cute blind girl I have ever loved.” Tucking enough real and metaphorical keys into Joey’s adrenalized narrative to create a motif, Gantos also trots out other significant figures from his protagonist’s past on the way to a fragile, hard-won but nonetheless real reunion. The conclusion invites readers to stop by: “There is always an extra slice waiting for you at the House-of-Pigza”—with delectable toppings aplenty. Dark, funny and pawzzz-i-tively brilliant. (Fiction. 10-13)
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“Action, clever humor, delightful illustrations and expectationdefying secret identities—when does the next one come out?” from the princess in black
THE PRINCESS IN BLACK
Rascal and her invented fairy godmother, Mr. Nuggy (he doesn’t look much like a fairy godmother), use the ensuing timeout to concoct poison soup for the witch. Eventually, the witch is vanquished and order more or less restored. Redeemed in the eyes of her siblings because she’s brave enough to retrieve a bouncy ball from the toilet as well as wildly imaginative, Rascal finally gets her wish. Often just on the edge of out of control, this inventive child is irresistible and her voice, convincing. Childlike drawings, often embellished with hand-lettered narrative or speech bubbles, of round-headed humans, Sendak-ian monsters and a snaggle-toothed witch add to the humor. Charming, funny and true to life. (Fiction. 6-9)
Hale, Shannon; Hale, Dean Illus. by Pham, LeUyen Candlewick (96 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-7636-6510-4 Perfect Princess Magnolia has a secret— her alter ego is the Princess in Black, a superhero figure who protects the kingdom! When nosy Duchess Wigtower unexpectedly drops by Princess Magnolia’s castle, Magnolia must protect her secret identity from the duchess’s prying. But then Magnolia’s monster alarm, a glitter-stone ring, goes off. She must save the day, leaving the duchess unattended in her castle. After a costume change, the Princess in Black joins her steed, Blacky (public identity: Frimplepants the unicorn), to protect Duff the goat boy and his goats from a shaggy, blue, goat-eating monster. When the monster refuses to see reason, Magnolia fights him, using special moves like the “Sparkle Slam” and the “Twinkle Twinkle Little Smash.” The rounded, cartoony illustrations featuring chubby characters keep the fight sequence soft and comical. Watching the fight, Duff notices suspicious similarities between the Princess in Black and Magnolia—quickly dismissed as “a silly idea”—much like the duchess’s dismissal of some discovered black stockings as being simply dirty, as “princesses don’t wear black.” The gently ironic text will amuse readers (including adults reading the book aloud). The large print and illustrations expand the book to a longish-yet-manageable length, giving newly independent readers a sense of accomplishment. The ending hints at another hero, the Goat Avenger. Action, clever humor, delightful illustrations and expectation-defying secret identities—when does the next one come out? (Fantasy. 5-8)
ODD, WEIRD & LITTLE
Jennings, Patrick Egmont USA (160 pp.) $15.99 | $15.99 e-book | Jan. 28, 2014 978-1-60684-374-1 978-1-60684-375-8 e-book At last: a humorous, useful and pedantry-free book about bullying! Woodrow and his classmates are surprised at the old-fashioned clothing and the tiny, delicate appearance of Toulouse, a newly arrived student from Canada. Is this Woodrow’s opportunity to pass his own victim status to someone else? Woodrow openly admits his acknowledged dorkiness, as in his fondness for “duck tape,” his hesitant speech patterns and that time he got chopsticks stuck in his throat pretending to be a badger. His first-person account of befriending someone even weirder than himself divulges such truths as school-playground hierarchies, adults’ proficiency or lack thereof at handling bullying behaviors, and “kid rules” that enable bullies. Woodrow risks regaining his place as top victim as he decides to befriend and protect Toulouse, who has drawn unwanted attention to himself with such anomalies as his bowler hats and his furry vomit. While enjoying every minute of Woodrow’s slow discovery that Toulouse is actually an owl—and the even more amazing fact that no one else reaches that conclusion—readers also learn about the psychology behind bullying and about self-empowerment. The rhythm of the prose is perfect for independent readers and for reading aloud; clever art, music and literature references add to the fun. Jennings does not skip a beat as he builds realistic relationships and problem-solving around an outrageously funny premise. (Fiction. 8-12)
DORY FANTASMAGORY
Hanlon, Abby Illus. by Hanlon, Abby Dial (160 pp.) $14.99 | Oct. 9, 2014 978-0-8037-4088-4
With words, pictures and pictures with words, 6-year-old Dory, called Rascal, recounts how she finally gets her older brother and sister to play with her. Rascal’s siblings complain that she’s always pestering them. She acts like a baby, she asks weird questions, and she chatters endlessly with her imaginary monster friend. So they tell her a kidnapping witch, Mrs. Gobble Gracker, is looking for her. In her efforts to avoid capture, Rascal becomes a dog. As a “dog,” she’s invisible to the little-girl–stealer but appealing to her older brother, who, it turns out, always wanted to have a dog. She maintains her dogginess all the way through a doctor’s checkup until a surprise vaccination spurs her to speech and retaliation. 86
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with every page turn.”—Publishers Weekly
“Epic.”
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“Will trigger laughs
—Kirkus Reviews
“Playful, eye-catching.” —Publishers Weekly
“Revelatory.”
—Voices of Youth Advocates
bookmaking, lovely storytelling and wondrous
illustrations.”—Publishers Weekly
“Excellent material
for a rowdy readers’ theater poduction.”
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“Beautiful
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“Compelling.”
—Booklist
—The Bulletin
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@LBSchool
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“Other accounts of displaced children…have borne witness to ways human-generated calamities harm their weakest victims, but seldom this convincingly.” from on two feet and wings
THE GREAT GREENE HEIST
no “everything happens for a reason.” Abbas’ anguish and fear, his repeatedly dashed hopes are wrenching. Yet whether he’s crushed or elated, the story itself is uplifting; readers will feel exhilarated when he solves a problem or makes the important discovery that what terrifies him—his vulnerability—is his biggest asset, bringing him notice from kindly adults who offer help. Other accounts of displaced children—China’s “paper sons,” young Central American refugees—have borne witness to ways human-generated calamities harm their weakest victims, but seldom this convincingly. Although Abbas’ account can be harrowing, it is told plainly, and these are not, regrettably, uncommon experiences for children, making this both accessible to and suitable for a middle-grade audience. Readers are often promised unforgettable protagonists—this memoir delivers one. (author’s note) (Memoir. 9-14)
Johnson, Varian Levine/Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 27, 2014 978-0-545-52552-7 978-0-545-52554-1 e-book Trying to go straight, troublemaker Jackson Greene succumbs to the lure of the con when it appears Maplewood Middle School’s student-council election is being rigged against his friend Gaby de la Cruz. Although Gaby’s been angry at Jackson for more than four months, the two could be more than just friends. And her twin brother, Charlie, Jackson’s best friend, is worried about her electoral chances. So Jackson breaks rule No. 3 of the Greene Code of Conduct: “Never con for love. Or even like.” During the week before the election, a delightful and diverse cast of middle school students with a wide range of backgrounds and interests concocts a series of elaborate schemes to make sure the Scantron-counted ballots will produce honest results. While all this is going on, Gaby is busily campaigning and rethinking her love life. References to previous escapades are so common readers may think this is a sequel, and the cast of characters is dizzying. But the results are worth it. Allusions to Star Trek abound. There is a helpful appended explanation of the cons and their shorthand references as well as the Greene Code. The elaborate bait and switch of this fast-paced, funny caper novel will surprise its readers as much as the victims. They’ll want to reread immediately so they can admire the setup. (Fiction. 10-15)
DASH
Larson, Kirby Scholastic (256 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-545-41635-1 978-0-545-66282-6 e-book Eleven-year-old Mitsi Kashino and her family are forced to move to a Japanese internment camp following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese-Americans are forced to leave their homes, their jobs, and all but what they can carry. Unfortunately for Mitsi, this also means leaving her beloved dog, Dash, behind. Thankfully, a good-hearted neighbor agrees to take Dash in. The neighbor writes letters to Mitsi, composing them from Dash’s point of view, and these keep Mitsi connected with the world beyond the fence. Overcrowded living quarters, long lines and minimal resources stretch the patience of the internees and threaten the bonds of the Kashino family. However, even amid their incarceration, there are spots of hope. Mitsi and her family find new friendships, rediscover old traditions and reinvent their lives. Through it all, Mitsi holds tight to her dream of the end of the war and her reunion with Dash. Larson makes this terrible event in American history personal with the story of one girl and her beloved pet. Spot-on dialogue, careful cultural details and the inclusion of specific historical characters such as artist Eddie Sato make this an educational read as well as a heartwarming one. An author’s note adds further authenticity. This emotionally satisfying and thought-provoking book will have readers pulling for Mitsi and Dash. (Historical fiction. 8-12)
ON TWO FEET AND WINGS
Kazerooni, Abbas Skyscape (224 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Oct. 21, 2014 978-1-4778-4783-1 978-1-4778-9783-6 e-book Abbas and his mother are about to board a plane for Turkey when authorities order her to remain in post-Revolution Iran with his father, Karim; Abbas, at Karim’s insistence, flies alone to Istanbul to stay and apply for a British visa—he is 9. Abbas doesn’t speak Turkish; a promised helper fails him; the fleabag hotel he’s deposited in is in a dangerous neighborhood. His intelligence, resilience and cocky charm help (though he owes more to luck and the kindness of strangers). He survives—barely. Karim’s lessons (be wary of strangers, change currency on the black market, eat just one meal a day to save money) go only so far. Here, everyone’s a stranger. Abbas must learn to tell friend from foe. Kazerooni doesn’t dilute harsh events or assign them benign meanings retroactively—there’s 88
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At the end of an isolated road outside a small village in Holland in 1937, Fing and her eccentric family find themselves in a strange house that gives up its secrets reluctantly and with far-reaching consequences. Young Fing is stalwart, compassionate and truth-seeking, but she is not an omniscient narrator, for she learns the intricate, tangled stories as they are doled out piecemeal by her grandmother Oma Mei, who is hiding as many secrets as the house. The work’s three-part construction weaves the events surrounding Fing’s family with an earlier cast of characters from the 1860s. Each part has a distinct tone and sensibility. In the first and third parts, Fing and her sisters rise to the challenges of life with their ever optimistic father, their somewhat inept older brothers, and the mad and mysterious Hatsi. All the while, they grow increasingly uncomfortable with the puzzles posed by the house and Oma Mei’s sometimes-contradictory tales. The middle part, Charley and Nienevee’s story, is narrated by Oma and has a darker and more sinister quality. Lindelauf lures readers into the intrigue and mystery of it all and then demands their intense concentration. Every element of the tale has a purpose, and in the end, the multiple layers of past and present separate and come together in surprising, often discomfiting twists and turns. A challenging and entirely unique Dutch import. (translator’s note, character list, slang word list, map, contents) (Fiction. 11-14)
FLY AWAY
MacLachlan, Patricia McElderry (128 pp.) $15.99 | $10.99 e-book | Apr. 8, 2014 978-1-4424-6008-9 978-1-4424-6010-2 e-book
Liu-Perkins, Christine Illus. by Brannen, Sarah S. Charlesbridge (80 pp.) $19.95 | $9.99 e-book | Apr. 8, 2014 978-1-58089-370-1 978-1-60734-725-5 e-book
Debut author Liu-Perkins’ infectious curiosity shines in this exploration of a Han dynasty burial chamber excavated in 1972. The “best preserved body in the world.” This honor goes to no ordinary mummy. It belongs to the remains of one Chinese woman known as the Marchioness of Dai, or Lady Dai. Buried beneath two hills called Mawangdui, Lady Dai’s tomb held three nobles: the marquis Li Cang, his wife, Lady Dai, and apparently one of their sons. As archaeologists dug through layers of white kirkus.com
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Filled with little moments of quiet wisdom and gentle humor, Newbery winner MacLachlan’s story about family love soars. Lucy is the only member of her family who cannot sing. Everyone else—her father, her mother, and her younger sister, Grace—sings on pitch. Even her toddler brother, Teddy, who does not yet talk, sings—although only Lucy knows this, as Teddy sings to her secretly each night. But while Lucy cannot sing (she thinks), she is planning to be a poet, and as she and her family journey across the Minnesota prairie in an old Volkswagen bus and arrive at her aunt’s home on the Red River in North Dakota, she composes poems, hoping to write one for her father that is “as beautiful as a cow.” (Her father loves cows.) The story, told in first person by Lucy, is ostensibly simple. But in the hands of MacLachlan, simple becomes sparely elegant, and the narrative unfolds to reveal a world of secrets, strengths, fears, and aspirations both relinquished and recovered, with a frisson of tension that rises as the Red River floods. The climax, when it comes, is less of a nail-biter and more of a warm, cozy blanket of love and support—and readers won’t mind one bit. A story that never cloys, succeeding on all levels. (Fiction. 6-10)
AT HOME IN HER TOMB Lady Dai and the Ancient Chinese Treasures of Mawangdui
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clay and charcoal, they uncovered more than 3,000 “astonishingly well-preserved” artifacts. Most amazing of all was Lady Dai’s body. After being buried for almost 2,200 years, her skin remained moist, her joints were movable, and her finger- and toeprints were still discernible. Other rare finds included an elaborate silk painting called a feiyi and the oldest and largest stash of silk books ever discovered in China. Based on 14 years of extensive research, the author’s storytelling is clear, inviting and filled with awe, as if she’s right there alongside the dig experts. Fictionalized vignettes of Lady Dai’s life that introduce each chapter add charm and perspective. Artifact photographs and illustrations heighten the fascination. In particular, Brannen’s illustration of Lady Dai’s chamber of multiple, nested coffins demonstrates the creative ingenuity of these ancient embalmers. Move over King Tut. Lady Dai is in the house. (historical note, author’s note, glossary, selected bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
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NINE OPEN ARMS
Lindelauf, Benny Illus. by Tolstikova, Dasha Translated by Nieuwenhuizen, John Enchanted Lion Books (256 pp.) $16.95 | Jun. 24, 2014 978-1-59270-146-9
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“The island setting is painted in such vivid detail that the nuances of both culture and climate shine through….” from little man
LITTLE MAN
sweaters to all the naked chickens. Soon Kung Pow Chicken is “locked in a battle of knits” with the nefarious Granny and her knitting needles. When she escapes, can Kung Pow Chicken overcome his self-doubt and save the City of Featherly Love? First of four to be released over the course of the next year and part of Scholastic’s Branches line of heavily illustrated easy chapter books, Marko’s debut is a perfectly puntastic pageturner. Hybrids of comics and traditional pictures, the goofy allcolor illustrations propel the fast-moving, high-interest story. “Ham and eggs!”—you don’t want to miss this! (Graphic/ fiction hybrid. 5-7)
Mann, Elizabeth Mikaya Press (208 pp.) $18.95 | $8.95 paper | Sep. 15, 2014 978-1-931414-49-4 978-1-931414-50-0 paper A tale of finding a place to belong with a specific setting but universal appeal. Albert Quashie is tired of being little. Shorter than his tall brothers were at his age, Albert is insecure and nervous about starting middle school, especially since his best friend has moved away from their small Caribbean island to Brooklyn. On the first day of school, Albert’s fears are realized when he is mocked for his height; worse, he finds that though he’s always been good at math, now that he’s skipped a year he’s lost his edge. Albert’s parents seek to lift him from his funk by allowing him to help his father’s band, and at its performance, Albert sees stilt walkers. He’s inspired by the bravery and beauty of their art and discovers the leader is also his school bus driver. Albert is soon invited to join a group of high school stilt walkers, and while at first he feels awkward and nervous, he eventually discovers a place he can belong. Third-person narration makes the pain of Albert’s insecurity and loneliness so real readers are sure to sympathize with his plight. The island setting is painted in such vivid detail that the nuances of both culture and climate shine through, exploring the uniqueness of Albert’s island home while also highlighting the universality of human experience. Exceptional. (Fiction. 10-14)
RAIN REIGN
Martin, Ann M. Feiwel & Friends (240 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-312-64300-3 A story about honorable living in the autistic-narrator genre that sets the bar high. Rose has a diagnosis of Asperger’s, and her world of comforting homonyms, rules and prime numbers is repeatedly challenged by social interactions of which she has no innate understanding. Newbery Honor author Martin crafts a skillful tale that engages readers’ sympathy for everyone portrayed in the story, even Rose’s garage-mechanic, hard-drinking single father. He has given Rose a stray dog he found after an evening of drinking at the local bar, and Rose names her Rain. Through touching and funny scenes at school—where Rose has an aide but is in a regular classroom—and discomfiting scenes at home, readers come to understand how Rose’s close relationship to Rain anchors her. But Rain goes missing during a storm, and when, with the help of her sympathetic uncle, Rose finds her dog weeks later, she is told that Rain was microchipped and actually belongs to someone else. Since following rules is vital to Rose, she must find Rain’s original owners and give her dog back. Martin has penned a riveting, seamless narrative in which each word sings and each scene counts. There is no fluff here, just sophisticated, emotionally honest storytelling. (Fiction. 8-12)
LET’S GET CRACKING!
Marko, Cyndi Illus. by Marko, Cyndi Branches/Scholastic (80 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-61062-9 978-0-545-61061-2 paper 978-0-545-61391-0 e-book Series: Kung Pow Chicken, 1
DAPPLED ANNIE AND THE TIGRISH
Can Kung Pow Chicken and Egg Drop beat the bad guys and be home in time for dinner? Second-grade chicken Gordon Blue and his still partially egg-bound little brother Benedict are mild-mannered chicks until they fall into a vat of toxic sludge in their uncle Quack’s lab. Suddenly, Gordon has birdy sense that tingles when danger is near. He can flap superfast, and his clucks are louder than any chicken’s (“His bok [is] worse than his bite”). He promises to use his powers only for good (and to keep his room tidy). Since he’s never met a bad guy, he has to do normal chicken things... until everyone starts losing their feathers at the Fowl Fall Festival in Fowladelphia. Could it be Granny Goosebumps’ yucky glowing cookies? She’s making money wing over fist selling itchy 90
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McCallum, Mary Illus. by Hayward, Annie Gecko Press (138 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2014 978-1-877579-95-0
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In this exceptional debut novel for middle graders, Annie’s quest to retrieve a blown-away birds’ nest becomes more magical, dangerous and urgent than she
Milford, Kate Illus. by Zollars, Jaime HMH Books (384 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-544-05270-3 978-0-544-05555-1 e-book
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When his parents’ hotel fills up with a variety of unexpected guests just days before Christmas, Milo is caught up in mysterious goings-on. The inn, hospitable to smugglers and named for its colored glass windows, sits on cliffs above the river Skidwrack. With the holiday interrupted by the demands of guests iced in by wintry weather, Milo finds both purpose and distraction in a role-playing game introduced by his new young friend, Meddy, and in a book of folklore given to him by a guest. A ghost story, a love story, a story of fabled relics and the tale of a legendary smuggler intertwine while Milo, in his game persona, finds longed-for
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GREENGLASS HOUSE
This magical adventure is set on the coast of New Zealand, where Annie lives with her mother, little brother and father— a lighthouse keeper whose unexpected absence has just begun to concern his family. The story begins on the cusp of Annie’s 10th birthday, when Annie’s usual visit to her unusual friends— a row of hedges—turns into a grand adventure that has hints of The Neverending Story and A Wrinkle in Time. By the time her birthday has arrived, Annie has learned that being “dappled” is a good thing, and she has proven to herself that she is capable of good decision-making and heroic bravery. Elements of magical realism fold beautifully into the story, as do the moments when Annie is testing a young person’s version of situational ethics. The warm family relationships add to the story’s charm: “On one hand, her brother was loud and sticky and annoying, but on the other hand, he knew interesting things about animals and snuggled up when she read to him.” Nature facts mingle easily with the supernatural, and gentle humor is omnipresent. Both cinematic and pleasingly literary, this will keep readers entranced. (Fantasy. 7-11)
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THE TURTLE OF OMAN
skills and strengths. Each guest seeks a secret treasure in the old house, while Milo, out of loyalty to his adoptive parents, hardly dares name his own secret quest: to know more about his Chinese heritage. Milford’s storytelling is splendid. Stories within the story are rich and layered; clues are generously offered; even the badly behaved visitors seem fairly good-humored until the worst reveals true perfidy at the last; the many threads of the tale all tie up. Milo’s world seems comfortably contemporary; the current history of his parallel world is mostly background that’s revealed at the close. An abundantly diverting mystery seasoned with mild fantasy and just a little steampunk. (Mystery/fantasy. 10-14)
Nye, Naomi Shihab Greenwillow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-06-201972-1
An enthusiastic boy from Oman has serious misgivings about temporarily moving from his homeland to Michigan. For Aref Al-Amri, “Oman was his only, number one, super-duper, authentic, absolutely personal place,” but in one week, he and his mother will be joining his father in Ann Arbor for three years. Aref hates saying goodbye to his friends and worries about being a new, foreign kid at an American public school. He hates leaving his house, his room and his rock collection. What about his cat, Mish-Mish? Mostly, Aref dreads leaving his beloved grandfather, Sidi. As he avoids packing his suitcase, Aref savors the familiar sights, sounds and scents of his hometown, Muscat, providing readers with a rich taste of life in contemporary Oman. Only after spending several days in Sidi’s reassuring company, exploring favorite desert and seaside haunts, is Aref finally able to “make a little space for bravery inside his fear.” Spanning Aref ’s final week in Oman, this sensitive chronicle perceptively conveys the feelings and fears of a boy about to leave the known and face the unknown. A warm and humorous peek at the profound and mundane details of moving from one country to another—a perfect pick for kids on the move. (Fiction. 8-12)
BIRD CAT DOG
Nordling, Lee Illus. by Bosch, Meritxell Graphic Universe (40 pp.) $6.95 paper | $25.26 PLB | Nov. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-4523-9 978-1-4677-4522-2 PLB Series: Three Story Books A serene suburban tableau cleverly describes the separate, exciting adventures of a bird, a cat and a dog, each the hero of its own story. In one of these stories, a lemon-yellow bird seeks freedom from its cage and finds itself encountering fierce raptors and a curious cat. In a neighboring backyard, an orange cat craves adventure outside of its fence, meeting a wily feral opponent. Nearby, a tough-looking gray dog strives to guard its doghouse from intruders and maintain peace. Readers, be advised, don’t let the seemingly simple, wordless nature of this offering fool you: This innovative charmer can be read four different ways. There is the bird’s story, soaring across the top panels in bright, cheerful azure tones, which can be read alone. Similarly, there are the cat’s escapades, creeping across the middle panels against a richly verdant palette, and the dog’s tale, in ochre, earth tones, marching across the bottom. Each animal’s adventure could be read individually, or all three could be read traditionally, left to right and then top to bottom, following each of the nine panels that occupy most of the pages. Multiple readings are not only expected, they are required. Stylish and inventive and an excellent examination of point of view. (Graphic adventure. 4-8)
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THE BOUNDLESS
Oppel, Kenneth Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $15.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-1-4424-7288-4 William Everett is proud of his ragsto-riches father, manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but he wants to forge his own destiny. Will’s first chance comes when reallife 19th-century rail baron Cornelius Van Horne invites him on a train ride to greet his years-absent, track-laying dad at a nearby mountain camp. After surviving an avalanche and a terrifying sasquatch attack, Will gets to hammer in the last spike, a diamond-encrusted gold railway spike worth a fortune. The story resumes three years later, as a taller, more fancified Will embarks with his now–high-ranking father on the maiden voyage of the Boundless, an opulent, 987-car train—a “rolling city” complete with automaton bartender and traveling circus, 7 miles from locomotive to caboose. Untold treasure is locked up in Van Horne’s booby-trapped funeral car, and a motley crew of hungry souls wants to get their hands on it no matter whom they have to kill to get it. The suspenseful shenanigans that follow shape this wild, cinematic ride, but the |
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“Telling her story in first-person verse, Pinkney uses deft strokes to create engaging characters through the poetry of their observations and the poignancy of their circumstances.” from the red pencil
THE RED PENCIL
Pinkney, Andrea Davis Illus. by Evans, Shane W. Little, Brown (336 pp.) $17.00 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-316-24780-1 978-0-316-24781-8 e-book A 12-year-old Sudanese girl struggles for survival after a janjaweed attack on her town forces her family to seek safety in an overcrowded refugee camp. Amira Bright has a dream: to leave her South Darfur farm and attend Gad Primary School, where girls are accepted. Muma, her mother, is a traditionalist about girls’ roles, while Dando, her father, and Old Anwar, a lifelong neighbor, are more supportive. Dando and Amira even have a favorite game called “What Else is Possible?” But when militia attackers suddenly upend her life, Amira is overcome with silent heartache. Relief comes when an aid worker at Kalma refugee camp offers her a yellow pad and a red pencil, eventually restoring her free expression. Telling her story in first-person verse, Pinkney uses deft strokes to create engaging characters through the poetry of their observations and the poignancy of their circumstances. This tale of displacement in a complex, war-torn country is both accessible and fluent, striking just the right tone for middle-grade readers. Evans’ elemental drawings illuminate the spirit and yearnings of Amira, the earnest protagonist. A soulful story that captures the magic of possibility, even in difficult times. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, glossary) (Verse fiction. 8-12)
THE NEXT WAVE The Quest to Harness the Power of the Oceans
Scientists and engineers from around the world work to harness the power of ocean waves, testing their ideas in an Oregon research lab and the stormy seas off the Oregon coast. Here’s another well-written science title from an author whose previous contributions to the Scientists in the Field series introduced researchers studying volcanic eruptions on Earth and exploring Mars. After explaining the world’s need for renewable energy sources and the force of ocean power, Rusch focuses on three different approaches to harnessing this power that were underway at the time of her writing. She draws in young readers by introducing two engineers as young tinkerers, following their work through college to the development of a company testing an energy-capture device that sits on the ocean floor. An Oregon State University faculty member has equipped a testing ground offshore to monitor different approaches; some of her students are now building a device that uses the upand-down motion of the waves. A third company has created working wave-powered buoys using a different design. A center spread describes other approaches from around the world. Lively design, clear explanations, text boxes, photographs and diagrams all contribute to an informative look at how people are working right now to find ways to use a previously inaccessible energy source. Timely, important, appropriately focused and interesting. (extensive chapter notes, sources, suggestions, index) (Nonfiction. 10-15)
WEST OF THE MOON
Thirteen-year-old Astri is a goat girl, but she’s no Heidi; she’s a sharp, stonehard girl who hasn’t yet found the goodness inside herself. In fact, her life is as wretched as the darkest Norwegian fairy tale. Instead of being taken by White Bear King Valemon to his castle, Astri has been sold by her own aunt and uncle for “two silver coins and a haunch of goat” to a nasty old hunchbacked goatman named kirkus.com
special issue: best books of 2014
Rusch, Elizabeth HMH Books (80 pp.) $18.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-544-09999-9 Series: Scientists in the Field
Preus, Margi Amulet/Abrams (224 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-4197-0896-1
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Svaalberd who lives in squalor. Folk tales from “The Twelve Wild Ducks” to “The Three Billy Goats Gruff ” weave through Astri’s often dryly humorous, suspenseful first-person account until one feels like the other...including her riotous escape from the violent man-troll and the rescue of her beloved little sister. The girls’ odyssey over hill and dale, aided by a kind milkmaid and lonely widow, takes them all the way to an America-bound ship—the Columbus. Whether or not their father is still alive in America, the country beckons like the castle in the bear story that “lies east of the sun and west of the moon.” Preus, who won a Newbery Honor for Heart of a Samurai (2010), was inspired by her Norwegian great-great-grandmother, who immigrated to America in 1851, as she explains in an author’s note, even providing reproductions of some of her great-great-grandmother’s papers. Norwegian history, fiction and folklore intertwine seamlessly in this lively, fantastical adventure and moving coming-of-age story. (glossary, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 11-14)
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underlying narrative track is Will’s dogged determination to follow his own bliss—perhaps as an artist—despite his father’s strict opposition. Canadian railway history, fantasy, a flutter of romance— and a thoughtful examination of social injustice—collide in this entertaining swashbuckler from the author of Printz Honor–winning Airborn (2005). (Historical fantasy. 9-14)
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“In this thoroughly researched and well-documented drama, Sheinkin lets the participants tell the story, masterfully lacing the narrative with extensive quotations….” from the port chicago 50
THE MAP TO EVERYWHERE
the huge explosion flattened the base, 320 men were killed, 202 of them black sailors who had been loading the ammunition. When it came time to resume work, 50 black sailors refused to work under the unsafe conditions on the segregated base and were charged with mutiny, with the possibility of execution. In this thoroughly researched and well-documented drama, Sheinkin lets the participants tell the story, masterfully lacing the narrative with extensive quotations drawn from oral histories, information from trial transcripts and archival photographs. The event, little known today, is brought to life and placed in historical context, with Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson figuring in the story. An important chapter in the civil rights movement, presenting 50 new heroes. (source notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Ryan, Carrie; Davis, John Parke Little, Brown (448 pp.) $17.00 | $9.99 e-book | Nov. 18, 2014 978-0-316-24077-2 978-0-316-24076-5 e-book Series: Pirate Stream, 1 Two displaced young adventurers sail streams of raw magic from world to world in this vividly cast series opener. Convergent plotlines bring together Marrill, who impulsively climbs aboard the four-master that floats into view atop a shimmering mirage in an Arizona parking lot, and Fin, another world’s scruffy orphan/thief who literally passes “out of sight, out of mind” with everyone he meets. Nearly everyone, that is: To his shock, Marrill actually remembers him when he’s not in view. Joining a notably diverse crew aboard the Enterprising Kraken, a ship able to sail the transformative waters of the multiverse-spanning Pirate Stream thanks to a hull made from “dullwood,” the two set out to gather the long-separated parts of a fabled map to Everywhere. The quest becomes a frantic dash thanks to hot pursuit by Serth, a mad wizard who constantly weeps black tears and seeks the map to fulfill a vision of universal apocalypse. Fin’s oddball ability serves him well in tight spots, but it also becomes an amusing running gag. Filling out the cast with sobbing pirates, briskly efficient “pirats” (or “bilge mice”) and like fancies, the authors send their intrepid searchers hither and thither, to a desperate climactic struggle...that is only a beginning. Multifaceted characters, high stakes, imaginative magic, and hints of hidden twists and complexities to come add up to a memorable start to a projected four-volume voyage. (numerous illustrations, not seen) (Fantasy. 10-13)
THE MEANING OF MAGGIE
Sovern, Megan Jean Chronicle (224 pp.) $16.99 | May 6, 2014 978-1-4521-1021-9 Based on the author’s family’s story, this novel mixes in equal thirds tears, wit and reassurance amid debilitating illness. The day her father “won’t stop beeping,” future president Maggie Mayfield begins a memoir of 1988, the year her “cool dude” dad’s multiple sclerosis takes a turn for the worse. Her dad’s MS is as much a presence as his love of Neil Young records; a scene of her mother brushing his teeth is as casual as a kiss on the cheek. Its progression hits hard— suddenly, her dad is unemployed and her mother is exhausted, while her older sisters mess with makeup and boys. Maggie vows to fix her father, but her hardest lesson may be that she can’t; the collision of her bookishness against her dad’s unknowable prognosis is bound to elicit tears (aka “brain sweat”). Tough family bonds ground the story, even under stress, and Maggie’s quirky everyday observations and sibling squabbles relieve tension. Maggie writes of a book that “[b]y the time you reach the end of the chapter, you realize you’ve highlighted every single word because every single word was really important.” Smart, sensitive, sad and funny, Maggie’s memoir reads the same way. More than an issue novel, Sovern’s debut will be a boon to kids coping with a parent’s illness or the unpredictability of growing up. (Historical fiction. 9-12)
THE PORT CHICAGO 50 Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
Sheinkin, Steve Roaring Brook (208 pp.) $19.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-59643-796-8
On July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, an explosion—the largest man-made explosion in history to that point—killed more than 300 men, leading to the largest mass trial in United States history. “[B]efore Brown v. Board of Education or Truman’s executive order, before Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson—before any of this, there was Port Chicago.” At Port Chicago, Navy ships were loaded with bombs and ammunition. All of the officers were white, and all of the sailors handling the dangerous explosives were black, with no training in how to do their jobs. When 94
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PACK OF DORKS
Vrabel, Beth Sky Pony Press (240 pp.) $15.95 | $9.99 e-book | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-62914-623-2 978-1-63220-222-2 e-book Debut author Vrabel takes three knotty, seemingly disparate problems— bullying, the plight of wolves and coping with disability—and with tact and grace knits them into an engrossing whole of despair and redemption. Popular fourth-grader Lucy and her best friend, Becky, kiss Tom and Henry behind the shed during recess as their class looks on, Lucy’s brief, reluctant peck paling against Becky’s smoldering “suction cup” smooch. When Lucy gets home, her mother’s in labor; Molly is born later that day with Down syndrome. Back at school on Tuesday, everything has changed. Now disingenuous Becky is with Tom, and Lucy’s being shunned by most of the class. Only then does she begin to understand life as an outsider and take a closer look at other bullying victims, each nicely depicted, both negative and positive characteristics colorfully drawn. Assigned to do a project about wolves with fellow victim Sam, Lucy gradually becomes friends with him, and they discover fascinating truths about wolf packs that give them insight into the behavior of their classmates. Simultaneously, Lucy and her parents slowly, believably come to grips with Molly’s uncertain future. Useful tips for dealing with bullying are neatly incorporated into the tale but with a refreshing lack of didacticism. Lucy’s perfectly feisty narration, the emotionally resonant situations and the importance of the topic all elevate this effort well above the pack. (Fiction. 8-12)
THE DAY MY FATHER BECAME A BUSH
van Leeuwen, Joke Illus. by van Leeuwen, Joke Translated by Nagelkerke, Bill Gecko Press (104 pp.) $16.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-877579-48-6
Welcome to the world of ethnic warfare, from the dinner table to the battle lines, full of haunted landscapes and social relationships—and you are a young girl. The story involves a girl, the narrator, who is forced to flee her village as civil war ravages her unnamed country, one of those endlessly grinding tank wars, fueled by animosities stretching back 600 years but as fresh as today’s daisies in the combatants’ noses. Her father, a pastry chef, has joined his neighbors: “He had to go and help defend one side against the other even though he had friends who were on the other side.” |
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Two sisters who are constantly at odds take a family road trip that covers more ground—both literally and figuratively—than they expect. After begging her parents for a sister, Raina gets more than she bargained for once Amara is born. From the moment she was brought home, Amara hasn’t been quite the cuddly playmate that Raina had hoped. As the years pass, the girls bicker constantly and apparently couldn’t be more unalike: Raina spends her time indoors underneath her headphones, and Amara loves animals and the outdoors. The girls, their mother and their little brother all pack up to drive to a family reunion, and it seems like the trip’s just going to be more of the same, with the girls incessantly picking on each other all the way from San Francisco to Colorado. However, when the trip doesn’t go quite as planned—for a number of reasons—the girls manage to find some common ground. Told in then-and-now narratives that are easily discernable in the graphic format, Telgemeier’s tale is laugh-out-loud funny (especially the story about the snake incident) and quietly serious all at once. Her rounded, buoyant art coupled with a masterful capacity for facial expressions complements the writing perfectly. Fans of her previous books Smile (2010) and Drama (2012) shouldn’t miss this one; it’s a winner. A wonderfully charming tale of family and sisters that anyone can bond with. (Graphic memoir. 7-13)
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The language is smart, innocent and full of surprising—but age-fitting—turns of phrase. The girl is sent to live with her estranged mother, across the border. On her way there, much on foot, often through dark forest, she meets a cast of characters who mirror all the bickering that’s tearing the country apart. The text makes all her emotions palpable (“My stomach was full of homesickness. There was no room for anything else”), fear above all, but it never overwhelms her, instead releasing sudden survival instincts that get her through. A brilliant, eerily engrossing evocation of war as it brushes up against youth—a harsh slice of the world during a mean piece of history. (Fiction. 9 & up)
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SISTERS
Telgemeier, Raina Illus. by Telgemeier, Raina Graphix/Scholastic (208 pp.) $24.99 | $10.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Aug. 26, 2014 978-0-545-54059-9 978-0-545-54060-5 paper 978-0-545-54066-7 e-book
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her one black friend attends a different school. Adopting a kitten is fun, but lightening her hair? Big mistake. (It was supposed to look “sun-kissed,” like Daisy’s—not orange.) Although Roxanne, her dad’s mother, a famous artist, has refused contact (she has her reasons), Violet engineers a meeting at a Seattle gallery, persuading her mom to take her. Rebuffed at first, Violet persists until Roxanne invites her for a visit, and what was frozen begins to thaw. Both families are stable, intelligent and wellintentioned, but forgiveness and trust require contact; healing can’t happen at a distance. Violet’s no tragic mulatto—she’d survive estrangement, but in reconnecting with her dad’s family and cultural roots, she’ll thrive, fulfill her vast potential and, in doing so, enrich both families’ lives across the racial divide. Infused with humor, hope and cleareyed compassion— a fresh take on an old paradigm. (Fiction. 8-12)
Wiles, Deborah Scholastic (544 pp.) $19.99 | May 27, 2014 978-0-545-10607-8 Series: Sixties Trilogy, 2 Freedom Summer in 1964 Mississippi brings both peaceful protest and violence into the lives of two young people. Twelve-year-old Sunny, who’s white, cannot accept her new stepmother and stepsiblings. Raymond, “a colored boy,” is impatient for integration to open the town’s pool, movie theater and baseball field. When trained volunteers for the Council of Federated Organizations—an amalgam of civil rights groups—flood the town to register black voters and establish schools, their work is met with suspicion and bigotry by whites and fear and welcome by blacks. In this companion to Countdown (2010) (with returning character Jo Ellen as one of the volunteers), Wiles once again blends a coming-of-age story with pulsating documentary history. Excerpts from contemporary newspapers, leaflets and brochures brutally expose Ku Klux Klan hatred and detail Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee instructions on how to react to arrest while on a picket line. Song lyrics from the Beatles, Motown and spirituals provide a cultural context. Copious photographs and subnarratives encapsulate a very wide range of contemporary people and events. But it is Sunny and, more briefly, Raymond who anchor the story as their separate and unequal lives cross paths again and again and culminate in a horrific drive-by shooting. A stepmother to embrace and equal rights are the prizes—even as the conflict in Vietnam escalates. Fifty years later, 1960s words and images still sound and resound in this triumphant middle volume of the author’s Sixties Trilogy. (author’s note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 11-15)
BROWN GIRL DREAMING
Woodson, Jacqueline Nancy Paulsen Books (336 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 28, 2014 978-0-399-25251-8 A multiaward-winning author recalls her childhood and the joy of becoming a writer. Writing in free verse, Woodson starts with her 1963 birth in Ohio during the civil rights movement, when America is “a country caught / / between Black and White.” But while evoking names such as Malcolm, Martin, James, Rosa and Ruby, her story is also one of family: her father’s people in Ohio and her mother’s people in South Carolina. Moving south to live with her maternal grandmother, she is in a world of sweet peas and collards, getting her hair straightened and avoiding segregated stores with her grandmother. As the writer inside slowly grows, she listens to family stories and fills her days and evenings as a Jehovah’s Witness, activities that continue after a move to Brooklyn to reunite with her mother. The gift of a composition notebook, the experience of reading John Steptoe’s Stevie and Langston Hughes’ poetry, and seeing letters turn into words and words into thoughts all reinforce her conviction that “[W]ords are my brilliance.” Woodson cherishes her memories and shares them with a graceful lyricism; her lovingly wrought vignettes of country and city streets will linger long after the page is turned. For every dreaming girl (and boy) with a pencil in hand (or keyboard) and a story to share. (Memoir/poetry. 8-12)
THE BLOSSOMING UNIVERSE OF VIOLET DIAMOND
Woods, Brenda Nancy Paulsen Books (240 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 9, 2014 978-0-399-25714-8 Violet’s a bright, engaging biracial preteen, resigned to a “predictable summer of boring nothing” in small-town Washington; happily, for her and for readers, she couldn’t be more wrong. Violet, 11, appreciates her loving family—busy neonatologist mom; sister, Daisy, 17; mom’s lively, ex-hippie parents—she’s just tired of explaining she belongs. She wouldn’t have to if her dad, an African-American doctor, hadn’t died in a car accident before her birth. In mostly white Moon Lake, Violet’s a rarity; 96
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fiction THE DEAD WIFE’S HANDBOOK
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Beckerman, Hannah Arcade (496 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62872-450-9
ALMOST FAMOUS WOMEN by Megan Mayhew Bergman.............. 98 IF I FALL, IF I DIE by Michael Christie.............................................. 99
Beckerman’s debut novel provides an intriguing tale of love after death and an insightful look at the bereavement process from both sides of the grave. We meet Rachel somewhere in the afterworld—a silent white void—where she grieves her sudden death at age 36, which has stolen her future with her beloved husband, Max, and young daughter, Ellie. The ethereal whiteness sometimes dissipates and she has access to their world; she can watch them and listen to them, but she can’t interact. Worst of all, she still experiences the whole range of human emotions. Rachel feels a burden of sorrow for the pain her death causes her family, but she also feels loved and less isolated witnessing their sadness and feels jealousy when Max and Ellie begin to move on, creating new lives and finding new love. She dreads the day when she finds herself in the “corner of someone’s mind, neatly packed away in a box marked ‘Memories.’ ” Beckerman sensitively articulates the grieving process for Rachel and also for Max and Ellie. She draws from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying, titling five of her chapters after Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Beckerman makes no pretense of portraying an actual after-death experience, nor does she draw upon traditional spiritual beliefs about what exists after death. Instead, she uses the motif of the bleak, white afterlife as a place for Rachel to ponder her former existence and come to a deeper understanding of what her life meant, as well as a vantage point for readers to experience Max’s and Ellie’s mourning. Beckerman provides gentle instruction for her readers through what Rachel learns from death’s journey. This is a touching, honest story of death—sad at times but not grim.
SWEETLAND by Michael Crummey.................................................100 THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Elisabeth de Mariaffi...........................100 THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins.................................106 ETTA AND OTTO AND RUSSELL AND JAMES by Emma Hooper................................................................................108 BLACK RIVER by S.M. Hulse............................................................108 TRUST NO ONE by Jayne Ann Krentz..............................................110 LILLIAN ON LIFE by Alison Jean Lester............................................ 111 THE ALPHABET OF BIRDS by SJ Naudé; trans. by SJ Naudé........ 113 ARROWS OF RAIN by Okey Ndibe................................................... 113 KING OF THE CRACKSMEN by Dennis O’Flaherty........................ 115 DON’T LET HIM KNOW by Sandip Roy............................................ 118 THE SECRET WISDOM OF THE EARTH by Christopher Scotton........................................................................119 A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD by Anne Tyler..................................... 123 THE JAGUAR’S CHILDREN by John Vaillant................................... 123 LAST DAYS IN SHANGHAI by Casey Walker...................................124 MY SUNSHINE AWAY by M.O. Walsh..............................................124 DIE AGAIN by Tess Gerritsen.............................................................129 SAY YES TO THE MARQUESS by Tessa Dare...................................139
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ALMOST FAMOUS WOMEN Stories
This is the first collaboration by Win Blevins, who’s primarily a historical novelist (Dreams Beneath Your Feet, 2008, etc.) and contemporary novelist Meredith Blevins (The Red Hot Empress, 2005, etc.). Appropriately, it intertwines the former’s deep and abiding interest in Native American culture with his wife’s skills in crafting romance between unlikely companions. The main character is a rock star living rough in San Francisco; Robbie Macgregor performs under the stage name Rob Roy with his popular band, the Elegant Demons. Robbie’s wife has just left him for her lesbian lover, and his inner demons are catching up with him. After a visit to his grandfather’s ashes, he decides to fake his own death. Confiding only in Gianni, his longtime business manager, Rob sets off for the wilds of America. Changing his name (and indeed, his entire personality) to “Red Stuart,” the former rock star winds up in Moonlight Water, a quirky artist’s colony deep in Mormon country that is largely populated by the Navajo people. There, he comes under the tutelage of a village elder, Winsonfred Manygoats, and quickly falls in love with Zahnie Kee, a local police officer. It’s pretty syrupy stuff. “A glorious, cool-shadowed twilight. Nary a sign of any bad guys. And the play of words and eyes of two people who were soon to be lovers, and knew it, and loved life, and the air, and the way they inhabited the world,” the authors write. Red also gets involved in a dust-up with a local thug named Wayne Kravin over the theft of Native American artifacts from the local ruins, and there’s a largely telegraphed betrayal, but neither situation generates any real tension. A strangely dispassionate affair with a picturesque Southwest setting.
Bergman, Megan Mayhew Scribner (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-8656-8 In her second story collection, Bergman tells the forgotten tales of women hovering on the edges of history. From Allegra Byron, the poet’s illegitimate daughter, to Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece, this book collects notable women whose lives have been forgotten. As the protagonist of “Who Killed Dolly Wilde?” muses, “[m]aybe the world had been bad to its great and unusual women”—and Bergman seeks to rectify this by bringing their glories and sorrows sharply to life. The tales focus on the characters’ changed lives after near-fame and are often narrated by ancillary characters, creating uniquely observant perspectives. In various settings—lavish but morgue-quiet bedrooms, cheerless Italian convents, remote islands—the women deal with their trials large and small. In “The Autobiography of Allegra Byron,” a nun struggles as 4-year-old Allegra pines for her famous father, who never visits the convent where she lives despite her constant letters and worsening illness. “The Siege at Whale Cay” finds Joe Carstairs, the fastest woman on water, lording over her own private island but suffering from post-traumatic stress after serving as an ambulance driver in World War II. And Romaine Brooks, a formerly famous artist who hasn’t painted in 40 years, spits constant, bitter orders at her servant, Mario—until he turns the tables in the final, mesmerizing paragraphs of “Romaine Remains.” “The Internees,” though more snapshot than story, provides a vivid and moving account of the women of Bergen-Belsen accepting boxes of expired lipstick during their camp’s liberation: “We had pink wax on our rotten teeth. We were human again. We were women.” Though some stories seem to reveal more about their fictional narrators than about the women themselves, this gives the collection a unified feel and helps readers see how little the public has understood about these women and their genius. Only “The Lottery, Redux,” a spinoff of the Shirley Jackson tale, seems obviously symbolic and mars this otherwise original and surprising collection. A collection of stories as beautiful and strange as the women who inspired them.
AMNESIA
Carey, Peter Knopf (288 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-385-35277-2 Carey returns to his native Australia, the setting of his two Booker-winning novels (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988; True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001), for this busy, history-soaked study of politics, family and computer hacking. Felix, the hero and occasional narrator of Carey’s 13th novel, is a legendary journalist who’s recently been disgraced in a libel trial. To redeem himself (and pay off his fines), he falls back into the orbit of a wealthy and politically powerful friend, who has a job for him: Write the life story of Gaby, a young woman accused of releasing a computer virus that freed inmates in almost 5000 U.S. prisons and jails. Felix was college friends with Gaby’s mother, Celine, and he’s being steered to find Gaby innocent, quite forcefully so—over time he’ll be sequestered in a remote hut and motel room with nothing but a typewriter and tapes of Gaby and Celine’s conversations to keep him company. That’s the novel’s spine, but it’s forced to bear the weight of a lot of back story, including musings on the CIA’s involvement in the disruption of Australia’s scandal-ridden government in 1975; the
MOONLIGHT WATER
Blevins, Win; Blevins, Meredith Forge (320 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-7653-1994-4 978-1-4668-6980-6 e-book After a burned-out rock star trashes his old life, he resettles in an unlikely community, hoping the desert air will clear his head. 98
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“Will, his mother’s protector, is nothing but a casualty waiting to happen, whether gazing at the world from a rooftop or tiptoeing through the mouse turds and ant trails of their house.” from if i fall, if i die
IF I FALL, IF I DIE
U.S. soldier and serial rapist who impregnated Celine’s mother; and Gaby’s awkward adolescence in the late ’80s, when she fell for a young man who taught her the ways of hacking, which led to some muckraking of a local polluter. As the title suggests, Carey is interested in the ways that we forget about the darker but influential moments in our lives, often deliberately. It’s a provocative theme, and Felix’s seen-it-all tone gives the political scenes an appealingly hard-nosed, jagged mood. But the novel overall is baggy, shifting from coder-speak to blunt dialogue to reportage. History is a complicated web, Carey reminds us, but this one is particularly sticky. A relatively forgettable entry in a top-shelf novelist’s oeuvre.
Christie, Michael Hogarth/Crown (336 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-8041-4080-5 Do we really have nothing to fear but fear itself? Perhaps—but, as the characters in Canadian writer Christie’s deftly written first novel instruct us, our worries, even though debilitating, may not be altogether groundless. Cairo, Venice, London, Thunder Bay: Young Will, artist and reader, is everywhere and nowhere. His mother is certifiable: afraid of the Outside, afraid of people, afraid of animals, prisoner of the deep mood that Will calls the Black Lagoon, yet a willing traveler of the mind, the rooms in her close-walled home named for faraway places. As the novel opens, the boy is Outside, tentatively ascertaining that it will not kill him: “He was not riddled with arrows, his hair did not spring into flame, and his breath
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did not crush his lungs like spent grocery bags.” That doesn’t mean he’s safe. Social anxiety disorder finds literary expression in Christie’s pages, which have all the bleakness of a Stephen King fright-night yarn but none of the inevitability; just when the story begins to resolve out of seeming hallucination, Christie conjures other tricks, writing both elegantly and with the innocence of a child (“they used to share bathwater but they stopped because of vaginas”). Will, his mother’s protector, is nothing but a casualty waiting to happen, whether gazing at the world from a rooftop or tiptoeing through the mouse turds and ant trails of their house; still, the greatest danger, as his mother fears, might just be that he finds out things he shouldn’t: “But now, given Will’s curious nature, he’d soon be retrieving painful morsels of her past like a terrier with a mouse in its jaws.” Reminiscent of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Christie’s fine novel is really a kind of spiritual cousin of Paul Harding’s Tinkers as a study of people who are in this world but not quite of it, whether ghosts from a grain-silo explosion or the people you see at the supermarket. Dark, threatening, dislocating and altogether brilliant.
SWEETLAND
Crummey, Michael Liveright/Norton (336 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 19, 2015 978-0-87140-790-0 On the small fictional island of Sweetland, just south of Newfoundland, a former lighthouse keeper becomes the last man standing when he refuses to accept a government resettlement package—much to everyone’s exasperation. Never married and with hardly any living kin, Moses Sweetland has spent most of his 69 years on the island to which his ancestors gave their name. Since technology eliminated his lighthouse keeper job, he has done a little bit of everything, like burying bodies and pulling a baby calf from a neighbor’s mistreated cow. He’s a sarcastic cuss, but his attachments—especially to his niece’s autistic son, who is as adamant about staying on Sweetland as Moses—are strong. In resisting the government’s $100,000 cash offer, which needs to be accepted by all the occupants to go through, Moses exposes himself to a series of threats, some of them grisly. But with all the memories the island has for him, and all the secrets there still waiting to be uncovered, he plans on being there until he dies. Canadian author Crummey employs a very different style here than he did with his fanciful, widely admired 2011 novel, Galore. Like Moses, Sweetland moves in fits and starts, capturing the present in patient detail and flashing back to dwell on milestone moments in his life. Unlike most novels steeped in rural nostalgia, it gets a kick out of contemporary life: Moses plays Internet poker; his niece is hooked on Mad Men. But the elimination of an entire community, and what it represents, is deeply felt. Through its crusty protagonist, Crummey’s shrewd, absorbing novel tells us how rich a life can be, even when experienced in the narrowest of physical confines. 100
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THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
de Mariaffi, Elisabeth Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4767-7908-9 In Canadian writer de Mariaffi’s debut mystery, a 1982 abduction and murder teaches girls growing up in Toronto how to be afraid. It’s 1993, and rookie reporter Evie Jones has been put on the research beat at her newspaper, the Toronto Free Press, for a new feature she nicknames the “dead-girls weekend section.” She spends hours in the basement archives, reading old articles and running searches on LexisNexis to look up infamous local cases of kidnappings, rapes and murders of girls, to support a story about women’s safety. Coincidentally, Evie has an intimate connection to this topic. Her best friend, Lianne, was raped and murdered in 1982 when she was 11, and the suspected killer, Robert Cameron, was never caught. As Evie gathers research to give her editor, she also embarks on her own investigation, trying to reconstruct Cameron’s movements. When she starts having doubts about Cameron’s guilt, her suspicions about the real killer make the past come hurtling dangerously toward her. Evie is a tough, wisecracking narrator worthy of the greatest private-eye pulp novels, but she isn’t hardened to the fear women live with. She can be alternately flippant (“Every girl I knew had a repertoire of raucous, horrifying rape jokes. One way to own it, I guess”) or terrified (“The safest place you can be is inside a shoebox, a tiny space that’s just for you”), but she’s always honest and unflinching. This world is not a safe place for girls, and Evie has lived with that knowledge far too long. With so many thrillers cheaply exploiting violence against girls and women, de Mariaffi’s (How to Get Along With Women, 2012) treatment of the topic, through Evie’s vulnerable yet empowered voice, is refreshingly reverent.
A SMALL INDISCRETION
Ellison, Jan Random House (336 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-8129-9544-2
A California mom with a son in a coma has a libertine past that’s come back to haunt her. Ellison’s debut novel is an emotional thriller of the Anita Shreve variety, with revelations that continue and relationships that evolve until the final pages. Annie Black is a lighting designer whose life has more or less exploded: First, she confesses to her husband some disturbing details about her youthful adventures as an office assistant in London and her recent trip back there. Three days later, an overflowing claw-foot bathtub falls through the ceiling over her store, The Salvaged Light, and |
“Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam completists.” from the hollow land
wrecks the place. Later that night, her son and her salesclerk, a young woman named Emme Greatrex, are in a terrible car accident; her son is taken by helicopter to the hospital, and Emme disappears. Not long after, her husband asks for a separation and moves out. She begs him to stay: “ ‘It was one night, Jonathan. It was stupid. It was pointless.’ He said nothing. Because the thing that had broken him was not the thing I was trying to explain away.” Tantalizing clues like this are doled out with a generous hand, keeping the reader from getting bogged down in the complicated chronology. Will Robbie come out of the coma? Why did Jonathan move out? What happened to the people Annie left in London? Where is Emme Greatrex? Ellison keeps the mystery going by switching among Annie’s life in London at age 20, parts of the recent past, and present-time diary-type chapters that cover the year following the accident, shuffled together in a way that fiendishly answers only one question at a time. Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison’s next trick.
An insider’s peek into hidden Chinese culture with a complex storyline, Gapper’s novel works on every level. (Agent: David Kuhn)
THE HOLLOW LAND
Gardam, Jane Europa Editions (160 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-60945-246-9 Two boys from different social classes become friends for life; their families follow suit. These linked stories from 1981 join last year’s reissue of A Long Way From Verona; both predate by many years the English author’s acclaimed Old Filth trilogy. Up in Westmorland, in England’s far north, farmers have worked the land for hundreds of years. By the 1970s they have started summer
THE GHOST SHIFT
Gapper, John Ballantine (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-345-52792-9
Gapper (A Fatal Debt, 2012, etc.) sweeps readers inside today’s China in his latest thriller. In 1989, a beautiful American woman adopts a tiny daughter in China. Twentythree years later, a young woman’s body is found in a pond in Guangdong. A party official known as The Wolf has summoned Song Mei, who brings along her partner, Yao, to the scene. Mei is puzzled. She’s training for a position in the Commission for Discipline Inspection, an agency that investigates disloyal behavior. Homicides are outside her realm of experience. But once she sees the body, she understands: The dead woman could be her twin. Mei, who grew up never knowing her parents, realizes she had a sister and begins to investigate the woman’s death on her own, with a few nudges from The Wolf. After discovering the girl’s identity and that she worked at a huge, secretive industrial complex, Mei also learns that a high number of suicides have taken place there. Soon, she meets Lockhart, a former CIA agent who works for the factory’s American owner, who has found himself growing less and less satisfied with the answers he’s getting about the company’s deaths. But Lockhart also has another reason to care about what happens at the factory, and it involves the mysterious dead woman and his own past. Gapper’s extensive knowledge of China and its inner workings adds authenticity as well as atmosphere to this tale of international high stakes and a people so accustomed to toeing the party line that they live in fear of torture and prison, having nothing in the way of a criminal justice system to intercede. Orphaned Mei, who grew up without the luxury of an ordinary home life, is a singularly courageous protagonist who does the right thing, even if it puts her own life in danger. |
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rentals for “incomers.” So the Batemans from London rent from the Teesdales. Things start badly. Mr. Bateman is a journalist who needs peace and quiet; the racket of harvest time almost drives him back to London. The mothers save the day, with behind-the-scenes help from their sons: Bell Teesdale, who’s 8, and Harry Bateman, a good bit younger. The kids hit it off from the get-go. Harry becomes so fluent in the local dialect that Bell teasingly reproves him, “Speak right, can’t yer. You’ll finish up a savage.” He mentors little Harry, showing him a secret opening to an abandoned silver mine, where a rock fall traps them. The lads get trapped again in a huge snowstorm, and when Harry begs Bell to save them, the older boy, in an echo of A.A. Milne, “felt very young indeed.” Familiar childhood escapades, yes, but Gardam makes them glow by seeing them through a child’s eyes, as she did in Verona. She gives weight to the tall tales and ghost stories of the region but is not above tweaking them mischievously. Only in the last story (“Tomorrow’s Arrangements”) does she fumble. A distant relative, a smooth operator, arrives from Brazil to lay claim to the farmhouse the Batemans still rent in 1999; it’s an improbable, large-scale development in a work whose success is tied to the small-scale. Winner of the Whitbread Award when it was first published, this is a buoyant collection that’s not just for Gardam completists.
IN SOME OTHER WORLD, MAYBE
Goldhagen, Shari St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-250-04799-1 978-1-4668-4829-0 e-book A movie and quirks of fate send strangers in all directions—but mostly toward each other. In 1992, the famous comic book series Eons & Empires is made into a movie, and its pull is irresistible to three sets of teenagers. In Florida, Chicago and Cincinnati, they make dates and ditch school to see their favorite comic on the big screen. From there, the book rockets into adult life, following some of those teens as they stumble through young adulthood and across one another. Oliver and Phoebe fall in love and then she disappears across the country; Adam develops from geek to movie star; and Sharon gets her heart broken then reinvents herself as a journalist. The characters call and write each other over the years as their relationships change, and much is made of their regular cross-country travels; the book features more airports than a James Bond movie. Goldhagen’s (Family and Other Accidents, 2006) writing is funny and honest and reflects well the oddities of modern America. However, at times the dialogue is so similar from arc to arc that it can be hard to differentiate them, which has the effect of making the stories blend together and seem a bit dull. And though Goldhagen 102
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cleverly winds the strands of each story around the others, the relationships between various characters don’t always add to other characters’ tales. Still, Goldhagen’s resistance to cliché keeps the story interesting, and it ends well. Suburban kids who matured in the 1990s and 2000s will find much to identify with, and fans of Rainbow Rowell’s adult novels will appreciate the realistic love stories. An original novel about how to let go of adolescent fantasies and make it to adulthood.
GIDEON
Gordon, Alex Harper Voyager (432 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-168737-2 978-0-06-209176-5 e-book A seductive work of paranormal horror that will draw readers into its cold and gloomy world. Generations ago, the people of Gideon burned a witch at the stake, and that decision has haunted the town ever since. Lauren Reardon doesn’t learn that her father was a witch of Gideon until after he dies, but she finds herself drawn, or driven, to go back and dig up his secrets, and some of her own. Her actions propel the present-day plot, but the town itself is the real main character—a small, suspicious community of souls standing guard over the barrier between this world and the next. Debut novelist Gordon’s witches aren’t glamorous, and they deal with plenty of dirt and blood and oozing gore. The twists and turns are entertaining enough, and there are a couple of strong surprises lurking near the end, but it’s the atmosphere that’s the real star here. Everything in Gideon is dark and damp and cold, and everyone is nursing at least one inherited grievance. In the end, the book is as much about life in a small, closed-off community that believes “blood tells” and character can be inferred from a last name as it is about elemental magic and the struggle between good and evil. This novel will thoroughly satisfy readers looking for suspense, horror and a grisly good time.
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“When Lincoln resurfaces later, the old friends team up with Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, not to mention that fight...on the decks of the Hindenburg.” from the last american vampire
THE LAST AMERICAN VAMPIRE
Grahame-Smith, Seth Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $27.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4555-0212-7 978-1-4555-0210-3 e-book Grahame-Smith (Unholy Night, 2012, etc.) continues his lunatic reimagining of American history after the death of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Keeping in mind that Grahame-Smith was responsible for the screenplay of his first Lincoln book’s awful film adaptation, this sequel is still better than his more gimmicky offerings (see: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 2009). That said, it pretty much offers much, much more of the same. As before, Grahame-Smith is supposedly writing about the secret adventures of Henry Sturges, a vampire who is finally revealing his tale. Henry’s story picks up the night of Lincoln’s assassination, as Henry turns Lincoln
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into a vampire in order to save him but loses him in the end. Later, Henry is told by Adam Plantagenet, a founder of the Union of Vampires, to seek out a mysterious “A. Grander VIII,” the monsters’ greatest threat and a figure from Henry’s past. Mostly, Grahame-Smith creates excuses over and over to mash up cool characters from history. In London, Henry stalks Jack the Ripper in the company of Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle. Remember when Nikola Tesla killed Rasputin with his secret death ray? (OK, that part was pretty cool.) These tales of twisted history are even accompanied by historical photographs, either altered or repurposed to serve the tale. When Lincoln resurfaces later, the old friends team up with Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, not to mention that fight to the death with the book’s villain on the decks of the Hindenburg. There’s an overarching plot about a long-term conspiracy—imagine one of James Ellroy’s novels shot through with a healthy dose of George Romero and you’re just about there—but readers who are jazzed by American vampire history probably don’t need the literary denouement anyway. A rather thrilling adventure spun off from a throwaway joke.
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MY FATHER’S WIVES
Greenberg, Mike Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-232586-0 978-0-06-232588-4 e-book Two weeks in the life of a man who caught his wife in flagrante delicto—or did he? When Wall Street executive Jonathan Sweetwater returns home early— an unlikely occurrence since he’s usually jetting around the country at the beck and call of Bruce, a hoops-obsessed CEO who likes to go one-on-one on private NBA-caliber courts—he hears the unmistakable sound of a tryst emanating from a guest bedroom in his Connecticut mansion. A glimpse through the keyhole confirms his worst fears—he sees the backs of two naked people, a long-haired man sitting on the Frette sheets getting dressed and a woman resembling his wife, Claire, walking into the bathroom. Without making his presence known, beyond leaving his briefcase in the living room, Jonathan takes off on another trip. A catand-mouse game unfolds: Which spouse is going to admit what to whom and who is going to do it first? Every time Jonathan tries to confront his wife, he is interrupted, in one case by his surprise 40th birthday party. Such a coincidence-dependent plotline threatens to grow wearying, until Greenberg shifts focus to back story—Jonathan embarks on an inquiry about his late father, Percy, a charismatic senator who left his mother when Jonathan was 9 and married five more times. Jonathan has the resources to investigate Percy’s serial monogamy himself while he waits for a private detective’s report on Claire. Greenberg is adept at description and dialogue. The basketball scenes, predictably for this ESPN sportscaster, are compelling—in one, Jonathan challenges Michael Jordan. Jonathan’s conversations with his mother, and the five other wives, in colorful locales—Manhattan, Chicago, Aspen, Nevis and London—are entertaining even if they generate scant insight into Percy’s behavior or its relevance to the burning question at hand—did she or didn’t she? There’s a superfluous subplot involving Bruce’s penchant for blackmailing employees. Ultimately, Greenberg paints himself into narrative corners where the only exits are marked with clichés. Much dribbling punctuated by a few slam dunks.
SECOND LIFE
Griner, Paul Soft Skull Press (304 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-480-9 A woman who knows far more than most about what lies beyond death must use her specific skill set to recover the body of a childhood friend. This highbrow thriller by Griner (Creative Writing/Univ. of Louisville; The German Woman, 2009, etc.) aims to mimic Cormac McCarthy’s severe (and quotation mark–shunning) style but ultimately falls somewhere between the gruesome science of Mary Roach and the grim despair of Joe Connelly’s Bringing Out the Dead (1998). The narrator is Elena Kelly, a coroner’s assistant in Danville, Kentucky, who slowly reveals her sins even as she attempts to right a wrong. When Lia Stefanini, her best friend from childhood, dies in a car accident—and is the victim of mistaken identity to boot—Elena promises Lia’s mother that she’ll recover her body so she can be properly put to rest. It turns out that Elena once had a lucrative trade in “corpse wrangling”—stealing bits and pieces of the human body to sell to unethical organ traders and the like. “Tibias first, then the fibula, long and lean and lucrative, and the spine, the spine, the golden spine, which, as you ran your fingers up the knobs of some stray companion, making your temporary bedmate shiver, made it nearly impossible not to calculate cost and profit, or how you’d peel their skin and bag it, since those long, smoked-salmon colored strips of skin came at such a premium, $1,000 per square foot,” Griner writes. Most of the novel plays out this way, with lyrical descriptions of the grotesque and the short, sharp shock of violence punctuating the scenes. Eventually Elena hooks up with Amed, a charming but ultimately unethical morgue worker, who leads her finally to the book’s proper villain. It’s an ugly concept that attempts to fold reportage into poetry. The result here is too dry to be pulp and too cartoonish for its literary aspirations. A near miss about the secret underground of body brokers.
CANE AND ABE
Grippando, James Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-229539-2 A stand-alone from the creator of adventurous lawyer Jack Swyteck (Black Horizon, 2014, etc.) that plumbs a Miami prosecutor’s nightmare when a serial killer strikes a little too close to home. The Cutter, as he’s been dubbed, has used a machete on four white women who’d dated black men, capping his gruesome murders by sprinkling ashes on his victims’ foreheads. So why is his fifth victim highflying black attorney Tyla Tomkins, and where are the ashes this time? These are big
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“Hannah bores down deep into her tiny cast’s secret lives, then still deeper.” from the carrier
problems, but Abe Beckham, a white senior trial counsel at the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney, is preoccupied with a more personal problem: how much FBI agent Victoria Santos, who’s coordinating the hunt for the Cutter, will find out about his own relationship with Tyla. Abe, who married his old girlfriend Angelina after his African-American first wife, Samantha Vine, died, already has his hands full with Samantha’s bipolar older brother, J.T., whose erratic behavior is constantly testing the promise Abe made his dying wife to look after him. Now he finds himself pondering possible links between the killings and the powerful Cortinas Sugar company and stressing out when Santos uncovers evidence that he’d seen Tyla a lot more recently than he’d told either her or Angelina. The pot comes to a rolling boil when Angelina vanishes shortly after capping a fight with Abe by throwing him out of their house. Has Abe killed his missing wife? Is her disappearance an attempt to incriminate him? Is Abe the Cutter? Did he kill Tyla as a copycat? And if he isn’t and he didn’t, who’s gone to such trouble to frame him? If only the answers to these questions were as good as the questions. As it is, Grippando supplies a satisfyingly wild ride through Presumed Innocent territory before the inevitable letdown.
THE CARRIER
Hannah, Sophie Putnam (480 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-670-78586-5 The smothering of a supremely unlikable woman provokes a conspiracy, a false confession, a hysterical outburst and round upon round of sifting through the evidence by DC Simon Waterhouse and his wife, DS Charlie Zailer (Kind of Cruel, 2013, etc.). Francine Breary was no prize even before the stroke that left her unable to move or speak. She’d taken accountant Tim Breary away from Gaby Struthers, the brilliant, wealthy tech developer he loved, and persuaded him to marry her, then proceeded to make his life miserable. So it’s no wonder Tim has confessed to her murder, adding parenthetically that he doesn’t know why he did it. Every detail of his confession is
RETRIBUTION
Hagberg, David Forge (352 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7653-3155-7 A former CIA director battles German mercenaries to protect members of SEAL Team Six. In this latest Kirk McGarvey novel (Blood Pact, 2014, etc.), a team of German assassins is targeting the 24-man SEAL Team Six unit responsible for the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Wolf, a police officer with Interpol, is hot on the mercenaries’ trail, and after he guns down the assassin who killed the first SEAL Team member, the CIA is brought into the fray. Elite intelligence officers inside the CIA piece together a theory that has the Pakistani government financing the operation against the SEAL Team as revenge for the unsanctioned assassination of bin Laden inside their country. The broker for this operation is a somewhat mysterious German named Pam Schlueter who, due to her former marriage to an abusive Navy SEAL, has her own goals of retribution to pursue. Into this web of intrigue steps former CIA director Kirk Cullough McGarvey, “Mac to his friends.” A former case officer with years of experience inside the agency’s black operations, Mac will do everything in his power to ensure the SEAL warriors’ safety. With the help of a beautiful CIA interrogator and an adroit computer specialist, Mac travels to Germany and Pakistan to find those plotting against his nation’s most revered special operators. The tension builds toward an inevitable showdown between some of the world’s best combat-trained soldiers. A believable story told in a clear and concise style. |
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“Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts.” from the girl on the train
backed up by the other residents of The Dower House—former caregiver Kerry Jose; her husband, Daniel; Francine’s caregiver, Lauren Cookson; and Lauren’s brutal husband, Jason. But Gaby, stranded overnight in Düsseldorf with an obnoxious stranger who turns out to be Lauren, hears her unwanted companion insist that Tim is being sent to his death for a murder he didn’t commit—then sees her escape into the night before Gaby can question her further. Lauren’s outburst throws new light on the man Charlie, watching from the sidelines, has dubbed the Don’t Know Why Killer but raises a host of uncomfortable new questions which are meat and drink to Hannah (The Orphan Choir, 2014, etc.). Before the curtain finally comes down, Simon will have heard unwelcome revelations from his boss’ daughter, questioned Gaby about who assaulted her moments after she walked out on her live-in lover, and contemplated a second body cooling in the morgue. Hannah bores down deep into her tiny cast’s secret lives, then still deeper, pausing along the way to cite or reprint a dozen poems, some of them clues, some not. Fans will love the endlessly knotty complications; those unable to commit their full attention to the problem at hand may well quit in exhaustion before the denouement.
THE ABDUCTION OF SMITH AND SMITH
Harrison, Rashad Atria (336 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4516-2578-3
Harrison’s (Our Man in the Dark, 2011) new historical fiction explores family and freedom, rage and revenge in the melting pot of post–Civil War San Francisco. Jupiter Smith left Col. Smith’s plantation to fight for the Union. The colonel raged, but he didn’t stop Jupiter. Jupiter was his slave, yes, but he was also his son, a connection Harrison slowly and elegantly reveals. What follows touches on themes from The Odyssey, Jack London’s Sea Wolf and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At war’s end, Jupiter returns to the plantation seeking his wife, Sonya, and child. Instead, he finds the colonel descended into syphilitic madness and Sonya gone west. Thinking it an act of mercy, Jupiter kills the colonel and sets out for San Francisco. There he takes work “crimping”—shanghaiing men and selling them to ship captains. Jupiter can’t find Sonya right away, but Archer Smith, the colonel’s son, finds him, seeking vengeance. However, war-wounded Archer’s addicted to opium, easily acquired along the embarcadero. Harrison’s clever with descriptions, capable of sketching a character with a quick sentence—“Large ears and head, beady eyes and too many teeth, he looked like the product of royal incest”—and his deftly plotted historical novel quickly becomes an around-the-world adventure. Sonya and young son Jacob are told Jupiter has traveled to Liberia, so they set out for Africa. Jupiter and Archer are themselves crimped and sold to Capt. Barrett, a China-bound gun-runner able to “slip through any blockade like a shadow.” Jupiter, Archer and Barrett are 106
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soon marooned on Tikopia Island, prisoners of the Kurtz-like Yerby, one of a plethora of characters in San Francisco, China, Cuba and finally Liberia who color the narrative, a motley cast ever conniving to betray, cheat or kill one another. A historical adventure that ends with a stunning revelation.
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
Hawkins, Paula Riverhead (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-59463-366-9 Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she’s only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins’ chilling, assured debut, in which the line between truth and lie constantly shifts like the rocking of a train. Rachel Watson—a divorced, miserable alcoholic who’s still desperately in love with her ex-husband, Tom—rides the same train every day into London for her dead-end job, one she unsurprisingly loses after one too many drunken outbursts. Continuing her daily commute to keep up appearances with her roommate, Rachel always pays special attention to a couple, whom she dubs “Jess and Jason,” who live a seemingly idyllic life in a house near her own former home. When she sees a momentary act of infidelity, followed soon after by news that Jess— whose real name is Megan Hipwell—has disappeared, Rachel is compelled to share her secret knowledge, becoming enmeshed in the police investigation, which centers on Megan’s husband, Scott. Further complicating matters is the fact that the night Megan vanished, Rachel has a hazy memory of drunkenly stumbling past the Hipwell home and seeing something she can’t quite recall. Hawkins seamlessly moves among Rachel’s present-day story as the investigation into Megan’s disappearance widens, Megan’s own life leading up to her disappearance, and snippets about Anna, the woman for whom Tom left Rachel. Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the harsh realities of love and obsession’s inescapable links to violence.
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RAIN ON THE DEAD
Higgins, Jack Putnam (320 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-399-17194-9
An elite British paramilitary unit squares off with a mysterious new alQaida master. Best-seller Higgins (Death Trade, 2013, etc.) returns with another round of gratuitous shoot-ups, back-room cloak-anddagger dealings, and hardened men willing to exchange death for money. With an eclectic cast of characters pushing their own agendas weaving in and out of the story, former IRA assassin Sean Dillon and decorated Afghan War hero Sara Gideon are the central protagonists once again. The novel begins with Gideon and Dillon as house guests at former U.S. President Jake Cazalet’s Nantucket home, and the action immediately takes off when the duo saves Cazalet from an assassination attempt at
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the hands of Chechen gunmen. While the Chechens don’t live long enough to do much talking, Dillon uncovers some of his old IRA cohorts providing assistance in the botched operation. With this lead, Dillon’s and Gideon’s colleague, the wheelchairbound Maj. Giles Roper, is able to connect the assassination job with the enigmatic new al-Qaida master, who may be operating inside the U.K. This shadowy figure is committed to killing the former president, and he even adds Gideon and Dillon to the list of intended targets. To carry out this operation, the alQaida master begins to contact experienced killers from dissident Irish groups and even a former member of the British army. As attacks and gunfights unfold from one incident to another, the underlying plans of this new version of al-Qaida remain unclear. Although there’s plenty of violence, we’re left with a rather flimsy storyline. A good read for those who want bullets without the complexity or distraction of a tight narrative.
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A PLEASURE AND A CALLING
Hogan, Phil Picador (288 pp.) $25.00 | $11.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-250-06063-1 978-1-250-06064-8 e-book
William Heming sells real estate, but that’s not his only pursuit in this dark first-person tale by English journalist Hogan. To say that Heming’s past was difficult is an understatement: His mother died in childbirth, his baby brother “disappeared,” and his cousin, Isobel, despises him, leaving Heming to be cared for by his aunt Lillian, who finds the young man repulsive. After one incident too many, he’s shipped off to boarding school, where his strangeness gets him into all sorts of trouble. Heming loves to steal keys and let himself into other people’s homes, including the rooms occupied by fellow students and teachers. But he’s not simply looking around; he likes to handle other people’s belongings, steal them and sometimes make himself at home. Eventually, he’s tossed from school and finds a job as an estate agent. When he encounters a rude dog walker one day, he decides to exact revenge. Since he keeps the keys to all the houses he’s ever sold, he still has the one that opens the man’s door, so he sneaks inside and leaves a “gift” that sets off a dramatic and deadly chain of events. In Heming’s character, Hogan has created a memorably creepy sociopath whose eloquent defense of behavior that most civilized people would find repellant only serves to illustrate the extent of his breaks with reality and, along with it, conventional behavior. Heming also hints at terrible past crimes, generously leaving the reader to fill in the blanks when it comes to both the mechanics and exact outcomes. Hogan skillfully builds a character that combines Mr. Goodbar, Hannibal Lector and Moriarty, but in doing so, he offers the reader little in the way of resolution. Deft characterization, but reading about someone this relentlessly unconscionable will make most readers lunge for the shower as soon as they’ve reached the final page.
ETTA AND OTTO AND RUSSELL AND JAMES
Hooper, Emma Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4767-5567-0
Hooper’s debut is a novel of memory and longing and desires too long denied. On Saskatchewan’s Great Plains grew 15 Vogel children. When Otto Vogel was still a child, half-orphaned Russell joined the brood. The Great Depression burned on, crops failed, and schooling was casual. One of the teachers was Etta, no older than Otto and Russell. World War II came. Otto left. Russell, broken leg improperly mended, could not. As Hooper’s shifting narrative 108
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opens, now-83-year-old Etta awakens, intending to walk to Canada’s east coast, leaving a brief note for her husband, Otto. She carries a bit of food, a rifle, and a note of her identity and home. To a Cormac McCarthy–like narrative—sans quotation marks, featuring crisp, concise conversations—Hooper adds magical realism: Etta’s joined by a talking coyote she names James, who serves as guide and sounding board. With Etta absent, Otto begins baking from her recipes, his companion a guinea pig, always silent. Soon Otto becomes obsessed with constructing a menagerie of papiermâché wildlife. Russell, shy lifelong bachelor and Etta’s wartime lover, follows her, finds her, only to hear her urge him to seek his own quest “because you want to and you’re allowed to and you can. You could have if you wanted to enough”—the novel’s thematic heart. Russell disappears into flashbacks. Hooper reveals more of Etta and Otto in letters exchanged during World War II, where Otto by turns is terrified, sickened and enthralled. Otto marries Etta on return, a less than perfect union shadowed by damaged Otto striking out at Etta. With beautifully crafted descriptions— derelict farm machinery as “gently stagnant machines”—Hooper immerses herself in characters, each shaped by the Depression. The book ends with sheer poetry, stunning and powerful, multiple short chapters where identities and dreams, longings and memories shift and cling to one character and then another within the “long loop of existence.” A masterful near homage to Pilgrim’s Progress: souls redeemed through struggle. (This review was first published in the Fall Preview 2014 issue.)
BLACK RIVER
Hulse, S.M. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (240 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-544-30987-6 Hulse debuts with a stark, tender tale about one man’s quest for faith and forgiveness. The initial question is whether Wes Carver can forgive Bobby Williams, the inmate who tortured him during a prison riot that left two of his fellow corrections officers dead. He gets a letter informing him Williams is up for parole just days before his beloved wife, Claire, dies of leukemia, so Wes is in shaky condition when he returns to Black River, Montana, site of the prison and home to his stepson, Dennis. It’s been 20 years since the riot, 18 since Wes and Claire moved to Spokane, leaving behind her 16-yearold son after a violent altercation between the two men. Hulse unpacks this back story slowly, reproducing the way past traumas shape the present. We grow to realize that Wes too needs forgiveness: for forcing Claire to choose between him and Dennis; for the silent stoicism that shut out even his wife; for the rigid, judgmental morality that keeps him away from the funeral of a troubled teen he befriends in Black River while waiting for the parole hearing. This last act prompts another angry break with Dennis, who has his own traumas to deal with. Wes is a |
hard man, yet we empathize with him because Hulse quietly reveals two defining, crippling absences. When Williams broke Wes’ fingers one by one, Wes lost his ability to play the fiddle, the great joy of a life haunted by his father’s suicide. Religion is no consolation; though Wes regularly attends church and says grace at meals, he struggles to truly believe—and is enraged that Williams claims to have found God. By making Wes’ suffering so palpable, Hulse makes it even more moving when, in the novel’s final pages, he achieves something he’s been seeking for a very long time: grace. Profound issues addressed with a delicate touch and folded into a strong story populated by wrenchingly human characters: impressive work from a gifted young artist.
DESCENT
Johnston, Tim Algonquin (384 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61620-304-7
THE RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY
Jääskeläinen, Pasi Ilmari Translated by Rogers, Lola M. Dunne/St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-250-06192-8 978-1-4668-6798-7 e-book “Secret members, stolen notebooks, pilfered writing ideas—it was all so ridiculous!” So rages Jääskeläinen’s exasperated heroine, and she does have a point. Mystery is the thing in this strange, dreamlike fantasy that explores the power of stories and those who write them and what happens when the buried secrets of an exclusive group of authors threaten to overtake the laws of nature. In the town of Rabbit Back, revered children’s novelist Laura White has taken nine writers under her wing as the mysterious Rabbit Back Literary Society, and she chooses Ella Milana, a young literature
Johnston tracks the dissolution of a family following the disappearance of the teenage daughter during a Colorado vacation. Grant and Angela Courtland’s marriage might not be rock solid, but it’s working when they take their two children, 18-year-old collegebound track star Caitlin and shy 15-year-old Sean, on vacation in the Colorado Rockies. Biking with Caitlin during an early morning mountain run, Sean crashes and breaks his leg. With no cell service and no help for miles, Caitlin hesitantly accepts a ride from a stranger who offers to drive her into town. That’s the last time she’s seen, and with his injuries, Sean isn’t much help in identifying her abductor. Time passes too quickly yet with excruciating slowness as the family tries, and fails, to pick up the pieces as the weeks become months with no sign of Caitlin. Angela returns to the family’s Wisconsin home, while Grant and Sean remain in Colorado, apparently in an effort to find Caitlin (though little actual searching seems to take place). Caitlin’s fate, or at least an inkling of it, is revealed early, deflating much of the ensuing story’s suspense. Sean strikes out on his own, going on an aimless cross-country odyssey before ending up back in Colorado, where Grant is helping an elderly man look after his land, perpetually hoping for news of Caitlin. Neither Grant nor Sean—Angela barely registers for the reader—makes for a compelling lead character, both laconic to the point of annoyance, and while Caitlin’s ordeal is chilling, it’s not enough to buoy this overwritten yet occasionally poignant tale.
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teacher, to take the coveted 10th spot in the group. But at the party to celebrate Ella’s membership, White suddenly disappears as her house fills with snow. Children in town soon report disturbing nightmares about White’s body showing up to read her stories to them, and Ella determines to use her ties to the Literary Society to research the true story of White’s life and the fate of the original 10th member, who died years ago. But the rules of The Game, a ritual dictated by the society’s members, require that every confession be a two-way street. At its best, the novel gives a compelling view of the strangeness that lurks beneath the most “normal” places and people, and it draws on elements of myth, fairy tale and ghost story to increase the scary factor. Sometimes, Jääskeläinen hits the right creepy note to make the hairs on the neck stand up, but sometimes the story crosses the line into just too weird. Has some Twin Peaks moments even if it tries a little too hard. Still, read with all the lights on!
Krentz, Jayne Ann Putnam (352 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-399-16513-9
When Grace Elland finds her murdered boss’s body, she comes to the attention of the police, a sexy new neighbor and an apparent stalker who seems linked to both this crime and a violent event from Grace’s past. After years of searching for the right professional fit, Grace has fallen into her dream job as the behind-the-scenes inspiration for self-help guru Sprague Witherspoon. Discovering his body throws her life into chaos, since not only is she suddenly out of a job, under a subtle cloud of suspicion from the police, and feeling the wrath of Witherspoon’s difficult and jealous daughter, but details of the crime scene echo elements of a traumatic brush with a murderer she experienced in her teens. Even more disturbing are the threatening emails she starts receiving from Witherspoon’s address and, in an entirely different way, the arrival in her life of Julius Arkwright, a successful businessman who realizes Grace is in danger and becomes her self-appointed bodyguard. There are plenty of suspects from Witherspoon’s staff, family and past, and the more Grace, Julius and the police dig, the more layers of misdeeds they find, including embezzled funds, con artistry and more attempted murder. But where Grace is concerned, the violence is escalating, and the events seem personal and vindictive. No amount of positive thinking or motivational affirmations can keep a determined killer at bay, so Julius will do everything humanly possible to keep her safe and put the predator away for good. And if she falls in love with him along the way, so much the better, since he’s already hooked on her. Krentz never disappoints, but this title shines with authentic characters, an unusual setting in the motivational business world, and a creative arc that ratchets up sexual and psychological tensions. An intriguing, textured mystery that perfectly layers humor, suspense and romance.
A BAD CHARACTER
Kapoor, Deepti Knopf (256 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 30, 2015 978-0-385-35274-1
The meeting between a restless young woman and a manipulative, worldly man in Delhi ignites a volatile, ill-fated love story, delivered with histrionic touches by debut Indian writer Kapoor. “The world keeps turning, but no one knows what turns in me,” reports the nameless female narrator of this short, overheated first novel, who opens with the announcement that her lover died when she was 21. Looking back 10 years later, the woman records her awkward early years, her mother’s death when she was 17, her beloved father’s abandonment of her, her relocation to Delhi to live with Aunty and attend college. There, she meets a man in a cafe. “I am pretty and he is ugly. And the secret is this turns me on.” Ugly he may be, and a liar too, it emerges, but the man knows Delhi inside out, has wealth, confidence and a wild streak, and woos her slowly but thoroughly. When the sex eventually begins, it’s intense and he’s in control. Kapoor boosts her slender coming-of-age story with flashes of Delhi in 2000, a place of economic ferment in some quarters, while elsewhere, the teeming centuries-old ways continue. Men’s predatory glances—and actions—are all around. Consumed by her passion, the girl allows her lover to dress her and give her drugs to sample. Later, after his death, she will sleep with strangers, taking coke to assuage her guilt at the thought he might have committed suicide over her. Yet their relationship had turned destructive toward the end, heralding the man’s mental breakdown. While the truth will remain ever obscure, the girl will eventually move on. Overfreighted with the angst of youth, this novel is at its most impressive in its impressionistic evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape.
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RADIOMEN
Lerman, Eleanor Permanent Press (288 pp.) $29.00 | Jan. 31, 2015 978-1-57962-383-8 Combining curiously disparate elements including radios, dogs, aliens and a religious cult, poet Lerman (Strange Life, 2014, etc.) pulls together a novel about a woman rediscovering how to find interest in her own life. Laurie Perzin is a middle-aged bartender who lives in Queens and works long nights at Kennedy airport. She plods through an unremarkable, routine-bound life, having no close |
“A slim novel that feels just perfect—each thought measured, each syllable counted, a kind of haiku to an independent woman.” from lillian on life
family and a well-honed skill of avoiding things she would prefer not to think about, including a strange childhood memory of a mysterious encounter with “the radioman.” When Laurie was 6, she met a featureless, shadowy figure while listening to her uncle’s homemade radio; after she spends years pretending the meeting was a dream, it sets off a sequence of strange events that drags Laurie into the company of a radio host, a psychic, an unusual dog and the leader of a religious cult that believes aliens—including Laurie’s radioman—are destined to bring humans to enlightenment. The novel begins slowly, indulging in numerous scenes of Laurie’s normal life that force the reader to accompany her through mundane commutes and dissatisfactions that fall flat as an effort to portray character and seem at odds with the many fascinating details that Lerman lavishes on radios and radio history. Once all the characters and elements come into place, the story picks up momentum and grows into its oddball components, though the only characters who develop a believable solidity are Laurie and a dog she acquires under strange circumstances and names Digitaria after a star that may or may not have alien connections.
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Without a streamlined plot to push it along, Lerman’s novel feels torn between relishing the fun of its more outlandish components and clutching at an adult refusal of wonder.
LILLIAN ON LIFE
Lester, Alison Jean Putnam (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-399-16889-5
In a remarkably confident debut, a woman’s life is revealed through fragments and meditations hinting at a life of great daring and unrealized dreams. The book’s 24 short, largely chronological chapters are titled like some kind of unorthodox primer—“On How to Study,” “On the Importance of Big Pockets,” “On One-Night Stands,” “On Looking the Part”—and indeed, Lillian holds forth, witty, crass and
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vulnerable, imparting the wisdom of a carefully reckless life. Despite being born to conventional Midwesterners in the 1930s, Lillian falls into a sophisticated life of love affairs and independence. After a couple of years at Vassar and polite Yale men, then a minor breakdown that sends her home to finish her English lit degree in Missouri, Lillian finds a temporary job typing a manuscript for a journalist in Germany. In Munich, she’s shellshocked by isolation and innocence, wandering around with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov to keep her dining-forone respectable. An ardent Hungarian named Lazlo forces himself on her, though “[s]uch things weren’t called rape back then.” Lillian finds permanent work at a newswire service, and her career takes her to Paris in the ’50s (and to the bed of Willis, a man of great taste and rash decisions), to London in the early ’60s (and a house with John, an icy columnist), and to New York in the ’70s (with Ted, her married boss, filling her every thought). Although she wanted marriage and children, a number of very bad and very good choices kept her single, though rarely alone. Unconventionally plotted, Lillian’s tale is filled with lush details and cool observations about the twins of female freedom: contentment and compromise. A slim novel that feels just perfect—each thought measured, each syllable counted, a kind of haiku to an independent woman.
be writing a novel?—eventually pays off in a best-selling nonfiction book for her and a satisfying solution for the rest of us. The Chinese box puzzle takes some getting used to, but it allows Margolin to deliver one of his cleverest cases while concealing his principal flaw—paper-thin characters—beneath constant shifts in time and case.
AGAINST THE COUNTRY
Metcalf, Ben Random House (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4000-6269-0
A boy’s school years in rural Virginia are marked by poverty, poultry, school bus torments and a brutish father, all of which would one day inspire him to tell his story with a ponderous postmodernist flair. Labyrinthine sentences and metafictional antics make it difficult to separate style from substance in this variously humorous and bilious first novel. The narrator looks back from a distance of 30 years to the time in the early 1980s when his father uprooted the family of five from town life and planted them in a ramshackle house to endure a country life that’s a darker take on the faux-gothic of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. There’s much more than a nasty thing in the woodshed. The boy endures snakes, wasps, ticks, bullies and frequent disciplinary thrashings. Two long sections concern the daily horrors of the “yellow beast,” the “yellow metal scow” that ferries him to and from school for frequent fights; and there’s a possibly symbolic tale of his chickens’ efforts to fly the coop. Elsewhere Metcalf focuses on the father and narrator-son. Along with his mean dad’s physical and psychological oppression, there are references to his former scholarship and serious literary interests. Bitterness and wit have a tug of war in this mock memoir, as when the narrator’s thoughts about his father lead to plays on the words “meaning” and “meanness.” But they also echo an earlier, earnest pledge to challenge his father “in the ancient art of meanness, to which ongoing contest I submit this humble text.” While Metcalf constantly impresses with his intelligence, his meta games and gnarly prose put such tough hurdles between the reader and this thorny parable of pain’s memory that it’s hard to see him winning more than a special, devoted audience.
WOMAN WITH A GUN
Margolin, Philip Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-06-226652-1 A haunting photograph sets an aspiring novelist to sniffing out clues in a cold case with roots in an even more distant past. Kathy Moran’s Pulitzer-winning photo is notorious not only because it shows a bride standing by the seaside with a longbarreled revolver in her hand, but because she snapped it the night the bride in question, Megan Cahill, was married and widowed 10 years ago. Palisades Heights investor Raymond Cahill’s murder has never been solved, and Stacey Kim, the hopeful writer toiling as a receptionist in a Manhattan law firm, is convinced that the photo holds the key to the novel she hasn’t been able to write. Before she can book a flight to Oregon to interview the principals in the case, Margolin (Worthy Brown’s Daughter, 2014, etc.) takes his time relating the facts—which implicate both Megan and her abusive ex, Oakland Raiders running back Parnell Crouse—from the viewpoint of Jack Booth, the assistant attorney general who’s been packed off to Palisades Heights to help Siletz County D.A. Teddy Winston handle the case. And, as if that weren’t enough, the tale delves further back to Jack’s first encounter with Kathy Moran five years earlier, when she was a young defense attorney he squared off against the time she defended Portland drug dealer Gary Kilbride on a murder charge while Jack dreamed about getting her into bed. Stacey’s improbable search for the truth—isn’t she supposed to 112
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“A Kafkaesque, imaginative novel of great necessity and power.” from arrows of rain
THE ALPHABET OF BIRDS
Naudé, SJ Translated by Naudé, SJ & Other Stories (336 pp.) $15.95 paper | $8.00 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-908276-44-5 978-1-908276-45-2 e-book Subtle stories with complex characters striving for connection amid the South African diaspora. This debut collection by a South African writer was hailed when published in Afrikaans in 2011 and here sees American publication with an English translation by the author. Some of the characters in these stories try to connect, but most are exiles or outcasts, “severed from their youth, from all ties and expectations.” Most are dealing with impending or recent deaths: of their mothers from cancer, their lovers from AIDS. And this—the human condition—is their real homeland: “The pain inside her is a strange country, an impenetrable language.” Two consecutive stories, “VNLS” and “Mother’s Quartet,” feature the same protagonist, Ondien, who abandoned her Ph.D. thesis to become a world-music performer, a white artist backed by two female Zulus, their artistry “meant to be subversive, an attack on the system.” It turns into something quite different, and the other members of the group, whom she calls “my family...my sisters,” turn out to have a different relationship with her as well. By the second tale, the group is no more, and Ondien visits her own alienated family, her siblings, scattered around the globe, suffering from collapsing marriages and careers. She returns to South Africa to find herself “a thief amongst thieves...part of natural life in this country, the instinctive processes sustaining themselves behind shiny surfaces.” Most of these stories concern subcultures—artistic, academic, sexual, racial, national—where some sense of belonging makes the characters feel that much more alone. Elliptical and ambitious, these stories communicate more through the silence of what isn’t said or revealed than through elaborate explication.
to a head. Representing himself in court, Bukuru steadfastly maintains his innocence, claiming the prostitute’s death is the latest in a series of covered-up rapes and murders by Bello and his task force. This, of course, is heresy, and the presiding judge orders all reporters to strike Bukuru’s words from their trial coverage. But one journalist does not: Femi Adero, the firstperson narrator whose charming self-deprecation and earnest doubt have seduced us into trusting his narrative reliability. Bukuru believes he now has a champion and arranges a secret meeting in his jail cell to enlist Adero to tell his story, saying he used to be a reporter “just like” Adero. If he had any sense of self-preservation, Adero would take this warning for what it is and flee Bukuru’s jail cell, returning to a life of conforming to the political status quo. But Adero does not. And giving voice to Bukuru’s story creates a larger narrative of whose life matters and whose truth matters—if truth even matters at all. What do you do, Ndibe asks, when you are faced with injustice and total corruption? When to speak will very likely mean your end? A Kafkaesque, imaginative novel of great necessity and power.
ARROWS OF RAIN
Ndibe, Okey Soho (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61695-457-4 The murder of an unknown prostitute rings in the 21st year of dictator Gen. Isa Palat Bello’s reign in Ndibe’s (Foreign Gods, Inc., 2014) fictional Republic of Madia. Bello and his rule are stand-ins for various real-life dictators and their 21st-century atrocities in post-colonial Africa. When the police detain Bukuru, the sole witness to the prostitute’s drowning, and accuse him of her murder, long-simmering tensions within Madian culture come |
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cancer twice before she even turns 30? She soon finds out that her cancer is particularly aggressive this time—it’s in her liver, lungs, bones and brain, giving her an estimated four to six months to live. Daisy immediately begins to worry, but not just about her impending death—she’s far more concerned about what her husband, Jack, will do when she’s gone. Who will pick up his socks, make sure he eats and take care of him when she isn’t around? She embarks on a seemingly impossible task—finding a new wife for her husband. Daisy begins evaluating every woman she meets and pulling away from Jack in an attempt to help him start a new life without her. Of course, it turns out that none of this is quite as simple as it seems. Daisy’s quest to find Jack a new wife may be a bit far-fetched at times, and the novel’s central conflict is wrapped up a little too neatly, but the emotion always rings true. It’s impossible not to feel Daisy’s pain, confusion and sadness as she thinks about what life will be like after she’s gone. Oakley also adds in some much-needed humor to lighten up the necessarily depressing subject matter. This emotional novel will make readers laugh through their tears.
O’Malley, Thomas; Purdy, Douglas Graham Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (400 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-316-32350-5 978-0-316-32349-9 e-book A dark thriller in which two misfits take on the corrupt Boston political system with revenge as their mantra. Boston, 1951: a ready-built noir setting. It’s gray and winter-cold, and men spend their time in grimy bars where drugs and violence rule. O’Malley and Purdy write cinematically, building the bleakness of the city and its denizens around Scollay Square into the fabric of the fiction, with the city itself becoming a primary character. “The radiators pinged and rattled, and the lower sections of the windows that looked out on the avenue were filmed with steam. From the windows they could see the vacant expanse that Scollay Square was becoming.” Cal O’Brien and Dante Cooper are childhood friends, each with his own poisonous issues. Cal has returned from World War II France with a limp and a drinking problem, killing the pain and the recurring dreams of death with booze. Dante is a junkie, spun out of control after he watched his wife overdose. Secrets and broken people populate these winter streets. Dante’s sister-in-law, Sheila, is found brutally murdered, assumed to be another victim of the Butcher who’s been stalking women in Boston and torturing them in an abandoned trailer. But when Dante and Cal take on the task of hunting the killer as a family matter, the facts veer abruptly to big money and an old neighborhood pal now running for Senate. Congressman and candidate Michael Foley had an affair with Sheila, and his brother Blackie, a punk gangster in the old neighborhood, cleans up the messes Michael makes along the path to election. When Blackie goes too far and murders Cal’s wife because he’s getting close to the truth, the hunt for a killer becomes all-out war. This is a bone-crunching, gut-wrenching novel that captures the atmosphere of a city in decay and its inhabitants. It delivers noir fiction like we always want it to be.
BEFORE I GO
Oakley, Colleen Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-6166-4 A dying woman tries to find a new wife for her husband in this sobfest from debut novelist Oakley. Daisy already beat breast cancer once in her 20s, but when she finds out the cancer is back, she goes into a full-blown panic. How could she get 114
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THE SACRIFICE
Oates, Joyce Carol Ecco/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-233297-4 A fictional account of the infamous Tawana Brawley case. Ednetta Frye has been searching for her daughter for days when a neighbor finds the girl bound with cords and covered in feces. The 14-year-old Sybilla is severely injured, and racial slurs have been scrawled on her body. Sybilla claims that several men—including at least one “white cop”—abducted her and held her captive while they beat her and raped her. But even before Ednetta hides her daughter from the police and social workers who come looking for her—even before they leave the hospital—the girl’s account seems to raise more questions than it answers. At this point, most readers will be thinking of Brawley, and Oates’ (Carthage, 2014; The Accursed, 2013, etc.) narrative certainly hews closely to the known facts of that 1987 case. But the author also uses fiction as an opportunity to interrogate the circumstances that made Brawley’s story a sensation and gave it meaning. Sybilla becomes a symbol of her blighted community, of black mistrust of a mostly white police department, of the way the larger public refuses to take an interest when a black girl is assaulted. The ultimate question seems to be: If Sybilla’s story is false, does that make racism— individual acts and structural inequalities—any less true? In order to offer this broad picture, Oates tells her story from a variety of perspectives. Unfortunately, except for adding details about themselves, the multiple narrators mostly just tell us the same information over and over again without adding nuance or fresh insights. And the shifts in point of view can be baffling, sometimes occurring within a single paragraph. This pushes the |
reader right out of the story, as do the author’s unpersuasive attempts to capture the speech of several key characters. Oates revives an old scandal without making it new.
BUTTERFLIES IN NOVEMBER
Ólafsdóttir, Auður Ava Translated by FitzGibbon, Brian Black Cat/Grove (304 pp.) $15.00 paper | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-8021-2318-3
An unlikely kinship develops in this strange Icelandic road trip novel. Ólafsdóttir’s (The Greenhouse, 2011) narrator is an unnamed, 33-year-old translator who’s married with no kids and a lover. Clueless about her boyfriend, her husband cites her frequent absences and lack of interest in motherhood as the two main reasons he’s divorcing her. That and the fact that he’s
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expecting a child with another woman. As it happens, her lover also dumped her just hours before. “Destiny isn’t something to be trifled with,” she says; “in a single day I’ve lost my home and my neat little past.” Adding a touch of prophecy to the tale, she has her fortune told: “There’s a lottery prize here, money and a journey. I see a circular road, and I also see another ring that will fit on a finger, later. You’ll never be the same again.” She actually wins two lotteries (a mobile “bungalow” and millions of kronúr), and after a good friend who’s pregnant with twins is put on bed rest with a broken ankle, she agrees to care for Tumi, her friend’s 4-year-old son, who’s deaf and has poor eyesight. Ólafsdóttir’s measured, often lyrical prose adds tension to the plot’s theatrics, as if life and fate are loud and humans must respond quickly to survive. Destination uncertain, the odd couple drives Iceland’s Ring Road, a desolate, unseasonably warm place (hence the butterflies of the title) peopled with rural folk who offer bursts of social commentary. Besides quick sex with a few men, life quiets down for the narrator after she and Tumi move into their countryside bungalow. Looking back while trying to move on, she does end up in love; it’s something
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“O’Nan has masterfully re-created the feel and ambience of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1930s.” from west of sunset
new, requiring immense risk. To end weirdly, Ólafsdóttir throws in 40 pages of recipes for things like Icelandic pancakes, sheep’s head jelly, undrinkable coffee and sour whale. Thoughtful and fun, if somewhat baffling; a novel of surprising tension and tenderness.
In contrast to a recent spate of historical novels written from the perspective of Zelda (Z by Therese Anne Fowler; Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck; both 2013), O’Nan (The Odds, 2012, etc.) places Scott back at center stage, with a sympathetic portrayal of a troubled genius, a kind but deeply flawed man trying to stay on the wagon while keeping the peace between his unstable wife and their teenage daughter. After a span of nearly 20 years, Fitzgerald comes back into contact with his first love, the rich, unattainable Ginevra, clearly his model for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, all while falling into an intense love affair with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist many years his junior. Sheilah is a fascinating character in her own right, a wholly self-invented heroine who could have stepped out of the pages of one of Fitzgerald’s own novels. O’Nan has masterfully re-created the feel and ambience of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1930s, where Fitzgerald is hired to doctor scripts that might never see the light of day and frequently finds himself defenseless against overweening producers and back-stabbing co-writers. Meanwhile, Zelda remains at the mercy of the all-powerful Dr. Carroll, existing at the center of an emotional tug of war between Scott and his disapproving mother-in-law. O’Nan has crafted an insightful glimpse into a sad period in Fitzgerald’s life, as he fades into poverty, drunkenness and anonymity among a cast of notables, after his and Zelda’s reign as America’s literary golden couple and before his resurgence into universal acclaim.
KING OF THE CRACKSMEN
O’Flaherty, Dennis Night Shade (336 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-59780-551-3 A New York safecracker forcibly turned secret agent takes on his corrupt bosses in this broad and brawling debut. Part alternate history, part Gangs of New York, the tale opens with unwilling “Pilkington” (i.e., Pinkerton) agent Liam McCool infiltrating the violent Molly Magees in Pennsylvania’s coal fields. He teams up with intrepid journalist Becky Fox (plainly modeled on Nellie Bly), and from there, it’s on to the stews of 1877 Manhattan and over the Mississippi into Little Russia for clandestine meetings with European-educated freedom fighter Crazy Horse and his associate Laughing Wolf (formerly known as George Armstrong Custer). It seems that ruthless Secretary of War Edwin Stanton has hidden away the not-quite-assassinated Lincoln and placed the United States in a “temporary” state of emergency. Now he is using fear and flag-waving to bolster public support for a war to reclaim the western part of the continent—and worse. For good measure, O’Flaherty tucks in encounters with the likes of Mark Twain and genius “Predictive Engine” designer Ada Lovelace as well as plagues of weirdly oversized rats and other colorful details. His doughty duo plunges through frequent hails of gunfire and massive explosions into battles, gang-led riots and flights in speedy dirigible Black Deltas. Yet more demolition at the end leaves the door open for sequels. As Liam remarks: “That ought to ginger them up.” He could be referring to readers of this rousingly violent, funny, sometimes shockingly profane opener.
GIRL BEFORE A MIRROR
Palmer, Liza Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-229724-2 978-0-06-229725-9 e-book A Washington, D.C., ad executive tackles what appears to be the 21st-century woman’s greatest challenge: learning to be happy with herself. Anna Wyatt just turned 40 and has a plan for her professional future—pitch an ad for Lumineux shower gel and hopefully the whole parent company, Quincy Pharmaceuticals, will come her way. This would get Anna out of Holloway/Greene’s pink ghetto of lady products to play with the big boys. She’s assigned illustrator Sasha Merchant—so stunning she’s confused for a model— and the two become fast friends. Sasha is obsessed with Be the Heroine, Find Your Hero, a self-help guide for women based on the plots of romance novels. They use the book as inspiration for their campaign, win over the Lumineux team and soon find themselves in Phoenix at RomanceCon, a romance-novel convention, where they will find the face of Lumineux from the male cover models in the annual pageant. There is much bicep ogling. Meanwhile, at the Phoenix Biltmore, Anna meets Lincoln Mallory: British, witty and finely attired. After a steamy elevator ride, the two begin a lusty affair touched with sadness; they keep
WEST OF SUNSET
O’Nan, Stewart Viking (304 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-670-78595-7
In his final, booze-addled years, F. Scott Fitzgerald tries his hand at Hollywood screenwriting, socializing with a colorful cast of characters that includes Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Parker, Helen Hayes and Marlene Dietrich, while his troubled wife, Zelda, languishes in a North Carolina asylum. 116
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telling each other they’re too emotionally damaged to have a real relationship. Anna felt unloved by her parents, and Lincoln feels guilty over his Iraq experience. None of this is very convincing, and too often the novel reads like a self-help book itself, lacking the kind of subtlety needed for complex characterizations. When Anna and Lincoln leave Phoenix to go back to their real lives, Anna asks him to meet her in a year. Will they wait for each other? Will Anna break the glass ceiling? Palmer offers a bumpy ride to a satisfying end. Palmer’s fine wit is certainly on display, but all the straight talk about female empowerment and self-analysis feels heavy-handed and clichéd.
THE MARTINI SHOT
Pelecanos, George Little, Brown (304 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-316-28437-0 978-0-316-28439-4 e-book Seven stories and a novella from the undisputed king of D.C. noir. Pelecanos, who made his mark as a guide to the lower depths of the nation’s capital and a writer/producer of the acclaimed TV series The Wire, has been as resourceful and inventive as his heroes, and this collection showcases his versatility. In the first and best of the stories, “The Confidential Informant,” a street-wise kid’s scheme to claim a $1,000 reward, set forth in scorching, slangy first-person, backfires fatally. “Chosen” chronicles the very mixed fortunes of an adoptive family whose youngest child is Spero Lucas (The Double, 2013, etc.). “String Music” toggles back and forth between Tonio Harris, who’s struggling to survive against an enemy he impulsively insulted, and Sgt. Peters, who’s struggling just as hard to protect him. “When You’re Hungry” shows a kid who escaped an impoverished background to become a crack insurance investigator sent to Brazil, where an alleged murder victim has been sighted, that there’s always somebody hungrier than him. A kid who’s dealing acquiesces in his childhood friend’s murder but still feels bad for the friend’s mother in “Miss Mary’s Room.” The narrator of “Plastic Paddy” recalls the dangers and dead ends he encountered in smoking dope with a faux-Irish friend destined for a “long fall.” In “The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us,” a young man who works under Pelecanos regular Nick Stefanos avenges a friend who tried to organize his fellow hotel employees, then wonders whether another employee who saw him on the scene will turn him in. The only real disappointment is the title novella, in which a TV writer/producer who sounds a lot like the author tracks down the men who killed his gaffer, an amiable doper, and sets them up for condign justice. The other stories all strike sparks as reminiscences of troubled youth recalled from the perspective of adult experience—or from beyond the grave.
THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA
Reilly, Matthew Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-4767-4955-6
Dragons, crocodiles and Communist Party bureaucrats abound in Reilly’s (Scarecrow Returns, 2012, etc.) latest thriller. “China does big better than any other country, including America,” says New York Times columnist Seymour Wolfe, one of a handful of Americans invited by the Chinese government to tour a new zoo, a massive project to rival the Great Wall in ambition and splendor. Also on the tour is CJ Cameron, who was a renowned herpetologist until an alligator attack left her scarred and wary of large reptiles. Little does she know how much she’ll need to rely on her scientific expertise when the star attractions of the zoo are revealed to be 232 dragons liv-
Available at lulu.com Soft Cover $ 12.00 plus shipping ebook Version $ 5.99 Contact Author Daniel H. Barrett at 606.593.5097 for bulk discount
B
riar’s Tale mixes down-home mountain humor with tales of coming of age in rural Owsley County, Kentucky. It explores the unique relationship between an avid outdoorsman and his bird dogs, hunting companions, and the natural world. Along the way, it explores ethical hunting practices and environmental education as well as how a dog and his master face the inevitable challenges of aging.
DB1002-4.937x5.5-KyBookFairAd.indd 1
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valley.” There’s little action in the first hundred pages of the book while the author tries to establish the scientific plausibility of dragons that have escaped detection in the modern world. The dragons are said to be archosaurs—with similar features to pterodactyls—that survived extinction 65 million years ago by hibernating beneath thick layers of nickel and zinc deposits. The Chinese have been working on observing, raising and training the dragons for 40 years, but of course, they underestimate the intelligence of these beasts, and things go horribly wrong. Despite the many encyclopedic explanations of reptilian biology and behavior, as well as maps and illustrations of the zoo’s various areas and control rooms interspersed throughout the book, no amount of plausibility can overcome the lack of character development or the monotony of relentless action sequences. Although CJ is a smart and brave heroine, the other characters are virtually indistinguishable from one another, and none of the relationships are deepened. This is Jurassic Park retold, without enough of a twist to make the retelling seem necessary.
HAPPY ARE THE HAPPY
Reza, Yasmina Translated by Cullen, John Other Press (160 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-509515-692-8
French playwright and novelist Reza, best known in America for her 2009 Tony Award–winning play, God of Carnage, offers 20 scenes to show the interlocking lives of various Parisian spouses, lovers, parents, children and friends. Although the title derives from a Borges poem, the intellectual pretentions do not weigh as heavily as they might; the scenes are brief, with limited punctuation and no paragraphing—as if to emphasize the evanescence and rapidly changing nature of relationships. No one is exactly the central protagonist here, but the opening belongs to the most frequently seen characters, Robert and Odile Toscano, whose push-pull of irritation and attraction during an argument over car keys represents the universal state of marriage. In a later scene, Robert grouses after the couple attends a party hosted by Remi, a lawyer who turns out to be Odile’s lover. Remi is acquainted with professional gambler Yorgos, whose friend Raoul played cards with Odile’s father, Ernest Blot, to help him recover from depression after a coronary bypass. Ernest’s sister, Marguerite, a Spanish professor, may be hopelessly in love with a colleague, but she seems like a strong woman compared to Ernest’s wife, Jeannette, when they clothes shop together after Jeannette’s 70th birthday party. And then there are Robert’s friends Luc and Lionel, who tells the other two the secret reason he and his wife, Pascaline, seem so devoted: Their son, Jacob, is in a mental hospital because he believes he’s Céline Dion. Raoul’s wife, Hélène, runs into Igor, Jacob’s psychiatrist, with whom she has 118
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an erotic history. And so the relationships unspool and reknot scene after scene to include a professionally caring, personally demented oncologist; unhappy mistresses; wives; mothers and children. The difficulty in keeping track of the names seems to be purposeful, a complex game of matching up characters in various patterns as lives sometimes crisscross, sometimes run parallel, until the Toscanos take center stage again in a funeral finale that brings everyone into new relief. Feather light but oddly compelling.
DON’T LET HIM KNOW
Roy, Sandip Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-62040-898-8
Roy’s mesmerizing debut explores the inner lives of a family of Indian immigrants who can never reveal their secrets. Romola Mitra doesn’t tell her new husband, Avinash, what she found in a letter addressed to him. It’s too late for that—she’s already left Calcutta for the small Illinois town where Avinash is finishing his Ph.D. Romola now bottles a painful secret that seems destined to explode. Instead, it fizzles. Flashbacks to Romola’s hopeful youth in India contrast with quiet scenes of domesticity with Avinash and their son, Amit, all three forming a close-knit family without knowing each other at all. Avinash, whose first crush was on his male barber, has resorted to meeting men in anonymous chat rooms and gay clubs, while his wife daydreams about the film star she might have married had her parents approved. Amit grows up and moves to San Francisco without ever knowing the sacrifices his parents made. In refusing to buck the system, they challenge the very notion of freedom. In Calcutta, the Mitra family had servants; in the middle of America, Romola is confined to her box of an apartment with no car and not quite enough English to fully express herself. She and her extended family find freedom in transcendent moments. Forbidden to eat sweets, Amit’s great-grandmother hides jars of mango chutney under her mattress to have when she’s bedridden. Her recipe—and the tastes and smells it produces—follows Amit all the way to San Francisco years after she dies. Romola’s adventures are the most surreal, including a harrowing encounter with a McDonald’s cashier, a tussle with a bodyguard at a funeral and a singalong with a drag queen named Bang la Dish. For Avinash, what doesn’t happen is almost as important as what does: At times, his indiscretion leads him to heartache or danger, but it doesn’t ruin his life. Instead, the truth becomes a canvas for a beautiful stilllife portrait—and a masterpiece at that.
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UNBECOMING
Scherm, Rebecca Viking (320 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-525-42750-6 The epilogue to Scherm’s debut novel would have made a terrific short story, or a film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. The novel that precedes it is infinitely less interesting, primarily because of problems with pacing. The story of Grace, a nice Southern girl who ends up planning an art theft from the local heritage house with the help of her too-loyal boyfriend, Riley, and his friends, is told in flashback sections that take too long to get to the point. The point is, of course, the heist, and though Scherm’s attention to detail is impressive— outlining just where Grace got the skills (apprenticing for an appraiser in New York City) and the cunning to pull off such a bold maneuver—the result is a novel that feels lopsided. All the
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buildup is meant to make us care more about Grace’s fate and the relationships among the characters, but it bogs the story down. When attempting to write in the vein of Hitchcock and Highsmith, authors should remember these masters’ precise economy of style. This novel is unsuccessful precisely because it tries to make the mundane part of the action, though it just acts as a counterweight to what should be the excitement of crime. Family lives, childhoods, petty failures and their associated feelings are supposed to give the novel heft, but they really just distract from the elements that are the most exciting, to both Scherm (her writing is best when Grace is at her most wicked) and the reader. More thrills and less ponderous thinking about thrills would have made this an impressive first novel. Instead, it’s a decidedly mixed bag, taking too long to gather the momentum it needs to succeed as crime fiction and not quite making the cut as satisfying literary fiction, either.
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“Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky’s coal country.” from the secret wisdom of the earth
THE SECRET WISDOM OF THE EARTH
Scotton, Christopher Grand Central Publishing (480 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4555-5192-7 978-1-4555-5193-4 e-book Debut author Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky’s coal country, 1985. With the small-town aura of To Kill a Mockingbird, a man reflects on the summer he learned that tradition, greed, class, race and sexual orientation can make for murder. Multiple stories are at play in the coal town of Medgar: Bubba Boyd, the boorish son of a coal baron, is raping the landscape; local opposition leader and popular hairstylist Paul Pierce’s homosexuality is used to attack his environmental position; and the narrator, Kevin, grieving the death of his younger brother, arrives at age 14 to stay with his widowed grandfather. With a mother trapped by depression and father subconsciously casting blame, Kevin’s left alone in grief ’s pit, and it’s Pops, a wise and gentle veterinarian, who understands his pain and guilt. In Medgar, mines are played out, and Boyd’s Monongahela Energy digs coal by “mountaintop removal,” pushing forested peaks into verdant valleys, leaving a poisoned landscape. Scotton’s descriptions of plundered peaks like Clinch Mountain, Indian Head and Sadler, Pops’ boyhood haunts, are gut-wrenching. As Kevin tags along on vet calls with Pops and befriends a local teen, Buzzy Fink—“fresh friends from completely different worlds faced with the hard shapings of truth and deceit”— Scotton explores both the proud, stoic hillbilly culture that accepts Paul’s “bachelor gentlemen” love and the hate-filled greed wielding the Bible as a weapon in service of ignorance and Mammon. And then Buzzy witnesses a brutal killing, a murder whose ramifications may cost Cleo, his brother, a prestigious college football scholarship. With glimpses of a mythical white stag and mad stones symbolic of the land’s capacity to heal, Pop, Buzzy and Kevin “tramp” to an isolated lake and find themselves targeted in a Deliverance-like shooting. Scotton offers literary observation—“a storm was filling the trees with bursting light”—and a thoughtful appreciation of Appalachia’s hard-used people and fragile landscape. A powerful epic of people and place, loss and love, reconciliation and redemption.
THE SASQUATCH HUNTER’S ALMANAC
Shields, Sharma Henry Holt (400 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-62779-199-1
Obsession, love and monsters combine to create a new set of family values in short story writer Shields’ (Favorite Monster, 2012) quirky first novel. Born and raised on the borderline between two states, Idaho and Washington, Eli Roebuck spends the rest of his life, and maybe even beyond, straddling two worlds. Obsessed with tracking down the elusive, hairy hominid—endearingly referred to as Mr. Krantz—who may be the Sasquatch and who wooed his disaffected mother away from her home and son in favor of life in the deep woods, Eli’s search colors every relationship and area of his life. Shields’ phantasmagoric and episodic tale chronicles Eli’s and his family’s near encounters with Mr. Krantz and close encounters with less-benign creatures including lake monsters, halfhuman puppies and bird-women over the course of at least 60 years. The porous border between the worlds of the mundane and the monsters is not as straight as the border between Idaho and Washington, and at times, elements of one almost completely obscure the elements of the other, as when Eli’s painstakingly crafted “life-sized” model of Mr. Krantz wreaks havoc upon a small-town parade and terrifies rather than edifies. A sly humor permeates many of Shields’ characterizations, but the pathos of the Roebuck-ian search is never obscured by it. A monster who undergoes laser hair treatments in the pursuit of love? Unicorns who bleed silver blood? Ape mothers and tentacled grandmas who complain about work conditions in the afterlife? Shields manages to utilize this mysterious and creepy cast of characters in surprisingly affecting ways to aid Eli on his quest. Imagine a mashup of Moby-Dick and Kakfa’s Metamorphosis (with a hearty dash of Twin Peaks thrown in), and you’ll begin to get an idea of what Shields’ ambitious tale of disenchantment sets out to do.
THE ROSIE EFFECT
Simsion, Graeme Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $25.99 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-4767-6731-4 First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes...a baby that Don Tillman, lovable genius, has certainly not factored into his current life plan. The Aussie genetics professor who warmed hearts in The Rosie Project (2013) succeeded in snatching “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.” But pragmatic Don thinks his situation might be too good to
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last forever. He’s right. Enter Bud: Baby Under Development. After 10 blissful months of marriage, Rosie announces she’s pregnant, uprooting the carefully balanced life they’ve created in New York. Complicating matters is a secret Don’s keeping from Rosie: A lunch with friends turned disastrous when a new acquaintance, a social worker, diagnosed Don as unfit for fatherhood. This puts Don under a lot of stress, which he tries to combat by learning as much as he can about fetal development. He’s as lovably frustrating as ever, handling this unexpected situation with utmost practicality. Rosie, though, is having none of it. She’s Don’s emotional opposite, dismissing Don’s suggestions and turning fonder of the f-word by the minute. After creating such a successful offbeat relationship in his first book, author Simsion chooses to dismantle it, leaving the quirky lovebirds unable to communicate. Really, it’s Rosie’s fault. She’s become entirely unlikable, failing to see that underneath Don’s unconventional methods is a man who cares. Instead, she finds him “embarrassing,” and it’s heartbreaking. The impending failure of their relationship feels sudden, most likely due to the book’s many side stories: Gene, Don’s best friend, is in New York after the breakup of his marriage. George, a rock star who lives upstairs, has issues of his own, as does a fellow pregnant couple with financial troubles. While Don tries to solve all these problems—exercising his winning analytic voice—his marriage is fading into the background, as is readers’ support of the Don-Rosie combo. Simsion tries to swiftly mend what’s been broken, but the happily-ever-after is lacking confidence. Don prides himself on meticulous consideration of all scenarios; not even he could’ve imagined that the sparkle of his love story wouldn’t last.
her hardest to avoid any sort of romantic commitment. Max’s tough past makes it hard for her to move forward, while Cathy is so hopeful that she continues believing in the book’s power even after her house burns down. The women’s stories can drag at times, and some are more interesting than others, but their friendships make up the heart of the story. Happy endings abound in this novel about the power of love and friendship.
THE LOVE BOOK
Solomon, Nina Kaylie Jones/Akashic (320 pp.) $15.95 paper | $15.95 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61775-317-6 978-1-61775-337-4 e-book Women find love and friendship with the help of a mysterious guidebook in this novel from Solomon (Single Wife, 2003). The four women who meet on a “Tour de Flaubert” bike trip in Normandy don’t necessarily expect that the trip will change their lives, but they end up forming a bond that affects each of them. Emily is a divorced mother and writer, Max is a tough personal trainer, Cathy is a teacher and hopeless romantic, and Beatrice is a 69-year-old cynic who has no time for romance. They seem unlikely friends, but one thing keeps them together—The Love Book, an instructional guide Cathy finds on a bookshelf. Although not everyone takes The Love Book as seriously as dreamy, naïve Cathy does, the book continues to figure prominently in the women’s lives as they attempt to navigate their own personal dilemmas. Emily deals with her ex-husband, her son and a pompous literary boyfriend, while Beatrice tries |
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MIGRATORY ANIMALS
Hale, learns that his beloved niece, Kylie, has gone missing in England, he quickly fills this void in Pike’s life and tells him to find the girl at any cost. Working with his partner, Jennifer Cahill, Pike discovers that Kylie’s disappearance is connected to a large-scale kidnap-and-ransom campaign by mysterious terrorists in which the military sons—and one daughter—of high-ranking American politicians have been surgically nabbed from across the globe. Although everyone in Washington is focused on bringing back the “fortunate” sons (and daughter) of America, Pike’s single-minded focus is on Kylie (who reminds him of the daughter he couldn’t save). The American government assumes the mass kidnapping is the work of Islamic terrorists, but Pike is convinced that the responsible party hails from the Emerald Isle. With his trademark intuition leading the way, he finds himself running down members of the Real IRA who are not only willing to dispose of the hostages, but are also planning to blow up one of Britain’s favorite tourist attractions. Like his namesake in the Bible (the Nephilim of Genesis), Pike is willing to become a giant monster, because only a monster can bring back the girl and bring these extremists to justice. Smoothly switching between third-person narration and Pike’s firstperson point of view, Taylor skillfully unfolds the story until it feels like you’re on a frenzied ride. A surefire page-turner that is nearly impossible to put down.
Specht, Mary Helen Perennial/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-234603-2 A group of brainy friends in Austin, Texas, struggles with the complications of adulthood in hard times. “Lying in bed, Flannery wished love wasn’t so hard on a person.” The reader wishes it too after sharing the troubles of the young climate scientist and her friends in this debut novel. As the story begins, Flannery is leaving her adored Nigerian boyfriend and life in Africa behind because her project has been shut down for lack of funding. Back home in Austin, she finds more to worry about. Among her tight-knit circle, most of whom met at a small engineering college with designs on being the “Harvard of the South,” little is going right. Her sister, Molly, is beginning to show signs of the Huntington’s disease that killed their mom and is alienated from her husband, Brandon. Molly moves out to the ranch where their friend Alyce has a fellowship to pursue her weaving; Alyce is suffering from a depression so severe that she’s asked her architect husband, Harry, to take their boys and leave the ranch. Harry and the kids move in with his business partner, Santiago, who’s hiding the fact that the economic recession has driven their firm to the brink of ruin and is also nurturing a hopeless attachment to Flannery. In addition to, or because of, their current problems, the characters suffer from painful nostalgia for their carefree college days. Into this tapestry, Specht weaves fascinating details on snowflakes, weaving, birding, genetics and engineering, plus a spoton portrait of Austin: “Tonight they walked past the bungalow with its garden lined with bowling balls; they walked past the purple A-frame housing a nonprofit shelter for gay youth, past the corner lot where a man lived inside a small historic church he’d had transported from East Texas.” A finely wrought if somewhat melancholy first novel. (Author appearances in Austin, Texas)
BRED TO KILL
Thilliez, Frank Translated by Polizzotti, Mark Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-670-02597-8 Paris-based Inspector Sharko and Lille police detective Lucie Henebelle, both shadows of their former selves following the abduction of the latter’s twin daughters at the end of Syndrome E (2012), reunite to investigate a bizarre series of genetically engineered murders. One of the twins is doing fine, but the other one is still missing and almost certainly dead. Single mom Lucie has quit the police force, but every time she hears a report of an unidentified child’s body, she races off in mortal fear to see if it’s hers. The psychologically rumpled Sharko, who had to be medicated for hallucinations and unwanted sounds in his head before the tragedy, trudges through his paces as a demoted homicide cop whose superior has it in for him. After the twins’ abductor is found dead in his jail cell, having ripped an artery in his throat with his bare hands, a connection is made between him and a female graduate student who was murdered in a primate research lab. Further ties are made between the abductor, who had a penchant for drawing things upside down, and a perfectly preserved Cro-Magnon man who left behind evidence of the same rare ability. Ultimately, a trip to the Amazon jungle is required to put all the pieces of the unsettling case together.
NO FORTUNATE SON
Taylor, Brad Dutton (368 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-525-95399-9
An elite counterterrorist operator races to save his commander’s kidnapped niece. With more than 20 years of experience in the U.S. Army Infantry and Special Forces, Taylor (Days of Rage, 2014, etc.) writes realistic military thrillers. In the seventh installment of his series, protagonist Nephilim “Pike” Logan has been released from the highly classified counterterrorism unit referred to as the Taskforce and finds himself without a mission. When Pike’s commander, Kurt 122
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This is the second of Thilliez’s novels to be translated into English (Sharko and Henebelle each has a series in French). Like Syndrome E, in which video images cause terrible harm to those who view them, the sequel is lifted by the author’s command of the sciences. Paleontology has rarely been this exciting. French author Thilliez’s follow-up to his international hit Syndrome E is nearly as good, leaving us eager to have the rest of his efforts released in the U.S.
HEAD FOR THE EDGE, KEEP WALKING
Tough, Kate Cargo Publishing (272 pp.) $13.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-908885-58-6
A woman confronts health problems and the end of a relationship in this debut novel. Jill Beech is still reeling from a breakup with her long-term boyfriend. She has the support of her friends and family, but she doesn’t quite know how to stop herself from moping over Angus. When a visit to the colposcopy clinic reveals abnormal cells on her cervix, Jill completes her transition into a full breakdown. She tries her best to ignore or bury her problems for as long as she can, until a cancer diagnosis forces her to finally confront some of her issues. But cancer isn’t the only thing she has to deal with. Between struggling to contribute at work, figuring out when to confront friends and navigating the terrifying world of online dating, Jill has a lot on her plate. The novel is at its best when it explores what is a central issue for many women—fertility. Jill’s friends either have, want or don’t want babies, while Jill struggles with her own complicated feelings toward childbearing. Jill can be a frustrating, but it’s satisfying to watch her come into her own and begin to take responsibility for her life and her choices. She’s a wry and funny character who will remind readers of a much more realistic Bridget Jones. A touching and comedic look at one woman’s journey to create a new life for herself.
A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD
Tyler, Anne Knopf (336 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-101-87427-1 Tyler’s 20th novel (The Beginner’s Goodbye, 2012, etc.) again centers on family life in Baltimore, still a fresh and compelling subject in the hands of this gifted veteran. She opens in 1994, with Red and Abby Whitshank angsting over a phone call from their 19-year-old son, Denny. In a few sharp pages we get the family |
dynamic: Red can be critical, Abby can be smothering, and Denny reacts to any criticism by dropping out of sight. But as Part 1 unfolds, primarily from 2012 on, we see Denny has a history of wandering in and out of the Whitshank home on Bouton Road just often enough to keep his family guessing about the jobs and relationships he acquires and discards (“ ‘Boring’ seemed to be his favorite word”) while resenting his siblings’ assumption that he can’t be relied on. This becomes an increasingly fraught issue after Red has a heart attack and Abby begins to have “mind skips”; Tyler sensitively depicts the conflicts about how to deal with their aging parents among take-charge Amanda, underappreciated Jeannie and low-key Stem, whose unfailing good nature and designation as heir to Whitshank Construction infuriate Denny. A sudden death sends Tyler back in time to explore the truth behind several oft-recounted Whitshank stories, including the day Abby fell in love with Red and the origins of Junior, the patriarch who built the Bouton Road home in 1936. We see a pattern of scheming to appropriate things that belong to others and of slowly recognizing unglamorous, trying true love—but that’s only a schematic approximation of the lovely insights Tyler gives us into an ordinary family who, “like most families... imagined they were special.” They will be special to readers thanks to the extraordinary richness and delicacy with which Tyler limns complex interactions and mixed feelings familiar to us all and yet marvelously particular to the empathetically rendered members of the Whitshank clan. The texture of everyday experience transmuted into art.
THE JAGUAR’S CHILDREN
Vaillant, John Houghton Mifflin (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-544-31549-5 Vaillant’s debut fiction follows Hector Lazaro from Mexico’s Sierra Juárez to Oaxaca’s el Centro to an old tanker truck poised to sneak into El Norte, the promised land. Because of his abuelo, an old man deeply rooted in Zapotec lands and culture, Hector carries an elemental connection to Oaxaca, a place somewhat Spanish but mostly Indio. But dreaming of El Norte, Hector’s father took his son into the U.S. for a few years, until la Migra found them. Home in Mexico, Hector earned his way into college, but his father kept insisting Hector head north, saying of Oaxaca, “[n]othing is changing in five hundred years.” Now Hector’s on the border, but it’s only because he tried to help his childhood friend Cesar, ending up pursued by the federales because Cesar has a secret. Now the friends, and other desperate migrants, are trapped in an abandoned tanker truck, “smelling like the intestine of some animal, slowly digesting us.” Cesar has a head injury, and Hector has a bit of water and Cesar’s cellphone with one American contact, AnniMac, but no signal. Vaillant’s tension-filled narrative has Hector relating his story kirkus.com
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“Walker’s impressive debut novel is a post-millennial noir thriller in which the grubbier impulses of two superpowers intersect with life-altering results.” from last days in shanghai
into a sound file, all while meditating on “the distance between Hope and God and Death growing smaller until it is impossible to tell one from the others.” As Hector tends to comatose Cesar, his deep and poignant story unfolds, covering his early life and his chance encounter with Cesar, whose research discovered clandestine information about KØrtez400, a GMO seed, which left Cesar pursued by murderous government bureaucrats. With superb minor characters like Don Serafín, “a rich and powerful chingón,” and Hector’s abuelo, a man who had his own deep secret linked to 1930s work with an American archaeologist, Hector’s reflections on Oaxacan culture fascinate. Vaillant writes with power and emotion, affection and respect for the Zapotec people and lands, a fertile place, where “the corn made possible everything we do and are,” now imperiled by international agribusiness. An eloquent literary dissection of the divide between the United States and Mexico.
THE DRESS SHOP OF DREAMS
van Praag, Menna Ballantine (336 pp.) $15.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-8041-7898-3 978-1-8041-7899-0 e-book
Four couples search high and low for romance amid the magical byways of Oxford, England, in this second novel. Twenty years ago, when her parents died in a mysterious fire, Cora Callaway (who was just a child at the time) shut down all her emotions. Since then, she’s felt neither fear nor anger—nor happiness, nor love. Her only wish is to continue working on the scientific breakthrough her parents had been about to announce at their deaths. Her grandmother Etta, who owns a magical dress shop where women can find their hearts’ desires, decides it’s way past time for Cora to learn to feel again. She works her sewing magic on her granddaughter and waits for the inevitable flood of emotions to arrive, especially Cora’s long-suppressed love for Walt, her childhood friend and owner of the bookstore where Cora has spent many hours happily reading science tomes, oblivious to Walt’s feelings for her. Walt, in an effort to excise Cora from his heart, starts reading Jane Austen novels at night on the radio, which brings him to the attention of Milly, a widow trying to mend her own broken heart, and Dylan, the radio-station manager who starts writing to Milly under Walt’s name. Meanwhile Cora seeks out the aid of police detective Henry to help her solve the mystery of her parents’ deaths, all while Henry pines for his ex-wife, Francesca, who harbors a deep, dark secret. And though Etta has set all this in motion with a few stitches of red thread, she can’t seem to work her magic on herself and her long-lost love. A few too many secrets and a murder-mystery plotline that feels like a bit of an afterthought can’t mar this brightly colored fabulist confection, more sweet than filling but still sure to delight those looking for a little fairy dust in their romance. (Agent: Andrea Cirillo) 124
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LAST DAYS IN SHANGHAI
Walker, Casey Counterpoint (250 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-61902-430-4 Slimy all-American graft oozes from beneath the economic aspirations of contemporary China in this witty, illuminating thriller. Walker’s impressive debut novel is a post-millennial noir thriller in which the grubbier impulses of two superpowers intersect with life-altering results. Among the lives being altered is that of Luke Slade, a casually cynical young man condemned to endure ridicule and abuse from his boorish boss, U.S. Rep. Leonard Fillmore, R-Calif., alias “Leo the Lyin’,” who’s dragged him along on some vaguely defined weeklong mission to the People’s Republic of China. On the second day, Luke loses the congressman, a professed born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic, in an all-night bender and must go in his stead to a rural province to discuss a major development deal. Somehow, Luke walks away from a meeting with the province’s mayor with a briefcase full of American cash. Luke suspects he’s been left “holding the bag” in more ways than one, and he frantically wanders from Beijing to Shanghai and back again trying to figure out what game he’s unwittingly playing and who’s pulling the strings. (It would also help if he could find his congressman, who’s still missing in action.) As if all that weren’t bad enough, Luke becomes the prime suspect in the murder of the mayor who dropped the bribe on him in the first place. The storyline grows murkier as Luke’s week from hell gets worse. But as is often the case with quality American literary thrillers, what happens is ultimately less interesting than what’s in the background; in this case, detailed and tautly rendered tours of both the smoggy physical landscape of 21st-century China and the even mistier psychological terrain of an aimless American forced to negotiate a clear path between risk and responsibility. Though its observations about China’s construction boom and the dismal state of American politics are as fresh as the morning news feed, Walker’s novel also feels like a disquieting peek deep into the coming decades of global economic upheaval.
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MY SUNSHINE AWAY
Walsh, M.O. Putnam (320 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-399-16952-6
The 1989 rape of a 15-year-old golden girl profoundly alters her suburban Baton Rouge neighborhood and all those who love her. “I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them,” says the narrator of Walsh’s debut novel, looking back on the floods, fires, mosquitoes, heat waves and psychopaths of his childhood. Probably so—but only a few can do it with the beauty, terror and wisdom found in these addictive pages. When Lindy Simpson’s childhood is abruptly ended one evening as she bikes home from track practice, so much goes with it, including the innocence of the 14-year-old boy who loves her to the point of obsession—and eventually becomes a suspect in the crime himself. He fills in the events of the next few years in a style that recalls the best of Pat Conroy: the rich Southern atmosphere, the interplay of darkness and light in adolescence, the combination of brisk narrative suspense with philosophical musings on memory, manhood and truth. All the supporting characters, from the neighborhood kids and parents to walk-ons like the narrator’s cool uncle Barry and a guy we meet in the penultimate chapter at the LSU/Florida Gators game in 2007, are both particular and real. So is the ambience of late ’80s and early ’90s America, from the explosion of the Challenger to the Jeffrey Dahmer nightmare. In fact, one of the very few missteps is a weirdly dropped-in disquisition on Hurricane Katrina. That’s easy to forgive, though, as you suck down the story like a cold beer on a hot Louisiana afternoon. Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of Southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member.
RODIN’S LOVER
Webb, Heather Plume (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-14-218175-1 Beautiful and tortured Camille Claudel wants nothing more than to be one of the greatest sculptors of all time—until she meets Auguste Rodin. Then she wants him, too. Caught between her relentless ambition and her searing desire for Rodin, Camille makes her way through 19th-century Paris. She’s determined to etch her name in history despite society’s belief that women can’t be artists, her mother’s belief that she should stay home and get married, and the dark voices in her head that grow louder with each passing day. Webb (Becoming Josephine, 2013) tells the true story of |
sculptor Claudel and her struggle to be remembered by a world that rejects everything about her. Webb’s research is meticulous, and she transcends the historical romance genre by describing the undercurrents of Claudel’s world incisively. She details the sexism female artists faced and hints at the personal toll of being driven by great ambition. Still, Camille and Rodin are anemic creations. Despite Webb’s adroitly turned phrases and rich material, her descriptions of madness and passion deliver no heat or sizzle. And while she captures the complexities and contradictions of her characters, she doesn’t offer any compelling answers for their behavior. Webb’s subject is fascinating, though, and readers will find themselves hunting up encyclopedias and visiting museums to learn more about Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin. An entertaining guide that will take readers in and out of the salons and studios of 19th-century Paris and introduce them to one of history’s most tragic and unsung rebels.
MOBILE LIBRARY
Whitehouse, David Scribner (272 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4767-4943-3
A precocious 12-year-old boy joins a cast of quirky characters in this surprising adventure novel. Whitehouse (Bed, 2012) fills this story with tropes from teen literature. Parents are conspicuously absent; books offer unique comfort; and adults are, by and large, cruel and all-powerful. Bobby Nusku lives with his abusive father and is frequently bullied at school. Since his mother left, Bobby’s primary pastime has been tending the meticulous records he keeps while he awaits her return. He has jars of her hair, bottles of her perfume and all of her jewelry stashed away in hiding spots in his room. Over summer vacation, Bobby forms an unlikely friendship with his neighbor Val Reed and her daughter, Rosa. Val, who works at a mobile library, invites Bobby to visit the truck full of books. There, Bobby falls in love with reading. He longs for the promised escape of a happy ending: “He wanted to be in a book, to have an adventure.” When vacation ends, Bobby snaps under the pressure of his harsh, lonely life. After a moment of aggression, he finds himself back at Val’s house. Rather than confront his wrongdoing, Val decides to give Bobby the adventure he craves, and the three run away in the mobile library. They soon meet Joe, a fellow escapee whom they find in the woods and invite along. The foursome grows predictably close as they drive across the U.K., avoid arrest and discover that “family is where it’s found.” The whimsical tone and fanciful flourishes—chapter names include “The Ogre” and “The Non-fire Breathing Dragon”—cross into the cartoony in scenes depicting violence and child abuse. The adults in the novel ask shockingly few questions before making irresponsible decisions that, while convenient for the plot, are highly kirkus.com
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implausible. Bobby’s desired happy ending clashes sharply with every foreseeable conclusion. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly bewildering to readers accustomed to novels that are grounded in reality. An offbeat narrative that struggles to gain traction with adult readers.
Winnette, Colin Les Figues (96 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-934254-56-1 When a couple’s young daughter vanishes, a carefully controlled way of life slowly and inexorably collapses. The opening sentence of Winnette’s short novel reveals the general shape of what’s to come: “We were on the porch most of the night before she vanished.” The novel’s narrator never reveals her name, and she refers to her daughter’s father as “her Dad” throughout. From this, two things can be gleaned: The narrator is fond of precision and she isn’t in the habit of divulging any information that doesn’t absolutely need to be divulged. Soon enough, the disappearance has taken its toll: “Her dad and I don’t sleep anymore, but we still get into bed.” As the distraught couple alternates between trying to get their lives back in order and making media appeals for their daughter’s return, clues slowly accumulate that suggest their idyllic life isn’t all it seems. In the novel’s opening scene, the narrator remembers her husband brutally killing a coyote; later, there will be impromptu haircuts, the destruction of inanimate objects, and scenes of introspection that turn ominous and violent. Slowly, the raw elements of a happy family are curdled into something far bleaker. Winnette’s eye for the media also plays a part here: The distraught couple seeks help from a series of talk shows and news programs. As time passes, the narrator’s efforts to get back on TV to press her case again, as well as her fixation on a police officer investigating the case, threaten the fragile strands of a seemingly peaceful existence. While there’s a contemporary urgency to Winnette’s novel, it’s the small details (and how they are revealed) that give this story its considerable sting.
RAGE IN PARIS
Williams, Kirby Pushcart (250 pp.) $16.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-888889-7-65 A raucous exercise in screwball historical fiction with some hard-boiled action blended in. Let’s see: A creole jazz clarinetist and one-time World War I air ace working as a private detective in 1934 Paris; a fascist French aristocrat and Nazi sympathizer whose closest aide is a belligerent African-American drummer; a trumped-up kidnapping with an oblique connection to the Lindbergh kidnapping that same year, which in turn will lead to a Nazi takeover of the U.S. And there are even more historically rooted whoppers in this satiric pulp pastiche written by a longtime African-American expatriate who’s borrowed some of his own real-life experiences and tossed them into this slam-bang vaudeville revue of mayhem, murder and cross-racial mischief. The gallivanting plot begins with the story’s stalwart hero, the aforementioned jazz artist/war hero/private eye Urby Brown, agreeing to help a shady white American businessman retrieve his beautiful daughter from the clutches of the aforementioned black drummer. Urby, of course, senses from the start he’s not being told the whole truth. (Is she really his daughter? Is he trying to set Urby up for the police?) In the meantime, the aforementioned aristocrat, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the detective, has his own suspect motives for finding the daughter, who’s nowhere near as helpless as she seems and who has sexual longings for both Adolf Hitler and her would-be rescuer. All the while, socialist and fascist mobs engage in bloody fisticuffs in the streets as Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Sidney Bechet and other real-life figures make cameo appearances. Williams is a first-time novelist, and it shows. The point of view teeters between Urby’s flashy first-person observations and a blander third-person narrative. Yet the book’s ragbag-deco milieu enhances its perversely anachronistic appeal.
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WATCH ME GO
Wisniewski, Mark Putnam (320 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-0-399-17212-0 Wisniewski’s novel, billed as a work of literary suspense, introduces readers to two people whose paths cross through tragedy and misfortune. Deesh is a black man awaiting trial on charges of murder. He isn’t crazy about his lawyer or his chances until a pretty white girl, Jan Price, comes to see him. Jan tells him she has information that can exonerate him. The story is told in alternating chapters by Deesh and Jan, who reach back over the past and recount where their lives took individual turns that ended with their intersection. For Deesh, it began when his old basketball buddies, Bark and James, took him to a place north of Poughkeepsie, New York, to pick up an |
old barrel that obviously held a body. After being paid for their deed, the three men drove to a wooded area and dumped the barrel, then panicked. They decided to run but gambled their pay on the horses to up their take and then Bark killed a cop while he and Deesh were fleeing. Meanwhile, Jan and her mother moved from Arkansas to stay with their old friends Tom and Colleen Corcoran, whose son, Tug, owns a failing horse farm. In her quest to become a jockey like her father, Jan starts digging deep into the racing culture with the result that she and Tug start to fall in love. Wisniewski runs into several problems in his approach to the material: Deesh, who is stuck in an interesting situation, is so stereotypical that readers will find him more caricature than character; while Jan’s jumbled story has odd interludes where Tug’s thoughts and feelings entwine with her own. The result: confusing, sometimes-lackluster prose. Wisniewski fails to take into account how modern police forensics would have implicated others and, in at least one case, cleared Deesh altogether in this very odd outing.
SECRET OF A THOUSAND BEAUTIES
Yip, Mingmei Kensington (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Nov. 25, 2014 978-1-61773-321-5
Set in 1930s China, Yip’s latest intrigue follows a runaway “ghost wife” as she finds a place in the world amid imperial loyalists and the rumblings of revolution. At 17, Spring Swallow is about to become a “ghost wife,” married to an unborn baby (he died during a miscarriage) and tied to her “husband’s” family. She runs away on her wedding day and is lucky enough to be taken in by Aunty Peony, who operates an embroidery studio. Spring Swallow lives and works there with the other sad-story girls, Purple, Leilei and Little Doll, while the imperious Aunty Peony teaches the ancient art of Su embroidery. They have a big commission from Peking and just six months to finish it, but Spring Swallow bristles at Aunty Peony’s rules—among them a vow of celibacy—and finds solace in climbing a nearby mountain. She writes poetry on the rocks and is surprised to find that someone has written back. She and Shen Feng finally meet, fall in love and are separated in short order—he’s a revolutionary on a mission. Meanwhile, Spring Swallow has been sneaking into Aunty Peony’s room and rummaging through her things. She discovers a shocking secret: Aunty Peony was an embroiderer for the royal household and mistress of the last emperor of China. After a series of tragedies, Spring Swallow is once again destitute but is hired by an embroidery shop whose owner wants her for a daughter-in-law. But her new husband is a scoundrel, and after a miscarriage (of Shen Feng’s baby), she is thrown out again, quickly finding a home with the Catholic missionaries and the love of an American priest. |
A runaway train of a plot, in which our heroine suffers four marriages, two pregnancies, three tragic deaths and too many coincidences in a two-year span to be believable, yet the narrative has a certain cheeky, boundless energy that propels the reader to a gratifying conclusion.
WILDALONE
Zourkova, Krassi Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | $14.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-232802-1 978-0-06-232804-5 e-book A paranormal romance among college students inspired by an ancient Bulgarian myth. Bulgarian piano prodigy Thea Slavin is hopelessly attracted to not one, but two young men, eerie but beautiful orphaned brothers who live in a mansion just off the Princeton campus where she is a freshman. Like their clear predecessor, Edward Cullen of the Twilight books, both men are secretive, controlling, possessive and egomaniacal, but to Thea, who says repeatedly how irresistible they are to her, their dark, brooding and mysterious traits outweigh their nastier ones. Thea’s personality, like Bella Swan’s, is mostly a blank slate; her desires shift any time it’s necessary to advance the plot or ratchet up the romantic tension. She seems to constantly be running to or away from one of the brothers, when not attending class or practicing piano (both of which are subjects of great emphasis in the beginning of the book but fade away without consequence as the love triangle develops). Initially, Thea’s mission at Princeton, aside from education, is to investigate the disappearance and possible murder of an older sister she never knew who was obsessed with the mythological samodivi, or “wildalones,” of Bulgarian culture—gorgeous moon worshipers who would beguile then destroy any man who came across them. Zourkova’s greatest strength in her debut novel is drawing parallels between the samodivi myths and the Orpheus story of Greek mythology and then bringing these elements to life on the Princeton campus. But the plot tries overly hard to craft reveals at the expense of natural progression or action, and the prose is crammed so full of abstract poetics that it obscures more than it illuminates. Passages on music are an enchanting exception. For those willing to wade through the dense text, there are many points of intrigue, but given the reductiveness of the love triangle, they may not be enough.
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his past, begs him to come to Washington, D.C., and help work against Idaho senator Rick Canart’s plan to track illegal immigrants with microtechnology first manufactured in China and code-named Shar Pei. Jake is only too happy to go home again when he gets a desperate cry for help from his friend J.P., who’s keeping an eye on the B&B. After sending a text saying she’s on her way home from Mexico, J.P.’s girlfriend, Esma, has failed to show up, and a search deep in the mountains almost gets both Jake and J.P. killed. Meanwhile, Jackson Police Chief Roger Terrell and his wife, Charlotte, have been invited to China to visit a theme park based on Jackson Hole. Its owner, Xiao, is a powerful man who holds them hostage to ensure the return of his brilliant daughter Meirong, who’d moved to Jackson and gone missing. Divya joins Xiao in pressuring Jake to find Meirong. But whom can Jake trust when the FBI, the CIA and the Chinese are all after Meirong and the dangerous secrets she holds? A majestic setting, plenty of action and a scary look at the possibilities of new technologies.
MYSTERY OF THE DINNER PLAYHOUSE
Befeler, Mike Five Star (266 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 21, 2015 978-1-4328-2964-3
A police detective’s retirement turns out to be a lot briefer than he’d expected. Retired for one week, Gabe Tremont is already driving his wife, Angie, crazy. So she suggests he make a long list of things he might enjoy doing and decides that a night at the Bearcrest Mystery Dinner Playhouse is just the thing to cheer him up for starters. Before they even arrive at the theater, Gabe informs Angie that the butler did it. As the play proceeds, the cast members raise their glasses in a toast, the lights go out, and Peter Ranchard, who’s playing the butler, is found dead offstage, poisoned with cyanide. Gabe immediately takes charge and, in the absence of any other detectives, agrees to handle the case. On stage at the time of Peter’s death were theater owner Mildred Hanson and actors Sophie Elmira, Col. Harold Coats, Arthur Buchanan and Clara Jager, and Mildred identifies a disguised audience member as Helen Lameuse, owner of a rival dinner theater. Gabe proceeds to interview everyone who had the opportunity to poison Peter and finds that they all had motives. Peter had been blackmailing several cast members, had had affairs with several more and was stealing prescription blanks from his psychiatrist to obtain drugs to sell. While working the case, Gabe continues to eliminate items from his retirement list, which is getting shorter by the day. Finding the killer unsurprisingly persuades him that retirement is not for him. Taking a break from his Geezer series (Nursing Homes Are Murder, 2014, etc.), Befeler introduces an appealing new hero while maintaining his quirky sense of humor.
RIVER OF NO RETURN
Bertsch, David Riley Scribner (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4516-9803-9
A fishing guide with a shadowy past is lured into an explosive situation. Jake Trent is a former prosecutor who once worked with a powerful group investigating and sometimes meting out punishment for high crimes. Now he lives outside Jackson, Wyoming, runs a B&B and tries to live a peaceful life. In his first adventure (Death Canyon, 2013), he teamed with park ranger Noelle Klimpton, but his cold feet put their love affair on hold. Now Divya Navaysam, a lover from 128
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MURDER AT THE CHASE
Brown, Eric Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8425-1
A mystery writer and an assistant literary agent delve into crime in the country. Donald Langham and his girlfriend, Maria Dupre, are at a garden party at his agent Charles Elder’s London town house when they meet Alasdair Endicott, the sickly son of manly mystery writer Edward Endicott, who’s just written his own first novel based on his experiences with ghosts. When Alasdair returns home to Humble Barton, Suffolk, to find Edward missing, he asks Donald, who’s worked as a detective, to come down. Donald and Maria, who have already booked a room at a nearby hotel, gladly come to Endicott’s Chase, where they meet former Hollywood star Caroline Dequincy, who’d like to be more than a friend to Edward. The police are called in when copious amounts of blood are found near the house. A walk in the woods with Caroline’s bloodhound turns up a body. It’s not Edward’s but that of a man who claimed to be the 150-year-old Victorian satanist Vivian Stafford, who’d recently held several séances at his former abode, Stafford Hall, now owned by the avant-garde artist Haverford Dent. When Edward appears, he claims to have been on a walking tour and to be shocked over the death of the man he had been researching for his next book. As Donald, Maria and the police struggle to discover who Stafford really is and why someone wanted him dead, tragedy strikes again when the Rev. Marcus Denbigh is killed by a giant orrery, the mechanical creation of Dent. Is it accident, suicide or murder? Donald’s second mystery (Murder by the Book, 2013) takes place in 1955 but reads like a country-house whodunit from the golden age, packed with fascinating characters, each boasting a motive for murder. |
“A not-for-the-squeamish murder mystery set in both Boston and Botswana.” from die again
A STITCH IN CRIME
Elliot, Cathy Abingdon Press (240 pp.) $13.99 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4267-7365-5 Co-chairing a quilt show seems like a piece of cake until disaster strikes. Antiques dealer Thea James may be fairly new to quilting, but she has the bug and is delighted to help out the Quilt-Without-Guilt Guild in setting up a show featuring both local quilts and the famous Wentworth quilt, “Larkin’s Treasure.” On loan from a California museum, the Wentworth quilt is reputed to hold the clue to finding great riches. As she helps prepare for the newcomer, Thea is upset that ever since her best friend, Renee, returned from her European honeymoon, she’s done nothing but make disparaging remarks about Thea. Thea’s co-chair, Prudy, and her twin sister, Trudy, are both expert quilters, but Prudy is not pulling her weight and often goes missing while Thea deals with all the little things gone wrong. When quilt expert Dr. Cottle, the judge for the show, doesn’t show up for a lecture, Prudy claims that his secretary called and cancelled at the last minute. Mary-Alice Wentworth either falls or is pushed to her bedroom floor and must be hospitalized. Her great-nephew, Kenneth Ransome, seems distraught, but her daughter, Louisa Wentworth Carver, is more troubled about a missing diamond brooch. When the time arrives to reveal the famous quilt, all that its display case holds is broken glass. The police investigate the theft of the quilt and brooch, but Thea feels obliged to use her insider knowledge to help solve the crimes before things get even worse. Elliott, taking her turn in the author’s seat for the Quilts of Love Series, produces pleasantly one-dimensional characters and a very slight mystery indeed.
RUNNING WITH WILD BLOOD
Finger, Gerrie Ferris Five Star (320 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 21, 2015 978-1-4328-2966-7
A tracer of missing children investigates a murder involving an outlaw motorcycle gang. Atlanta Detective Richard Lake asks his girlfriend, Moriah Dru, owner of Child Trace (Murmurs of Insanity, 2014, etc.), to look into the unsolved three-year-old homicide of Juliet Trapp. The spoiled daughter of a wealthy family, Juliet had a history of taking off on wild adventures, and her involvement with the Wild Blood Motorcycle Club may have led to her death. Although her body was found, raped and murdered, near the club’s hangout, the police have never proved anything against them. Juliet’s missing father, Sherman, may have been reduced to the remains Dru discovers have been stolen from a |
Chattanooga crematorium. Dru’s only lead in Chattanooga, a Wild Blood girlfriend, has vanished. Since Juliet attended the Winters Farm Academy, Dru starts nosing around there and soon learns that some of Juliet’s relationships with the faculty were problematic. One of her two best friends was left a paraplegic by a riding accident during a wild, unapproved steeplechase Juliet planned. The other, Bunny Raddison, proves hard to find. Lake and Dru get permission to ride Lake’s Harley with the Wild Bloods to a gang convention in Florida. After Dru fatally shoots a wannabe biker trying to kill Wild Blood leaders at a Blood funeral, the gang agrees to help find Juliet’s killer. Dru’s mission is complicated by ambitious FBI agent Grady, who has a snitch in the gang. Grady follows the Bloods to Florida and seems to be trying to roll their case into his big investigation of outlaw bikers. While Dru and Lake desperately try to find Bunny, Dru’s computer specialist continues to dig for background. When Dru is nearly taken down by hired killers, she knows she must be getting close to the solution. A heady mixture of thriller and mystery with so many red herrings that you’ll need a trawler to catch them all.
DIE AGAIN
Gerritsen, Tess Ballantine (352 pp.) $27.00 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-345-54385-1 A not-for-the-squeamish murder mystery set in both Boston and Botswana. The trouble starts on a safari in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Former Londoner Millie Jacobson narrates in the present tense about her vacation to hell, from which she emerges much the worse for wear—but the others on the trip don’t emerge at all. Years later in Boston, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles investigate the death of renowned taxidermist Leon Gott, who never met a big animal he didn’t want to shoot and stuff. Through relentless digging, Rizzoli and Isles uncover connections between the two events. Jacobson’s chapters are filled with fear and tension; she’s a city woman who quickly learns that in the African bush, “every creature that’s born will ultimately be eaten.” Long after her ordeal should be over, Millie tells her 4-year-old daughter that “the world is a place of peace and light,” so the girl “does not know that monsters are real.” Oh, but Millie knows. Sitting at her computer one evening, “I click the mouse. I might as well have lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite.” Fans of the Rizzoli and Isles novels already know what to expect: a pair of smart women underestimated by some of their colleagues and with a knack for being where the gore is. They are sympathetic pros with problems of their own—Isles’ mother is dying in prison, and Rizzoli’s mom is “psychotically depressed.” The characters are strong—who can’t be intrigued by a name like Johnny Posthumus?—and the plot is tight and believable, except for the Boston Police Department’s springing for round-trip flights to and from Cape Town, South Africa. Readers may have to kirkus.com
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suspend disbelief on that detail, but the other seemingly disparate pieces fit together well. Mystery lovers not familiar with the author’s work should brace themselves, because they might trip over a bucket of entrails. But they will also find a terrific storyteller.
THE SOUL OF DISCRETION
Hill, Susan Overlook (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-1-4683-0145-8
Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler goes undercover in a highly secure prison to gather evidence in a child prostitution case in Hill’s latest series installment (A Question of Identity, 2012, etc.). Despite its quaint exterior, the fictional English town of Lafferton holds dark secrets. Approached by his superiors because of his previous experience with violent crime, Serrailler—who bypasses the gruff and crusty detective stereotype and ends up being simply unpleasant—agrees to pose as a sex offender in order to tease information out of Will Fernley, the key player in an Internet child pornography ring. Fernley is housed in one of the U.K.’s “therapeutic communities” rather than a typical high-security facility like Dartmoor; Stitchford aims to help the worst of the worst come to grips with their crimes through intense therapy. As Johnno Miles, Serrailler pretends to bare his soul and so must also listen to explicit stories of the other men’s heinous acts, primarily against women and children. He gains Fernley’s trust and makes the potentially deadly decision to follow the posh yet slimy man when he escapes from Stichford. On the outside, Serrailler’s girlfriend, Rachel—though it’s unclear why she’s attracted to a man who doesn’t seem to care about her one way or another—is clueless about the dangerous, top-secret mission, as is Serrailler’s sister, Dr. Cat Deerbon, who knows only that Serrailler will surface when the job’s done. Graphic depictions of sexual violence against children may turn the stomachs of even the most seasoned crimefiction fans, and for a hero, Serrailler is decidedly unlikable.
Inbinder, Gary Pegasus Crime (352 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-60598-647-0
A police detective uses science to solve a grisly murder in 19th-century Paris. In 1889, Boulevard de Clichy feels like the center of the world. Crowds of tourists already in Paris for the Universal Exposition to marvel by day at sights like M. Eiffel’s wondrous tower flock at night to Montmartre to watch the scandalous new dancers at the Moulin Rouge , where Virginie Ménard dances cancan under the watchful eye of Maurice de Toulouse-Lautrec. In his atelier, the artist has seen more of the young dancer than the glimpse of undies she flashes in the club. Nevertheless, Lautrec never misses a chance to sketch one of his favorite models. So when Virginie goes missing, he’s one of the first to notice. Not far behind is American artist Marcia Brownlow, whose fascination with Virginie enrages her lover, heiress Betsy Endicott. But the police are as indifferent to the disappearance as the artists are concerned—until the headless body of a young woman is found in a cesspit. Old-school detectives like Inspector Rousseau rely on a network of snitches. But Chief Inspector Féraud has faith in modern young inspector Achille Lefebvre. And Lefebvre has faith in evidence. With the help of crime lab pathologist Alphonse Bertillon, Lefebvre examines the crime scene, casting footprints in the mud and dusting for fingerprints. As the yellow press blames the crime on a conspiracy of Jewish bankers and Rousseau takes aim at the art community, Lefebvre seeks to unmask the real killer, who has autographed his work as surely as Lautrec signs his. Essayist Inbinder’s mystery debut shows Montmartre at its atmospheric best—inhabited by characters as diverse and devious as Paris can offer.
WHEN THE DEAD AWAKEN
Jacobsen, Steffen Quercus (336 pp.) $26.99 | $26.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62365-868-7 978-1-62365-902-8 e-book Danish surgeon Jacobsen’s third novel, and his first to be translated into English, sets a Naples prosecutor determined to avenge her father against the criminal Camorra that killed him and an awful lot of other people. When a crane drops a container that’s about to be loaded onto a Mediterranean-bound ship, the crane operator is so frightened of the consequences that he jumps to his death. And no wonder, for the container, burst open, turns out to hold bag after bag of human remains, and the accident’s taken place right under the eyes of Camorra assassin Urs Savelli. Sabrina
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D’Avalos, the assistant public prosecutor assigned to identify all the corpses from F to L, tells her boss, Federico Renda, that she’s linked two of the victims, eight-months-pregnant attorney Lucia Forlani and her son, Salvatore, to the rash of violence back in 2007 that killed her own father, Gen. Baron Agostino D’Avalos—who had placed mother and son in the witness protection program—and consigned Renda to a wheelchair. Lucia’s husband, Giulio, was murdered the same week she disappeared. So were virtually all the top scientists working with him at Nanometric, a company whose proprietary technology sought to prevent forgeries from passing themselves off as the real things. Since Camorra’s principal source of income is from designer knockoffs and fakes, it’s assumed that the murders are the work of Savelli, their most active killer, and the woman known only as L’Artista, who’s so expert that it’s a rare privilege to be killed by her. It doesn’t matter to Sabrina that Renda’s not that interested; she’s motivated enough for the whole office— and, it turns out, violent enough as well. Jacobsen isn’t afraid of clichés, and genre fans will find plenty of familiar character types and situations here, along with an impressive set of variations on the motif of raising the dead, none of them pleasant.
DISCLOSURES
James, Bill Creme de la Crime (208 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-78029-065-2 Full disclosure: DCS Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles’ 31st case contains very little Harpur and not much more Iles. Instead, James (Play Dead, 2013, etc.) finds Ralph W. Ember, a crook who’s been at the game so long he’s a local institution, and ACC Esther Davidson, both reminiscing about the decades-old Mondial-Trave incident that went a long way toward making them both what they are. Having recently thrown in his lot with the Pasque Uno drug firm, Ralph is one of four men sent to reconnoiter Mondial Street and Trave Square, the capital of an area whose jurisdiction is disputed by the rival Opal Render. Distracted and bullied by Pasque Uno’s Quentin Stayley, who keeps referring to him—as many later associates will—as Panicking Ralph, he decides he’d better return to the place on his own for another look. This time he spots Esther, who’s been tipped off about the coming battle and plans to introduce some armed officers from the Met to alter its course to her own ends. After wrestling manfully with his conscience about what to tell whom, Ralph reports his discovery to Pasque Uno leader Dale “Gladhand” Hoskins. His warnings are brushed off, and bloodshed ensues. Most writers would limit this Kabuki flashback to the opening chapter or two; James allows it three-quarters of his tale, with a scant 50 pages devoted to Harpur and Iles’ present-day attempt to close the books on the incident for good. |
Not much more plot than a guide to Zen, but dozens of wonderfully precise passages distinguishing merely philistine lawbreakers like Stayley (“Il y a des lacunes, as the French would say”) from truly clueless hopefuls like Panicking Ralph (“he thought the people he was with...would be familiar with the lagoons”).
SWIMMING IN THE SHADOWS
Janes, Diane Severn House (256 pp.) $29.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8431-2
A runaway wife finds her new life threatened when the murder of a schoolgirl brings the police to her doorstep. Jennifer Reynolds goes from the frying pan straight into the fire. She leaves her stern, unloving parents for Alan, an antiques dealer whose trinket-filled living quarters seem at first a refuge from her parents’ obsessively clean house. But Alan treats Jennifer like a backward child, missing no chance to belittle her. So one day, simple Jennifer simply takes off. A series of dead-end jobs under a string of temporary identities keeps body and soul together until the death of an old school acquaintance, Susan McCarthy, gives Jennifer the chance at something more permanent. Since Susan died in France, no death certificate has been recorded in England. Armed with enough vital statistics to apply for a birth certificate, Jennifer becomes Susan. By the time she reaches Lasthwaite, a resurrected Susan McCarthy has a car, bank accounts and enough work history to apply for a real job as manager of Lasthwaite Health Centre. She also finds real romance with kind, solid Rob Dugdale, a teacher at a local secondary school. Susan is hesitant about accepting Rob’s proposal—after all, as Jennifer, she already has a husband. But she longs for a real home and family. She’s already on edge when a local television station airs Disappeared!, which tells the story of three unsolved missing persons cases, including Jennifer’s. But the murder of Rob’s student Julie Peacock threatens to push her over the edge—especially when the police learn that Rob was the last person to see Julie alive. Janes (Why Didn’t You Come for Me?, 2011) sets up a clever puzzle only to trash it with a solution as improbable as it is long-winded.
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“Members of a death club each hoping to be the last one standing meet gruesome ends.” from the curse of the house of foskett
THE CURSE OF THE HOUSE OF FOSKETT
Getty, into the case of Christopher Drayton, who fell, jumped or was pushed off a cliff. They visit Drayton’s famous neighbor, writer Nathan Clare, who is Esa’s lifelong friend. Clare longs to renew a relationship that was destroyed by Esa’s former partner, a siren who bewitched Clare into testifying against Esa in a complaint that almost ended his career. Rachel has secrets of her own. She still lives at home with her abusive excop father and her meek mother in the hope that the beloved brother who left home at 15 will seek her out. The older daughter of Drayton’s fiancee, mercenary Melanie Blessant, hated Drayton and hoped she and her sister could live with their father if her mother remarried. After dozens of letters with horrifying stories of rape and murder are found in Drayton’s safe, Esa admits to Rachel that Drayton is probably Dražen ´ a former lieutenant colonel in the Bosnian Serb Army Krstic, and the instigator of horrific war crimes. Paley wants the story kept quiet until they positively identify Krstic´ and learn the manner of his death. The scandal of U.N. forces standing by while thousands of Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered is intensified by the possibility that Krstic´ entered Canada with a fortune in blood money. Khan’s stunning debut is a poignant, elegantly written mystery laced with complex characters who force readers to join them in dealing with ugly truths.
Kasasian, M.R.C. Pegasus Crime (320 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 14, 2015 978-1-60598-669-2
Members of a death club each hoping to be the last one standing meet gruesome ends, and only Sidney Grice and his ward can stop the slaughter. Sidney Grice is in a funk, and so is his career as a personal detective thanks to bad press about his last case. His young ward, March Middleton, is concerned even though she has no great affection for her arrogant, humorless, one-eyed guardian. He constantly belittles her and ignores her well-grounded retaliation, and he’s no more polite to a potential client. Horatio Green, one of seven members of the Last Death Club, reports that barely a week after the group’s formation, one of its cohort is dead. The last surviving member will inherit £70,000, plus accrued interest, and Green proposes that Grice will get £7,000 if he investigates the death of each member as it occurs, to be sure there’s no foul play. Grice doesn’t have to wait long to get to work: Green dies of prussic acid poisoning at the detective’s feet. Frustrated by an indifferent inspector, Grice and March investigate Green’s dental surgeon, who almost immediately dies. Visits to the taxidermy studio of the first victim, the homes of the reclusive Baroness Foskett and the other club members, including the improbably named Prometheus Perseus Piggety, are the next steps in a maze of greed, cruelty and vengeance. Grice, with his oozing eye socket, and March, with her love of cigarettes, gin flasks and occasional bets, are hardly the typical crime-solving duo. All they seem to share is their sadness about lost loves—and the flicker of hope for happiness with new partners doesn’t do much to offset the horrors of their investigation. Kasasian’s sequel is as witty and imaginative as his debut (The Mangle Street Murders, 2014), if you like your humor dark and your delights grotesque. Animal lovers may not be the only readers taking refuge in Beatrix Potter if they make it past the first few chapters.
THE EVIL DEEDS WE DO
Levinson, Robert S. Five Star (342 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 21, 2015 978-1-4328-2967-4
A relentless prosecutor, a power-loving political aide and a desperate record producer form a dangerous triangle. Lainie Davies Gardner is a former street urchin who made it big, married a minor mobster and saw him shot to death. Though she had been indicted on 24 counts of unlawful business activities along with her husband, the charges were dropped after his murder. Once she was president of Blue Pacific Records and lived in a big house in Encino, California; now she lives in a small apartment and tries to keep her teenage daughter on a straighter path than she was on at that age. When Harry Roman, an assistant district attorney who’s determined to convict Lainie for hiring her husband’s killer, starts haunting her, she tries to convince herself he has nothing on her. Then Thom Newberry, her former lover and mentor/tormentor from her days on the street, warns her that Roman has new information from someone who claims Lainie gave her the shooting contract. Newberry, now the influential lieutenant to a mayor on his way to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, has an elaborate scheme for Lainie to ingratiate herself with a powerful international businessman and get him to back her in a new recording company, all so she can find out what’s being hidden in an off-limits area. Her old production team, a promising new singer and an Australian movie
THE UNQUIET DEAD
Khan, Ausma Zehanat Minotaur (336 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-250-05511-8
Two Toronto detectives are handed a politically sensitive case. Esa Khattak is a second-generation Canadian Muslim who heads the new Community Policing Section, created to deal with delicate cases involving minorities. A call from Tom Paley, chief historian at the Canadian Department of Justice, drops Esa and his partner, Rachel 132
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producer help Lainie work her way back into the business. But with the threat of indictment for murder over her head and Hurricane Harry at her heels, Lainie is playing a game that becomes increasingly dangerous—and makes it harder to keep a secret of her own. Levinson’s (Finders, Keepers, Losers, Weepers, 2014, etc.) herky-jerky narration alternates between suspenseful buildups and elaborate back stories in a ruthless world in which no one is to be trusted, the author least of all.
RED LIGHT
Masterton, Graham Head of Zeus (439 pp.) $19.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-78185-677-2 A rash of sex trafficking murders leads an Irish detective to suspect that someone’s out for revenge. When the first body is found with hands cut off and two bullets to the brain, DS Katie Maguire is determined to find the culprit. With all the hard work she’s put in to become a female detective in the small city of Cork, Katie’s fresh off a victory after solving a series of gruesome murders (Broken Angels, 2014), and she has an early lead in this case. A young woman, apparently brought from her African homeland for the sex trade, was found with the body and may be able to give the detective more information once Katie figures out the girl’s native tongue. Meanwhile, Katie’s hard at work on Operation Rocker, a long-term investigation of sex trafficking in the Cork area. She hopes to be able to stop the crimes at their source, which she thinks she’s pinpointed as the slick and smooth-talking Michael Gerrety, despite his insistence that the women who work for him do so willingly. A sudden switch in her supervisors leaves Katie unsure whether she can continue her work on this operation, or even whether her colleagues are in on the subterfuge. If only she could confide in her boyfriend, John—but he’s been out of sorts ever since he decided to stay in Ireland for Katie’s sake instead of moving to the U.S. to pursue a dot.com career. Although Masterton continues to grow in this crimefocused series, his horror themes can seem rote and routine, while his romantic episodes are tinged with soft-core pornography.
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PLAIN KILLING
Miller, Emma Kensington (304 pp.) $15.00 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-7582-9174-5 Rachel Mast (Plain Murder, 2013, etc.) finds the Amish are no more immune from crime than the people they call the English. It’s been years since restless Rachel fled her family’s farm as a teen. Starting with only the eighth-grade education afforded most Amish kids, she earned an MBA from Wharton and became successful in business. But Rachel never felt at home in the English world. So she came back to run a bed-and-breakfast in Stone Mill, near central Pennsylvania’s thriving Amish community. Now she lives between the two worlds. Her boyfriend, Evan Parks, is a state trooper, but her best friend remains her cousin Mary Aaron Hostetler. Her uncle Aaron and aunt Hannah, tolerant of Rachel’s English ways, allow her to drive Mary Aaron and a group of Amish teens to swim at the local quarry, where they’re horrified to find the body of Beth Glick. Like Rachel, Beth left Amish life, but unlike Rachel, she left after her baptism and therefore was shunned by the community. What caused her to come back, dressed in Amish garb, to a place she knew she would be unwelcome? Rachel is determined to find out. Ignoring Evan’s pleas for caution, she investigates the paths of teens leaving Stone Mill. A panicked call from Hannah Verkler, who disappeared years ago, convinces Rachel she’s on the right track. But Hannah’s call is from New Orleans. Can Rachel and Mary Aaron find Hannah in a city that represents everything the Amish reject? Miller’s second book about Rachel pushes the mystery aside to give vibrancy to the world of Stone Mill and urgency to Rachel’s dilemma.
GODS OF GOLD
Nickson, Chris Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8428-2 A detective inspector’s wedding takes second, or third, place to several complicated cases. DI Tom Harper is soon to marry well-to-do widow Annabelle Atkinson, but 1890 Leeds has already been thrown into turmoil by a gas workers’ strike when Harper and his detective sergeant, hot-tempered ex-soldier Billy Reed, learn of a missing child. Col Parkinson’s wife is in jail, and he claims his little daughter, Martha, is with his sister. Since he has no sister, where is Martha? Soon Col is found hanged, leaving behind two suspects for the kidnapping: a small dark man and a big bruiser with cold, dead eyes. Although his boss, Superintendent Kendall, understands Harper’s frustration, all leaves have been cancelled kirkus.com
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“The house and grounds are a warren of hidden rooms and tunnels, and someone seems to have hired a private eye to plant listening devices in every one of them.” from dying for the past
because the powers that be are bringing in replacement workers, known as blacklegs. Harper, who’s sympathetic to the workers, is told to put the missing child aside for now and help keep order. When a blackleg is stabbed to death on the steps of Town Hall, the chief constable indicates that he’d be happy if Harper could prove that the killer was one of the strikers. But his investigation suggests that only council workers and the suspects in Martha’s disappearance were nearby. No one admits knowing the men or whom they work for. When the police catch the big man, he refuses to speak, even after Reed loses his temper and beats him so badly that he has to be hospitalized, and he’s poisoned before another interview can take place. Harper, who knows that a powerful man must be behind the taking of Martha and several other girls who have vanished from orphanages, continues to investigate. What he finds will shake Leeds to its foundations. Although Nickson’s tales of Richard Nottingham (Fair and Tender Ladies, 2014, etc.) take place more than 100 years earlier, Harper faces the same disturbing inequalities in this police procedural with a social conscience.
DYING FOR THE PAST
O’Connor, TJ Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (408 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-7387-4206-9 A ghostly detective who hovers over Winchester, Virginia, learns to harness his powers. Oliver “Tuck” Tucker, a police detective who solved his own murder (Dying to Know, 2014), watches over his wife, Angel, who can hear and talk to him. So can his old partner Bear Braddock, though he refuses to admit it. When wealthy Stephanos Grecco is shot dead in front of loads of witnesses at a black-tie charity ball organized by Angel, Tuck begins to whisper advice in Bear’s ear. The site of the ball has dire associations. Vincent House is a mansion named for gangster Vincent Calaprese, of the New Jersey Calaprese family, who back in the 1930s found Winchester just close enough to Washington, D.C., to be handy. Now his ghost pays Tuck a visit, insisting that Tuck bring him Benjamin and a book. Unfortunately, Tuck has no idea what he’s talking about. Meanwhile, Grecco’s trophy wife, Bonnie, claims the bullet that killed her husband was meant for her; the money collected at the ball is stolen; and Angel’s close friend Andre Cartier is arrested. A mystery guest turns out to be ambitious Ruth-Ann Marcos from the U.S. Attorney General’s office. The FBI wants to take over the case. Even the Russian mob is involved. The house and grounds are a warren of hidden rooms and tunnels, and someone seems to have hired a private eye to plant listening devices in every one of them. Tuck finally gets Bear to admit he can hear him, but danger awaits Angel, and the solution may lie in a past Tuck never knew he had. Tuck’s second moves along briskly enough, but the plethora of suspects and motives may leave you scratching your head. 134
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KILL ’EM WITH CAYENNE
Oust, Gail Minotaur (320 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-250-01105-3 978-1-4668-3429-3 e-book A spice shop owner teams up with her BFF to clear a friend suspected of murder in the lead-up to the local Barbecue Festival. The annual Brandywine Creek Barbecue Festival brings the heat of competition to the small Georgia town and a fair amount of foot traffic into Piper Prescott’s boutique, Spice It Up!. Though Piper’s glad for the business, she’s not so glad the festival seems to have attracted former resident Barbara Bunker Quinlan, aka Barbie Q. Piper gets a funny feeling every time she sees Barbie with Police Chief Wyatt McBride, even though Piper’s settled in with her boyfriend and McBride’s known her only as trouble since their last interaction, which involved Piper’s unofficial and unwelcome investigation of a murder (Rosemary and Crime, 2013). Nor is Piper the only one unhappy that Barbie is in town. Becca Dapkins nearly gets into a fight with Barbie in Piper’s shop. Piper’s not sure who she would have rooted for if she’d been there because Becca has stolen Buzz, Piper’s friend Maybelle’s boyfriend of 13 years. While she’s out for an evening constitutional, Piper’s pup, Casey, leads her to Becca, who seems to have been bludgeoned by a brisket. To save Maybelle from suspicion, Piper and her best bud, Reba Mae, resolve to find the killer, though everyone seems to have had a motive for killing someone as bristly as Becca. Serving up another seasoning-themed cozy complete with a guide to peppers and a rub recipe, Oust excels when she concentrates on her leading lady’s friendships and other relationships, even though a little more spice would up the ante.
A STRING OF BEADS
Perry, Thomas Mysterious Press (400 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8021-2329-9
A refreshing change of pace for Jane Whitefield McKinnon, who specializes in helping people hide from dangerous pursuers (Poison Flower, 2012, etc.): She’s asked to find someone who’s already gone to earth. No request that comes from the eight clan mothers of the Tonawanda Seneca clan in which Jane grew up can be denied. So Jane doesn’t hesitate to leave her long-suffering husband to search for her childhood friend Jimmy Sanders, who punched a drunk who took a swing at him in an Akron bar and then found the cops building a homicide case against him when the drunk, |
“Stacey seems ready to merge his dog and horse franchises in a pleasing puzzler.” from nothing but lies
Nick Bauermeister, was shot dead in the home he shared with his girlfriend, Chelsea Schnell. Jimmy makes it easy for Jane to find him—everything in this installment is unexpectedly easy— but soon enough, they’re predictably on the run together. The only thing that’s not predictable is the reason why. Nick, it turns out, didn’t just work for Daniel Crane’s Box Farm Personal Storage facility; he worked for Dan as a thief, and Dan, who killed him in the hope of securing Chelsea’s favors himself, turns out to be seriously connected to people who are even more seriously connected. The upshot is that it’s not just the law that’s looking for Jimmy; an awful lot of conscientious, well-armed professionals are involved as well, some of them employees of mob uber-boss Lorenzo Malconi, some of them on loan by associates eager to do Malconi a favor. Oddly, Jane and Jimmy (and later Chelsea) never seem to be squeezed, as you’d expect, between the cops and robbers looking for them; instead, it’s the bad guys who are squeezed between Technical Sgt. Isaac Lloyd, of the New York State Police, and Jane herself, whose best defense is often a good offense. Perry (The Boyfriend, 2013, etc.) supplies twists and thrills aplenty, but it’s hard to feel the suffocating kind of suspense that’s his stock in trade when the pursuers seem to be in more danger than the pursued.
ASYLUM CITY
Shoham, Liad Translated by Kitai, Sara Harper/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $25.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-06-223753-8 A taut, engaging Israeli murder mystery from the author of Lineup (2013). Michal Poleg is a young volunteer working for the Organization for Migrant Aid in Tel Aviv; when Gabriel Takela, an Eritrean she’s been helping, finds her dead body in her apartment, he flees the scene and is quickly apprehended. Anat Nachmias, deputy chief of the Special Investigations Unit, should have an easy case on her hands, because Gabriel confesses to the murder. The trouble is, he seems to have no clear motive and doesn’t know all the details a killer should know. So why would Gabriel lie? And if he didn’t kill Michal, who did? The answer is not obvious, and readers will have a good time trying to guess. One of her neighbors tells Anat, “[t]he black ones, that’s all she had eyes for.” Israel is considered a relatively safe place for East Africans seeking asylum from kidnappers and traffickers in child prostitution, although there are Israelis who would like all the migrants to go away. Men like “golden boy” Yariv Ninio and Ehud Regev “built their careers on stoking the flames of hate against Africans.” The book has a strong cast of characters such as Itai, whose job at OMA is to “provide asylum seekers with the bare necessities.” He was close to both Michal and Gabriel, and as far as he was concerned, “a fine young man was in jail.” This well-plotted tale gives readers insight into Israeli law and society and the issue of African migrants in |
particular. Compliments as well to the translator, who makes the story look as if it were written in English to begin with. A treat for mystery fans who enjoy variety in their whodunit settings—or who simply savor a good yarn.
NOTHING BUT LIES
Stacey, Lyndon Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8400-8
An ex-cop finds himself in the soup when he helps an old friend protect his fiancee. In the years since Daniel Whelan (No Holds Barred, 2012, etc.) left the Bristol police, he’s remained friends with Jo-Ji Matsuki, who took over Dan’s post as dog-wrangler. So when Jo-Ji asks him to help him play bodyguard to his partner, Tamiko, who’s being followed by a mysterious guy in a hoodie, Dan once again asks his boss, Fred Bowden, for leave from his job as a lorry driver. Fred assents grudgingly, and Dan heads off with Taz, his German shepherd, for Maiden Ashton, the village where Jo-Ji and Tamiko live. Their small house is busy and crowded, since massage therapist Tamiko and beautician Karen both see clients there. Siamese cats Shinju and Yasu resent Taz’s intrusion into their territory. And while they live outdoors, Babs and Rolo, Tamiko’s horses, add to the general commotion because they need their stalls mucked out and their coats brushed. Things get even more hectic when Tamiko’s sister, Hana, on the run from her abusive boyfriend, Samir Jafari, shows up with her 4-year-old son, Jahan. Tamiko distracts them by taking them to a horse show, where they meet other breeders like Boo Travers. But their idyll is cut short when Hana is killed in a hit-and-run accident while driving Tamiko’s car. Tamiko is so preoccupied with grief over her sister and concern for Jahan that Dan and Jo-Ji are left to wonder whether Tami was the real target all along. Stacey seems ready to merge his dog and horse franchises in a pleasing puzzler. Will Shinju and Yasu join in, as rivals to Midnight Louie and Joe Grey?
A KILLER RETREAT
Weber, Tracy Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (336 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-7387-4209-0 A yoga teacher’s romantic getaway almost gets her jailed for murder. Kate Davidson reluctantly agrees to a vacation with her boyfriend, Michael, and her German shepherd, Bella, to a health resort on an island in Puget Sound, where she’ll teach some yoga classes to pay for their stay. Kate, kirkus.com
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who has control issues and a hair-trigger temper, is enraged when a walk turns dangerous. Bella, a formerly abused dog who suffers from EPI, a life-threatening disease controlled by special food and drugs, does not play well with others, and when an overdressed woman lets her terrier, Bandit, run loose, the dog is lucky to escape a mauling. Back at the resort, Kate again meets Bandit’s owner, Monica, the stepmother of Emmy, who with her fiance, Josh, is refurbishing the resort. Kate and Michael’s accommodations are small and Spartan. Despite the beauty of the place, everything goes wrong soon after Kate’s best friend, Rene, and her husband, Sam, arrive. Rene’s sick, Sam’s upset, and Kate’s afraid that Michael will pop the question. Dinner at the vegan restaurant is spoiled by Monica’s insistence that she must have meat. She fights with both Chef Kyle, who refuses to cook flesh, and Emmy’s mother, Helen. Later, at a party, Kate rashly jokes that she’d like to poison Monica. When Monica is found strangled in the spa with her dog’s leash, Kate is first on the scene, and the lone island police officer takes her in for questioning. Michael gets her a lawyer, a down-home type who runs a goat rescue on the island but is a former defense attorney. Everyone but the lawyer and Rene begs her not to investigate; after all, she almost got killed in her maiden attempt at sleuthing (Murder Strikes a Pose, 2014). Despite lots of red herrings, yoga lore and ways to treat EPI, Kate’s second lacks a strong mystery. And sometimes you just want to shake the temperamental heroine.
THE HONEST FOLK OF GUADELOUPE
Williams, Timothy Soho Crime (336 pp.) $26.95 | $26.95 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61695-385-0 978-1-61695-386-7 e-book Two disturbing murders unsettle the residents of a tropical paradise. May 1990. Judge (which in Guadeloupe means investigator) Anne Marie Laveaud is questioning fragile Madame Dugain about the death of her husband, Rodolphe, a popular environmentalist and local television personality. The official ruling of suicide seems incongruous because of Rodolphe’s steady good humor and the four children he leaves behind. After over 10 years in Guadeloupe, the French-Algerian Anne Marie has learned to sidestep the local morass of petty political and racial tension by operating with cool dispassion and inscrutable efficiency (Another Sun, 2013). She’s far less impassive within the walls of her home, where she remains as obsessed with this as with previous cases. So does she really need the married head of the Tourist Bureau, charming as he is, to invite her to dinner? Anne Marie’s discovery of Rodolphe’s former mistress definitely complicates the case. Her plate becomes unpleasantly full with the disappearance of young French tourist Evelyne Vaton, who could be a match for the remains recently found on a nude beach. But when Evelyne’s parents claim that the victim’s corpse is not 136
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their daughter, Anne Marie is forced to look elsewhere. In light of the victim’s race and the island’s dependence on tourism, she faces immense pressure to make an arrest as soon as possible. Anne Marie’s second appearance, courtesy of the author of the Pietro Trotti crime novels, boasts an elegantly incisive narrative and a fascinating heroine.
science fiction and fantasy UNBREAKABLE
Bauers, W.C. Tor (368 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-7653-7542-1 Military science fiction with a kickbutt female lead: Bauers’ debut. Planet Montana, a colonial backwater languishing in the buffer zone between the Republic of Aligned Worlds and the Lusitanian Empire, is highly susceptible to attack by pirates. During one such raid, Promise Paen’s pacifist father was killed. Thus orphaned, Promise joined the RAW Marine Corps—a sort of mechanized infantry—seeking revenge, even though she’s haunted by the ghost of her mother, Sandra. Now a provisional member of RAW, Montana’s entitled to at least a modicum of protection, and when another pirate attack devastates the world’s capital and spaceport, Promise and Victor Company receive orders to clear the hostiles out. Promise succeeds, though she’s badly wounded, receiving a promotion to first lieutenant and a hero’s acclaim. But her orders also include staying on and making nice with President Annie Buckmeister and the planet’s population of rugged individualists, who, while grateful to Promise and Victor Company, remain skeptical about RAW membership. Unfortunately, the watching Lusitanians are well-aware that Promise’s devastated company has not been reinforced and decide this would be a good time to boot out the heavily outnumbered RAW forces. Past a dull start, the fast-paced narrative features plenty of outstanding action sequences and characters who, while getting the job done, aren’t ashamed to weep over fallen comrades. There’s plenty of weaponry to keep the techies happy and even a love interest for Promise. The ghost pops up with annoying frequency while contributing little. And that name, Promise Paen: really? Neither is there too much originality on display. Still, it’s a subgenre with a well-established audience, and Bauers makes a solid entrance.
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“Mosley is always genuinely interested in getting inside people’s heads and trying to bridge social, economic and racial divides.” from inside a silver box
FINN FANCY NECROMANCY
Henderson, Randy Tor (352 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-7653-7808-8
A fast-paced fantasy mystery set in a mostly well-realized world stuffed with magical eccentricities. Henderson’s debut novel is somehow lighthearted despite the doom and gloom inherent in its premise: A necromancer from a family of magical undertakers has just three days to prove he’s been framed for terrible crimes or he’ll lose his body and be exiled to the Other Realm—again. Phinaeus “Finn” Gramaraye was first framed for an assault using dark magic when he was 15. Now, 25 years later, on his first day back in his own body, somebody’s trying to frame him for murder. He’s accompanied in his search for truth by a motley crew that includes a brother who thinks he’s a werewolf, an ex-magical cop with a habit of going Viking-style berserk, and two women from his past. The quick turns of the mystery plot make this a speedy and enjoyable read, and Finn’s world is a lively one, packed with all manner of weird and wonderful ghosts and goblins. But the idea that our hero is essentially a 15-year-old trapped in a 40-year-old body isn’t fully realized. Finn’s pop-culture references are amusingly dated, but his relationships with his neighbor Dawn and high school crush, Heather, seem to pick up right where they left off, without much indication that these women have matured any more than he has. And the prospect that someone from Finn’s own family might be involved in setting him up reads more as a frustrating complication than a deep betrayal. Genre fans looking for a fix will enjoy the gleefully ghoulish setting and engaging, suspenseful plot. But readers who crave characters with rich, fully inhabited emotional lives should look elsewhere.
THE GENOME
Lukyanenko, Sergei Open Road Integrated Media (368 pp.) $16.99 paper | $14.99 e-book Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-4976-4396-3 978-1-4976-4394-9 e-book A medium-future exploration of the effects of genetic engineering, which first appeared in Russian in 1999, from the Moscow-resident author of Night
Watch (2013, etc.). Many genetic modifications, from street sweeper to starship pilot, are available in the 22nd century; known as “speshes,” they kick in during early adolescence and provide the recipients with enormously enhanced abilities appropriate to the spesh. Pilot-spesh Alex Romanov, discharged from a hospital on planet Quicksilver Pit after a horrific accident, |
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runs into Kim O’hara, a 14-year-old fugitive from planet Edem who is on the verge of her metamorphosis into a fighter-spesh. Compelled by his spesh to help her, Alex takes her to a cheap hotel and watches over her as he searches for work. Surprisingly, an attractive prospect materializes—as captain of a flying saucer with the right to select his own crew. He discovers, meanwhile, that Kim is carrying a computer crystal worth a fortune. With few candidates to choose from, he quickly hires a co-pilot, a navigator, an engineer, a doctor and Kim as a fighter, but he has doubts about them all—especially when his commission turns out to involve conveying a pair of VIP insectlike Zzygou, a formerly hostile race, on a tour of humanoccupied planets. And when one of the Zzygou is gruesomely murdered, a galactic war threatens; worse, Alex learns, none of his crew members are what they seem, and each had a powerful motive to commit the crime. The narrative moves briskly and often mysteriously, with a curiously boyish enthusiasm. Add in splashes of humor, quirky references to Western cultural tropes and a true-to-life conclusion that leaves many of the surviving characters deeply dissatisfied yet optimistic. Not quite up to the standard of Russia’s greatest science-fiction writers (such as the Strugatsky brothers) but nonetheless refreshingly different and something of a page-turner: well worth investigating.
INSIDE A SILVER BOX
Mosley, Walter Tor (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-7653-7521-6
After an African-American thug murders a white graduate student jogging in Central Park, the two team up to combat an alien menace in Mosley’s (Rose Gold, 2014, etc.) latest science-fiction effort. When Ronnie Bottoms brains Lorraine Fell with a rock, her corpse conveniently falls on top of the Silver Box, an incredibly powerful AI remorseful about its original purpose: fulfilling the whims of the Laz, a sadistic conquering race. When the Box acts to help Ronnie resurrect Lorraine, they also inadvertently awaken the Laz as well, which soon sets its sights on Earth. Mosley is always genuinely interested in getting inside people’s heads and trying to bridge social, economic and racial divides—or at least, to disseminate understanding about the natures of those divides. But for some reason, his science fiction is typically crafted in the form of fables, and the insights which seem organic and integrated in his mysteries lose subtlety in his SF. The message of this particular fable is also somewhat murky: What do Lorraine and Ronnie gain by their encounter with the Silver Box? Have they really become more enlightened? Ronnie does become a more philosophical person, willing to consider the implications of his actions (although fidelity doesn’t seem part of that package). But Lorraine seems to have gained Ronnie’s less attractive qualities in return, rejecting philosophy (formerly her area of study) and words for the
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MORTE
purely physical, running for miles and having sex with a stranger (the oddly named Alton Brown—does Mosley have some connection with the Food Network celebrity?). And although she’s strong enough now to resist her domineering father’s bullying, she apparently has no problem continuing to accept his financial support and never for one second worries that it might be cut off. Food for thought, if not entirely digestible.
Repino, Robert Soho (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-61695-427-7 A war novel/religious allegory about cats, dogs and giant ants driven by a hive mind. Yes, really. So, let’s imagine W. Bruce Cameron’s silly and maudlin A Dog’s Purpose recast as a violent and frightening post-apocalyptic global battle for the souls of Earth’s survivors, layered with a messiah prophecy that makes The Matrix look simplistic by comparison. If that’s a bit much, maybe just think Animal Farm re-imagined by Orson Scott Card. Either way, you end up with this devilishly entertaining debut about anthropomorphized animals caught in a conflict between an invading army of insects and the planet’s few remaining humans. The novel begins from the point of view of Sebastian, an aloof but observant house cat whose only true companion is a dog named Sheba. Through animal eyes, he describes Earth’s descent into chaos as giant ants—that’s Hymenoptera unus to you—break through the planet’s crust to wreak havoc on human civilization. At the heart of their plan is the decision to release a virus that gives all animals self-awareness, a bipedal structure and better-than-human intelligence. After the change, Sebastian recreates himself as the cat-warrior Mort(e), the hero of a breakaway army called The Red Sphinx. “Don’t you all know who this is?” says his superior to a new crop of recruits. “This is Mort(e). The hero of the Battle of the Alleghenies. The Mastermind of the Chesapeake Bridge Bombing. The crazy bastard who assassinated General Fitzpatrick in broad daylight. This choker was killing humans before some of you were born.” After a while the story gets kind of messy with a memetic virus called “EMSAH,” the aforementioned prophecy and the preordained battle to end all wars, but it’s still awfully good sci-fi that imagines a world where humans are no longer at the top of the food chain. A wild riff on interspecies warfare sure to make pet owners think twice the next time their tabby cats dart by.
THE GLOBE The Science of Discworld II
Pratchett, Terry with Stewart, Ian and Cohen, Jack Anchor (384 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-8041-6896-0
This sequel to the fantasy/nonfiction hybrid The Science of Discworld (2014; U.K. 1999), wherein the bumbling wizards of Discworld’s Unseen University accidentally created our universe and the planet Roundworld, aka Earth, first manifested in the U.K. in 2002. In the first book we learned that the inhabitants of Roundworld will escape the planet via a space elevator before another ice age would have wiped them (us) out. Unfortunately, Roundworld (“It mostly had ice ages, and was less engrossing than an ant farm”) has become infested with elves—Pratchett’s version being thoroughly nasty creatures like psychic leeches that, if left to themselves, will sap humanity’s creativity and drive so that nobody (human, that is) will escape the forthcoming disaster. Thanks to Hex, Discworld’s intelligent, magic-powered computer, the wizards can move through time, so they travel back and banish the elves. However, the humans that result are placid, cowlike creatures, incurious and almost devoid of intellect. Somehow, elves are essential to human development. But how? And what to do? In chapters that alternate with Pratchett’s tale, Stewart (Mathematics/Univ. of Warwick) and Cohen (Biology and Mathematics/Univ. of Warwick) explore, via physics, biology, literature and a dozen other topics, the role of culture or, more precisely, narrative, in fostering curiosity and intellectual development (“we may indeed share 98 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees, but then, we share 47 per cent with cabbages”). Readers who simply want more Pratchett may begin by skimming the more factual sections, but it will dawn on many that the discussions are at least as fascinating and entertaining as the antics of the wizards. It’s baffling why this appealingly distinctive offshoot (there are two volumes still to come) of the wildly popular Discworld yarns took so long to cross the Atlantic.
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THE MIME ORDER
Shannon, Samantha Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-62040-893-3
Paige Mahoney, the Pale Dreamer of The Bone Season (2013), returns in this second volume of a projected seven-volume fantasy/science-fiction epic. The novel begins with Paige’s escape to London as she eludes pursuers of all stripes and becomes public enemy No. 1. On the plus side, she’s with a gang of clairvoyants, and her cohort is headed by Jaxon Hall, one of the mime-lords of the title. (Mime-lords |
“Even a crowded house can’t keep the long-simmering attraction from flaring between Rafe and Clio. ” from say yes to the marquess
and mime-queens are leaders of clairvoyant gangs who form a subgroup within the various cohorts.) London becomes the main setting of the novel, and it assumes various guises, some comforting but most harrowing. Cohorts inhabit spaces that seem vaguely familiar (Covent Garden, Camden Town, Soho) yet remain mysterious and sinister. Readers of the first volume might also remember the emphasis on a specialized and arcane vocabulary applicable to the alternative universe the author creates. The glossary is again a welcome necessity. The prime mover of action here is Paige’s relentless pursuit by Scion, a governmental organization that sees her as a threat to its status and power. Eventually Paige meets up again with Arcturus Mesarthim, her Warden and a Rephaite—a physically immortal being. He has some advice for her—to be wary and to “manipulate [her] mime-lord...as he has spent his life manipulating others”—good advice for a world that is arcane, complex, multilayered and at times almost incomprehensible. Shannon’s prose style is serviceable, but her legion of fans will once again be here for the propulsive plot rather than lyricism.
r om a n c e LOVE ME SWEET
Brogan, Tracy Montlake Romance (326 pp.) $12.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-4778-1963-0 978-1-4778-2418-4 e-book This snowblown romance from Brogan (The Best Medicine, 2014) is the latest in her Bell Harbor series. When Delaney, a hot reality star, goes on the lam to escape a sex-tape scandal, she ends up in tiny Bell Harbor, Michigan. There, she meets Grant, a hot cinematographer who happens to be in her rented shower. A mix-up means both have a claim to the house, so they agree to share the space until Delaney’s rent money gets returned from Donna, the landlady, who’s Grant’s mother. Unfortunately, Donna has a slight kleptomania problem, and the temporary roommates must drive through a Midwestern blizzard to recover both mother and money. Will these unusually attractive people be attracted to one another? Yes. Is there a problem? Yes. Delaney lied about her name and history to Grant, setting up the inevitable moment-of-truth confrontation. Grant must decide whether to trust the woman he knows as Elaine, who has $40,000 in cash in a backpack and won’t say why. Brogan’s prose is peppered with deliberately snarky, slangy lines, and the tone is light except when the main characters ponder the other’s drool-worthiness. Then the mood gets hot and heavy. There’s nothing particularly engaging about Delaney or Grant as protagonists, but the book does push an upbeat, |
generous message about finding yourself, standing up for yourself and living an authentic life. Some of the most compelling parts involve the subplot of Delaney’s reality-star life, including media exploitation and the loss of privacy. Those sections are where the book stands out. This is a sexy, slightly kooky romance that should please Bell Harbor fans. The writing and message make it a pleasant read that ends on a higher note than it begins on.
SAY YES TO THE MARQUESS
Dare, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-06-224020-0 When Clio Whitmore inherits a castle from her uncle, she decides to call off her long-standing engagement and asks her would-be brother-in-law—who’s secretly in love with her—to help her get out of the marriage agreement. Clio has always followed the rules and done what was expected of her; she “had been raised by good parents, with the benefits of education and close attention to propriety, and she was engaged to marry England’s most promising young diplomat,” Piers Brandon. But after eight years of waiting, she has become an object of ridicule. Inheriting a castle from her elderly uncle gives her a new sense of freedom, and she decides to call off the engagement. Clio seeks out Rafe, Piers’ brother and London’s “most infamous scoundrel,” hoping to convince him to use his power of attorney over Piers’ estate to nullify the marriage agreement. He refuses. Rafe wants the marriage. For one thing, if Piers settles down, Rafe can get back to his own life as a champion prizefighter. For another, if Clio marries his brother, she’ll have the title and lifestyle she deserves, things he could never give her. After she decamps to her castle, Rafe follows with his jack-of-alltrades manager to ensure the nuptial ceremony is set in motion. Arriving on her doorstep, he finds the castle occupied by Clio’s family: Daphne, her demanding younger sister; Daphne’s shallow husband, Sir Teddy; and Phoebe, the brilliant but socially awkward youngest sister. Even a crowded house can’t keep the long-simmering attraction from flaring between Rafe and Clio, though. Navigating that dangerous reality while also trying to protect Phoebe from Daphne’s social expectations becomes complicated and exhausting for Clio, who realizes which brother she belongs with, even if he won’t admit it. Dare continues her Castles Ever After series with another cleverly crafted love story that hits all the high notes. A sparkling, emotionally lush romance.
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CATCH A FALLING HEIRESS
Guhrke, Laura Lee Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-233465-7
An impoverished English aristocrat is determined to protect an American heiress from an unscrupulous fortune hunter but, in doing so, compromises her himself, then finds he’s falling for her—even though she won’t give him the time of day. Having set an elaborate trap intended to cause a New York villain to show his true colors, the Earl of Featherstone is appalled when the blackguard tries to save himself by convincing heiress Linnet Holland to marry him. Stepping in to prevent that, Jack kisses her, thus shredding her reputation and obliging him to propose marriage to her, a suit she refuses. Deciding he’s the last man on Earth she’d marry, and convinced he’s a fortune hunter himself, Linnet sets sail for England to try to get a jump on the scandal and find a husband across the pond. Unfortunately for her, after that kiss, Jack has decided she’s the wife for him, and when her father offers him a financial incentive beyond her dowry, he becomes more resolved. Following her back to England, Jack finagles his way to a house party she’s attending and devotes himself to wooing her. The courting starts off horrendously but quickly moves into mutual interest until Linnet discovers Jack’s agreement with her father and concludes he can’t be trusted. Guhrke pens an intelligent and moving romance full of distrust and misunderstanding between two headstrong characters who are trying to find happiness against the odds. The unusual social backdrop of New York’s Gilded Age adds an interesting dimension to a story that hinges on a number of intriguing financial elements. A sexy, smart romance with a unique arc that’s enhanced by its upper-class old New York social setting.
THE EARL I ADORE
Knightley, Erin Signet Eclipse/NAL (336 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-451-46679-2 A young lady with a modest dowry is husband-hunting at a summer music festival, but her task becomes more urgent as she waits for the news of her sister’s elopement to leak out and ruin her chances. Knightley (The Baron Next Door, 2014, etc.) returns with the second book in her Prelude to a Kiss series. The deck is stacked against Sophie Wembley in the marriage mart. Her dowry is modest, her family’s status is low, and her talent as an oboe player is an unconventional one. Unable to afford a third season for Sophie, her mother brings her to a long 140
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music festival in Somerset, hoping to find an unconventional husband for an unconventional bride. Sophie is having the time of her life until news reaches them that her sister Penelope has eloped with someone unsuitable, and the family’s low status is about to get even lower. Sophie figures she has two weeks to catch a husband before word gets out, and who better to catch than the man she’s secretly been pining for? Little does Sophie know that her chosen beau, John Fairfax, Earl of Evansleigh, has made a pact with his sister never to marry, both of them afraid to pass on the mental instability that runs in their family. Evan, as he’s known to his friends, is well aware that Sophie’s mother is trying to trap him into marrying her daughter, but he’s drawn to Sophie nonetheless. Meanwhile, his sister, Julia, is pulling for Sophie and her music-loving group of friends. Early in the novel, stereotypes like the intelligent daughter with a stupid, grasping mother threaten to ruin the plot, but the lively characters and engaging storyline save the day. The musical events threaded throughout also add depth. Well worth reading.
YOU’RE SO FINE
Kramer, Kieran St. Martin’s (432 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-250-00992-0
When her boss runs away with her boyfriend, single mom Lacey Clark finds herself broke and jobless in idyllic Indigo Beach, South Carolina, while sharing a lighthouse with a handsome movie star, and she’s dangerously falling in love with it all. Lacey had a taste of Hollywood, and for her it was kind of bitter. Reinventing herself as a personal assistant has been better for her as a single mom, but when her actress boss flees her movie set to run away with Lacey’s actor boyfriend, Callum, her life takes another unexpected turn. She’s grateful when Callum’s agent takes pity on her and lets her stay on in the lighthouse his client rented for the summer. Unfortunately, Callum has sublet the place to Beau Wilder, his replacement in the movie and one of the most famous—and handsome—actors on Earth. At first Beau is ready to toss Lacey out on her ear, but he doesn’t have the heart when he realizes she has Henry, her 5-year-old son, with her. A mutual attraction blazes into a relationship, but Lacey and Beau each have baggage, a few secrets and a long-lost connection to Indigo Beach. Denying that they’re having an affair, Lacey and Beau explain her presence by claiming a longstanding family friendship, which becomes an increasingly complicated cover once Lacey starts working as babysitter for the movie’s director and their personal and professional lines begin to blur. When their secrets begin to surface and their cover unravels, Beau and Lacey are at a crossroads. Beau can’t stay on Indigo forever, and Lacey and Henry never want to leave. Beau’s next picture is waiting, and Lacey needs to figure out who she is before she hands her heart over to another actor. Doesn’t she? |
MAKE ME LOSE CONTROL
Kramer’s (Sweet Talk Me, 2014, etc.) second foray into contemporary romance is filled with smart, believable characters and fresh, witty storytelling A sexy, poignant romance wrapped in Southern charm and lightly accented with Hollywood glamour.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ALICE
MacAlister, Katie Signet (352 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-451-47137-6
The itinerary looks promising, but the excursions are disappointing in MacAlister’s (Time Thief, 2013, etc.) contemporary romance set on a cruise ship— the first book in the Ainslie Brothers series. A broken engagement shouldn’t stop Alice Wood from enjoying her honeymoon cruise by herself. Unfortunately, the ship is much smaller than it looked in the brochures, and when the groom gives away his ticket to a friend, Alice is stuck in very close quarters with Elliott Ainslie, the eighth baron of a crumbling English estate who somehow supports his eleven siblings with his career as a novelist and needs time alone to write. Their trip will take them along the Danube, Main and Rhine rivers and straight into the Port of Missed Opportunities. At a coffeehouse in Amsterdam that’s known for serving marijuana, they don’t inhale anything beyond secondhand smoke and then claim to have hangovers the next day. At a sex club in Germany, they check into a pirate-themed room but have to leave early when Elliott gets stuck in a torture device before he has a chance to experience the parrot-shaped nipple clamps. Whereas Alice charms with kooky dialogue—“Now you’re my prisoner, Lord Hunkybuns”—Elliott sounds stilted with his flowery speeches (“I want to be with you for all the days that remain to me”) and his questionable British accent (“A gull tried to eat my shoe earlier today. It was most amusing”). Even less convincing is Alice’s theory that Elliott is a spy. Despite living inches away from Elliott’s side of the cabin, Alice asks him very few questions about his supposed work. She doesn’t have much evidence to go on until the other passengers finally reveal what’s been happening right under her nose. But love prevails, and Elliott’s brother Gunner should be the next in line to find a bride. A meandering plot detracts from a quirky, enjoyable voice.
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Ridgway, Christie Harlequin (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-373-77871-3
After a one-night stand leaves Shay Walker feeling bruised and lonely, things turn even more problematic when she realizes her erstwhile lover is Jace Jennings, the physically and emotionally remote father of her teenage tutoring pupil. When a nearby forest fire cuts off the resort where Shay is supposed to meet a friend to celebrate her birthday, she meets a wildly attractive man and, throwing her typical caution to the wind, seduces him. Despite understanding it’s not supposed to last, she’s unnerved by the connection she feels to the enigmatic man and feels dejected when he leaves. Heading back to her life as the live-in tutor of London—a lonely girl whose flighty mother has recently died—she’s stunned when her one-night stand shows up on their doorstep and introduces himself as London’s father. Also stunned, Jace decides immediately that Shay is too much of a distraction and needs to go, but he decides to let her stay when he sees the quirky but close relationship she’s developed with his daughter. Still, in his mind, both Shay and London are only at Blue Arrow Lake for a limited time, because London will be packed off to boarding school as soon as possible. Shay, meanwhile, wants Jace to step up and embrace a larger role in his daughter’s life and hopes that he might learn to open up his own emotions. Shay’s complex relationships with her own siblings make her a fierce advocate for Jace establishing stronger ties to his daughter. Falling in love with him makes it even harder to see his determination to keep his distance. Ridgway returns to Blue Arrow Lake and the Walker family with an emotionally touching story about uncertain Shay, standoffish Jace and searching London. Part passionate romance, part fulfilling family drama, overall a sexy, touching read.
ANGEL IN ARMANI
Scott, Melanie St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-250-04040-4 When a dangerous storm keeps helicopter pilot Sara Charles and her devastatingly handsome client, Lucas Angelo, out of the air, it leads to a night of passion, then to an uneasy but passionate affair between two people from completely different worlds. A thriving surgeon, Lucas is also part owner of the New York Saints, a Major League Baseball team he bought with his two best friends. Commuting between Staten Island and Manhattan is easier by helicopter, he finds, especially with a female kirkus.com
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pilot who stays on task and keeps the copter steady. But when a violent storm strands Lucas and his favorite pilot outside the city, Sara makes a move on the achingly handsome Lucas, then winds up sneaking away the next morning when she learns her helicopter has been damaged by the weather. With her business grounded, Sara has other things to think about than the man who set her on fire one dark night, and she’s too embarrassed to contact him, but Lucas is obsessed with the mysterious woman who disappeared. Tracking her down only intrigues him more, and he hires her as the team’s private pilot, increasing their proximity in both New York and in Florida, where the Saints are in spring training. At first, Sara and Lucas agree to keep things professional, but that plan soon flies out the window. However, as hot as the affair gets, Sara is uncomfortable with Lucas’ wealth and high-profile life, not to mention his family’s noticeable disapproval. Lucas is all-in where Sara is concerned, and he’s surprised that his courageous helicopter pilot is choosing to be ruled by fear where her heart is concerned. Scott continues her New York Saints series with another emotionally complex romance set against the exciting backdrop of professional baseball. Sara, especially, has to overcome some major vulnerabilities, and the way she handles her misgivings is understandable but at times aggravating. A smart, compelling romance that realistically explores two socially mismatched lovers fighting for their happily-ever-after.
intimate epiphanies, but Laney and Noah are unique, likable characters worth rooting for as they fall in love and try to overcome the complications of their situation. At the end of their magical layover, Noah still needs to contend with his fiancee, Sloane, who is also the boss’s daughter, and Laney still has to face her own romantic past: a turbulent relationship with her rock drummer boyfriend who suffered an untimely death. And let’s not forget Laney’s mother, waiting in Hawaii for her wedding dress. Though sometimes the language isn’t as witty or romantic as it’s trying to be, Topper makes good use of the dress as a plot device and infuses enough fun and suspense into the rollicking storyline to make it a satisfying read.
DICTATORSHIP OF THE DRESS
Topper, Jessica Berkley Sensation (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-425-27625-9
Two strangers in transit share plenty of baggage in Topper’s (Louder Than Love, 2013) second romance. Former Marvel Comics illustrator Laney Hudson isn’t thrilled about having to transport her mother’s wedding gown from New York to Hawaii as carry-on luggage. Naturally, though, when people see a woman lugging a wedding gown, they’re going to assume she’s the bride, which Laney uses to her advantage to get bumped to first class on the first leg of her journey, from New York to Chicago. Seated next to her is Noah Ridgewood, a software designer with an acute fear of flying and a demanding socialite fiancee who’s giving him a serious case of cold feet. When a flight attendant mistakenly announces Laney’s and Noah’s pending nuptials with a champagne toast, they have no choice but to ride out the charade until they land in Chicago. From there, they will surely go their separate ways. His destination is Vegas, where his bachelor party is already underway, and she has miles to go before she can watch her mother get married on Waipouli Beach. Fortunately, a bad storm grounds both of their connecting flights, giving Laney and Noah more time to get to know each other. Their interactions evolve in a typical arc, starting with faintly antagonistic banter and ending with 142
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nonfiction THE MAN WHO COULDN’T STOP OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought
These titles earned the Kirkus Star: THE MAN WHO COULDN’T STOP by David Adam.......................143
Adam, David Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-374-22395-3
IT’S WHAT I DO by Lynsey Addario................................................. 144 THE SUMMIT by Ed Conway.............................................................148 ELEANOR MARX by Rachel Holmes................................................. 157 THE ITALIANS by John Hooper.........................................................158 H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald..............................................162 THIEVES’ ROAD by Terry Mort........................................................165 ALPHABETICAL by Michael Rosen...................................................169 THE YANKEE COMANDANTE by Michael Sallah; Mitch Weiss..... 170 KILLERS OF THE KING by Charles Spencer...................................... 171
H IS FOR HAWK
Macdonald, Helen Grove (288 pp.) $25.00 Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-8021-2341-1
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An engrossing first-person study of obsessive-compulsive disorder from within
and without. “An Ethiopian schoolgirl called Bira once ate a wall of her house,” writes acclaimed British Nature editor and writer Adam in the opening of his account of OCD. “She didn’t want to, but she found that to eat the wall was the only way to stop her thinking about it.” Bira, who had eaten over half a ton of mud bricks by the time she was 17 and finally sought medical attention, was found to have only “moderately-severe” OCD because she spent a mere two hours per day thinking about and then eating a wall of her house—the average OCD sufferer can spend six hours per day thinking odd thoughts and then four hours acting on them. What lends especial weight to Adam’s remarkable study of what psychiatrists consider the fourth most common mental disorder and the World Health Organization ranks as the 10th most disabling is Adam’s admission that he, too, suffers from OCD, having been plagued for over 20 years by an irrational fear of contracting AIDS. Far from being fastidiously punctual or a tad “anal” around the house, Adam demonstrates that OCD is a serious, crippling condition capable of rendering the daily life of the afflicted virtually unlivable. “OCD,” writes the author, “dissolves perspective. It magnifies small risks, warps probabilities and takes statistical chance as a prediction, not a sign of how unlikely things are.” Repeatedly transfixed by a bizarre thought, which turns into an obsession, the OCD sufferer cannot find relief until compulsively acting on that obsession. Adam delves deeply into OCD’s possible causes, its varieties—whether obsessed with contamination from dirt (Lady Macbeth) or disease (Howard Hughes), an irrational fear of harm or irrepressible need for symmetry (Samuel Johnson)— and treatments, breaking down this complex condition in easily accessible layman’s terms. Well-researched, witty, honest and irreverent, Adam’s account proves as irresistible as his subject.
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“A brutally real and unrelentingly raw memoir that is as inspiring as it is horrific.” from it’s what i do
IT’S WHAT I DO A Photographer’s Life of Love and War
Addario, Lynsey Photos by Addario, Lynsey Penguin Press (384 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 5, 2015 978-1-59420-537-8
A remarkable journalistic achievement from a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship winner that crystalizes the last 10 years of global war and strife while candidly portraying the intimate life of a female photojournalist. Over the last decade, Addario has been periodically beaten, robbed, kidnapped, shot at and sexually assaulted from one end of the Middle East and North Africa to the other. Risking her life for images that might change public policy, she ran into Taliban fighters who fired on her in the Korengal Valley, Gadhafi loyalists who imprisoned her in Libya and Israeli soldiers who abused her outside the Gaza Strip. A deadly car accident in Pakistan nearly claimed her life. Many of Addario’s friends and colleagues did die during that time, while lovers faded away and family members freaked out. But such was the cost of the author’s life’s work. Told with unflinching candor, the award-winning photographer brings an incredible sense of humanity to all the battlefields of her life. Especially affecting is the way in which Addario conveys the role of gender and how being a woman has impacted every aspect of her personal and professional lives. Whether dealing with ultrareligious zealots or overly demanding editors, being a woman with a camera has never been an easy task. Somewhere amid Addario’s dizzying odyssey, she also became a mother. However, instead of slowing her down, it only deepened the battle-hardened correspondent’s insight into the lives of those she so courageously sought to photograph. “Just as in Somalia,” she writes, “when I had felt my baby moving inside me as I witnessed the suffering of other infants, I could suddenly understand, in a new, profound, and enraging way, the way most people in the world lived.” A brutally real and unrelentingly raw memoir that is as inspiring as it is horrific.
AMERICAN RECKONING The Vietnam War and Our National Identity
Appy, Christian G. Viking (416 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 9, 2015 978-0-670-02539-8
Analyzing public, political and cultural responses to the Vietnam War, Appy (History/Univ. of Massachusetts; Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, 2003, etc.) argues that the protracted conflict “shattered the central tenet of American national identity—the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world.” 144
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Although he does not prove that belief in “American exceptionalism” was shattered, the author makes a strong case that the war continues to affect national identity. As the war raged, many soldiers became disillusioned and demoralized by the futility of their mission; at home, a fiery peace movement burgeoned into other areas of social protest, generating widespread “debates and disunity.” After the war, the fall of South Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge’s victory in Cambodia generated concerns about American culpability for the volatile political situation in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, President Gerald Ford, rather than call for “a great national reckoning of U.S. responsibility in Vietnam, called for a ‘great national reconciliation,’ ” which the author characterizes as a call for “a willful amnesia.” In the 1980s, protest over Ronald Reagan’s Central American policies seems to Appy evidence of “a broad public skepticism about military intervention” that, some feared, might result in another Vietnam. Nevertheless, writes the author, despite “all the heated rhetoric about the Vietnam syndrome, it never produced a drastic military downsizing or demobilization.” What it did produce was intolerance for more protracted wars with high American casualties. That intolerance, though, ended on 9/11. As the author admits, government leaders still unabashedly proclaim that U.S. power is justified “because it would be used only as a force for good.” For generations who know the Vietnam War largely through movies and fiction, this well-informed and impassioned book is an antidote to forgetting and an appeal to reassess America’s place in the world.
HOW TO FLY A HORSE The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery
Ashton, Kevin Doubleday (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-385-53859-6
As a writer on technology and coiner of the phrase “the Internet of Things,” Ashton seems to be a particularly creative type. But the “secret” of the subtitle is that there is no secret, no magic and no mystery. Creation isn’t light-bulb illumination or flashes of insight, writes the author. It is step-by-step, trial-and-error work. “Work is the soul of creation,” he writes, often with different turns of phrase. “Work is getting up early and going home late, turning down dates and giving up weekends, writing and rewriting, reviewing and revising, rote and routine, staring down the doubt of the blank page, beginning when we do not know where to start, and not stopping when we cannot go on.” Ashton shows how work builds on the work of so many others, for generations, thus debunking the very notion of individual genius, or even individual credit. Along the way, he incorporates examples ranging from all sorts of scientific discovery (a process that occasionally involves theft) to Bert and Ernie, Coca-Cola, the films of
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Woody Allen and the creative dynamic behind South Park. His message is inspirational, that “we all have creative minds. This is one reason the creativity myth is so terribly wrong. Creating is not rare. We are all born to do it.” From such inventions as the airplane and the smartphone, Ashton shows how asking the right questions and providing the right frame for the problem can achieve something extraordinary and how important are qualities such as seeing (clearly) and actually starting. “We are inclined to regard passion as positive and addiction as negative, but they are indistinguishable apart from their outcomes,” he writes in one of many overstated passages. “Addiction destroys, passion creates, and that is the only difference between them.” Ashton makes compelling arguments about creativity and genius but continues to belabor them long after readers have gotten the point.
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WHO’S AFRAID OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM?
Bilgrami, Akeel; Cole, Jonathan R.—Eds. Columbia Univ. (448 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-231-16880-9 Scholars consider threats to free inquiry. Editors Bilgrami (Philosophy/Columbia Univ.; Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, 2013, etc.) and Cole (Mason Professor of the University/Columbia Univ.; The Great American University, 2010, etc.) bring together eminent scholars—Stanley Fish, Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, among them—to analyze the vexing and controversial issue of academic freedom. The concept began in the late 19th century, when American colleges no longer aimed to train men for the ministry but rather to become critical thinkers. “To criticize and augment, as well as to preserve the tradition, became an accepted function...,” write the editors. “This was an
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“A graceful confirmation that reading can be an integrative education that offers a surprise with every turn of the page.” from schubert’s winter journey
extraordinary departure for a system that previously had aimed primarily at cultural conservation.” Coincident with internal changes was new funding: private support by prominent businessmen, who assumed they could influence curriculum and hiring. Princeton professor Joan Scott notes that the doctrine of academic freedom was codified in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors to ensure faculty autonomy in newly established research universities. The AAUP held that teaching, research and publications should be evaluated only by professional scholars with relevant expertise. That stipulation still engenders debate, as government funding and Institutional Review Boards weigh in on research parameters. Like other contributors, Columbia philosophy professor Michele Moody-Adams sees the university as a refuge where intellectual diversity, however unsettling to donors, colleagues or even students, must be preserved. Several contributors consider whether academic freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment or whether it has a special legal status. A final, eye-opening essay summarizes a study conducted at Columbia in which 1,610 faculty members were asked to evaluate 14 vignettes suggesting challenges to academic freedom: research curtailed by IRBs, for example, or faculty making politically unpopular remarks in class. The results showed wide disagreement about what free inquiry means and what academic freedom protects. Cogent essays about a topic crucial to the university and to all discourse in a democracy.
SCHUBERT’S WINTER JOURNEY Anatomy of an Obsession Bostridge, Ian Knopf (544 pp.) $29.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-307-96163-1
A singer, author and professor expertly escorts us through Winterreise, Franz Schubert’s 24-song cycle. The subtitle refers to an obsession, and that is no exaggeration. Reporting that he has sung the cycle about 100 times, Bostridge (Music/Oxford Univ.; A Singer’s Notebook, 2011, etc.) frequently confesses his fondness for the piece, an affection that is patent throughout this illuminating and comprehensive work. Although the author pauses at times to discuss music theory, it’s not often, and he keeps in mind a more general reading audience. Devoting a section to each of the 24 songs, Bostridge employs an organization that is both fixed and flexible. He begins with the lyrics (poems by Wilhelm Muller, with German and English, on facing pages) and then both focuses and digresses in ways that explain the music and illustrate the value of a liberal arts education. In his rich, highly readable text are allusions to Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dante, Napoleon, the Nazis, J.M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Thomas Mann, Gustav Mahler, James Fenimore Cooper and countless others. He shares the remarkable story of Schubert’s decline and death, a period during which he was compulsively reading Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. However, 146
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it is the winter journey itself that most interests Bostridge, and he dives into the text, explores how the words and music relate, looks for analogues in the composer’s life, and discusses his own performances and performances by others that helped shape his view of the piece. He treats readers to some things they would not expect in such a book: the history of postal delivery, the scientific explanation of the will-o’-the-wisp, the theme of loneliness in Romantic art, and the differences between crows and ravens. A graceful confirmation that reading can be an integrative education that offers a surprise with every turn of the page.
RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS A Life in the Public Square Boyagoda, Randy Image/Doubleday (480 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-307-95396-4
The many sides of Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009). Boyagoda (American Studies/Ryerson Univ.; Beggar’s Feast, 2011, etc.) does a true service by offering this first full-length biography of the Christian cleric. Though Neuhaus was a man who defied labels, he was classified by many as a radical leftist, neoconservative, Lutheran, Catholic, activist, writer, etc. Boyagoda begins with a compelling account of Neuhaus’ boyhood as the precocious son of a conservative Lutheran pastor in Canada. One of eight children, he nevertheless soon stood out as unique, playing preacher and giving sermons to his little sister. Despite largely misspent teen years, which Boyagoda does not blanch to reveal, Neuhaus finally settled into a life of the mind at a St. Louis Lutheran seminary. There, he caused trouble not so much through alcohol and pranks as through doctrinal difference. Eventually, Neuhaus pursued urban ministry in New York and fell headlong into the civil rights movement and liberal politics. By the end of the 1960s, however, his views had begun to change, and he began to move toward becoming one of America’s most recognizable neoconservatives. Moreover, he continued on a spiritual road that would eventually bring about his conversion to Catholicism and ordination as a Catholic priest in 1990. Along the way came international fame, the editorship of First Things and such acclaimed books as The Naked Public Square (1984). Neuhaus also rubbed shoulders with legions of important politicians, activists, theologians, pundits and others during the course of his life. Boyagoda dispassionately describes this fascinating and active life, and he manages to blend skills as a folksy storyteller, researcher and unbiased historian, providing a biography that is balanced, interesting and relevant. A useful, provocative spotlight on one of the leading lights of the 20th century.
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A MATTER OF BREEDING A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and How the Quest for Status Has Harmed Man’s Best Friend Brandow, Michael Beacon (288 pp.) $18.00 paper | $18.00 e-book Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8070-3343-2 978-0-8070-3344-9 e-book
A no-holds-barred defense of dogs that are the hapless victims of their clueless owners. Brandow, a professional dog-walker and petsitter in New York City, deconstructs the idea of diversity when it comes to dog breeds. His subjects are not working dogs bred and trained for special skills but those that have been bred for appearance, a standard he equates to racism. The author writes that as he studied his charges and their owners over the years, his focus shifted from the problems faced by overbred dogs to “the humans hooked on their looks.” Brandow enumerates the disastrous results of modern breeding practices—higher levels of cancer, structural deformities, skin conditions and more—and many of his stories are distressing—e.g., a baby bulldog that, despite bulging muscles, barely had the strength to walk. He was the cherished pet of a gay couple who were muscle-builders themselves and had chosen a puppy to match their own self-image. (The author explains that he allows himself the liberty of satirizing the owners as faddists because he, too, is gay.) Remarking that the lineage of bulldogs is traceable to dogs bred to take on bulls in fights, the author marvels at their popularity with modern opponents of violence and cruelty to animals. Over time, such practices as bull baiting were outlawed in England, and the bulldog was refashioned into a house pet. In 1929, the American Kennel Club was incorporated, becoming the standard-setter for all breeds. “Dog breeding and showing have had more to do with social survival of the owner than survival or fitness as a basic concern,” writes the author in this occasionally overheated book, but he is optimistic that the tide is changing as more pet owners are rejecting such false standards and opting for rescue dogs. Brandow’s vitriolic style can be distracting, but his message is serious.
Galesburg, Illinois, was once a town of steel, glass and rubber, devoted to meeting “America’s seemingly insatiable postwar appetite for appliances.” Newcomer workers received the less-than-desirable jobs, loading trucks and stuffing refrigerators with insulation and the like. “Appliance City,” as Galesburg was called, had a population of 5,000 in its heyday, and it was something of a blue-collar paradise, its jobs paying $15-plus per hour with ample benefits. As Broughton (Public Policy/Univ. of Chicago) observes, in the late 1950s, Admiral, Maytag and other American manufacturers were producing 3 million refrigerators per year, along with washers and dryers. Half a century later, almost all that work had been outsourced, the good factory work moving to plants just across the border in Mexico, where a $15-per-hour job could be filled for $15 per day or less. As a result, the sleepy border town of Reynosa, Mexico, where Galesburg’s jobs went, has increased 1,000 percent in population, bringing all the usual crime and anomie. Broughton limns the story with interviews with those left behind and those newly hired, as well as the intermediaries who profit from others’ loss. One of them, central to the story, “saw himself as a warrior, fighting to take
BOOM, BUST, EXODUS The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities Broughton, Chad Oxford Univ. (416 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-0-19-976561-4
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. As this sociological study shows, that, at least, is what they tell the eggs. |
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“The scope of the subject matter is impressive, and the execution is outstanding.” from the summit
Rust Belt jobs and to stop China from stealing low-wage work from the maquilas.” That’s loyalty of a sort, one supposes. Sadder still is the author’s account of the cognitive dissonance that has settled like a shroud over both cities, as workers in Reynosa work 13-hour shifts and lose connections with their families and as the people of Galesburg try to convince themselves that things are for the better in a new world of flipping burgers and stocking shelves at the big-box store down the road. Though somewhat academic and consistently grim, Broughton’s book provides ample documentation of a central truth of late-American history—namely, that capital has no country.
A THEORY OF THE DRONE
Chamayou, Grégoire Translated by Lloyd, Janet New Press (304 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-59558-975-0 978-1-59558-976-7 e-book
If you are what you eat, then you are also what you kill with. Q.E.D. The idea that there might be a philosophical theory behind, or at least something philosophical to say about, the use of remote-controlled weapons is a very French one: In this instance, it’s not so much the Montaigne-born drive to understand the world as the Barthesian one of fearing letting something obvious go by unremarked. Chamayou, a “research scholar in philosophy,” gamely codifies what has gone unsaid: In war, soldiers have to draft a narrative that turns the moral violation of killing into a “virtue, not something prohibited.” This is easier done, by his suggestion, when one is looking into the eye of the enemy. But what of the drone operators, tucked safely away in a bunker in the desert? Well, they are “in a sense both in the rear and at the front, caught up in two very different moral worlds that pull their lives this way and that.” Nonetheless, the military has admitted that some drone operators far from the front have to be treated for PTSD. “If it is true that weapons constitute the essence of combatants,” the author writes, that begs the question, “what is the essence of those who fight using drones?” The implication: A machine, of course, which makes the state behind the murderous technology a sort of machine, as well. In the end, having been treated to a light survey of the ethos of mechanized war, readers are left with the sense that this is the product of someone who must enjoy the unhurried leisure of not being chased around by one of the killing machines he’s writing about—a first-world ponderer of third-world problems, perhaps. Chamayou does land some good points in this rather arid exercise, but one would rather have a Camus than a Derrida on this point.
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THE SUMMIT Bretton Woods, 1944: J.M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy Conway, Ed Pegasus (480 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 11, 2015 978-1-60598-681-4
Sky News economics editor Conway (50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know, 2009) covers the inside story of what really happened during the 22 days of the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. The author provides a compelling portrait of the event, which took place on the international stage of big-power geopolitics and was driven by long-range changes in monetary relations. It was at Bretton Woods that the dollar became the world’s senior reserve currency, replacing the debt-ridden British pound and the collapsed gold reserve system discredited during the Great Depression. Conway also chronicles the rise of the United States as the world’s leading creditor from before World War I, and he outlines how that trajectory affected the proceedings, counterpointing the disastrous attempts of debtors like the British and French to revive the prewar gold standard. The author also extends the narrative to the present by way of President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to take the dollar off the gold standard. Conway takes issue with earlier, narrowly focused economic treatments and the view that international monetary economics is “esoteric and irrelevant.” The author draws on previously untapped material from participants, (e.g., George Bolton of the Bank of England), including personal recollections, accounts and diaries, and archives from Russia. Conway documents the rich relationship between John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Competition between the two was long-standing—White was determined to secure hegemony for the dollar after the war, while Keynes attempted to protect the U.K.’s finances from the effects of its indebtedness to colonies like India and South Africa—and Conway presents the relationship intriguingly throughout. Additionally, he portrays how Keynes’ incredible arrogance and rudeness undermined his effectiveness with American policymakers. The scope of the subject matter is impressive, and the execution is outstanding. (16 pages of b/w photos)
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GREAT CATASTROPHE Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide de Waal, Thomas Oxford Univ. (312 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 2, 2015 978-0-19-935069-8
The causes and consequences of a crime against humanity. Journalist, historian and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, de Waal (The Caucasus: An Introduction, 2010, etc.) investigates an event still “highly politicized,” although it occurred a century ago: the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts and current scholarship, the author assesses the context, and political and cultural aftermaths, of the atrocity that Armenians insist was genocide, an accusation that Turkey
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has consistently denied. De Waal presents evidence that the ruthless killings did not result from hatred and paranoia on the parts of all Turks and Kurds but rather were fomented by Turkish Unionist leaders intent on pushing the country into modernity. As one historian argued, some mass atrocities have been incited when a minority identified as “primitive” is “perceived as a threat and ultimately destroyed.” The Armenian narrative about the massacre became complicated after 1944, when a Polish-Jewish lawyer coined the term “genocide,” which he defined as “the mass slaughter of a national group.” In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which stipulated that acts against the victim group were punishable if “committed with intent to destroy.” Turkey hotly denied that “intent” could be proved. Later, with increased attention on the Holocaust, the term “genocide” generated controversy when Holocaust survivors and historians objected to its application to anything other than the Nazi extermination of Jews. For generations, what to call the event has made a TurkishArmenian dialogue impossible.
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THE BRAIN’S WAY OF HEALING Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
In this measured study, De Waal asserts his optimism that young scholars, freed from past narratives and drawing upon “hidden histories of the Armenians,” will amplify what is known about the late Ottoman period and complicate a history that both sides have tried mightily to own. A perfect scholarly complement to Meline Toumani’s outstanding memoir, There Was and There Was Not (2014). (22 b/w halftones; 2 b/w line illustrations)
THE DEVIL WINS A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Denery II, Dallas G. Princeton Univ. (360 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 18, 2015 978-0-691-16321-5
An intellectual discourse on the essence and history of duplicity. In an attempt to answer the question “Is it ever acceptable to lie?” Denery (History/Bowdoin Coll.; Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life, 2005, etc.) delivers a predominantly referential tome on how ancient history viewed deception and why the behavioral evolution of dishonesty, from the Medieval period and Middle Ages to the early modern world, continues to influence society at large. He does so through a multipart narrative offering five differing perspectives on how lying has altered historical events, beginning with an astute analysis of varying theological conceptions of mendacity. The author juxtaposes God and the devil, with each entity exhibiting its own form of both obvious and cleverly cloaked deception. Denery also examines the schematics of the Garden of Eden and ideological debates of theologian philosophers such as Augustine, Calvin and Descartes to create a rich tapestry of creative thought, attitude and presumption. He interprets these theories with an expert hand while exploring how mistruths upended the secular law of the Middle Ages, and he scrutinizes the controversial crossroads of masculine and feminine deceptive traits. Not necessarily for casual readers, Denery’s classroom-ready textbook is often stiffly academic in tone and delivery. The author smartly skirts the tinderbox subject matter of dishonesty within the political arena (which could endure ad infinitum) and concludes with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s take on how lies are simply “problems with natural causes and, hopefully, natural solutions.” Collectively, Denery’s chapters authoritatively chronicle deception’s gradual evolution from a hellish side effect of satanic belief to perhaps the pivotal axis upon which the contemporary world turns, ultimately (and somewhat startlingly) rationalizing that “[w]hile lies might occasionally threaten civil society, they also make it possible.” A sophisticated, densely referenced, scholarly take on the perennial traits of human deceit and dishonesty.
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Doidge, Norman Viking (432 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-670-02550-3
Doidge (Psychiatry/Univ. of Toronto; The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, 2007) reports on continuing advances in our understanding of the human brain and its unique way of healing. The author’s first book chronicled revolutionary new insights into how the brain can be helped to restructure itself in response to injury. Here, Doidge interviews a second generation of “scientists, doctors and patients,” whom he calls “neuroplasticians.” He recounts his discussion with an American physician specializing in the treatment of chronic pain who pioneered a new method using mental imagery, after he suffered a serious injury. Doidge visited with a controversial 77-year-old sufferer of Parkinson’s disease who claims to have been able to reverse his symptoms (and slow the underlying process of deterioration) by focused exercise. One of the most fascinating characters is an Israeli medical practitioner who developed a unique healing method for patients suffering muscular injuries, based on insights from the practice of jujitsu. Doidge uses these and other clinical accounts to illustrate what he claims are three fundamental processes that can be tapped to unleash the brain’s healing capacity: the necessity of countering the brain’s adaptation to a lost function by “learned nonuse”; the importance of isolating damaged neurons from healthy ones; and the significance of recognizing that “the organic living brain is quite the opposite of an engineered machine with hardwired circuits that can perform only a limited number of actions that it has been designed to do.” Doidge’s takeaway message is that mental activity correlates with neuronal activity, but we still do not know where thought takes place. “This mystery of the mind remains unsolved,” he writes. A lively, anecdotal account of potential new directions that may point the way to major therapeutic breakthroughs.
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“A formidable challenge for general readers but a must for specialists and those interested in how the past informs the present and how the present alters our understanding of the past.” from hall of mirrors
HALL OF MIRRORS The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses—and Misuses— of History
THE FIRST AMENDMENT BUBBLE How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press Gajda, Amy Harvard Univ. (320 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 5, 2015 978-0-674-36832-3
Eichengreen, Barry Oxford Univ. (592 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-0-19-939200-1
A distinguished economic historian examines the remarkable parallels and the significant differences between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Faced with the greatest economic disaster in 80 years, policymakers of the waning George W. Bush and the incoming Barack Obama administrations quite understandably looked to the last great crisis for lessons on how to cope. According to Eichengreen (Economics and Political Science/Univ. of California; Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Failure of the International Monetary System, 2011, etc.), they got a lot right and, thus, avoided another full-blown depression, but by failing to do more once the emergency passed, they weakened the recovery and virtually ensured another crisis at some point. The author’s dual-track narrative alternates between the two historic episodes, the run-up, the breakdown, the response and the denouement. A powerful plus ça change vibe courses through his comparison, as he discusses each era’s major players and events—e.g., the grifters (Charles Ponzi vs. Bernie Madoff), the reparative legislation (Glass-Steagall Act vs. Dodd-Frank), the economic advisers (FDR’s brains trust vs. Obama’s team), the institutional collapses (Union Guardian Trust vs. Lehman Brothers) the bubbles (the Florida land boom vs. the subprime mortgage loans), the panicked electorate and the nervous politicians. Eichengreen leavens his wide-angle treatment of complex issues—he devotes almost equal time to economic developments in Europe during each era—with capsule portraits of the major players, with becoming modesty about his own assessments (notwithstanding his obvious intellect) and even with occasional humor. He reminds us, too, that economic analyses of causes or cures are insufficient, that there’s a human dimension to any economic crisis and that implementing policy is always a matter of politics. A helpful 25-page dramatis personae concludes the volume. A formidable challenge for general readers but a must for specialists and those interested in how the past informs the present and how the present alters our understanding of the past.
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A lawyerly look at what threatens journalistic free speech liberties. As a former journalist, Gajda (Law/ Tulane Univ.; The Trials of Academe: The New Era of Campus Litigtion, 2009) critiques and advises on matters of privacy and free speech with a keen journalistic eye. She explores the ways public scrutiny by news media (while protected under the guise of “newsworthiness”) tarnishes the notion of public privacy. As First Amendment constitutional protections for the press continue to expand, the “balance between privacy rights and public interests” becomes increasingly skewed. The author cites the current
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wave of ubiquitous social media, where personal information is willingly and willfully disseminated, as a prime instigator fueling the privacy rights debate. But at what point do First Amendment rights trump personal privacy rights? Her thoughtful discussion includes chapters juxtaposing journalism’s former golden age with the lax media standards of today’s paparazzi and shock reporters, where “push-the-envelope behavior has elevated privacy concerns to new levels.” Writing in concise, authoritative language, Gajda reiterates the significance of free speech, freedom of the press and the preservation of personal liberties within a complex debate that has become frustratingly blurred by legal ambiguities and loopholes. Fully utilizing (if overly reliant upon) pivotal court cases, she also highlights ruthless vigilante programs like To Catch a Predator and stories of misbehaving celebrities who have been scrutinized for wrongdoings by exploitative websites infamous for straddling ethical boundaries. Ultimately, Gajda writes, this is subject matter that will fester for decades as digital and social media erode the protective facade of personal privacy and evaporate the guidelines of what is considered newsworthy. She concludes with an appeal for change in how the law appropriates the First Amendment framework in both the private sector and within news media circles. An eye-opening, relevant and cautionary book.
TALES FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE BRAIN A Life in Neuroscience Gazzaniga, Michael S. Ecco/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $28.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-222880-2
“How on earth does the brain enable mind?” That is the still-to-be-answered question posed by Gazzaniga (Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, 2011, etc.), the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In this scientific memoir, the author chronicles his 50-year career at the forefront of research and “the scientific saga” in which he still plays a part. “I have come to realize the great extent to which my own march through life has been influenced by others,” he writes, “...and how we scientists are all a composite of both scientific and nonscientific experiences.” His own scientific journey began as a graduate student at Caltech, where the hot topic was “split brain research [on animals] which was trying to find out if each hemisphere of the brain could learn independently from the other.” His focus became the study of epileptic patients who underwent similar surgery to control intractable seizures, and he describes his stunning realization that his first human subject’s “right brain completed an act of which his own left hemisphere had no knowledge.” In effect, two separate minds were functioning in the same body. Though they could not communicate directly, over time, they developed indirect ways of cueing each other. Gazzaniga describes how this discovery paved the way for understanding how normal 152
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brains use modular processes that work in parallel to process information and come to decisions. The author writes warmly of the people who shared in his discoveries and his many friendships. In a foreword, Steven Pinker pays tribute to Gazzaniga not only for his scientific achievements, “midwifing the field of cognitive neuroscience, but...for showing that science is compatible with all the other good things in life.” A lively appreciation of both the complexity of the human mind and the scientific enterprise. (b/w illustrations)
RUSSIAN TATTOO A Memoir
Gorokhova, Elena Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4516-8982-2
In her second memoir, St. Petersburg native Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs, 2010) chronicles a decadeslong clash of cultures between Russia and America. The author describes the misfortune of being married, against the will of a formidable Stalin-era apartment block of a mother, to a creepy American who wooed her with the thought that Leningrad, as the city was then called, referred to someone other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. “This is literally Lena’s city, he said, smiling at his own clever manipulation of Russian grammar,” a manipulation involving the possessive form. Possessive: Her husband is nothing but, even if, soon after the papers were signed, he informed her that the marriage would be open. “I didn’t know marriage could be paired with an adjective gutting out the essence of the word’s meaning,” she writes, “but then I didn’t know lots of things.” The years rolled by, and she continued to learn more about her redoubtable mom, who, having “survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, and the Great Patriotic War,” could be as fierce a protector in the new world as in the old. As will happen in America, one marriage gave way to another, and a child arrived and went through all the predictable stages of adolescent rebellion, not least acquiring the tattoo of the title. Still, the same old chores awaited Gorokhova, just as the same kotlety awaited anyone sitting at her table, the “oval-shaped hamburgers” reflecting the cultural collisions that threatened to unmake her life. The tone of the book is tentative, as if Gorokhova is under threat of deportation at any moment, but never meek. The author projects a quiet sense of defiance and provides occasional sharp observations about what it means to be an immigrant in an immigrant society. Overall, however, there are no surprises: The author suffered hard luck and misunderstanding, then redemption of a kind—the usual narrative arc, that is, with a pleasing payoff. Without the flair of Gary Shteyngart or the urgency of Anna Politkovskaya—of some interest but modestly so.
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MIND CHANGE How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains
Greenfield, Susan Random House (368 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-8129-9382-0
A comprehensive overview of the scientific research—albeit in its infancy— into the effects of cybertechnology on
our brains. Considering the advances in neurology over the past decade or so, neuroscientist Greenfield (You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity, 2011, etc.) raises questions with startling implications. How does our screen-oriented daily existence affect how we think, feel, live our lives and shape our identities? What are the consequences of connecting digitally rather than in person or collapsing the frameworks and timetables that have given
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skeletal stability to our daily lives? Much of the research that Greenfield explores is inconclusive (so far), but in her formal tone, she presents much to ponder. She synthesizes the substantial amount of work that has already been accomplished: how technology in general has been shown to improve working memory, slow cognitive decline through stimulation, and improve visual processing and motor response skills, but also how spending too much time in the digital zone leads to sleep problems, a gathering sense of isolation, “nature-deficit disorder,” diminishing face-to-face social skills and a constant level of interruption, which interferes with deep thinking. Yet more important to Greenfield is how the brain “has evolved to respond with exquisite sensitivity to external influences—to the environment it inhabits.” Identity, writes the author, “is a...spatio-temporal phenomenon, combining the hardwired, long-term, generalized neuronal network...with momentary consciousness, the fleeting generation of macro-scale coalitions of neurons (assemblies) in less than a second.” Connecting these neurons into a unique configuration personalizes the brain and shapes the individual mind. Throughout, the author
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“A catalog of occasional victories and constant missteps that is eye-opening, illuminating and maddening.” from 88 days to kandahar
DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
finds conspicuous problems with the screen life: inattentiveness, problems with reading, a disconnect between actions and consequences and, creepily, the lack of a “you”: “your story, your internally driven scenario—above all, for your imagination.” Challenging, stimulating perspective from an informed neuroscientist on a complex, fast-moving, hugely consequential field.
88 DAYS TO KANDAHAR A CIA Diary Grenier, Robert L. Simon & Schuster (464 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-4767-1207-9
Former CIA officer Grenier delivers an action-packed tale, rich in implication, of the post-9/11 race to unseat the Taliban and rout al-Qaida in Afghanistan. A field agent who “had a huge natural advantage over desk-bound, bookish analytic types” in having vast experience in both Central Asia and in the paramilitary operations of the CIA, the author was called on immediately after 9/11 to examine the internal politics of Afghanistan and help develop national policy (against, he notes, the CIA’s brief “to inform policy, never to make it”) on the brink of the American invasion of 2001. Grenier’s recommendations were nuanced, allowing even the Taliban some face-saving means of separating from al-Qaida. Among his other tenets: The United States should avoid giving the appearance of taking sides in a civil war that had ethnic dimensions, and “the U.S. effort should always be in support of Afghans, rather than the other way around.” The author’s memoir of transforming from disaffected longhair into dedicated warrior sometimes reads like mere filler, but his critique of what became of that plan is devastating: As he notes, we have broken the china and are now in a rush to flee the shop, while carefully forged alliances are unraveling and supposed allies are casting their eyes in other directions for friends. He opens, darkly, with the hope that the lessons his narrative offers will be useful as we prepare for a third Afghan-American War, having narrowly won the first and botched the second. Apart from his taut, well-written account of action on the ground, its heroes mostly gnarly Special Forces troops and spooks, CIA watchers will be fascinated by Grenier’s look at the twisted, surprisingly nasty politics within the intelligence community in the age of Bush/Cheney and their appointees, squabbling that makes Afghanistan look tame. A catalog of occasional victories and constant missteps that is eye-opening, illuminating and maddening.
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Hamid, Mohsin Riverhead (240 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-59463-365-2
An acclaimed novelist reports on peril, war and peace. After three novels, Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 2013, etc.) gathers 36 short pieces of nonfiction published in the last 14 years: some, ephemeral essays about life and art; others, trenchant reports from Pakistan, where, after decades in New York and London, the Pakistani-born author now lives. Hamid hopes that “the fragmentary and ‘of the moment’ nature of the pieces” reveal “a different type of honesty than a book that is conceived as a whole and executed as a single effort.” Although honest and candid, the collection is uneven, with astute essays about politics weakened by slight opinion pieces on fatherhood, reading and writing. He muses, for example, on his experience reading e-books; bristles at the idea of “the Great American Novel by a Woman” (“ ‘the’ is needlessly exclusionary, and ‘American’ is unfortunately parochial”); and wonders if “the widespread longing for likable characters” reflects a desire “to not be entirely alone.” As a cultural observer, the author takes the perspective of “a correspondent who cannot help but be foreign, at least in part,” an experience that, in the age of globalization, seems to him “increasingly universal.” That perspective informs his analysis of Pakistan’s politics, complex religious tensions, endemic poverty, fraught international relationships and future, about which he is justifiably anxious. Pakistan, he wrote in 2012, on the nation’s 65th birthday, “is meddling in the affairs of neighbors, victimizing marginalized ethnic and religious groups, and building nuclear weapons while citizens go without electricity.” Small-minded nationalism, he warns, will undermine the concept of shared humanity; instead, he advocates that Pakistan widen its view to include “a blurring and reconceiving of national boundaries,” an “embrace of cross-border autonomous zones,” and a revision of the nation’s self-image “as a pawn in someone else’s game.” Passion and hope infuse Hamid’s most incisive dispatches.
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CHASING THE SCREAM The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs Hari, Johann Bloomsbury (400 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-62040-890-2
Award-winning journalist Hari’s multistrand examination of the war on drugs, spanning 100 years from inception to the present day. Through a smattering of narratives, the author looks at the centennial of the war on drugs from the time it was legislated with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914. Blending sociology, history and reportage with novelistic detail, Hari uses the narratives of the first American drug czar Harry Anslinger, jazz singer and addict Billie Holiday, and drug-dealing gangster Arnold Rothstein as archetypes to point out how the war continually perpetuates itself with shocking intensity and contradiction. The author is a sharp judge of character, and he wisely notes that the underlying reason for drug prohibition was not an altruistic desire to protect people from harmful and addictive chemical substances but rather fear “that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.” It certainly seems that the primary goal of the war was to repress minorities and solidify white dominance, and little has changed in the past 100 years. Racial discrimination continues to dominate discussions of the drug war’s effectiveness; a majority of nonviolent drug offenders are black, yet statistics show that drug use across races is equal. Alarming, though well-known statistics such as this are peppered throughout the many profiles Hari shares from his travels around the world to experience the repercussions of the drug war firsthand. While the author harangues the singularly negative consequences of drug prohibition, he discusses the case of Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized since 2001; there, the average drug use is now lower than any rate in Europe. It is one of the few glimmers of hope, alongside movements to legalize marijuana, in a worldwide war whose fight should not be against drugs but for humanity in general. A compassionate and humane argument to overturn draconian drug policies.
MR. AND MRS. DISRAELI A Strange Romance
Hay, Daisy Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-374-27063-6
A dual biography of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Mary Anne Lewis. Before he was Queen Victoria’s close friend, Disraeli failed as a lawyer, stock speculator and newspaper proprietor, but even as he found success, he sank into vast debt but found a satisfying, useful 156
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relationship. Hay (Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation, 2010) provides insight into the marriage of convenience that became a love story to rival Victoria and Albert’s. These two middle-class people succeeded as Mary Anne charmed the voters and Disraeli’s intense, clear outlook brought them fame and position. Mary Anne was a sailor’s daughter first married to Wyndham Lewis, owner of Welsh ironworks. Also a marriage of convenience, Lewis adored Mary Anne, and she lived happily on his wealth. She secretly supported her brother, paying his debts and buying his military promotions. At the time, Disraeli was always in fear of debtors prison, as his poetry and the romantic silver fork novels he wrote could never pay his debts. Lewis and Mary Anne propelled him into Parliament. He enjoyed Parliamentary privilege as opposed to debtors prison, but his eventual marriage to the widowed and wealthy Mary Anne paid only a fraction of his debt. She never knew how desperate he actually was, and she was deemed vulgar and graceless by the upper classes. However, the queen’s favor assured Disraeli a place in society. Hay provides interesting discussions of how Mary Anne’s devotion to her brother, and Disraeli’s to his sister, created major deceptions in their marriage. Mary Anne’s political acumen and her adulation by his constituency got him elected, and his brilliance made him a leader. With this new addition to Disraeli-ana, readers will be enlightened by the younger man and how alike he was to Mary Anne, who became the love of his life. (8 pages of b/w illustrations)
MURDER AT CAMP DELTA A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantánamo Bay Hickman, Joseph Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4516-5079-2
Disturbing account of abuse and secrecy at the Guantánamo Bay military prison, tied to the deaths of three detainees. Proud of his long career in the Marines, Army and corrections, Hickman re-enlisted after 9/11. He joined the Maryland National Guard and was ultimately sent on a yearlong deployment to Gitmo. Although the author had worked in violent prisons in the past, he was shocked by the chaotic atmosphere in the detention units, noting that interrogation personnel were exempted from standard security oversight and that there was a fraught atmosphere of racial tension and mistrust between the Guardsmen and the Navy personnel administering the prison. Although Hickman suspected that many detainees were potentially dangerous jihadi, he was disturbed by the unprovoked harassment and abuse handed out by the guards. His unease climaxed in June 2006, when, on his supervisory watch, three inmates died mysteriously. Hickman was first informed they’d had rags stuffed in their mouths, but the media received an
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“The extraordinary life of Karl Marx’s feisty feminist youngest daughter told with passionate sympathy and conviction.” from eleanor marx
implausible account of a coordinated suicide, which an inscrutable report later supported. Though he was never contacted by investigators, the author remained sufficiently haunted by his experience to contact a Guantánamo-focused think tank at Seton Hall Law School, setting in motion a six-year investigation. They meticulously deconstructed the report and other evidence, determining the deaths may have stemmed from deliberate overdoses of anti-malarial drugs with psychoactive side effects, administered “to break down detainees.” Chillingly, Hickman concludes that commanders as highly ranked as Donald Rumsfeld had decided to use Gitmo as “America’s battle lab,” testing unproven interrogation techniques on its alleged enemy combatants: “I believed we were guards protecting America from the worst of the worst,” writes the author, “...[but] the authorities behind it aimed to create ‘controlled chaos.’ ” A plainly told, unsettling corrective to the many jingoistic accounts of post-9/11 military action.
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ELEANOR MARX A Life Holmes, Rachel Bloomsbury (528 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-62040-970-1
The extraordinary life of Karl Marx’s feisty feminist youngest daughter told with passionate sympathy and conviction. The relationship between her committed socialist parents forms the key to the vivacious life of Eleanor “Tussy” Marx (1855-1898), as portrayed chronologically by British writer Holmes (African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus, 2007, etc.). Exiled from Germany and France after their participation in the failed democratic revolutions convulsing Europe in 1848, the Marxes relocated to London. With only three surviving daughters, they scraped by largely thanks to colleague Frederick Engels’ generous subsidies.
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While the two elder daughters enjoyed some formal education, Tussy was mostly schooled at her parents’ knees, imbued with their firebrand ideals of collectivism and internationalism and their advocacy for the proletariat and the principles of the International Workingmen’s Association, and she aided her beloved father in his research for his opus Capital at the Reading Room in the British Museum. Having watched her mother’s intelligence and ambition subsumed by her father’s work, then seeing her two older married sisters shackled by motherhood and household drudgery, Tussy chose free love with talented older men and an autonomous life earning her own wages as a tutor, translator and writer. Indeed, writes Holmes in this consistently illuminating biography, she was the “apple of [her father’s] eye” and later became his executor. She channeled her high spirits first into the theater (she and her father had recited Shakespeare together as a way for him to learn English), translated Madame Bovary into English, among other works, and eventually set up house in London with the “reptilian” fellow actor and intellectual Edward Aveling, who never married her despite his 14-year promises. Holmes is absolutely outraged by Aveling’s betrayal and Tussy’s horrifying, untimely death—a tragic tale of a brilliant light eclipsed by the stifling patriarchy of her age. A full-fleshed, thrilling portrait, troubling and full of family secrets.
the tangled bureaucracy. Italians are suspicious of change, their foods rarely go through significant changes, and they don’t eat much foreign food. They rarely obey laws but rigidly observe their traditions. This country, which prides itself on the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and Risorgimento, is incredibly diverse but still unified—except, of course, when it comes to soccer matches. Italians are devoted to family, and they communicate with a host of symbols, gestures and untranslatable phrases. “Few countries,” writes the author, “are as comprehensively associated with happiness as Italy. Just the mention of its name brings to mind sunny days, blue skies, glittering seas; delicious, comforting food; good-looking, welldressed people; undulating hills topped with cypress trees; museums crammed with much of the best of Western art.” What’s not to love? A thoroughly researched, well-written, ageless narrative of a fascinating people.
THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BE WASHINGTON Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History Horn, Jonathan Scribner (384 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-4856-6
THE ITALIANS
Hooper, John Viking (336 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 29, 2015 978-0-525-42807-7 A compact but comprehensive study of the people of Italy. Economist Italy correspondent and Guardian southern Europe editor Hooper (The New Spaniards, 2006, etc.) begins with the geographic divisions of mountains, lakes, plains and seas. Ten percent of Italians live on islands—Sardinia, Sicily, Capri, Palmaria and dozens more—“physically detached from the rest of the nation.” Since the Roman Empire, Italy has been made up of independent duchies and principalities, which have been occupied by Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, Normans, Muslims, Spaniards and Germans. Historically, Italy is divided into the north, the Papal States, and the Mezzogiorno, or south. The author puts his finger on the vast diversity of the country through his descriptions of their linguistics, cultures, foods, economies and even journalism. The greatest cultural and economic differences are evident between the north and south. The Piedmontese of the north led the country to the Risorgimento, or unification, and the much poorer south joined grudgingly, mostly for economic reasons. (Hooper’s suggestion that the growth of the Mafia was a reaction to the unification is feasible.) Italians admire furbo, the cunning of those who can “find a way” around a problem; for Italy, it’s often 158
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A romantic, rueful portrait of the Confederate general and the fatal decision that shut him out of history. Former White House speechwriter Horn finds Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) a deeply sympathetic American hero whom fortune seemed to have favored as heir to George Washington, if only Lee had thrown his lot with the Union rather than the South. That is certainly a steep qualifier, yet the author tracks Lee’s rigorous antebellum loyalty to the Union, beginning with his father Harry’s intrepid Revolutionary derring-do as captain of the light dragoons, gaining the nickname “Light-Horse” Lee and the admiration of fellow Virginian Gen. Washington, whose land speculations around the Potomac River spurred Harry to buy 500 acres. Although Harry ended up in debtors prison later in life and abandoned his surviving children from his second marriage in Alexandria, Harry “remained an apostle for Washington’s glory” and coined the memorable phrase at the great man’s funeral: “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Hence, it was surely fate that brought West Point graduate Robert and his rich cousin Mary Custis together: She was the daughter of Washington’s adopted son who had built the showy Arlington mansion atop Alexandria’s hills overlooking the capital city. Subsequently, Arlington would be the only home in Virginia the peripatetic soldier Robert would know until the Civil War, and with the death of his in-laws and the growing debility of his spoiled wife, he was entrusted with its care. In somewhat melodramatic fashion, Horn builds Lee’s great tragedy around this
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“A privileged perspective on the man and his art.” from selected letters of langston hughes
SELECTED LETTERS OF LANGSTON HUGHES
idyllic Arlington inheritance, peopled by slaves he couldn’t quite free, according to his father-in-law’s dying wishes. Lee’s tortured decision to resign from the Union Army rather than fight against his home state resulted in the loss of his homestead; ironically, it would become a national cemetery for the young men he sent to their deaths. Compelling research within an overwrought presentation.
GOD, GUNS, GRITS, AND GRAVY
Huckabee, Mike St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-250-06099-0
More chuckly preaching from the former Arkansas governor and Fox News weekly show host. Having run for president in 2008 and lost the Republican nomination to Mitt Romney, Huckabee (Dear Chandler, Dear Scarlett: A Grandfather’s Thoughts on Faith, Family, and the Things that Matter Most, 2012, etc.) sounds like he is going to try again, and he presents his clear delineation in ideology between the views of “Bubble-ville” (the “nerve centers” of New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles) and “Bubba-ville”—the rest of the country. While residents of the former are among his best friends, of course, even if they hate guns, eat kale and embrace gay marriage, the latter group includes his homegrown buddies, those who cherish their guns for hunting and self-defense, attend church and find Miley Cyrus’ contortions shocking. In the name of “decency,” Huckabee sees the country going down the tubes with the politically correct thought police stifling free expression (e.g., “illegal aliens” have become nonoffensive “dreamers”), former New York City Mayor Michael Blumberg trying to take away the Big Gulp, National Security Agency revelations that demonstrate how we are becoming more like China in terms of surveillance and rights’ suppression (while China is becoming more like us in terms of capitalist acquisition), TSA officials patting down toddlers in airports, and the general Democrat-driven overloading of regulation and taxation that is, for example, sending California’s small-business owners to Texas. While the author is fond of declaring that people just want to be left alone, he has to admit that certain members of his own party are ruining it for the rest of them—e.g., conservatives attacking other conservatives for not being conservative enough. Huckabee also skewers the Republicans who supported the TARP bailout of banks and offers a populist, bottom-up economic approach to empowering the regular, God-centered folk. More of the same from the outspoken Southerner.
Hughes, Langston Rampersad, Arnold; David Roessel—Eds. Knopf (480 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 13, 2015 978-0-375-41379-7 The renowned poet’s life revealed in letters. A star of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-1967) published poetry, fiction, humor, books for young people, biographies and autobiographies, anthologies, and assorted works of history and translation. He also wrote thousands of letters, from which Rampersad (Humanities, Emeritus/Stanford Univ.; Ralph Ellison, 2007, etc.) and Roessel (Greek/Stockton Coll. of New Jersey; coeditor: Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes, 2013, etc.) have made a discerning selection—including several disarmingly candid drafts—to offer a vivid portrait of a man sometimes cowed by self-doubt and vulnerability, sometimes given to outbursts of bravura, always eager for adventure and always short of money. In the 1930s, his youthful socialist sympathies transformed into passionate radicalism. He cherished friendships, as letters to Arna Bontemps, Carl Van Vechten and Countee Cullen attest, and he was quick to encourage other writers, including Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker. As a young writer himself, he could be self-deprecating: He felt timid about meeting editor and professor Alain Locke, he told Cullen, “because I know he’d find me terribly stupid.” When he was 25, Hughes was taken up by Charlotte Osgood Mason, an elderly white philanthropist who offered him a monthly stipend to support his writing and insisted on being called “Godmother.” Hughes loved Mrs. Mason “as a son loves his mother,” Rampersad writes. When Mason flared up angrily at what she saw as indolence, Hughes felt desolate: “I am humbly deeply sorry,” he wrote, but he confessed, “I cannot write at all on any sort of pre-arranged schedule.” An intrepid traveler, Hughes saw the world; championed by Van Vechten and his publisher Blanche Knopf, he socialized with celebrity artists and writers. Yet all the while, he took advice offered by Vachel Lindsay to be “wary of lionizers.” A privileged perspective on the man and his art. (36 photos)
THE REAPER Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers Irving, Nicholas with Brozek, Gary St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-250-04544-7
Gung-ho account of a sniper’s time in Afghanistan, focused on “the thrill, the rush, the smell of gunpowder in combat.” |
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Raised in a military family, Irving felt destined for service at a high level, becoming an Army Ranger at age 22. His perspective is unabashedly adolescent, portraying combat like a giant video game and entranced by the rituals and comradeship of men under arms. As with other recent books, Irving—writing with Brozek (co-author: The Hurt Artist: My Journey From Suicidal Junkie to Ironman, 2014, etc.)—is adept at discussing the uncompromising minutiae of weapons, tactics and battle staging, the lifeblood of the elite sniper fraternity. He portrays several action-packed missions during a 2009 deployment to Afghanistan, pursuing suicide-vest makers and other high-value Taliban targets in both rural and urban environments. During one grueling daylong firefight, Irving killed so many Taliban that his awed comrades bestowed upon him the titular nickname. Irving would ultimately claim 33 confirmed kills, evoking jealousy in his fellow snipers, described as having been “itching for some trigger time.” Given that the snipers are essentially tasked with shooting any armed military-age males they encounter, this pervasive machismo gives the narrative an unsavory (albeit unsurprising) subtext, especially since Irving rarely considers the larger political narrative of counterterrorism and the Afghanistan War. Despite his enthusiasm, by the end of the deployment, “all I could think of was that I wanted to get the hell out of that country and go home.” Though flattered by his formidable reputation as “this ‘little guy’ who was on a crazy roll racking up kills,” the hostility of Afghan civilians and the injuries suffered by his friends led him “to question why we were putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears in a place where people didn’t seem to want our help.” A generic addition to the crowded shelf of post-9/11 special-ops memoirs.
THE LOST GOSPEL Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene
Jacobovici, Simcha; Wilson, Barrie A. Pegasus (544 pp.) $29.95 | Nov. 12, 2014 978-1-60598-610-4
Exploration of a long-forgotten text. Filmmaker Jacobovici (co-author: The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity, 2012, etc.) and researcher Wilson (Humanities and Religious Studies/York Univ.; How Jesus Became Christian, 2008, etc.) collaborate to popularize a little-known sixth-century text known as Joseph and Aseneth. The story, ostensibly about the Old Testament patriarch Joseph, was originally known to be written in Greek but now survives, in its oldest form, translated into Syriac. The authors dedicate a sizable portion of the book to a new English translation of the text, along with notes. They argue that the strange and anachronistic story is in fact a hidden Gnostic Gospel, which, when properly decoded, provides a wealth of detail about the life of Jesus and his wife, who the authors claim is Mary Magdalene. 160
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The authors argue that past interpreters ignored the early church’s trend toward typological analysis of the Old Testament, through which Christian motifs were located within the Hebrew Scriptures. Instead, they claim that Joseph and Aseneth should be read as a “disguised historical narrative.” The authors argue this “gospel” gives details of the personal life of Jesus: “It tells the story of how Jesus met his wife, how they married, and how they had children.” However, many readers will find Joseph and Aseneth allegorical at best, hopelessly mysterious at worst. It is only through what appears as speculation that Jacobovici and Wilson piece together a fantastical tale of love, intrigue and, of course, sex, around Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Wrapped in the modern trend to discount New Testament writings and push forward even the most tenuous Gnostic texts, the authors write that “[w]hat seemed like fantasy is actually history, and what seems like history turns out to be carefully edited spin.” Yet the authors’ subjective tone, dramatic language and willingness to stretch logic leave readers skeptical from the first page. This intriguing ancient text deserves a solid academic study by serious scholars. Unfortunately, this book is not it.
MARCHING HOME Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War
Jordan, Brian Matthew Liveright/Norton (416 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 26, 2015 978-0-87140-781-8
This Civil War history begins where most end, showing what happened to the men who fought to preserve the Union. Jordan’s (Civil War Studies/Gettysburg Coll.) book is about the postwar tribulations of Billy Yank. While the civilian population had had enough of war, those who fought for the North were unwilling to forgive and forget, and they marched in Washington a few weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered and Abraham Lincoln was murdered. Two million boys in blue had fought in the war, and more than 800,000 were mustered out in six months—more veterans than the country had ever known. In a nation that evidenced little appreciation beyond bombast for their sacrifices, there was no national welfare policy, network or veterans’ service. The Yanks had difficulties getting home. Many had lost limbs, and many were unemployable and fell victim to alcoholism. Illness, poverty and suicide were endemic badges of service. Like soldiers throughout history, they treasured mementos of battle. More than warriors of the past, they united in the postwar fight for recompense and respect. They returned to battlefields like Gettysburg and prison camps like Andersonville and erected monuments to mark their presence. They created newspapers, wrote memoirs and histories, and established benevolent organizations—the most effective of which was the Grand Army of the Republic. They campaigned for decent pensions and federal “asylums” to house those who were impoverished and disabled. Jordan doesn’t need to
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emphasize the obvious contemporary parallels. Assiduously researched—half the volume is occupied by a bibliography and copious notes—his book is entirely founded on the words of those who fought, extracted from letters, recollections and reflections. The boys in blue who rallied around the flag are gone, but in Jordan’s history, their words survive. A useful history of how “the terror of this unprecedented war long outlived the stacking of arms at Appomattox.”
LINCOLN’S POLITICAL THOUGHT
Kateb, George Harvard Univ. (224 pp.) $24.95 | Dec. 15, 2014 978-0-674-36816-3
A sincere attempt to make peace with Abraham Lincoln’s written political thought leads the distinguished Princeton academic into reflective, occasionally troubled waters. Kateb (Human Dignity, 2011, etc.) feels his way through Lincoln’s speeches and letters, probing the process, gradual and often opaque, of his grasping of the necessity as president of emancipating the slaves in order to reassert the worth and dignity of the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident first assumption. In unearthing Lincoln’s “political religion,” which evolved over roughly 10 years, from passage of the KansasNebraska Act in 1854 to his assassination in 1865, Kateb looks first at what Lincoln was up against, namely unprecedented “group ferocities” that counted not just the intractable Southern states bent on secession (the slave states did not even make a show of backing Lincoln’s Democratic rival, Stephen Douglas), but also the outraged abolitionists sworn to vengeance on the South. The author also examines the “passion of patriotism” each side claimed for its own. By the time of his “House Divided” speech in 1858, Lincoln declared that the nation “would become all slave or all free”—there was no more room for compromise. Which was the truth; i.e., which side did God endorse? Lincoln, the politician and man of his age, was not rallying for the abolitionists, and while he detested slavery, he did not endorse emancipation until much later, believing that blacks weren’t ready—or rather, whites weren’t. Kateb traces these telling moments in Lincoln’s words, where he “was hiding the truth or hiding from it.” What Lincoln did embrace above all was human equality and the sanctity of the preservation of the Union; for these to endure, slavery had to be destroyed. An erudite work that gently unravels the great man’s distortions and political expediency. Though it may prove recondite for a general audience, the book is compelling throughout.
THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER
Keen, Andrew Atlantic Monthly (288 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8021-2313-8
A Silicon Valley veteran and journalist sounds the alarm on the pernicious effects of the Internet. Everything you love about the Internet—the connection, the convenience, the way it puts the world of information, goods and services at your fingertips—has its dark, Orwellian side, argues Keen (Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, 2012, etc.). Yes, the Internet changed the corporate playing field, and some have played by the new rules far better than others, but the book sometimes makes it seem that such success is itself a crime: “As in the medieval world, Google, Apple, and Facebook have detached themselves from the physical reality of the increasingly impoverished communities around them.” Keen rightly warns about loss of privacy (often willingly if unwittingly surrendered), about fortunes made through consumers working for free (with every Facebook post or Google search), about a future, if not the present, in which every connection is monitored and exploited. But his laments about the crash of Kodak and the demise of so many record stores suggest that he might as well be pining for the steam locomotive and quill pen. While he admits that much of the cultural change has been driven by consumers, leading to winner-take-all fortunes for whoever satisfies the customer best, those consumers simply don’t see the big picture: “Internet evangelists, especially libertarian entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, see everything in terms of satisfying the customer. And while Amazon does indeed satisfy most of us as consumers, it is having a far less satisfactory outcome for citizens.” For all of his doomsday prophecy, Keen’s solutions seem scaled down and conventional: recommendations for “technology Sabbaths or joining the ‘slow Web’ movement” and to “use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.” Though the book serves as a corrective to cybertech utopianism, even the author admits, “I certainly couldn’t have written this book without the miracles of email and the Web.”
WHIPPING BOY The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully Kurzweil, Allen Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-226948-5
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“Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.” from h is for hawk
Sent to a Swiss boarding school run with clocklike precision at the age of 10, Kurzweil (Leon and the Champion Chip, 2010, etc.) endured a year of torment, especially from one student, a bully named Cesar Augustus. Thirty years later, the author’s nemesis appeared as a character in one of his children’s books, an event that triggered him to search for Cesar, as he still remembered the pain and shame of the verbal and physical abuse he suffered. Over the course of 10 years, Kurzweil became a master sleuth and discovered that Cesar was far more than a bully. Using the Internet and many other resources, the author discovered that Cesar had been involved in a major advance-fee banking scam, fronted by the Badische Trust Consortium, which involved millions of dollars, fake princes and knights, high-profile lawyers and gullible clients longing for the funds to finance their dreams. Kurzweil explores his longing to connect with and confront the bully of his childhood, who had become an adult con artist convicted twice yet still seemingly intent on scamming people in one way or another. His story reads like a European version of American Hustle, complete with men in monocles and silk ascots, fancy dinners in expensive restaurants and his own methods of espionage that he used to obtain information. His fast-paced narrative, with its rich details of the intricate nature of the scam and his uncanny ability to ferret out the truth, almost masks his underlying desire to talk to Cesar about that year in school. When he finally does, readers receive a satisfactory ending to this 40-year drama. Full of intrigue and suspense, the story follows the bizarre twists and turns of one man’s journey to find and confront his childhood tormentor—ready-made for a film treatment. (two 8-page b/w photo inserts; 83 images throughout)
GHETTOSIDE A True Story of Murder in America Leovy, Jill Spiegel & Grau (336 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-385-52998-3
Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Leovy looks at the thinly veiled racist origins of violence in South Central LA. In her debut, the author journeys where most fear to tread: the perennially mean streets of South Central LA, where she uses the senseless murder of a policeman’s progeny as a jumping-off point to investigate broader issues of why, even as violent crime as a whole in America continues to drop, that urban area sees so many of its people dying by tragically violent means. Leovy’s big-picture thesis is that whether you’re talking about the “rough justice” of vigilante revenge killings in Ghana, Northern Ireland or South Central LA, the one underlying cause is the same: a vacuum left by a legal system that fails to serve everyone equally. Leovy posits that the gang violence in LA is the result of the local police simply not doing their jobs. On a microcosmic level, the author follows the lives of two LAPD officers, John Skaggs and Wally 162
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Tennelle, the former investigating the murder of the latter’s son. Tennelle’s decision to buck the trend among LA cops and live within the city limits furthered his career as a police officer but had deadly consequences for his son. Intertwined with Leovy’s swiftly paced true-crime narrative involving Skaggs’ methodical tracking down of Tennelle’s killer is some probing sociological research into how blacks in LA got the short end of the socioeconomic straw: Hispanics may have been treated unfairly in the jobs they worked, but as Leovy points out, African-Americans were, even as far back as the 1920s, often excluded from even the lowest-skilled jobs in the city. Unfortunately, however deftly the author interweaves the more personal angle of officers Skaggs and Tennelle with broader sociological “root cause” investigations, there is little to suggest that real change will arrive soon in South Central LA. A sobering and informative look at the realities of criminality in the inner city.
H IS FOR HAWK
Macdonald, Helen Grove (288 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-0-8021-2341-1
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk. Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
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“...a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer’s creative evolution.” from ongoingness
ONGOINGNESS The End of a Diary
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.
WHEN GLOBALIZATION FAILS The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana Macdonald, James Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-374-22963-4
The tattered history of the notion that free, international trade ensures the permanence of peace and the disappearance of war. Macdonald—a former investment banker, now an author (A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy, 2003)— returns with a two-century history, noting how, continually, events and violence have shattered the notion that trade will bring peace among nations. He begins in the 19th century and describes Pax Britannica, a time, he writes, when “it all seemed so simple.” But history is not static, and France began its steady return to power after Waterloo while the United States, following the Civil War, began its own journey to the pinnacle of world power. Macdonald then devotes chapters to our major wars (world wars I and II) and shows how and why the tradepeace theory just did not obtain. He focuses on economic factors throughout: the hunger for coal, the thirst for petroleum, the passion for raw materials. He revisits the post–World War I failures of Versailles (France wanted Germany’s resources; Germany wanted them back) and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II—a move that, had it been successful (as it nearly was), would have considerably altered subsequent world history. The second half of the text deals with Pax Americana: how the United States achieved it, how it has attempted to administer it and how current events are fracturing it. The author concludes with accounts of the rises (and increasing sways) of India and China and the enduring contention and concern in the region about access to the Strait of Malacca and the control of key Pacific islands. Macdonald concludes with an eight-point list of factors in the more-or-less enduring post–World War II peace among the world’s powers. He does not believe America can afford a new isolationism. Sturdy, scholarly, sharply focused, closely reasoned.
Manguso, Sarah Graywolf (144 pp.) $20.00 | Mar. 3, 2015 978-1-55597-703-0
A chronic diarist discovers that there’s a lot to be said for putting your pen down. There seems be a pattern with Manguso. The more weighty and personal her books get, dealing with everything from her own dread illness (Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008) to a friend’s suicide (The Guardians: An Elegy, 2012), the shorter they are. Her latest is remarkably brief, with more white space than print, devoted to the seemingly dull topic of why she quit her diary. But the brevity is the point: Where Manguso’s 25-year journal was obsessively detailed, this eulogy doesn’t have a wasted word. She’s a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis, both in the way she distills complex thoughts on time and memory into pure essence and in how she examines writing as a means of control. “I didn’t want to lose anything,” Manguso states at the beginning. “That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” The diary eventually became a crutch for survival: “If I allowed myself to drift through undocumented time for more than a day, I’d be swept up, no longer able to remember the purpose of continuing.” Keeping a diary meant imposing a shape or structure on life, a view that changed when motherhood ruptured her own space-time continuum: “I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.” While Manguso’s thoughts are inward, they work outward—from her life to life itself. Read as either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer’s creative evolution.
WIDE-OPEN WORLD How Volunteering Around the Globe Changed One Family’s Lives Forever
Marshall, John Ballantine (352 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-345-54964-8
One family’s adventures volunteering in foreign countries. Getting bitten by a spider monkey multiple times was not what Marshall was looking for when he and his wife decided to take their two teenage children on a six-month, around-the-world trip based on volunteerism. “Uninspired” in his work, with his eyes “constantly red from too much computer time,” the author was “listless, unmotivated, |
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going through the motions of life—which was a fairly accurate description of my marriage at the time, too.” Although still in love, there was no spark or passion with his wife, Traca. They wanted more for themselves and for their children, who were locked into the computerized social media world like so many American children. So, they rented their house in Maine and set out, first landing at the Osa Wildlife Sanctuary in Costa Rica, where the spider monkeys were free to roam and the humans were often at their mercy. From there, the family flew to New Zealand and worked on a variety of farms, spending days pulling mountains of weeds to reclaim the native bush from invasive plants. Then they went to Thailand for a month, where they taught English in a small village school and Marshall’s two children “were treated more like visiting pop stars than untrained volunteers.” The next stops included an orphanage in India, a school in the Himalayas and a short visit in Portugal. Marshall’s use of rich details locates readers firmly in each time and place, enabling them to sense the adventure, wonder and joy he experienced in his surroundings and in watching his children grow into hardworking, more responsible teens, as well as the frustrations and disappointments he and his family inevitably encountered along the way. A great armchair adventure that should inspire others to consider voluntourism as a way to help others and see the world. (8-page 4-color photo insert)
LINCOLN’S GREATEST CASE The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America McGinty, Brian Liveright/Norton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 9, 2015 978-0-87140-784-9
Solid account of the most significant case in Abraham Lincoln’s 25-year law career. On May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton crashed into the Rock Island Bridge—the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River—damaging the span and destroying the vessel and its 350 tons of livestock, machinery and other cargo. The 200 passengers on board were unharmed. The boat operators’ ensuing suit for damages sparked an “epochal clash” between the railroads—a new, faster, more economical means of transport—and the steamboats then commanding the nation’s western waterways. With a focus on the lanky Lincoln, a lawyer for the defense who would become president four years later, historian and attorney McGinty (The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus, 2011, etc.) recounts the historic 15-day Chicago trial, which involved more than 100 witnesses and ended in a hung jury, paving the way for the dominance of the railroad industry. Despite Lincoln’s low self-assessment (“I am not an accomplished lawyer,” he said), he proved a persuasive orator, sometimes whittling a piece of wood as he contested testimony and impressing jurors with his detailed knowledge 164
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of river currents and other facts in the case. Lincoln may have been awkward and ungainly, writes the author, but his courtroom skills convinced powerful backers that he had a political future. His debates two years later with Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas would prove his springboard to the presidency. Besides detailing the Effie Afton case’s importance to Lincoln’s career, McGinty offers an excellent view of Mississippi steamboat traffic in the mid-19th century and the coming onrush of the railroads, which would transform how the nation moved passengers and goods. An important footnote in the making of the 16th president.
IT WAS ME ALL ALONG A Memoir Mitchell, Andie Clarkson Potter (240 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 1, 2015 978-0-7704-3324-6
A young blogger shares the story of how she overcame a lifetime of bad eating habits, lost the weight that threatened her health and began her journey to self-understanding. Mitchell came from a working-class “family of eaters.” But beneath the “heaps and sloppy gobs and spilling surplus” of food she consumed was a dysfunctional home situation that included a chronically unemployed alcoholic father and a mother who struggled to support the family with wages from multiple jobs. Food—especially cookies, cakes and other sweets—became the author’s source of comfort and the way her mother could assuage her guilt for being unavailable. It also helped her forge a bond with the troubled, overweight father who drifted from the family and eventually died in poverty. The perennial target of schoolmate jokes about her size, Mitchell weighed 200 pounds by the end of seventh grade. Her sense of humor eventually made her popular among her peers, but her weight continued to increase. Mitchell signed up for medical studies and weight loss programs, but nothing worked. In college, she reached 268 pounds. Not just obese, “but morbidly so,” Mitchell began a strict regimen of exercising, dieting and journaling. A semester in Rome showed her a whole new way of eating that was as delicious as it was healthy. During her senior year of college, she eventually reached 133 pounds, only to realize that she now had to tackle a whole set of psychological issues that, in her drive to lose weight, she had ignored. Overeating had only been a symptom of a far deeper problem. To manage it, she had to learn to love herself and her body, understand the meaning of life-balance and ultimately accept that life had far more to teach her than she ever realized. A candid and inspiring memoir.
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“Mort’s delightful prose will entice readers of history, geography, Native American studies and sociology.” from thieves’ road
THE EVIL HOURS A Biography of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder
THIEVES’ ROAD The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer’s Path to Little Bighorn
Morris, David J. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (336 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-544-08661-6
Mort, Terry Prometheus Books (340 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-61614-960-4
An exploration of the enduring human cost of war. Journalist Morris (Storm on the Horizon: Khafji—The Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War, 2004), a former Marine and embedded reporter who suffers from PTSD, did not intend this book to be a therapeutic exercise, but he discovered that researching and writing about PTSD helped him to make sense of his own struggle with an affliction that “destroys the normal narrative of life.” Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, biochemistry, history, poetry and fiction, he offers an insightful—and never self-indulgent—overview of the “ghost that haunts history.” Among many traumatic stressors—rape, natural disasters, child abuse, for example— Morris focuses most intensely on war. The term PTSD emerged after Vietnam, but Morris discovered that soldiers’ trauma was recognized in Judeo-Christian times, in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when religious authorities imposed “prayer, fasting, and abstinence from communion” on warriors who had killed. Civil War veterans were diagnosed with “nostalgia,” a term “used to indicate a number of conditions that today might be called clinical depression or simple panic.” For World War I veterans, the term was shell shock. Symptoms were common to all: nightmares, flashback memories and paranoia. The author summarizes current cognitive and pharmacological therapies: prolonged exposure therapy, or flooding, which reprises intense trauma; cognitive-behavioral therapy, with roots in psychotherapy; propranolol, to treat anxiety and panic; selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Zoloft; eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing; and even yoga. In his experience, Morris has found “alcohol, taken in moderation, is one of the best PTSD drugs ever invented.” Morris deplores civilians’ lack of connection to soldiers’ brutal experiences. If the truth were known, he writes, “we wouldn’t continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do.” If soldiers were welcomed with empathy, “half of combat PTSD...would disappear overnight.” An eye-opening investigation of war’s casualties.
The history of Gen. George Custer’s 1,000-man exploration across 300 miles of Dakota Plains in search of gold. Mort’s (The Wrath of Cochise, 2013, etc.) enlightening works about Native Americans are remarkable not only for their depth, but also for the poetic beauty of his descriptions of their lives, religions and cultures. The Sioux had no concept of private property. The land was theirs by right of conquest—of the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Crow—and due to the fact that they occupied it. The white man defined ownership as working the land—e.g., farming, which was work that male Indians felt was only for squaws. President Ulysses Grant’s peace plan involved containing the tribes on reservations, training them in agriculture and taking their children into missionary schools. That was the best way to extinguish the Native American way of life, and the Sioux knew it was so. The stated objective of Custer’s expedition in 1874 was to find a site for a permanent military installation, but the implicit goal was to find gold. It was hoped that the finding of gold in the Black Hills would help offset the country’s massive Civil War debt. It would also bolster the stock and bonds tied to the Northern Pacific Railroad, an important project for the general. The Sioux called Custer’s trail the Thieves’ Road since it stole into their territory and foretold the end of their freedom and way of life. They had already dealt with incursion before, during the Red Cloud War, when Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe joined to destroy the Bozeman Trail. The 1868 Treaty of Laramie closed forts along that trail and ceded a million acres with hunting rights outside the reservation. Mort’s delightful prose will entice readers of history, geography, Native American studies and sociology. All will revel in the feeling of being in the Dakotas at the end of the 19th century.
GRANADA A Pomegranate in the Hand of God Nightingale, Steven Counterpoint (400 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-61902-460-1
Poet and novelist Nightingale (The Wings of What You Say, 2013, etc.) makes his nonfiction debut in this rhapsodic paean to the Spanish city, where he, his wife and young daughter now live part of each year. |
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For the author, Granada is nothing less than idyllic, with verdant, sun-dappled gardens fragrant with orange blossoms; enchanting labyrinthine lanes; and a “rambunctious diversity” of friendly, gentle and wise neighbors who display a “helpless love” for children: “They know that children have been recently formed in heaven and so on earth need special devotions.” A “sainted notary and his equally blessed wife” provided housing for Nightingale and his family while their house was being renovated by nimble craftsmen, one “with the bearing of an Arab prince.” In spring, the “garden and house embraced one another, took up an amorous life together,” and sprouted grapevines and honeysuckle that grew into the bedrooms. In search of Granada’s glorious past, though, Nightingale discovers brutality. While the city thrived during the “lustrous” Al-Andalus period, from 700 to 1492, when Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted, for the most part amicably, and arts and sciences flourished, conditions changed dramatically in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella decided to purge the area of Jews and Muslims. During the Spanish Inquisition, mosques and synagogues were razed, property confiscated, more than 5,000 books burned, and those who refused to convert to Catholicism were massacred. By 1620, the once-populous city was reduced to 6,000 who lived among rubble. In the next three centuries, the deterioration worsened, and the city became a refuge for anarchists; during the Spanish Civil War, fascists took hold. Not until 1994, when it was named a World Heritage Site, did Granada begin to revive. A romantic, at times overly sentimental homage to a city “perfected by catastrophe” and transformed into a place of “concentrated joy.”
LOVE, AGAIN The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance Pell, Eve Ballantine (224 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-8041-7646-0
How and why older couples have searched for and found new loves. Using details from her own latein-life love story and those of 14 other couples, Pell (We Used to Own the Bronx: Memories of a Former Debutante, 2010) explores why couples in their 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s have reached out and found new companionship and romance. Pell poses a series of questions that are answered in revolving snippets from each couple’s perspective; the responses help explain why the graying population of America is embracing another chance at happiness. Whether they’ve met online, where the fastest growing dating demographic is individuals over the age of 60, through mutual friends, or rekindled an old love interest from high school, these couples have all decided that the joy, companionship and physical contact are benefits that outweigh any negatives. Many found their adult children were not supportive at first, as they didn’t understand the need for company after successful relationships of 40-50 166
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years or more. Other couples faced serious health issues that cut short their time together, but all agreed none would skip the experience even if they knew the outcome in advance. Some overcame the dilemma of living in separate houses, filled with years of accumulated stuff, or of living in two different parts of the country. “What has astonished me is the intensity and passion that old people can experience,” writes Pell, “as well as the depth, feeling, and resourcefulness in working out ways of relating, whether living together or apart, married or unmarried....I know from my own experience that people once written off as too old for romance—most notably by family—can transcend such stereotypes and engage in mad love affairs.” Readers old and young can take heart knowing that love doesn’t fade just because one grows old. An entertaining look at older romance that should encourage baby boomers to get out there and mingle.
THE HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
Pillsbury, Michael Henry Holt (336 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-62779-010-9
A presentation of China’s hidden agenda grounded in the author’s longtime work at the U.S. Defense Department. Since his recruitment into lofty intelligence circles as a young China expert in 1969, Council on Foreign Relations member Pillsbury (China Debates the Future Security Environment, 2004, etc.) has been privy to the debriefings of various Soviet spies and Chinese dissidents who have clearly warned of China’s aim to surpass America as world leader in time for the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Communist People’s Republic: 2049. Yet America has not listened. Once also a “Panda hugger,” as he calls this group of “happy barbarians gleefully ignorant of the deeply subversive” aims of China, Pillsbury has changed his view, as he demonstrates in this systematic destruction of the well-accepted Western notion of China as a martyr and welfare state. A student of Mandarin, the author notes that the Chinese speak in a “secret code” difficult for outsiders to decipher. The assumptions of this “constructive engagement crowd,” which developed from the Nixon-Kissinger entente of 1971, include the idea that “engagement brings cooperation” and that China is “on the road to democracy”—both false. The truth can be found in the statecraft primer Mao Zedong cherished close to him from the Long March until his death, The General Mirror for the Aid of Government, containing the stratagems favored by the Warring States period dating from 4000 B.C. These Darwinian lessons, readily grasped by the wave of hawks directing China policy since the 1990s, who gained the upper hand over the reformers, encompass all kinds of sneaky tactics—e.g., stealing your opponent’s secrets. Perhaps most
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REVOLUTION STARTUP How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World
galling in Pillsbury’s findings is the degree of demonization of the U.S. taught regularly in Chinese institutions, without any positive sense of American historical contributions to China’s growth. Fodder for concerned thought, with a dollop of paranoia.
THE AGE OF DIGNITY Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America
Poo, Ai-jen with Conrad, Ariane New Press (176 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-62097-038-6
A fierce advocate for the rights of domestic workers examines two phenomena—a booming aging population in need of long-term care and the rising tide of undocumented immigrants—and finds not two problems but one great opportunity. National Domestic Workers Alliance director Poo is surprisingly optimistic in the face of what would seem to be tough problems for American society. With reams of statistics, she presents the facts about the coming increase in our aging population, and she points out that we can learn from other countries, namely Japan and Germany, that have already faced this situation and have been finding ways to cope with it. We can become a more caring nation by making certain cultural, behavioral and structural changes in our society, and Poo offers some specific models of change to build on. Some are technological developments; some are community-based projects; some are government programs currently being tested in a number of states. The author argues that just as the nation has built an infrastructure of roads and electricity, so can it build an infrastructure of care. The caregivers that the elderly must frequently most rely on are immigrants, “the invisible infrastructure” of our economy and our social fabric. Poo claims that we must create a way for undocumented caregivers to attain legal status, provide the training needed to raise the quality of care and improve their wages. She even outlines how the money could be raised to accomplish these goals. Her narrative is filled with stories of the lives and struggles of individual caregivers for the elderly that she has interviewed, and she provides photographs of her grandmother and other elderly women with their devoted caregivers. Three appendices provide further information on resources. This can-do book by an activist seeking to rouse the public into action has a lot to say to anyone who plans on getting old.
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Popovic, Srdja and Miller, Matthew Spiegel & Grau (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 13, 2014 978-0-8129-9530-5
DIY handbook for those newly interested or already engaged in civilized activism. Belgrade-based Serbian political activist Popovic parlays his experience on the activist front lines in Syria and Kiev into a uniquely personable, often droll directive on the nuances of peaceable protesting. The author begins with accounts of the earliest development of a grass-roots resistance movement called OTPOR. The group’s 1992 Serbian protest opposed then-president Slobodan Milosevic’s dictatorial tactics but used turkeys and flowers instead of weapons and embodied Popovic’s motto to “start with something small, relevant, but achievable.” The author’s tool kit includes examples of the kind of effectively creative peaceful protests rarely covered by the contemporary news media, using oranges, ping pong balls, rock music and the kind of disarming humor he calls “laughtivism.” Popovic profiles the men and women responsible for some of the most proactive, noninvasive protests across the globe—their names carefully enshrouded for privacy, of course. Empowered by American activists like Harvey Milk and James Lawson and even the underdog themes found in The Lord of the Rings, the author presents stimulating ideas backed by sensible and entertaining vignettes. In the concluding chapters, Popovic discusses the importance of a group’s unity and identity and offers useful tips and strategies on how to organize an assembly, the myriad ways to keep the group fresh, organized, and, most importantly, unarmed and nonviolent, and the most effective methods to ensure they flourish and result in positive social and political change. Collectively, Popovic’s examples reflect what he calls “people power,” and he communicates the ideas and sentiments of these “ordinary revolutionaries” with verve and humor, encouraging everyone to “oppose oppression and bring about liberty, democracy, and joy.” A motivational and impactful guide to the “movements that are now sweeping through so much of the world, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street.”
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BRAVE GIRLS Raising Young Women With Passion and Purpose to Become Powerful Leaders
Radin, Stacey with Goldman, Leslie Atria (288 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4516-9930-2
Leadership consultant Radin’s debut book describes her after-school program that empowers middle school girls through animal rescue. The book was co-authored by health and fitness writer Goldman (Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth about Women, Body Image, and Re-imagining the “Perfect” Body, 2006, etc.). Radin realized there were no activities targeted specifically for middle school girls, and yet this stage represents a developmental crossroad in their lives. So she developed the Unleashed program based on her extensive background in psychology and coaching executive women. Radin focused on puppy rescue since women and girls are willing to take risks and use their power more effectively when they are passionate about a cause. Her model “aligns with the developmental trajectory of women, their need for community and relationships, fostering a sense of sisterhood.” The goal for young women in the program is to develop mental templates so they are equipped to manage adversity throughout their lives. “Not only do our girls need an environment that permits them to showcase their talents, applauds their success, and encourages them to persevere,” writes the author, “they must be able to fail miserably.” Strengthening emotional intelligence and empathy is embedded in the program, as is embracing their strengths and power as women and speaking their minds. Building a strong network, or “sisterhood,” is an important goal of Unleashed, allowing girls to experience collaboration, support and the strength of female kinship. Radin’s considerable research and experience informs each step in the program. Each chapter ends with power boosts, a series of exercises and questions to build on the chapter’s concepts. The author’s work is well-referenced, and she also provides a two-page list of suggested reading for further study. A solid resource for parents and educators working with middle school girls; the program goals can be adapted to other issues.
ZILLOW TALK The New Rules of Real Estate Rascoff, Spencer; Humphries, Stan Grand Central Publishing (288 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4555-7474-2
How-to advice on the new paradigms of real estate. When the 2008 housing bubble popped, the dynamics of buying, selling and renting shifted significantly. Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, the “largest real estate site on the Web,” with 90 million visitors a month, and its chief economist, Humphries, pull together exhaustive data obtained from constantly updated algorithms and crunch these figures to give readers a definitive guide to real estate in the 21st century. They discuss the pros and cons of buying versus renting, having a fixed-rate mortgage over an adjustable-rate mortgage, and whether that kitchen remodel or man cave are really the best investments of your time and money. Want to know the best time of year to list a home, what a street name means in terms of housing prices, and how to spot the next neighborhood where houses will appreciate in value? These are just some of the numerous questions the authors address using the information they’ve compiled from their database of more than 100 million listings on Zillow. They analyze the superstitions surrounding numbers in a home’s price, “decode” the words used in a listing to describe a house, debunk long-held real estate myths (e.g., always buy the worst home in the best neighborhood), consider the advantages and disadvantages of buying a foreclosure, and even look at the effect a nearby Starbucks has on housing prices. Informative and entertaining, their advice is filled with concrete figures enhanced by graphs and charts that help readers absorb their counsel in small, easy-to-manage bites. A collection of straightforward, easily assimilated facts and figures on the real estate business—a must-read for readers interested in buying, selling or renting a home.
HELL AND GOOD COMPANY The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made Rhodes, Richard Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4516-9621-9
Readers who pay attention to the preface will look elsewhere for a definitive history of the Spanish Civil War, but there are plenty of good reasons to con-
tinue with this one. Veteran, prizewinning historian Rhodes (Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, 2011, etc.) delivers a fairly superficial account of the fighting as a backdrop for insightful digressions into the war’s medicine, art and journalism. Foreign volunteers organized 168
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“A delightfully informative book about letters, their meanings, and the words and meanings we derive from them.” from alphabetical
and staffed dozens of hospitals whose doctors and nurses worked under appalling conditions and then often went on to write about their experiences. The author extols the many medical advances, which vastly benefited wounded soldiers in future wars. A Spanish doctor, Frederic Durán-Jordá, organized the world’s first mobile transfusion service, which, expanded by legendary Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, collected and distributed blood to the wounded near the front. Rhodes pauses regularly to describe the Spanish artists working at the time (Picasso and others), whose paintings immortalized the suffering of their people. Even more familiar is the flood of foreign supporters of the Republic who came to fight (George Orwell, Andre Malraux) or report (Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Mathews). Some of the fighters wrote books now considered classics—e.g., George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). Nowadays, few read the reportage that emphasized the war’s horrors, Franco’s atrocities and the courage of the Spanish people. It produced widespread sympathy among the democracies, save for their governments, which steadfastly refused to get involved. History has not been kind to their version of events. This is not one of Rhodes’ major works, but it is an interesting collection of observations on an iconic war that the good guys lost but which produced important cultural and therapeutic advances.
ALPHABETICAL How Every Letter Tells a Story
Rosen, Michael Counterpoint (448 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-61902-483-0
A poet, writer of children’s books and host of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth tells the history of each letter in our alphabet. Rosen (Fighters for Life: Selected Poems, 2007, etc.) shows a capacious curiosity and imagination in a work that, in lesser hands, would glaze the eyes of all but the most nerdy language freaks. He proceeds alphabetically (duh) but also in a sort of defiantly digressive way. For each letter, the author provides—in sort of dictionary fashion—some of its history, evolution, pronunciation(s) and, for many, some “sound play” involving the letter. Regarding N, for instance, Rosen mentions “ninny,” “no-no” and “nanny” (among others). These initial pages for each letter are informative and good for reference, but the remainder of each section is even better. For example, for C, he discusses ciphers, the Enigma code and even Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster. For K, he spends some time with Korean and with the recent YouTube phenomenon of “Gangnam Style.” S takes us into signs and symbols, from Morse code to the International Phonetic Alphabet. And Z? ZIP codes. Along the way, we learn about Beowulf, e.e. cummings, George Bernard Shaw’s disdain for the apostrophe, our fondness for initials, a bit about that old song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” the history of okay, the |
history of shorthand, why rhyme has an h, Noah Webster and the Urban Dictionary. Rosen also is mellow about “correctness” in usage and punctuation (“Our personal histories and feelings are wrapped up in what the letters and their means of transmission mean to each of us”) and shows little sorrow for the disappearance of handwriting in schools; in fact, he thinks our current emphasis on it doesn’t make much sense. A delightfully informative book about letters, their meanings, and the words and meanings we derive from them.
A BRIEF STOP ON THE ROAD FROM AUSCHWITZ
Rosenberg, Göran Translated by Death, Sarah Other Press (352 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-59051-607-2
A searing survivor’s tale told by a son. This English language debut by Swedish writer and TV personality Rosenberg is both a personal journey and a son’s letter to a loving father, David, who survived Nazi Germany but never got over it. Drawing on both historical research and family documents, the author re-creates the life of a Polish Jew who saw his hometown turned into a barbed wire hell in which 200,000 people, including his father and brother, lost their lives. Throughout the book, Rosenberg tries to picture what David saw and heard: Was he there when Jewish leader Chaim Rumkowski told the gathered throng that he had reached a bargain with the Nazis and only sick people and small children would be liquidated? David was sent to Auschwitz, which he survived only to spend the last desperate days of the war at the Wöbbelin concentration camp, where Nazis tried killing off as many Jews as possible before the liberators arrived. After the war, the ambitious David and his wife settled in the Swedish factory town of Södertälje, outside of Stockholm, for what they hoped would only be a “brief stop” on the road to a bigger, brighter future. Instead, it was a dead end. David’s dreams were at constant war with his recurring nightmares. “What I realize, much later,” writes the author, “is that time after time you make a run-up toward the horizon, and time after time you fall back to earth again.” Rosenberg was constantly asking his father why: Why this direction and not that one? Why didn’t you follow through on your dreams? It isn’t until the devastating ending that we see just why these questions loomed so large in his head. A deeply felt story and a sobering reminder of the long shadows of the Holocaust.
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AMERICAN DREAMS Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone
Rubio, Marco Sentinel (256 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-59523-113-0
Florida senator and conservative hero Rubio (An American Son, 2012) hits the hustings to proclaim a—surprise—rightwing economic platform. It’s families that make us the best nation of all time. So what to do when, laments the author, we live in a time of “the easy acceptance of unwed motherhood and absent fathers, the ‘just do it if it feels good’ ethos”—and even gay marriage? If homosexuals are going to advocate for marriage equality, Rubio writes, then they’re going to have to listen to the moralizing of those “who continue to support traditional marriage.” Most of Rubio’s social proscriptions and prescriptions are war-on-Christmas stuff, with the usual tropes: Americans are exceptional; government is bad; Ronald Reagan was a saint; if there’s ever an issue that can be raised, it must be done against the background of all these tenets. Thus, for instance, the problem that faces retirees is not, say, the specter of outliving their money but instead the out-of-control government spending on such things as Social Security, Medicare and “Obamacare”—but not fighting undeclared wars half a world away. Some of Rubio’s proposed reforms are mild enough to be palatable, like a slice of American cheese. He even notes, with a finger to the populist wind, that “in a time when corporate profits are reaching record highs and wages are stagnating,” now might not be the best time to impose a flat tax or tinker with marginal rates. Ultimately, it never seems to occur to Rubio that his party’s fiscal policies have contributed to some of the miseries he enumerates (student debt, for one) or that the other guys might have an idea or two worth discussing. Readers will know what’s coming before they turn the first page—no better or worse than the average politico prose; as to the contents, all will depend on point of view.
THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II Russell, Jan Jarboe Scribner (400 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4516-9366-9
Texas Monthly contributing editor Russell (Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson, 1999, etc.) recounts a dark episode in America’s past in this engrossing history of the forced detention of thousands of civilians in internment camps during World War II. 170
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Soon after the nation entered the war, Franklin Roosevelt empowered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to find and arrest Japanese, Germans and Italians—immigrants, their wives and their American-born children—in the United States and Latin America so that they could be “a ready source of exchange” for Americans imprisoned in enemy countries. When Eleanor Roosevelt opposed the project as smacking “too much of Gestapo methods,” Hoover started a file on her, too. Russell focuses on Crystal City, a camp designed especially for families, located near the Mexican border in the Texas desert. By the time it closed in 1948, it had housed more than 6,000 people. Conditions in the camp, monitored by the International Red Cross, were humane, both to comply with Geneva Convention provisions and to ensure that rumors of mistreatment did not exact reprisals against American prisoners abroad. Each family had separate living quarters with a kitchen and bathroom; a mess hall served three nutritious meals per day. At their own request, prisoners designed and built a pool “the size of a football field,” relief against the oppressive heat; when high school seniors wanted a prom, they had one, as well as graduation ceremonies. The camp’s administrator, Joseph O’Rourke, emerges as kind and caring, but he could not protect the families from the secret prisoner exchanges that sent thousands back to Germany and Japan, where families were shocked to find nations in rubble; nor from Truman’s edict requiring repatriation of “any enemy alien considered dangerous,” decisions summarily made on shaky evidence. Based in part on interviews with camp survivors, Russell documents in chilling detail a shocking story of national betrayal. (8-page b/w insert)
THE YANKEE COMANDANTE The Untold Story of Courage, Passion, and One American’s Fight to Liberate Cuba Sallah, Michael; Weiss, Mitch Lyons Press (288 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7627-9287-0
A nonfiction account of an unlikely American hero in revolutionary Cuba that succeeds as both a thriller and a love story. While working at the Toledo Blade, Miami Herald reporter Sallah and AP reporter Weiss shared a Pulitzer Prize (with another of the Blade’s reporters) for a series on Vietnam War atrocities that they expanded into their first book (Tiger Force, 2006). They also met a remarkable woman living in Toledo, a Cuban émigré and former political prisoner whose story inspired another newspaper series and this book. When she was Olga Maria Rodriguez, she had fallen in love with and married a man who initially didn’t even speak her language, an American named William Morgan who had found purpose in his difficult, directionless life by joining the revolutionary forces in Cuba to
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overthrow Fulgencio Batista. His experience in the U.S. Army had ended with him going AWOL, but his superior military skills helped him overcome the distrust of his Cuban comrades and earn the admiration of the country’s citizenry, who were “hailing him as a hero of a revolution that was about to change the course of history.” Yet there was tension in the revolutionary forces between Morgan’s Second Front and Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, as the former remained committed to liberating the country and holding elections while the latter was consolidating power and turning the new government into a communist dictatorship. Even greater complications ensued as Morgan was recruited for a plot to assassinate Castro, turned double agent by revealing the plot to the targeted dictator while continuing to play along, and ultimately found himself stripped of his American citizenship and imprisoned by the Cuban government. His widow’s memories help humanize a complicated and conflicted man whose story sheds fresh light on the pivotal period in U.S.-Cuban relations. Beyond the political implications and entanglements, the story engrosses with its fast-paced, plainspoken narrative. (film rights optioned by George Clooney)
THE STRONGHOLD How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House
Schaller, Thomas F. Yale Univ. (368 pp.) $32.50 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-300-17203-4
Political writer Schaller (Political Science/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, 2006) examines how Republicans sacrifice presidential power for congressional clout. The author tackles a subject that has been bandied about in radio and TV in superficial ways but until now has not really been comprehensively covered in extended book-length form: how the Republican Party has not only become a political party at war with itself, but also a party that has become, in a purely congressional context, one of the most disruptive and obstructive forces in American political history and a party whose presidential potential has steadily diminished. Schaller’s main thesis is clear: “The Republican Party is a Congress-centered and specifically a House-heavy party because congressional Republicans made choices and staked out positions during the post-Reagan era that tended to benefit themselves at the expense of the party’s presidential candidates.” While this is a somewhat general history of the post-Reagan Republican Party, it’s also a straightforward recent history of the party’s steady shift rightward, culminating in the far-right tea party wing. Schaller puts forward Newt Gingrich, not Reagan, as the most significant figure in the Republican Party. Gingrich, after all, instituted the policy that avoids compromise with the opposition at all costs, which is the same policy in effect today. |
Unfortunately, the author spreads his research too thin at times, and the main thrust of his argument tends to get lost in peripheral historical detail. The writing is also pockmarked with the sort of pesky political clichés and catchphrases that can often mar mainstream political radio and TV. However, Schaller takes care not to let the book fall into overly partisan territory (although he’s assuredly pro-Democrat), and he lays out a simple, just-the-facts approach. He ends with a conclusion that’s as simplistic as it is convincing. Occasionally facile but credible examination of the GOP’s self-destructive Congress-centric power shift.
KILLERS OF THE KING The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Spencer, Charles Bloomsbury (352 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-62040-912-1
C.V. Wedgwood’s masterwork told this story in three volumes, but Britain’s Charles I (1600-1649) loses his head on Page 55 of this fascinating, one-volume account in which British historian Spencer (Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, 2008, etc.) describes what happened afterward. Stubborn and authoritarian, Charles provoked a rebellion that ended in his defeat, capture, trial and execution. Nearly 60 of the 83 “commissioners” who conducted Charles’ trial signed his death warrant. Careful to observe bureaucratic niceties, they carefully preserved the warrant and all records, a move that proved to be a bonanza for historians as well as Royalists on their return 10 years later. Before assuming his father’s throne in 1660 (following Oliver Cromwell’s death two years earlier), Charles II issued his famous Declaration of Breda, proclaiming general forgiveness for those who declared their loyalty “excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament”—a big loophole. Readers will initially be sympathetic to Royalists who suffered under the republic, which treated Charles I badly, executing him after a distinctly Stalin-esque show trial. However, they will reverse their sympathies as Charles II and a new Parliament, dominated by Royalists, wreaked vengeance. Spencer recounts the mostly dismal fates of the surviving regicides. Thirteen were tried (in equally Stalin-esque settings) and executed, mostly by drawing and quartering, a gruesome, protracted procedure. Nineteen received life imprisonment under awful conditions, and few of those survived. Fifteen fled to Europe and three to America where several were murdered by Royalists, three kidnapped and returned for execution, and the rest passed anxious lives, the last dying in 1689. A gripping account of the aftermath of Britain’s revolution, during which both sides fought for justice and Christianity and behaved despicably.
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MADISON’S GIFT Five Partnerships that Built America
I AM NOT A SLUT Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet
Stewart, David O. Simon & Schuster (432 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4516-8858-0
A fond portrait of the mild-mannered Virginian and implacable advocate for the young American government. Historian and novelist Stewart (The Lincoln Deception, 2013, etc.) offers a pertinent lesson on Madison’s ability to forge working bonds with other founding members of the new American government, even if they did not always see eye to eye. Discreet, generous and nonegotistical, unlike others who hammered out the documents that framed the new government, Madison refused to take credit, rather conceding the “work of many hands and many heads” in the forging of the Constitution. Small and soft-spoken, he was overshadowed by the more dynamic personalities of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe, yet the complement of their respective qualities resulted in brilliant working relationships during the course of Madison’s political career. Hamilton and Madison, both in their 30s, recognized that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for managing the new nation and had to be replaced by a stronger national government. Their energy as “impatient young men” galvanized the other delegates in Philadelphia over “framing a system which we wish to last for ages,” while their dozens of newspaper essays (written with John Jay) explaining the Constitutional structure became the incomparable work of political theory, The Federalist Papers. Madison cleverly used the power and prestige of Gen. Washington in consolidating attendance at the Convention and winning votes for the Bill of Rights, and the two largely struck the deal to build a new capital on the Potomac. In Jefferson, Madison found an intellectual kindred spirit and lifelong friend. Monroe served in Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations and navigated the Louisiana Purchase and renewed hostility with Britain. Finally, the woman and helpmate Madison found late in life, Dolley, evolved into a winning “Lady Presidentess” and devoted caretaker in his dotage at Montpelier. Stewart’s lively character sketches employ sprightly prose and impeccable research.
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Tanenbaum, Leora Perennial/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $15.99 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-228259-0
An enthusiastic update on the state of female sexual liberation in contemporary society. Fifteen years after her well-received book on sexual stereotyping, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation (1999), grass-roots feminist Tanenbaum (Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, 2008, etc.) still bristles at the “contradictory landscape in which females are applauded for sexual audacity when they’re not being humiliated and disgraced.” As the Internet’s omnipresence continues to realign attitudes regarding what constitutes appropriate behavioral standards, the author revisits former arguments on issues of female empowerment and verbal sexual harassment, refreshing her research with new interviews with girls on the frontlines of name-calling and bullying. She updates readers on what has changed on the name-calling landscape, noting that the term “slut” has “metastasized” outward throughout our culture, with girls often reclaiming the term to defuse it in mutual conversation. Tanenbaum makes potent use of the anecdotal material she’s collected from a wide variety of young women, mostly students, which makes the text useful for concerned educators. Their experiences illustrate the viciousness of social mudslinging, which takes the form of online and direct-contact verbal bullying (“slut-bashing”) and diffused, casual judgmentalism (“slut-shaming”). The “razor-thin” contradictory line between “sexy” and “slutty” shows up in the most provocative chapter, which depicts girls who ineffectively attempt to be sartorially sultry while avoiding male sexualization or worse, rape. In the final chapters, Tanenbaum arms parents and budding professional women with helpful, if somewhat canned, advice addressing modern society’s “sexual double standard” and how to avoid becoming a victim of harassment. In a reliably approachable tone, the author seeks to empower and not chastise, optimistically promoting the incremental elimination of societal slutshaming with education and the self-actualization of young women. A significant, spirited analysis sure to be embraced by feminists and deserving of wide attention.
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“One of the best books written about the world of professional ski racing.” from the fall line
GEORGE HARRISON Behind the Locked Door
Thomson, Graeme Overlook (464 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-1-4683-1065-8
New biography of the youngest, gloomiest Beatle. It may come as news to some fans of the spiritually minded Harrison that, by Thomson’s (Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, 2010, etc.) account, he was as sexually promiscuous as many of his fellow musicians: “He seduced one young woman days before the Concert for Bangladesh, and even made overtures to another in the wings during the concert itself.” It may come as news to others that Harrison, once pioneering in his blend of Eastern and Western musical traditions, was a sonic fuddy-duddy in his later years: “Rap stinks,” he pronounced, “and techno is humanless music coming out of computers that bring you to madness.” That seems stern for someone who introduced Moogs to Beatlemaniacs and had no qualms about setting Hare Krishna chants against pop backgrounds, but though Harrison never advertised himself as a saint, Thomson seems always surprised that Harrison was, from the earliest age, a smoker, drinker and drugger—in other words, a rock musician. The author covers his subject from cradle to grave, a span of time that has been thoroughly covered by other writers, on some of whom he relies too heavily. The result is a plethora of old news, including the well-worn observation that it was George who taught John Lennon how to tune a guitar. The writing is seldom distinguished, too often pockmarked by forced observations that the refrain of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” “seemed to capture something of Harrison’s growing ambivalence as The Beatles dragged themselves around the United States for the second summer in a row” and that “like an alcoholic with the bottle, no Beatle was ever freed from the grip of the Fab Four.” Indifferent writing and tut-tutting and shallow criticism conspire to make this of interest mostly to completist collectors.
ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN Modern American Revolutionary
Vapnek, Lara Westview/Perseus (160 pp.) $20.00 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8133-4809-4
Biography of an important early-20thcentury labor and human rights activist known as the East Side Joan of Arc, now sadly neglected. This is the latest in the Lives of American Women series. A radical agitator and later devoted member of the U.S. Communist Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was notorious in her day, stretching from 1906, when she first began speaking |
publicly against the capitalist exploitation of the working class at age 16, until her death in the Soviet Union at age 74. Vapnek (History/St. John’s Univ.; Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920, 2009, etc.) sketches Flynn’s radical activity within the context of ongoing labor struggles and the rise and fall of sympathy for the socialist cause in the first half of the century. Indeed, Flynn had gotten arrested and imprisoned numerous times in her career. Her longest incarceration occurred during the fraught McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when she served more than two years at West Virginia’s Alderson Female Penitentiary for “conspiracy” as a CP leader. Flynn’s Irish immigrant parents fostered her early free-thinking radicalism; members of the Knights of Labor, they moved from New England to the Bronx to find work, lived among the struggling poor and were compelled by the revolutionary message of socialism. From her first public speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” Flynn gained the notice of leaders like anarchist Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World. Becoming a first-rate Wobbly “jawsmith,” Flynn traveled widely for the IWW, dropped out of high school, got married and had a child, whom she deposited with her family in the Bronx while she pursued her trailblazing work for the right of free speech and the strikers. Flynn denounced the violence that beset the struggle and did not work for women’s suffrage, although she believed fiercely in women’s equality, free love and birth control. A brief encapsulation of the fury and disillusionment that characterized the career of this significant American activist.
THE FALL LINE How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge
Vinton, Nathaniel Norton (384 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 2, 2014 978-0-393-24477-9
Inside the world of world-class alpine ski racing. For generations, the United States Ski Team was a virtual afterthought in alpine ski racing. The Austrians, Swiss and teams from the Nordic nations dominated a sport characterized by swashbuckling athletes undeterred by the speed and risks inherent in hurtling down some of the world’s most treacherous mountains. However, by the turn of the 20th century, change had arrived, and American skiers such as Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn suddenly found themselves atop podiums. As a result, they became celebrities in Europe and even in the United States, where the sport of skiing only rose to prominence every time the winter Olympics rolled around. New York Daily News investigative reporter Vinton (co-author: American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime, 2009), a former ski racing coach, ably narrates this story of the rise of American skiing to the sport’s highest levels. The author focuses
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on the 2009-2010 World Cup season and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Vinton writes vividly and captures the dangers and thrills inherent in the sport, especially its crowning event, the downhill. Although the book purports to look comprehensively at the entire team, Miller and Vonn are the clear stars. Through their stories and those of many of their teammates, Vinton provides compelling insight into a sport that millions enjoy recreationally but that relatively few will ever experience competitively. If there is a quibble about the book, it is that the 2009-2010 season is far enough removed from the present to not be particularly timely—the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics have already come and gone—but is not distant enough to qualify as history. Nonetheless, the book is a winner. One of the best books written about the world of professional ski racing.
THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCES A Chronicle of Concern and Hope
White, Courtney Counterpoint (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-454-0
A series of essays that explore some of the most pressing environmental challenges we face today and optimistically suggest some solutions. Inspired by an urge to explain to his children what has been done—or not done—to the environment and to chronicle his journey as an environmentalist, activist and parent, White (Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey Through Carbon Country, 2014, etc.) started a blog on Earth Day 2008 titled A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences, from which the essays in the first half of this book are culled. The Age of Consequences, explains the author, is the moment we are living in now, where the unsustainable ways we have depleted our resources have become impossible to ignore. White reflects on the words of renowned environmentalists, poets and philosophers, as well as his own personal experiences and travels—to places like Venice, Italy and Horse Progress Days in the middle of Ohio Amish farm country—to paint a simple but compelling case for why we should be concerned. By admitting his own inability to constantly align his decisions with his values, White strikes a refreshing tone that will resonate with readers turned off by the superior or condescending attitudes of some environmentalist writers. “We ought to walk,” he writes of his mornings shuffling two young kids off to school, “...but for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, we don’t.” In the second half of the book, White shares stories of unconventional, progressive ranchers and farmers across the country to suggest new ways of approaching conservation. Throughout, he balances abstract questions and ideas with tangible life experiences. After describing the overwhelming “cornucopia” he was presented with at a natural foods store, he was reminded of a quote from poet Ogden Nash: “Progress was good for awhile... but then it went on and on.” 174
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Though White presents no earth-shattering revelations (or solutions), readers will be engaged by his frank and thoughtful discussion of our modern environment.
PHANTOM TERROR Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848
Zamoyski, Adam Basic (592 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-465-03989-0
Zamoyski (Poland: A History, 2012, etc.) shows how the French Revolution instigated fear in the hearts of European governments, most of it unfounded and falsely propagated by undefined fears and self-perpetuating rumors. The author examines how broadly European countries enacted reactionary and draconian laws meant to control the masses. Austrian Prime Minister Klemens von Metternich was a prime example, especially since it was he who encouraged the spread of false stories like that of the Comité Directeur—ostensibly a revolutionary group that was the driving force behind all the insurrections and demonstrations that occurred across Europe, even though it never existed and the demonstrations were caused by high bread prices and poor working conditions. “Nowhere was there any sign of anyone, let alone any body, directing anything,” writes the author. “There was no transnational cooperation.” The chaos immediately following the French Revolution was subdued by the ascent of Napoleon, who instituted central organs of control, while other countries relied on local governance. With the defeat of Napoleon, the “Holy Alliance” of Russia’s Alexander I, Austria’s Francis I and Prussia’s Frederick William III attempted to return to a social order based on throne and altar and eliminate the influence of the Enlightenment and the belief in popular sovereignty. All were irrationally aggressive, fearing a new revolution backed by the secret organizations of the Comité, Freemasons, Jacobins and Illuminati. That aggression took the form of spies and secret police in every country, most widely under Metternich. Though the French Revolution may have spread the idea of the “rights of man,” it also increased the fears and the power of those who repressed it. Zamoyski provides perhaps too many examples of severe sentencing of innocents, but his point is important, and his book comprehensively examines the role of the powerful over the weak and the effects of governmental overreactions.
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STEALING THE GAME
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem; Obstfeld, Raymond Disney-Hyperion (304 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4231-7871-2 978-1-4231-9041-7 e-book Series: Streetball Crew, 2
FINDING SPRING by Carin Berger................................................... 177 DEAR MR. WASHINGTON by Lynn Cullen; illus. by Nancy Carpenter...................................................................182 STELLA BY STARLIGHT by Sharon M. Draper................................185
Abdul-Jabbar and Obstfeld (Sasquatch in the Paint, 2013) team up for another exploration of the intersection of sports and life conduct. Chris is a good, quiet kid who likes to keep his head down. As he says, “I was friendly to everyone but friends with no one.” Still, if the machinery of thought made much noise, Chris would be a one-man band. For a 13-year-old, he does considerable shrewd, high-ground thinking, as do his friends (“You know,” one says, “not talking about things doesn’t actually make them disappear”). Where it really shows itself is on the basketball court, where he plays a savvy, court-wise game. Enter his brother, Jax, a golden boy who appears to have fallen from the pedestal upon which his well-intentioned parents have placed him, and Chris’ still waters are about to feel a hefty stone break their surface. Add his classmate Brooke, a sharp girl with plenty of her own baggage, and a waterspout is in the making. The authors’ light hand allows readers to inhabit the characters; to taste the value of respect, dignity and vulnerability; and to embrace the elemental joy of sports—all without ever feeling like they are being tube fed. The shifting structure of the story and a clever series of blind alleys keep readers on tenterhooks. A deft, understated sports thriller with a solid moral compass. (Fiction. 8-12)
BEASTKEEPER by Cat Hellisen.........................................................188 THE SHADOW CABINET by Maureen Johnson................................190 THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND by William Kamkwamba; Bryan Mealer; illus. by Anna Hymas.................................................191 PEEP AND DUCKY RAINY DAY by David Martin; illus. by David Walker........................................................................196 MARK OF THE THIEF by Jennifer A. Nielsen...................................199 MONTY’S MAGNIFICENT MANE by Gemma O’Neill.................... 200 SAND SWIMMERS by Narelle Oliver.............................................. 200 THE GHOSTS OF HEAVEN by Marcus Sedgwick.............................205 THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, VOLUME 1 by Oliver Stone; Peter Kuznick; adapt. by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.................................................207 THE FOUNDING FATHERS! by Jonah Winter; illus. by Barry Blitt.............................................................................210
SHUTTER
Alameda, Courtney Feiwel & Friends (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-250-04467-9
STELLA BY STAR LIGHT
Draper, Sharon M. Atheneum (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4424-9497-8
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Horror grips San Francisco when a murderous ghost eludes the Helsing Corps, a famed band of monster hunters. The last descendant of the Van Helsing of Dracula fame, Micheline disobeys her father when she runs alone into a haunted hospital, convinced she can exorcise the violent ghost that’s taken over the pediatric ward. Instead, the ghost overpowers her, inflicting her and the three young colleagues who kirkus.com
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follow with deadly soulchains that will kill them all in seven days. Worse, the ghost knows Micheline’s name. Escaping after her dad confines her to her room, she gathers her team and embarks on a mission to trap the ghost—a particularly strong one—by capturing it on film. Racing against time and the progression of the soulchains, Micheline and three other Helsing reapers desperately devise new methods to combat the ghost, even as other monsters get in their way. When Luca, a denizen of the plane between life and death called the Obscura, appears to Micheline with dubious advice on how to proceed, she has even more decisions to make. Alameda keeps the fear dripping from the walls as she plunges headlong into this full-scale thriller. She invents threatening and gruesome monsters, packs her heroes into seemingly inescapable plights, and adds mystery with the introduction of Luca and the identity of the terrifying ghost. There’s even a bit of forbidden romance. A page-turner for thriller fans. (Horror. 13-18)
POLARIS
Arnett, Mindee Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-223562-6 978-0-06-223564-0 e-book Series: Avalon, 2 Jeth and his band of interstellar thieves tackle their most dangerous mission yet. Usually, Jeth chooses his gang’s escapades himself, even while they’re busy evading the Interstellar Transport Authority, the most powerful entity in the universe. The ITA’s pursuing Jeth for events from eight months ago (Avalon, 2014). But when crime lord Dax seizes the gang and assigns them to destroy something enormous on First-Earth, there’s no refusing—not only because Jeth’s longdisappeared mother is involved, but because Dax slides a brain implant into Jeth’s head. The implant increases his strength, but it also bends Jeth’s will to Dax’s—and leaves him going through withdrawal when it’s removed. This far-future space opera provides twists and turns aplenty, though the science is very soft: Brain implants that threaten a person’s selfhood slide in and out of the skull easy as pie; extraterrestrials called Pyreans enable spaceships to jump through metaspace and humans to communicate brain to brain. Humanity’s enslavement of those Pyreans lies at the story’s core, but the text soft-pedals the atrocity; Jeth himself initially finds the Pyreans “a remarkable life-form, so useful.” Emotions feature more heavily here than in Avalon, which is unfortunate, because Arnett’s rugged, macho narration (“Every second he sat here helpless was torture”; Jeth’s girlfriend is “all blond hair and pale skin”) can’t pull them off. Slapdash science and little complexity—read for bang’em-up action. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
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THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES
Arnold, Elana K. HMH Books (240 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-544-33464-9
Hoping for one particular miracle leads Iris to discover that life may be a series of them. Iris has moved from California to Oregon, where the change from sun to rain every day mirrors her sorrow after the death of her best friend, Sarah. Only one thing comforts her: She feels Sarah’s ghost in the closet of her family’s new house. Although Iris’ parents want her to make friends, Iris would rather experience a miracle allowing her to talk with Sarah. She sees a vehicle to this miracle in her classmate Boris, who, some say, should have died as a baby but was miraculously healed in utero. Iris’ longing is palpable, and her grief is tenderly portrayed. She toys with contacting Sarah through a physic or, with Boris, through Electronic Voice Phenomena (the principle that the dead are all around but we simply cannot hear them). She also wonders if prayers can provide a miraculous intercession, meets with a therapist and talks with her parents. Supported by a well-developed cast of characters, Iris moves through the process, sharing stories of loss with others, learning her own strengths and developing her friendship with Boris. Iris still misses Sarah but begins to feel hope and see small miracles of life all around her. Just as Iris finally embraces the rain, spinning round and round, readers, too, will recognize the circular patterns of love and loss, joy and grief, life and death. A quiet, affecting journey rendered with keen insight. (Fiction. 10-14)
I REMEMBER YOU
Bell, Cathleen Davitt Knopf (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-385-75455-2 978-0-385-75457-6 e-book 978-0-385-75456-9 PLB This romance with a dash of time travel and a hint of war smacks of a Nicholas Sparks novel for teens. The premise of Bell’s latest is initially promising. An adult Juliet tells readers at the outset of the novel that she is relating the story of falling in love for the first time, during her junior year of high school, in order to prove she still remembers the boy that stole her heart in 1994. It’s the tried and true tale of the straight-A student falling for the sensitive jock from the other side of town with the “ten-gigawatt smile.” She is on the fast track to college. He is counting the days until he can enlist in the Marines. A few intense gazes later, and Juliet and Lucas are an item. It’s a cliché with a twist, however, as Juliet discovers kirkus.com
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“Snippets of newsprint, handwriting, lined composition paper, faded letters and old books simply beg for scrutiny.” from finding spring
that Lucas can not only predict the future, he is convinced he has already lived it. Unfortunately, the explanation behind Lucas’ ability to reach back through space and time for Juliet is so convoluted and far-fetched it makes it impossible to suspend disbelief for the sake of story and just enjoy the ride. A supporting cast of underdeveloped characters and a lackluster second half further complicate matters. Alas, unmemorable. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)
Even though woodland friends Squirrel, Rabbit, Deer and Robin tell him it isn’t quite time yet, Maurice soon mistakes falling snow’s icy beauty for springtime. Cut-paper collages, enlivened by subtly placed ephemera, create manifold, bafflingly luminous and engaging illustrations. Photographed and reproduced to fill every double-page spread in this immensely pleasurable seasonal story, they offer a sense of continuum (perfect for a tale of cyclical change), luxuriant space and a wonderfully immersive reading experience. Snippets of newsprint, handwriting, lined composition paper, faded letters and old books simply beg for scrutiny. Cut-paper forms, the raised edges of which cast little shadows within the collages, challenge two-dimensionality and enchant readers. Petals, tree trunks, evergreen boughs and berry bushes appear as sculptural shapes, multidimensional and magical, bestowing on young children the same pleasurably disorienting and dazzling confusion the little bear feels when holding his first ice crystal. Maurice awakes to find his red scarf wet from the snowball he hoped to save, a sweet wink to Peter and his Snowy Day, but he also finds spring itself in all its budded, bountiful, glory.
FINDING SPRING
Berger, Carin Illus. by Berger, Carin Greenwillow/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-225019-3 Maurice, a little bear, can’t wait to experience his first spring, so while Mama hibernates, he goes looking for it.
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“The liveliest, most evocative scenes are those far from civilization and its discontents; it’s in the lonely, arid Texas and Nevada landscapes that the characters come close.” from julia and the art of practical travel
Exceptional, exhilarating artwork perfectly suited for a story about anticipation, discovery and joy. (Picture book. 2-6)
NO PARKING AT THE END TIMES
Bliss, Bryan Greenwillow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-06-227541-7 978-0-06-227543-1 e-book Even though the end of the world didn’t happen, it still feels like it to Abigail. After the teen’s down-and-out parents sell all their possessions in North Carolina and give the money to smarmy Brother John in California—who claims that the end of the world is near—Abigail, her twin brother, Aaron, and her still-trusting parents find themselves homeless, living out of their van in San Francisco. In this debut novel informed more by adult sensibility than teenspeak, Abigail begins to see her parents’ manipulation by Brother John and questions her own faith in the world. Aaron, meanwhile, escapes the insanity by sneaking out each evening to meet up with the city’s other homeless teens. As Abigail notices her once-close brother’s increasing detachment from her and the family, she wrestles with a range of emotions, from jealousy to separation anxiety. Packed with some lovely phrasing, the story has good intentions, but a slow, repetitious plot and a lack of tension will keep it from fully engaging most adolescent readers. A hopeful yet too-tidy ending offers instant resolutions. Thoughtful readers may take interest in Abigail’s selfdiscoveries. (Fiction. 14 & up)
JULIA AND THE ART OF PRACTICAL TRAVEL
Blume, Lesley M.M. Photos by Blume, Lesley M.M. Knopf (192 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-75282-4 978-0-385-75284-8 e-book 978-0-385-75283-1 PLB
In 1968, after Julia’s aunt Constance is forced to sell Windy Ridge, home to the aristocratic Lancasters since the American Revolution, to Tipsy von Lipp (nee Shirley Hicks), the two set off to find Julia’s mother, Rosemary, who traded pearls for love beads three years earlier. Julia brings her Brownie camera, and with Lancaster heirlooms—oriental carpets, silver tea service—in steamer trunks, one even lashed to the roof of the station wagon, they drive to Manhattan to stay with Tipsy at her invitation while Aunt Constance combs Greenwich Village searching for Rosemary. Stuck 178
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in the suffocating apartment with gloating, vulgar Tipsy, Julia’s inspired to play an elaborate practical joke that quickly ends their visit. The droll, meandering road trip across the United States unfolds in spare but telling detail that draws on Blume’s poignant imagery. But the inconsistent tone—early, broad farce gives way to pointed pathos—and jerky, episodic plot can jar. There’s little sense of the vivid 1960s in the text or Julia’s generic photos. Ridiculing silly Tipsy, a shrill hayseed who’s never seen an oyster fork (how many young readers have?), makes Julia seem heartless—a preteen Eloise. The urban snobbery has a chilling effect. The liveliest, most evocative scenes are those far from civilization and its discontents; it’s in the lonely, arid Texas and Nevada landscapes that the characters come close. Readers who make it to the heartland with her will find the pleasure in Julia’s travels. (Historical fiction. 8-12)
THE PIRATE WHO’S AFRAID OF EVERYTHING
Bondor-Stone, Annabeth; White, Connor Illus. by Holden, Anthony Harper/HarperCollins (192 pp.) $12.99 | $9.49 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-06-231387-4 978-0-06-231388-1 e-book Series: Shivers!, 1 Get ready for a breathlessly paced pirate adventure starring Shivers, who is terrified of just about everything. The fearful 11-year-old, the youngest in his family of pirates, begins the story with an overreaction to his beeping alarm clock. The liberal use of capitalized dialogue (“LOAD THE CANNONS! SWAB THE POOP DECK!”) makes it clear that Shivers is easily freaked out. When a carrier pigeon delivers a plea for help from his parents, he goes to the police station for some help. Good thing spunky Margo, two years his junior and the police chief ’s daughter, is craving some true adventure. The unlikely duo sets sail and encounters colorful characters. Here the authors’ language often impresses with its rich and humorous descriptions: “In a deep voice that sounded like pancake syrup dripping down a jagged rock, he bellowed, ‘...I am Captain Pokes-You-in-the-Eye!’ ” Man-eating sharks, a giant squid and a villain with a passion for mustard are all part of the overthe-top journey. Cartoonish illustrations in black and white by Holden further emphasize the crazy antics that rapidly move the characters on until their heroic climb of the Statue of Liberty and one final, colossal panic attack that brings the slapstick story to a tidy conclusion. While the premise is initially hard to accept given its pure ridiculousness, fans of Captain Underpants and the Wimpy Kid may find Shivers more hilarious than overwrought. (Fiction. 8-11)
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for a mountain refuge to take stock and come up with a strategy that will vanquish Wade and Clara Quinn, siblings who also have two pulses, and their father, Hotspur Chance. But they don’t have much of a chance to strategize, as the Quinns invade all too soon, taking out some of their slender forces and kidnapping Dylan’s half sister, Jade, in the process. It’s an all-or-nothing battle now, and the fate of the entire Western State rests in their hands. Carman keeps the action moving at all times, allowing well-timed breaks for his solid, likable characters to contemplate the difference between right and might, as well as mind over matter. An engaging end to a well-developed arc. (Dystopian romance. 13-16)
Carman, Patrick Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $17.99 | $4.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2015 978-0-06-208590-0 978-0-06-208601-3 e-book Series: Pulse, 3 This final installment in the Pulse trilogy starts up only moments after the ending of Tremor (2013), and the action
never lets up. Faith Daniels is sure of only a few things in life: that she loves Dylan Gilmore, that they are both virtually indestructible due to their dual pulses, which protect them while giving them superpowers, and that they’re in a fight against an evil genius who thinks the only way to save humanity is to destroy millions of people. Representing all that is left of the rebellion, along with friend Hawk and military bodyguard Clooger, they head
At 1313 Road to Nowhere in Foggy Point, an enchanting goth family’s legacy in cryptozoology is threatened by harassment, loss, and haters. Can this enchanting family raise their teens in a world that is not? Welcome to the Monsterjunkie Manor---where the bizarre is normal and the magical is real. For inquiries about publishing and representaaon, email arkwatchproduccons@gmail.com.
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ALL FALL DOWN
Carter, Ally Scholastic (320 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-65474-6 978-0-545-65478-4 e-book Series: Embassy Row, 1 A 16-year-old Army brat, unpleasantly in the public eye, copes with grief over her dead mother and fears for her own mental health. In this new series by the author of the Gallagher Girls books, Grace is sent to live with her grandfather, the United States ambassador to Adria. Trouble-prone Grace causes an international incident on her very first day. Besides, everybody in Adria thinks she’s crazy; Grace has spent the last three years insisting she saw her mother murdered by a gruesomely scarred man, though all the evidence says it was an accident. Grace doubts herself when she sees evidence of sinister doings in Adria: conspirators in the palace, secret tunnels and—worst of all—the Scarred Man walking Adria’s corridors of power. Though some of the local kids try to help, Grace hates being surrounded by the competent and attractive multinational kids of Embassy Row while she’s heavily medicated, prone to self-harm, and too pale and blonde to be pretty. Grace’s adventure waffles among spy thriller, an examination of grief and an exploration of mental illness. It rockets wildly to and fro; the setup for the inevitable second volume doesn’t follow even slightly naturally from the mystery’s conclusion. Still, the mix-and-match bucket of tropes creates a not-entirely-infelicitous goofy whole: Hallucinations, mean girls and kidnappings abound. Will appeal not only to psychological-thriller fans, but to those who want a little glamour, some A-list social politics and a bit of high school nastiness mixed in with their suspense. (Thriller. 12-14)
THE BACKWARDS BIRTHDAY PARTY
Chapin, Tom Illus. by Groenink, Chuck Atheneum (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 17, 2015 978-1-4424-6798-9 978-1-4424-6800-9 e-book What if birthdays were backward? A young Caucasian boy wakes up ready to celebrate his birthday only to find that time is moving backward. As the fanciful refrain says, they are, “[a]t the backwards birthday party, / where everything’s out of whack. / The backwards birthday party! / The partyday birthwards back.” A bouncing, jovial rhyme describes the reversed sequencing as the story moves forward—er, backward. The sun sets, the animals say goodbye, and then they enter the house in a most perplexing manner. 180
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Colorful, appealing illustrations portray the boy and his animal friends with just the right amount of detail as they eat cake first thing (hurray!) and the boy wraps presents and hands them out to each animal. The boy’s parents watch, flummoxed, as confusion and backward behavior abound. With the exception of a sentence that reads oddly (it begins at the bottom of the page and moves up), all is smooth and silly here. Youngsters will giggle along with this lighthearted selection as they relish all the important moments that birthdays bring and learn about sequencing and time in an enjoyable way. A nice selection for any collection and, of course, an excellent birthday present. (Picture book. 4-8)
MONSTROUS
Connolly, MarcyKate Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-06-227271-3 A monster’s search for identity and redemption, with betrayal, lies and madness at its core. Having wakened with no memory, patchwork Kymera knows only what her kind-faced creator, Barnabas, tells her— that the girls of nearby Bryre are being stolen by a deranged wizard, and she has been assembled from gathered parts of victims and magical creatures to rescue them, one per night. But as Kymera pursues her nocturnal mission, aided by wings and a stinging tail that (in overt homage to Frankenstein) are bolted on, exchanges with an intrepid lad named Rendall and other puzzling clues gradually lead her to question her assumptions. The horrific truth at last revealed, devastated Kymera sets out to rescue the dozens of girls she has taken. More betrayal awaits, though, along with considerable slaughter, before just deserts are fully paid. Connolly makes her conflicted narrator so slow on the uptake that readers, who will twig to the true villain’s identity far earlier, may grow impatient waiting for her to get on with it. Not that the plot is particularly compelling, what with its dependence on conveniently overheard conversations and stylized battle choreography, plus Kymera’s angst-y frets about her true inner nature to slow it down further. The story may be spun with classic DNA, but in the end, it’s sluggish and overwrought. (Fantasy. 12-14)
COUNT WITH MAISY, CHEEP, CHEEP, CHEEP!
Cousins, Lucy Illus. by Cousins, Lucy Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7643-8
Barnyard antics combine with flaps and basic counting skills in this, the latest of Maisy’s adventures. kirkus.com
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“Economical, expressive, fluid black lines capture Smick’s range of doggy emotions and postures….” from smick
THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS
With bedtime on the horizon, Mommy Hen enlists Maisy’s aid in rounding up her widely scattered little flock. With a variety of shaped flaps, Maisy’s search for each chick takes readers to different parts of the farm. From the pigsty to the apple tree, eventually nine of the errant fowl are accounted for. Finding the last and 10th, however, requires a bit more work (and quite a few more flaps) before the final chick returns to its family. As if starring in a reverse telling of the song “Five Little Ducks,” Mommy Hen’s ever increasing brood will provide a great deal of amusement for the toddler and preschooler set. As they are found one by one, they accompany Maisy while she searches around the farm, often riding on her head or tail and once, in a particularly surreal touch, even on an elephant. While the book hardly breaks new ground, the counting combined with the flaps, appealing barnyard animals and varied farm locations make this an ideal counting companion to better known stories and songs, such as “Old MacDonald.” A book that doesn’t take any “cheep” shots at the material. (Picture book. 3-5)
Coville, Katherine Knopf (400 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-385-75573-3 978-0-385-75575-7 e-book 978-0-385-75574-0 PLB
Jane Eyre meets the Three Bears. Once upon a time, in the faux-Victorian enclave of the Enchanted Forest, sentient creatures lived in harmony with humans—until the Anthropological Society began agitating for human supremacy. In this fraught atmosphere, the Vaughn family, three bears of great refinement, engage the young and naïve bear Ursula Brown as governess. Like any proper heroine, she forms an immediate bond with her charge, Teddy, and tumbles into star-crossed love. Still, she is troubled by ominous forebodings about Teddy’s resentful Nurse, the bigotry seething within the quaint village, and, above all, the dark secrets lurking in the titular stately mansion. Then, one night, a human girl with golden curls steals into her room....Ursula narrates in a deliberately oldfashioned cadence with “had I but known” asides. Principled and sincere, her dedication to Teddy and Goldilocks compels admiration, and the devoted friendship between cub and child is genuinely heartwarming. But the heavy-handed condemnation of prejudice jars oddly against Ursula’s genteel snobbishness, and her romance is downright mawkish. Like the other Enchanted beasts, her cultivated comportment—including corsets, pianofortes, Latin studies and conventional Christian piety—downplays her animal nature, making each reference to snouts, paws and fur appear intrusive. Likewise, the cameo appearances by storybook characters, while occasionally clever, often seem forced. An ambitious but awkward mashup of nursery-tale whimsy, Gothic tropes and modern didactic moralism. (Fantasy. 10-16)
DOGS ARE PEOPLE, TOO A Collection of Cartoons to Make Your Tail Wag
Coverly, Dave Illus. by Coverly, Dave Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (224 pp.) $12.99 paper | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-62779-042-0
A large collection of dog-themed cartoons from the creator of the syndicated panel “Speed Bump,” punctuated with snapshots and fond reminiscences of his own real pooches. From “My bark is worse than my bite but it’s nothing compared to my breath” to “Yoga position #42: ‘The Licking Dog’,” the simply drawn, single-panel zingers all pay affectionate tribute to the intelligence, refreshingly candid habits and overall lovability of man’s (and woman’s) best friend. In general, the snarky humor isn’t pitched to younger readers (“My dog is rolling in your resume,” observes a job interviewer. “It’s not a hopeful sign for you”), but with the possible exception of the occasional canine dressed as a dominatrix, they won’t leave them completely befuddled. Along with sharing occasional memories of Shag, Kenzi and other family pets, Coverly tucks in quotes from the likes of Orhan Pamuk, perfunctory chapters of doggy “Fun Facts” and introductions to such “Amazing Dogs” as Laika and Barry, the original St. Bernard rescue dog. These read more as filler than personal notes or insights. “The secret to life is TREATS!” intones a canine yogi. With that, at least, even diapered dog devotees will concur. (Cartoons. 10-13, adult)
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SMICK
Cronin, Doreen Illus. by Medina, Juana Viking (40 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 5, 2015 978-0-670-78578-0 A dog named Smick encounters a stick and Chick, with high-action results. When Smick hears his named called, followed by the command to sit, he eagerly responds, winning a laudatory “Good, Smick.” Ordered to fetch a stick, Smick complies and earns another “Good, Smick.” Then Smick hears Chick clucking. He curiously approaches the little bird to investigate and receives an alarmed “No, Smick, no!” As Smick and Chick check each other out, Chick perches on Smick’s head until Smick resumes chasing the stick. Eventually, the unlikely pair bond and |
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“[Charlotte’s] polite, guileless accounts belie the household mayhem that Carpenter’s lively ink-and-wash illustrations depict.” from dear mr. washington
companionably share the stick as well as a friendly lick. Printed in bold, black typeface, the spare text plays with single words like “Smick,” “stick,” “Chick,” “sidekick,” “sidechick,” “lick” and “ick,” triggering a neat rhyming cadence from beginning to end. Simplicity is key in the energetic, digitally rendered illustrations printed on plain white backgrounds. Economical, expressive, fluid black lines capture Smick’s range of doggy emotions and postures, while Chick catches the eye as a single red-and-yellow digitally collaged flower petal with a black beak, eye and wings digitally added. The realistic photo of a stick adds whimsical verisimilitude. Less is definitely more in this fetching, fun-filled mix of dog, chick and stick, guaranteed to tickle all. (Picture book. 2-8)
DEAR MR. WASHINGTON
Cullen, Lynn Illus. by Carpenter, Nancy Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-8037-3038-0
Gilbert Stuart, George Washington’s portraitist, had 12 children and fretted about his famous subject’s unsmiling mien. These details inspire Cullen’s story of three rambunctious siblings: Charlotte, James and Baby John Stuart. Charlotte, a budding artist herself, writes three letters to “Mr. Washington” in April 1796. Her polite, guileless accounts belie the household mayhem that Carpenter’s lively ink-andwash illustrations depict. Charlotte’s first missive thanks Washington for sending an etiquette book; she pledges to copy it out, just as Washington had done as a boy. Indeed, Cullen adapts the historical book Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation for the 10 proscriptions that Charlotte lists out. Covering both the usual (eating) and the quaint (the polite way to dispatch fleas, lice and ticks on oneself and others), the rules are comically illustrated as paintings on canvas, presumably done by Charlotte herself. She confides, “In no time I am sure James and I will have learned all these Rules. I hope so, for Mother says until then we get no Pudding after dinner.” Subsequent letters recount both good behavior (which induces sleep in both the children and Washington, scuttling one sitting) and chaos, with an overturned punch bowl engendering a cascade of events culminating in a smile from George—and the completion of Stuart’s portrait. This collaboration’s clever epistolary narrative and playful pictures present a fresh, remarkably humanizing view of our first president. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-8)
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FIELD-TRIP FIASCO
Danneberg, Julie Illus. by Love, Judy Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | $6.95 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-58089-671-9 978-1-58089-672-6 paper Series: Mrs. Hartwell’s Classroom Adventures Mrs. Hartwell, of first-day, last-day and standardized-test fame, is back, this time trying to survive a class field trip. It’s taken some time for the teacher to get over the last class field trip, but with some preparation, this time she thinks she is ready. And over the course of the day at the zoo, she carefully follows her handwritten list of field-trip tips, but her “handydandy, just-in-case-something-unexpected-happens bag” still gets some use. From a bus-related delay and a few minor scrapes to a serious need for some paper towels and a change of clothes, pith-helmet–clad Mrs. Hartwell is prepared for any eventuality, including the need to change her own carefully made plans. Teachers will certainly see the humor and gentle lessons in Danneberg’s latest school story. The questions is, will kids be as engaged? The kids’ mishaps are just as tongue-in-cheek as ever, but behind them is the fact that Mrs. Hartwell’s writing assignment is keeping them from seeing some of the cool things the zoo animals are doing—maybe it’s revealing too many tips of the trade? Love’s illustrations are fun to peruse, and she masterfully portrays her characters’ every emotion. But while Eddie’s personality comes through loud and clear, the other students are rather generic, not like the class found in Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ Twelve Days series. Not as strong as Mrs. Hartwell’s previous outings. (Picture book. 5-8)
SEEKER
Dayton, Arwen Elys Delacorte (448 pp.) $18.99 | $10.99 e-book | $21.99 PLB Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-385-74407-2 978-0-385-37857-4 e-book 978-0-375-99148-6 PLB Three teens are tricked into using their phenomenal cosmic powers for immoral purposes. Quin, Shinobu and John are finally ready to be inducted into the secret society of Seekers. Though they are only teenagers, they have trained since they were children to fight with the Seeker weapon, the whipsword, and to avoid the dreaded mind-destroying disruptor. Somehow, horrifyingly, John fails his final test and is sent away. John, however, already knows the secret that’s been kept from Quin and Shinobu: The Seekers are no heroes. Quin has spent her life desperate for her father’s approval and is horrified to realize what a monster he’s always kirkus.com
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GUESS WHO’S IN THE TREES
been. With their lives toppled, the three would-be fighters are separated, traveling with magical speed from rural Scotland to a noir Hong Kong stocked with opium dens. The childhood friends are now at odds, though with chapters alternating with each protagonist, the characters have the opportunity to show all their perspectives. In an adventure packed with drug abuse, self-harm, amnesia and betrayal, one erstwhile Seeker aims to control another. It’s a thinly drawn tangle of a setting, with portable televisions and cellphones alongside steampunk-style airships and sci-fi “airlifts.” Nor do the heroes escape lazy stereotyping. For biracial Shinobu, for example, becoming “more Japanese” translates to “things like manners and honor.” A relationship triangle completes the picture (as it’s packed with pseudo-sexual violence, it’s difficult to call it a love triangle). Ellipsis-laden dialogue makes even death-defying, CGI-ready adventures drag. (Science fantasy. 14-16)
de la Bédoyère, Camilla Illus. by Hajée, Fiona QEB Publishing (24 pp.) $16.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-60992-706-6 Series: Guess Who’s
Lift-the-flap lovers explore forest habitats, guessing what animals live in each, in this outing, one of a set of four. Three clues, two on the verso and one on the flap that’s located on the recto, encourage little ones to guess before lifting the tempting, shaped flaps and revealing a photo cutout of the animal, parts of which peek out the sides and through diecut holes in the simple cartoon backgrounds. These clues run the gamut in terms of both helpfulness and factuality, some of the “clues” anthropomorphizing the animals: “Who loves to swoop through the trees?” The reveal shows the entire animal along with one or two sentences describing another fact. “I do! I am a gibbon. I can swing up to 30 feet (9 meters) from one branch to another!” The specificity of animals included varies within books and across the set. Generic ones are easy enough for children to guess, but while this title reveals a “snake,” Guess Who’s in the Sand uncovers a “cobra.” Similarly, readers will find a butterfly and a woodpecker among the trees, but a snowy owl and an emperor penguin chick in the Snow. (And strangely, a hippo is in the Grass.) “Talking points” in the back of each book instruct adults as to how to best share the book with children and give the adult-child pair some things to do together, including learning more through research, mapping habitats, doing an activity and looking for similar animals near home. Uneven, but children will enjoy the guessing and likely learn something all the same. (Informational picture book. 3- 6) (Guess Who’s in the Grass: 978-1-60992-698-4; Guess Who’s in the Sand: 978-1-60992-699-1; Guess Who’s in the Snow: 978-1-60992-705-9)
FIREFLY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANIMALS
de la Bédoyère, Camilla; Whitfield, Philip—Eds. Firefly (256 pp.) $19.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-77085-457-4
From echidnas to paddle worms, this broad guide to the animal kingdom introduces more than 700 animals, organized in groups, illustrated with detailed watercolors and photographs, and presented in conjunction with features on particular types of animals and general animal behavior. Each of six chapters opens with a striking double-page photograph of an iconic member of the broad group followed by another spread of general information answering the question, “What is a...?” (mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, or invertebrate). Each section includes numerous specific examples, organized again in groups such as “hoofed mammals,” “seahorses, stonefish, and relatives,” “spiders and scorpions.” The entries come from all over the world; some are common and others rare, but all are interesting in some way. Each creature is presented with its common and Latin names, an image, a descriptive paragraph, and a card noting size, general range and habitat. These entries are arranged unevenly on a faintly lined page topped with guide words. The design sometimes makes it harder to connect the image with the explanation but is far more attractive and appealing than that of a traditional encyclopedia. There are few glaring inaccuracies (elk and moose are not the same) but only occasional use of European rather than North American names (divers for loons). The Firefly Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals publishes simultaneously. For browsers and researchers alike, this is a useful and inviting display—and a bargain. (index) (Nonfiction. 8-14) (Firefly Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals: 978-1-77085-460-4)
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ONE WITCH AT A TIME
DeKeyser, Stacy McElderry (224 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4814-1351-0 978-1-4814-1353-4 e-book Magic beans, a boy brave enough to confer with witches and a girl strong enough to defy a tyrant are the ingredients for another original tale with famil-
iar folklore roots. Thirteen-year-old Rudi, who first encountered the Brixen Witch a year earlier when she helped him retrieve stolen village children, once again heeds her advice. After red-haired Agatha brings beans she’s stolen from Petz’s tyrannical resident witch, a giant, to Rudi’s home province, the old woman on the mountain tells Rudi to return them. Magic has rules: Witches and their magic must stay home. Rudi and 9-year old Susanna, who recognizes the beans’ magic, travel through a beanstalk to |
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neighboring Petz, where they meet Agatha again and learn how sad conditions are there. The greedy giant-witch of that frozen province has taken every good thing, including summer. The three enter the giant’s lair to return his beans but make things worse by coming home with a hen, whose eggs are, of course, golden. Perhaps Agatha goes along too easily with Rudi’s plan to return all the Petz magic, and perhaps Rudi is a bit too dutiful, but the characters are awfully likable, and this tale is set so believably in a traditional Alpine world that it’s easy to go along with the make-believe. A satisfying, stand-alone sequel that will certainly send readers back to read The Brixen Witch (2012). (Fantasy. 8-12)
I’LL MEET YOU THERE
Demetrios, Heather Henry Holt (400 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8050-9795-5
Skylar’s post-graduation mission to get out of tiny Creek View, California, is sidetracked by her mom’s downward spiral into alcohol abuse and by hot hunk Josh Mitchell’s return from a tour in Afghanistan minus a leg. A collage artist intent on getting to San Francisco State, Skylar’s home situation is both motivation to go and a ball and chain that keeps her from leaving. Skylar’s two besties, Chris and Dylan, are unable to help. Chris is busy hankering after Dylan when he’s not focusing on college in Boston in the fall, and Dylan’s baby is taking up almost as much of her time as his daddy, Jesse, does. Part-time work at the Paradise Motel believably brings Josh and Skylar together to connect and flirt, observed by their beloved and unbelievably undemanding boss. Ominous moody moments contrast with the happy, soaring— and steamy—times, and of course they are followed by the inevitable, completely devastating low. Demetrios (Something Real, 2014) again focuses on timely issues, interspersing Skylar’s account with short chapters in Josh’s anguished voice that relive his painful wartime memories. Skylar is almost preternaturally naïve, an abstemious virgin surrounded by hard-partying, foulmouthed, slur-slinging classmates all too conscious of their limited futures and all too willing to try to forget it temporarily with bad sex. A heady, page-flipping romance. (Fiction. 14 & up)
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CAN’T-DANCE-CAMERON A Scottish Capercaillie Story Dodd, Emily Illus. by Pamment, Katie Floris (24 pp.) $11.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-7825-0095-7
Can Cameron kick up a capercaillie ceilidh—a shindig, that is, a hoedown, a bird hop—in the ancient evergreen woodlands under the Cairngorms, or is he a grouse with two left feet? Despite his smart plumage—in the elegant, spare palette of the Scottish Highlands—Cameron isn’t a confident creature. He can’t dance like the other capercaillies, especially not like other members of his famed MacFeather clan. He has tried, but he just doesn’t have the confidence. The moves are there, though; they are just hidden under a layer of qualms and uncertainties. With a little Zen guidance from Hazel the squirrel, Cameron learns that he is hard-wired with dance steps; indeed, he uses them every day as he goes about his business in the forest. He can shimmy (see him shake off those pine needles); he can duck walk (see him limbo under that downed tree); he can kick like a Rockette (see him distract that bobcat by booting a pine cone). Now tie them together on the dance floor—he’s a feathered Fred Astaire. “Sometimes, Cameron, you go looking for something and find that you had it all along,” says Hazel. Pat, but true. What gives the truism new life is the locale: exotic, yet very real. Lovely to look at—and just kooky enough to keep readers engaged for the hoary message. (Picture book. 4-8)
THE TALE OF TAM LINN
Don, Lari Illus. by Longson, Philip Floris (32 pp.) $11.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-78250-134-3
The captive knight’s rescuer comes off as particularly fierce and courageous in this retelling of the old Scottish border ballad. She’s heard the warnings, but as “Janet didn’t believe in fairy stories and Janet didn’t like being told what to do,” off she goes one October day to Carterhaugh Woods to pluck a rose and meet the dashing Tam Linn by a well. And why would she help him escape? “Because I believe that the boy stolen by the fairies should be allowed to walk back out of the woods.” Scowling beneath a heavy mane of red hair, Janet shines with determination in Longson’s shadowed, misty Celtic scenes—returning on Halloween to seize Tam Linn and hold on stubbornly while the enraged, Maleficent-like fairy queen transforms him first into a succession of huge wild beasts, and then a burning branch that Janet casts into the well. Out comes Tam Linn, wet, laughing and free. The romance being relegated to a closing glimpse of the two young folk holding hands, Janet’s heroism is the rendition’s most visible theme. Don recasts the ballad into standard kirkus.com
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“Draper expertly creates a character filled with hope, dreams and ambition in a time when such traits were dangerous for a girl of color.” from stella by starlight
NOBODY’S PERFECT
English, without dialect or regional idiom. In other additions to the Picture Kelpies series Theresa Breslin does likewise as she relates with a wink how Assipattle and Princess Gemdelovely defeat the “ginormous” Dragon Stoorworm (illustrated by Matthew Land), and so does Janis Mackay for a bland version of The Selkie Girl (illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane). Of the simultaneously publishing trio, only Tam Linn comes with a historical note. A traditional Scots tale served up both fresh and freshly illustrated. (Picture book/folk tale. 7-9) (The Dragon Stoorworm: 978-1-78250-117-6; The Selkie Girl: 978-1-78250-130-5)
Elliott, David Illus. by Zuppardi, Sam Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-7636-6699-6
Nobody’s perfect, and that’s actually fine. A boy sits on the bottom step of an indoor staircase musing about imperfections. His baby sister, Gigi, is loud. His best friend, Jack, is “kind of a show-off.” His mother won’t listen when he insists that the dog’s habit of sleeping on his bed should be blamed on the dog. That last disagreement explains why he’s sitting here, in a timeout. His own imperfection, he thinks, is messiness: His room has toys everywhere and drawers bursting open. After he cleans, it’s demonstrably worse—the drawers have leaped free of the dressers, and the floor is nigh impassable. But messiness is key to joy and artwork, Jack’s showing off is fun when it’s playful, and Gigi’s clamor enables thrilling, pot-banging screamfests. The boy forgives his mom’s supposed flaw too, but he doesn’t reframe it— she’s OK because “[s]ometimes she does listen,” not because her trait is sometimes a boon. This uneasy break in the pattern dilutes the interesting point that flaws aren’t always flaws. Zuppardi’s loose, scribbly, deceptively child-styled pencil outlines vibrate with energy, and his colorful acrylic backgrounds feature uninhibitedly visible brush strokes, drips, splotches and lines made from pulling a tool through wet paint. The kids have enormous heads; their wide-open mouths are unabashedly colored in with gray pencil. Not the most fascinating or consistent storyline, but snazzy artwork spruces it up. (Picture book. 3- 6)
STELLA BY STARLIGHT
Draper, Sharon M. Atheneum (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4424-9497-8
When a young girl gains confidence from her failures and strength from what her community dreads most, life delivers magic and hope. Stella Mills and her brother Jojo witness the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross late one starry night, setting off a chain reaction that leaves their entire community changed. During the Depression, North Carolina was less than hospitable for African-Americans forced to work more to earn less while being deprived of basic human rights. Through the perspective of Stella, young readers glimpse the nearly suffocating anguish that envelops this black community, illuminating the feelings associated with suppression. In a telling passage, Stella’s mother attempts to comfort her: “ ‘It’s gonna be all right,’ her mother whispered as she smoothed down Stella’s hair. But Stella felt the tension in her mother’s arms, and she knew that in reality, fear hugged them both.” Draper expertly creates a character filled with hope, dreams and ambition in a time when such traits were dangerous for a girl of color. While the use of language honors the time period, the author is careful to avoid the phonetic quagmire that ensnares lesser writers of the period, allowing the colorful idioms to shine. A tale of the Jim Crow South that’s not sugar-coated but effective, with a trustworthy narrator who opens her heart and readers’ eyes. (Historical fiction. 9-13)
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THE VOLUME OF POSSIBLE ENDINGS
Else, Barbara Illus. by Broad, Sam Gecko Press (336 pp.) $17.95 | $8.75 paper | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-927271-61-2 978-1-927271-37-7 paper Series: Tales of Fontania, 3 One child raised in secret and another assembled from mechanical and magical parts find themselves enmeshed in a deadly scheme to usurp the throne of Fontania in this high-spirited second sequel to The Traveling Restaurant (2012). Dorrity’s peaceful life in the otherwise childless hamlet of Owl Town is abruptly upset when she discovers a magic book that spells out five cryptic and troubling predictions. This is quickly followed by the arrival of a clockwork boy recently escaped from the workshop of King Jasper. Though annoyingly ignorant and self-pitying, “Metalboy,” as she dubs him, turns out to be a doughty friend as the two are swept into a series of |
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“The household is as much a character as the stuffie and kids, its cozy accoutrements overlaid with Andrew’s (and Timbo’s) imaginations.” from elephantastic
captivities and escapes. Along with trucking in a busy supporting cast that ranges from animals transformed into people and vice versa to a trio of inept anarchists roaring about on motorbikes, Else contrives a plot that leaves neither characters nor readers much chance to catch their breaths. Many chases and narrow squeaks later (highlighted by a nerve-wracking ride in a small homemade submarine...with a bear), a tumultuous faceoff brings just deserts. Despite a tendency to overestimate her ability to sneak about undetected, Dorrity is a clever, resourceful sort, and better-read children will find in Metalboy engaging echoes of both Pinocchio and the Tin Woodman. An entertaining romp, more comical than scary and with a poignant but hopeful close. (endpaper map) (Fantasy. 10-12)
BREAKOUT
Emerson, Kevin Crown (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-385-39112-2 978-0-385-39114-6 e-book 978-0-385-39113-9 PLB An eighth grader writes a song that perfectly captures how he feels about being stuck between childhood and
adulthood. Anthony’s in a tough spot. He’s feeling disrespected in the classroom and at home. The only place he feels valued is in the after-school Rock Band Club, a program in which he and his friends excel. After a particularly tough day, Anthony stays up all night writing an angst-y anthem that goes viral. His band mates want to play the song at the school’s talent show, but will the administration let them play a song with a couple f-bombs in it? Emerson’s prose captures the early-teen mood swings well, but it feels weird coming from a character who does fairly well in school and has two loving parents who support his musical interests. When his song crescendos with a repeated, screamed “F*** THIS PLACE!” it’s hard not to wonder what it is exactly he hates—a point his club adviser tries to get at as well. Regardless, the narrative momentum keeps readers invested in Anthony’s moral conundrum. Unfortunately the book’s ending fizzles out in the most disappointing—if realistic—way possible, failing to provide any sort of satisfying resolution to Anthony’s problems. A strong effort that stumbles short of the finish line. (Fiction. 12-14)
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ELEPHANTASTIC
Engler, Michael Illus. by Tourlonias, Jöelle Translated by Garlid, Ann Peter Pauper Press (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-4413-0841-2 Inattention results in a potential domestic tragedy in this German import. Andrew is so busy drawing a treasure map, he really does not hear what Mommy says about delivering the package in the hall to their upstairs neighbors. So when he finally gets to the package, he figures it is for him and opens it. It’s a large stuffed elephant! Its name is Timbo, and it speaks to him! They immediately go on many adventures: climbing mountains, hiking through jungles and dancing in the valleys. This is all illustrated in double-page, full-bleed spreads in which the furniture and artifacts in Andrew’s home transmute themselves into mountains and jungles and valleys, just as they do in children’s play everywhere. When Mommy finds Andrew, she tells him gently that the package was meant for Louise upstairs. Louise is delighted to get her present, but Andrew is heartbroken to leave Timbo behind. His melancholy is solved very neatly when a barefoot Louise comes downstairs to announce that Timbo misses Andrew, and the three have adventures together. Browns and golds dominate the pictures, and children and elephant have button-dot eyes and, for the children, comma noses. Perhaps in keeping with this aesthetic, the faux–hand-lettered type is, unfortunately, small. The household is as much a character as the stuffie and kids, its cozy accoutrements overlaid with Andrew’s (and Timbo’s) imaginations. A sweet celebration of the imagination. (Picture book. 5-8)
CLOVER’S LUCK
George, Kallie Illus. by Boiger, Alexandra Disney-Hyperion (144 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4231-8382-2 Series: Magical Animal Adoption Agency, 1 Clover might have a lucky name, but she is sure that she’s the unluckiest girl ever. Clover believes in luck, and she’s tried everything to improve hers. She painted her room green (the color of clovers), she hung a horseshoe above her bed, and she carries a wishbone everywhere. Nothing works. Now her best friend, Emma, has gotten the last space at Pony Camp, and Clover will be alone all summer. When her pet canary escapes through a hole in her window, Clover chases the bird into the dark and forbidding Woods that surround the town. She doesn’t catch the bird, but she sees an ad for volunteers at an animal adoption agency posted on a tree. When she finds the cottage on Dragon Tail Lane, she learns that Mr. Jams fosters magical |
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KATIE FRIEDMAN GIVES UP TEXTING! (AND LIVES TO TELL ABOUT IT.)
animals. He accepts her as a volunteer but must leave on a special rescue mission almost immediately. He places Clover in charge. Can she do the job without her bad luck tripping her up—especially with a wicked witch about? George kicks off her Magical Animal Adoption Agency series with the tale of how Clover discovers her luck isn’t what she thought it was. All works out appropriately conveniently for the audience, and the solidly written, gentle tale of magic and self-reliance will entertain confident new independent readers. Clover’s sweet story is a good next step for lovers of the Magic Tree House. (Fantasy. 6-10)
Greenwald, Tommy Illus. by Coovert, J.P. Roaring Brook (240 pp.) $13.99 paper | Feb. 17, 2015 978-1-59643-837-8 Series: Charlie Joe Jackson, 5
A texting gaffe leads to tumult for middle schooler Katie. The tale opens with a wry glimpse at Katie’s technologydriven existence, documenting the flurry of texting, posting and so on that consumes Katie’s time. Disaster occurs when Katie accidentally sends a text meant for BFF Charlie Joe containing careless remarks about her current boyfriend, Nareem, to Nareem instead. An aspiring songwriter, Katie transforms her remorse into the lyrics of a new song. When hometown rock star—and Katie’s favorite musician—Jane (of Plain Jane fame) learns of Katie’s predicament, she proposes a challenge. If Katie can convince 10 friends to join her in eschewing their phones for one week, the group will be invited to Jane’s concert, where she will play Katie’s song. Greenwald explores the complications inherent in relying upon technology as a substitute for genuine social engagement, comically highlighting both the pitfalls and the benefits of modern communication practices. Katie’s project ultimately brings together a disparate group of middle school students whose efforts to get by without their phones result in meaningful discoveries about one another and themselves. Coovert’s illustrations convey Katie’s spunky personality, capturing both her mishaps and triumphs. Fans of the Charlie Joe Jackson series will enjoy the evolving changes in Charlie Joe and Katie’s friendship. With wit and perception, Greenwald reminds readers that there is communication beyond their electronics. (Fiction. 10-13)
ALL THAT BURNS
Graudin, Ryan HarperTeen (464 pp.) $9.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-06-218743-7 978-0-06-218744-4 e-book Magic and monarchy collide in this romantic fantasy, a sequel to All that Glows (2014). Emrys gave up her immortality and her magic when she fell in love with Richard, the 18-year-old new king of England. Richard has put forth a controversial policy: British mortals should welcome the faery world as partners, a plan chiefly opposed by Julian Forsythe, a politician who hopes to incite fear of faeries in order to become prime minister. When Richard is kidnapped from his coach on the way to his coronation, Emrys embarks on a mission to find him and learns that she isn’t the only faery in Britain’s history to unite with a king. Echoes of Camelot, a time Emrys personally remembers, enter the story, with more than one of the actual Arthurian figures still alive and active. She unites with Richard’s sister, Belle, and Kieran, one of the Ad-hene that guards the prison of the faery world, to find the trail of a recent escapee, even as Forsythe turns all of London against her. Graudin relies on abundant elements from the romance and fantasy genres—perfect boyfriends, royalty, magical creatures and spells—but admixes enough plot to keep readers engaged. The King Arthur legend also works well to keep an intriguing mystery moving through the tale while leaving room for another sequel. Fluffier than the series opener but still appealing for fans. (Fantasy. 12-18)
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THE CONSPIRACY OF US
Hall, Maggie Putnam (336 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-399-16650-1
A friendless teen discovers she’s the key to a millenia-old epic prophecy— making her an invaluable pawn of the world’s great powers. Sixteen-year-old Avery West has a Plan: don’t make friends, so as to remain unhurt when she inevitably has to change schools. Her single mother is a military contractor (something to do with a mandate), and Avery never lives anywhere long. At least Avery’s learned to hide her violet eyes behind colored contacts, so she’s only friendless instead of mocked. Avery’s plan doesn’t take into account the two gorgeous young men who appear fascinated |
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with her: suave Jack and scruffy Stellan. The boys insist they’re taking her to meet long-lost family and whirl Avery across the Atlantic to Paris (an unplanned trip about which she’s remarkably sanguine). There, she learns of a conspiracy almost as old as Western civilization. Political leaders, actors, sports heroes and businessmen have come from just 12 families for nearly 2,000 years. Avery’s place in all this has to with a prophecy called, surprise surprise, the mandate. Avery’s thrust into a cinematic, puzzle-solving action-adventure that takes her from Paris to Istanbul. Though she’s overwhelmed by “boy drama,” she knows her quest is “way more important.” Thrill as Avery’s outfitted in Prada and Louboutin! Gasp as she jumps from a fire escape into a gunfight! Swoon as sexy Europeans fight for her hand! This series opener won’t win any prizes, but it will appeal to those who want puzzles and action mixed with their fashion and romance. (Thriller. 12-14)
MONKEY AND DUCK QUACK UP!
Hamburg, Jennifer Illus. by Fotheringham, Edwin Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-64514-0 Will Duck speak a rhyme by contest time? One day Monkey sees a sign hanging on a nearby vine: “Rhyming contest, enter now! / Register with Lou the cow. / Find a friend and rhyme in twos. / (Winners win a three-day cruise!)” Monkey is sure that he and Duck can easily win since they’re young and hip. He throws out an open-ended string of random words and phrases: “Beat! Sheet! Meet! Greet! / Eat some wheat, / then wash your feet! / Have a seat! / Trick or treat! / Hear a finch go tweet, tweet—” to which Duck responds, “Quack.” No matter what he does, Monkey can’t get anything other than that classic duck sound out of his friend. Then he has a brainstorm that wins them the cruise and that preschoolers will love participating in. After settling in at sea, Monkey gloats, “The two of us, we have a knack. / Don’t you agree?” And Duck’s response? “Let’s get some ice cream.” This sophomore effort from TV writer Hamburg (A Moose That Says Moo, illustrated by Sue Truesdell, 2013) might not startle with originality, but it offers the opportunity for children to play with rhyme and expectations. Fotheringham’s digital illustrations show the main characters as scratchy-lined, bold cartoon animals, their silly antics highlighted on monochrome backgrounds of various colors. It may be a bit odd, but it is a solid choice for rhyming play. (Picture book. 3- 7)
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THE LAST TIME WE SAY GOODBYE
Hand, Cynthia HarperTeen (400 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-06-231847-3 978-0-06-231849-7 e-book After her younger brother’s suicide, ordinarily rational Alexis starts seeing her younger brother’s ghost. Seven weeks after Ty shot himself with a hunting rifle, Alexis’ mom announces she’s seen him in the house. Alexis, a math student with aspirations of attending MIT, is skeptical but soon sees visions of her own. Alexis watches Ty die in recurring dreams, reluctantly relives firsts and lasts in a journal suggested by her therapist, and tries to stay strong for her mom, who is drinking to cope and certain that her own life is over. Alexis herself hasn’t cried since her brother’s death. Instead, moments of intense emotion open what Alexis powerfully describes as a “hole in my chest.” The hauntings here are more emotional than paranormal, and Alexis’ journey primarily entails reconnecting with estranged friends and family and slowly moving on. The characters involved are many—a childhood friend–turned–occultist stoner, Alexis’ emotionally absent father and Ty’s last girlfriend, to name a few—but each storyline is distinctly important and carefully woven in. Details of Ty’s last days, Alexis’ sense of guilt and the incident itself are revealed slowly and are often unexpected but always believable. Evocative and insightful. (Fiction. 14-18)
BEASTKEEPER
Hellisen, Cat Henry Holt (208 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8050-9980-5 A girl untangles family curses that cause desertion and bitterness—and transformation into beasts. Thirteen-year-old Sarah’s life has always been unsettled; her parents move their three-person family often, always “sun-chasing” to avoid cold. One night Sarah’s mother tells her father that she’s leaving. The reasons that Sarah overhears are cryptic, and suddenly her mother’s gone. Sarah and Dad manage, barely (he forgets to shop for groceries, so it’s just peanut-butter sandwiches), and she’s distracted by an improbable teenage boy named Alan she meets in the nearby Not-a-Forest. But Dad’s changing. His wrists are hairier, his teeth lengthen, and he eats meat raw. Without explanation, he abruptly drops Sarah off at a damp, moldy castle with grandparents she never knew existed. Her grandfather’s a clawed, furred beast that seems to be an amalgam of bear, wolf and lion, and he’s caged. As Sarah confronts her family’s curses and the curses’ obscure terms, Hellisen’s narration is thoughtful and lyrical. Figurative prose is memorable yet never |
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“The guileless language of Hokenson’s third-person narrative perfectly captures both Leif ’s earnest simplicity and his wonderment at the wider world….” from leif’s journey
flashy: “The words fell out onto the table and flew away like dandelion seeds, never reaching him”; “a fiddlehead of apprehension unfurled in her chest.” Sarah’s hearing and smell sharpen; she races through forest and snow. “Beauty and the Beast” shimmers faintly underneath this story, but slant; the meanings here are multiple and surprisingly subtle. A wild, unique fairy tale. (Fantasy. 10-14)
throws herself into her training with the new vow of hunting down the renegade Konstantin to bring him to justice. Four years later, she’s an accomplished tracker, finding Kanin changeling children in the human world and bringing them home (but not before draining the trust funds that their wealthy adoptive parents give them—a keystone of the Kanin economy). During a routine assignment, she suddenly comes face to face with Konstantin, who also pursues her target. She gets the changeling to safety but is baffled by a strange sympathy she feels for Konstantin. Soon another tracker encounters him, establishing a mystery: Why is he after the changelings? The plot’s generally accessible to readers new to Hocking’s universe, though they may be frustrated by gaps in explanations of the world’s mechanics. Besides the Konstantin plot, Bryn also struggles against feelings for her handsome superior officer as well as with race and class issues, as she’s only half-Kanin and therefore looked down upon. The ending is painfully abrupt. Good for fans of romance and the genre. (Fantasy. 14 & up)
PROMPOSAL
Helms, Rhonda Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (224 pp.) $17.99 | $11.99 paper | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4814-2232-1 978-1-4814-2231-4 paper High schoolers try to outdo one another in elaborate, romantic ways to pitch invitations to the prom. Camilla swoons over Benjamin, who probably doesn’t know she’s alive. Meanwhile, her bestie, Joshua, has been secretly crushing on his other bestie, Ethan, since middle school, when they both realized they were gay. Camilla finds herself in trouble when Zach gets his TV-reporter mom to film his “promposal” to Camilla in the school hallway. Camilla can’t figure out how to say “no” on camera, so she thinks she’s stuck with him. Meanwhile, unaware of Joshua’s feelings, Ethan asks Joshua to help him concoct an elaborate invitation to Noah, the hot new guy in school. Despite the frothy subject matter, Helms keeps the narrative nicely straightforward and sometimes humorous as she puts her characters into increasingly awkward situations. She delves into common teen anxieties over social and romantic situations, even showing both sides of a girl who becomes a pariah when she turns down a promposal too harshly. The book alternates narration from both Camilla’s and Joshua’s points of view, treating the gay and straight romances equally. It all adds a little bit of depth to the standard who’s-going-to-date-whom plot. Chick lit to the max. (Fiction. 12-18)
LEIF’S JOURNEY
Hokenson, Terry Namelos (172 pp.) $18.95 | $9.95 paper | Jan. 16, 2015 978-1-60898-183-0 978-1-60898-184-7 paper Leif, just coming into manhood on the northern prairie of Minnesota in 1881, must either find a way to make peace with his often angry father or leave the farm forever, as his older siblings
have chosen to do. His competently managed wintertime journey by snowshoe to a distant town to obtain supplies and his chance encounter with Anna, a teen who has been forced to flee a demented uncle despite blizzard conditions, inspire Leif to take a closer look at his unsatisfactory relationship with his emotionally abusive father. As his friendship with Anna deepens into love, a visit from his older sister provides Leif with the first tools to resolve the problems with his father in this heartfelt coming-of-age tale. The guileless language of Hokenson’s third-person narrative perfectly captures both Leif ’s earnest simplicity and his wonderment at the wider world after the isolation of his rural upbringing. Historical details are spot-on. Leif ’s tender attachments to his mother and Anna are sensitively depicted. His frustration and despair over his father’s anger provide ample conflict, but sometimes the man’s behavior just doesn’t seem hateful enough to justify Leif ’s level of angst. Readers may see through his father’s attitude long before Leif does. Readers of the genre will savor this immersive and ultimately satisfying tale of coming of age on the American prairie. (Historical fiction. 11-16)
FROSTFIRE
Hocking, Amanda St. Martin’s Griffin (336 pp.) $9.99 paper | $7.12 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-250-04982-7 978-1-4668-5077-4 e-book Series: Kanin Chronicles, 1 A Trylle Trilogy spinoff features new beautiful trolls from a different tribe— the Kanin. Ambitious Bryn’s plan is to earn an appointment to the elite guard, the Högdragen, by serving as a tracker. She idolizes one of the Högdragen, the handsome and wildly talented Konstantin Black—until he attempts to murder the chancellor, her father. She and her father survive, and she |
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“This deftly plotted and richly developed third installment skillfully weaves together the plotlines from its predecessors, creating a carefully and engrossingly built world.” from the shadow cabinet
ENSNARED
change of seasons provided a more dynamic visual display. Here, the cool palette combined with the flat, graphic style does not have the same climatic effect—perhaps if done in silk screen rather than digitally, it would be more compelling. Still, there is much for the dog lover and coastal dweller to enjoy. Attractive and crisp. (Picture book. 3-5)
Howard, A.G. Amulet/Abrams (400 pp.) $17.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4197-1229-6 Series: Splintered, 3 Alyssa Gardner prepares to wage war on mad Queen Red, rescue her two loves and restore weirdness to Wonderland in this third and final book. With her mom trapped in a diseased Wonderland and her loves—human Jeb and netherling Morpheus—sucked into the prison-world AnyElsewhere with her enemy, Queen Red, Alyssa simultaneously tries to resolve her relationship woes and save the world. After restoring her father’s memories and meeting his gatekeeping brothers, Alyssa and her father dive into the mutant-filled, landscape-shifting AnyElsewhere. But rescue proves difficult as artistic, tattooed and pierced, abuse survivor Jeb proves addicted to his new powers of creation and reluctant to hurt or be hurt by Alyssa again. Erratically English and sinisterly seductive Morpheus further complicates matters with his continual striving to wed Alyssa and rule Wonderland. Alyssa suffers literal heartbreak over Jeb and Morpheus and goes power mad while fighting Red but does so in trademark sartorial splendor. Alyssa’s observation, “how convoluted the rules are. Nothing in Wonderland is simple,” also applies to the novel, which is rife with unnecessary and nonsensical plot twists, darker than its predecessors—more gory than Gorey—and filled with unsettling sadism and borderline erotica. A visually rich but tortuous conclusion meant for hardcore fans of the goth-chic series. (Fantasy. 14 & up)
FETCH
Hurley, Jorey Illus. by Hurley, Jorey Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4424-8969-1 978-1-4424-8970-7 e-book At the beach, a dog’s game of fetch becomes an exploration of the natural environment. A retriever splashes into the water in pursuit of a beloved red ball and in so doing offers readers a fantastical canine perspective of coastal life. As the determined dog swims, dives and plays, a school of rockfish flurries below, a harbor seal peers through kelp, and several dolphins cruise by. As she did in Nest (2014), Hurley limits herself to one word per spread, each one thoughtfully designed and executed. Vertically turned spreads reveal the water’s depth, and readers’ eyes must move—to the right as the dog journeys away and back left to the point of origin, as the dog returns to the owner, to home. While the story arc is clear, and the minimalistic approach in both text and illustration is pleasing, this lacks the pizzazz of the author’s debut work, where the 190
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WOVEN
Jensen, Michael; King, David Powers Scholastic (352 pp.) $18.99 | $18.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-68572-6 978-0-545-68573-3 e-book In a world where reality is created on looms and woven into complex tapestries, Nels’ life dangles from a single vulnerable thread. Nels longs to be a knight and can’t understand why his mother’s forbidden him to pursue his dream. Coaxed into disobeying her to attend the summer festival, he beats Avërand’s chief knight in a wrestling match but is publicly snubbed by Princess Tyra, who reneges on her promise to kiss the winner (after all, Nels is a mere peasant). Just hours later, Nels is murdered by a mysterious stranger and becomes a ghost, visible only to Tyra. She may be able to help him back to life, but first he must persuade her to do so and to accompany him on a dangerous quest before time runs out. Mentoring the heroes’ journey is Ickabosh, who practices Fabrication, as he is able to perceive and manipulate the threads from which reality is woven. They’re pursued by Rasmus, Bosh’s former apprentice, bent but powerful and wielding a terrifying gift. Jensen and King’s cosmology draws from weaving and tailoring, as do the tools fabricators manipulate—thread, thimbles, scissors—and what they create with them. While the plot follows a familiar high-fantasy arc that occasionally dips into melodrama, the worldbuilding is dynamic, original and intriguing (if a tad schematic), and the characters, appealing. A sure bet for high-fantasy fans. (Fantasy. 10-14)
THE SHADOW CABINET
Johnson, Maureen Putnam (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-399-25662-2 Series: Shades of London, 3
Transplanted Southerner Rory must once again save London, but this time her foes aren’t all completely dead. Upon a less-than-graceful exit from Wexford, her posh London boarding school, Rory is now on the run with the Shades, a clandestine band of police who attend to supernatural phenomena. Stephen, a member of the Shades (and her last kiss), hangs in a precarious kirkus.com
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RUNNING DRY The Global Water Crisis
state between life and death. With her amplified abilities to both see the dead and possess the power of a mystical stone, Rory could help Stephen. Unfortunately, Jane, a crazed occultist and Rory’s ex-therapist, wants to harness Rory’s powers and use them to perform the Rites of Demeter in hopes of defeating death and resurrecting two powerful magicians. Rory’s London is one where death is but tenuously separated from life, and she must use her abilities to save not only her own friends, but now the city at large. This deftly plotted and richly developed third installment skillfully weaves together the plotlines from its predecessors, creating a carefully and engrossingly built world. Moving away from what could have easily been a predictable, cookie-cutter ghost-busting template in every book, the series has gracefully evolved into a heady mix of ghost story, myth, conspiracies and history. Creepy, tense and wonderful: Don’t expect to put this down once it’s begun—but be sure to begin with The Name of the Star (2011). (Supernatural thriller. 13-18)
Kallen, Stuart A. Twenty-First Century/Lerner (64 pp.) $33.32 PLB | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-2646-7 PLB
In urgent tones, a call for action as climate change and continuing waste and pollution of available fresh water pose imminent threats to human health and agriculture. Drawing from recently published reports and news stories, Kallen paints an alarming picture. Aquifers are being sucked dry by large-scale agriculture, lake levels are falling, and water sources above- and belowground are being polluted. Though he points to a few significant counterefforts—the Clean Water Act (1972) in the United States and local initiatives elsewhere, such as “rainwater harvesting” ponds in India and Kenya—these come off as spotty responses that are often hobbled by political and corporate foot-dragging. He also points to shrinking glaciers and snow packs (plus, for added gloom, superstorms like Sandy) as harbingers of climate change that will lead to widespread future disaster. Aside from occasional incidents or examples and rare if telling photos, though, this jeremiad is largely composed of generalities and big numbers—not a formula for motivating young readers. Nor does the author offer budding eco-activists much in the way of either hope or ways to become part of the solution; for the latter, at least, Cathryn Berger Kaye’s Going Blue: A Teen’s Guide to Saving Our Oceans, Lakes, Rivers, & Wetlands (2010) is a better choice. Cogent of topic, but for readability, it’s aptly titled. (source notes, multimedia resource lists, index) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
MY FAMILY ADVENTURE
Jules, Jacqueline Illus. by Smith, Kim Picture Window Books (96 pp.) $4.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-4795-5790-5 Series: Sofia Martinez, 1
Everyday stories reminiscent of Ramona in an early chapter book. Sofia Martinez is a creative 7-yearold whose life revolves around her family. Sofia—who likes to stand out—is frustrated when she notices that she and both of her older sisters wore blue for last year’s school pictures. Swapping the photos into different frames, Sofia is further annoyed when no one notices. In the next chapter, Sofia feels ignored when family members obsess over her baby cousin, who wears a big hair bow. Though Sofia is out of sorts for a while, a conversation with her caring Papá (one of many—but not too many— Spanish words peppered throughout) helps her hatch a plan to draw the spotlight. Two more episodes also appear in a series of short, accessible chapters and are more interesting than the first. Colorful illustrations on at least every other page should draw reluctant readers, while Spanish words and phrases printed in pink are easily identifiable should readers want to use the glossary for definitions (though the meanings of the words are usually made clear through context). The book’s major drawback is that many of the characters look nearly identical; readers will have to look closely at hairstyles and height to distinguish Sofia from her sisters. In all, Sofia is a likable new protagonist to add to the lineup of chapter-book heroines. (Fiction. 6-9)
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THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND
Kamkwamba, William; Mealer, Bryan Dial (304 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 5, 2015 978-0-8037-4080-8
The author and his collaborator have condensed the original memoir of the same name, a story of an innovative and compassionate boy coming of age during an era of extreme hardship in Malawi. This newest incarnation of Kamkwamba’s tale is as absorbing as its predecessor and still delivers with equanimity facts both disturbing and inspiring. Kamkwamba describes his early life in Masitala, a tiny rural village where, typically, large families of subsistence farmers lived in huts without electricity or running water. Until December 2000, Kamkwamba’s life reads like an African parallel to the idyllic, early-20th-century scenes in Sterling North’s Rascal: soccer with balls made from plastic bags; juicy mangoes and crunchy grasshoppers; storytelling by |
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the light of a kerosene lamp; experiments with old radio parts; loyal friends and faithful pet. A perfect storm of deforestation, governmental changes, flooding and drought creates a sudden famine. The text does not spare readers the effects of starvation and grinding poverty on humans and animals. However, there are also many descriptions of how and why power-generating inventions work, and the passages about creating tools from almost nothing are reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Against astounding odds, Kamkwamba’s eventual creation of a windmill to bring lighting to his family’s home is nothing short of amazing. Compelling and informative for a broad readership and a good addition to STEM collections. (map, prologue, photographs, epilogue, acknowledgments) (Memoir. 11-16)
WHO IS MACKIE SPENCE?
Kaymer, Lin Merit Press (208 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-1-4405-8460-2
A romance blossoms between two teens while strange circumstances threaten to tear them apart. Mackie Spence nearly drowned over summer break. When her family’s boat capsized, Mackie spent three hours lost in the water and a week in a coma after that. And then she woke up. Now she’s back at school, and longtime friend Jeremy is drawn toward her more than ever, wondering how she survived and hoping she likes him as much as he likes her. As the two teens court, Kaymer displays a wonderful talent for developing relationships with realism and ease. This is a sweet, goodnatured romance not fueled by teen lust or high emotion but by genuine personal attraction. Adding to the realism is Jeremy and Mackie’s group of friends, a group that doesn’t fit into any standard stereotype. The author captures what it’s like to be a smart, emotionally stable, excitable teenager without resorting to tropes or archetypes. The book’s fantasy elements are less intriguing, with some odd worldbuilding in the back end that comes close to undercutting the courtship between Mackie and Jeremy. The fantasy and romance elements pinball against one another and never jell as well as they should, resulting in a mildly engaging fantasy/mystery grafted onto a charming love story. Half great, half so-so, but most readers will leave satisfied. (Romantic suspense. 12-16)
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HOW TO OUTSWIM A SHARK WITHOUT A SNORKEL
Keating, Jess Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (240 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4022-9758-8 Series: My Life Is a Zoo, 2
Which is worse: a shark or a 13-yearold bully? Ana Wright is more worried about working with her archnemesis, Ashley, than she is about handling the sharks at the new Marine Adventure Zone in her family’s zoo. Ashley has always been beautiful, popular and mean, and now Ana fears Ashley is going to seek revenge for a trick Ana played on her a few weeks ago. But it turns out that Ashley is pretty nice and even helps Ana out with some wardrobe issues. Can Ana ever shake off the feeling that Ashley’s mean side may be revealed at any moment? Add into the mix a pact over a first kiss plus her always-annoying twin brother, and it’s no surprise Ana starts to stress. Keating maintains the same humorous, lightly soul-searching tone, perfect for a barely teenage girl, with which she infused Ana’s first outing, How to Outrun a Crocodile When Your Shoes Are Untied (2014). Ana and her friends explore the widening doorway of adolescence in a way that’s both innocent and marked with fresh knowledge about desire and disaster in the realm of relationships. Occasionally, Ana’s inner monologue leans too heavily on material she’s previously explored, such as whether or not Kevin likes her, but the overall theme of living up to one’s own expectations makes for solid narrative bedrock. An enjoyable frolic with a great message that kids won’t even notice they’re absorbing. (Fiction. 9-13)
JACK & LOUISA Act 1
Keenan-Bolger, Andrew; Wetherhead, Kate Grosset & Dunlap (240 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-448-47839-5
When Jack Goodrich, a 12-year-old Broadway actor, moves from New York City to Shaker Heights, Ohio, he decides to reinvent himself—but his new neighbor and classmate, musical aficionado Louisa Benning, is determined to lure him into a local production. In New York, Jack went to the Professional Performing Arts School, where it was perfectly normal for a boy to take ballet without becoming “bully bait.” Not so at Shaker Heights Middle School, so Jack, whose changing voice has left him feeling insecure about his true passion, decides to try out for soccer. But Louisa, who dreams of being a Broadway actress, uses every trick in the book to get him to audition for the Shaker Heights Community Players’ production kirkus.com
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“While Jonah’s fighting skills sometimes defy belief, his wins are always satisfying, and readers may even have an urge to stand up and cheer.” from the incredible space raiders from space!
THE INCREDIBLE SPACE RAIDERS FROM SPACE!
of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Jack and Louisa take turns narrating the story in the first person, and the conflict between them has a manufactured quality. This is partially because neither has an offstage reality and also because the outcomes of Jack’s two “will he, won’t he” dilemmas seem inevitable. The joy in this book, which is full of theater lingo and other references, is the palpable pleasure the protagonists take in the art and craft of musical theater and its subtle but boffo ending. Theater fans will eat this up, but it’s unlikely to find a wider audience. (Fiction. 10-14)
King, Wesley Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4814-2319-9 978-1-4814-2321-2 e-book Jonah Hillcrest is not exactly a Marty Stu. In Internet fan fiction, a “Mary Sue” (Marty Stu when it’s a guy) is a character who’s impossibly kind, skillful and heroic, and is instantly beloved by everyone in the story. Jonah is not beloved. He’s kidnapped against his will to join the Space Raiders and, within a few chapters, accused of being a spy and a thief. The other kids avoid him. But by the end of the book, he’s won so many impossible victories he’s being called “the best Space Raider in history.” While Jonah’s fighting skills sometimes defy belief, his wins are always satisfying, and readers may even have an urge to stand up and cheer. Here’s another term from the Internet: “infodump.” That’s a gigantic block of plot exposition. The climax of the book is one enormous infodump in the form of a lengthy tribunal. But the testimony has so many genuine surprises that it becomes sort of thrilling. And despite its flaws, the novel is full of exciting chases and clever battle strategies. If readers wanted to describe this book in Internet terms, they would be emoticons: wide-eyed surprise, tears at a few late revelations and many smiley faces at the end. (Science fiction. 8-12)
HAS ANYONE SEEN JESSICA JENKINS? Kessler, Liz Candlewick (288 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7060-3
Superhuman powers. The best thing ever—or a total nightmare? Jessica Jenkins and her best friend, Izzy, work to investigate her newfound ability to become invisible, which first occurs spontaneously in geography class. Why does she have this power? How does it work? Who else has these powers? Luckily, invisibility helps the sleuthing process, as Jessica sneaks into a laboratory while Izzy distracts its genius doctor. Discovering ties to her mom’s best friend, Nancy, and a beautiful necklace Nancy gave her on her 13th birthday, Jessica begins to unravel the mystery. Kessler (A Year Without Autumn, 2011, etc.) often explores themes of friendship, and this book is no exception. The mystery that the girls must solve provides the frame for stretching their minds about relationships as well. Could popular girl Heather also have superpowers? What about their brilliant friend Tom? The lighthearted tone of the book allows readers to suspend disbelief about the pseudo-science behind all of this, but questions of medical ethics and commercial corruption remain key to the story. Readers not yet ready for teen thrillers should warm to this unlikely band of new friends who solve this easy-toread “scientific” mystery with no adult intervention. (Fantasy. 9-12)
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FREDDIE & GINGERSNAP FIND A CLOUD TO KEEP
Kirsch, Vincent X. Illus. by Kirsch, Vincent X. Disney-Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4231-5976-6 Series: Freddie & Gingersnap
Two friends off on an adventure have an unexpected encounter that leads to new discoveries and a sense of satisfaction. Readers familiar with their eponymous first outing (2014) will remember that Freddie, a skinny green dinosaur with sharp teeth, and Gingersnap, a pink and purple dragon with a bow on her single, straggly hair, overcame their differences to become friends. Newcomers, however, may have a bit more trouble initially figuring out just what kinds of animals they are and why they are tangled together, flying through the sky (courtesy of Gingersnap’s wings) in search of clouds. Straightforward sentences capture their mildly contentious debate about whether anyone can own a cloud. Then suddenly they come upon a hot air balloon with two singing children inside. Mistaking the balloon for a cloud, both are captivated by how friendly and engaging this particular “cloud” is—even more so when the young |
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“The distinctive voices of a cynic, a true believer, a hopeful optimist, a terrified tag-along and others create depth, while break-ins, theft, vandalism and an explosive car chase keep the pages turning.” from masterminds
pilot apparently conjures up a magical thunderstorm. Black outlines and intense colors show up well against the mostly blue backgrounds, while the textures of paper and paint add visual interest. Like its predecessor, this also features a double gatefold midway through; however, this one does little to enhance the slight plot or heighten the atmosphere. Though the story is simply told, the overall effect is somewhat cryptic, making it a challenge to connect with these characters and their quest. (song lyrics, score [not seen]) (Picture book. 4- 6)
Sensitive Otto decides to run away rather than endure their teasing and soon finds himself so lonely he composes his own poem inspired by the moonlight. When he recites his poem aloud, Otto discovers a group of field mice who have been listening and now clamor for more. Emboldened by a willing audience, Otto begins to recite Joyce Kilmer and Emily Dickinson, coming to the realization that “[p]oetry should be shared with everyone.” Such affirmation does Otto a world of good as other owls begin to find his proclivity for reciting T.S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti and the like to be infectious. Kousky’s mixed-media, digitally rendered spreads warmly depict an animated Otto and friends against the inky backdrop of the forest’s night sky. They visually encourage young readers to explore poetry as a way into relationships as opposed to isolation in a solitary creative world. Though quite Frederick-like in its poetic lure, Kousky’s individualistic paean to the communal power of art is not without its own charms. Simple and clearly told, with a wonderfully engaging protagonist. (Picture book/poetry. 6-9)
MASTERMINDS
Korman, Gordon Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-229996-3 978-0-06-230001-0 e-book With no unemployment, no homelessness and no crime, Serenity, New Mexico, is the perfect town. Or is it? When 13-year-old Eli Frieden attempts to bike past the town limits for the first time, he is struck with paralyzing nausea and pain that makes him wonder if Serenity is less of a paradise and more of a prison. When Malik Bruder, his classmate, discovers that the major employer, a traffic-cone factory, is just a front for something more sinister, the two boys, along with friends Hector Amani and Tori Pritel, decide to investigate. They find that Serenity, which holds honesty and integrity above all else, is built on a lie. The truth is so shocking that it puts into question everything they know, even their identities. The mystery is unraveled through several alternating first-person narratives. The distinctive voices of a cynic, a true believer, a hopeful optimist, a terrified tag-along and others create depth, while break-ins, theft, vandalism and an explosive car chase keep the pages turning. A cliffhanger ending points to at least one sequel. A fresh premise, good pacing, surprising twists and engaging characters all combine to make this a series worth following. (Adventure. 8-12)
JUST ITZY
Krumwiede, Lana Illus. by Pizzoli, Greg Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-5811-3
This book that combines nursery rhymes and folk songs about spiders with a first-day-of-school story about not giving up offers a little something for everyone. Itzy Bitzy is not fond of his nickname. In fact, he is looking forward to his first day of spindergarten just so he can reinvent himself. But his big brother, Gutzy, isn’t helping. “Only spiderlings bring lunch boxes.” Determined to not be Itzy Bitzy anymore, Itzy purposefully “forgets” his lunch and his raincoat. But his lunch-catching web-spinning does not go well. A girl on a tuffet scares away the first fly he spies, an old woman swallows the second (along with Itzy!), and Itzy’s interrupted while making his third web by a cry for help from the waterspout. Proving his web-making prowess in more than one way, Itzy saves the day and has lunch to boot, and in the end, he doesn’t feel “one bit bitsy.” Pizzoli’s spiders manage to convey emotion through body posture, dot eyes and line mouths. The pencil, India ink, Plaka paint and Photoshop illustrations feature cartoon details against pastel, retro-type backgrounds. While appealing, they don’t quite match the tone of the text, and it can take some close looking to make out some of the details. Readers familiar with the allusions likely won’t care, though, as it’s so much fun to see old favorites in new tales. Spidery good fun with a can-do message. (Picture book. 4- 7)
OTTO THE OWL WHO LOVED POETRY
Kousky, Vern Illus. by Kousky, Vern Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-399-16440-8 A poetically inclined owl learns to accept his calling. In Kousky’s picture-book debut, Otto the oddball doesn’t roost or hunt like other owls, quietly preferring to read, befriend mice and recite poetry. When other owls in Otto’s neck of the woods discover his eccentricities, they mock him. 194
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THERE WILL BE LIES
is presented in dozens of image-based color maps and charts. There’s a picture of a cloth diaper next to the single 18-liter water bottle that represents its manufacturing footprint and a disposable paired to 31 similar bottles; another image presents 15 filled bathtubs to show how much water a meat-based diet consumes each day. Though quoting an estimate that household use accounts for only 14 percent of humanity’s water footprint, he closes with a chapter of general water-saving tips that will at least make readers feel better as they face the apparently inevitable dry times ahead. A heavy flood of information better suited as a resource for study and reports than an immersive consciousnessraiser. (index, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 14-18)
Lake, Nick Bloomsbury (464 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61963-440-4
Over a period of eight days, 17-yearold Shelby’s life is forever changed. Home-schooled in Scottsdale, Arizona, the two things Shelby’s sure of are that her father is dead and that the world is a dangerous place. Her friend, Mark, tells her that “[t]hings are...starting to happen” right before she’s struck by a car, fracturing her foot. As she passes out, a coyote seems to give her a cryptic message about lies and a hard truth. From then on, Shelby’s life quickly unravels. Her onceshy mother’s behavior becomes erratic as she drives Shelby to Flagstaff and tells her that her father, not dead after all, may be chasing them. When Shelby closes her eyes, she finds herself in the Dreaming, where Mark is the trickster Coyote and where her recurring dream of a crying child in need of rescue takes on urgency. Counting down the days toward a life-altering revelation, Shelby steps in and out of the Dreaming, its fairy-tale castles, crones and changelings blended with the sacred Eagle and Coyote of Navajo legend. Discerning readers might pick up carefully planted indications that Shelby is deaf early on. The suspenseful, complicated story slowly spins out clues to Shelby’s life that have been hidden from her for years. A fine exploration of the power of story itself to heal the unconscious from scars physical and emotional. (Fiction. 13-17)
MACANUDO #2
Liniers Illus. by Liniers Translated by Lethem, Mara Faye Enchanted Lion Books (104 pp.) $19.95 | Dec. 27, 2014 978-1-59270-169-8 A second collection of daily comic strips from Argentine cartoonist and children’s-book creator Liniers (What There Is Before There Is Anything There, 2014, etc.). First run in La Nación in 2003 and 2004, the delicately colored strips vary wildly in tone and content but are unified by an appealingly daffy sensibility. The cartoonist has a rotating stable of characters he seems to trot out whenever the mood strikes. Book-loving Henrietta delights in the company of her cat, Fellini, and her teddy bear, Mandelbaum, and enjoys sweetly innocent “adventures.” In one strip, she hangs from a tree branch, explaining to a curious Fellini that “I want to know how I’m going to see the world when I’m a grown-up....” Other recurring characters include Z-25, the sensitive robot (unsurprisingly, he is quite lonely), the top-hatted, carrot-nosed “mysterious man in black,” a squadron of gnomes with tall, striped or polka-dot hats, a flock of penguins, “the bovine movie buff,” and most poignantly, Oliverio the olive, whose punch lines almost always include the tragic realization that he is a foodstuff. Many cartoons celebrate the surreal, others provoke existential musings, and still others are wry acknowledgments of the challenges inherent in producing a daily comic strip (“I recently got an idea for a joke,” confides a man whose hat has grown and shrunk over eight minipanels, “but it got away from me”). Fresh, thought-provoking, consistently amusing; readers will start to browse, then find they’ve finished it. (Comic strips. 12 & up)
YOUR WATER FOOTPRINT The Shocking Facts About How Much Water We Use to Make Everyday Products Leahy, Stephen Firefly (160 pp.) $35.00 | $19.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-77085-499-4 978-1-77095-295-2 paper
Leahy drops a tsunami of sobering facts and infographics on the heads of readers who take what comes out of their faucets for granted. Focusing not on fresh water use in general but on its “footprint”—meaning water that agricultural and manufacturing processes leave polluted or otherwise locally unusable—the author sprays his urgently toned narrative with alarming observations and eye-opening comparisons. These are all pumped from cited official reports and studies, and they range from (extensive) lists of contaminants found in the drinking water of various municipalities to evidence that biofuel production is not a sustainable process and an ominous claim that the water in the Midwest’s Ogallala Aquifer is being drained 14 times faster that it is being replaced. The wellspring of his argument |
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THE HOUSE THAT’S YOUR HOME
birds and leaves that fill the pages as Sparrow goes from tree to tree looking for a way to survive the winter. The leaves of each tree are bright and recognizable in their autumn dress. A foreword by storyteller Robert Lewis, of Cherokee, Navajo and Apache lineage, and an author’s note add background. A pleasing pourquoi tale. (Picture book/folktale. 5-8)
Lloyd-Jones, Sally Illus. by Dyer, Jane Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-375-85884-0
Lloyd-Jones and Dyer introduce children to the concept of “self ” in relation to “place.” A little redheaded girl is gradually made aware of the expanding boundaries of her world, from the familiar and immediate environment of her house to the schoolyard and beyond, culminating with the world: “On the ground where you stand / In a place of Your Own / In the world / That’s Your Home.” Throughout this catalog of the mundane, the language ranges from lyrical (“And the sun rising up / Is the light of Your Eyes”) to pedestrian, even monotonous (“A cat is Your Cat / And a dog is Your Dog / And they are Your Pets”). Whenever something or someone associated with the child is named, the word “your” and the subsequent noun are capitalized: “Your Tree,” “Your Life” and “Your Grandpa.” This emphasis on the possessive pronoun is mystifying and feels overdone, unless the intent is to reassure an insecure child—which this chubby-cheeked preschooler does not appear to be. Dyer’s soft gouache and pencil illustrations are extensions of the soothing tone set by the author and are poetic in their own right, depicting an idealized Caucasian family in an appealing Craftsman-style rural home. They cannot, however, compensate for the needlessly drawnout text, which is almost too long for the intended age group. Visually beautiful but conceptually off the mark. (Picture book. 3-5)
PINE AND THE WINTER SPARROW
Lumbard, Alexis York Illus. by Vidal, Beatriz Wisdom Tales (28 pp.) $15.95 | Feb. 2, 2015 978-1-937786-33-5
The evergreen-ness of the pine tree is explained in a tale that’s possibly Cherokee but definitely Native American. Sparrow has an injured wing but nevertheless thanks the Creator each day with his song. He cannot fly south with his family, though, as winter approaches. He seeks shelter first with Oak, then Maple, Elm and Aspen, but each tree rejects him, quite rudely. Pine, however, welcomes Sparrow, with an apology for his sticky branches and needlelike foliage, and tucks the little bird into a high, sheltered branch. When his family returns in the spring, Sparrow’s wing has healed. The Creator calls a council, admonishing the trees that had so much but would not share, proclaiming that only Pine will be green all year: “Pine, your gift to Sparrow was a gift to Me.” The language is simple, with an unornamented oral quality. Vidal has made effective patterns of 196
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IT’S SO GOOD! 100 Real Food Recipes for Kids!
Martell, Nevin—Ed. Illus. by Galera, Rebecca Auzou Publishing (122 pp.) $19.95 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-2-7338-2986-8
The design of this cookbook cleverly supports young chefs in their mess-making—er, cooking. With glossy pages that will withstand a wet-washcloth cleanup and a cover that unfolds into a stand, this easy-to-use spiral-bound cookbook is made for kids and includes both U.S. and metric measures. But the recipes and directions are not as well-designed. The safety note is just one sentence at the very beginning, easily missed. Seven sections follow, focusing on breakfasts; appetizers, soups and salads; main courses; beverages; snacks; desserts and baking; and projects to add ambience. Even picky eaters are sure to find something, although there are some ingredients that children will likely turn their noses up at, whether from taste or unfamiliarity: Gruyere cheese, dandelion leaves, bulgur wheat. Other ingredients may be hard to find—vanilla pods, orange-flower extract, orangeblossom water. And some of the ingredient lists are not specific enough—“1 bag of carrots,” “4 zucchinis,” frozen fish (the directions never say to thaw). But the biggest problem lies with the directions. Cooking terms are not defined—cream, sift, knead, score—and the pictures of the finished products frequently do not match the written instructions. Some of the steps could use pictures of their own, especially for those kids who don’t yet know their ways around a kitchen. Small spot cartoons of people and anthropomorphized animals dot the directions, but they seem more for amusement than to actually help young chefs succeed. The title doesn’t fit the book. (Cookbook. 9-14)
PEEP AND DUCKY RAINY DAY
Martin, David Illus. by Walker, David Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-7636-6884-6 Series: Peep and Ducky
Rainy days are oh, so dreary, but not for Peep and Ducky. They turn a rainy day into the perfect time to play! The two feathered friends build a fort, have a pillow fight and then go outside to splish and splash. “Peep gets his boots, / and Ducky kirkus.com
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“Even though this London is a grim place, the upbeat, can-do attitudes of the protagonists relieve the potentially depressing effects of the dystopia.” from rat runners
VILLAIN KEEPER
does, too. / Peep’s are red, / and Ducky’s are blue.” The bouncy cadence rolls along, keeping equal pace with the two avian youngsters as they flit from one activity to another. Martin tones down the cutesy words from Peep and Ducky’s eponymous first outing (2013), instead choosing strong, simple rhymes. Luckily for readers, the “lucky, lucky, lucky” refrain remains, echoing throughout and providing opportunities for little ones’ participation. This play date wouldn’t ring true without a small argument, so one is appropriately included—a power struggle over who gets to be captain of the umbrella boat. Thick, blackinked outlines can barely contain these two birds’ energy, and splotches of rain won’t derail their fun. Totally in tune with toddlers, this snappy read-aloud gets it right. (Picture book. 2-5)
McKay, Laurie Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-06-230843-6 978-0-06-230845-0 e-book Series: Last Dragon Charmer, 1 Determined to gain both his father’s approval and the title of Elite Paladin, 12-year-old Prince Caden embarks on a quest to slay a dragon—and ends up in a different and very strange universe. Alas, a mysterious spell thwarts his plans almost instantaneously, sending him, his horse and Brynne, a former playmate and budding dark (but not evil) sorceress, to Asheville, North Carolina. The young prince quickly discovers that middle school can be as dangerous as any quest, particularly when the math teacher is an evil tyrant, the lunch ladies are witches, and the placement counselor is a dragon. Caden and Brynne land in foster care, where they make like-minded friends who will, they hope, help them defeat the resident evil and return home. While primarily a lighthearted coming-of-age fantasy, the book offers surprising moments of depth focusing on familial relationships or the lack thereof. Unfortunately, while the plot is entertaining, there are missteps. The characters frequently seem to know more than they should, and the narrative is weighted down by unnecessary back story. Finally, the mystery is revealed too early, robbing the narrative of energy. While perhaps not enough to sink this new series entirely, the cumulative effect does diminish its power. A promising new series gets off to a shaky start; here’s hoping subsequent volumes smooth out the ride. (Fantasy. 8-12)
RAT RUNNERS
McGann, Oisín Open Road Integrated Media (400 pp.) $16.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4976-6580-4 978-1-4976-6572-9 e-book Nimmo, Manikin, Manikin’s younger brother, FX, and Scope, all rat runners who live outside the constraints of their controlling government, inhabit an edgy, believably depicted dystopian version of London. Nimmo generally fights his battles alone, staying hidden in plain sight and eluding the piercing interest of the robotic SafeGuards that cruise the city to enforce its laws. Manikin and FX work their scams together, combining FX’s tech-savvy skills with Manikin’s quick wits. Scope’s area of expertise is forensics, but she spends nearly all her time within the underground domain of crime boss Move-Easy. After Nimmo’s neighbor is murdered, Move-Easy enlists the aid of the teens to find a valuable box, but it becomes clear that more is missing than that, and the trove is of great value to any number of thugs. The kids, never fully certain of one another’s loyalties, nonetheless form an effective team in this high-velocity effort. McGann too often tells rather than trusting his narrative to show, but the peril is so pervasive and persistent, and the teens’ responses so clever, that few will object. Even though this London is a grim place, the upbeat, can-do attitudes of the protagonists relieve the potentially depressing effects of the dystopia. Who cares if the teens’ escapades and escapes seem a little too convenient to be fully plausible; it’s all about suspense and action. (Dystopian thriller. 11-18)
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RESCUE ON THE OREGON TRAIL
Messner, Kate Scholastic (144 pp.) $17.99 | $5.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-545-63915-6 978-0-545-63914-9 paper 978-0-545-63916-3 e-book Series: Ranger in Time, 1 This series’ first entry introduces a courageous time-traveling golden retriever on the Oregon Trail. While digging for a bone in his backyard, Ranger discovers a first-aid kit. Mysteriously imbued with time-travel properties, the kit sends Ranger back in time to Independence, Missouri— a starting point for the Oregon Trail—where Sam Abbott is searching for his little sister. Though he loves chasing squirrels too much to pass his search-and-rescue training, Ranger, who can understand human speech, doesn’t pay distractions any mind as he follows his training to find little Amelia. His heroics |
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earn him a place with the Abbott family on their journey, and he proves himself both remarkable and useful through many crises (like a buffalo stampede, sickness and river rapids). Though Ranger grows to love the Abbotts, he’s constantly on the lookout and longing for Luke, his boy in the future. In the end, the kit takes Ranger back home, though its nature remains an enigma. The third-person narration expertly balances Ranger’s thoughts between the appropriately doglike (squirrels! bacon!) and the heroic (Ranger’s drive to find and protect). This well-paced story will keep the attention of even reluctant readers with its commitment to accurately chronicling the excitement and danger of the Oregon Trail. Whom will Ranger save next? (Adventure. 5-9)
ALL THE ANSWERS
Messner, Kate Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $16.99 | $11.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-61963-374-2 978-1-61963-375-9 e-book When 12-year-old Ava Anderson finds a magic pencil in the kitchen junk drawer, geometry becomes a lot easier—and her life becomes much more complicated. Ava lives with her family in upstate New York, along with two goats purchased by her father in hopes that fresh goats’ milk will help Anderson’s General Store survive the new ShopMart superstore. Ava is afraid of the goats. She’s also afraid of math tests, band audition, field trips and participating in the lunchtime library book club at school. So when her pencil says, “Two Pi R,” when she desperately writes, “What is the formula to find the circumference of a circle?” on her math test, she sees her road to certainty. But it won’t answer just any question—like whether her parents may get divorced—as people have free will, and some answers are just plain terrifying, like whether her grandmother is going to die. Messner plunges Ava into recognizable preteen situations both at school and at home. She stuffs her book with issues, though, and both the nature of and the explanation for the pencil’s magic are fatally contrived. Nevertheless, readers will cheer as Ava heroically tackles a terrifying ropes course alone so that her mother will get a medical test only Ava knows she needs. This sympathetic protagonist offers children a mostly successful look at clinical anxiety. (Fantasy. 8-12)
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SOULPRINT
Miranda, Megan Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2015 978-0-8027-3774-8 One of life’s great ethical questions is considered in this novel, with mixed results. Alina Chase has spent her whole life being blamed for something that happened before she was born. In a time when souls can be tracked from one life to the next, Alina’s soul was previously June Calahan, who broke into the soul-registry database and allegedly blackmailed powerful figures with criminal pasts. June’s crime was so heinous that Alina has grown up in confinement in an island prison. When she is rescued by oddly friendly former guard Dominic and Cameron and Casey, a pair of siblings with their own agenda, Alina is hopeful that she might finally escape June’s shadow. But it’s not so simple when it’s revealed that Dominic has his own connection with June, and he wants Alina to hack back into the soul database. That sends Alina on the run with Cameron and Casey. A romance with Cameron will give Alina the strength to find out the truth about June—and hopefully finally break free. The story’s success rests on readers’ ability to accept the fear that June still inspires, which many may find extreme. The villains are from the mustachetwirling school, but Alina, Casey and Cameron are well-drawn. A perfectly competent thriller for those who can suspend disbelief. (Thriller. 14-18)
SOMETHING ABOUT A BEAR
Morris, Jackie Illus. by Morris, Jackie Frances Lincoln (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-84780-516-4
With huge, richly detailed pictures (who knew watercolors could make so many different kinds of brown?) and a lucid and near-poetic text, Morris describes the lives and habitats of eight kinds of bear. Baby pandas are “soft and small as peaches” when they are born. Spectacled bear mothers nurse their cubs in the cloud forest canopy. Polar bears are not white! (Their fur is hollow, and their skin is black.) She packs an amazing amount of information about bears into the text, and that is supplemented by notes on each animal and a handful of websites listed in the backmatter. Even the names of the bears make for evocative reading within the lyrical prose: brown bear, giant panda, sloth bear, spectacled bear, moon bear, polar bear, sun bear, American black bear (and yes, the American black bear comes in many colors, including white). Water, architecture, other plant and animal life, and various indicators of habitat are painted with energy and intensity. Even as she dazzles with the splendid, upclose images and information, Morris does not lose sight of the most important bear of all. Every child will recognize that one. kirkus.com
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It is lovely to see natural history and a sense of ecoawareness combined with many children’s most beloved plaything. (Informational picture book. 4-9)
it, whom Nic names Caela. The two escape the cave only to be recaptured and sent to Rome as players in the city’s brutal blood sports. With the bulla’s help, they survive the games— barely. Caela’s wounded, and Nic flees into the sewers, where he must beg for help from the girl he’s angered. There’s more to Nic than meets the eye—effervescent, hot-tempered, irreverent and funny, he’s a bracing antidote to jaded teen heroes commenting ironically from the sidelines. Getting out of, then right back into, tight situations without losing sight of his goal— reuniting with his enslaved sister—Nic seizes each day with gusto, knowing his future will be short unless he can evade the power brokers—senators, Praetors, general, emperor—determined to make him their pawn. The fast-paced, ingenious plot, charismatic hero and highly diverse cast of characters—including the ancient, eternal city itself—make this series opener a captivating joy ride. (Historical fantasy. 10-14)
INHERIT MIDNIGHT
Myers, Kate Kae Bloomsbury (400 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-61963-219-6
After she’s caught escaping her harsh boarding school, Avery reluctantly enters the competition devised by her imperious grandmother to determine who among the mostly despicable VanDemere clan will inherit the family business and fortune. Each timed challenge (the competition’s more reality TV than The Westing Game) is crafted around character traits Mrs. VanDemere admires: intellect, fortitude, resourcefulness, unity, commitment, courage and integrity (but not mercy, compassion or forgiveness, Avery notices). Travel and genealogical research (ancestors include a Scottish lord, two Pilgrims, and veterans of the Revolutionary and Civil wars) are required. Unless expressly prohibited in the rules, unethical behavior is allowed. To secure Avery’s participation, the family lawyer, whose gorgeous son Avery selects as her helper, reveals that contrary to what she’s been told, her Croatian mother’s alive; with each stage Avery completes, he’ll release one of her mother’s letters. Abandoned by her father, bullied by cousins and uncles, Avery now discovers her grandmother’s cruelty to her mother. Though the novel is entertaining, with two incompatible storylines, it never quite coheres. The high-concept plot is the more successful—watching the avaricious, sneaky, squabbling VanDemere clan compete and cheat is a hoot—but juxtaposed against Avery’s efforts to reconstruct the somber past and reconnect with her mother, it seems trivial and Avery’s willing participation, questionable. Recommended for reality TV fans and genealogy buffs. (Thriller. 12-15)
BOOK OF THE DEAD
Northrop, Michael Scholastic (208 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-72338-1 978-0-545-72345-9 e-book Series: TombQuest, 1 Scholastic launches its latest multiplatform series, this one steeped in ancient Egyptian magic. Twelve-year-old Alex Sennefer is blessed with a mother who would risk everything for him, a best friend, Ren (short for Renata), who accepts him just as he is, and an insatiable hunger for anything having to do with ancient Egypt. It’s a good thing that his second home is the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his Egyptologist mother is preparing to open a groundbreaking new exhibition. If only his body would hang on long enough for him to see it. A lifetime of illness catches up with him, and he is pronounced dead by his doctors—but then Alex is suddenly pulled from the brink and awakens to discover he is not only alive, but also healthier than ever. Unfortunately, Alex isn’t the only one being given a second chance at life. Almost immediately, he and Ren find themselves in a battle of ancient Egyptian proportions and embroiled in a quest to find his mysteriously missing mother and save the world. Like a preteen Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, Alex and Ren make a compelling duo, and Northrop balances pathos and action effectively to engage readers. Funny and smart, Alex and Ren are excellent companions for this fast-paced and scorpion-filled ride. (Adventure. 8-12)
MARK OF THE THIEF
Nielsen, Jennifer A. Scholastic (352 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-56154-9 978-0-545-56203-4 e-book Series: Mark of the Thief, 1 Compelled by an ambitious general to retrieve an amulet from Julius Caesar’s treasure, long hidden in a mine outside Rome, Nic—a slave with attitude—more than succeeds, upending his life and escalating conflict among the power brokers of imperial Rome. Caesar’s bulla (a good-luck amulet given to boys in wealthy families), a gift from his ancestress the goddess Venus, is especially powerful. So is the terrifying but beautiful griffin guarding |
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“A remarkably effective combination of history and natural history of a mysterious ecosystem.” from sand swimmers
MONTY’S MAGNIFICENT MANE
interplanetary pet market. Should he even try to rescue them? (To his credit, Sawyer doesn’t hesitate to do the right thing.) Ultimately, and with real help from a pair of allies that includes an odd new classmate who’s not entirely human either, he stages a dramatic rescue, unmasks (literally) the kidnapper and comes to terms with his differences. Though practically mirroring Bob Balaban’s Boy or Beast (illustrated by Andy Rash, 2012) in premise and even parts of the plot, it’s nevertheless good fun. An entertaining barrel ride past sheaves of middlegrade themes from bullying to racial identity. (Science fiction. 10-12)
O’Neill, Gemma Illus. by O’Neill, Gemma Templar/Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7593-6
A lion named Monty is so proud of his mane that he nearly causes disaster for himself and his little meerkat friends. A charming double-page spread shows Monty relaxing on his back and happily fiddling with a lock of his autumn-hued tresses with one padded paw. The large-print text reads, “Meet Monty, King of the Jungle. Monty loves his long, curly, beautiful mane. No one else has a mane quite like his. Monty thinks it’s magnificent.” The next few pages show Monty allowing about a dozen tiny meerkats to play in and around his mane, until the mane becomes “dirty and matted!” In an especially amusing sequence, the meerkats try to make amends by braiding Monty’s mane and decorating it with feathers, to no avail. As he stalks off to the watering hole, one little meerkat says timidly, “Remember to be careful of the....” Of what? Of the “little creature” in the water who expresses admiration for Monty’s mane and invites the lion to “come a little closer”? The suspense builds to a “SNAP!” that readers will anticipate, as the concealed crocodile opens its scary but comical pointy-toothed jaw. Little ones will enjoy the animated scenes, the threatening but ineffectual crocodile, and a vertical two-page spread that deliciously illustrates the lion’s mighty, capitalized “ROARS!” The colorful illustrations are enhanced by tiny scraps of newsprint and maps. The tried-and-true fable about curbing vanity and appreciating friends enjoys a fresh touch with these ebullient African animals. (Picture book. 2-5)
SAND SWIMMERS The Secret Life of Australia’s Desert Wilderness Oliver, Narelle Illus. by Oliver, Narelle Candlewick (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-7636-6761-0
The remote and forbidding central Australian desert called the “Dead Heart” appears lifeless, but it harbors curious creatures whose tracks appear in the early morning and evidence of an ancient, wetter world. After introducing fossil evidence and the broad knowledge of the original desert dwellers, the author/illustrator organizes her description of this secret world by following the path of an early expedition. In 1844, Charles Sturt hoped to find an inland sea; instead, he saw only a hostile wasteland. Linocut rubbings, inset maps and lines from Sturt’s journal run along the bottom of each spread; linocut prints in black and brick red show what he missed. Some illustrations are cutaways, showing animals underground, with boxed, smaller images for identification; others are day or nighttime scenes, some with a key that helps readers see the camouflaged animals. In roughly alternating paragraphs, Oliver contrasts the experience of the 1844 expedition with what can be discovered by a determined naturalist. From mulga scrub and spinifex grasses to lizards, insects and rodentlike marsupials, the plants and animals are surprising. The author also provides Aboriginal names (in three languages) for some creatures, and near the end, a spread shows a silent expedition watcher, a successful hunter who could read the mysterious tracks that the Europeans could not. A remarkably effective combination of history and natural history of a mysterious ecosystem. (bibliography, index of animals, author’s note) (Informational picture book. 7-10)
DINOSAUR BOY
Oakes, Cory Putman Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (224 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-4926-0537-9 Series: Dinosaur Boy, 1 Just getting to his seat in fifth grade becomes an ordeal for Sawyer after he develops the tail and back plates of a stegosaurus over the summer. Not that it’s a surprise, since his family is descended from one of a number of victims of a lab accident years ago that mixed human with dinosaur DNA. But even with tennis balls covering the spikes so he doesn’t inadvertently impale anyone, accidents keep happening. Not to mention relentless bullying. In a series debut with more twists than a strand of DNA, Oakes not only presents her frustrated dino-lad with a physical challenge, but a moral one too: Though it seems that the new principal is ruthlessly culling Sawyer’s multiple bullies to enforce a zero-tolerance policy, in fact she’s collecting them to sell on the 200
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THE THIRD TWIN • The Secret Life of Australia’s Desert Wilderness
Preschoolers will enjoy this very festive celebration. (Picture book. 2-5)
Omololu, C.J. Delacorte | (336 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-385-74452-2 978-0-385-39024-8 e-book 978-0-375-99171-4 PLB
ONE PLASTIC BAG Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia
Paul, Miranda Illus. by Zunon, Elizabeth Millbrook/Lerner (32 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-4677-1608-6
Could an identical twin be a killer without her sister knowing it? It all began as a joke when Lexi and Ava were little: The identical sisters would imagine they had a “third twin” named Alicia. Now in their senior year of high school, the girls have reincarnated Alicia, using this persona to dress up and date boys they normally wouldn’t. They’ve even gone to the trouble of creating a fake ID and social media site to build a back story for this fictitious sister. The fun ends when Lexi, out as Alicia, is the last known person to have seen Casey, her date and would-be rapist, alive. Told from Lexi’s point of view, the mystery continues as more of “Alicia’s” dates turn up murdered. When the evidence and unusual coincidences all point to Ava, Lexi feels like the person she’s always known best is suddenly a stranger. And because they share DNA, Lexi also becomes a person of interest. As she races to find the real killer, she must also contend with moving on from high school to college, finding her own identity and trying to save the boy she really loves from meeting a deadly fate. Although the resolution may be more out of Hollywood than reality, the dramatic suspense will keep mystery fans entertained. A classic whodunit for the teenage set. (Mystery. 13-18)
Distressed by the problem of plastic-bag disposal, a Gambian woman organizes her neighbors to turn trash into treasure. When Isatou Ceesay first discovered plastic bags in the Gambia in West Africa, in the 1980s, they seemed wonderfully useful and sturdy. But in her village, they soon became a nuisance, piling up in ugly dump areas where mosquitoes bred. Goats ate them and died. Her solution was to collect and clean used bags, cut them into strips and crochet the strips into useful plastic purses. These were sold at local markets and eventually internationally. Paul, who first went to the Gambia as a volunteer and has returned in other roles, tells this story in a straightforward fashion, deftly including words from the Wolof language and including details about Ceesay’s village life. A map, author’s note, glossary, timeline and excellent suggestions for further reading set this example of a woman who made a difference in a larger context. Fittingly, the collage illustrations make use of colorful papers and plastic bags. These reveal the labor involved and show the women’s joy in the results of their work. Though Isatou Ceesay’s country may be unfamiliar to young readers, they’ve probably done some handicraft recycling of their own. The easy connection makes this a welcome addition to the small shelf of examples of ingenuity in developing nations. (Informational picture book. 5-8)
BEARS AND A BIRTHDAY
Parenteau, Shirley Illus. by Walker, David Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-7636-7152-5
WILLOWGROVE
Peacock, Kathleen Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-204871-4 978-0-06-204873-8 e-book Series: Hemlock, 3
Get ready for a very special party! “The makings for / a cake are there. / The recipe’s ready. / Where are the bears?” Parenteau’s four furry friends are sweet as pie and ready to bake a cake—but for whom? It just might be for Big Brown Bear, who is having a birthday. Rhythmic text bounces along as Yellow, Calico, Fuzzy and Floppy mix and measure while following a recipe. Gentle and full of charm, this is a nice selection for toddlers and very young readers, who will appreciate the clear story, repetition and obvious affection shared among the lovable characters. Warm acrylic illustrations in a slightlybrighter-than-pastel palette show the round, appealing young bears as they wrap a present and don festive party hats. But wait, there’s more! “The four bears shout, / ‘Surprise, Big Bear!’ / Here’s why we / were busy in there!” Readers familiar with the series will be happy to revisit these good friends, while those new to the furry foursome will have a satisfying surprise in store. |
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Peacock brings her Hemlock werewolf trilogy to an appropriately bloody conclusion. Mackenzie may have broken her friend Serena and hundreds of other teen werewolves out of the titular “rehabilitation” facility Thornhill (2013), but that doesn’t mean things are hunky-dory. Back home in Hemlock, tensions are running high as members of the anti-werewolf vigilante group known as the Trackers converge there for a mammoth rally. Stephen, the |
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“The Qitsualik-Tinsleys tell an elemental tale, humor and emotions equally broad and visceral.” from the walrus who escaped
UNSPEAKABLE
older brother of Mac’s dead best friend, Amy, is back in town as well, working at CutterBrown, the family pharmaceutical company. Might he be an ally? Following hints a ghostly Amy brings her in dreams, Mac is convinced there’s some connection between CutterBrown and the horrific experiments that have left Serena psychically broken and unable to shift into wolf form—and the target of mysterious pursuers. Fights and chases keep the characters moving, and clumsily planted clues lead Mac, hot werewolf boyfriend Kyle, and lovelorn friend and former Tracker Jason into an obvious but nevertheless dangerous mystery surrounding the powers behind Thornhill. Peacock isn’t shy about killing characters off, which keeps pages turning, though the plot moves forward in fits and starts, making for an uneven read. The back story is complicated enough that only dedicated fans of the first two titles will want to tackle this one. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)
Pickett, Michelle K. Clean Teen (303 pp.) $9.95 paper | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-63422-020-0 A high school senior struggles to survive serious physical and emotional abuse. Willow wants only to finish her senior year in high school, where she takes all AP classes and shines on the chess team, so that she can escape her Midwestern town and get away from her abusive boyfriend. She knows she can’t leave Jaden, because the football star knows her family secret, a fact so horrible she can’t allow it to be spoken. Her stepfather, Ralph, compounds her misery by insisting that she continue her relationship with Jaden and beating her whenever she tries to break away. Enter Brody, the new boy in school. Brody not only achieves dropdead male-model hotness, he turns out to be intelligent and sensitive too. Willow falls for him hard. When she and Brody finally start dating, the violence from both Jaden and Ralph increases, sending Willow to the hospital. All the while Willow behaves as do most abuse victims: She lies to protect her abusers. Pickett balances the seemingly perfect romance story with Willow’s efforts to avoid and survive the abuse. Brody’s character, as everyone’s ideal, perfect boyfriend, may come across as just plain impossible, and Jaden behaves with such constant nastiness that readers may wonder why he suffers no consequences for his actions. Those two extremes aside, however, the book portrays Willow’s plight realistically. An insightful cautionary tale. (Fiction. 12-18)
I DON’T WANT TO BE A FROG
Petty, Dev Illus. by Boldt, Mike Doubleday (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-385-37866-6
A tiny frog desperately wishes to be any other animal. After reading a book about a cat, the young frog stretches open his mouth as wide as it will go and decidedly declares, “I want to be a CAT.” His father patiently explains, “You can’t be a CAT....Because you’re a FROG.” But frogs are too wet and slimy. The little frog then decides to be a rabbit. After all, he can already hop. But father points out that he does not have long ears. The young amphibian is not deterred. There are many other options—a pig, perhaps? Or an owl? But his no-nonsense father explains away each one. Until a wolf, who enjoys eating many animals—except wet, slimy frogs—comes along and changes the young frog’s perspective. Debut author Petty presents a droll take on this oft-explored wish of being different. But what shines the brightest is Boldt’s expressive frog duo. Question-weary grown-ups will understand the father’s heavylidded eyes, and nothing embodies a childlike curiosity (and/or crazy, determined declarations) more than the tiny frog’s wideopen mouth. Colored speech bubbles distinguish the speakers’ words and tumble over each other on the page. A lively look at self-acceptance. (Picture book. 3- 6)
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THE WALRUS WHO ESCAPED
Qitsualik-Tinsley, Rachel; Qitsualik-Tinsley, Sean Illus. by Brennan, Anthony Inhabit Media (32 pp.) $16.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-927095-68-3
A tale from an Inuit folklorist and her husband explains how the walrus’ tusks came to be straight. Long ago, the tale begins, creatures could draw upon the Land’s mystical Strength to take whatever shape they liked. Walrus uses his lovely, long spiraled tusks to scoop clams up from the seabed. Raven, who loves clams, was envious. Not brave enough to change shape to dive for them herself, she just digs “each clam from the icky shore.” One day Walrus makes the mistake of mocking Raven, and she uses the Strength of the Land to freeze the walrus in ice; only his head and snout are above its surface. After Raven’s protracted gloating, Walrus finally summons the Strength to break free, emerging with red eyes and straight tusks. The Qitsualik-Tinsleys tell an elemental tale, humor and emotions equally broad and visceral. Short sentences both evoke the oral experience and keep the pacing brisk. |
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SCRIPTED
Brennan’s illustrations meld an animation aesthetic with a cool palette appropriate to the setting. They are at their most successful when depicting the tale’s emotional high points; Raven’s crackling anger is made manifest with lightning bolts, while Walrus’ icy fury is barely contained in his looming bulk. Less emotive moments are weaker, but throughout, there’s a pleasing child-friendliness. Though it’s not clear whether this is an original or a traditional tale, it’s an appealing addition to the pourquoi shelf. (Picture book. 3- 6)
Rock, Maya Putnam (336 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 5, 2015 978-0-399-25733-9 Not all is blissful on Bliss Island, where a whole community lives in a reality show dystopia decades after a world war. Nettie lives with her mother, knowing she’s a Character and on camera most of the time, as is everyone on the island, born into a reality show that has run for a century. Nettie is in serious trouble: Her ratings are down, and she’s in danger of being cut, thereby becoming one of the missing Patriots. The armed, collective Authority immediately remove anyone cut and forbid the remaining Characters from ever acknowledging that person’s existence. When her friend Belle disappears, however, the girl’s brother, Scoop, can’t forget. Meanwhile, Nettie’s best friend breaks up with Callen, Nettie’s next-door neighbor and secret heartthrob, and her producer suggests she can improve her ratings by flirting with Callen. Things go well. However, Media1, the production company that controls not only their lives, but even the weather on the island, begins to demand more. Nettie knows she can’t refuse, but she also works with Scoop to discover what happens to the so-called Patriots. Rock effectively contrasts the pretty unreality of the Characters’ lives with the looming discovery of their true fates. Issues of privacy and freedom dominate the deceptive glamour as Nettie struggles to make a firm decision about what to do with her own life. An effective, suspenseful dystopia for a wide audience. (Dystopian romance. 12-18)
THE SECRET CIPHER
Ringwald, Whitaker Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-06-221617-5 978-0-06-221619-9 e-book Series: Secret Box, 2 Book 2 in the middle-grade Secret Box mystery series (The Secret Box, 2014). Cousins Jax and Ethan and Ethan’s older brother, Tyler, are off on another adventure propelled by Greek mythology. At home in New Jersey, Jax has been contacted by a Boston convalescent home telling her that a woman who had suffered a stroke was admitted with no identification beyond Jax’s home phone number written on her bandanna. Jax is convinced it’s great-aunt Juniper and that the Greek mythological urn of Hope, rescued by the children in Book 1 and now in Juniper’s possession, is in danger. Impetuous Jax and nerdy Ethan entice Tyler, geeky gamer, to drive them to Boston. Once there, they discover that there is not just one urn in peril, but three—Hope, Faith and Love—and that a villain already has Faith in his possession and seeks the other two. With the help of a mysterious girl and Jax’s incarcerated father (whom Jax meets for the first time), the children begin the race to keep the urns of Hope and Love from the villain’s clutches. Ringwald repeats her successful Book 1 narrative structure as Jax, Ethan and Tyler each narrate chapters in their distinctive, hilarious first-person voices. Twists abound, and the ending will leave readers demanding the third installment immediately. Suspense, humor and sparkling narrative voices combine to deliver an engaging adventure. (Mystery. 8-12)
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THE SIN EATER’S DAUGHTER
Salisbury, Melinda Scholastic (320 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-81062-3 978-0-545-81973-2 e-book
A peasant girl transplanted to the royal court repeatedly confronts death in her new life as executioner, entertainer and bride. Raised as the Sin Eater’s daughter and apprentice, Twylla expected to deal with the deceased by eating food symbolizing their sins (to free their souls) and to grow morose and morbidly obese like her mother. But four years ago, she came to the court of Lormere and became Daunen Embodied—the king and queen are the other divine representatives—only to find herself delivering death instead of salvation. Petrified that Lormere will become like Tregellan (a science-minded democracy) or Tallith (abandoned for 500 years), mad queen Helewys controls the court through fear and religion (and even darker means). Twylla is literally |
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BIG RED KANGAROO
untouchable—her skin seemingly made poisonous through a mystical ritual and mysterious potion. She misses her sister and still mourns her dead friend, but she nevertheless longs for companionship. Accordingly, two men vie for her affection: her new, Tregellian guard, Lief, who encourages her to question her faith, and her betrothed, Prince Merek, who pushes for political upheaval. Torn between the boys and her beliefs, Twylla suffers identity crises, court conspiracies and cruel revelations before being able to redefine herself. Through Twylla’s deliberate, present-tense narration, Salisbury weaves a complex tale of romance, religion, fairy tales and politics. A slow but satisfying read with impressive depth and emotion. (Fantasy. 14 & up)
Saxby, Claire Illus. by Byrne, Graham Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7636-7075-7
In the hot, dry lands of central Australia, big Red leads his band of kanga-
roos through a night. A band of kangaroos is called a mob, and Red is the mob leader. Not only must he lead his group to the woods for shelter from nighttime storms and daytime heat and to grassy areas for food, he must keep a wary eye out for other male kangaroos (potential challengers) and other enemies. The text is presented in dual narratives. One, surprisingly lyrical, focuses on Red’s activities; the other, straightforward and distinguished by an italicized typeface, adds details about kangaroo behavior in general. Charcoal drawings digitally splashed with the brick red of that dusty world show the band and some of the plants and animals that share their world: clumps of spinifex grasses, wallaroos, thorny devils, dingos, a goanna and a spinifex hopping mouse. Although these are identified in the text, readers with no prior knowledge of Australian flora and fauna might find the attractive art a little too allusive for easy understanding. But the narrative arc will keep them engaged and perhaps inspire further research. The book concludes with general information about kangaroos. The front endpapers show kangaroo tracks, repeated in many illustrations. Appealing in subject and presentation, this will be a welcome addition to primary-grade nonfiction collections. (index) (Informational picture book. 5-9)
FIREFIGHT
Sanderson, Brandon Delacorte (432 pp.) $18.99 | $10.99 e-book | $21.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-74358-7 978-0-449-81840-4 e-book 978-0-375-99122-6 PLB Series: Reckoners, 2 Teen slayer of evil, superpowered Epics David Charleston carries the fight from Newcago to New York in this slash-and-burn sequel. Arriving with his boss, Jon Phaedrus, Dark Knight–ish founder of the Epic-killing Reckoners, David is stunned to find the city—now known as Babylon Restored, or Babilar—flooded, weirdly lit by glowing graffiti and populated by lotus eaters who subsist on glowing fruit that grows indoors. He faces three powerful Epics: Newton, who can deflect bullets; Obliteration, mad destroyer of Houston; and, most dangerous of all, hydromancer and wily former attorney Regalia. As in the previous episode (Steelheart, 2013), Sanderson presents a Marvel Comics–style mix of violently destructive battles, fabulous feats and ongoing inner wrestling over morality and identity. He lightens this with such elements as an Epic who is felled by Kool-Aid balloons and David’s predilection for hilariously lame similes (a room is “lit by fruit that dangled from the ceiling like snot from the nose of a toddler who had been snorting glowsticks”). Risky romance plus late revelations about the source and flaw in all the Epics’ powers set up the (probable) closer. Big in size and vision, this is the rare middle volume that keeps the throttle open and actually moves the story along significantly. (Fantasy. 11-14)
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THE WAY TO STAY IN DESTINY
Scattergood, Augusta Scholastic (192 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-545-53824-4 978-0-545-63364-2 e-book
Music and baseball history combine to convince sixth-grader Thelonious Monk Thomas that Destiny, Florida, should be his hometown. When Uncle Raymond, a Vietnam vet still hurting from the war and from his dead sister’s antiwar activities, brings orphaned Theo to Destiny in May 1974, he warns him not to get attached. But in Rest Easy, their new rooming house, Theo finds a piano to play and a determined landlady, dance teacher Miss Sister Grandersole, who encourages his musical gift just as energetically as his angry uncle discourages it. Theo also finds a friend in classmate Anabel Johnson, who loathes dance but loves baseball. She enlists him in a project to find evidence of major league baseball players who lived in town 20 years earlier. Did Hank Aaron once stay where Theo lives? Theo tells of his first weeks in Destiny in a |
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“Individually [the stories] conform to conventions; together they defy expectations as they raise questions about humanity and its connections to the universe and one another.” from the ghosts of heaven
not-completely-convincing first-person, present-tense narrative that moves quickly through the days, culminating in his accompanying a dance recital and finding a way to stay as well as a possible Hank Aaron sighting. It’s puzzling that no one mentions skin color, not even when characters talk about Aaron in the 1950s, when the “tall, skinny guy” would have been living and dining in accommodations separate from most of his teammates. Doesn’t quite hit the right notes. (Historical fiction. 9-13)
Veteran author-illustrator duo Shields and Meisel team up again (Someone Used My Toothbrush and Other Bathroom Poems, 2010, etc.) to depict the full spectrum of fun to be had after school lets out. Looking at what typically happens at the end of the school day—homework, snacking, being reunited with pets, car pools, texting friends, a little instrument practice—Shields and Meisel paint a realistic portrait of how kids feel about these activities. From the opening pair of “2:48” poems, Shields quickly establishes the collection’s light, edgy tone, showing how student and teacher alike often find the last two minutes of the day “the slowest of all.” By week’s end, Shields cleverly uses end rhyme to highlight the irony to be found in a “Friday Night” sleepover: “We call it sleeping over— / That’s not exactly true. / We bring along our sleeping bags, / But sleep? Not what we do.” Throughout the volume, Meisel’s dynamic, childlike mixed-media illustrations effectively underscore the child’s perspective these poems so often provide. But occasionally Shields also shares some important advice as a former child, enlightening young readers as to the dangers of saying, “I’m bored!” to one’s parents or trying to mask unauthorized video game usage behind a beatific smile. Smart and sassy poems and accessible illustrations combine for an engaging, humorous package. (Picture book/ poetry. 6-10)
THE GHOSTS OF HEAVEN
Sedgwick, Marcus Roaring Brook (368 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62672-125-8 Similar to Sedgwick’s Printz Award– winning Midwinterblood (2013), four stories relate in elusive ways. Sedgwick calls these stories “quarters” and encourages readers to experience them in any order. If read in the printed order, they begin with the dawn of time in a story that uses spare verse to describe a cave-dwelling girl who awakens to the world through the spiral shapes she sees as she gathers magic for her people. The second story skips to pre-Enlightenment England and the heartbreaking story of Anna, who is accused of witchcraft after taking up her mother’s “cunning woman” mantle. The fictitious journal entries of a Dr. James follow as this early-20th-century psychiatrist forms an unusual relationship with an asylum patient and leaves readers wondering who the true threat to society is. The quartet concludes with a science-fiction thriller in which Sentinel Keir Bowman, awake only 12 hours every 10 years, journeys on a spaceship scouting for new life. What openly draws these stories together is a spiral and spinning symbolism that presents itself through vivid details, from the seemingly mundane to literary references. Individually they conform to conventions; together they defy expectations as they raise questions about humanity and its connections to the universe and one another. Although Sedgwick gives a nod to teens, this complex masterpiece is for sophisticated readers of any age. Haunting. (Fiction. 14 & up)
AFTER THE BELL RINGS Poems About After-School Time Shields, Carol Diggory Illus. by Meisel, Paul Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-8037-3805-8
Twenty-two light poems and accompanying illustrations explore what happens after school. |
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YETI AND THE BIRD
Shireen, Nadia Illus. by Shireen, Nadia Atheneum (32 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-4814-0389-4 978-1-4814-0390-0 e-book A picture book about an unexpected friendship. Big, hairy, scary Yeti lives deep in the forest, and the other animals are afraid of him, so they leave him alone. But Yeti, for all his bulk and bluster, is lonely. When a small red bird, lost, lands on him by mistake, he roars, but she is unafraid. The two strike up an unlikely friendship, playing games during the day and singing “sweet, sad songs together” each evening that “[soothe] the forest to sleep.” However, the season is changing to winter, and Yeti’s cold forest is no place for the bright bird. Sadly, they part, and Yeti, having known friendship, feels more alone than ever. That is, until the other forest animals, having seen Yeti’s soft side, make friendly overtures, and Yeti finds a life filled with companions—including the red bird, who drops by when she can. A tale about an unlikely friendship that changes a lonely life is not a new theme, but Shireen writes with admirable restraint and fills in the narrative gaps with engaging illustrations. Her double-page spreads create potent atmosphere with carefully placed strong shapes and forthright color. Spot illustrations effectively convey easy-to-understand action and humor. Striking visuals that combine compelling use of shape, page design and color successfully carry this version of an oft-told story. (Picture book. 3- 7) |
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“As in previous volumes, the wickedly funny, quickly paced style is anchored by the novel’s underlying theme of the marginalization of people and its effects….” from feral pride
THE GLASS ARROW
Simmons, Kristen Tor (336 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-7653-3661-3 978-1-4668-2878-0 e-book A teenage girl raised free in the wild struggles to escape the fate of city girls— being auctioned for breeding. Aya’s captured during a brutal attack and brought to the city, where she’s placed in a holding facility for unpurchased virgins. City girls, raised on “meal supplement pills,” aren’t as fertile as wild girls, so Aya’s a hot commodity, making it imperative that she sabotage her chances of purchase. Acting out to avoid going to auction, she is punished with solitary confinement. In solitary, she meets a Driver (odd, mute mountain people who handle horses and are viewed as a lower life form) and forms a strange friendship with him. After failed escape attempts result in stricter surveillance by the biologically enhanced Watchers, quickthinking Aya hatches a last-minute (hilarious) plan during the auction—and it might have worked if the mayor’s son hadn’t also found it funny. Aya has just moments to be rescued by the Driver from life as property. A forced gynecological-exam scene that’s horrifying but not explicit is the most graphic sexual content, enhancing the terror of the culture’s implied, off-page rapes. The culture and world are vaguely drawn, suffering from dropped plotlines, convoluted rules and poorly defined settings. The ending neither screams sequel nor especially satisfies. The ideas—extreme control of women and their sexuality—are more successful than the story’s execution. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
BLOW YOUR NOSE, BIG BAD WOLF! A Story About Spreading Germs Smallman, Steve Illus. by Merz, Bruno QEB Publishing (24 pp.) $15.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-60992-708-0 Series: Fairytales Gone Wrong
Children learn the value of sharing (and tissues) in this remake of “The Three Little Pigs.” Children think they know all about the three little pigs and the big, bad wolf. After all, there have been plenty of tales that have looked at the story from all different angles. But how many know that Big Bad just had a nasty cold and simply wanted the pigs to share their tissues? It’s true. And when he climbs down the chimney, incensed at their selfishness, he gets a soothing warm bath as well as a bit of revenge. “If only they had given Big Bad a tissue, they wouldn’t have caught his cold!” Other books in the series adapt “Goldilocks” to teach kids about eating 206
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healthy food, “Cinderella” to impress upon them the importance of brushing twice a day, and “The Gingerbread Man” to stress staying active. These books all have a spot on the didactic spectrum, some higher than others, and only Keep Running, Gingerbread Man really gets its message across smoothly and without changing the original story too drastically. Eat Your Veggies, Goldilocks is the weakest, featuring a brat who wants to only eat treats. But magically, when she’s discovered by the Bears, she shares their healthy food without a complaint. The cartoon illustrations for the four are all by different illustrators, but they all simply reflect the tales rather than extending them. Even lovers of fractured fairy tales will see straight through these. (Picture book. 4- 7) (Eat Your Veggies, Goldilocks: 978-1-60992-707-3; Give Us a Smile, Cinderella: 978-1-60992-700-4; Keep Running, Gingerbread Man: 978-1-60992-701-1)
FERAL PRIDE
Smith, Cynthia Leitich Candlewick (304 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 1, 2015 978-0-7636-5911-0 Series: Feral Nights, 3 A battle pitting a group of werepeople and their vampire compatriot against demons in disguise concludes this trilogy that began with Feral Nights (2013). Escaping to the same imagined alternate Austin, Texas, first created by Smith in Tantalize (2007), teen werecat Kayla lies low with her new friends after having been outed to the world, caught on video transforming into her feline form. It’s not due to embarrassment but rather because her recorded shift coincides with the abduction of the state’s governor by a creature claiming to be a weresnake who insists that people accept that shifters are their superiors. As in previous volumes, the wickedly funny, quickly paced style is anchored by the novel’s underlying theme of the marginalization of people and its effects, both those obvious (“Our legal rights are slippery,” explains Kayla) and more insidiously subtle (like the wedge driven between Clyde, a werepossum/werelion hybrid, and his human girlfriend, Aimee, because of her father’s prejudice). Alternating narration among Aimee, Clyde, and werecats Kayla and Yoshi makes for an interesting blended perspective but can also be a bit confusing, particularly when combined with the intricately detailed plan that evolves to take out the demon masquerading as a weresnake with nothing other than an angel’s sword. A final episode that is witty, smart and moving—sure to satisfy those who’ve been following the series. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)
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THE QUIRKS AND THE QUIRKALICIOUS BIRTHDAY
the creases of the paper like growing things, red mushrooms in a sped-up video.” This lyricism exists side by side with gritty realism: slut-shaming and mean girls, childhood abuse suffered by classmate Martin, and the nonstop emotional and physical neglect and abuse Lacy endures from her own mother. Sometimes horrifying and sometimes charming, this is a powerful if uneven novel. Lacy sees herself as a battleground between light and dark, and she must find her own way even as she deals with levels of grief and pain she’s almost unable to face; readers may be left uncomfortable when that way seems to forgive her mother, but they will rejoice in the confirmation that we are what we make ourselves, regardless of the darkness that surrounds. Unexpected, uncanny, unforgettable. (Magical realism. 14 & up)
Soderberg, Erin Illus. by Jack, Colin Bloomsbury (208 pp.) $13.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61963-370-4 Series: Quirks, 3
The Quirk twins, about to turn 10, disagree about how to celebrate against a backdrop of magical mishaps. This year, Grandpa Quill’s Quirkalicious Birthday Hunt will be the toughest yet. (Rules are helpfully spelled out: In the week leading to their birthday, there are five clues; four lead to small gifts and the last to the big one.) Facing a greater-thanexpected challenge, Penelope and Molly disagree on how to proceed and who should call the shots. Additionally, for the first time ever, they are having a birthday party with friends. Molly wants her first birthday party to be perfect—and perfectly normal; Penelope’s anxious about being the center of attention and keeping her splashy magic power (her thoughts manifest in reality) under wraps. This conflict of desires is heightened as Pen concludes that Molly’s bossy, and Molly resents the sacrifices she makes to help Penelope control her magic. Additionally, the scavenger hunt’s riddles challenge the girls, but nothing puzzles them more than the seemingly random small gifts. Will the twins reconcile their differences, prevent their birthday party from becoming a disaster and find their big gift? Of course, but the emotional roots of the disagreement will ring true for readers with siblings or close friends, grounding the story with a touch of reality amid the silly magic. This birthday-anxiety story is made fresh by both the twins’ dynamics and the riddles. (illustrations not seen) (Fantasy. 8-11)
WHEN MY HEART WAS WICKED
Stirling, Tricia Scholastic (192 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-545-69573-2 978-0-545-69575-6 e-book A mix of the mundane and the magical permeates this slender portrait of a girl in pain. After a childhood bouncing between her mother, possibly a witch and probably unstable, and her father, whose presence made it possible for Lacy to see magic and beauty everywhere, Lacy’s mother, Cheyenne, disappeared. Her mother’s influence gone, Lacy’s darkness blossomed into light and kindness. But her father has died, and although stepmother Anna wants to keep her, Cheyenne returns to drag Lacy back to Sacramento. Lacy narrates in lush, almost magical prose: “Smoke billows out and bits of glowing ember consume |
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THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, VOLUME 1 Young Readers Edition, 1898-1945
Stone, Oliver; Kuznick, Peter Atheneum (400 pp.) $19.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-4814-2173-7 978-1-4814-2175-1 e-book Series: Untold History of the United States The darker side of the “American Century,” recast for younger audiences from the companion to a sobering documentary film (book and film both 2012). From the hugely profitable Spanish American War to the “gratuitous” bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the coauthors “focus a spotlight on the ways we believe the United States has betrayed its mission and the ideals of its own Constitution.” That harsh light moves from the U.S. subjugation of Latin America to the ready support American industrialists gave both the Germans in World War I and the Axis in World War II—casting sidelights on the hypocrisy of Woodrow Wilson and Truman’s lack of statesmanship and moral vacuity. The account closes with the thoroughly documented claim that the atomic bombs were dropped more as a message to Stalin than to force Japan into a surrender for which it was already practically begging. Along with giving Russia a more significant role in defeating both Hitler and Japan than standard histories usually grant, the authors also point to other turning points and near misses that are rarely if ever part of standard school curricula. The first of a planned four-volume set, this has a more open page design than the original book for adults and some additional photos. A natural and notable companion for Joy Hakim’s magisterial but sunnier History of US (2006). (chronology, sources, index) (Nonfiction. 13-16)
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THE CASE OF THE MISSING MOONSTONE
woods or even in a small cluster of tents right outside their community’s wall. As the community’s sole pilot and therefore crucial for surveillance and reconnaissance, Adam’s all too aware that in this post-apocalyptic world, his community is an island of haves in a sea of have-nots. He struggles to help outsiders as much as possible and frequently argues against Herb’s ruthless pragmatism. Less about physical survival, in this sequel, the conflict concerns the community’s morals and soul. The middle sags as a slow burn of incidents illustrate the outside world’s destabilization, but the pace picks up in the conclusion’s twists and cliffhanger. Although less action-packed than its predecessor, the philosophical questions and killer ending will prime readers for the next book. (Adventure. 12-17)
Stratford, Jordan Illus. by Murphy, Kelly Knopf (240 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-75440-8 978-0-385-75442-2 e-book 978-0-385-75441-5 PLB Series: Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, 1 The future author of Frankenstein teams up with the future inventor of the computer to establish a young ladies’ detective agency. The fact that in real life Mary Shelley, nee Godwin, was 18 years older than Ada Lovelace, nee Byron, doesn’t seem to bother Stratford one whit. He simply reduces the age difference by 15 years and arranges for Mary to be sent to Ada’s house for tutoring. Their tutor is a hapless Percy Shelley (bumblingly incognito); illicitly sharing Mary’s carriage every day is a cheerful young Charles Dickens. Young readers unencumbered by the knowledge that the setup is laughably ahistorical may enjoy the slight mystery, which unfolds when Mary and Ada decide to spice up their routine by investigating interesting crimes. They will probably warm to Mary’s steady intelligence. They will certainly relish Ada’s many eccentricities, especially the hot air balloon she keeps tethered to her roof and her willingness to store Shelley in the distillery closet when he gets in the way. But even the most credulous child may find it very hard to believe that a Victorian family submits to the interrogation of two strange girls about a lost gem under the guise of a school project. An author’s note attempts to correct the text’s inaccuracies. At best readers won’t get it, and at worst they will believe it. (Historical mystery. 8-12)
MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES
Warga, Jasmine Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-06-232467-2 978-0-06-232469-6 e-book Two teenagers make a suicide pact in this poignant, first-person debut. Sixteen-year-old Aysel’s life “can be neatly divided into two sections: before my father made the nightly news and after.” Since her mentally ill father murdered a local boy with Olympic hopes, Aysel feels as though her only escape from the public shame is suicide. She also worries that her father’s madness is genetic and exists inside her as well. Through a website that matches suicide partners, Aysel meets Roman, a kind, attractive, athletic boy who feels responsible for the drowning death of his little sister. Even though Aysel harbors a passion for science and Roman a love of basketball, they are determined not to let each other “flake out.” Together they begin enacting a fake relationship designed to lull Roman’s overprotective mother into allowing Roman more freedom so they can carry out their fatal plan. But when Aysel begins falling in love with Roman for real, she knows she can no longer follow through on their pact. Can she convince Roman that his life is worth living before it’s too late? Any teen who’s ever felt like an outsider will be able to relate to Aysel’s and Roman’s fully realized characters. The countdown at the beginning of each chapter to the couple’s death date (the same day Roman’s sister died) will help propel readers forward to a hopeful if not entirely unexpected ending. Earnest and heartfelt. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 13-17)
FIGHT FOR POWER
Walters, Eric Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-374-30179-8 Series: Rule of 3, 2 The struggle for survival in a world suddenly bereft of technology continues immediately from where The Rule of Three (2014) left off. Adam’s community having successfully defeated a large force of murderous raiders, the neighbors celebrate safety. Ex-CIA Herb, however, warns that peace isn’t just fleeting; it’s deceptively dangerous. Along with worrying about the battle’s survivors—that those left behind guarding the raiders’ compound could regroup—he advises that without a unifying common threat, the community itself will be less easily managed. As Herb predicts, tensions rise inside their walled community over things like rations. Meanwhile, those rations are envied by outsiders who live in nearby neighborhoods, the 208
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“Spooky descriptions of ghostly voices, subtly changing paintings and children-turned-monsters are some of the book’s most effective elements.” from the bargaining
HONEY
dead Rae visit Penny as ghosts, but Penny is equally haunted by the loss of Rae and her own perceived role in it. Less effective is the book’s pacing; information about Rae’s death and the Carver House’s tragic history are revealed frustratingly slowly, and it’s hard to understand why neither Penny nor April ever questions the locals about their extreme responses to learning where the two of them are staying. It’s uneven, but it rewards patient readers with both frightening action and emotional insight. (Horror. 14-18)
Weeks, Sarah Scholastic (160 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-46557-1 978-0-545-66281-9 e-book Melody Bishop’s peaceful life with her widower father is upset when the annoying 6-year-old next door comes home from the beauty parlor with some gossip. The 10-year-old has already noticed her father’s increased distraction and a new tendency to whistle, so when Teeny Nelson reports that “Henry’s been bitten by the love bug,” Melody is avid to know more. With her best friend, biracial Nick Woo, at her side, she goes to the Bee Hive beauty salon to investigate. What she discovers there rocks her world not once but twice, as salon owner Bee-Bee has information about Melody’s mother, who died in childbirth and about whom her father never speaks. Weeks gets the small moments right: Melody’s exasperation with Teeny and the way it turns to sympathy when the little girl’s mother threatens a spanking; her affectionate resignation when her grandfather, who has emphysema, sneaks out to the garage for a smoke. And Melody’s close relationship with her loving father is sweetly evoked. But other elements fail to cohere. Obvious misdirection leads Melody to a critical misunderstanding that never amounts to more than a plot contrivance, and the mystical visions of Bee-Bee’s dog, Mo, who has an unknown connection to Melody, strain credulity. In all, it’s an unsuccessful follow-up to Weeks’ Pie (2011), but word-loving Melody is appealing, and her appended list of nail-polish colors is somewhat amusing. (Fiction. 7-10)
BLUES FOR ZOEY
Weston, Robert Paul Flux (312 pp.) $9.99 paper | Feb. 8, 2015 978-0-7387-4340-0 A workaholic teen makes an unusual friend. Kaz Barrett scrimps and saves every dollar he makes slaving away at the laundromat that does business below his family’s apartment. His mother is the victim of a fantastically rare disease, and the only doctors that’ll treat her demand big bucks. Kaz’s single-minded pursuit of a cure for his mother robs him of a girlfriend or a real social life, but that all changes when he spots the impossibly beautiful Zoey through the laundromat window. Weston fills Kaz’s world with colorful tertiary characters, but it all falls by the wayside eventually. The real thrust of the book is Kaz’s courtship of Zoey, a manic pixie dream girl who fits the stereotype to a T. Mysterious past? Wacky hairdo? Otherworldly beauty? All boxes are checked, and for three quarters of the novel readers would be forgiven for feeling a bit of déjà vu. But the author has a nice twist in store, subverting even the keenest readers’ anticipations. For this, Weston deserves credit, but whether or not the reveal is worth all the trouble will be up to individual readers. A great twist doesn’t make a great book. (Fiction. 12-16)
THE BARGAINING
West, Carly Anne Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4424-4182-8
COLONIAL MADNESS
In a multilayered ghost story, Penny spends a summer helping her father’s new wife restore a decrepit house in tiny Point Finney, Washington. As far as Penny can tell, neither her father nor her mother wants her around, especially after the death of Penny’s manipulative former friend, Rae. April, her father’s much-younger second wife, takes Penny to live in the Carver House for the summer, hoping that renovating it together will bring the two of them closer. Two things, however, quickly become clear: First, the house will be almost impossible to repair, and second, the house is haunted. Spooky descriptions of ghostly voices, subtly changing paintings and children-turned-monsters are some of the book’s most effective elements. The haunting is also astutely connected to Penny’s emotional landscape. The Carver House children and the |
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Whittemore, Jo Aladdin (240 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 10, 2015 978-1-4814-0508-9978-1-4814-0509-6 e-book Tori and her mom must live in the past in order to win a desperately needed inheritance. Tori’s divorced mom has a designer dress shop, but it turns out that she isn’t a very good businesswoman: The family is broke. If Mom’s going to keep her store, she’ll have to find some money. Enter recently deceased Great-Aunt Muriel, who has left a fortune to whichever of her relatives can survive for a week living in her Colonial |
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“Winter’s folksy narrative manages to give each of the founders both dignity and humanity.” from the founding fathers
mansion. It sounds good until they learn that everyone has to live as though they were in Colonial times, lighting fires with flint and making their own candles. Plus, they have to survive daily elimination challenges, doing Colonial tasks such as making porridge from scratch—including grinding the corn—and archery contests. Tori’s certain that Mom won’t be able to cope, but it turns out that Mom has some experience living off the land. The difficulty is that at least one member of the competition appears to be sabotaging Tori and her mom’s efforts—but which one? Add a dash of forbidden romance to the mix, and Tori finds herself in all sorts of trouble. Whittemore brings her customary insight and humor to every page of this funny and sometimes-suspenseful romp. The history goes down easy, with lots of laughs. (Fiction. 9-13)
BILBY Secrets of an Australian Marsupial
Wignell, Edel Illus. by Jackson, Mark Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7636-6759-7
Kangaroos and koalas may steal the limelight, but they aren’t the only marsupials in town—or the Outback. The omnivorous bilby is ratlike but both endangered and cute enough to, as the author notes, be catching on as chocolate alternatives to Easter bunnies in Australia. Here, they “canter” through painted nighttime desert scenes rendered in short-stroked brush work and scribbly orange lines. In passages of fictionalized narrative paired to factual commentary in another typeface, Wignell follows mother Bilby as she crawls down into her spiral burrow to give birth, then traces the growth and development of Young Bilby as he ventures out of the pouch to find food and to survive owls and other predators long enough to reach solitary adulthood. Though overall the story has a generic cast into which any small, furry creature could be plugged, the main subject, setting and at least some of the wild supporting cast are specific to Down Under. Also, the information about life cycle, senses, behavior and other natural detail is backed up by a rudimentary topical index. Bland and purposeful, but a close-up view of an animal likely to be new to readers in this hemisphere. (Informational picture book. 5- 7)
WAITING IS NOT EASY!
Willems, Mo Illus. by Willems, Mo Hyperion (64 pp.) $8.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-9957-1 Series: Elephant & Piggie
Gerald the elephant learns a truth familiar to every preschooler—heck, every human: “Waiting is not easy!” When Piggie cartwheels up to Gerald announcing that he has a surprise for him, Gerald is less than pleased to learn that the “surprise is a surprise.” Gerald pumps Piggie for information (it’s big, it’s pretty, and they can share it), but Piggie holds fast on his basic principle: Gerald will have to wait. Gerald lets out an almighty “GROAN!” Variations on this basic exchange occur throughout the day; Gerald pleads, Piggie insists they must wait; Gerald groans. As the day turns to twilight (signaled by the backgrounds that darken from mauve to gray to charcoal), Gerald gets grumpy. “WE HAVE WASTED THE WHOLE DAY!...And for WHAT!?” Piggie then gestures up to the Milky Way, which an awed Gerald acknowledges “was worth the wait.” Willems relies even more than usual on the slightest of changes in posture, layout and typography, as two waiting figures can’t help but be pretty static. At one point, Piggie assumes the lotus position, infuriating Gerald. Most amusingly, Gerald’s elephantine groans assume weighty physicality in spreadfilling speech bubbles that knock Piggie to the ground. And the spectacular, photo-collaged images of the Milky Way that dwarf the two friends makes it clear that it was indeed worth the wait. A lesson that never grows old, enacted with verve by two favorite friends. (Early reader. 6-8)
THE FOUNDING FATHERS! Those Horse-Ridin’, Fiddle-Playin’, Book-Readin’, Gun-Totin’ Gentlemen Who Started America
Winter, Jonah Illus. by Blitt, Barry Atheneum (48 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4424-4274-0 978-1-4424-4275-7 e-book
Fourteen of the men who somehow separated from one country and cobbled together a new one despite their differences are presented in a lively celebration of politics and personalities. Each gets a two-page spread with a full-page portrait (name, sobriquet and dates included) along with a casual, colloquially phrased summary biography and then lots of stats presented briefly and intriguingly: height, weight, political leaning, education, wealth, and religious belief, in addition to hobbies, nickname and position on the Boston Tea Party. This last, notes 210
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Winter in an excellent addendum/glossary, was by no means a political action supported by all the founders. Winter addresses the question of ownership of humans directly, noting what his subjects’ expressed views were on slavery as well as which of these early Americans owned slaves. Winter’s folksy narrative manages to give each of the founders both dignity and humanity. Blitt’s signature style is perfectly suited to this droll enterprise. His Benjamin Franklin multitasks, his Patrick Henry emotes. The witty, energetic illustrations include clever references and a couple of sly anachronisms. Endpapers offer oval portraits of the entire lineup, with Washington, Franklin and Jefferson among the seven on the “Varsity” team, and Hancock, Marshall and Paine among the “Junior Varsity” faces. Author’s notes and a resource list are included, but frustratingly, the book lacks pagination and indexing. Wonderful for future constitutional scholars and other curious young readers. (Nonfiction. 8-13)
Sjölin, Fredrik Illus. by Degerman, Christer Tales & Dice AB $3.99 | Apr. 26, 2013 2.2; Oct. 17, 2013 Backyard robot-building is the order of the day in an app that will appeal most to budding tinkerers. Two young friends, Hanna and Henri, meet up to visit Hanna’s aunt, a goggles- and apron-clad inventor. Hanna and Henri work together to create their own robot (with some help from readers to sort parts and choose the creation’s look in one of several challenges). How much readers enjoy this will depend on their tolerance for extraneous characters and locations that have nothing to do with the main story. There are also two minor annoyances: The text is too tiny to be read without manually adjusting its size (an option in an easyto-access sliding menu), and load times between screens feel slow in this otherwise very responsive app. On the other hand, the app has pleasingly detail-heavy art that appears hand-drawn, and the depictions of women and girls in the story as inventors and robot builders are refreshing. But perhaps the biggest selling point is that the central robot project can be built in lots of different ways, making the story one that invites repeated readthroughs. The animation is fluid, and the resulting robots never fail to be worth the trouble. There are even pages of bios for all the story characters. A mostly solid piece of garage building with winning characters and very cool robots. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 4-10)
interactive e-books TRAIL, MARTIM IS A STRONG BOY ativgreen Casa Gráfica Expressa $0.00 | Sep. 26, 2014 1.0; Sep. 26, 2014
A young boy goes for a ride on his bike, exploring the world around him in this simple but engaging interactive story. “Martim is a strong boy / who wanted to ride a long way.” From the very first page, readers must figure out how to move the story forward. Martim lifts the first letter of “strong” up and then points down to the word; readers experiment by tapping on the remaining letters and watch them fly up onto his shoulders one by one. Once Martim gets on his bike, he rides through a wet yard, along a smooth sidewalk, over a bumpy trail and more. The black-and-white illustrations have an appealing linedrawn quality, with plenty of white space in the background. Readers will enjoy the variety of interactive elements as they help Martim proceed through the story. The interplay among the illustrations, animation and printed words is thoroughly enjoyable, whether Martim is climbing the tall letters of “HILL” or bouncing “down” the blocky letters of the square’s steps. The assortment of sound effects adds interest. Although some readers may miss narration, its absence suits this app nicely for a read-aloud experience. Delightful at every turn. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 4-8)
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continuing series
TOOTH TROUBLE
Hale, Bruce Illus. by Francis, Guy Harper/HarperCollins | (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Dec. 31, 2014 978-0-06-227908-8 978-0-06-227906-4 paper Clark the Shark (Early reader. 4-8)
SATURN COULD SAIL
DiSiena, Laura Lyn Illus. by Oswald, Pete Little Simon | (32 pp.) $17.99 | $6.99 paper | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-4814-1429-6 978-1-4814-1428-9 paper Did You Know? (Informational picture book. 4-8)
CHASING GOLD
Hapka, Catherine Aladdin | (192 pp.) $6.99 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4814-0342-9 paper Marguerite Henry’s Ponies of Chincoteague, 3 (Fiction. 8-12)
MY SUPER-SPY DIARY
Gale, Emily Illus. by Dreidemy, Joelle Aladdin | (128 pp.) $16.99 | $5.99 paper | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4814-0653-6 978-1-4814-0652-9 paper Eliza Boom, 2 (Fiction. 6-9)
THE BLAZING STAR
Hunter, Erin Illus. by McLoughlin, Wayne Harper/HarperCollins | (320 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-06-206358-8 Warriors: Dawn of the Clans, 4 (Adventure. 8-12)
PRINCESS POSEY AND THE VALENTINE’S DAY BALLET
Greene, Stephanie Illus. by Sisson, Stephanie Roth Putnam | (96 pp.) $13.99 | $4.99 paper | Dec. 26, 2014 978-0-399-16962-5 978-0-14-751292-5 paper Princess Posey, 9 (Fiction. 5-8)
ORIGINS OF OLYMPUS
O’Hearn, Kate Aladdin | (432 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-4424-9715-3 Pegasus, 4 (Fantasy. 8-12)
NEVER WEAR RED LIPSTICK ON PICTURE DAY
THEA STILTON AND THE MISSING MYTH
(And Other Lessons I’ve Learned) Gutknecht, Allison Illus. by Lewis, Stevie Aladdin | (176 pp.) $16.99 | $6.99 paper | Nov. 11, 2014 978-1-4814-2959-7 978-1-4814-2958-0 paper Mandy Berr, 3 (Fiction. 7-10)
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Stilton, Thea Scholastic | (176 pp.) $7.99 paper | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-545-65601-6 paper Thea Stilton, 20 (Adventure. 7-10)
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BRIDGING TO THE TRILLIONS MARKET A Simple Guide
These titles earned the Kirkus Star: ORPHAN IN AMERICA by Nanette L. Avery................................... 214
Abang, Mazlan PartridgeIndia (90 pp.) $36.60 paper | $4.99 e-book Jul. 21, 2014 978-1-4828-2444-5
AMERICAN BOYS by Louise Esola.................................................... 219 HOW NOT TO BECOME A SPY by Justin Lifflander....................... 222
A beginner’s guide to the fast-paced world of currency trading. More than $3 trillion changes hands each day in foreign exchange markets, and Abang, in this debut guide, tells how he figured out how to snatch a piece of it. As a career entrepreneur who’s swapped currencies for more than 12 years, he outlines a trading system based on well-established technical indicators. Using straightforward language and easy-to-follow sample charts, he demystifies terms such as “pips” and “spreads” in a brisk introduction to “forex” fundamentals. That’s not to say that he promises readers that they’ll be able to spin straw into gold; he cautions that currency speculation is a risky venture that requires more than just the ability to spot price trends. He also argues that psychological and behavioral factors separate those who reap profits from those who are perennially in the red. The market doesn’t doom traders, he says—traders doom themselves. Abang learned this lesson the hard way after losing money as a novice, and now he seeks to help others avoid common pitfalls. He addresses often ignored subjects such as trading addiction, desperation trading and work-life balance. His central message is that traders must first adopt a proper mental attitude: “[K]nowing your strengths and limitations and fine tuning your emotions and habits to the demands of the job are what will make you a successful trader,” he says. The text’s practical component includes a step-by-step explanation of how to identify buy and sell points by using price tools such as moving averages and convergence/divergence crossovers. The techniques themselves aren’t new, but combined with Abang’s psychological insights, the book is a suitable starting point for newcomers. Because currency trading relies on high amounts of leverage, the book could have devoted more space to sound money management. Still, at fewer than 100 pages, it’s remarkably well-rounded. Most importantly, it confronts the two demons that haunt the brain of every trader: fear and greed. A slender but information-packed primer for those daring enough to enter the world’s largest financial market.
AMERICAN BOYS The True Story of the Lost 74 of the Vietnam War
Esola, Louise Pennway Books (452 pp.) $19.99 paper $9.99 e-book Sep. 2, 2014 978-0-9960574-0-0
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DESTA 3 To Whom the Lions Bow
and is horrified when representatives of a child welfare program rap on his front door and forcibly separate him from his beloved Pa. Alex is put on an orphan train, a service that relocated more than 250,000 vulnerable children from East Coast urban slums to the rural Midwest between 1853 and 1929. After he arrives at his destination, he’s thrown into an experience reminiscent of a cattle auction, in which stern-faced farmers and their wives eye each child carefully for potential adoption. No sooner is he introduced to his new parents than he’s set to work on a farm. A quiet, removed child, Alex finds more solace in nature than he does with his adoptive family. He forges a strong bond with the farm’s workhorses, Delilah and Dandy, and shares all his secrets with them. Avery juxtaposes Alex’s story with that of Will and Libby Pickard, a couple in industrial England. They head for America’s Eastern Seaboard on a ship, the Elijah Swift, and soon become embroiled with the powerful Cambridge family of Baltimore, leading to a number of dark, unexpected plot twists. The author spent several years immersing herself in the history and lifestyle of 19th-century rural America, and it shows; by comparison, the English environments seem quaint, but this doesn’t detract from the overall story. The author’s prose charts a close proximity to the land; for example, in one touching moment, young Alex sifts through dirt and finds a tiny seed. He turns “the seed over several times in his fingers,” sensing its importance without fully understanding its potential to yield new life. On occasions such as these, Avery makes readers remember what it’s like to see aspects of the natural world for the first time. She also captures some of the terse correctness of the classic 19th-century epic novel, but her tone also has a contemporary easiness that makes it approachable and pleasurable. A beautifully written, effortlessly measured historical novel.
Ambau, Getty Falcon Press International (312 pp.) $19.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Jun. 21, 2014 978-1-884459-04-7 The third installment of Ambau’s (Desta and the Winds of Washaa Umera, 2013, etc.) YA fantasy series, set in 1960s Ethiopia, continues the adventures of a young shepherd boy on an epic search to find a magic ancestral coin. The story chronicles approximately three years of teenage Desta’s life after he leaves his home to pursue his education in a distant town. Finding himself homeless with no money, he relies on his positive existential philosophy to overcome the hardships that threaten to derail his dreams of getting an education and finding the twin of a coin that his father possesses. Years earlier, Desta’s grandfather’s spirit revealed that the young man might be the one to fulfill a prophecy of reuniting the two magical coins; King Solomon had made them thousands of years ago for the descendants of his own two children. Desta, who sees the whole world as his extended family, finds work where he can to survive. He gets into a new school and quickly becomes a standout student with a voracious appetite for learning. But after he suffers physical and emotional torment outside of school, he’s forced to ask himself whether his education—and his quest—is worth the steep cost. This story, powered by vivid descriptions of an Ethiopia of decades past, is much more than an allegory about a young boy—it’s a cultural and historical experience. Ambau creates a narrative that has universal thematic appeal but is also undeniably fueled by Ethiopian culture and perspective. For example, when Desta receives unexpected monetary support from an older brother, he says: “This is what the desert must feel like when it receives a sudden shower from out of the blue sky.” This immersive African parable should appeal to young and adult readers alike—even if a bottle of tella and a slice of spiced honey bread aren’t included. An equally entertaining and edifying tale of Africa.
NIGHT AND THE TEXAS SKY Baker, Travis G. CreateSpace (260 pp.) $10.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Mar. 5, 2014 978-1-4961-4815-5
A raw, no-holds-barred novel of rock music, murder and mayhem. University of Maine professor Baker’s raunchy, imaginative debut follows a motley quartet of band mates from a grunge rock group based in Houston, Texas, as they fight, do drugs and cause trouble. Of the four, Zac, the bass guitarist, is the most unsettled. As the story opens, he’s still traumatized by his brother James’ tragic, violent death. He’s contacted by a half-Vietnamese, half-Irish drummer named Sean who’s searching for a bassist for his band, Double Murder Suicide, after the abrupt exoduses of several of its original members. Excited at the prospect, Zac joins the ragtag group, which includes sexually ambiguous, gothic lead singer Kitten, a pierced-tongued child abuse survivor who “wore herself like it was Halloween”; and angry guitarist Raven, a virgin who drives with a 9 mm Glock under the seat of her car. In this
ORPHAN IN AMERICA Avery, Nanette L. CreateSpace (626 pp.) $21.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Aug. 4, 2014 978-1-4954-3340-5
Three generations of a family venture west in this engaging, intricately embroidered 19th-century historical epic by Avery (Jars in a Pioneer Town, 2010, etc.). The novel opens with a young boy, Alex, watching his mother die, marking the beginning of a desperately mournful early life. Despite being raised in abject poverty in a New York slum, he remains steadfastly true to his father 214
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“[Beard’s] cleareyed precision and stark honesty mine the heart and soul of her vulnerability and the natures of human desire, routine and self-control.” from quit or die trying
minimally plotted yet character-rich story, they’re all damaged goods, living on drugs and inspired by rock and roll. Each has great aspirations, but in Baker’s fractured scenario, it could just be the drugs talking. The band scores their first real gig for a professional wrestler named Steele in exchange for a stash of cocaine. Their set is marred by violence, and after fleeing the scene, they regroup at a sex-drenched orgy where Raven loses her virtue. The band’s only remaining hurdle is finding a way to avoid a demanding drug dealer with a foot fetish. In this devilish, capably written debut, Baker manages to inject a good amount of melodrama into his monochromatic world of anger, suppressed childhood memories and displaced aggression. More refined readers may find that this hardscrabble tale of excess pushes the boundaries of decency and good taste. However, fans of authors such as Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh will likely enjoy the author’s nasty sense of humor and keen eye for grit. Many of them will undoubtedly want more adventures from this ragtag rock foursome. A provocative, brazenly vulgar yarn sure to shock the sensitive and delight the daring.
between companies in different industries, from media companies, which tend to be populated by big cats and birds of prey, to the financial sector, where elephants who worry about compliance and regulation dominate. Barnes’ guide will continually amuse readers—whether office newbies or corporate lifers. Read it on your commute to work; engineer an office takeover by lunch.
QUIT OR DIE TRYING Beard, Alison Self Oct. 14, 2014
A relentless, cautionary chronicle of smoking dependency. In this affecting, journal-inspired memoir of cyclical compulsion, Pennsylvania author Beard describes a torturous lifelong waltz with the cold clutches of nicotine addiction. It started early, after her older sister, Tracy, was caught by her mother with a pack of cigarettes in her coat pocket. To appear “cool like everyone else,” Beard took up smoking at age 12, unaware that the habit would haunt her well into adulthood, beginning with collapsing lungs in her early 20s and progressing to agonizing episodes of hypochondria, depression and mood swings. The author’s fiance supported her many attempts to quit, offering nicotine gum and kind words, while her co-workers at a chocolate manufacturing plant were smug and cruel, waving their cigarette packs in the air as she passed. Beard writes with heartfelt honesty about continually wrestling with medicinal patches, doctors and her own cravings, which, at times, consumed her. In this slim memoir, she compresses a great amount of angst-ridden urges, fortitude and determination; using smoking-related historical and medical factoids, she dutifully reminds readers of nicotine’s immensely addictive and physically deteriorative qualities. Her riveting daily struggle to quit evolves through episodes of guilt, shame, success and failure in an internally combustive standoff between “knowing that I needed to quit and an addiction to the pernicious drug that kept me enslaved.” Beard’s all-too-common story will resonate with readers willing and interested in quitting cigarettes, and her fresh, unfettered perspective offers both hope and solidarity. Her cleareyed precision and stark honesty mine the heart and soul of her vulnerability and the natures of human desire, routine and self-control. She firmly resolves to remain an “endurance quitter” who recognizes that the struggle calls for committed, daily baby steps and nearly superhuman willpower. Smart and strikingly veracious.
THRIVE Surviving in a Corporate Jungle
Barnes, Mark Illus. by Clifton, Greg i.Line Design Limited (140 pp.) $11.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Jul. 19, 2014 978-0-9929336-0-9 A field guide to the office jungle. Starting a new job can feel like stepping straight into the lions’ den. Barnes doesn’t do much to dispel those fears in his brief, witty debut, which starts from the assumption that “corporate jungles are inherently dangerous places to work” and then offers tonguein-cheek suggestions for explorers and adventurers who are navigating an unfamiliar and often hostile terrain. “This isn’t a serious book,” the author acknowledges, but the observations and advice are clearly drawn from his experience working for various companies. While the tone is light, there’s a serious aim: to help people “actively enjoy life in the corporate jungle.” Yet the picture he paints of working for a corporation is so bleak (treacherous colleagues will stab you in the back, doing any real work will be virtually impossible, downsizing is a constant risk) that the sensible response seems to be to flee in fear rather than venture into the thicket. Still, the observations, accompanied by Clifton’s charming illustrations, are amusing and often on point. The book’s organization could be improved, however. Throughout, Barnes references a virtual corporate zoo, from ants to snakes, but the chapter on the taxonomy of office wildlife doesn’t appear until the last third of the book. He also assumes that most corporations operate in fundamentally the same way, with arcane rules, numerous roadblocks and hidden minefields, though it’s not clear that’s actually the case. The final chapter, however, does highlight some of the differences |
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NIPUTI...THE NEPHEW Life Under a Shadow of a Mafia Killer
Chai’s first book in English seems intended to repay a debt of sorts. As he sees it, the United States has twice saved South Korea from disaster in the 20th century, and the Asian country owes its educational success, at least in part, to American support. Now, their respective national roles seem reversed; educational outcomes in America continue to rapidly decline, while South Korea’s have become a global example of educational efficiency. According to the author, the U.S. remains an education leader, particularly with respect to its private schools and universities, but it chronically flounders when it comes to serving low-income, urban minorities. He also argues that although American teachers are often woefully underpaid, public schools suffer from systemic problems that can’t be fixed solely with money. He holds up the Korean approach, despite its reputation for relentlessly pressuring its overworked students, as a model that the U.S. might emulate. “Many people, especially foreign visitors, mention that Korean schools...are too intense....Despite the current imperfections of the Korean education approach, there are a few things people in other cultures can learn from it.” Some ways the U.S. can follow Korea’s lead, he says, are administrative; for example, he believes that the federal government should increase emphases on math, science and technology. Much of his counsel, though, focuses on cultural disparity: American parents, he says, need to take a more proactive role in their children’s schooling, and society needs to hold teachers in greater esteem. Throughout this book, Chai’s analysis is clear, shorn of any partisan ideology, and he’s effectively armed with his own personal experiences attending Korean, Japanese and American schools. He also includes inspirational tales—case studies of disadvantaged Korean students who achieved impressive scholastic success. As a former teacher and economist, he provides a unique perspective on the U.S.’s educational troubles, and he provides fine recommendations on how to use Korea’s successes to rehabilitate the American system. A rare find: a cool-headed assessment of American education that’s both nonpartisan and multicultural.
Bonpensiero, Joe Manuscript
Bonpensiero (Chocolate Moon, 2011), a retired Sicilian-American Air Force officer, seeks to bury the hatchet about his mobster uncle in this tightly knit narrative. In the 1970s, while serving in the Air Force, Bonpensiero was hit with news of his uncle’s murder through a high-profile article in Time magazine. Uncle Frank was a mobster, a black sheep from whom the author had been trying to distance himself. Looking to provide some closure and to counteract clichés about the Sicilian community, Bonpensiero delivers a detailed account of his family history with a focus on his notorious relative. Working with anecdotes and personal recollections, he describes a childhood growing up in San Diego’s Little Italy in the 1940s. His father, Salvatore, aka Sammy or Turi, started out as a fisherman, but ill health rerouted his career to that of a successful businessman managing a string of restaurants and bars in the city. Frank’s disreputable activities always cast a shadow on Sammy’s businesses, however, leading the authorities to routinely come sniffing. As niputi (nephew), the author was witness to his uncle’s bullying tactics, his “You ask, I give, you owe!” methods of extortion and forced allegiance. Even more frustrating for the boy was his father’s endless patience with his difficult brother. While the account might suffer from a surfeit of anecdotes and some language that comes close to political incorrectness, Bonpensiero succeeds in painting a picture of a closely knit immigrant community and a wayward son who, to put it mildly, regularly tried everyone’s nerves. Along the way, readers see the unfolding of an American life, one colored by the Sicilian immigrant experience. The trinakria, an icon borrowed from the Greeks, graces the beginning of every chapter—a reminder, Bonpensiero says, that Sicilians are of mixed Greek heritage, that “Sicilians are/were a distinct people from the Italians, with or without the Mafia.” An entertaining narrative that sheds light on family ties and a distinctive cultural identity.
OUT OF THE DARKNESS AND INTO THE BLUE Surprising Secrets, Tactics, and Training Concepts: A Memoir from One of Kalamazoo’s Top Cops Christensen, Robert T. CreateSpace (286 pp.) $19.99 paper | $11.49 e-book May 22, 2014 978-1-4953-0105-6
OBAMA PRAISES THE “KOREAN EDUCATION FERVOR” Should We Emulate It?
Chai, Ju- Chun CreateSpace (116 pp.) $8.00 paper | $8.00 e-book | Jul. 3, 2014 978-1-4961-9347-6
A Michigan police officer recounts 25 years of nabbing suspects and terrifying life-or-death moments. Christensen has seen enough danger for many lifetimes. His gritty, often shocking memoir describes the hazards and heroics of being a cop in Lawrence and Kalamazoo, Michigan, from 1988 to 2012. Always eager for difficult assignments, Christensen worked the most violent inner-city neighborhoods. As if
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this wasn’t perilous enough, Christensen also served as a firefighter, EMT and an Army Reserve soldier, once volunteering to go to Afghanistan as a combat adviser. The book opens with a graphic account of how, as a young officer, Christensen was badly beaten by a drunk driver. Though he managed to knock the suspect unconscious with a last-ditch knee strike to the face, the incident spurred a lifelong desire to improve his battle readiness. This desire would serve him well as he confronted nightmarish situations—encountering bullet-ridden murder victims, managing enraged rioters near Western Michigan University, delivering a baby in a hotel laundry room. Christensen is a gifted storyteller with a penchant for grisly details worthy of a detective novel. Once while assisting at the scene of a fatal car crash, Christensen helped remove bodies from the wreckage: “We simply placed three gut piles into three separate body bags. The backseat passenger was literally scraped off the back seat with gloved hands. There was nothing to pick up. I just scooped up guts in my hands and flung them into the body bag.” Christensen states he doesn’t intend his story to be an instructional guide, but there is a significant teaching component to the book. He offers tips for fellow officers on topics ranging from traffic-stop safety to career planning. More importantly, civilian readers will gain a deeper understanding of what police officers face. The danger cannot be overstated—more than 4,200 officers died in the line of duty during the author’s career. Christensen writes candidly about the emotional and psychological aspects of the job. His personal revelations shatter more than one stereotype about law enforcement. A sinewy, stomach-twisting memoir that shows it takes more than a badge and gun to be a cop.
songs and traditions, including its own Torahs; and “Enlarging the Tent,” describing CBST’s continuing embrace of diversity among its members and its plans for the future. The many personal glimpses of CBST members scattered throughout this account add much interest, poignancy and humor. Several early members mention how freeing it was to avoid the prying questions during oneg (a useful glossary is appended for gentiles), the social/cultural hour after services in which members might be asked, for instance, if they were getting married. A heartbreaking number—nearly half the original male members—of in memoriam notices are reproduced for AIDS-related deaths, but, in a heartening statistic, baby-naming ceremonies “far outpaced AIDS funerals” by the early 2000s. Cohen is honest about the disagreements that were part of CBST’s growth, such as inclusion of women, and how the organization is still changing—for example, the basic issue of confidentiality, so important to early members, has altered with time: “It wasn’t until the 2000s that mail from CBST began to bear the synagogue’s name on the envelope, a change that some members found startling even then.” But what comes through most strongly is the congregation’s feeling that at CBST they’ve found a home—an inclusive, welcoming home that takes its spiritual and social responsibilities seriously, with a side of joy and song. Well-written, valuable history of a unique synagogue at the crux of social change.
A CUP OF HEMLOCK A Detective Toussaint Mystery Curley, Clyde Manuscript
CHANGING LIVES, MAKING HISTORY Congregation Beit Simchat Torah
The clues are few and the suspects are many in this whodunit by Curley (Raggedy Man, 2012). History teacher Nicholas Lehrer is mysteriously shot dead in his classroom at Monroe High School in Oregon just before the end of the academic year, and detectives Matthew Toussaint and Missy Owens are assigned to investigate his murder. The killing of “Mr. Nick,” who seems to have been beloved by his students and respected by his fellow teachers, shocks the community. But as Toussaint and Owens dig deeper into the case, they find that not everyone was a fan of the 10-year teaching veteran. Lehrer made plenty of enemies due to his unconventional methods and his passionate opposition to new state standards that left no room for teacher discretion or students’ individual learning styles. The suspects soon pile up: There’s DeVon Carter, a once-promising senior who won’t graduate because of a failing grade in Lehrer’s class; principal Terry McManus, who resented the teacher for standing in the way of instituting the new standards; Molly Easley, the meth-addict mother of Lehrer’s former student who killed himself earlier in the year; high school football coach Joe Chudo, who loathed the instructor for convincing his star player to give up the sport; and Kenny Knutsen, a hotheaded father who complained that
Cohen, Rabbi Ayelet S. Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (320 pp.) $23.81 | Sep. 23, 2014 978-0-9794009-1-9 This wonderfully illustrated volume looks back on four decades at a groundbreaking New York City synagogue and its LGBTQS—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, straight—community. Rabbi Cohen served the Congregation Beit Simchat Torah for 10 years, first as a rabbinical intern, then as rabbinic partner with Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum. In this fascinating, welldocumented history, Cohen traces the development of CBST from its earliest beginnings in a 1973 Village Voice ad: “Gay Synagogue, Friday Night Service and Oneg Shabbat, Feb. 9, 8:00 pm.” A dozen men showed up. Today, Yom Kippur services draw over 4,000 people. Cohen divides her book into three main sections: “The Early Years,” covering CBST’s efforts to find a home, deal with the AIDS crisis and find a rabbi; “Building the Sanctuary,” addressing how CBST came to develop liturgy, |
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“Di Cola helps us isolate and understand why we have such a difficult time accepting our individual beauty.” from “ you are photogenic”
Lehrer was indoctrinating his daughter with ideas that went against God and country. Overall, this novel isn’t a revolutionary example of its genre; it moves forward at a rhythm familiar to anyone who regularly watches television detective shows. That said, it still packs a unique punch, thanks to the author’s insights from his former career as a high school English teacher, which makes it hard to put down. He effectively explores the tension between what government, administrators and parents think is best for young people and what actually is best for them. Readers who don’t have backgrounds in the world of education will have the sense of a curtain being pulled back, revealing a consequential, dramatic world they never knew existed. A worthy, suspenseful crime novel set in the world of education.
lives. The notion that our sense of self is heavily based on our outward appearances can initially be an overwhelming concept, especially because it’s so ingrained within our society. Di Cola helps us isolate and understand why we have such a difficult time accepting our individual beauty. Combining thorough research, personal insights and photo galleries of numerous internationally known celebrities, Di Cola has created a thoughtful work on the perception of physical beauty.
THE DOG AND THE DOLPHIN Dworkin, James B. Illus. by Chelich, Michael CreateSpace (36 pp.) $9.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Jun. 30, 2014 978-1-4947-0254-0
“YOU ARE PHOTOGENIC” Discover Your True Self with Photo-Image in the Age of the Selfie (Color Version)
In this delightful children’s picture book by a veteran educator, a dog’s best friend has fins, not fur. A lively Irish setter’s frolicsome day at the beach would be even better with a buddy to share it with. On this sunny, lazy day, silky-coated Red is on his own, nosing at seashells, chasing sea gulls and pelicans, and sailboats, small planes and the rolling waves. Red doesn’t have anyone with whom to share his fun. When he sees something leaping in and out of the waves, he’s intrigued—as young readers will be when they turn the next few pages and consider the author’s teasing possibilities, vividly illustrated by Chelich: “A swimmer?” “A shark or swordfish?” “A sea monster?” No, it’s a frisky dolphin who turns out to be as curious about Red as the pup is about him. In no time, the odd couple is frolicking in the water and playing Frisbee “keep away” until the sun goes down. The two new best friends look forward to the next day so that they can do it all over again. Dworkin’s simple, uncloying language is pitch-perfect, as are the beautiful illustrations by gifted artist Chelich, who delights the eye with soft-textured, deftly observed images of animals and objects in a natural setting. Ideal for children pre-K through the third grade, this charming dog-meets-dolphin picture book finds simplicity and heart in both words and illustrations. Simple, child-savvy language and painterly, frameworthy illustrations that dog-loving adults will appreciate, too.
Di Cola, Pina CreateSpace (192 pp.) $26.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Aug. 27, 2014 978-1-4949-2148-4
Debunking the myth that some are just born “photogenic,” author and professional photographer Di Cola investigates the nature of beauty and the empowering concept of the “photo-image.” With decades of experience photographing stars from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Mariska Hargitay, Di Cola has seen her fair share of good-looking mugs. She explains that the best way to photograph anyone isn’t about a particular angle or set of lights; rather, it’s about revealing the beauty within that person. However, she argues that no one can accurately see themselves unless they invest in understanding and procuring a “photoimage,” which is essentially Di Cola’s version of an unfiltered, honest portrait that is neither refracted nor altered. In daily life, when we look into mirrors, we are seeing a flipped image of ourselves. When we see ordinary photographs, we often feel that they are not accurate representations of us, and so we claim that we are not photogenic. However, with a series of neatly laid out chapters and elegant photo insertions, Di Cola makes the case that everyone is photogenic. The problem is not with the image but rather our perception of that image. By having a solid sense of who we are and what we look like, we allow our full beauty to become evident. Without name-dropping, Di Cola weaves anecdotes from her life as a photographer with her personal and professional insights. She supports her claims for the “photo-image” and our skewed perceptions of ourselves in mirrors with extensive research and physics footnotes. The book acts simultaneously as an endorsement of Di Cola’s services and as a meditative, reflective work. Why do we accede so easily to the perceptions of others? What does it take to give us a solid, genuine sense of self? Perhaps most intriguingly, the book serves to document the sheer power of imagery in our 218
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AMERICAN BOYS The True Story of the Lost 74 of the Vietnam War
FALL SEMESTER
Fournet, Stephanie CreateSpace (368 pp.) $14.00 paper | $3.99 e-book Aug. 2, 2014 978-1-5002-4491-0
Esola, Louise Pennway Books (452 pp.) $19.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 2, 2014 978-0-9960574-0-0
A novel about an affair between a student and a professor and how both choose to cope with love and loss. At the start of Fournet’s debut novel, 34-year-old Malcolm Vashal, a professor of Central and South American literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is morbidly depressed. He hasn’t written or published in years, his marriage to his wife, J.J., has recently ended, and he feels miserable teaching at the university. In fact, his depression has gotten so bad that he’s obtained a handgun and is considering suicide. Everything starts to change, however, when he meets 24-year-old Maren Gardner, an alluring new graduate student who’s transferred in from Denver in order to be closer to her dying father. It doesn’t take long before Malcolm and Maren realize that they have a crush on each other. Both carefully navigate how to handle their developing relationship, as well as how to balance it with the other happenings in their lives. Overall, this is a lovely read. Although it grapples with death, depression and heartbreak, it’s also a heartwarming, hopeful romantic story that highlights the unmistakable power of love. The author creates a vivid, believable environment, including very specific details about the university’s English department (Maren takes “St. Martin and MacIntosh’s poetry workshop, Russo’s transcendentalists class, and Dr. Sheridan’s Romantics seminar”), the people involved in it and the places they frequent. The novel’s only major weak point is its occasionally old-fashioned language, particularly in its sex scenes (“He circled a finger over her pubic bone before dipping it into her sex”), which feels awkward in the otherwise tightly written narrative. An often endearing love story, much like those in Hollywood’s best rom-coms.
This is history at its best: the riveting, realistic story of courageous sailors forgotten by their country. During an exercise in the South China Sea on June 3, 1969, the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans was split in half after colliding with an Australian aircraft carrier. Seventy-four men perished. Although the ship was actively engaged in the Vietnam War, the names of these men have never been placed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. In her first book, seasoned journalist Esola brings the events and people involved vividly to life. She begins with a double-barreled prologue: first, a powerful description of the memorial wall, ending with Ann Armstrong Dailey’s realization that her brother Alan’s name is not on it. “It was like he was dead all over again,” their sister said. Next, a gripping account of the ship’s final moments puts readers right in the middle of the action: “Everything was going, rolling, topsy turvy. And fast.” What follows is a comprehensive yet uncannily personal history of this arcane footnote to the Vietnam War. Esola inhabits the minds and hearts of all players, from sailors to admirals to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Many men, she discovers, joined the Navy (some at the behest of their parents) to avoid being drafted into the Army. She moves easily from their personal stories to politics to the reasons WWII vintage ships like the Evans—a “floating paint bucket”—were still in service. The story proceeds from the men’s enlistments and the ship’s role in Vietnam through to the accident and its aftermath. Later, Esola’s own growing involvement forces her to abandon journalistic detachment and join the effort to have these men recognized. Replete with black-and-white pictures, endnotes and incredibly detailed research, this book is both comprehensive history and a beautifully written human tale that reads like a novel: “Eunice Sage wore a short-sleeved black suit and matching gloves; a gold rose pinned to the center of her blouse glistened in the sun.” It should appeal not only to readers of military history, but to anyone who enjoys a well-told, fascinating tale. An intriguing, well-written and poignant work that transcends its historical genre.
STARTUP WEALTH The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Personal Financial Success and Long-Term Security Franklin, Joyce L. Rubydon Press (228 pp.) $15.95 paper | $8.99 e-book Jun. 26, 2014 978-0-9916172-2-7
A guide to the financial aspects of entrepreneurship, both personal and corporate. In this debut business book, Franklin draws heavily on interviews with veteran entrepreneurs willing to share the lessons they’ve learned. She also makes use of her own accounting and financial planning background to explore the areas entrepreneurs need to consider as they attempt to expand their businesses. The |
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“The ending offers a resolution, but the Phoenix Order’s expansive background is a literary hotbed for sequels.” from the c enigma
book breaks entrepreneurship into a three-phase cycle, from the initial idea to realizing the dream. Much of Franklin’s advice is focused on the “liquidity event,” the merger, acquisition or IPO that generally means a significant windfall for the founder. The book guides readers through the financial structures of such events, explaining both the contractual restrictions, e.g., stock vesting, as well as the tax implications of the large payouts. The extended sidebars and the main narrative incorporate advice from experienced entrepreneurs, some of whom have founded and sold multiple companies, as they share both their mistakes and their successes. The book’s audience is a relatively narrow one: Franklin restricts her discussion to technology companies, nearly all in the Silicon Valley area, and there are frequent references to entrepreneurs’ tendencies to work long days for little initial pay, driven by passion and/or the expectation of an eventual financial return. Readers who don’t fall into those categories might see limited value in the book. But those in the early stages of their own startups will find the book a useful tool, with its discussion of everything from key points to cover in negotiations with venture capitalists to reasons why founders should diversify their holdings as soon as they are able to begin selling the stock they hold in their companies. A comprehensive handbook to the financial decisions that founders of technology companies must make, strengthened by a knowledgeable author and extensive expert interviews.
character made even creepier by the mystery obscuring him (Albert isn’t even his real name). The story’s pliable timeline— moving from the end of World War II to the late 1980s to 2008—complements Matthias’ global trek, as the Sanctum tracks down key members of the Phoenix Order. The narrative does unfortunately become a bit confusing when names and dates are muddled: Matthias’ birthday is initially in May but later given as January; his surname alternates between Adkins and Atkins; his grandmother’s name changes from Carolyn to Caroline and then to Cynthia, which is also his mother’s name; and Thomas’ year of death is noted as both 1988 and 1978. Gratsias clarifies a number of historical references via footnotes, while the abundance of newspaper articles, websites and Wikipedia entries that characters, particularly Matthias and Linda, peruse are properly cited, also in footnotes. The ending offers a resolution, but the Phoenix Order’s expansive background is a literary hotbed for sequels. A myriad of codes and riddles provide a solid amount of enjoyment for fans of mysteries or espionage thrillers.
TRANSMUTATION Haakenson, Brad Manuscript Oct. 1, 2014
On probation for his computer hacking abilities, a young American becomes an alchemist and discovers his powers are far greater and more mysterious than he could have imagined. Combining the mythological weight of Highlander with the pop-cultural magic of the Harry Potter series, this novel is as much about the wizardry inside the laboratory as it is about the centuries-old weights of family and responsibility. Ian Lloyd is a somewhat introverted teen who, after losing his leg in an accident, spends the majority of his life online and in his room. On probation after he’s busted for hacking, he begins to develop a social life and other interests, including a steady girlfriend, and has a chance encounter with a seemingly hippieflavored alchemy demonstration. Fascinated by the process of alchemy, he signs up for more in-depth classes just as his mother gets sick and dies. Alchemy, however, is more than just a distracting hobby; almost immediately, Ian begins to manifest amazing objects by following the whims of his “talent,” exceeding the abilities of his fellow students and teacher. Soon after, Ian creates a genuine “Philosopher’s Stone,” and a mysterious fellow named Cagliostro shows up after class, and Ian discovers his own true destiny is equal parts glamour and danger. With an intriguing mythology, a gripping opening and believably flawed yet lovable characters, Haakenson’s book is equally grounded in reality and mystical fantasy. The idea of the philosophers’ stone ingeniously fits in this context, as it elegantly explores how family can be both a hindrance and a loving aide to anyone with exceptional imagination and ability. Although the prose is straightforward, it is never slack, and dialogue elegantly
The C ENIGMA
Gratsias, Spiros CreateSpace (312 pp.) $14.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2014 978-1-4996-2560-8 In Gratsias’ debut historical thriller, an anthropologist learns that his family may be linked to a decadeslong war between good and evil. Dr. Matthias Adkins, head of the University of Colorado’s sociocultural anthropology research department, makes a shocking discovery in his grandmother’s attic. A hidden box that belonged to his late grandfather Thomas contains a photo of an unknown German naval officer, an Iron Cross, and a leather notebook with codes and symbols. He and his live-in girlfriend, Linda, identify the officer as Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed in 1945 for working against the Nazi regime, while Thomas’ codes and riddles take Matthias to Boston, Argentina and France. It seems that Matthias is destined to join the Phoenix Order—a secret group created by Canaris—to protect the order’s sacred relics. Matthias needs to find the hidden relics, but he must first elude the Sanctum, an evil society tied to the Nazi Party. In Gratsias’ historically rich mystery/thriller, watching Matthias and Linda decrypt Thomas’ coded messages is both enjoyable and intriguing (the codes certainly aren’t easy to solve), while the Sanctum’s Albert Moreno, a killer who targets Matthias, is an unsettling 220
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JUMPING THE LINE
advances the story: “But the curtains. Why did they put them up if they don’t know about the stone?” Ian asks. “I told Stanley that you are doing blind research,” Cagliostro tells him. “He put the curtains up to protect everyone else if things go wrong for you.” Ian’s personal travails in love, both the romantic and familial kinds, flesh out his humanity, making him a relatable and slightly power-hungry hero. With a deliciously complex back story and relatable emotional qualms, this mystical tale pairs the best elements of fantasy with the tender resonance of a coming-ofage story.
Harpold, Michael G. Book Publishers Network (275 pp.) $16.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Nov. 19, 2013 978-1-940598-05-5 A heart-rending novel by a former U.S. Border Patrol agent that explores how Mexican migrant workers are willing to endanger their lives for the prospect of better ones in America. After legal Mexican migrant labor is discontinued in 1965, Miguel’s first illegal entry into the United States terrifies him. A kindly farmer takes him in, but his Mexican-American farmhand, Ohscar, is so desperate to maintain his own family’s newfound financial stability that he reports Miguel’s presence to the Border Patrol, with disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, Ohscar’s teenage son Javier has few social or education options. In an act of rebellion, he agrees to be the driver for the moronic Chuy, a “coyote” who smuggles undocumented immigrants across the border and who foolishly wants to branch out into drugs. The lives of these three men and their families intersect for the next three decades as they experience successes and frequent misfortunes. They’re complex characters who occasionally do wrong things, but they all realize their errors or pay the price for them (with the exception of the irredeemably evil Chuy). Harpold’s sympathetic account touches on union organizing and Cesar Chavez, but more extensively explicates the naïvete, vulnerability and desperation of workers and the exploitation they still experience despite myriad changes in policy and law—not just from employers, but from “coyotes” as well. Harpold, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, interestingly depicts agents as vindictive and officious. If the novel has a flaw, however, it’s that it portrays some of its Mexican characters as almost childlike in their naïvete. Overall, this sad but realistic tale challenges its readers to examine the stereotypes of migrant workers and undocumented immigrants and the ultimate costs of cheap labor. A debut novel about a timely issue elucidated with an insider’s understanding and sensitivity.
BINNACLE BAY
Harker, S.C. CreateSpace (222 pp.) $9.95 paper | $2.99 e-book | Aug. 6, 2014 978-1-5007-0409-4 Harker’s debut mystery explores shocking murders in a small coastal town. Binnacle Bay Police Chief Pat Fitzlaff knows something is wrong when he receives a call about Gus Murdoch and his wife, Sasha—who happens to be Pat’s ex-girlfriend. When he arrives at their home on the beach, he finds Gus’ lifeless body but no trace of Sasha. The one living creature he does find is an enormous shaggy dog no one even knew the Murdochs had. The dog, Murphy, becomes his companion as he investigates the mystery of Gus’ death and Sasha’s disappearance. Pat relies on the help of his friend Dylan Hunter, along with his very attractive sister Claire, but he can’t shake the suspicion that they might be hiding something from him. As Pat delves further into the case, he must contend with the relentless rumor mill of Binnacle Bay, which isn’t making his job any easier; when his boss learns of his past relationship with Sasha, he threatens to take Pat off the case. Despite these obstacles, Pat perseveres, eventually uncovering a tangled web of stolen cash, a gang boss’s mistress and desperate fugitives. Some readers may feel that Harker’s prose at times sounds quaint or old-fashioned. For example, the usually abbreviated words “missus” and “mister” are spelled out here. Some phrases—“There was about it something that was at once bleak and yet ever so hopeful,” “he had a serenely oriental face,” etc.—often seem idiosyncratic. However, these moments are offset by instances of subtle humor or charming imagery, as when Pat says, “[M]y mom used to tell me those little wind devils were lost spirits finding their way to heaven.” They help achieve a sense of balance that should keep readers engaged. Harker skillfully develops the atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest coastal town, and while the ending isn’t exactly a shocker, her lively pacing combines with the individual quirks of her characters to offer a realistic portrayal of a small-town community. Vivid setting and animated characters create a satisfying mystery.
BLOOD FEUD
Harris, Daniel Rosedog Books (178 pp.) $18.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 17, 2012 978-1-4349-7383-2 Control of a successful, multigenerational family enterprise fuels this rousing tale of greed, animosity and corporate rivalry. Harris’ (Capital Crimes, 2002, etc.) third novel follows the churning melodrama surrounding the Galetti clan’s $2 billion supermarket chain. Right from the opening pages, there’s a legal battle brewing between co-CEOs |
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and estate heirs Joe Galetti and his deceased brother Dom’s wife, Maria, over stocks and profits the company has made and failed to share with her side of the family. The story’s narrator, Galetti company executive Russell Riley, is curiously not a blood relative but rather a faithful employee who becomes embroiled in the family’s domestic disputes. Riley’s version of events contributes a unique, semioutsider’s perspective of the tense squabble, which is presented with an effective combination of presentday court proceedings paired with Riley’s fond flashbacks of growing up with Dom as a boy in the Galetti flagship market outside Boston and then, as an adult, while tensions grew as the business expanded. As the court case simmers, Joe becomes an embittered tyrant, and truths are revealed about the business and the nature of familial loyalty. Peripheral yet richly drawn characters—Joe’s genial nephew Trip; Helen Cortez, a highly compromised court clerk; demure law partner Diane Dunbar; scorned business partner Maria—add texture and flourishes of levity to a familial melodrama that intensifies as Harris amps up the messy courtroom antics in the novel’s fiery, scandalous and surprising conclusion. With an economy of words and spry dialogue, Harris’ novel doesn’t skimp on action, subtle romance or satisfying suspense. A sordid tale of sparring bloodlines that will entertain fans of family dramas.
activities, like the Americans’ intermittently moving a trio of pink flamingos for no other reason than to keep the ever observing Soviets guessing. Lifflander’s predicament became considerably dourer when the KGB suspected he was an intelligence officer, though it was a hilarious misunderstanding: He was digging through basement walls in an American building searching for a bug merely out of boredom. The book’s final act, however, which centers on Lifflander and Sofia’s (and Sofia’s son, Max) trying to make a future together, turns somber and somewhat depressing. The story’s still engaging, though, even without the laughs, thanks to Lifflander, whose refusal to give up on a life with Sofia is something to be admired. Lifflander includes a number of black-andwhite photographs to complement the text, but his descriptions are so dynamic and graphic that the pictures aren’t necessary; for instance, when Lifflander and Sofia walk into a cathedral and a “sea of babushkas,” readers will already have the image. A real-life Cold War tale filled with nostalgia, exuberance and satirical wit.
UNEXPECTED ODYSSEY Danzig To Tennessee Luehning, Klaus V. KVL Press Jul. 18, 2014
HOW NOT TO BECOME A SPY A Memoir of Love At the End of the Cold War
The sweeping memoirs of a Polish immigrant. Luehning reflects fondly on a supremely brimful life beginning with his birth in 1940 in the northern Polish town of Zoppot, mere months after the start of World War II. His father, a conductor and classical pianist–turned-soldier, disappeared during wartime, leaving Luehning’s mother to single-handedly raise him and his younger sister, Heike. They eventually relocated to Hoechst, near Frankfurt, Germany, and then immigrated via military troop ship to Brooklyn, New York, in 1947. The author’s prose shines best when regaling us with stories of his grade school days, family trips to Times Square and the family pizza shop. He also tells of various rollicking teenage adventures at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, where he later graduated as a distinguished maritime engineer. Those years were a crucial watershed in his life, encouraging him to “identify my ambition in cold logic and to work my ass off to succeed.” The remainder of the memoir is comprised of smoothly told anecdotes on a series of ships, a stiff reunion with his father, a marriage and divorce, a struggle with sobriety and a stint in graduate school. Luehning later became an executive chef and owned and operated several gourmet restaurants for nearly a decade. His journey concludes with his mother’s tragic death and his retirement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Photographs of the author’s family and of the ships on which he sailed provide vibrant visual references along the way. Running parallel to his own memories are those of his mother, “Mutti,” penned in 1988. They independently form a dramatic, candid chronicle worthy of its own stand-alone memoir, supplementing the emotional depth of the family legacy while offering
Lifflander, Justin Gilbo Shed (282 pp.) $14.00 paper | $4.49 e-book Sep. 9, 2014 978-0-692-25994-8
Lifflander’s debut memoir of his time as an aspiring spy in Moscow, where he fell in love with a Russian woman who may have been keeping an eye on him for the KGB. Lifflander thought his dream of being a spy had come true when, as a recent graduate in 1987, he got a job as a driver/ mechanic at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He was soon assigned to the On-Site Inspection Agency, part of the treaty between the USSR and U.S. to eliminate nuclear missiles; essentially, the American OSIA ensured that the Soviets were implementing the treaty. Sofia was one of the Soviet “escorts,” comprised mostly of young ladies who oversaw the U.S. inspectors while also (covertly) watching for potential intelligence-gathering. Lifflander and Sofia tried to hide their developing romance but quickly realized that hiding a relationship isn’t easy when you’re surrounded by spies. Both the author’s title and foreword hint at the story’s tongue-incheek approach: Lifflander refers to the USSR’s alarming shortage of socks as the “sock crisis”; and he notes that a chef at the missile inspection facility graduated from the CIA—the Culinary Institute of America. But Lifflander doesn’t force the humor; it’s derived from the absurdity of countless situations and twisted 222
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LUCIFER’S DRUM
an added perspective on the era. Luehning, now 74, has clearly led an extraordinary life, and reading his memoir is like spending the weekend with a friendly, war-veteran anecdotalist. This tome not only entertains, but also reflects the fortitude and perseverance needed to survive life’s storm fronts. An exhaustive, meticulously detailed memoir of a passionate American that is sure to challenge and delight many readers.
MacKinnon, Bernie Pine Badge Press (794 pp.) $25.95 paper | $7.99 e-book | Jul. 28, 2014 978-0-9860774-0-1 Nineteenth-century federal agents hunt for a vicious murderer in the midst of the Civil War in MacKinnon’s (Song for a Shadow, 1991, etc.) historical novel. In 1864, Maj. Nathaniel Truly of the National Detective Police and Capt. Bart Forbes of the Bureau of Military Information are trying to stop newspaper editor/owner Gideon Van Gilder, a Confederate sympathizer, from fleeing the Union. But when they intercept Van Gilder’s coach, they find the man dead inside, his body mutilated. They link an associate of his to U.S. Rep. Ezra Underhill of Maryland, but a letter written by Van Gilder is most illuminating—vaguely suggesting that he and other men, including Underhill and a detective, are being blackmailed. After another man is murdered, Truly and Forbes search for the blackmailer in order to prevent another killing. The author layers the story with extensive historical background, including such notable events as Lt. Gen. Jubal Early leading Rebel cavalry toward Washington, D.C. The perspective shifts from the investigation to the Confederate army’s preparations and march, but the murder mystery offers the more invigorating story, featuring moments of dark humor: Forbes finds a photograph of a recent murder victim and states bluntly and with no sign of mockery, “Here’s how he looked with his face on.” The military story gradually takes over, but the investigation is never completely sidelined and remains intriguing until the end. Significant secondary characters include Sapphira, a young black woman whom Truly bought at a slave auction, freed and raised as his own daughter; and real-life historical figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, who discusses the attempted Capitol seizure with fellow Confederate William Norris. MacKinnon keeps the plot moving at a steady tempo with an agent going undercover, an abduction and even more murders. Readers should brace themselves for a hefty read, however, as the book clocks in at nearly 800 pages. An epic novel in which the historical and thriller elements enrich each other.
A NEW TAXONOMY The Seven Law Firm Business Models
MacEwen, Bruce Adam Smith, Esq., LLC (116 pp.) $14.95 paper | May 14, 2014 978-0-615-91419-0 An analytically rigorous but accessible guide to the shifting world of big law. MacEwen (Growth is Dead: Now What?, 2013) has built a strong reputation within the legal industry as an innovative thinker. He practiced law for years in New York, founded the popular website AdamSmithEsq. com and has written for numerous periodicals about legal issues. In his second book, he parses “Big Law” into its elemental, commercial parts, detailing the basic categories of law firms, including “Global Players,” “Capital Markets” and “Boutiques.” He proceeds in the spirit of biological taxonomy, linking his approach to the Linnaean method of classifying different types of natural life. He aims to use the taxonomy not only to describe these firms, but also to demonstrate the evolving nature of competition in the legal sphere: “I believe an analogy to biological classification is useful...because there’s competition within species (between individual firms who are essentially alike) as well as competition across species (between, e.g., global firms and boutiques).” For the firms themselves, understanding these classifications, and their places within them, is necessary to gauge their target audiences and to market themselves effectively to prospective clients. The author deftly presents each of the seven types, highlighting its unique characteristics, its advantages and disadvantages, and its “managerial priorities.” He concludes with an engaging, original view about the future of law firm competition partly inspired by Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibria theory”: “We have enjoyed a long period of stasis, but now we may be at the start of a period of intense speciation, with new forms of life emerging—some of which will prove adaptive and survive and others of which will be rejected by the antibodies of the marketplace.” Even for the nonexpert, MacEwen’s prose is clear and mercifully free of gratuitous jargon. A sharp, concise meditation on the business of law and, by extension, an important commentary on the state of the economy as a whole.
THE LAST SICARIUS
Mayhall Jr., Van R. iUniverse (372 pp.) $30.95 | $20.95 paper | $1.99 e-book Feb. 6, 2014 978-1-4917-2108-7 Ancient languages professor Dr. Cloe Lejeune returns to stop an evil organization from locating a cave of oil jars crucial to the survival of Christianity in Mayhall’s (Judas the Apostle, 2013) latest religious thriller. |
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Cloe is translating parts of an old journal that may have been written by an apostle chronicling three years in the life of Christ. The documents were found in ancient oil jars, one bequeathed by her late father and the other from the Sicarii, a group protecting a cave reputedly filled with similar jars. Pope Francis enlists Cloe to find the elusive cave, since proof of the apostle’s diary might have the power to either confirm or refute the Gospels. He also hopes to find the cave before a villainous enterprise; Cloe has already dealt with its murderous leader, the Kolektor, but he’s gone, replaced by his former servant, the Karik, as well as a mysterious heir. Cloe, her military son, J.E., and Monsignor Albert Roques join Swiss Guards in tracking down the cave. The author’s novel is rife with mystery, as Cloe’s group uncovers a myriad of clues, from tunnels in the Church of St. John in France to a burial site in Tunisia, Africa. Mystery even surrounds some of the characters, particularly Miguel, who’s trailing the Karik (and by extension, Cloe and the others) for killing his family with a bomb intended for him; the reason he’s initially a target doesn’t come to light until later. Mayhall recaps his previous novel thoroughly but nonintrusively, opening with momentum (the Sicarii facing the advancing Romans in A.D. 70) and relaying the earlier plot in snippets as the story progresses. Cloe is a commendable protagonist, more than proving her worth intellectually but also handling herself physically; she shows that a high heel can be a weapon, too. While the strongest scenes involve Cloe’s making her way to the cave using the Sicarii’s cryptic signs and biblical verses, the novel has its share of action, including a plane that goes down and a standoff with gunfire and grenades. Once again, Mayhall wraps everything up quite nicely while leaving the story open for another sequel. Reading the preceding novel isn’t a requirement, though this volume will likely inspire readers to do so. An exhilarating companion piece to the first in the series.
her gather acorns and leaves, as Tree requested; at the same time, Cornerback is busy training a new puppy and building a tree fort with his best friend. It’s a leap year, and on Feb. 29, a rare lunar eclipse is set to occur; it’s also Cornerback’s, his father’s and his grandmother’s birthdays. The young man sneaks out to the forest to watch the celestial sight—and soon ends up joining Cat, the forest creatures and trees in a fight against the Dark Shadow. The novel relays its conservation message in an original way, although younger readers might miss it in all the action. While talking animals are fairly common in fiction, talking trees (which are a bit more mobile than average plants) lend the book a magical feel, as does Cornerback’s ability to understand animal languages. At times, Cat’s and Cornerback’s parallel stories feel like two separate novels. However, Cornerback’s often humorous antics help to add a lighter tone to Cat’s serious, time-sensitive assignment to track down Live’s siblings. Plot twists, magic, danger and action keep this YA fantasy novel moving swiftly along.
FEARLESS JOE DEARBORNE Mitchell, Lisa Whitney CreateSpace (198 pp.) $8.99 paper | Jul. 11, 2014 978-1-4959-3359-2
This debut middle-grade book asks readers: Would you rather be fearless or courageous? Sixth-grader Joe Dearborne is known in his small North Carolina hometown for being fearless, a reputation he earned for such feats as rescuing a neighbor’s dog from a burning house. But the truth is he’s just reckless: He literally doesn’t feel fear. However, after a poisonous snakebite nearly kills him, it also robs him of this gift and gives him the chance not only to be afraid, but also to learn what real courage means. His first encounter with being scared arrives in the coolly diabolical form of Mrs. Chill, who comes to look after him while his father takes care of business matters overseas. At first, Joe longs for the simplicity of his old life, but then he resolves to ignore the fact that he’s afraid of Mrs. Chill until his dad gets home. But when she turns out to be a real danger to Joe’s family and friends, he must find the courage to stop her. The allegory may seem obvious to experienced readers as Joe moves from innocence to experience in order to discover his true character. Young readers, however, will be captivated by the tightly written, suspenseful story featuring a likable main character and an engaging villain. Mitchell creates scenarios that are exciting, believable and age-appropriate; Joe goes on adventures, such as a night in the woods with a coyote, and experiences a budding romance with an equally courageous girl named Meg Darcy. The mystery of Mrs. Chill’s true motives, along with the story’s apparently paranormal elements, will make it hard for youngsters to stop reading. A unique, engaging chapter-book adventure.
TREECAT
McFadden, Jackie TreeCat Press (184 pp.) $7.99 paper | $5.99 e-book | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-9903988-0-6 Unlikely allies team up to save a forest in this middle-grade novel. In McFadden’s debut, a young feline befriends a wise old tree. Cat enjoys listening to Tree’s stories, which are more than just entertainment: They’re the true account of a tree named Live (later revealed to be Tree’s actual name) and his siblings, who tried and failed to stand up to an entity called the Dark Shadow in their youth. Now that the Dark Shadow is returning to the forest, Tree needs Cat’s help to unite his separated siblings. Meanwhile, in the human world, a young man named Cornerback is concerned by the plastic ribbons appearing on the trees in his beloved forest. He’s also troubled by the way his father, the town mayor, has been behaving; he’s seemed off ever since he had an accident in the woods a year ago. As Cat travels to find Tree’s relatives, other forest creatures help 224
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“There’s plenty of material here for readers who’ve never felt like princesses.” from mirror, mirror
MIRROR, MIRROR
TALES FROM THE OLDEST PROFESSION
Noll, Katherine Red Sky Presents (177 pp.) $9.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-941015-19-3
O’Donnell, Kevin BalboaPress (310 pp.) $19.99 paper | $3.99 e-book | Jun. 5, 2014 978-1-4525-1387-4
A feel-good fairy tale about a full-figured woman pursuing her dreams. Noll (Animal Jam: Official Insider’s Guide, 2014, etc.) updates the story of “Snow White” in this novel. As the story opens, Neve Bianca, in her early 20s, helps her loving father in her family’s construction business. She never attended college and had a difficult time in high school because other teens tormented her about her weight. She has aspirations to go to library school someday but doesn’t do anything to fulfill them. When her father dies, she discovers that her stepmother, Vania, is involved with the Russian mob. Vania orders Neve killed, but when the hit man can’t bear to do it, Neve runs, eventually ending up at a traveling music festival. There, she meets Lindsey, a young performer with dwarfism whose first love is Shakespeare. She helps Neve regain some self-confidence; in one of their first interactions, for example, Lindsey asks, “Why would you ever believe what a bunch of bullies have to say about you? They are totally screwed up in the head.” Lindsey then helps get Neve a job at a candy-apple stand. At a party, Neve’s dancing attracts the attention of the director of a burlesque act, which does more to bring Neve out of her shell. When her dancing is publicized, though, her stepmother recognizes her, which puts everything at terrible risk. Noll conscientiously creates a heroine with an innocent heart and a painful past. She gives Neve a few quirks, such as a habit of reciting facts when she’s nervous, but, much like a princess in a fairy tale, she has no serious flaws. When she runs away from her old life and starts anew, nearly everyone she meets is willing to help her. She even finds love with a respectful, attractive rock star who has a history of being bullied himself. Despite the plot’s requisite obstacles, there’s little doubt that everything will work out in the end. Noll transports a classic fairy tale into the modern world with a spirit of optimism, highlighting Neve’s essential goodness. There’s plenty of material here for readers who’ve never felt like princesses, from Neve’s body-image struggles to Lindsey’s deep suspicion of romantic attention, and Noll resolves it all neatly. An easy, escapist fantasy tied up with a happy ending.
O’Donnell, in his debut memoir, takes an irreverent look at practicing law Down Under. In Australia, making fun of others is known as “sledging.” In this book, a Melbourne attorney subjects his colleagues to a fair amount of sledging, providing readers with a light, irreverent memoir. “If you are expecting that this book is about the law, I’m sorry,” he writes. “It’s not. It’s about people.” Those people include a veritable encyclopedia of legal professionals, from fellow law firm partners and law clerks to judges, whom O’Donnell often captures with a sharp, satirical pen. They include “Simon,” who used “nearly $300,000 of his clients’ money to purchase a flock of emus”; “Fred,” whose wife challenged him to perform sexually while he was hospitalized in traction; “Bert,” whom local police described as “the FBI (fat bald and ignorant)”; and two elderly judges who refused to recognize the concept of daylight saving time. As O’Donnell tells tales of his colleagues’ boozing, cricket-playing and mutual sledging, readers may wonder how Australian lawyers ever get any work done. But the author gets into the work as well, offering readers an intriguing window into Australia’s British-style legal system. Along the way, he details several cases, including that of a woman who claimed workers’ compensation benefits after a lamp fell on her when she was having sex with a colleague. The book becomes a bit tedious when the author discusses trusts, mortgage funds and other dry legal subjects, but it doesn’t take long before he’s back sledging a cop known as “Radar,” who claimed he didn’t need any electronic equipment to gauge a car’s exact speed. Breezy portraits of lawyers and judges that capture the quirkiness of the Australian legal profession.
STEEL The Story of Pittsburgh’s Iron and Steel Industry 1852-1902
Perelman, Dale Richard CreateSpace (222 pp.) $12.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Jul. 10, 2014 978-1-4973-4140-1 A history of Pittsburgh and its steel industry, from the robber barons to the laborers. In this history book, Perelman (The Regent, 2012) brings together many narrative threads: the changes in Pittsburgh and surrounding communities as the steel industry developed; the workers who toiled for low pay and saw their attempts to organize met with violence; and the ruthless, driven industrialists who clawed their ways to the top. Andrew |
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Carnegie, Henry Frick and Charles Schwab are among the famous names inhabiting the elites’ side of history, while Perelman’s workers are generally nameless, identified more by their ethnicities and meager incomes. At times, this can seem like an odd choice, particularly because Perelman invents dialogue, often in stilted English, for his unnamed workers: “ ‘Where go train?’ he asked an agent in English like the sailor had told him. ‘Over there, Greenhorn,’ the man answered curtly pointing to the railroad station.” The book is stronger when dealing with the documented historical record, and the footnotes demonstrate Perelman’s wide-ranging research. Demonstrating a clear understanding of complexities in the steel industry, he unravels the clashing loyalties of the Homestead strike and the back-stabbing business negotiations, making them intelligible to readers less familiar with the subject. Though the narrative is well-structured, the writing lacks polish in some areas; other times, it occupies the boundary between elegant simile and overwriting: “Jones eased into the iron industry like a male model fitting into a bespoke suit”; “From the onset, the two clashed like vinegar and oil.” Readers willing to accommodate such narrative flourishes will find the book a useful addition to the shelves of American industrial history and a valuable guide to both primary and secondary sources, as well as a vivid depiction of some of the 19th century’s most ambitious, contradictory tycoons. Thoroughly researched and revealing.
tides of American individualism, Taylor’s participation in its resurgence in the late 20th century and a biographical account of her own personal life. All three are handled with meticulous care, combining the investigative rigor of journalism with the intellectual breadth of academic scholarship. Particularly fascinating is an account of Taylor’s revisionist account of feminism’s history that, quite unconventionally, places it within the fold of individualist thought. The author concedes that, since his work uses Taylor’s life as a means to explicate individualism as a whole, it “does not qualify, strictly speaking, as a biography”; nevertheless, the narrative can sometimes become mired in personal details, including conflict with Taylor’s domineering mother or her failed first marriage. While interesting in themselves, these detours don’t help illuminate the intellectual movements at the center of the book’s purpose. Still, as someone who had a personal friendship with Taylor for a quarter-century, Riggenbach is well-positioned to provide such insights. Overall, the work is a model of historical clarity, reintroducing a woman whose not-so-minor life will enthrall readers. A foreword by Charles Murray is an added bonus. A well-researched study of American intellectual history through one of its most committed advocates.
OUR LADY OF WEST HOLLYWOOD
Roether, Susan Fellow Travelers Media (362 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 16, 2012 978-0-615-52273-9
PERSUADED BY REASON Joan Kennedy Taylor and the Rebirth of American Individualism
The lives of four women intersect in Southern California in Roether’s (Reflections on Color, 1982) thought-provoking novel. Six months have passed in West Hollywood without heavy rain. Therapist Ginger lives with Nora, who co-writes with restaurateur Dan, hoping to sell a screenplay. While driving, Ginger and Nora notice two young women who appear to be prostitutes. Eager to help, Ginger invites the girls, Jennifer and Michelle, to come home with her, and they quickly accept. Ginger hopes to help the pair become empowered, but “always getting upset about things that happened to other people,” she’s prone to parsing. Nora is hesitant to emotionally connect, while Michelle is a follower relying on Jennifer, who is bright and at times sarcastic; the girls easily connect with Ginger’s neighbor March, who reads palms. When a mystical event occurs on March’s property, Michelle and Jennifer are thrust into the limelight. The church urges people to pray, and Jennifer miraculously survives an accident. Agents are calling because “the story strikes a chord with people,” but Michelle and Jennifer seem genuinely touched by the visitation from “Our Lady of West Hollywood.” The four women are strongly delineated characters, and entertainment professionals are portrayed in a nonstereotypical manner. One can’t help but empathize with people so self-consciously aware of image, to the point of altering their physicality to appeal to the masses. Jennifer tellingly
Riggenbach, Jeff Cook & Taylor (518 pp.) $35.00 | $27.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Sep. 18, 2014 978-0-9914171-0-0 A sweeping biography of Joan Kennedy Taylor coupled with a history of the American individualist movement she helped craft. Riggenbach, a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, has previously written two book-length histories: In Praise of Decadence (1998) and Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009). His third effort tackles Joan Kennedy Taylor, a friend and an admittedly little-known author/actress/psychotherapist who, despite her contributions to feminist and libertarian theory, is “not considered to be among the major theorists or practitioners of the libertarian and feminist creeds.” Her life, however, was deeply entangled in the unfolding of both: Riggenbach lucidly details her encounters with Ayn Rand and her schooling in objectivist philosophical principles; her commandeering of the important journal Persuasion until 1968; her long-coming break with the Republican Party; and her preoccupation in her later years with feminist theory and activism. The work splinters into essentially three parallel narratives: the historical ebbs and 226
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observes of her Native American friend: “[M]en like Floyd couldn’t live in this city,” though she herself loves Los Angeles. (Quotation marks are randomly missing from the text, as are transitions for changes of scene, but the meaning shines through.) Humor is often understated: For instance, to attract a producer, Nora and Dan knock themselves out on a script, yet two ingénues have a vision, and bam, they’re famous. One central character has a surprising spiritual arc, finding peace by embracing the present moment—seemingly impossible to achieve when the camera is running. There might be something sacred in the City of Angels after all. Well-told tale of a supernatural occurrence that unfolds with unexpected reverence as four determined women make different choices in image-obsessed Hollywood.
self-care measures. The nonbiochemical chapters of the book are somewhat less evenhanded. The opening chapter is a horror show of a case study—a cautionary tale of an addict named Michael that is as grim and transparently foreboding as Go Ask Alice. And the chapters on counseling and prevention, somewhat in conflict with the book’s earlier argument that addiction is largely biochemical in cause and is not anyone’s fault, take a dim and slightly sanctimonious view of modern parenting practices. But overall, the book is an intelligent, thorough overview of addiction with a reassuring proposal for a treatment regimen that has helped many and has the potential to help many more. Well worth a read for anyone dealing with or wishing to prevent an opiate addiction in themselves or a loved one.
ADDICTED KIDS; OUR LOST GENERATION An Integrative Approach to Understanding and Treating Addiction in Teens
WATERMARK The Truth Beneath the Surface
Sikstrom, Sari CreateSpace (234 pp.) $11.00 paper | $7.99 e-book May 30, 2014 978-1-4973-9874-0
Santasiero, Ronald P.; Santasiero, Cherie L. CreateSpace (320 pp.) $17.99 paper | $12.89 e-book Jul. 26, 2014 978-1-4961-1209-5
In this debut novel, a forensic librarian uncovers letters that lead to an explanation for her father’s absence. Vela Ostofvold is in Rome at a symposium about her work as a forensic librarian, “profiling how ephemera, inscriptions, and notations create distinct book personalities.” A rather sad, mysterious man named William Dean approaches her. He tells her that he went to school with her mother, Olivia, with whom he’s lost contact, in the Canadian town where Vela was also raised while Olivia pursued her career as an opera singer. Vela, still in Rome, then goes to the antiquarian bookstore discovered during her vacations spent with her mother. She chats with friend Amelia, who now runs the shop, and wonders if Dean could be the father she has never known. Later, Vela and Amelia are packing up Olivia’s Rome flat, since the building is being sold. In a letter of instructions, the ever traveling Olivia mentions that she plans to go to Oxford, England, to visit Penelope Arthur, her childhood teacher. Vela then finds letters from Penelope, which reveal the teacher had offered to raise Vela but went to India instead. Vela travels to Oxford, where she has a consulting project, and visits Penelope, whose memory is failing. Thanks to material provided by Penelope, however, and after another conversation with Dean, Vela finally discovers a past tragedy and her father’s identity. The novel concludes with Vela’s return to Rome and a new opportunity to reignite her romance with Franco, Amelia’s cousin. First-time novelist Sikstrom brings ambitious scope to this narrative, which encompasses a compelling family mystery, a heroine whose career could be the subject of its own series, several exotic locales, and a fairy tale–like love story. While Sikstrom is mostly successful in handling all these elements, the narrative is occasionally unbalanced. For example, Vela’s
Ronald and Cherie Santasiero explore the opiate-abuse crisis among teens in the United States and offer specific strategies for treatment and prevention. Written by a married couple who share a medical practice specializing in opiate addiction treatment and counseling, the book is clearly intended to support and promote their practice and specific approach. The Santasieros are candid about the fact that they strongly advocate the use of Suboxone (buprenorphine combined with naloxone) for detoxification and as substitution therapy, a methodology that, in their analysis, too few physicians are using. (They are careful to state that they “do not have any connection or financial ties to Reckitt-Benkeiser,” the drug’s manufacturer.) The reasons, they say, are manifold: stringent federal and state regulations about the use and dispensation of Suboxone; a prejudice on the part of doctors and therapists that any sort of substitution therapy is counterintuitive for addicts; and a general unwillingness on the part of physicians to bring addicts into their practices and offices. Their discussion of these barriers is fascinating and compelling, as is their physiological analysis of how Suboxone works within the brain. Written in layperson’s language but not dumbed down, the biochemical conversation makes a strong case for the theory that many opiate addicts—particularly teen addicts—are naturally deficient in an essential brain chemical, the neurotransmitter known as GABA, gamma-amino butyric acid, and that with opiate use, they are essentially self-medicating. Suboxone, they believe, is a dramatically safer way to replace that neurotransmitter during recovery, especially coupled with counseling, holistic supplements and lifestyle changes, including diet and other |
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“Spears’ heartening philosophy and approach are appealing and accessible...and it’s easy to see that her assignments might be as useful to seasoned professionals as to beginners.” from the creative eye
current age and home base are left a bit hazy, and there’s digressive detail about Penelope’s sojourn in India. Overall, however, this is a rich and entertaining debut. A lush, atmospheric novel that combines literary detective work, romance and international flair.
takes pencil to paper. Spears is interested in the neurobiology of sight, frequently alluding to recent findings—most via functional magnetic resonance imaging—about what kinds of visual experiences make certain areas of the brain ignite with activity. “The visual brain sees,” Spears writes, “and sometimes loves what it sees and calls it ‘beautiful.’ ” That visual passion is hard-wired into our biology, she argues, and it is only the selfcriticism, baggage, prejudices and assumptions we bring from the outside world that prevent us from translating that passion into art. The baggage, she says, is “around you and ready to encourage, discourage and generally interfere with your present efforts.” Spears’ heartening philosophy and approach are appealing and accessible (even if the neurological terminology gets a little weighty at times), and it’s easy to see that her assignments might be as useful to seasoned professionals as to beginners. Her own drawings, interspersed throughout the book among student illustrations, are lovely and sensitively wrought, giving credence and weight to her role as an instructor. There are moments when her exercises and instruction seem a bit overly prescriptive—for example, defining her philosophy of vision as empirically “accurate”—but overall, the book is welcoming and expansive. In an added attraction, numerous poets and philosophers offer words about art and vision, which are as inspiring as Spears’ own illustrations. An inventive and intelligent, yet accessible, approach to drawing; recommended for everyone from amateurs to professionals.
THE CREATIVE EYE Drawing, Vision and the Brain—Illustrated Edition Spears, Heather Self (270 pp.) $84.00 paper | $14.99 e-book Oct. 3, 2013 978-1-61750-450-1
Spears explores how drawing involves the neurological process of vision as much as it does the movement of the pencil in the artist’s hand. Spears, an artist, instructor and poet, begins her first instructional book with a simple visual exercise, setting the tone for an interactive reading experience. Although the author acknowledges that some readers might not complete the drawing assignments, they nevertheless represent the heart and soul of the book. At its core, this is a drawing curriculum, and the book only fully comes to life when the reader
DENOMINATIONAL STEW: AMERICAN STYLE
This Issue’s Contributors
Stephenson, Lyndel M. Westbow Press (190 pp.) $13.95 paper | Jun. 5, 2014 978-1-4908-3380-4
# Adult Maude Adjarian • Stephanie Anderson • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Adam benShea • Rebekah Bergman • Amy Boaz • Jeffrey Burke • Tobias Carroll • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Ruth Douillette • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott Gro Flatebo • Jordan Foster • Peter Franck • Mia Franz • Bob Garber • Lauren Gilbert • Devon Glenn • Amy Goldschlager • Miriam Grossman • Shalene Gupta • Matt Jakubowski • Jessica Jernigan Rebecca Johns • Robert M. Knight • Jocelyn Koehler • Megan Kurashige • Paul Lamey • Chelsea Langford • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Lisa Levy • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Georgia Lowe Joe Maniscalco • Virginia C. McGuire • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Sarah Morgan • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • Therese Purcell Nielsen • John Noffsinger Mike Oppenheim • Derek Parsons • John Edward Peters • Jim Piechota • William E. Pike • Gary Presley • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Michael Sandlin • Chaitali Sen Gene Seymour • Linda Simon • Wendy Smith • Sofia Sokolove • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Claire Trazenfeld • Hope Wabuke • Pete Warzel • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Kerry Winfrey • Marion Winik
In a clear, concise manner, this useful guidebook traces the history of religion in America and the roots of today’s Christian denominations. Twisting the classic analogy of America as a melting pot, Stephenson describes the country and its 1,200 different denominations “more as a big pot of chunky stew,” an image he uses often. Broadly defining a denomination as people who’ve rallied around a movement, Stephenson explores the founding, theology and current practices of today’s denominations. He does a fine job summarizing vast swaths of biblical history. While building a framework for his sketches of today’s denominations, he covers major belief elements, such as the doctrine of predestination, central to Calvinism, as well as its alternative, Arminianism, which says all men can be saved. Stephenson also covers key religious events such as the first and second Great Awakenings. Noting the propensity of American Christians to latch onto fads, he says we became a nation of fundamentalists and fanatics, a “mix and match people with a pick and choose attitude about everything.” The meat of the book is a section devoted
Children’s & Teen Elizabeth Bird • Louise Brueggemann • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Carol Edwards • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan K. Lesley Knieriem • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner Mary Margaret Mercado • Daniel Meyer • Lisa Moore • R. Moore • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Lesli Rodgers Erika Rohrbach • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mindy Schanback • Mary Ann Scheuer • Stephanie Seales • John W. Shannon • Karyn N. Silverman • Jennifer Sweeney • S.D. Winston • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko Indie Paul Allen • Poornima Apte • Kent Armstrong • Becky Bicks • Darren Carlaw • Stephanie Cerra Tricia Cornell • Simon Creek • Megan Elliott • Joe Ferguson • Lauren L. Finch • Shannon Gallagher Alissa Grosso • Lynne Heffley • Matthew Heller • Susan J.E. Illis • Julia Ingalls • Ivan Kenneally • Isaac Larson • Judith B. Long • Angela McRae • Jim Piechota • Judy Quinn • Sarah Rettger • Megan Roth Jessica Skwire Routhier
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to denominations themselves, arranged alphabetically from Adventist to Yahweh. Who knew there were 27 subdenominations of Baptists? And while Stephenson includes the Roman Catholic Church in his list of denominations, he acknowledges that others see it as its own separate religion. His well-written book is hindered only by occasional typos, e.g., “alter” instead of “altar” and Luther’s “95 Thesis” instead of “95 Theses.” Such errors aside, it’s enlightening to learn, for instance, that today’s Church of the Nazarenes came out of the Wesleyan Holiness movement. And for readers who’ve ever wondered, Stephenson explains that Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel Church is so named because McPherson’s habit was to preach in one corner of the sanctuary, then move to another corner until she had covered topics in all four. Immensely readable, entertaining account of America’s Christian denominations.
illustrating concrete ways to carry them out in daily actions. Though targeted toward the working professional, the concepts are relevant enough to be applied to any lifestyle that requires scheduling, task lists and goal setting. A thorough, well-thought-out guidebook to solving time dilemmas and organizing a working life.
IT’S ABOUT TIME!
Weinman, Mitzi iUniverse (202 pp.) $16.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jun. 19, 2014 978-1-4917-3262-5 In this A-to-Z guide to managing time in a professional setting, debut author Weinman delivers sound strategies for focusing goals, managing daily tasks and projects, and building a work-
ing system of success. Founder of TimeFinder, a company that offers productivity coaching to professionals, Weinman approaches time as a highly controllable feature of a professional’s life. By establishing hierarchies of needs and desires, then budgeting time accordingly, Weinman says a professional can solve any time dilemma or perceived obstacle that is impeding the flow of production. The book takes an organized approach to alphabetizing basic principles, such as anticipation, delegation, jump-starting and routine. The concepts are illustrated with examples and testimonies from anonymous clients who needed a strategy to solve a problem in his or her daily schedule. For example, one client had a problem arriving at work on time because she was attempting to balance caring for and playing with her children in the morning before showering and catching a train to work. The author lays out a plan for strategizing how to incorporate quality time, as the client desired, with a strict adherence to certain truths—in this case, a certain train that needed to be met to ensure on-time arrival to work. This required establishing an itinerary, something Weinman suggests that all professionals should create as a map to ensure smooth transitions from one event to the next. Anticipation of irregular yet likely incidents, such as inclement weather or late public transportation, is another crucial step the author outlines in establishing time blocks and itineraries. The book succeeds not just in outlining principles, but also in
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 2014 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948-7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744. Subscription prices are: Digital & Print Subscription (U.S.) - 12 Months ($199.00) Digital & Print Subscription (International) - 12 Months ($229.00) Digital Only Subscription - 12 Months ($169.00) Single copy: $25.00. All other rates on request. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Kirkus Reviews, PO Box 3601, Northbrook, IL 60065-3601. Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, TX 78710 and at additional mailing offices.
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Books of the Month the monsterjunkies
justice for the black knight Jerri Blair
Erik D. Shein, Theresa Gates
A must-read story of relationships, prejudice and bravery, and a vivid paean for justice.
A well-wrought sequel with more than a few excellent messages for young readers.
BEHIND THE LINES
THE INSIDER’S GUIDE TO A CAREER IN BOOK PUBLISHING
Jeffrey B. Miller
An excellent history that should catapult Miller to the top tier of popular historians.
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Carin Siegfried
A thorough introduction to the publishing industry.
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Appreciations: The Wizard of Oz and the Promise of Better Times
B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE
In 1932, an appliance salesman named Isidore Hochberg wrote a set of politically charged lyrics for a satirical musical called Americana. In one tune, the narrator builds railroads, fights wars, plows fields and erects skyscrapers in the space of a few verses, only to be undone by predatory capitalists. The show closed after only a couple of performances, but that song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a smash hit, recorded by a young Bing Crosby. Come the New Deal, Hochberg, now called Yip Harburg, had reason to be more optimistic. Seventy-five years ago, his bright song “Over the Rainbow” was unveiled, one of the most memorable of the tunes in the film The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps rightly, the dark wizards of the McCarthy era pegged the chipper lyrics as subversive and Harburg was blacklisted for many years. He had the last word, though: In 2001, the Recording Industry Association of America named “Over the Rainbow” the most important song of the 20th century. Would L. Frank Baum, the writer behind the saga of Dorothy Gale, have approved of Harburg’s politics? Very likely, for Baum, though born into comfort, had lost his own modest fortune in an earlier economic downturn and moved, in some disgrace, to the remotest place on the prairie that he could find. That place was not in Kansas, but he still set a strange yarn he wrote in his self-imposed exile there, in a state he never saw. A biopic devoted to Baum is reported to be in production today, and how closely it will deal with Baum’s own views remains to be seen. Baum was progressive, a feminist and a socialist of sorts; critics have read in the Oz cycle of novels a sendup of industrial capitalism and a demand for a return to an economy of concrete production instead of abstract speculation. (In that light, “Oz” is said to stand for an ounce of gold, the stuff with which the Yellow Brick Road was paved.) Baum was also, however, a devotee of social Darwinism, with the view that the fittest would outlast the weak and that cultures not meant for the age of machines—American Indians, say—were doomed to extinction. Completed late in 1899, Baum’s original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was published the following year in Chicago. Its publisher did not hold out much hope for it, but something in the tale of young farm girl Dorothy Gale’s stormy transportation to a magical kingdom just beyond the rainbow struck a chord in populist America, and within a couple of months 25,000 copies had sold, the vanguard of millions to come. Baum had written the story as a one-off, but now, flooded by letters from children, he set out to write a series of stories that extended the tale of Oz’s new rulers—a newly strong lion, of course, but also a straw man of the farm and a tin man from the foundry. In the end, Baum and the ghost writers who followed him wrote 35 Oz books. All save the inaugural volume are forgotten today—but that one book and the movie and songs it spun seem destined to be remembered forever. Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews. |
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“Inspirational.” “A soulful story that captures —Booklist
the
magic of possibility.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Potent...distinctive.” 978-0-316-24780-1
—Publishers Weekly
“Stunning.... An essential purchase.” —School Library Journal
STAR LIGHT, STAR B RIGHT LittleBrownLibrary.com
LittleBrownSchool
“ Tantalizing.”
@ LBSchool
—Booklist
“Multifaceted...imaginative.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Combines action with whimsy…. 978-0-316-24077-2
A strong start for what promises to be a highly enjoyable series.” —Publishers Weekly
“ Wholly orig inal…
enjoyable and humorous.” —School Library Journal