BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

eyes; he experiences near brushes with the sunlight after sleeping over at Elsie’s—he’s led to reevaluate his life and weighs the benefits of safely tucking himself away in the archives against inhabiting the flesh-and-blood human world. Author Fellman has sensitively constructed the complex internal landscape of a multilayered protagonist whose self-consciousness, quirks, and anxieties are palpable; vampire or not, Sol is a uniquely relatable character whose inner life jumps off the page. Though Sol and Elsie’s relationship sometimes veers into the saccharine, their shared vulnerability as each grapples with their sexual and gender identities is genuinely moving. Most of all, the book’s musings about bodies—their trials, tribulations, and pleasures; the ways they sometimes serve and sometimes oppose their owners—provides a deep, rich undercurrent.

Unique and emotionally deep.

GIRL IN ICE

Ferencik, Erica Scout Press/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $27.00 | March 1, 2022 978-1-9821-4302-2

When a girl frozen in ice at the Arctic Circle thaws out alive, an ancient Nordic languages specialist with troubles of her own is called to the scene. Ferencik—author of Into the Jungle (2019)—specializes in thrillers set in wilderness environments with female protagonists; her latest takes us to the land of subzero temperatures and wind-whipped polar landscapes. But bad weather is just the beginning of the unpleasantness Val Chesterfield encounters when she overcomes her many phobias to fly out and help climate scientist Wyatt Speeks with his perplexing specimen. The girl he chopped out of the wall of a crevasse and defrosted is terrified, violent, and unintelligible. While Wyatt is creepy on many levels, creepiest of all is his unwillingness to discuss the death by exposure of his erstwhile lab partner, Val’s twin brother, Andy. Andy’s having gotten locked out of the house overnight in his underwear has been presented as a suicide, but neither Val nor her father, also a climate scientist, believe it. Belief is a problem all through this book—the elements made up to serve the plot rest on a foundation of real climate science, linguistics, and cultural history but still don’t manage to be convincing. The five characters—Val, Wyatt, a nasty cook, and a pair of married marine scientists—are also less than lifelike. Saddled with mental health issues and bad manners, their interactions range from rude to abusive except for the married couple, who are so in love it’s nauseating. You really wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with these people, which poor Val is much of the time, and now someone has stolen her anxiety meds and hidden the booze! She finds herself becoming deeply attached to the mystery girl, but progress with communication is slow, and the girl’s health takes a drastic turn for the worse. And then they all go outside and things get crazy.

Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.

BOOTH

Fowler, Karen Joy Putnam (480 pp.) $28.00 | March 8, 2022 978-0-593-33143-9

Ostensibly about the family of Shakespearean actors best known for their connection to Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, Fowler’s novel explores tensions surrounding race, politics, and culture in 19th-century America.

Given his upbringing in a vegetarian, strongly anti-slavery, highly literate, freethinking household that even today would be labeled bohemian, how did John became a pro-slavery,

pro-secessionist fanatic capable of terrorist murder? And how did his actions affect his surviving family? Alcoholic, eccentrically idealistic Junius Booth is a major star on the British stage when he and his “wife,” Mary, run away to rural Maryland while he is still married to another woman. Of their 10 offspring, six survive past early childhood. Bright oldest daughter Rosalie dotes on charming Johnny but is keenly perceptive about his weaknesses. (In a heartbreaking depiction of Victorian women’s limited options, Rosalie’s own sparkle fades into genteel alcoholism after she’s forced to forego education and marriage and become the family caregiver.) Brother Edwin is quiet, responsible, maybe even dull compared to charismatic John, but despite sharing the family addiction to alcohol, Edwin has the discipline, intelligence, and talent that John lacks to succeed as an actor. To his own—and John’s resentful—surprise, Edwin becomes America’s foremost actor, maintaining his prestige despite his brother’s infamy. Staunchly abolitionist and pro-union, Edwin, who once saved Robert Lincoln’s life, and Rosalie are increasingly aghast at John’s increasingly crazed behavior and racist ravings. More conflicted is sister Asia, who shares John’s charm as well as his prickly disposition; after the assassination, she finds herself briefly under suspicion. As the Booths’ story unfolds, Fowler inserts major national events into the narrative, like the Dred Scott case and John Brown’s uprising, along with key moments in Lincoln’s life showing his humanity as well as his public nobility. The historical context she offers is of a pre–Civil War America of deep moral divides, political differences tearing close families apart, populism and fanaticism run amok.

The similarities to today are riveting and chilling.

THE SUMMER WE BURIED

Gehrman, Jody Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $26.99 | March 8, 2022 978-1-64385-923-1

A strong professional woman turns to jelly when her old college friend abruptly appears to ask a very loaded favor. Massage therapist Selene Rathbone has had a hold over Tansy Elliot ever since the night 18 years ago when the two of them agreed to keep mum about an attempted rape and its fatal consequences. Now Selene has popped up again to exact payment. Worried that her daughter, Jupiter, is being emotionally abused by her boyfriend, Colton Blake, she insists that Tansy, a guidance counselor at Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon University, take Jupiter, a VMU undergraduate, in hand and persuade her to ditch Colton, or at least to lift the restraining order he’s persuaded Jupiter to file against her flamboyant, interfering mother. Recognizing both Selene’s power over her and the serious breach of professional ethics she’s demanding, Tansy, a former singer and songwriter who still misses her band, the Insatiables, which broke up when its bass player died of a heroin overdose, temporizes and dithers long enough to field some barely veiled threats from Colton’s father, Henry Blake, the local district attorney and VMU trustee, and fall for Selene’s kid brother, Zack, a