THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE by Benjamin Myers

her caste identity, but given her fair complexion, the farming villagers immediately suspect she is not one of them. Despite the taboo against intercaste marriage, Kumaresan believes that they can settle happily there and that his community will eventually embrace the lovely Saroja just as he has. Saroja is a city girl, and her transition to farming life would have been difficult even without the explicit derision and antagonism that the couple experiences from everyone in the village, including Kumaresan’s mother, extended family, and the village leaders. Their naïveté plays against the community’s hatred and cynicism and creates a sense of foreboding that propels the narrative to its inevitable conclusion. An acclaimed writer in his native India, Murugan skillfully contrasts the young couple’s innocence with the increasingly caustic attacks on their marital union. His spare prose mesmerizes, and Vasudevan’s translation of the original Tamil conveys both meaning and needed context for Western English readers. India’s casteism is on full display, but what makes this novel so powerful is how Murugan shows that intolerance, cruelty, and bigotry are universal traits of humankind, even while tailored to the peculiarity of each society. Universal too, are the love, kindness, and familial bonds that exist between individuals who have the sensitivity to look beyond societal custom and coercion.

A haunting story of forbidden love set in Southern India that illustrates the cruel consequences of societal intolerance.

THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

Myers, Benjamin Melville House (272 pp.) $27.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-61219-958-0

A quiet, peculiar, and utterly charming novel about...crop circles. Myers’ new book—brief though it is—contains a buzzing, busy multitude. It’s part Künstlerroman, part rural idyll, part environmental alarm, part picaresque about two outcasts,

part philosophical novel. The setting is summer 1989, in southern England, and two men are embarking again on—trying to perfect—the work they began the summer before. Amid strict secrecy, and in accordance with an elaborate set of rules they’ve developed to keep themselves safe and anonymous, they steal off at sunset in a battered camper van, park along a verge, walk at least one mile to a field they have identified and scouted, and spend the long summer dark meticulously creating ever larger, ever more elaborate designs (all without breaking the stalks of wheat or rapeseed, so as to be committing acts of art and not vandalism, addition and not subtraction). The two men are Calvert, an anxious ex-soldier who wears dark glasses even at night to protect his eyes and his scars, and his friend Redbone, imaginative, unpredictable, and cheerful. The book consists of a brief chronicle of each of their summer exploits in the field, one by one, with quick news breaks between to record their rising fame as their work garners attention from tabloids, UFO enthusiasts, landowners, and others taken by this mysterious, gigantic-scale environmental art. They are moving always toward what they know will be their end-of-summer culmination, the Honeycomb Double Helix. Myers’ newest is a lyrical novel, leisurely of pace and rich in nuance, that rewards the reader who slows to its rhythms.

An odd and winsome pleasure: a novel of friendship, collaboration, and environmental guerrilla art.

TRUE BIZ

Nović, Sara Random House (400 pp.) $28.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-593-24150-9

The author of America Is Immigrants (2019) and Girl at War (2015) goes deep into Deaf culture. True biz is an expression in American Sign Language that has a variety of English translations—“for sure,” “seriously,” “no joke,” and “totally” among them. By using this phrase as her title, the author is underscoring the point that ASL is not just English rendered in hand gestures. It is, instead, a language with its own grammar, its own idioms, and its own stylistic flourishes. This presents Charlie Serrano with a challenge. The child of hearing parents, Charlie has a cochlear implant and has barely mastered the ASL alphabet when she transfers from her public high school to River Valley School for the Deaf. Headmistress February Waters—the hearing child of deaf parents—asks Austin Workman to help Charlie acclimate to her new environment. The fifth generation of his family to be deaf, Austin is something like aristocracy within his community. All of these characters are about to have a very tumultuous year. Nović is deaf, and her second novel might be regarded as part of the movement for stories about marginalized groups to be written by people who are themselves part of that group. Nović addresses a lot of topics here, from eugenics and racism to teen romance and middle-aged marital strife. The resulting narrative has an odd shape. The first half progresses at a very slow pace, and it’s heavy on exposition. Things start moving in the second half, and there’s a lot of action toward the end. The lessons in ASL and Deaf history interspersed throughout the text may keep the reader’s interest more than the story alone would.

A coming-of-age story that explores the complexities of community and the ways in which language defines us.

THE CROCODILE BRIDE

Pedersen, Ashleigh Bell Hub City Press (296 pp.) $26.00 | April 19, 2022 978-1-938235-91-7

Pedersen’s debut novel describes how generations of abuse come to a head for one rural Louisiana family in 1982.

That’s the summer Sunshine turns 12. She initially seems the classic preadolescent

heroine—tomboyish, plucky, innocent yet wise—but her comingof-age story is as much about loss as growth. Sunshine has grown up in the dying bayou hamlet of Fingertip, cocooned by family despite having no mother or any knowledge of one. She and her harddrinking, charming, but moody father, Billy, whom she adores, live just across the road from Billy’s sister, Lou, and Sunshine’s cousin and only friend, JL. Sunshine’s summer, and the novel, starts with her bittersweet awareness that her world is about to change, that Lou and JL will be moving at summer’s end into the nearby town of St. Cadence with Lou’s fiance (the novel’s one example of uncomplicated decency and kindness). The first seemingly lighthearted scenes—a swim with Lou and JL, a family celebration over Billy’s announcement that he’s been promoted—are infected with overt foreboding even before Billy admits to Sunshine that he was actually fired then briefly, tearfully, drunkenly gropes her. The novel frequently shifts between Sunshine’s increasingly perilous summer and the past history of Lou and Billy’s long-dead parents. Alcoholic John Jay beat his wife, Catherine, and bullied his children, especially sensitive, stuttering Billy. Telling the children fanciful stories to ward off ugly truths, Catherine failed to protect them. By 15, Billy was emotionally unstable and drinking heavily. Lou married early to escape Fingertip, but when her first husband proved more violent than her father, she returned home with JL. Lou and Billy have never confronted their own troubled relationship. Now she senses but cannot quite face the danger signs as Billy goes off the rails in ways Sunshine is ill-equipped to understand or stop. Pedersen builds an all-too-familiar “chain of grief” linked by violence, incest, and family secrets.

Despite empathetic characters and delicate prose, the Southern gothic tropes feel overly familiar.