fiction

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Beware The Woman

Abbott, Megan

Putnam (304 pp.)

$28.00 | May 30, 2023

9780593084939

An expecting couple’s whirlwind summer trip to reconnect with family unravels into something like a game of cat and mouse.

It’s no spoiler to say that Jed and Jacy’s trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit Jed’s father, Dr. Ash, doesn’t go as expected. Jacy, as first-person narrator, is not afraid to drop hints that all is not well in Jed’s childhood home despite the happy reason for the trip—celebrating the newlyweds’ pregnancy news. After a lucid dream in a roadside motel, Jacy suggests “we could go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.” How different things could have been. Instead, the couple pushes on, their nervous excitement brimming. “It was tempting fate, though, wasn’t it? I see that now,” says Jacy, a couple days into the visit and growing more aware. Dr. Ash shows a touching interest in Jacy’s well-being, an eye always on her belly. It’s only natural that Jed’s mother would come up. She died in childbirth, Dr. Ash reveals. “Had Jed told me this and I’d missed it?” Jacy wonders. This is the first crack in the family facade, a chip in the paint that reveals layers of history underneath. The voice of Jacy’s own mother rings in her head—“Honey…we all marry strangers.” Lurking in the background is Mrs. Brandt, the Ash household’s longtime caretaker. Her formal nature suggests a strong loyalty to Jed’s family. “It’s hard enough seeing you,” Mrs. Brandt says. “Pregnant, fulsome. Fecund, ripening.” This ability to twist a good thing inside out until it feels shameful is classic Abbott. Jacy’s belly is suddenly a trigger, the inevitability of birth like a bomb waiting to go off. Unease turns to discomfort turns to fear when Jacy wakes up bleeding one morning, and suddenly her body no longer feels like her own. Jacy wants to leave, but Dr. Ash wants her to do what’s best for the baby. Who gets to decide? And what about Jed? Compared to Jacy, Jed reads like a ghost of a person, flat on the page. But maybe that’s the point given this is Jacy’s story to tell. Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman’s heightened senses—“I could smell everything now…even the carpet glue, the wood paste in the staircase post”—to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of Get Out You’re sure to get chills.

An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.

Halcyon

Ackerman, Elliot Knopf (256 pp.)

$24.99 | May 23, 2023

9780593321621

A novel of alternate history, life everlasting, and American democracy in peril.

In this version of the recent past, President Al Gore has assumed office after a perjury conviction drove Bill Clinton from the White House, and he has his hands full in a sharply divided and polarized country. Firstperson narrator Martin Neumann is a historian and college professor, on leave to write his next book, “a study of postbellum attitudes on the Civil War...and what the historian Shelby Foote termed ‘the great compromise,’ a cultural reconciliation between North and South that followed those blood-soaked years.” Foote’s interpretation has “fallen from favor,” Neumann’s department chair tells him. Ackerman wants to explore whether nuance and compromise are possible where others see black and white, right and wrong. His narrator has “become obsessed with the role of compromise in the sustainment of American life,” a notion that has fallen from favor as polarized opinions became louder and more rigid. Recently divorced, he’s also obsessed with his own alternative histories of what might have been. He’s spending his sabbatical on an estate with the ominous name that gives the novel its title, where his landlord is the legendary Robert Ableson, a legal lion and champion of liberal causes, now retired and in his 90s. And very spry, for reasons the novel will reveal but signals in its very first sentence, informing the reader that “resurrection, a new life, had become a scientific possibility.” In 2004, when the novel opens, there are all sorts of further complications to the context—Gore plans to pardon Clinton, statues of the Confederacy are sacrificed to historical revisionism, conservatives want to shut down scientific progress. The historian and his landlord both find that their perspectives and attitudes, once perfectly acceptable, now put them on the wrong side of history. The narrator seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, or at least the future of democracy as we know it.

A novel of ideas in an age of opinions.