THISTLEFOOT by GennaRose Nethercott

“Brimming with creativity, wisdom, and love.”

thistlefoot

anti-malarial flowers. Other agents of change follow: There are the European agronomists who come in to demand that the villagers replace their formerly diverse crops with beans and coffee, then the priests who come in to demand that they give up their “pagan” religious practices in favor of “Yezu.” Drought ensues, and with it the people starve, and with that they recall the old ways, when their king would sacrifice himself or one of his family. Thus Kibogo, the legendary son of a king, offers himself up in one such sacrifice, volunteering in a long-ago time to climb a nearby mountain and call down the clouds in the face of sure death. That high country harbors others who are convinced of their magical powers. One is Akayezu, or “Little Jesus,” who enters a French seminary only to decide that he has divine powers of his own and, without waiting for ordination, preaches a gospel that “compared Kibogo rising to Heaven to Yezu’s ascension, Maria’s Assumption, and the abduction of the prophet Elijah on a pikipiki of thunder and flame.” Akayezu’s evangelization extends to a hermit who herself believes that she has a spirit within that “commands the rain.” When the rain does arrive, it comes in punishing torrents and violent thunderstorms that put terror in the hearts of the villagers: “Some jangled rosaries, others gourd rattles, or the bones of warthogs or of their ancestors.” It’s satisfying to see the colonial experts and intrusive priests get some measure of comeuppance while Kibogo makes his return to bring, finally, more sustaining rains, proving, as Mukasonga’s narrator has it, that “Kibogo too can shake the sky and set off the thunder: isn’t the tale of Kibogo equal to the tale of Yezu?”

Pensive and lyrical; a closely observed story of cultures in collision.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA

Nayler, Ray MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (464 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 4, 2022 978-0-374-60595-7

In the not-too-distant future, a marine biologist specializing in cephalopod intelligence discovers a species of octopus with astonishing language skills—research that a giant corporation

wants to monetize.

Dr. Ha Nguyen is so amazed by her findings that she’s willing to submit herself to the odious tactics of the big tech company, which controls the Vietnamese island where the octopuses dwell. Having “resettled” the population of the Con Dao Archipelago, the company not only will kill any outsiders who attempt to set foot there, but also has ordered Ha’s death should she attempt to leave. Not that she has any inclination to do so. Once exposed to the octopuses, she is determined to uncover the great mysteries of extrahuman intelligence. In spite of their hostile reputation, these are creatures of transcendent beauty, communicating through glowing visual symbols that move on their skin in complex patterns and sequences. In a world of robot-operated slave ships, bee-size drones, and AI automonks with three-fingered hands and light receptors for pupils, her main ally is Evrim, the world’s first and possibly last true android, which not only thinks like a human being, but also believes it is conscious. Ha’s benefactor and adversary is Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, the Icelandic brains of the corporation, whose ultimate goal is to create a mind “wiped clean of its limitations.” A prolific writer of SF stories making his debut as a novelist, Nayler maintains a cool, cerebral tone that matches up with the story’s eerie underpinnings. Less an SF adventure than a meditation on consciousness and selfawareness, the limitations of human language, and the reasons for those limitations, the novel teaches as it engages.

An intriguing unlocking of underwater secrets, with the occasional thrill.

THISTLEFOOT

Nethercott, GennaRose Anchor (448 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-593-46883-8

Part ghost story, part font of wisdom, this gorgeously written novel takes a fantastical romp while cautioning readers to remember the violence and inequity of the past—even when forgetting seems preferable.

As young American adults, Isaac Yaga, busker and pickpocket, and his sister, Bellatine, find themselves in possession of Thistlefoot, a magical house that moves on chicken legs. With their last name as a clue, the house opens a key to their past. They descend from Baba Yaga, the sinister witch of Russian folklore who inhabited such a house. The siblings’ quest will be to defeat the Longshadow Man, a murderous, shape-shifting supernatural enemy. In poetic language, the author leads readers to her definition of evil—the silencing of the brutality of the past. “The body remembers. The soured air remembers. We cannot forget.” Through both humorous and violent ups and downs, Isaac and Bellatine learn to deploy the contents of their strange, fantastical house in pursuit of justice. They bond with other bedeviled young people and revive ghosts through Bellatine’s power of Embering; heat emanates from her hands and wakes the dead. With echoes of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem, as well as Buddhist and Christian overtones, the Yagas unearth their past. They learn they come from people who dreamed and believed, who brought with them to America “languages, folded into the suitcases of their tongues.” They realize they must tell the story of Gedenkrovka, Russia, where a pogrom destroyed its Jewish inhabitants. Despite its serious subject matter, this novel contains delights on every page. The author displays a capacious imagination, providing an entertaining, colorful read while grappling with subjects of utmost importance to today’s turbulent world.

This book blooms from a fairy tale to a panoptic story that defies space and time, brimming with creativity, wisdom, and love.

THERE ARE NO HAPPY LOVES

Olguín, Sergio Trans. by Miranda France Bitter Lemon Press (352 pp.) $15.95 paper | Sept. 20, 2022 978-1-913394-71-4

Brash Buenos Aires journalist Verónica Rosenthal investigates the licensing of adoptions through the Catholic Church— a story with possible ties to the discovery of a truckful of human body parts being investigated by prosecutor Federico Córdova.

Depressed and physically a wreck, still torn over her breakup with Federico—who has stoked her jealous anger by dating another woman named Verónica—Rosenthal hasn’t written anything of substance in months. She manages to pull herself out of her rut when Darío, the cousin of another former lover (who was killed in a previous book), beseeches her to help find his young daughter, Jazmín. Though authorities have ruled the girl and her mother died in a fiery auto crash that Darío barely survived, no remains were found. He is convinced his wife, with whom he was at odds, fled the scene with Jazmín and went into hiding. Jazmín, it turns out, was adopted—one of many babies from struggling families in northern Argentina who were illicitly placed by the church with well-off families, Rosenthal learns. Even more alarmingly, some of those babies were the result of sexual abuse by church officials. Teaming up with María Magdalena, a good nun who became an influential journalist, Rosenthal gets a taste of what bad nuns can be like as she zeroes in on the truth. Loosely based on actual incidents, Olguín’s latest is driven by the same sense of moral urgency and enriched by the same regional color that lifted his excellent previous Rosenthal books, The Fragility of Bodies (2019) and The Foreign Girls (2021). Verónica isn’t quite as compelling a character this time, her trademark sexual interludes unable to overcome their gratuitousness. But the book does a solid job of connecting the dots between narratives and, like the television series The Wire, between religious, political, and judicial institutions.

A solid entry in an impressive series.

WHEN YOU GET TO THE OTHER SIDE

Osorio Gumá, Mariana Trans. by Cecilia Weddell Cinco Puntos Press (304 pp.) $20.95 paper | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-94762-761-1

Borders, both territorial and familial, can be hard to cross. All forms of unwanted separation are painful, with the deaths of beloved family members being the most devastating. Couple that with having to leave one’s homeland, and the suffering is even greater. That’s the predicament facing 12-year-old Emilia Ventura and her 15-year-old brother, Gregorio, who depart their home in Amatlán, Mexico, after their abuela Mamá Lochi dies. Their goal: to be reunited with their father and uncles in America. Mamá Lochi was a curandera (healer). When she was young, a lightning bolt struck her and left a scar “like a fern with little red branches.” It also gave her the “power of vision and her ability to cure people.” Emilia also has visions, “the seeing thing,” always accompanied by “an insect or a full swarm of them filling [her] vision.” And she can hear voices of her family as she and Gregorio make their journey northward. The topic of border crossings is important, so it’s a pity Osorio Gumá took a simplistic approach. The story relies more on action than introspection. Chapters that alternate between flashbacks of Mamá Lochi’s life and present-day scenes of Emilia and Gregorio’s journey don’t quite reinforce each other. Many of Osorio Gumá’s characters feel imagined but not understood, with hard-boiled lines such as, “As sure as my name is Gregorio Ventura, I’m gonna bust us the hell out of here ASAP.” Readers interested in a more nuanced treatment of curanderas and oppression should turn to Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds (2022). Osorio Gumá’s flashbacks are strong and sensitively rendered, however, and rich with memorable details, as when Emilia recalls watching Mamá Lochi make perfect homemade tortillas, which she’d done so often “she didn’t feel anything with her fingertips anymore.”

A sincere attempt to fuse the supernatural with the plight of migrants.

MAD HONEY

Picoult, Jodi & Jennifer Finney Boylan Ballantine (464 pp.) $26.99 | Oct. 4, 2022 978-1-9848-1838-6

The shocking murder of a teenager thrusts a small town into the headlines and destabilizes the lives of everyone who knew her. Olivia McAfee, a professional beekeeper and single mother, fled Boston and an abusive husband to try to give her son, Asher, a better life in small-town New Hampshire. Things go well for their first 12 years in Adams. Asher is a well-liked senior and captain of the high school hockey team; he barely remembers his abusive father; he and his mother have a great relationship; and he’s preparing to go off to college. Then he meets Lily Campanello, a new girl who, like his mother, has fled a troubled past. Things get very serious quickly; then, one afternoon after they’ve had a fight, Asher finds Lily dead at the bottom of her basement stairs. Before he even has time to grieve, he’s arrested and charged with her murder. What follows is a long and public courtroom trial in which everyone’s secrets are exposed and even his own mother begins to question his innocence. Told in two storylines—one Olivia’s, in the present, and one Lily’s, going backward from the day of her murder—the novel is well plotted but sometimes feels long-winded, including characters who don’t have much