March 1, 2012: Volume LXXX, No 4

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REVIEWS

t h e w o r l d’s t o u g h e s t b o o k c r i t i c s f o r mo r e t h a n 7 5 y e a rs fiction

nonfiction

children & teens

Sarcastic, rule-breaking FBI agent Andy Fisher returns in Jim DeFelice’s latest thriller p. 444

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow delivers a hardhitting debut about how the country has lost control of its national-security policy p. 484

Traction Man and Scrubbing Brush are back for their most dangerous adventure yet! Will Beach-Time Brenda™ spell the end of the daring duo? p. 507

in this issue: continuing series round-up kirkus q&a

featured indie

Irvin D. Yalom talks about writing and research, philosophy and psychiatry, and his latest spellbinding novel, The Spinoza Problem p. 448

Rebecca Meredith blends the tradition of the Southern novel with outsider art p. 536

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The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

The Sea Is My Brother: Jack Kerouac’s Lost-and-Found Novel B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE

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 Editor E L A I N E S Z E WC Z Y K eszewczyk@kirkusreviews.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkusreviews.com Features Editor M O L LY B RO W N molly.brown@kirkusreviews.com Children’s & YA Books VICKY SMITH vicky.smith@kirkusreviews.com Kirkus Indie Editor P E R RY C RO W E perry.crowe@kirkusreviews.com

Ja c k K e r o ua c wa s j u s t 2 0 w h e n he put out to sea for the first time, serving in the Merchant

Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH

Marine during a dangerous time when the North Atlantic was the province of Nazi submarines. He

Assistant Indie Editor REBECCA CRAMER rebecca.cramer@kirkusreviews.com

didn’t face much danger personally; he sailed to Greenland, then returned to port. He was passed over to head to the war farther overseas, and when he joined the Navy in 1943 he lasted only eight days before being drummed out as a psychiatric case.

Kerouac may not have been cut out for the military life, even in the short term, but we know what he did in his bunk when not on duty: He tried his hand at a novel. The novel that ensued was a young man’s work, and plenty autobiographical, tracking the adventures of a young man who lands in New York on shore leave, starts drinking in bars full of sailors fresh off the water and gets himself in all sorts of difficulties, some romantic, some legal, most merely existential. Presaging a theme that would later make Kerouac famous, the novel, published this March as The Sea Is My Brother, also turns most closely on the friendship between two young men, a friendship that threatens to shade off into one with benefits at any minute.

Fame would not come for another 15 years, time that Kerouac spent writing and writing. His official first novel was a Thomas Wolfe–tinged affair, The Town and the City, and he subsequently would convert much of his early writing into the “Duluoz saga,” the cycle of novels that would include the novel that launched him into fame, On the Road, published in 1957 but begun nearly a decade earlier. Of that book, Kerouac took elaborate pains to convince readers that it had sprung from his head as Athena did from Zeus’s brow, but in fact Kerouac drafted and redrafted it and most of his other work, diligently improving it as he went along.

The Sea Is My Brother was not among the writing that Kerouac rescued for use in the saga. Instead, the manuscript turned up in a suitcase where it had been lodged for a couple of generations and, being of book size, was hauled off to the agent’s. Given that Kerouac was a careful archivist and recycler, one can conclude, charitably, that he didn’t wish it to see the light of day, and indeed it’s a raw, unfinished piece that will be of interest to literary scholars, but probably to few other readers.

Writers of all kinds have passed into the great beyond, only then to have their closets and garages and attics searched for leftovers that are of financial benefit to their heirs, but not necessarily to the cultural benefit of anyone else. This happened to Ernest Hemingway a couple of decades ago, yielding the embarrassing novel The Garden of Eden; it’s been happening to Hunter Thompson for a few years now. Soon it will be John Kennedy Toole’s turn. For the moment it’s Jack Kerouac’s, and we can hope only for worthier finds from the rummaging to come.

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Editorial Coordinator CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkusreviews.com Contributing Editor G REG ORY Mc NAME E #

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This Issue’s Contributors

Maude Adjarian • Kent Armstrong • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Gerald Bartell • Josh Bell • Joan Blackwell • Amy Boaz • Allie Bochicchio • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Eveline Chao • Marnie Colton • Lisa Costantino • Gregory F. DeLaurier • David Delman • Kathleen Devereaux • Ameena Din • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Megan Elliott • Gro Flatebo • Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Jeff Galipeaux • Bob Garber • Sean Gibson • Faith Giordano • Amy Goldschlager • Christine Goodman • Jeff Hoffman • BJ Hollars • Nicholas Holtz • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Raina Lipsitz • Swapna Lovin • Joe Maniscalco • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Sarah Norris • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • Gary Presley • Karah Rempe • Karen Rigby • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • Bob Sanchez • Michael Sandlin • William P. Shumaker • Rosanne Simeone • Arthur Smith • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Emily Thompson • Claire Trazenfeld • Norman Weinstein • Carol White • Chris White • Patrick Whitehurst • Joan Wilentz

contents f i c t i on

c h i l d r e n

Fiction starred review list................................................p. 439

Children & TEENS starred review list........................... p. 499

Fiction..........................................................................................p. 439

Children & Teens..................................................................... p. 499

Mystery........................................................................................p. 456

GET MOVING WITH SINGER AND PHAM JULIE DANIELSON ON A STICK IS AN EXCELLENT THING.....p. 517

Science Fiction & Fantasy....................................................p. 463 KIRKUS Q&A WITH IRVIN D. YALOM......................................... p. 448

Kirkus Round-up EASTER & BUNNY..................................... p. 523 interactive e-books...............................................................p. 524

n on f i c t i on

i n d i e

Nonfiction starred review list.......................................p. 467

Indie starred review list......................................................p. 531

NONFICTION..................................................................................p. 467

Indie................................................................................................p. 531

KIRKUS Q&A WITH CRAIG TAYLOR............................................p. 482

Kirkus Q&A with REBECCA MEREDITH................................. p. 536

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on the web A therapist and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford’s School of Medicine, Irvin D. Yalom is the author of several professional works and a novelist who has introduced three different philosophers into his fiction—first Nietzsche, then Schopenhauer and now Spinoza. Here, he fictionalizes an account of Baruch de Spinoza, a rationalist philosopher whose genius wasn’t recognized until after his death. It’s a book that we said was “imaginative and erudite.”

w w w. k i r k u s r e v i e w s . c o m / l i s t s Discover more lists created by the critics online: New & Notable Fiction New & Notable Nonfiction 20 New & Notable Kids Books 20 New & Notable Young Adult Books

Bestselling author Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 1997) returns with her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, delving into her past of being raised by Pentecostal evangelists, her domineering adoptive mother--and the search for her biological one. Along the way, Winterson writes of the many hardships she faced while trying to grasp a bit of happiness.We called the book, “A moving, honest look at life as an abused adopted child.”

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Comedian/actor Michael Ian Black has just released a funny, heartwarming memoir, You’re Not Doing it Right. Black, known for his work in Wet Hot American Summer, Stella and The State, here tackles the everyday trials and tribulations of his life and marriage, from his days of dating in New York City to becoming a suburban dad in Connecticut. As with his last New York Times bestseller, My Custom Van, the humor here is sly, smart and packed with humility.

Artist Derf Backderf, known for his comic strip The City and previous graphic novels Trashed and Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, revisits his adolescence in Ohio, growing up beside serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in a sleepy, typical Midwestern town during the 1970s. Here, he re-creates a teen Dahmer’s life, illustrating his dysfunctional family, his alcohol abuse and depraved behavior, which all led up to what Dahmer would eventually become—a monster. In a starred review, we called it “a powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.

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on the web

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9 You are passionate about books and so are we. Visit the Kirkus Book Bloggers Network to find current commentary on your favorite genres.

From celebrity to sci-fi, we cover it all.

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fiction WHITE HORSE

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: WHITE HORSE by Adams, Alex.................................................... p. 439 KINGDOM COME by Ballard, J.G................................................ p. 440 SCHMIDT STEPS BACK by Begley, Louis......................................p. 441 EXIT PLAN by Bond, Larry........................................................... p. 442 THE HELIOS CONSPIRACY by DeFelice, Jim............................. p. 444 ANGELMAKER by Harkaway, Nick............................................. p. 446 THE LIFEBOAT by Rogan, Charlotte.............................................p. 452 MANUAL OF PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY by Saramago, José....................................... p. 453 HAND ME DOWN by Thorne, Melanie.........................................p. 456 THE SPINOZA PROBLEM by Yalom, Irvin D...............................p. 456 A WOMAN OF CONSEQUENCE by Dean, Anna......................... p. 457 THE BEDLAM DETECTIVE by Gallagher, Stephen........................p. 459 EXOGENE by McCarthy, T.C........................................................ p. 464

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Adams, Alex Emily Bestler/Atria (256 pp.) $19.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-4516-4299-5 A woman on the run ponders the nature of humanity as she lives through the end of the world.

Readers have gleefully suffered through the End of Days in a good many apocalyptic novels in recent years. Whether it’s zombies in World War Z, robots in Roboapacalypse or vampires in The Passage, writers suffer no shortage of inventive ways to kill us off. What debut novelist Adams brings to the scene in a planned trilogy is an unhinged but disquietly clear perspective on survivor’s guilt and the grimy nature of humanity. “It’s not just college grades that fall in a curve,” observes 30-year-old American refugee Zoe. “Human decency is bell-shaped, with some of us slopping over the edges.” Adams ramps up our end days in an increasingly horrifying amplification of events: a Chinese intervention of cellular technology; weather modification experiments gone awry; and a DNA-warping virus that halves the population at an astonishing rate. Zoe is making her way across Europe, hoping to book passage on a boat to Greece, but it’s hard traveling, especially when she discovers she’s pregnant. She and a young companion are beset by bands of predators and are stalked by a shadowy figure dubbed “The Swiss,” a murderous abortionist driven by a startling secret. With uncommon confidence, Adams flips back and forth between the present day and Zoe’s life before. She dreams of a container of horrors straight out of the Pandora myth, pieces together the (naturally) man-made origins of the plague and recounts her relationship with Nick Rose, her therapist. Adams has an excellent sense of timing, delivering gasp-inducing moments that punctuate her nightmare with verve. But it’s Zoe’s clear-eyed sense of self-preservation that will keep readers waiting for Adams’ follow-up.

The novel relies heavily on biblical and Greek myths to welcome readers to Zoe’s nightmare, but it’s a small price to pay for the jolt.

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“A freshly imagined work, this novel boasts clever twists and revelations right up until the end.” from complication

COMPLICATION

Adamson, Isaac Soft Skull Press (272 pp.) $15.95 paperback | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-59376-432-6 Prague is the setting for this unusual meta-mystery, in which an American’s investigation of his older brother’s disappearance occasions stories-within-stories involving Nazi occupiers, Communist spies, a gangster known as Rumpelstiltskin and a stillticking watch that goes back to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Sorting through his recently deceased father’s effects, Chicago debt collector Lee Holloway finds a letter from a Czech woman named Vera saying she needs to talk to him about his son Paul, who disappeared years ago. Though it was reported that he drowned in a flood, she writes, he was in fact murdered.

At the shadowy Black Rabbit bar in Prague, the frail, elusive Vera tells Lee his brother was involved in a plot to steal from an art gallery the Rudolf Complication, a legendary watch commissioned by Rudolf II. An accomplice, she said, killed Paul. Into the underground of the city, and European history, Lee goes, tour book in hand, eventually crossing paths with an American writer with the meaningfully palindromic name Hannah and a former Czech detective with sinister airs. Jutting into the main narrative are flashbacks and side stories including the anguished first-person confessions of a jeweler in Nazioccupied Prague who discovers the watch he is repairing is the miraculous watch and the tale of the resurrected suicide who created the watch that wasn’t a watch because, like victims of the serial killer loose in Prague, it’s missing hands. Adams, author of the punk-noir Billy Chaka series (Tokyo Suckerpunch, 2000, etc.), blends the Czech magic realism of Milan Kundera and American gumshoe fiction with an admirably light hand.

The asides sometimes prove distracting or unnecessary, but the parts add up to a satisfying whole.

A freshly imagined work, this novel boasts clever twists and revelations right up until the end.

THE GILLY SALT SISTERS

Baker, Tiffany Grand Central Publishing (384 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 14, 2012 978-0-446-19423-5 In her second novel, Baker (The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, 2009) follows the lives of two sisters whose family has always harvested salt that may or may not have magical powers over their Cape Cod community.

The town of Prospect (a town unbelievably untouched by modern life or tourists) depends on salt from the Gilly Salt Creek Farm for luck; the residents read their futures in the colors rising from Gilly salt thrown on the annual bonfire. Although the Gillys 440

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attend the same Catholic Church as everyone else in town, the feared power of their salt makes them permanent outsiders. As the book opens, the Gilly sisters have grown estranged. Younger, pretty Claire has married local rich boy (and her sister Jo’s former boyfriend) Whit Turner, and joined local society, while Jo remains on the struggling farm. Why is Whit so anxious to buy Jo out and Claire so anxious to turn people against Jo’s salt? Flashbacks show Jo has always been committed to harvesting the salt since her childhood in the 1950s, while book-smart Claire always wanted desperately to get away. Jo’s one childhood playmate was Whit, son of the wealthiest family in town. Whit’s mother wanted the children to have nothing to do with each other, and Jo’s mother was equally unenthusiastic. Shortly before charming but headstrong Whit left town for boarding school, he tried to proclaim his love to Jo. But having learned a family secret—one that most readers will guess way too soon—Jo broke off their budding romance. Years later, after Claire’s boyfriend broke her heart by becoming a priest, a newly returned Whit wooed her.

Twelve years later their marriage has soured. Then Whit begins an affair with a lonely young girl who has recently arrived in Prospect. When she becomes pregnant, Whit shows his darker side and all hell breaks loose. There are two fires, one accidental and one perhaps unintentionally lethal, before a discomfortingly amoral happy ending. Baker’s gift for richly embroidered fantasy only partially compensates for the novel’s inconsistency.

Alice Hoffman–lite.

KINGDOM COME

Ballard, J.G. Liveright/Norton (304 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 5, 2012 978-0-393-08178-7 Ballard (1930–2009) creates a world reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange and V for Vendetta in this novel of suburban fascism.

At the heart of the narrative is the Brooklands Metro-Centre Mall, a monstrosity that feeds excess and consumerism. In a recent incident, not atypical of the violence that pervades this vision of modern British life, a man has been shot and killed at the mall. Held for his murder is Duncan Christie, a mental patient who was on day release when the incident occurred. This seems to be a cut-and-dried case, even to Richard Pearson, narrator and son of the victim, but a few anomalies crop up. For example, three witnesses emerge who claim that Christie was at one of the entrances to the mall at the time of the shooting…and these witnesses just happen to be Christie’s physician, his psychiatrist and one of his former teachers. Pearson is not wrong in assuming this to be overly coincidental. In addition to the loss of his father, Pearson has other problems, for he has recently lost his job, pushed out of his position in an ad agency by his own wife. Pearson watches with some amazement the rise of quasifascist elements in this quasi-suburban setting that’s starting to create its own reality, for “leafy Surrey” is no longer a suburb

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of London but rather a suburb of Heathrow. Troops dressed in St. George’s shirts march in the streets, encouraging hooliganism and attacks against immigrant businesses; riots break out in sports arenas; and Pearson finds out his father might have had sympathies with the brown-shirted St. George’s movement.

Ballard writes brilliantly about the nightmarish underside of modern life, and this novel makes us poignantly aware of the loss of his voice.

SCHMIDT STEPS BACK

Begley, Louis Knopf (352 pp.) $25.95Mar. 16, 2012 978-0-307-70065-0

In the third of the Schmidt novels, what had been described as a comedy of manners turns tragic and redemptive.

Updike had Rabbit, Roth has Zuckerman, Richard Ford has Bascombe and Begley has Schmidt. While all serve a similar purpose, to illuminate American life and culture through the passages of one man’s maturation, the return of “Schmidtie” represents a significant advance from preceding volumes (Schmidt Delivered, 2000, etc.). An even longer interval has passed in Schmidt’s life than between books, since the protagonist readers knew in his early 60s is now 78 (it’s hard to imagine Jack Nicholson continuing in this role). Now deep into his second career, as a retired lawyer turned foundation head, he is much more concerned with topical events—wars and terrorism and politics (he loves Obama). And he has found new love with a woman who is more age appropriate, merely 15 years his junior (in contrast with the promiscuous waitress, younger than his daughter, who continues to play a key role in his life).

Artistically and thematically, this is the most ambitious novel in the Schmidt cycle, also the longest, and it requires familiarity with the earlier volumes to appreciate its richness. It ties the ends left loose at the conclusion of the last—his relationships with his daughter and his former lover, and the anticipation of the two babies that will make him a grandfather (and perhaps a father as well). Yet chronologically this isn’t a mere continuation of the Schmidt narrative, but one that finds him reflecting (“stepping back”), coming to terms with some pivotal episodes that were either downplayed or omitted from the first two novels. He has arrived at a place where he feels he has “at last grown up,” possibly capable of a “rebirth.” Yet, given the course his life has taken and the stage at which he has arrived, he compares himself to Lear and Job, facing what is likely his “last chance.”

The good news is that Schmidt still feels he has 10 years to live, which likely means at least one more novel. (Author tour to Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.)

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MISS FULLER

Bernard, April Steerforth (192 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-58642-195-3 A letter from one woman to another washes ashore.

This letter details the adventurous, fantastic, revolutionary life of Margaret Fuller. But will her words unite or divide? Will anyone read her letter at all? Bernard (Romanticism: Poems, 2009, etc.) juxtaposes two lives, two paths taken by very different 19th-century women, one conventional and the other extraordinary. Attending one of Margaret Fuller’s famed Conversations, Anne Thoreau, Henry’s adopted younger sister, is first preoccupied by her own plain dress and awkward manners. Yet Anne is quickly entranced by the charismatic Fuller with her bold call to each woman to embrace her inner Minerva, her own feminine wisdom that should stand alongside masculine wisdom. Fuller’s early feminism both attracts and frightens Anne. Indeed, the disapproving eyes of not only conventional society matrons but also her own professed friends, the men of the Transcendentalist Concord circle, shadow her constantly. After serving abroad as one of the first women foreign correspondents, Fuller and her family tragically drown as their ship founders off the coast. Henry rushes to the wreck and finds, among other things, a letter to Sophia Hawthorne. When he contacts the Hawthornes, however, Nathaniel, disturbed by reports of Fuller’s unconventional behavior, refuses to allow Henry to deliver it. Intrigued by the tale, Anne begins to wonder more about Fuller. Only after her children have grown and Henry himself has died does Anne seek out and read Fuller’s heartbreaking letter. The thrill of being an intrepid reporter, Anne discovers, is tempered by financial strains and illness. The price is steep, yet Fuller’s accounts of love and adventure justify the cost of her unconventional life, making her watery death much more tragic.

Bernard skillfully contrasts the public and private sides of Fuller, crafting a book with rich imagery, emotional depth and a poetic rhythm.

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“A classy entertainment from the British virtuoso.” from waiting for sunrise

EXIT PLAN

Bond, Larry Forge (432 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 4, 2012 978-0-7653-3146-5 A fast-moving military thriller that grabs the reader’s attention and holds on tightly.

Iran has a secret about its nuclear program—of course, the world assumes it has one, but no one knows how poorly it’s going. One of their scientists, a woman named Shirin, decides to defect to the West to prevent the war she fears will come from the world’s misunderstanding. But how can she leave Iran? It’s a job for the Navy SEALs to extract her and her husband from the Iranian coast and spirit her onto a submarine. This book is the product of plenty of research—on the capabilities of U.S. and Iranian submarines, the practices of the SEALs and the terrain along the Strait of Hormuz. Plenty goes wrong as the story shifts rapidly among several points of view. All the characters act with intelligence and dedication to their cause.

Even the “traitor” Shirin is motivated not by affection for the United States but by love of her native Iran—she does not fully trust the Americans, nor they her. Yet she must act to prevent a war that would kill thousands, so she willingly risks her life and that of her unborn child. On the American side, Navy submariner Jerry Mitchell is the nominal main character, although he is often a half step behind the SEALs he accompanies on his mission.

The writing is clear and crisp, the characters strong and deserving of sympathy. The reader may feel tempted to mentally wave a flag and chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” as our country takes extreme measures to preserve the peace, but Israelis and Iranians are also portrayed as strong, tough and generally principled patriots.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are prominent in the news.

That makes this novel a perfectly timed, first-class read.

WAITING FOR SUNRISE

Boyd, William Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-06-187676-9 A classy entertainment from the British virtuoso (Ordinary Thunderstorms, 2010, etc.)— a period caper that evolves into an adventure story of wartime counter-espionage.

A handsome young English actor has a sexual problem: He cannot ejaculate. Which is why Lysander Rief is in Vienna in the summer of 1913: He’s a patient of an English psychoanalyst with a crackpot theory, Parallelism. Lysander needs his problem cleared up before he marries his fiancée, the lovely leading lady Blanche Blondel. Soon enough, Lysander discovers that underneath Vienna’s decorum runs a “river of sex.” A fellow patient, Hettie Bull, seduces him, and to his delight Lysander performs well; hey, the theory works! Lysander enjoys trysts with the volatile 442

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Hettie, an English sculptor, until one day, to his astonishment, he is arrested on rape charges; Hettie has betrayed him to her menacing common-law husband. Military attachés at the British embassy bail him out, sheltering him and devising his escape. The actor improvises a disguise to leave Vienna which so impresses the attachés that a year later, now the Great War has begun, they recruit him to track down a high-placed traitor in the British war machine. Subterfuge has been a recurrent theme in Boyd’s work. Lysander’s mission entails a dangerous visit to the front, followed by a tricky confrontation with the traitor’s German contact in Geneva. Even in another outrageous disguise, Lysander is almost shot dead by another British agent due to a misunderstanding. Back in London, the intrigue becomes even denser. Boyd parodies the convolutions of the genre but retains its suspense, while that river of sex flows like the Thames. A contrite Hettie re-appears. Lysander enjoys himself with her before finding true fulfillment with Blanche, who has survived a Zeppelin attack, and dispatching the traitor with the help of his gay uncle (don’t tell the boss).

Boyd’s latest has the irresistible charm of a vintage car that’s still eminently roadworthy. And it’s great fun.

HINTERLAND

Brothers, Caroline Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-60819-678-4 School in England is the dream motivating two Afghan boys on their dangerous trek across Europe.

Here they come, 15 men, following the smuggler’s directions as they cross the river in full flood, the border between Turkey and Greece, part of a current phenomenon of trans-Europe migration. Accompanying them are two little guys, 14-year-old Aryan, the viewpoint character, and his 8-year-old brother Kabir. They are orphans. They lost their parents in separate terrorist attacks back home; an older brother was murdered by the Taliban. The boys have already covered many miles, spending time in Tehran and Istanbul.

Now, across the river in Greece, they board a truck that makes an unexpected stop when the brothers are handed over to a waiting Greek farmer. “Here’s your merchandise,” says the driver. Seven months of forced labor follow; at one point Kabir is sodomized by another truck driver. Then they abscond, hopping another truck, slowly making their way to Italy and France. There’s a Hollywood moment in Nice when a married couple from Los Angeles, IranianAmericans, buys them clothes, dinner and tickets to Paris, but then it’s back to reality in Calais, where swarms of Africans and Middle Easterners are living in makeshift camps. Aryan is tear-gassed by the cops and fingerprinted. The only free route to England seems to be the refrigerated truck, a potential death trap. First novelist Brothers, an Australian, is a journalist who has covered this story; she acknowledges her debt to a French language memoir by Wali Mohammadi. The question is how well her account of lost children on the march translates into fiction. How convincing is Aryan? He’s

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a saintly, protective big brother, and so resourceful he qualifies as Superboy, but he’s not individuated enough, any more than those American Good Samaritans or Idris, king of the Calais smugglers.

A debut that personalizes a humanitarian crisis but fails to fully penetrate others’ lives as does, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

ALWAYS COCA-COLA

Chreiteh, Alexandra Translated by Hartman, Michelle Interlink (144 pp.) $25.00 | paper $15.00 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-1-56656-873-9 978-1-56656-843-2 paperback The title refers to an advertising slogan, one that appears on a billboard in Beirut, for the ubiquitous soft drink.

Before narrator Abeer Ward (Arabic for “Fragrant Rose”) was born, her mother had a craving for only

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one thing—Coca-Cola. Ironically, 20-some years later Abeer’s good friend Yana, a sexually liberated woman and model in Beirut, becomes the visible emblem of the soft drink on a billboard that Abeer can see from her room. (It doesn’t hurt that Yana’s boyfriend is the manager of the local Coca-Cola company.) Yana is Romanian rather than Lebanese, but she’s established herself comfortably in Beirut…at least till she finds out she’s pregnant, and by her boyfriend rather than by her ex-husband. Although she wants to keep the baby, the boyfriend gives her a choice—get rid of the baby and continue to see him, or keep the baby and lose the relationship.

Yana and Abeer have a third friend, Yasmine, who makes her own statement by boxing and working out in the local men’s gym. This slim novel, expanded from a short story, follows their day-to-day dealings with the crisis involving Yana, a crisis exacerbated when her boyfriend rapes Abeer. Worried that she’s pregnant, Abeer has to deal with some of the realities of modern life—like getting a pregnancy test from a local pharmacy without becoming branded, shamed or ostracized. Chreiteh keeps up a lively dialogue (trialogue?) between the main characters, and eventually they all learn what it means to be 20-somethings in modern Beirut.

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THE LAST STORYTELLER

Chreiteh is a fresh voice in the Arab world, though either she or translator Hartman is overly addicted to exclamation points that give far too many sentences an inflated and artificial oomph.

THE HELIOS CONSPIRACY

DeFelice, Jim Forge (384 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 28, 2012 978-0-7653-2327-9 Wisecracking, rule-breaking FBI special agent Andy Fisher (Threat Level Black, 2005) returns to investigate the murder of his long mooned-over ex-girlfriend Kathy, brainy point person behind potentially life-changing solar-energy technology.

Fisher discovers that the Chinese stand first in line to sabotage her company’s groundbreaking project and steal its research, but they are hardly alone in opposing Icarus Sun Works. The New Mexico concern is all set to begin launching satellites that can draw energy from space and send it back to earth as inexpensive, environment-friendly electricity. The mysterious explosion of the rocket carrying a test satellite benefits energy profiteers who manipulate gas and electricity prices and make millions from brownouts. One of those investors, slimy Jonathon Loup, is in hock to the Chinese. The Russians have their own man on the ground doing dirty deeds. Fisher, who is addicted equally to bad coffee, cigarettes and withering sarcasm, ultimately must save Kathy’s co-worker and longtime friend Sandra from an assassin—a task made personal by the strong attraction he feels to her, years after having a crush on her. Criss-crossing the country, from New York to New Mexico to California to Pennsylvania, Fisher is the epitome of unflappability, until love unexpectedly re-enters his life. After reading this terrific book, mystery fans will hope that the prolific DeFelice, best known for military and techno-thrillers (some co-written with Stephen Coonts, Larry Bond and Richard Marcinko), brings him back more frequently. Smarter and funnier than its Da Vinci-esque title might suggest, this book is a complete success with its appealing investigator, rapid-fire dialogue and convincing storytelling, which exposes the overlap between science and politics. The climax, played out on New Mexico’s Indian ruins in the dead of night, could hardly be more satisfying.

A breezy and informative FBI thriller with personality to burn.

Delaney, Frank Random House (384 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-1-4000-6785-5

Irish-born novelist Delaney (Ireland, 2005, etc.) spins another charming mix of cotton-candy romance and history.

When we last left Ben MacCarthy, world war, social upheaval and sometimesrequited love were thick in the air. Now, at the start of Delaney’s latest, we find him across the pond, facing “a frigid Saturday in late 1956, in my struggling, depressed native land.” He has a job well suited to his curious and artful mind, gathering stories from old-timers, notable among them a yarn maestro who “had, naturally, pored over the monkish volumes, but he had also heard many of his stories in the old ancestral way, in his own home.” Ahem: a man who collects blarney may just commit some on his own, and McCarthy, whom we suspect of being a stand-in for Delaney himself, is a gifted practitioner of the trade. He’s not quite prepared, though, for the return of his beloved Venetia, star of stage and—well, stage—who, having split the blanket in the previous volume in Delaney’s saga, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show (2010), breezes merrily back into his life. Or, better, the life of poor battered Ireland, for it’s one of Ben’s pals who has the task of telling him that she’s turned up nearly a quarter-century later: “She’s touring the country. But I’m sure you know it. And you’re avoiding it.”

Just to rub it in, the friend adds that she’s just as beautiful as ever, and lonely. Well, gents, start your storytelling engines: Ben roams up and down the old sod seeking both stories and solace, affording Delaney plenty of opportunities for his hallmark tricks of the trade, from Quiet Man–style fisticuffs to goofy asides (“If Greece may be considered the birthplace of the rhetorical question, call Ireland the country that robbed it of all meaning”) and fourth-wall demolition (“The youngster who found the bodies, as I expect you’ve guessed, had come from the local hall”).

The story line isn’t exactly Ulysses, but Delaney makes the most of it to craft a light and pleasing entertainment.

(Local author promotion in New York)

AN ACCIDENTAL AFFAIR

Dickey, Eric Jerome Dutton (352 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-525-95234-3

What’s a financially successful screenwriter to do when his movie-star wife stars in an extremely explicit sex video?

Can he possible believe her claim that it was all an accident? Dickey’s latest novel (Tempted by Trouble, 2010, etc.) drops the reader into a very hip world starring characters ready-made for the screen. Their finances are vast, their bodies perfect, their troubles worthy of coverage on TMZ. Gorgeous 444

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“Few melodramatic prompts go unexplored in this tale of domestic woe.” from whatever you love

Regina Baptiste, James Thicke’s wife, has struggled to be taken seriously as an actor. Yet she has surprisingly starred in an explicit video with Johnny Bergs, aka Johnny Handsome, an actor she previously claimed to despise. James first gauges the world’s reaction via social-networking sites. He then attacks Bergs and flees to a seedier part of town while his driver, called Driver, packs up and delivers all of his furniture and electronic gadgets. Hiding out amid a curious assortment of characters, James immediately, repeatedly and with carefully described technical prowess, exacts sexual revenge upon his wife with virtual strangers. His new neighbors include Mr. Chetwyn Holder, who jealously loves his young girlfriend. Mrs. Patrice Evans, who uses exercise not only to keep her body in shape but also to fill the emotional void that is her marriage. Sweet Isabel, a lovely, slightly older woman, offers James conversation and more. Yet Regina still loves James, Bergs’ family wants revenge and a mysterious number keeps showing up on James’ caller ID. And then there’s the mysterious and threatening return of Regina’s exhusband. Dickey has set up an ardent thriller in which James must discover why his wife was in the sex video. Did someone coerce or trick her? How? Could the affair actually have been accidental? The pace is fast, to be sure, yet James’ own promiscuity makes his jealousy difficult to sympathize with.

A mix of erotica and noir, this novel lacks emotional depth.

WHATEVER YOU LOVE

Doughty, Louise Perennial/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Mar. 27, 2012 978-0-06-209466-7 Dead child, cheating husband, stalking, mental breakdowns, misunderstood immigrants—few melodramatic prompts go unexplored in this tale of domestic woe.

Laura, the narrator of the sixth novel

by Doughty (Fires in the Dark, 2004, etc.), is suffering from two emotional catastrophes. The first is the collapse of her marriage to David, who left her for one of his co-workers. The second, and most devastating, comes a few years later, when their 9-year-old daughter, Betty, is killed in a car accident in their quiet British town. Doughty structures the story by bouncing back and forth in time to cover Laura’s mental state before and after the accident. In doing so, she draws out the occasional keen observation about husbands and wives and mothers and daughters. But the novel is also saddled with bland characters and plot turns that are unengaging when they don’t defy credulity. In one thread running through the story, Laura struggles to identify the author of a series of intimidating and taunting anonymous messages, but its resolution is unsurprising and ultimately irrelevant to the story. Another subplot involves the anti-immigrant sentiment that pervades the town, focused on the Albanian man driving the car that killed Betty; in time the connection between him and Laura becomes closer, but then grows unconvincing and absurd. The novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Costa Book |

Award, presumably on the strength of its portrait of grief—in its more meditative moments, Laura’s feelings of shellshock are powerful, and her recollection of the day of Betty’s death is turned with agonizingly patient prose. But such moments are overwhelmed by ungainly police-procedural touches, and the novel’s shifts between the past and present sap its momentum.

An overly earnest portrait of one mother’s suffering.

THE FAMILY CORLEONE

Falco, Ed & Puzo, Mario Grand Central Publishing (448 pp.) $27.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-446-57462-4 Don Corleone’s family navigates opportunity and treachery as Prohibition comes to a close in New York.

Playing around in the Godfather universe is a tightrope act. The original novel is a pulpy, popular synthesis of influences, while its film adaptation is a timeless classic. The video games are slushy Grand Theft Auto knock-offs, and Mark Winegardner’s sequels are labyrinthine marathons with epic casts. This time, the franchise falls back on more workmanlike writer Falco (Saint John of the Five Boroughs, 2009, etc.), who reels the story back to its roots though moments resurrected from unproduced scripts by Mario Puzo. It’s 1933, and the Don is at the height of his power.

Peter Clemenza is Vito’s capo and Genco Abbandando remains consigliere. Michael and Fredo squabble underfoot but it’s Sonny’s explosive temper that film fans will recognize. Meanwhile, dutiful college student Tom Hagen is having a harmless fling—that turns out to be not so harmless when psychotic Luca Brasi decides to kill Tom for messing with his broad. In other boroughs, Giuseppe Mariposa conspires with Emilio Barzini and Phillip Tattaglia in his slow tango with the Corleones, while a pair of Irish brothers adds a new element to this dangerous mix. What works well is Falco’s depiction of Vito Corleone, which captures both the cool reserve of young Vito and the insight he demonstrates as Don. “To understand the truth of things,” he cautions Sonny, “you have to judge both the man and the circumstances. You have to use both your brains and your heart. That’s what it’s like in a world where men lie as a matter of course—and there is no other kind of world, Santino, at least not here on earth.” More obsessive fans also get a reveal about a member of the Don’s family, as well as a juicy unveiling of Luca Brasi’s back story pulled from The Godfather.

A worthy addition to the lurid world of the Five Families, if not quite an offer you can’t refuse.

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ANGELMAKER

Harkaway, Nick Knopf (496 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 20, 2012 978-0-307-59595-9 A bang comes at the door, and with it an offer that one shouldn’t refuse but must.

Thus begins Brit novelist Harkaway’s (The Gone-Away World, 2008) latest stuffedto-the-rafters romp through genres and eras. Harkaway is the son of spy-thriller master John le Carré, but he has none of his father’s economy or world-weariness. Indeed, he takes a more-is-better approach: If one jape is good, 10 will kill; if one dramatic arc succeeds, let’s have a few more. The tale opens up as a sort of hard-boiled fantasy: The unfortunately named Joe Spork, a clock repairer by day, finds himself drawn into a weird web involving his father, a gangster and half of British intelligence during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, all courtesy of a sort of doomsday machine that falls into his possession. The current inhabitants of Whitehall want it. So does a bad, bad Asian dictator. A band of steampunks called the Ruskinites—you’ve got to know a little something about Victorian aesthete John Ruskin for that joke to work—figure in the proceedings, as do assorted hunters and collectors. Joe has a few choices: He can hit the trail, he can turn tough-guy and fight back or he can sell out. Which choice he’ll stick with is a matter on which Harkaway leaves us guessing, meanwhile traveling the edges between fantasy, sci-fi, the detective novel, pomo fiction and a good old-fashioned comedy of the sort that Jerome K. Jerome might have written had he had a ticking thingy instead of a boat as his prop. Harkaway is a touch undisciplined; his tale stands comparison to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, but it’s a lot looser, and sometimes there’s too much of a good thing. But it’s a funny surfeit, rich with good humor and neat twists—and you’ve got to love the self-doubting super-spy heroine, once a bit of a femme fatale, now a dotty oldster: “She has to admit privately that she may be mad…She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she had observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal.”

A touch early in the season for a beach book, though just the kind of thing to laugh at away from polite society.

Top-notch. (Agent: Patrick Walsh)

A PERFECT BLOOD

Harrison, Kim Harper Voyager (448 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 21, 2012 9780061957895 In book 10 of a popular urban fantasy detective series, Cincinnati witchturned-demon Rachel Morgan confronts a powerful hate group.

Nothing ever comes easy for Rachel.

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no legal status—in fact, she’s listed as dead—which makes it complicated for her to renew her Ohio driver’s license. She does want the other demons to think she’s dead, but the charmed silver bracelet that severs her connection to the demon collective also blocks most of her magic. As a result, when strangely mutated and mutilated witch corpses begin turning up, she’s both blamed for demonic activity by law enforcement and (apparently) nearly defenseless when the true perpetrators target Rachel (never count her out, though).

It’s all part of a convoluted plot by HAPA (Humans Against Paranormals Association) to synthesize demon blood and use it to exterminate all Inderlanders (vampires, Weres, witches, etc.). As per usual, Rachel’s struggle with self-acceptance, her good heart, her rejection of everyone’s advice, her impulsiveness and recklessness and her all-around gift for causing chaos get her into trouble. Those qualities up the action quotient, but it would be nice to see Rachel’s emotional growth progress a little more quickly. Every novel ends on a high note of confidence, but by the time the next one opens, Rachel has already plunged back into neurosis and worry, restarting the cycle. On the positive side, Rachel’s relationship with elf businessman/ drug lord Trent appears to be deepening; but again, it’s not as far advanced as some might wish.

Still fun, but could reach farther. (Author tour to Atlanta, Boston, Boulder/Denver, Detroit, Ft. Lauderdale/Miami, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.)

AEROGRAMMES

James, Tania Knopf (192 pp.) $24.00 | Apr. 5, 2012 978-0-307-26891-4

A well-turned set of stories defined by emotional and physical separation, particularly in the Indian-American diaspora.

James’ fine debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns (2009), was a continenthopping tale that tracked the divergent lives of two Indian sisters with wit and a lightly comic touch.

Her debut story collection displays a similar approach, and she enthusiastically tests how her style can function in a variety of settings. The two most inventive stories study human emotions in nonhuman contexts. “What to Do With Henry” follows a chimpanzee’s travels from Sierra Leone to the United States, where he builds an uncanny bond with a woman and her adopted daughter; as the chimp struggles for his place in a zoo’s pecking order, James crafts a clear (but unforced) allegory of our own human strivings. Likewise, the closing “Girl Marries Ghost” imagines a society where people who are desperate for companionship can marry ghosts, who are eager to spend a little time back in the real world; James’ portrait of one such marriage is a seriocomic expose of our craving for order set against our inability to let go of our messy pasts. The other stories deal in culture clashes, mostly featuring Indian Americans, but for James ethnicity isn’t the sole source of conflict. The Indian

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“Classic literature gets desterilized with the help of the modern world’s most daring graphic artists.” from the graphic canon

dance teacher in “Light & Luminous,” for instance, is defined as much by her sense of personal pride as her growing feeling that her art is out of step with the times. In the title story, the protagonist (who has the evocative last name of Panicker) is deciding whether his fellow nursing home residents are more embracing than his family.

At every turn, James’ prose is crisp, observant and carefully controlled; unlike the narrator of “Escape Key,” who grows increasingly aware of his fiction’s shortcomings, James projects a deep emotional intelligence.

ALL WOMAN AND SPRINGTIME

Jones, Brandon Algonquin (384 pp.) $24.95 | May 1, 2012 978-1-61620-077-0

A debut novel about the plight of young women in North Korea (written before the recent death of dictator Kim Jong-il), with its socio-political insights undermined by clichés, stereotypes, plot devices and sentimentality more appropriate within a romance or even young adult novel.

The Author’s Note provides an unusual warning: “Parts of this novel reveal the physical and psychological traumas associated with human trafficking and sexual slavery. Because of the graphic and mature nature of these themes, the contents of this book may not be suitable for young readers.” A novel aimed at adults wouldn’t seem to require such a disclaimer, but it’s perhaps more fitting here.

Particularly early on, both the tone and the subject matter seem more appropriate for readers of a similar age as the novel’s teenage girls, Gi and Il-sun, who become close friends at an orphanage and a factory despite the significant differences that will ultimately distinguish them. The opening part reads like a primer of everyday drudgery and illusion in the totalitarian regime, where they learn that they live in a “Worker’s Paradise,” in contrast to the oppression of South Korea, where “imperialist Americans were harsh overlords.” Gi is comparatively plain and boyish, with a gift for numbers (that she keeps to herself), while Il-sun is “ripening into womanhood in the way some girls do, like a bomb exploding.”

Though the two consider their friendship as “two halves finding unexpected completion,” there is little doubt that as Il-sun’s budding sexuality (whether ripening or exploding) leads her to sexy but dangerous men and ultimately to her pride in her sexual allure, she is headed for a fall. A very different fate awaits Gi, whose looks don’t give her as much to barter for her survival, but whose mathematical gifts lead to a surprising conclusion in a surprising place.

A novel for those who like lessons in international culture spiced with lines about “a dapper, flashy, dangerous bad boy whose smile had the effect of sliding her panties off her legs.” (Agent: Wendy Weil)

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THE GRAPHIC CANON Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons

Kick, Russ--Ed. Seven Stories (448 pp.) $34.95 paperback | May 22, 2012 978-1-60980-376-6

Classic literature gets desterilized with the help of the modern world’s most daring graphic artists.

In this first of three volumes, editor Kick (100 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, 2008, etc.), better known for rabble-rousing at Disinfo.com, collects an incredible variety of graphic adaptations of oral tales, plays, essays, sonnets and letters. Starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Hamlet, this meaty slab is laced with more wit, beauty, social commentary and shock than one might expect from a book tailor-made for college classrooms.

The expected suspects are all here in excerpted or abridged form, including The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Divine Comedy. But there are unexpected entries, too. Tania Schrag turns in a delightfully explicit depiction of the Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, while Vicki Nerino delivers a raw take on an explicit yarn usually expunged from The Arabian Nights. Noah Patrick Pfarr turns John Donne’s “The Flea” into an elaborate lesbian tryst. Robert Crumb does his characteristically bizarre take on James Boswell’s London Journal, with high debauchery intact. More unpredictable entries are drawn from Native American folktales, a Japanese play, Chinese poetry and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Serious treatments are given to King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not to mention a museum-worthy portrait by Eric Johnson of a minor character from Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queen. Some of the artistic heavy hitters in this volume include a selection from Seymour Chwast’s outstanding adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Rick Geary’s take on the Book of Revelation, Peter Kuper’s blistering take on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and the legendary Will Eisner’s view of Don Quixote from his 2003 graphic novel The Last Knight. The infamous Molly Crabapple closes the book with rich portraits of The Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont from Dangerous Liaisons.

If artists, as British sculptor Anish Kapoor famously said, make mythologies, then this volume is genuinely a marriage of equals.

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THE MASTER BLASTER

Kluge, P.F. Overlook (304 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-59020-322-4

Kluge chronicles the overlapping lives of strangers who travel to Saipan and find an America they never expected.

George Griffin is a disillusioned travel writer whose latest book proposal isn’t exactly working out the way he wanted. |

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h i r v i n d. ya l om

The Spinoza Problem

Irvin D. Yalom Basic Books (336 pp. ) $25.99 Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-465-02963-1

“Imaginative and erudite” sums up The Spinoza Problem.

A therapist and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford’s School of Medicine, Irvin D. Yalom is the author of several professional works and a novelist who has introduced three different philosophers into his fiction—first Nietzsche, then Schopenhauer and now Spinoza.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a rationalist philosopher whose genius wasn’t recognized until after his death. Spinoza was Dutch and Jewish, a man whose concept of “God as Nature,” his rationalist deconstruction of the Torah, led to cherem, excommunication. Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue brought to justice on the Nuremberg gallows, plays a role as a second protagonist in the book.

Here Yalom talked to us about writing and research, philosophy and psychiatry, and his latest spellbinding novel.

Q: Why Spinoza? Did you have any help in research?

A: This is the most difficult writing project that I’ve undertaken, from start to finish approximately four years. When formulating the plot, it did not dawn on me that a novel, taking place in two time periods, would double research time. Most of my research was done from reading and with the help of colleagues in the philosophy department at Stanford and colleagues elsewhere in the United States, Holland and Germany.

Why Spinoza? I’ve long been interested in Spinoza and felt many of his ideas have importance to the field of psychotherapy. For example, the idea that all events, including mental events, have causes and that, if we could research deeply enough, we would be able to understand human thoughts and feelings with great precision, that understanding resulting in transcendence.

Spinoza spent a great deal of time examining how we can escape from the bondage of passions and clearly that theme overlaps heavily with the endeavor of therapy. At one point he stated that reason is no match for passion and, thus, we must try to transform reason into passion. I find that idea quite useful in my therapy work and endeavor to incite the patient’s curiosity about him/herself.

Q: Why Rosenberg, a relatively unknown Nazi?

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Q: Have you studied philosophy?

A: I took a straight premedical, science-based curriculum and had no philosophical background.

However, I was familiar with the great philosophical novelists—e.g., Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Camus.

Fairly early in my career, I felt strongly that the history of psychotherapy did not begin with Freud or Jung, or psychophysiological work in the 19th century but instead began with the great writers and thinkers going back to the earliest written record.

During the first year of my psychiatric residency, I was growing dissatisfied with the two major current orientations: psychoanalysis and biological psychology. At that time an extremely important book, Existence by Rollo May, was published that introduced the relevance of European existential thought to psychiatry, and I understood that there was a third, philosophical path available to me. I decided to pursue a philosophical education and during my residency enrolled in undergraduate courses in philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

I’ve audited many courses at Stanford and continue this education until this day.

-By Gary Presley

9 For the full interview, please visit kirkusreviews.com

p hoto by re id ya lo m

A: The idea of using Rosenberg was entirely the result of a visit to the Spinoza Museum in Holland.

I had the desire to write about Spinoza, but I had no story. It’s most difficult to write a novel about a thinker who lives only in his thoughts.

It was only when I heard my guides mention that the Nazis had confiscated Spinoza’s library in

the beginning of World War II, and that the Nazi officer who confiscated the library stated that this library would help them with the “Spinoza problem,” that I began to formulate the plot of the book. The officer was a member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a task force headed by Alfred Rosenberg with the mission to plunder Europe. I immediately began to research this man and then build him into my novel.

In my prologue, I cited Gide’s statement that “fiction is history that could have happened whereas history is fiction that did happen.” In my view, the fiction in this novel could have happened. Rosenberg considered himself a philosopher and was well read in the European tradition and could well have been troubled by the fact that the greatest German thinkers all revered the Jew, Spinoza.

Stephanie Warner is an academic running away from a failed marriage. Mel Brodie, a Jewish businessman, and Khan, a Bangladeshi worker, round out the core cast of characters arriving on the same flight, each hoping to find on the South Pacific island of Saipan the something that’s missing from their lives. Home to fierce fighting in World War II, Saipan became a U.S. Commonwealth, but other than the title, there is very little about the small island that speaks to the American way of life. With a tropical climate blanketing the ruins of a war fought many decades ago and the remnants of failed motels and industrial buildings littering the roads, the island speaks to immigrants looking to better their situations. Many of them find exactly the opposite, working in jobs where they are treated like slaves, earning barely enough to survive. While the island’s residents like to tout the place as paradise, one person spends much of his time bursting that bubble. Known for reasons Kluge never fully explains as the Master Blaster, this rebel maintains a website that critically examines Saipan, leading to threats and attempts to unmask his identity. Kluge’s story, told in turn by the different travelers, traces the intersection of his characters’ lives and how they relate both to one another and to Saipan. The writing is right on the mark, with the author migrating effortlessly from one point of view to another. And the characters interact plausibly, their stories overlapping almost imperceptibly, but the picture he paints of Saipan is depressing: In Kluge’s hands the island becomes a down-on-its-luck Paradise wannabe that exists only to bilk migrants of their dreams.

Highly imaginative but unfortunately titled and depressing from first page to last, the novel won’t send anyone rushing to book a vacation on the island of Saipan.

UNDER OATH

McLean, Margaret Forge (320 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-7653-2813-7 Former prosecutor McLean juggles a vast cast of characters in this courtroom drama, her second legal thriller, set in the crime-ridden Boston neighborhood of Charlestown.

Readers met quirky defense attorney Buddy Clancy in McLean’s first novel (Under Fire, 2011). This time Clancy is defending a not-so-innocent drug dealer and killer named Billy Malone, who prevails as the scourge of Charlestown.

Feisty prosecutor Annie Fitzgerald, an Asian American despite her Irish name, has joined forces with Boston Homicide Det. Mike Callahan, whose career-long crusade to put Malone out of business and in prison has taken him to dark places. This time the pair have Charlestown’s resident bad boy up on a charge of killing a young artist named Trevor Shea, whose insightful and lifelike paintings take the viewer deep into the souls of his subjects.

Trevor, who died after using some particularly potent heroin, left behind a collection of paintings depicting Charlestown’s more famous murder victims. Annie believes those paintings hold the key to solving Trevor’s death and races the clock to find more of |

them, as well as the key that links them together. But she has her work cut out for her: In addition to a garrulous and uncooperative juror who spills the jury’s secrets, she’s also battling the one person who should want to see the case against Malone succeed, Trevor’s brother Chris. While Annie tries to keep the prosecution’s witnesses from being picked off one-by-one, she finds that she cares almost too much about getting Malone off the streets once and for all. As for Clancy, he struggles with his representation of the repugnant Malone, but justifies his defense by claiming he’s doing it to ensure the sanctity of Malone’s constitutional rights. McLean writes trial scenes well and distinguishes herself by moving some of the action out of the courtroom. However, she also requires the reader to suspend common sense and swallow the premise that the present guardians of Boston’s justice system routinely behave like a bunch of squabbling kids fighting over whose turn it is at bat.

Melodramatic and implausible in places, but still entertaining.

JOE GOLEM AND THE DROWNING CITY

Mignola, MikeGolden, Christopher St. Martin’s (288 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-312-64473-4 978-1-4299-4079-5 e-book

An adolescent orphan navigates a subterranean world of magic and technology with the help of an aged detective and his mysterious square-jawed protector.

There’s an appetite out there for these sorts of propulsive, fantasy-rich mash-ups of steampunk and mythic literature, as evidenced by the likes of the video game Bioshock and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But few combine literary sincerity and fun as well as Mignola (creator of the comic-book superhero Hellboy) and sometime collaborator Golden (Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, 2007, etc.). Here the pair construct a rich world ripe for sequels and prequels. In their version of New York City, a cataclysm flooded the place in 1925, sinking Lower Manhattan in what has become known as “The Drowning City.” An elderly necromancer named Felix Orlov has taken 14-year-old redhead Molly McHugh under his protection. When malevolent gas-masked intruders attack, Molly is saved by an enormous boxer-nosed brute named Joe. It turns out that Joe works for an ancient Holmsian detective, Simon Church, who inspired dozens of stories and novels but whose real work is keeping tabs on the city’s occult activity. “Give me honest ghosts, a vampire hungry for blood, boggarts that eat children…that’s more my area,” says Church. “Not this vast, unknowable cosmic lunacy.” For decades, Church has been hunting the malevolent Dr. Cocteau, a brilliant and elusive villain who’s gotten his hands on a powerful artifact called Lector’s Pentajumlum. Steely-eyed but an amnesiac, Joe instinctually becomes Molly’s protector, but the dreams of this Croatian behemoth are of killing witches, a tidbit that becomes important later in the story. With Jules Verne technology, ghosts, magic and multidimensional monsters, it doesn’t

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“A profane, heady thriller more startling and compelling than its individual components and influences might demonstrate.” from strange flesh

fall that far from Mignola’s Hellboy origins, but it’s an awfully fun way to pass an afternoon.

Mignola’s affectionate, Kirby-esque portraits compliment Golden’s imaginative, YA-friendly prose.

JONAH MAN

Narozny, Christopher Ig Publishing (200 pp.) $15.95 paperback | May 15, 2012 978-1-935439-48-6

Narozny draws an intriguing literary debut from the unexpected milieu of yucks and pratfalls, “browsers” and “sleeper jumps” of 20th-century vaudeville.

It is 1922, glory days for skits and novelty acts on stages large and small. But Swain, a one-handed juggler, scrambles for second-tier bookings, relegated to chase audiences after the performance of a child artist as gifted as a young Chaplin, a youngster named Jonson. Swain also is a drug courier, distributing vials of silver-blue liquid around the hinterland, vials he notches carefully each time he samples and then dilutes the contents. Narozny supplies ample back story for Swain. Twenty years earlier a major headliner as a wire act, and then he fell. Confidence gone, Swain partnered with Connor, a medicine show charlatan until, missing the vaudeville lights, he makes an unspeakable choice to return. The novel is divided into quarters, with Jonson père, soon to be Swain’s nemesis, the focus of the most compelling segment. Jonson too was vaudeville, in a husband-wife act, but his wife died in childbirth, leaving him with his son. Easing his pain with booze, Jonson takes work as a piano player in a high-society brothel, allowing his boy to be mothered by one of the girls. Jonson also becomes an ally of the madame, and she sends him back to vaudeville, accompanied by the boy already so talented as to be “a hytone note on a bill of hokum.” Jonson is also to deliver the silver-blue narcotic and shadow Swain’s drug dealings, an easy task since he’s already suspicious of Swain’s intentions toward his son.

There are murders, with the final two segments unreeling from the point of view of the boy and of a nameless detective identified as the Inspector. The story unfolds believably, albeit with a subtle shadow of near surrealism.

An original and promising literary debut.

STRANGE FLESH

Olson, Michael Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-2757-2 Sex, lies and video all play a role in the unraveling of a lusty, gifted hacker.

Readers can choose their poison in this richly composed slab of transgressive fiction by debut novelist Olson—say, a healthy measure of Neal Stephenson 450

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crossed with a slice of Warren Ellis with a serious splash of Nicholson Baker’s sex novels. Crossing the barrier between sex, games and virtual reality, the book is likely to be the only Marquis de Sade–influenced thriller this year. It starts with a bit of Social Network aristocracy, introducing narrator James Pryce, a Harvard-educated social engineer with exclusive security firm Red Rook. “We Socials believe that a bug in your firewall program, once discovered, can be patched in minutes, but the software running the human brain will stay broken forever,” muses the hacker. James’ talents have been especially requested by twin media moguls Blake Randall and his sister Blythe, with whom Pryce has a troubled, heated history. Their brother Billy, a rogue performance artist of sorts, has gone missing with the threat to bring down their empire. James is tasked with infiltrating Billy’s playground, GAME, a high-tech artists’ colony whose home base is a virtual-reality simulation called NOD. Once inside, James meets a voracious Russian femme fatale who introduces him to her click’s secret project, “Imminent Teledildonics,” a state-of-the-art sex simulation. Meanwhile, Billy’s avatar is inspiring a wildly complex chase through NOD inspired by The 120 Days of Sodom. It all gets to be a bit much for James, whose clever asides neatly cool the wrought-iron tension of the plot. “Maybe I need to take measures to get my personal shit together,” he wonders. “Tamp down the Byronic passions I’m starting to feel for this tarted-up vacuum cleaner.”

For readers with a penchant for this volatile mix of sex, violence and technology, the payoff is rich indeed.

A profane, heady thriller more startling and compelling than its individual components and influences might demonstrate. (Agent: Jenn Joel)

THE MASTER’S MUSE

O’Connor, Varley Scribner (256 pp.) $25.00 | May 8, 2012 978-1-4516-5538-4

A fictional portrait of ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq’s struggle with polio—and George Balanchine.

As O’Connor’s main narrative opens in the summer of 1956, the New York City Ballet is on tour in Copenhagen when 27-year-old Tanny (as everyone calls her) is stricken with polio.

George nurses her devotedly and pushes her almost as hard in physical therapy as he did in rehearsal, but they must face the fact that she will never walk or dance again, while his life continues to be consumed by ballet. Tanny, his fifth wife, is well aware of George’s habit of marrying his favorite ballerina, making great dances for her, then moving on to new inspiration. The balance of the novel traces the evolution of their complicated relationship: during the remaining 13 years of their marriage, when she tells herself “the other women mean nothing” and are merely fodder for his choreography; through the crisis sparked by his obsession with teenage Suzanne Farrell, which destabilizes NYCB and finally leads to their divorce; and in later years, when they resume a friendship that

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still has moments of jealousy and anger, but is founded on enduring love and long intimacy. Jerome Robbins, Diana Adams and Maria Tallchief are among the other real-life figures vividly depicted in the first-person narration O’Connor (A Company of Three, 2003, etc.) crafts for Tanny, but the center of attention is always George, captured in all his intermingled charm, cruelty and utter devotion to his muse—whoever she may be. We believe Tanny’s assertion that she holds a special place in his heart, but we sense that she knows there are special places there for all his women. Tanny has another lover later in life, and she finds fulfilling work writing books and coaching dancers; this is not a novel about victimization or the malevolence of genius, but rather about the painful accommodations all of us make for the things and people we love.

Thoughtful, tender and quite gripping, even for readers unfamiliar with the historical events the author sensitively reimagines. (Agent: Joy Harris)

SACRILEGE

Parris, S.J. Doubleday (432 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-385-53547-2 Giordano Bruno, the excommunicated monk attached to both the French embassy and the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham, is lured to Canterbury by still another troubled attachment.

In 1584, Bruno thinks he’s put Sophia Underhill, whom he loved in vain in Heresy (2010), behind him.

And so he has, but only in the sense that she’s dogging his steps in London disguised as a boy. When he recognizes her, she appeals once more for his help. Sir Edward Kingsley, the much older magistrate to whom her aunt married her off after an illegitimate child exiled her from the life she’d known, has been brained with a crucifix in Canterbury Cathedral under conditions that echo the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and make Sophia the obvious suspect. Only Bruno, she insists, can vindicate her by unmasking her hated husband’s killer. Under protest, Bruno persuades Walsingham to dispatch him to Canterbury, ostensibly to report back on the doings of Dr. Harry Robinson, the spymaster’s man inside the Cathedral Chapter, but secretly accompanied by Sophia, still disguised as Kit. He soon identifies several other promising suspects: Sir Edward’s wastrel son Nicholas; physician/alchemist Dr. Ezekiel Sykes; and cathedral gatekeeper Tom Garth, whose sister Sarah died in the Kingsley home nine years ago under mysterious circumstances. In the meantime, however, Bruno stumbles into much deeper waters, from the disappearances of a number of young boys to a plot to revive the Becket cult, dormant ever since the disappearance of the saint’s bones, to a conspiracy involving the alchemical theories of Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistus.

Instead of flying below the radar, as Walsingham bade him, Bruno finds himself swiftly making influential enemies as well.

Densely textured but slow-moving, with a mystery whose tangled mess of multiple plots and plotters is only partly resolved

by Bruno’s trial for murder, attempted murder and larceny. |

EMPRESS OF THE SEVEN HILLS

Quinn, Kate Berkley (512 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-425-24202-5 The lives of an ambitious soldier, a patrician heiress and a future emperor fatefully intersect.

Ex-gladiator Vix, short for Vercingetorix (after Julius Caesar’s Gallic nemesis), has just returned to Rome. His parents, in the Roman equivalent of a witness-protection program for their role in the assassination of tyrannical Emperor Domitian, have retired to Britannia, where they have a villa and a garden. Vix seeks out the protection of his parents’ protector and co-conspirator, Senator Norbanus. Hired as a guard, Vix is enticed into the bed of Norbanus’ daughter Sabina, who at 18 has still not chosen a husband. After Sabina marries Hadrian, ward of the current Emperor Trajan, Vix joins the Tenth Legion and is off to Germania. When Hadrian and Trajan arrive to put down a barbarian rebellion, Sabina tags along, and is soon marching with the legions herself. Since Hadrian is preoccupied with male lovers, spirited Sabina is free to share the campfire and cot of Vix, forging convivial friendships with his comrades, including her former suitor Titus, a reluctant military tribune. Vix hopes to advance through the ranks despite his plebian status, but his only chance of making Centurion is to distinguish himself in battle: this he does by finding the weak spot of a fortress under siege, and killing the barbarian king. Promoted to aquilifer (bearer of the legion’s eagle standard), Vix’s joy is short-lived: His treasonous affair with Sabina is very nearly exposed. Hadrian’s meddling mentoress, the Empress Plotina, convinces Hadrian to curtail his wife’s freedoms. Years later, Vix, on the verge of attaining his dream, Centurion-hood, returns to Rome, where Sabina remains under tight surveillance by Hadrian and the Empress. Titus advises Vix to steer clear, particularly if he wants to join Trajan’s next campaign of conquest in Parthia. However, soon Sabina, Vix and Titus dare to flout Hadrian, who, if Plotina’s schemes bear fruit, will occupy the imperial throne (and Quinn’s next book).

I, Claudius it’s not. Still, Quinn handles Imperial Rome with panache.

A SURREY STATE OF AFFAIRS

Radford, Ceri Pamela Dorman/Viking (288 pp.) $25.95Apr. 2, 2012 978-0-670-02342-4

If you thought Bridget Jones was ditzy, wait till you read the online diary of a blissfully out-of-touch wife and mother at the heart of conservative middle England.

Drawn from a daily column in a British newspaper, Radford’s debut is unsurprisingly episodic and repetitive in its lightly comic account of

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Constance Harding’s gradual emergence from a world of her own. Satirical, but with little edge, the book evokes the life, family and social circle of a cheerily naive homemaker blind to her husband’s infidelity with the live-in Lithuanian housekeeper; her son’s homosexuality; her fellow bell-ringer’s passion for her; and so much more. Instead, Constance busies herself with matchmaking, the Church Flowers committee, yearning for grandchildren and holding the domestic fort. Narrative high points include the infected tongue piercing of her slutty daughter; an escaped parrot; a neighbor’s change of fortunes; and eventually a crisis with Constance’s husband, which leads to Buenos Aires and a new leaf being turned. Throughout, the predictable humor is reliant on easy targets, Constance’s ineffectual voice and her old-fashioned attitudes—”Never trust boys who don’t own cuff links.”

Despite references to blogs and reality TV, traditionalism and stereotype live on in a comedy that’s as bland and clichéd as a cucumber sandwich.

THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE

Rich, Roberta Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Feb. 14, 2012 978-1-4516-5747-0 It’s one crisis after another for a 16thcentury Italian-Jewish midwife and her merchant husband struggling to be reunited.

Religious persecution, sexism, pestilence and murderous, scheming siblings are just a few of the hurdles confronting Hannah Levi and her husband Isaac in Canadian-based Rich’s cliffhanger-strewn debut. Key events have happened before the story opens, giving the novel the feel of a sequel: Isaac, who gambled his fortune on a shipment of silk, was captured by mercenaries and is now a slave in Malta; Hannah’s sister, a convert to Christianity, is working as a courtesan; and Hannah herself has become “the best midwife in Venice, Christian or Jew,” having invented forceps, the use of which risks accusations of witchcraft. When a Christian nobleman implores Hannah to help deliver his son and heir, she does so in defiance of her rabbi in order to raise Isaac’s ransom money.

The baby is born, but the forceps are stolen by the nobleman’s wicked brother from whom she must also rescue the kidnapped child before masquerading as a plague victim to avoid further threats. Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Isaac is being starved and beaten in Malta where, after multiple plot twists, the story screeches to a breathless halt.

Overstuffed is an understatement for this heavily researched but lightweight historical adventure. (Agent: Bev Slopen)

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THE LIFEBOAT

Rogan, Charlotte Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown (288 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-316-18590-5 First-time novelist Rogan’s architectural background shows in the precision with which she structures the edifice of moral ambiguity surrounding a young woman’s survival during three weeks in a crowded lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic in 1914.

The novel begins with Grace back on American soil, on trial for her actions on the boat. Two other female survivors who are also charged, Hannah and Mrs. Grant, plead self-defense. Grace, guided by her lawyer Mr. Reichmann, who has had her write down her day-by-day account of events, pleads not guilty. Rogan leaves it up to the reader to decide how reliable a narrator Grace may be. Newly impoverished after her father’s financial ruin and subsequent suicide, New Yorker Grace set her sites on the wealthy young financier Henry Winter and soon won him, never mind that he was already engaged. They sailed together, pretending to be married, to London, where he had business and they legally wed before boarding Empress Alexandra (named for the soon-tobe-assassinated Tsarina) to return home. When an unexplained explosion rocks the ship, Henry gallantly places her, perhaps with a bribe, into a lifeboat already packed to over-capacity. She never sees him again. An Empress crewmember, Mr. Hardie, quickly takes charge of the passengers, distributing the limited rations and organizing work assignments with godlike authority. As hope for quick salvation dims, passengers fall into numb lethargy. Some go mad.

There are natural deaths and (reluctantly) voluntary sacrificial drownings. Dissention grows. Mr. Hardie’s nemesis is the sternly maternal Mrs. Grant and feminist Hannah, who plant suspicions about his motives and competence. Grace avoids taking sides but eventually helps the other women literally overthrow him into the sea. Is she acting out of frail weakness, numbed by her ordeal, or are her survival instincts more coldblooded? Even she may not be sure; much of her conversation circles morality and religion.

The lifeboat becomes a compelling, if almost overly crafted, microcosm of a dangerous larger world in which only the strong survive. (Agent: David McCormick)

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ALMOST NEVER

Sada, Daniel Graywolf (344 pp.) $16.00 paperback | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-55597-609-5 Sada starts his novel with the word “Sex” and ends it with “Sheer relief,” and in between we find almost every variation on the theme.

Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist in Mexico in 1945, and he has an unbridled |

“Another stand-alone suspenser that rams home the point that there’s no such thing as an ex-mother.” from come home

need to unleash his prodigious sexual appetite, especially when it comes to Mireya, a gorgeous prostitute with whom he falls half in love—and fully in lust. Because his job is rather boring, he finds he’s energized only when he’s visiting Mireya at the brothel. She fulfills his every sexual desire, and at first these consummations seem to provide Demetrio with a provisional, albeit carnal, happiness. But Demetrio’s sexual idyll is interrupted when he attends a wedding in northern Mexico and meets a very different kind of woman, the virginal Renata, who’s closely watched by her mother.

Demetrio falls in love with Renata but finds his courtship abruptly truncated when he kisses (or “licks”) her hand, a sign of disrespect according to Renata’s madre. Then begins Demetrio’s dance between purity and desire, for while he wants Renata, he also wallows in sensuality with Mireya. When he finally makes up with Renata’s mother, she sets the date of the wedding a year away, primarily to make Demetrio suffer so that he will appreciate the special quality—let’s call it primness—of her daughter.

The novel culminates with the long-delayed consummation of Demetrio’s wedding and honeymoon.

Sada writes lustily and with comic brio about Demetrio’s dilemma—but this is definitely not a book for the kiddies.

Saramago writes beautifully, and his style is ruminative—not for every taste, but definitely for those who appreciate finely wrought, meditative prose.

COME HOME

Scottoline, Lisa St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $27.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-312-38082-3 Another stand-alone suspenser that rams home the point that there’s no such thing as an ex-mother.

Pharmaceutical rep William Skyler blamed his divorce on his wife, Dr. Jill Farrow. He told his daughters, Victoria and Abby, that Jill had cheated on him and forbade them to keep in touch with her or her own daughter Megan. Now, three years later, William is dead, overdosed on prescription medications

MANUAL OF PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY

Saramago, José Translated by Pontiero, Giovanni Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (256 pp.) $13.95 paperback | May 1, 2012 978-0-547-64022-8 Nobel Prize–winning author Saramago explores art and the meaning of life in a posthumous release of his first novel.

This is an “adult” novel in the best sense, for Saramago examines serious philosophical questions about aesthetics, sexuality and politics through a portrait painter (and alter ego?) known only as “H.” While H. is introspective and speculative, he’s also self-critically aware of his limitations as an artist. At the moment he’s working on a portrait of “S.,” a successful industrialist. With the important exception of sitting for the portrait, S. has delegated the mundane tasks of communication to his secretary, Olga, with whom the artist begins a short-lived but tempestuous affair. Dissatisfied with his original portrait, H. works on a second portrait and, still dissatisfied, tries to capture a “portrait” of S. in words, for the visual artist is also an auteur manqué. Away from personal and political turmoil, H. makes a brief but serene visit to Italy, where he embarks on a pilgrimage to see the works of truly great artists like Cimabue and Piero della Francesca, but he’s quickly pulled back to life in Portugal, where his friend Antonio has been arrested by the secret police in Salazar’s regime. H. tries to find out what has happened to Antonio but is turned away at the prison where Antonio is incarcerated. Meanwhile Antonio’s sister, cryptically named “M.” and also concerned about her brother’s status as an enemy of the state, arranges a meeting with the artist, and they embark on yet another tumultuous affair. |

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Abby is convinced he didn’t take himself. What’s Jill supposed to do when Abby drives unannounced to the home she shares with diabetes researcher Sam Becker, drunk, weeping hysterically and begging for help? Nothing, maintains Sam, who tells Jill that she’s choosing continuing loyalty to Abby (and to Victoria, who makes it witheringly clear at William’s funeral that she still wants nothing to do with Jill) over her commitment to him and his son Steven. Nothing, say the Philadelphia police, who insist that William’s death was no homicide. Nothing, Jill’s penny-pinching medical-practice manager Sheryl Ewing says—or would surely say if Jill, already playing out a losing hand in office politics, ever brought it up to her. Naturally, Jill, protesting, “What’s a mother, or a stepmother?...Isn’t it forever?,” takes it upon herself to investigate anyway. Scottoline backs her increasingly beset supermom (“It wasn’t a juggling act, it was a magic act”) into sleuthing mode with practiced expertise, giving her exactly the right motivations and qualifications for the specific questions she asks. And there’ll be a lump in every throat when Abby disappears and when Jill fights to diagnose a baby who keeps getting ear infections. As usual with Scottoline, though, the complications are a lot more satisfying than the windup, in which reason and plausibility take a back seat to tearful family affirmations.

Connoisseurs of mother love imperiled will prefer Save Me (2011). But it would be a mistake to count Scottoline out; she’s sure to be back next year with another dose that might be even more potent.

GAMES TRAITORS PLAY

Stock, Jon Dunne/St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-0-312-64477-2

Ploys and counter-ploys, motives sincere and suspicious, agents trustworthy and treacherous—plus a daunting lexicon of spy-agency jargon, terms and acronyms—highlight a complex thriller about the search for a “most wanted” terrorist.

Like just about everyone else who appears in this intricate tale from British journalist Stock (Dead Spy Running, 2010, etc.), the storyteller in the Marrakech marketplace is more than he appears to be. Besides regaling visitors, he passes on, in code, orders to Daniel Marchant, late of Britain’s MI6, to head into the nearby mountains where Salim Dhar, who recently attempted to assassinate the president of the United States, may be hiding out. In the well-crafted set piece that follows, Marchant watches as six U.S. Marines are captured, but not before Dhar appears before them and is taken out. Or is he? Washington’s National Security Agency, eager to annihilate Dhar—and score a coup over MI6—insists he was. But Marchant thinks Dhar lives on. A labyrinthine plot with an overriding theme of trust ensues. Sipping scotch back in Marrakech, Marchant meets CIA op Lakshmi Meena, who happens to mention the “half-brother thing” between Marchant and Dhar, something to which M16 operatives in Britain are keenly attuned. Fearing Dhar may be 454

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at the center of plans to launch a massive terrorist attack on London, the intelligence agency thinks Marchant’s fraternal tie to Dhar may afford an approach to the terrorist. But some at M16 distrust Marchant’s allegiances since his late father, who had been at MI6, was thought by some to be a covert Russian agent. Russia likewise questions Dhar’s sympathies and wants him to prove his loyalty. It is left to the younger Marchant to reach Dhar and force his hand—or to reveal his own loyalties.

Scattered clichés and a threadbare Mata Hari subplot aside, this one will please fans. (Agent: Claire Paterson)

THE DEEP ZONE

Tabor, James M. Ballantine (420 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-345-53061-5

A super-lethal, fast-spreading bacterium that eats its victims from the inside out is decimating U.S. troops in Afghanistan and posing the threat of a pandemic.

To collect rare biomatter that works as an antidote, members of a top-secret disease-control agency risk their lives in the deepest and scariest caves of Mexico. If the dangers of spelunking—or a violent army of local drug dealers—don’t thwart them, a mole working for a nefarious international group might. Since being drummed out of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) a year ago on false charges, expert caver Hallie Leland has been running a dive shop in northern Florida. Though still bitter over her treatment, she agrees to lead a government expedition thousands of feet beneath a remote forest—“Journey to the Center of the Earth, but worse”—when her onetime mentor spells out the global threat of the drugresistant Acinetobacter baumannii. In Afghanistan, Army nurse Lenora Stilwell is risking her life tending to soldiers infected by the ACE, possibly through their widespread use of tampons to stanch wounds. Like Leland, she must cope with male superiors more interested in following procedure and saving face than saving lives. Tabor, a bestselling nonfiction writer (Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth, 2010, etc.), makes a solid debut as a novelist. The narrative is a bit lumpy, the suspense a bit forced: Hallie is subjected to more near-death experiences than the story can bear. But she’s a strong, appealing protagonist, as is Stilwell in her brief scenes. And with his evocative descriptions, Tabor succeeds in portraying the mysterious Cueva de Luz (Cave of Light) as a living, evolving, spiritually charged organism. The outcome may be conventional, but the writing brims with intelligence.

A smart, informative debut thriller with a pair of assertive heroines that draws us into the strange wonders of inner space.

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DERBY DAY

Taylor, D.J. Pegasus (416 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 15, 2012 978-1-60598-332-5 Taylor reinvents the Victorian novel, basing his narrative loosely on W.P. Frith’s massive satirical portrait of mid-19th-century English life of the same name.

This novel is preoccupied with social status, power relationships and even, as Taylor has it, “d______d villains.” Although he creates a diffuse world without much of a center, one of the major players is Mr. Happerton, a ne’er-do-well with the casual villainy of Our Mutual Friend’s Alfred Lammle. He marries Rebecca Gresham, the daughter of a wealthy London lawyer, a mariage de convenance that gets him closer to a source of the money he craves for his schemes. Happerton is a sporting gentleman whose obsession is Tiberius, a racehorse owned by the financially strapped Mr. Davenant. Happerton

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buys up notes to make Davenant indebted to him, though Happerton’s sole purpose is to procure Tiberius and run him at Epsom Downs. In his schemes he’s assisted by the hapless Captain Raff, who’s completely outmaneuvered by the rakish and sharp-witted Happerton. Also involved in the action is Mr. Pardew, suspected of having robbed a London mail train and a man perhaps even shrewder than Happerton. He’s on the lam while Captain McTurk, a detective, tries to track him down. Mr. Gresham becomes a valetudinarian, though it remains a possibility that his son-in-law has been slowly poisoning him. The climax of the story is the running of the Derby, and Happerton might be attempting a double cross, betting on a competing horse and trying to ensure Tiberius’ loss.

A sprawling and expansive novel that will appeal to those who like leisurely paced narratives with authentic 19th-century flavor.

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“Imaginative and erudite.” from the spinoza problem

HAND ME DOWN

Thorne, Melanie Dutton (320 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-0-525-95268-8

First-time author Thorne wears her heart on her sleeve in this semi-autobiographical tale about a 14-year-old who juggles equal amounts of hope and despair in her chaotic daily life.

Liz and younger sister Jaime have learned they can only count on one another after their mom, Linda, marries a convicted sex offender. Terrance, who parades around the small apartment half-dressed and leers at Liz, makes it clear that if she complains he’ll take it out on her sister. But when Terrance’s parole officer receives a tip that the ex-con is in violation of parole by living with the two girls, their mom’s solution is to farm the girls out to other family members. Jaime moves in with their dad, a lying drunk who mercilessly beat Linda during their marriage, while Liz is farmed out to Terrance’s brother, Gary, and his wife. Liz worries she’s missing too much school and is haunted by the fear that their father will repeat history and drive drunk with Jaime in tow. Liz continues to narrate her journey with prose that vibrates with intelligence and passion. Although she is just beginning her freshman year of high school, Liz manages to carry around with her a heavy burden of responsibility for her sister. Thorne writes Liz as world-weary and mature in ways children should not have to be.

From the mother who willingly throws over her children for the promise of marriage to a man who uses her, to the well-meaning Aunt Deborah, who offers Liz a home she cannot accept, Thorne populates her pages with characters who are fascinating and sharply drawn.

Failed by the adults in her life and forced to be the grown-up when she should be experiencing first dates and football games, Liz is a wise, wry, wonderful heroine.

(Agent: Trena Keating)

THE SPINOZA PROBLEM

Yalom, Irvin D. Basic (352 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-465-02963-1

As much intellectual exploration as novel, Yalom’s latest (The Schopenhauer Cure, 2005, etc.) fictional foray into philosophy connects Baruch Spinoza and an agent of the Holocaust.

The Nazi is Alfred Rosenberg, historical figure, war criminal sent to Nuremberg’s gallows, and philosopher-manqué and self-styled intellectual catalyst of German fascism. As a schoolboy, Rosenberg latched onto Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s racist theories. Rosenberg also worshiped Goethe, though he couldn’t understand Goethe’s appreciation of 456

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Spinoza. Thus, The Spinoza Problem. “Never able to cleanse his mind of the image of the great Goethe genuflecting before the Jew Spinoza,” Rosenberg migrates to Munich, writes for a propaganda sheet and befriends Hitler. In chapters shifting between Spinoza and Rosenberg, Yalom unfolds the dual narratives in clear, straightforward language, following Spinoza as he rejects religious superstition and embraces rationalism while simultaneously sketching the history and social milieu of Jews who fled the Hibernian peninsula for Holland. Spinoza’s conversations with the fictional Franco Benitez, a refugee from Portugal, bring the philosopher to life as he suffers excommunication (cherem), befriends scholars like Franciscus van den Enden and lives “an unencumbered life of contemplation.” Characterizing Spinoza as “the supreme rationalist,” one who “saw an endless stream of causality in the world,” Yalom makes the philosopher accessible to a popular audience. He also does a credible job of imagining how the intellectual connection between Goethe and Spinoza would have befuddled the narcissistic Rosenberg, who was trapped in the belief that there are “higher things than reason—honor, blood, courage.” Yalom ends with Spinoza interacting with patrons and Rosenberg on the gallows, followed by an epilogue and an addendum explaining the novel’s impetus and construction.

Imaginative and erudite.

m ys t e r y MURDER AT THE LANTERNE ROUGE

Black, Cara Soho Crime (320 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-1-61695-061-3

Aimée Leduc (Murder in Passy, 2011, etc.) helps her partner clear his girlfriend of a grisly crime.

Red lanterns mark the doorways of the oldest and smallest of Paris’ four Chinatowns. Tucked in a corner of the Marais, the district boasts shops, restaurants and a thriving retail trade fueled by waves of illegal immigrants who work in sweatshops by day and sleep on mattresses on the factories’ floors at night. Meizi Wu is one of these immigrants. A doll-like woman, scarcely taller than dwarf René Friant, Meizi accepts René’s attentions hesitantly.

But during her birthday dinner at Chez Chun, Meizi receives a phone call that causes her to flee the restaurant and disappear.

The police think her disappearance is connected to the death of Pascal Samour, asphyxiated with shrink-wrap and left in an alley to be gnawed by rats. But how could tiny Meizi overpower the sturdy engineer? René begs his partner Aimée to find the real killer. So does Mademoiselle Samoukashian, Pascal’s great aunt,

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a survivor of Nazi persecution of Armenians. But the plea that tempts her most is from the muscular, brown-haired agent of the DST—Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—France’s Homeland Security. Sacault, who tells her that Pascal worked for DST, offers her information about her mother, who disappeared when Aimée was eight, in return for her help. Aimée is sure that the solution to the mystery lies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Artes and Métiers, where Pascal studied engineering. But finding the connection between the prestigious technical school and Chinatown’s shadowy world of undocumented workers will take all Aimée’s skill and determination.

Black’s 11th lets readers peek into a corner of Paris that Fodor’s leaves out.

GUNS IN THE GALLERY

Brett, Simon Creme de la Crime (208 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-1-78029-015-7

If someone’s prone to suicide, is it OK to lend a helping hand?

Fennel Whittaker tried to kill herself in a Pimlico flat a few years back. Her sister Chervil found her and called on their dad to hush the matter up. So when she’s discovered with her wrists slashed, a suicide note beside her, in one of the yurts due to open soon as a therapy spa on the family’s West Sussex estate, most everyone, including the police, thinks that she finally managed to do herself in. But Jude, the Fethering healer who’d been treating her, disagrees, insisting that her client had been feeling quite chipper. Along with her neighbor Carole, Jude had witnessed Fennel’s outburst at the Cornelian Gallery’s private showing of Denzil Willoughby’s conceptual art, when she seemed to be blaming him for an obscure past misdeed. Perhaps Fennel died by his hand, not her own. Other possible suspects include Chervil, whose boyfriend, the son of Bonita the gallery owner, once romanced Fennel; the girls’ mum, who seems relieved that Fennel’s fragile psyche will no longer be her problem; and whoever it is who took Fennel’s mobile phone from the crime scene, obviously to delete an incriminating message. There’ll be a disastrous outing on the sea and news of a long-thwarted love before the culprit is unmasked.

Brett’s usual cozy charm and flashes of wit (Bones Under the Beach Hut, 2011, etc.) are nowhere in evidence here. Perhaps it’s time to retire the Fethering series and start something fresh.

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DOLLED UP FOR MURDER

Cleland, Jane K. Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 27, 2012 978-1-250-00184-9

What could be more natural than a New Hampshire antiques dealer becoming a magnet for crime?

Perhaps because she handles many expensive objects that sometimes bring out the worst in people, Josie Prescott has gotten a reputation as an amateur sleuth. So it’s appropriate, if horrifying, that she’s on the scene when one of her clients is shot dead in her parking lot. Alice Michaels was a doll collector and a financial advisor who was about to be arrested for an alleged Ponzi scheme. She’d just put down a deposit on a doll collection Josie had agreed to appraise for the two sisters selling it. When Josie’s helper is kidnapped on the way back from collecting more of the dolls, the ransom demanded is the collection itself.

Although the dolls are valuable, Josie is sure that there’s more to them than meets the eye. Sure enough, X-rays reveal wads of bills hidden in some of their heads—perhaps rare and valuable Civil War notes, which would be well worth the kidnappers’ efforts.

There are plenty of suspects in Alice’s death, starting with all those who lost money in her scheme. Even the dolls themselves may have had motives for murder. The police chief is a friend who’s not about to turn down Josie’s help when it comes to solving antiques-related crimes, even when it puts her in danger.

Cleland continues to offer clever mysteries (Deadly Threads, 2011, etc.) studded with enough information on antiques to keep collectors coming back for more. (Agent: Cristina Concepcion)

A WOMAN OF CONSEQUENCE

Dean, Anna Minotaur (336 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-312-62684-6 A clever regency sleuth is much like Jane Austen with her ability to see that the mundane things of life are more important than they seem.

Due to a family reversal of fortunes Dido Kent is residing with her brother Frank and sister-inlaw Margaret. Although Margaret does not treat her well, the neighborhood provides plenty of entertainment for her active mind, especially the residents of Madderstone Abbey, which is reputed to be the home of a ghost known as the Grey Nun. Although one of Dido’s acquaintances, the beautiful Penelope, is hurt in a fall at the ruined abbey, it is the shocking discovery of a body in the ornamental lake that arouses Dido’s curiosity.

The property owners are the Harmon-Footes and the body proves to be that of Miss Fenn, a governess who had vanished years ago. The coroner’s jury declares Miss Fenn a suicide, the

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minister has refused her burial in the churchyard and Mrs. Harman-Foote begs Dido to look into the case refusing to believe her beloved governess killed herself. Dido ponders the strange behavior of a naval man who seeks to attach himself to both the lovely Penelope and the wealthy Lucy, the landscape architect who drained the lake without permission and the local doctor who conducts strange experiments. Dido is also dealing with a marriage proposal from Mr. William Lomax (A Gentleman of Fortune, 2011, etc.), a man she could love but fears she cannot marry because he disapproves of her independent ways as dangerous.

Dido manages to solve a very complicated mystery but can she find happiness with her suitor?

The third in Dean’s series is another delight, complete with perfect regency prose and an excellent mystery.

DEADLY OFFER

Doudera, Vicki Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (312 pp.) $14.95 paperback | Apr. 8, 2012 978-0-7387-1980-1 A favor for a friend involves realtor Darby Farr in yet another murder case.

Darby’s returned to her real-estate agency in Southern California after helping to solve a murder in Florida (Killer Listing, 2011, etc.). When her assistant ET Gomez learns his sister Selena is dead, he asks Darby to drive him up to Selena’s winery, Carson Creek Estate, where he’ll meet with his brother Carlos. Selena, who wasn’t well and was thinking of selling her beloved winery, was found dead in her hot tub. It looks like a heart attack, but when Darby, who has an amazing sense of taste, detects something off in the wine Selena was drinking, her new evidence says murder. Asked by Selena’s brothers to handle the sale, Darby stays on, only to learn that each of the prospective buyers insists that Selena had decided to sell to him or her. Selena’s winemaker Dan Stewart soldiers on, the crop is almost ready to harvest, but suddenly there are numerous acts of sabotage intended to ruin the crop. Certainly the people who want to buy are all suspects: the driven sister of a wealthy pop artist; Selena’s former abusive lover who claims he wanted to make amends; and the Contento family next door, owners of one of California’s largest wineries. Although Darby is dealing with a friend’s sudden disappearance in Hawaii and the return of her love interest reporter Miles Porter from Afghanistan, she refuses to leave crime solving to the police.

Darby’s third enlarges on her love life and real-estate skills while providing a complex mystery.

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CINNAMON ROLL MURDER

Fluke, Joanne Kensington (304 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-7582-3493-3

A bus crash diverts cookie maven Hannah Swenson (Devil’s Food Cake Murder, 2011, etc.) at least momentarily from the train wreck of her love life.

Hannah had been looking forward to hearing the Cinnamon Roll Six perform live at the Lake Eden Inn during innkeepers Sally and Dick Laughlin’s first-ever jazz weekend. Too bad the group’s tour bus wiped out on one of the icy roads Minnesotans routinely navigate in April. The driver is dead at the scene, but Hannah and her youngest sister Michelle help paramedics load the injured musicians onto an ambulance. Still, only five of the six survive their hospital stay. Keyboardist Buddy Neiman dies, not from his relatively minor injuries but from a pair of surgical scissors plunged into his chest. So Hannah, still reeling from her breakup with Norman Rhodes, who plans to marry his fellow dentist Bev Thorndike in two weeks, seeks solace in Lake Eden’s newest murder. She soon tracks Buddy’s roots back to the Seattle jazz scene. But her investigation really starts to cook when she discovers that Dr. Bev has a Seattle connection too.

Suddenly it’s not clear whether Hannah is trying to forget Norman or win him back. With sisters Michelle and Andrea at her side and mother Delores at her back, Hannah discovers that once she’s on the trail, there aren’t enough Chocolate Caramel Pecan Bars in the world to stop her from seeing justice done.

Fluke wraps up her 16th recipe-studded entry sweetly but not neatly, leaving just enough loose ends to hint at a tasty sequel.

DAIQUIRI DOCK MURDER

Francis, Dorothy Five Star (292 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 11, 2012 978-1-4328-2574-4

Black sheep hotelier Rafa Blue finds a friend dead in the water.

Rafa is checking the family boat during a storm when she discovers the body of her friend, dock master Diego Casterano, floating nearby. Being first on the scene puts her on the suspect list. So despite entreaties from her shrimper boyfriend Kane Riley, Rafa decides that she must investigate the murder. Her only clue is a piece of blue rope used to tie Diego to a cement block that resembles a piece she had seen on Riley’s shrimp boat. She can hardly picture Riley as a killer, but the coincidence does raise some niggling doubts in her mind. Diego, who had come to Key West from Cuba, has one son, a beach bum who occasionally plays drums at the hotel Rafa helps run with her mother and sister, both of whom are currently out of town. Of course there are other suspects beside Rafa and Pablo.

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“Monsters, actual and metaphorical, are at the heart of this superbly crafted thriller.” from the bedlam detective

Poet Dolly Jass was the last to see Diego alive. Dock owners Brick and Threnody Vexton had a disagreement with Diego over some plans to build a new hotel. And it turns out that Diego is only the first murder victim.

The Florida Keys are as lovingly portrayed as ever (Killer in Control, 2011, etc.), but the sparse mystery lacks cohesion.

THE BEDLAM DETECTIVE

Gallagher, Stephen Crown (256 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-0-307-40664-4 Monsters, actual and metaphorical, are at the heart of this superbly crafted thriller.

Gallagher has been called a horror writer, a fantasy writer, a non-fantasy writer, a writer for big screens and smaller ones, a writer whose considerable talent has enabled him to slip in and out of genres precisely as if those tidy little boxes didn’t exist—as indeed they don’t for his character-driven books. In this one, Sebastian Becker (The Kingdom of Bones, 2007, etc.), his fast-track career abruptly derailed, contemplates an uncertain future. Now that the Pinkertons have sent him packing, he faces 1912 back in his native England, employed as the special investigator to the Masters of Lunacy. Englishmen of property deemed too loopy to look after anyone’s property face Bedlams of one sort or another, their property removed from their care.

It’s up to Sir James Crichton-Browne, acting for His Majesty’s Government, to render judgments informed by evidence his special investigator Sebastian provides. The job pays poorly but is nuanced enough to be interesting. And it gets even more so when Sebastian meets Sir Owain Lancaster, a scientist who’s been widely respected until he blames the failure of his lavish Amazonian expedition on a series of attacks by horrific monsters only he can see. No longer respected but still exceedingly rich, he becomes grist for Sebastian’s mill. Is Sir Owain really crazy? Or, much worse, is he himself a monster?

Gallagher loves character development but respects plotting enough to give it full measure. The result is that rare beast, a literary page-turner. (Agent: Howard Morhaim)

THE MAGIC LINE

Gunn, Elizabeth Severn House (192 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8116-8 A dead perp gets up and hightails it away from the murder scene.

There’s been carnage at the stash house: two dead inside, two more outside. Tucson homicide detective Sarah Burke, who catches the case, is mortified |

when one of the men she and the ME thought was dead starts breathing, then escapes from the gurney transporting him to the hospital. At the cop shop, they start calling him “the exdead-guy” while they piece together how the home invasion went down, put names to all the players and work out which gun offed which perp. Lo and behold, it turns out that the exdead-guy hasn’t been the only one to get away. Zeb, a petty thief making a move up in crime, ran off just as the mayhem began, winding up on a bus stop bench next to an old woman who offers him a few bucks if he carries her groceries home. Meanwhile, the ex-dead Robin, the mastermind who planned the drug house break-in, holes up in a parking garage while he plots what to do next. A chance meeting in a bar leads Robin to Zeb, while routine police work lands Sarah in their orbit just in time for one more death and one act of valor from a surprising source.

Like Kissing Arizona (2011), a stolid, earnest police procedural with a shade too much information about Sarah’s domestic arrangements.

PLAY NICE

Halliday, Gemma Minotaur (272 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-312-65607-2 A former assassin can’t seem to hide from her past.

Anna Smith’s life is boring. She works at the Golden Gate Animal Shelter, then comes home to her dog Lenny. It’s a good thing that Lenny is such great company, because Anna has no friends or family, not even any visitors into her quiet life. No one would guess that this quiet vegetarian loner was once Anya Danielovich, assassin for hire. Raised and trained by Goren Petrovich of the KOS, Anna gave up the life with her kill of General Fedorov years earlier. She’s been living under the radar, or so she thought, until she and her co-worker Shelli are shot at during what up until then was a perfectly normal day at work. Nick Dade, who’s been tailing Anna and seen the shooter take aim, isn’t quite sure what to think. Technically, he’s been hired to kill Anna, but something stopped him from pulling the trigger first. Now he feels an obscure duty to find out who did, even though it means teaming up with Anna. Not that he feels any way about her personally; he’s just trying to do his job. Anna has her doubts about working with Nick, too, especially since she isn’t armed. But she doesn’t have much of a choice if she wants to figure out who’s uncovered her secret.

The unlikely pair’s investigation leads Anna to question her past and ponder whether she can ever really leave it behind.

Halliday (Deadly Cool, 2011, etc.) combines investigation with the inevitable romance for a mystery that’s enjoyably by the book.

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WILDCAT PLAY

Knode, Helen Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (320 pp.) $24.00 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-15-100429-4 A film reviewer leaves Hollywood for the rough-and-tumble world of the San Joaquin Valley.

A bloody murder took its toll on Ann Whitefield in body and in spirit (The Ticket Out, 2003). So she holes up in the tiny desert town of Wilson with her grandfather’s friend Joe Balch, who saved Wilson from near extinction when his wildcat oil well came in, bringing good jobs with Balch Oil to the isolated region northeast of Los Angeles. Now in his 70s, Joe is wildcatting for gas on a lease just north of his spacious home.

When Ann begs him for a job on his rig, Joe agrees to let her “roughneck,” cleaning the “doghouse,” a steel-sided room next to the rig floor, where Emmet, the “toolpusher,” directs the drilling operation. Emmet has two rules for Ann: work hard, and “no vamping my boys.” Most of the boys take to the rookie rig hand, teasing her and calling her “Pup.” Like Emmet, they’re transplanted Okies, and they share their boss’ strict work ethic.

But Kenny Mills, a local, is a different story. A loner strung out on meth, he’s an accident waiting to happen. And sure enough, one night when the rig is socked in by tule fog, someone drops a hammer from the tower, stopping Kenny’s clock for good.

Ann suspects the accident was really murder. But was Wade the intended target, or was the killer aiming for Richie, Emmet’s protégé? And was the purpose to kill, or to stop Balch from realizing his wildcat dream?

Knode’s second entry is complex both in plot and setting, equal parts mystery and primer in the art of drilling for oil.

BEASTLY THINGS

Leon, Donna Atlantic Monthly (304 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-8021-2023-6 The death of an inoffensive veterinarian takes Commissario Guido Brunetti once more into the heart of the human beast.

Even after the victim is identified— and it’s a good long time before he is—the name of Dottor Andrea Nava’s killer seems less mysterious than the question of why someone, anyone, would have stabbed him in the back three times and dumped his body into a Venetian canal. Although he’s estranged from his wife, Anna Doni, she faints from either grief or guilt when Brunetti and his friend, Inspector Lorenzo Vianello, break the news to her. Clara Baroni, his assistant at the Clinica Amico Mio veterinary practice, can shed no light on his death. And although his sad little dalliance with Giulia Borelli, Director Alessandro Papetti’s assistant at 460

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the slaughterhouse where he moonlighted part time, may have threatened his marriage, it hardly seems a weighty enough motive for murder. It’s not until after a tour of the slaughterhouse brings Brunetti and Vianello up against the horrid realities behind the meat they placidly consume every day that Brunetti realizes that carcasses aren’t the most bestial presences lurking there.

Brunetti, who airily tells his wife Paola, “I don’t do ethical,” spends less time than usual (Drawing Conclusions, 2011, etc.) butting heads with his nemesis, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. But his conspiratorial dealings with his omni-competent assistant Signora Elettra and his suave attempts at acting dumb while he’s questioning his few suspects are equally rewarding. (Agent: Diogenes Verlag)

A VELVET SCREAM

Masters, Priscilla Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8109-0

A series of attacks that may or not be rape pose a difficult case for DI Joanna Piercy and her colleagues.

Joanna is busy getting ready for a wedding she’s not at all sure she wants when a young girl is found nearly frozen in the parking area of Patches, a local night club in Leek. The disapproving parents and daughter of Joanna’s intended, Dr. Matthew Levin, are making life so difficult for her that the new case is a welcome distraction. The avowed victim, Kayleigh Harrison, is the 14-year-old daughter of a mother who couldn’t care less and a father who went back to London when she was a baby. She claims that she was raped, but her description of a thin older attacker with a London accent doesn’t ring true. Joanna and her team question the clubgoers and staff and watch the surveillance tape but make little progress. The case becomes much more urgent when the university-bound daughter of two local teachers vanishes from Patches and Joanna discovers to the parents’ horror that their beautiful child has been sneaking off to clubs for quite a while.

When her body is found, they connect it to another case in a different town where a girl was drugged, raped and nearly killed.

Even once they know they’re looking for a sexual predator with a taste for young girls, finding him will be no easy task.

Masters, who writes several different series (Frozen Charlotte, 2011, etc.), here gives Joanna a sturdy police procedural with a touch of romance.

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NOR ALL YOUR TEARS

McCarthy, Keith Severn House (208 pp.) $28.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8119-9

Dr. Lance Elliot (Dying to Know, 2010) returns to deal with the ever-widening contagion of homicide that bids fair to decimate Croydon.

Nobody at Bensham Manor School thinks it greatly amiss when PE teacher Marlene Jeffries is bashed to death with a dumbbell. After all, it’s widely assumed that Thornton Heath physician Lance Elliot— whose father’s inamorata, Ada Clarke, is the head dinner lady at the school—attracts corpses wherever he goes. Inspector Masson duly arrests caretaker George Cotterill, whose dicky heart gives out while he’s in custody. Case closed—until Yvette Mangon, a math teacher at Bensham Manor, is stabbed to death with a compass. Yvette, it turns out, was much more than just Marlene’s landlady, and their unorthodox domestic arrangements may well have inflamed murderous passions. But then why would someone go on to drown biology teacher Jeremy Gillman and leave him with a frog in his mouth? The link between each dead teacher and the symbol of his or her subject matter seems promising. But when McCarthy, whose métier is grisly forensics (Soul Seeker, 2011, etc.), adds an accidental death, a suicide, a threatening ex-brother-in-law and whoever killed the pet rabbit of veterinarian Maxine Christy, Dr. Elliot’s girlfriend, you have to wonder if he’s asking you to accept a little too much of the cozy gardens of Bensham.

Though the locals complain that murder victims seem to pile up in Dr. Elliott’s wake, that’s no more than a convention of the genre. The real problem here is the number of independent malefactors working at cross-purposes to keep the population down.

LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE

O’Donohue, Clare Plume (272 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-452-29782-1 A TV producer, bored with the shows she’s been doing, has no idea that her two new entries will provide her with a walk on the wild side.

Independent producer Kate Conway is still struggling with the death of the husband who’d left her for another woman. Her cameraman Andres and her sound man Victor, concerned with her lack of interest in any relationships, offer little help because they’re too busy working on two new documentaries: one about lifers in a nearby prison, the other on a group of investors opening a new restaurant. One of the lifers is a stoic who’s accepted his fate; another is a charmer who insists he’s innocent and tries |

to enlist Kate to help. The investor who proposed Kate for the restaurant job is Vera, the mistress of Kate’s husband, a guileless, wealthy woman who wants to befriend the producer.

She’s invested at the behest of her new boyfriend, a man Kate instantly suspects is only after Vera’s money. The other investors include an entrepreneur with a dangerous past and an ambitious wife, a front-of-house man with outlandish ideas and a driven chief eager for a new opportunity. When one of them is murdered, Vera, who finds the body, tops the suspect list.

Between them, she and Kate tell the police enough lies to get them into deep trouble unless Kate can solve the crime. Kate can only hope that her prison interviews give her some insight into the mind of a murderer.

This sophomore outing for clever Kate (Missing Persons, 2011) works several intriguing twists into its two interconnected mysteries. (Agent: Sharon Bowers)

CLOUDLAND

Olshan, Joseph Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-250-00017-0 978-1-4299-4247-8 e-book In this refreshingly cliché-free serialkiller tale, Olshan tries his hand with a female narrator/heroine, whom he handles just as deftly as his sensitive male heroes (The Conversion, 2008, etc.).

Two-and-a-half years and five corpses after Tammy Boucher was stabbed to death in New England’s River Valley, police in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts still don’t have any idea who’s killing these women or why. The forensic evidence is hopeless, and the discovery of Seventh-Day Adventist tracts on some of the victims hardly seems to rise to the level of a clue. After she discovers the sixth victim, long-missing nurse Angela Parker, buried in the thawing snow, Catherine Winslow, a former investigative reporter who’s retreated to Vermont to write a syndicated column of household hints, finds herself drawn into the case and is soon resisting the suggestions of Springfield-based Det. Marco Prozzo, who’s evidently intent on pinning the crimes on knacker Hiram Osmond or painter Paul Winter’s adopted son Wade. Prozzo doesn’t seem to notice several more inviting suspects, from Dr. Anthony Waite, the troubled psychiatrist who’s helping with the investigation, to Matthew Blake, the former college student who’d been Catherine’s lover and is now conveniently returned from Thailand, where he said he’d gone to forget her. Although all these chilly, hurting souls are well worth your time, the real keeper is Catherine, still grieving the death of the husband she’d divorced and the loss of the younger lover she’d pushed away.

Even as you wonder who the killer will turn out to be, you’ll worry mainly about how she’s going to come through all this. (Agent: Mitchell Waters)

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“Slam-bang action scenes and deft writing can’t quite pump up the slightness of the story.” from boston cream

DRIVEN

Sallis, James Poisoned Pen (158 pp.) $19.95 | paper $11.95 | Lg. Prt. $18.95 Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4642-0010-6 978-1-4642-0011-3 paperback 978-1-4642-0012-0 Lg. Prt. Just in time for fans of the Ryan Gosling film adaptation, the further adventures of Driver (Drive, 2005).

He’s been calling himself Paul West for seven years. That’s the name by which his fiancée, Elsa Jorgenson, knew him when she died, killed by a pair of goons Driver swiftly dispatched.

But everyone outside Elsa’s family (“we are your family,” her father mournfully tells him) still calls him Driver. It’s presumably Driver, not Paul West, that the men sent to follow him are interested in. Acquiring an innocuous-looking Fairlane 500 and tweaking its engine, Driver begins to make more and more adventurous forays outside Phoenix, where he’s settled. He shares portentous conversations with his hardheaded buddy Felix and his screenwriter friend Manny. He hooks up with law student Stephanie Cooper, whose ex-cop father Bill is sitting in a nursing home indulging in even more cryptic exchanges with ex–Special Forces visitor Wendell. He takes a meeting with selfanointed problem solver James Beil, who hints that Driver’s problems may be closely akin to his own. He works his way up the food chain to post-Katrina carpetbagger Gerald Dunaway and big wolf Bennie Capel in a search for whoever’s sent the interchangeable guys who’ve been dogging his tracks. All the while, Sallis (The Killer Is Dying, 2011, etc.) is using his mouthpieces to dispense nonstop nuggets of existential wisdom (“We think we make choices. But what happens is the choices walk up, stand face to face with us, and stare us down”) that both prepare and compensate for the inconclusiveness of the plot.

The noir formula readily accommodates Sallis’ mannered dialogue. Even so, most readers will feel a jarring split between the ostensibly thrilling tale and the downbeat commonplaces that punctuate it, or vice versa.

BOSTON CREAM

Shrier, Howard Vintage Canada (336 pp.) $17.95 paperback | Jan. 31, 2012 978-0-307-359-56-8 My son, the doctor, is missing.

Never in his young life has David Fine come even close to setting a foot wrong. An overachiever almost from the womb, a dutiful son to adoring Jewish parents, a doctor, a surgeon yet, he’s on his way to collecting his full share of glittering prizes, until suddenly he isn’t. Suddenly he’s gone, baby, gone, and no one in Boston can tell Jonah Geller a single thing that makes sense 462

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of the disappearance. What’s a Toronto PI doing in Boston anyway? It’s a concern Jonah himself had put before David’s Orthodox father, who hired him, caveats and all, promising that the mission would have God’s sanction. So Jonah signed on. It turns out that David is a surgeon with an evocative specialty: transplants. It doesn’t take Jonah long to learn that the grievous unavailability of human parts spells opportunity to sharpies like Sean Daggett. Clever, amoral and ruthless, Daggett is an entrepreneurial thug, a spider for well-intentioned flies like idealistic David who, helplessly ensnared, becomes an object lesson in what can happen to a nice Jewish boy when a bottom-feeder beyond redemption, some bad breaks here and there, and a bit of his own hubris conspire against him. Shrier’s third (High Chicago, 2009, etc.) is a near miss.

Slam-bang action scenes and deft writing can’t quite pump up the slightness of the story.

ASHES TO DUST

Sigurdardottir, Yrsa Minotaur (368 pp.) $14.99 paperback | $9.99 e-book Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-312-64174-0 978-1-250-00823-7 e-book A trip down a flight of stairs leads to an unspeakable discovery with appalling consequences for Reykjavík attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir and her latest client.

No one has been able to enter the house in which Markús Magnússon had been brought up since a volcanic eruption in Iceland’s Westmann Islands in 1973. Now that an archeological project is excavating several of the houses buried under lava and ash, Markús has engaged Thóra to accompany him and the project’s representative as he searches the house for personal articles his family might have left behind in their hurried evacuation. But he insists on going down to the basement alone, and when he calls out to her, she joins him to find a horrifying scene: three longdead bodies and the severed head of a fourth. The story Markús tells is as shaky as he is. Alda Thorgeirsdóttir, the nurse he’d carried a torch for when they were in school together, had asked him to retrieve a box she’d asked him to get rid of just before the eruption—a box he’d left in the basement without ever opening it to reveal the head. Unfortunately for Markús, Alda’s in no position to confirm this wild tale because someone’s just killed her in a particularly fiendish way. So after the police lock up Markús for the 34-year-old murders, Thóra (Last Rituals, 2007, etc.) makes the rounds of three generations of locals searching for exculpatory evidence and alternate suspects. The former is hard to find, but the latter are plentiful in a world in which the sins of the fathers are visited without mercy on the children.

Buried under all the volcanic ash, false trails and endless recriminations is a puzzle whose grim solution is worthy of Stieg Larsson.

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AIRS AND GRACES

domestic violence call discloses a kinky sex contract gone wrong.

A homeless man beds down in a dumpster that’s already hosting a corpse. In the middle of this junkyard, a flower struggles to bloom: the unlikely romance between Lita Medina Flores, an incoming Mexican illegal hired to dance even though she’s a terrible dancer, and Dinko Babich, the old school friend Hector pays to deliver her to Club Samara. When Lita sees and hears one detail too many about the deaths of a dozen Asian women in a cargo container, Dinko helps her escape and stashes her in his mother’s house as Hector’s seriously ruffled bosses start looking for her. The sideshow acts Wambaugh presents mix legal justice and rough justice, laughter and tears, so inventively that it’s hard to tell until the very end who’ll come out on top.

A welcome recovery from the middling Hollywood Hills (2010), with enough juice for one wild miniseries.

Southey, Roz Creme de la Crime (256 pp.) $28.95 | March 1, 2012 978-1-78029-017-1 A musician has come up so far in the world that he’s quite a determined sleuth.

Winter 1737. Charles Patterson is living with his wealthy and beloved wife Esther in Newcastle-upon-Tyne when the couple and their friend Hugh Demsey, a dancing master, spot a young woman climbing down a rope from a bridge onto the frozen river. Minutes later, they arrive at a shop on the bridge, where they find a terrified young girl screaming and the rest of her family slaughtered. Charles rushes after the departed woman, but all he finds is a tarnished old coin. Because the constable is ill, Charles, who has experience in solving murders, is asked to oversee the investigation.

The murder victims are nasty Mr. Gregson, his wife and younger daughter and his apprentice Ned. Missing and presumed guilty is his daughter Alice, who had recently and unhappily returned from London. But Alice’s other sister, Mrs. Fletcher, insists that she is innocent. His investigations entangle Charles with Balfour, the architect for the new assembly rooms; a thief taker who insists the killer is a man he has chased from Kent; and his patron Heron, who becomes obsessed with the ancient coins found in the cellar of a burnt-out building. Apparently he is not the only one interested, since Charles and Hugh are both attacked for the few artifacts they have found. At length Charles must follow Alice to the spirit world to get answers in an exceedingly complex case.

This pleasing latest case for Charles (The Ladder Dancer, 2011, etc.) combines plenty of historical details, a teasing puzzle and a touch of the supernatural.

science fiction and fantasy IMMOBILITY

Evenson, Brian Tor (256 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-7653-3096-3 Realization of what appeared, briefly and fictionally, as a “hypothetical” novel in one of Evenson’s (Last Days, 2009, etc.) previous works.

In this combination of two classic science fiction tropes—the post-apocalyptic future and the protagonist who has no memory—a man who may or may not be named Josef Horkai wakes from what he is told has been 30 years of cold-sleep storage. Following the Kollaps, the landscape is pocked with craters, scarred by violence and poisoned by radiation; only a few scattered groups cling to survival in shelters and caves. Rasmus, the leader of the group, tells Horkai that he is the group’s “fixer,” needed to retrieve a mysterious cylinder that has been stolen by a rival group. Horkai’s legs are useless and, according to Rasmus, he needs regular injections in his spine to stop a lethal disease spreading upwards to his brain.

To get Horkai where he needs to go, two “mules,” placid, literal minded individuals of limited intelligence, will carry him. Qanik and Qatik, the mules, don radiation-resistant suits, but Horkai needs none; more, he can heal from any injury and seems to be immortal. According to Qatik and Qanik—they refer to their group as the “hive,” and neither expects to survive the trek— there are other, similar, survivors. It’s a formidable what’s-goingon scenario, told from the point of view of a character who has

HARBOR NOCTURNE

Wambaugh, Joseph Mysterious Press (336 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-8021-2610-8

The harbor district of San Pedro turns out to be just as jam-packed with dangerous criminals, clueless cops and variously complicit citizens as anywhere else in Wambaugh’s storied Hollywood Division.

Young and ambitious, Sgt. Thaddeus Hawthorne of Hollywood Vice thinks he sees a way to put pressure on Hector Cozzo, an errand boy for a gang that’s smuggling and prostituting illegals: Persuade the surfer officer universally known as Jetsam to use his amputated foot to ingratiate himself with a shadowy Russian associate with a fixation on amputations. If this sounds like a crazy idea, it’s no goofier than what goes on during a normal Hollywood shift. A fight among superhero panhandlers leads to the hot pursuit of a purse snatcher. A |

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“Tends toward the claustrophobic at times, but superior and fulfilling.” from the killing moon

every reason to be unreliable, that merited further development rather than just a slam-dunk ending.

Satisfying if not particularly surprising or original.

LANCE OF EARTH AND SKY

Hoffman, Erin Pyr/Prometheus Books (310 pp.) $17.95 paperback | Apr. 24, 2012 978-1616146153

Sequel to Sword of Fire and Sea (2011), video-game designer Hoffman’s venture into text fantasy.

Andovar, a world where air, fire, earth and water magic all work, is inhabited not just by humans but various tribes of gryphons, birdlike seridi, dryads, gods and what-all. Vidarian Rulorat, gifted with both fire and water magic he can’t control, opened— mysteriously, especially if you haven’t read the first book—a gate between worlds, thus allowing elemental magic to reawaken.

Now, magically-powered flying ships roam the skies; robots built centuries ago have revived. Trade is controlled by the Alorean Import Company, most of whose directors, rendered immortal through hoarded magics, dropped dead when the gate opened.

Numerous conflicts smolder. The spirit of Vidarian’s oldest friend, Ruby, also killed when the gate opened and trapped inside one of the gems used to open the gate, wakes up and demands her body back. This might prove difficult, as she was buried at sea a while back. And Ariadel, Vidarian’s curiously tepid lover, is pregnant and not speaking to him. Faced with war on several fronts, Emperor Lirien summons Vidarian to help out. Unfortunately Vidarian brings along his gryphon pals, upsetting the Alorean traditionalists. He’s also visited by the Starhunter, a mystifying goddess who shows up without warning, quickly grows bored and murders people. Indeed, there’s so much going on, not to mention the huge, underdeveloped cast, that it’s very difficult to make sense of how, if, what or who are related. And despite the dazzling ideas, Hoffman hasn’t mastered the skill of describing a widescreen magical battle rather than programming one.

Highly entertaining and baffling in equal measure.

THE KILLING MOON

Jemisin, N.K. Orbit/Little, Brown (448 pp.) $14.99 paperback | May 1, 2012 978-0-316-18728-2 New ancient Egypt–flavored fantasy from the New York resident author of The Broken Kingdoms (2010, etc.).

In the city and state of Gujaareh, the Hetawa temple is dedicated to Hananja, goddess of dreams, and its priests harvest the people’s dreams to create dream-magic to heal wounds and cure ailments. The Hetawa’s elite Gatherers also 464

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ease the passage of the dying—and kill those judged corrupt.

When Gatherer Ehiru is ordered to kill Charleron, a corrupt outlander, somehow his flawless technique goes awry; Charleron dies in agony, but not before hinting that something is gravely amiss in the Hetawa. Shaken, Ehiru finds he can no longer function as a Gatherer and goes into seclusion, watched over by his young apprentice, Nijiri—until Ehiru receives orders to kill Sunandi Jeh Kalawe, the “corrupt” ambassador from neighboring Kisua. Sunandi bravely defends herself and reveals that her predecessor and adoptive father passed to her a dreadful secret involving war, murder and, perhaps, Eninket, Prince of the Sunset Throne—who happens to be Ehiru’s brother. Though all the signs point towards the Hetawa— innocent dreamers are being murdered by an insensate, renegade Reaper—Ehiru cannot believe that the priesthood itself is corrupt. Nevertheless he agrees to help Sunandi unravel the conspiracy. Though a little too heavily dependent on the intricate details of Gujaareh’s religion, Jemisin’s patient worldbuilding and extraordinary attention to detail help frame and propel the complex plot, and she weaves subtle, emotionally complex relationships between the main characters. The text includes a useful glossary but, alas, no maps.

Tends toward the claustrophobic at times, but superior and fulfilling.

EXOGENE

McCarthy, T.C. Orbit/Little, Brown (400 pp.) $7.99 paperback | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-316-12815-5 The second novel in McCarthy’s Subterrene War series (Germline, 2011, etc.) is a standalone tale that encompasses theology and existentialism in its story of a genetically engineered warrior discovering her own path.

Each Subterrene novel follows a different character involved in a brutal future war between the United States and Russia over natural resources in Kazakhstan. This time, McCarthy focuses on Catherine, one of the artificially grown super-soldiers used by the United States as frontline combatants against the Russians and their allies. Unlike the journalist protagonist of the previous installment, Catherine knows little to nothing about the motivations behind the war, and has been conditioned to focus her entire existence on killing enemy soldiers. Writing from Catherine’s perspective, McCarthy captures a fascinating mix of naïveté and ruthlessness, as Catherine, grown in a tank to the equivalent of 15 years old, is unfamiliar with everyday human life but knows everything about battlefield tactics and killing efficiently. The novel starts as Catherine is beginning to experience “the spoiling,” a degradation process that affects all genetics after they’ve been in the field for two years. Rather than submit to the mandated “discharge,” or suicide, Catherine escapes from her unit and begins a journey through battle-scarred Russia and the nuclear

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LIMINAL STATES

wasteland of North Korea, in the process questioning the principles that have so far defined her existence. A big part of that involves teasing out her own concept of God, and McCarthy portrays Catherine as a complex mixture of zealotry and skepticism, depicting a mindset that is effectively outside human experience while also very much identifiable. Although the novel takes place in the midst of a war and involves a number of battles, it’s less a war story than a rumination on identity and faith, anchored by a protagonist who brings surprising and moving depths to familiar science-fiction concepts.

This exciting and thoughtful story marks McCarthy as one of sci-fi’s most promising new talents, and bodes well for the series’ forthcoming third installment.

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Parsons, Zack Citadel/Kensington (448 pp.) $14.95 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-8065-3364-3 This first novel from the author of Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon (2009) is part of a multimedia project that also encompasses video, music, artwork, blogs and web pages.

In 1874, Gideon Long, terrified of his tyrannical father, plots a train robbery in order to conceal the losses he caused in the family business. Unfortunately, tough sheriff Warren Groves gets wind of the crime and, obliged to leave his beloved wife Annie in the throes of a difficult childbirth, rides in pursuit of Gideon’s gang. Fatally wounded by Warren, Gideon staggers away into the desert and follows an eerie white dog to a mysterious, hot, milky pool hidden in an abandoned pueblo. He falls in, only to find himself reborn in a

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new, younger body. With his deep hatred of Warren—the two were rivals for Annie, though Warren doesn’t know that yet— Gideon captures the sheriff and throws him into the pool, too.

(How’s that again?) And this Fountain of Rebirth also turns out to be a Fountain of Duplicates. (Don’t ask. It just is, OK?) Gideon even tries to bring Annie back after she dies in childbirth, but bodies reborn from dead flesh are alive but soulless.

Eventually, with multiple copies of both men, they’re forced to put their rivalry aside and come to an agreement—since each duplicate has all the memories of the original. Fast forward to 1951, where Casper Cord, a Warren dying of radiation-induced cancer after serving in the invasion of Japan following multiple atomic bombings, stumbles upon a murdered duplicate of Annie—apparently she had all her faculties—and sets out to discover where she came from and why she was murdered. And then, in 1973...and 2006...

Intensely realized and often gripping, so perhaps the lack of any discernable structure, logic or explanations deliberately points readers to the multimedia extensions. It’s bizarrely fascinating, and what it’s all about is anybody’s guess.

the narrative offers a grand tour of the inhabited worlds, often to excess, plus padding with 18 future-factual “extracts” to fill in the background, 15 rather bizarre “lists” (e.g. space accidents, propulsion systems) and three passages representing the mental processes of the humanoid qubes.

A small, clever novel obscured rather than enlightened by philosophy, synthesis, analysis and travelogue.

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Robinson, Kim Stanley Orbit/Little, Brown (576 pp.) $25.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-316-09812-0 Another textbook disguised as a novel: the first of a projected trilogy from Robinson (Galileo’s Dream, 2009, etc.) set in a future similar to that envisioned in his Mars trilogy from the 1990s.

By the 24th century, humanity has established settlements throughout the solar system on terraformed moons and planets and inside habitats hollowed from conveniently orbiting asteroids. Travel to the most remote destination takes mere weeks; quantum computers, qubes, are ubiquitous but have not yet reached true sentience. Former habitat designer Swan Er Hong makes her home on Mercury, where the city of Terminator crawls around the planet on rails, perpetually keeping just ahead of the rising sun. Her beloved grandmother, Alex, has just died. Two individuals, diminutive investigator Jean Genette and Wahram, a huge, froglike negotiator, wonder whether Swan’s recently deceased, beloved grandmother Alex left any information about her work—Alex studied Earth which, despite mass emigration, remains a basket case of environmental degradation, climate change and vampire capitalism. Then Swan, who has a qube named Pauline inside her head and once swallowed a cocktail of alien bacteria from Enceladus, and Wahram narrowly escape when Terminator is destroyed by an undetectable shower of meteorites directed from somewhere in space. Seems Alex, who distrusted qubes and all forms of electronic communication, had good reason for her paranoia: apart from the mysterious group who destroyed Terminator, somebody is building humanoid bodies operated by qubes, for purposes none of the three can guess. Other than Robinson’s usual novelistic virtues, 466

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nonfiction OBLIVION A Memoir

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Abad, Héctor Translated by McLean, Anne and Harvey, Rosalind Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $26.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-374-22397-7

OBLIVION by Abad, Héctor...........................................................p. 467 GRAVITY by Clegg, Brian............................................................... p. 473 HORSESHOE CRABS AND VELVET WORMS by Fortey, Richard...................................p. 476 MRS. KENNEDY AND ME

by Hill, Clint with McCubbin, Lisa.............................................. p. 477 LIKE ANY NORMAL DAY by Kram Jr., Mark..............................p. 483 DRIFT by Maddow, Rachel........................................................... p. 484 NAPLES DECLARED by Taylor, Benjamin................................... p. 494 ON THE EVE by Wasserstein, Bernard.......................................... p. 496 BYE BYE BABYLON by Ziadé, Lamia.......................................... p. 498

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A Colombian writer delivers a rousing, affecting tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a professor and physician who was murdered in 1987 by radical political opponents.

Gómez—who, according to the author, had limited skill with his hands and once inadvertently hastened the death of a surgical patient—moved from private practice to become a passionate advocate for public health, in Colombia and elsewhere, and a fiery writer of books, essays and op-ed pieces opposing violence and promoting personal freedom and equality—ideas sure to get you killed in many places. The son adored the father and writes about what in many was an ideal, if not idyllic, childhood. Gómez was extraordinarily affectionate and latitudinarian in just about everything. He continually encouraged his son, profoundly patient with him and loved him with a patent preference that in some ways, as the author recognizes, was unfair to the author’s sisters. Abad remembers the conflicts in his family, notably the deeply pious Roman Catholic women who struggled mightily against the father’s more liberal religious views. He also remembers with lingering horror the death of his own talented sister to cancer. The author creates enormous dramatic irony in his text: We know from the beginning that his father will be murdered, so Abad imbues every moment with an aching pathos. The translators have preserved his facile and sophisticated uses of the language. One 205-word sentence, for example, unspools with absolute clarity. Sometimes the detail is grim and wrenching—a sewer pipe clogged with tapeworms, his poor dying sister’s physical decline, his father’s bullet-riddled corpse. One small reservation: a tendency—somewhat understandable—to quote excessively from his father’s publications.

Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?

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IMPERFECT An Improbable Life

Abbott, Jim & Brown, Tim Ballantine (288 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-345-52325-9 978-0-345-52327-3 e-book

Former Major League pitcher Abbott recounts the ups and downs of his career— and how he managed to succeed despite being born without a right hand.

Abbott’s athletic success was perpetually viewed through the lens of his disability. His achievements, while impressive, were deemed extraordinary relative to what the average one-handed person might expect to accomplish. Such judgment rankled the principled, hard-working lefty, however, as he recounts in this chronicle of his childhood growing up in hardscrabble Flint, Mich., and subsequent rise to the majors, where he pitched for the California Angels and New York Yankees (among others). Throughout his career, Abbott fought to be evaluated based not on his remarkable ingenuity and dexterity in learning to both pitch and field so well with one hand, but rather on the merits of what he achieved on the mound. He could not, however, fail to acknowledge his status as a hero to the disabled, a burden he willingly bore throughout his career. Overall, Abbott enjoyed a marginally successful pro career with a lifetime record of 87-108. He excelled for a few seasons and even threw a no-hitter in fabled Yankee Stadium, all after being one of the nation’s best college pitchers at the University of Michigan; he also won a gold medal in the 1988 Olympics. Still, as much as Abbott sought to be known solely as a pitcher rather than a onehanded pitcher, it’s impossible to contextualize his career without acknowledging the incredible odds he overcame. His retrospective is appropriately modest and self-effacing, and able co-author Brown punches up an inning-by-inning recap of the no-hitter, but there’s a predictability to the narrative that makes it somewhat less remarkable than it should be.

Inspirational paint-by-numbers, but a worthy addition to the category of moving athlete memoirs. (8-page color photo insert)

PINSTRIPE EMPIRE The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss

Appel, Marty Bloomsbury (640 pp.) $28.00 | May 8, 2012 978-1-60819-492-6

A former Yankees’ PR director and sports commentator charts the vicissitudes of the beloved/hated team once known as the Highlanders.

Appel (Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain, 2009, etc.) is no disinterested observer. He is a Yankees insider, and he 468

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has enviable contacts with the high and the low in Yankee history and occasionally slips easily into the first person. But he’s also unable to be critical when circumstance calls for it. His account, for example, of the slow desegregation of the Yankees is brief, dry and emotionless. Of greatest interest are Appel’s descriptions of the early years of the team—their first park, the great stars of Murderers’ Row (Ruth, Gehrig and company), the building—and later remodeling—of the original Yankee Stadium and its emotional razing eight decades later. The author also offers the odd detail (Yogi Berra used a woman’s falsie to pad his catcher’s mitt), close looks at the great and not-so-great Yankee managers (Huggins, Stengel, Houk and Torre among the former) and a careful chronicle of the bizarre hire-and-fire-and-rehire history of Billy Martin and the irascible George Steinbrenner. Appel also notes the contributions of PA announcers, National Anthem singers, groundskeepers and others. But the author rushes through the most recent decades, trying to do justice to Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and so many others—an effort highlighting the near impossibility of his task: cramming between the covers of a single book the complicated history of a most complicated franchise.

Torrents of information (good portions of which are genuinely interesting) cascade over readers, who will feel at times as if they’re trying to fill a water glass beneath Niagara Falls. (Two 16-page color inserts)

THE WOMAN WHO CHANGED HER BRAIN Stories of Transformation from the Frontier of Brain Science

Arrowsmith-Young, Barbara Free Press (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4516-0793-2

A pioneer in the treatment of learning disabilities describes how she diagnosed her own mental disability and created unique exercises to retrain her brain.

Arrowsmith-Young’s goal is to train educators—her method is now taught at more than 30 schools in the United States and Canada—and create tailor-made cognitive exercises for students at her Toronto school. The author chronicles how she overcame her inability to conceptualize causality despite having excellent audio and visual memory. She could “make no sense of the relationship between the big and little hands of an analogue clock.” Even simple arithmetic was beyond her capability, and her reading comprehension was poor. She had difficulty following conversations, catching only fragments at a time and then replaying them in her head later. By dint of her “singular work ethic and gritty determination to succeed,” she stumbled through school by relying on her phenomenal memory to compensate for her disabilities. While studying child behavior in graduate school in the late 1970s, Arrowsmith-Young discovered a book by Soviet neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria, in which the author described his work with brain-injured World War II

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“A frank and funny memoir of a successful New York restaurateur.” from restaurant man

veterans. She was amazed to find that many of their symptoms paralleled her own, and she also learned about rats whose brains showed physical change as a result of being placed in stimulating environments. Consequently, the author devised a series of increasingly complex exercises, drilling herself with flash cards showing the hands of a clock in different positions. Her success in increasing her mental function laid the basis for her teaching method, which challenges students to directly address their handicaps. Arrowsmith-Young provides helpful anecdotes that indicate impressive improvements achieved by her students by following the mental exercises that she has developed.

An inspiring, instructive life story.

MEMOIRS OF A RUGBYPLAYING MAN Guts, Glory, and Blood in the World’s Greatest Game

Atkinson, Jay Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-312-54769-1 978-1-4299-9061-5 e-book

Atkinson (Writing/Boston Univ.; Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America, 2010, etc.) takes readers on an exuberant journey into the center of the rugby scrum.

As a 35-year veteran of the sport, the author’s passion translates easily to the page, providing a reflective look at his entrance into what he dubs the “blood fraternity.” Atkinson makes no attempt to hide his zeal for the sport, explaining, “There are the things we do for love, and the things we do for rugby…” Atkinson addresses both, examining his struggle to serve two competing mistresses, writing and rugby. Throughout his graduate studies at the University of Florida, Atkinson began to understand the overlapping traits required for writers and rugby players alike: “grit, aggression, physical courage, loyalty, chivalry, insouciance and comic self-awareness…” While Atkinson attempted to hone these skills, he became distracted— not by his sport, but by its culture. When not on the pitch, the author and teammates forged their bonds in the bars, partaking in the usual rabble-rousing (including bar fights and the occasional run-in with the law). Yet Atkinson’s hijinks came to a halt when he learned of the death of his father, a life-changing event that forced him to confront emotional pain in addition to his physical pain. Though an overseas rugby tour helped him through his grief, it was not the sport that healed him, but the lessons learned from its grueling trials.

A testosterone-laden tale deserving of an audience well beyond the locker room.

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RESTAURANT MAN

Bastianich, Joe Viking (280 pp.) $27.95 | May 1, 2012 978-0-670-02352-3

A frank and funny memoir of a successful New York restaurateur.

Distinctly Italian with a twist of Queens, Bastianich displays a palpable love of good Italian food and wine throughout his humorous reflections on how he became one of the best-known restaurant owners in New York City. From his early days as a dishwasher and busboy in his parents’ Italian restaurant (his mother is famed chef Lidia Bastianich), the author learned the basics of restaurant management— e.g., “your margins are three times your cost on everything”; “you have to appear to be generous, but you have to be inherently a cheap fuck to make it work”; “no bottle of wine costs more than five dollars to make.” After a stint in Wall Street and a wild time in Italy working in restaurants and vineyards, Bastianich returned to New York, unable to deny his “biological imperative.” Using the maxims his father had taught him, he launched his own restaurant, Becco, and from there the direction was only up. He and his business partner, Mario Batali, moved on to open many other prosperous Italian eateries, culminating in his part ownership of Del Posto, the only four-star Italian restaurant in America. Despite his liberal use of the f-bomb, the author’s easygoing voice and substantial knowledge of real Italian food (not the spaghetti-and-meatballs kind) will lure booklovers and food lovers alike. Oenophiles will appreciate Bastianich’s rich descriptions of the many Italian wines he recommends and his savantlike ability to recall and identify the tens of thousands of wines he has tasted since his childhood.

Engrossing details of being the front man in a variety of thriving restaurants.

CURES FOR HUNGER A Memoir Béchard, Deni Y. Milkweed (336 pp.) $24.00 | May 1, 2012 978-1-57131-331-7

Béchard (Vandal Love, 2006) comes to terms with the painful legacy of his father, a suicide at 56.

At first, the author’s portrait of his childhood in British Columbia seems yet another snapshot of a dysfunctional family. Dad, reckless and macho, was always beating people up and getting visits from the police; he fought constantly with Mom, who eventually took the kids and returned to her native Virginia. By that time the author was 10, torn between admiration for his father’s swaggering and fear of its consequences, André, as his wife and children called him, had assumed many names since leaving his French-Canadian

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family in provincial Quebec and embarking on a criminal career that included bank robbing and jail time. He went straight after he married but remained angry and conflicted, often telling Deni “you’re like me” and seeming to half-want his son to take up his old lawless life. Béchard, who initially hated school but loved to read and yearned to write novels, didn’t know what to make of his father’s mixed signals or his own mixed feelings. His memoir gains power and clarity from the author’s searching, scrupulously honest chronicle of a lengthy process of alternating alienation and reconciliation. Against considerable financial and emotional odds, Béchard entered college in Virginia. This act of defiance won him André’s grudging respect and launched a series of latenight, long-distance conversations in which the elder Béchard mused over his turbulent life while the younger took notes and promised to write his father’s stories. After years of refusing to discuss his origins, in their last phone call André gave his son his birth name and the names of his mother and hometown. Two years after his death, the author went to Quebec and confronted the roots of his father’s malaise, in some ways preordained by family dynamics and yet fundamentally self-chosen.

A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.

BIRD SENSE What It’s Like to Be a Bird

Birkhead, Tim Walker (288 pp.) $25.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8027-7966-3

Birkhead (Animal Behavior and the History of Science/Univ. of Sheffield; The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology, 2008, etc.) looks at the adaptive significance of bird behavior.

A lifetime spent in ornithological research and old-fashioned bird-watching has convinced the author that “we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird’s head.”

He describes how using the latest available tools, neurobiologists have uncovered new aspects of bird perception—e.g., the fact that female birds that see in the ultraviolet range chose mates on the basis of characteristics we can’t directly perceive such as plumage markings. Even more fascinating, Birkhead explains that some birds “tend to use their right eye for close-up activities like feeding and the left eye for more distant activities such as scanning for predators.” Another unexpected discovery which he hopes may prove relevant to the treatment of neuro-degenerative brain disease in humans is the plasticity of the brains of birds that live in temperate regions. As the days shorten with the approach of winter, the birds’ brains shrink; conversely, increasing daylight triggers a hormone release resulting in an increase in brain size.

This is correlated to the great mental activity required as new songs are acquired, mating occurs and nests are protected from predators. Another exciting discovery is the evidence of sensitive areas on their tongues and beaks, which enable 470

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them to preen in a manner similar to chimpanzee grooming.

While Birkhead recognizes the problem of anthropomorphic interpretations of animal behavior, he describes a colleague’s observation of birds engaging in an intense 17-minute greeting ceremony after being separated, behavior that suggested a human reunion. He admits to finding it tempting to infer that “birds experience similar pleasurable emotions.”

An entertaining book guaranteed to bring pleasure to bird-watchers that will also fascinate students contemplating a career in ecology. (B/W illustrations throughout)

FATHER’S DAY A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son

Bissinger, Buzz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 15, 2012 978-0-547-81656-2 The author of Friday Night Lights (1990) chronicles a cross-country road trip he shared with his 24-year-old brain-dam-

aged son Zach.

In addition to probing his son’s inner life, Vanity Fair and Daily Beast contributor Bissinger (Three Nights in August, 2005, etc.) attempts to re-create the pleasure he took in being on the road with his own father. The author explains that Zach has the comprehension skills of a 9-year-old because of brain damage suffered at the time of his premature birth, three minutes later than his twin brother Gerry. Yet while Zach’s mental processes are slow, he has a phenomenal memory, complete recall of past events, friends with whom he corresponds by e-mail and a close relationship with Gerry. Because of his limited mental capacities, Zach works as a supermarket bagger: “He has been doing the same job for five years, and he will do the same job for the rest of his life,” writes the author. “My son’s professional destiny is paper or plastic.” Bissinger laments what he believes to be his son’s impoverished mental life in ways that sometimes seem unduly condescending—e.g., expressing disappointment that he prefers swimming or sitting by the hotel pool to gambling at the tables in Las Vegas, one of the stops on their trip.

The author describes an exciting bungee jump that he shared with his son, and meetings with friends and relatives they visit on the way to Los Angeles, but much of the book is devoted to flashbacks about incidents in his own life, his failures and disappointments as well as the pains and pleasures of fatherhood. Surprisingly, while he had hoped to help his son expand his mental horizons, the author was the one who gained valuable insights, one of which was the realization that his son does indeed have a rich inner life.

An intriguing memoir that suffers from confusing narrative lapses, such as contradictory accounts of Zach’s work history.

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“Bristow unpacks the complex cultural, social and scientific effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic and reveals the American voices that fill the gap of a suppressed national memory.” from american epidemic

MORAL ORIGINS The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame Boehm, Christopher Basic (352 pp.) $28.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-465-02048-5

Boehm (Anthropology and Biological Sciences/Univ. of Southern California in Los Angeles; Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, 1999, etc.) probes the origins of human conscience and altruism.

Trained as an evolutionary biologist, the author is the director of the Jane Goodall Research Center. He questions why altruistic behavior—”being generous to people lacking any blood ties to the generous party”—is a matter of everyday human practice, theorizing that generosity and other moral virtues evolved genetically according to the principle of natural selection as a byproduct of social selection, which rewarded impulse control and punished aggressive behavior. Boehm suggests that egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups would have needed strong social controls to ensure cooperation and equitable sharing of the kill. This, he contends, could have caused a biological shift. While highly competitive Chimpanzee alpha males dominate and receive disproportionate shares of food and sexual favors—thus gaining competitive advantage for the perpetuation of their genes—in hunter-gatherer societies such behavior could not be tolerated and would confer a reproductive disadvantage. The universal existence of blushing as an expression of shame exists only among humans; therefore, writes the author, it must be genetically based rather than just a cultural phenomenon. Boehm cites recent work establishing the existence of empathy, undoubtedly a precursor to morality, in primates, but he contends that altruism and shame are distinctly human qualities. People recognize virtue and feel shame; animals seek approval and fear disapproval.

Boehm also cites instances in which Inuits and Pygmy tribes have used gossip and shaming to discipline would-be freeloaders, and even harsher methods to deal with bullies, thieves and murderers.

A provocative though speculative thesis related in a chatty, occasionally repetitive style.

AMERICAN PANDEMIC The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Bristow, Nancy K. Oxford Univ. (304 pp.) $34.95 | May 1, 2012 978-0-19-981134-2

Bristow (History/Univ. of Puget Sound; Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War, 1996) unpacks the complex cultural, social and scientific effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic and reveals the American voices that fill the gap of a suppressed national memory. |

In less than two years, influenza killed more than 50 million people worldwide, shocking existing medical infrastructures and destabilizing the trust that citizens had in science. Physicians were at a loss to prescribe effective treatments; racial and gender divides grew as misunderstandings about the spread of disease exacerbated existing stereotypes; and fear of contagion threatened to collapse the kind of community support that had helped the nation endure past hardships. Simultaneously, the rise of public health care employed the rhetoric of opportunity and optimism, further destabilizing social boundaries as the death rate climbed. A combination of media emphasis on looking toward the future and a public call for increased funding for new scientific research assisted in whitewashing the deep sense of loss and despair that afflicted most Americans as they dealt with the aftermath of the pandemic. Bristow, whose great-grandparents succumbed to influenza in 1920, writes with depth and feeling. By researching dozens of primary sources, she reveals the human circumstances and personal stories behind the history of this tragic era. It’s a much-needed addendum to pandemic literature and an important perspective to understand as new and ever-evolving flu strains hover over our collective understanding of disease.

Well-researched and insightful. (20 b/w halftones)

THE VOLUNTOURIST A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem

Budd, Ken Morrow/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $15.99 paperback | May 8, 2012 978-0-06-194646-2

A travel memoir, volunteer-style.

After the death of his father, Budd confronted the age-old question about life’s purpose. With no sufficient answers, he volunteered to help with hurricane relief in New Orleans. What started as a work-sponsored week of helping out morphed into a full-fledged journey to find himself by traveling the world as a volunteer. But volunteer tourism brought a whole new set of questions—e.g., how helpful can he really be in two weeks and whether these trips make him a better person or a worse one. “My renewed quest to be a better person began with my being a selfish jerk,” he writes. Though he’s often an unsympathetic narrator, his honesty helps readers accept the flaw and keeps him relatable. Each of six trips—New Orleans, Costa Rica, China, Ecuador, Palestine and Kenya—makes up a section of the book, with vivid details about his experience in each place delivered through vignette-like memories of certain days and moments. Travelers will recognize the mish-mash of memories that accompany trips like these, but the narrative occasionally feels like an unedited journal. Readers may wonder when they’ll find their way back to the narrative thread, but they will still enjoy the journey. Ultimately, Budd comes to his conclusions about life quietly, with little of the fanfare common in memoirs. For much

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THE EPIGENETICS REVOLUTION How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

of the story this works well, but questions will linger over his relationship with his wife and his plans for future volunteer trips.

Not for readers easily frustrated with wandering thoughts, but a solid introduction to the world of volunteer tourism and a pleasant diversion for those who don’t mind a winding road. (Author tour to Denver, New Orleans, New York, Washington, D.C.)

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SUNDAY DINNER? A Year of Italian Menus with 250 Recipes that Celebrate Family Caponigri, Lisa Photos by Ambrosino, Guy Sterling Epicure (352 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4027-8482-8

Caponigri shares her family’s tradition of Sunday dinners.

“Sunday was for gathering, preparing, cooking, eating, sharing, talking, laughing…a time to disconnect from the rest of the world and reconnect with family and friends,” writes the author. In that spirit, she organizes her debut cookbook into “52 Sunday dinner menus in the Italian tradition.” The thematic menus include: antipasto (usually a crostini to pass at the table), a primo (first course), a secondo (main course) served with a single contorno (side dish) and dessert. While some of the recipes are standard Italian fare (veal piccata, spinach lasagna, stuffed mushrooms), others are less common but intriguing (prosciutto soufflé, veal breast stuffed with raisins and pine nuts, hazelnut truffle pie). These are not last-minute items; Caponigri feels preparation should involve a noisy kitchen full of people. She also highlights recipes that are child-friendly to prepare and serve. Caponigri suggests five ways to incorporate Sunday dinners into your routine: Make them a priority, plan ahead, decide the menu and assign the chores together, keep the menu simple, let go and have fun. The book is flavored with Italian aphorisms, informative menu introductions and Caponigri’s family history.

Guy Ambrosino provides the enticing photographs, with food styling by former Gourmet editor Kate Winslow.

A good cookbook to gather a hungry crowd and leave them happily satiated.

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Carey, Nessa Columbia Univ. (352 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 6, 2012 978-0-231-16116-9

British virologist Carey tackles epigenetics with a passion to explain a rapidly developing and complex field.

Early on the author reminds us that a surprising finding from human-genome research is that only two percent of the DNA in our cells codes for proteins used in the body. Though it was once fashionable to call the rest “junk” DNA, that’s not the case today. Some of this DNA is transcribed as “non-coding RNA” with various functions, and some codes for proteins that determine which genes are expressed and which genes are silent in a given cell type—a liver or a skin cell, for example—ensuring that when these cells divide, the daughter cells will be the same type. Epigenetics is the study of those DNA controls, the key players for which are proteins that attach methyl groups to selected parts of DNA and proteins that add acetyl groups to histones (proteins associated with DNA on chromosomes).

None of these controls is evident when sperm meets egg and undergoes initial cell divisions, which explains why “embryonic stem cells” are prized for their ability to develop into any cell type. As Carey surveys the field, she dwells on early development as a critical period when environmental influences can affect epigenetic controls with long-term effects. Thus women pregnant in the first trimester in the infamous Dutch famine in World War II gave birth to offspring at increased risk for obesity as adults. Similarly, Carey explores epigenetic changes dues to childhood abuse as contributing to stress-related illnesses in maturity. Epigenetic effects may also play a role in schizophrenia and chronic diseases, including cancer, and have already inspired new drugs to inhibit epigenetic controls. There is also fascinating research to explain, for example, why feeding honey-bee larvae royal jelly will turn them into queens and not sterile workers. Carey makes clear that debate and controversy attend this rapidly growing field, and she takes pains to explore alternate (non-epigenetic) explanations for various findings.

An exhilarating exploration of an exciting new field, and a good gift for a bright biology student looking for a career choice.

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“A useful, pertinent work for understanding the human story behind the headlines.” from the impossible state

THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE North Korea, Past and Future

Cha, Victor Ecco/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $29.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-06-199850-8

From the former director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, an eye-opening view of the closed, repressive dictatorship of North Korea.

Cha (Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, 2008, etc.) first visited North Korea during George W. Bush’s second term with thengovernor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to try to defuse nuclear-testing tensions. The author was amazed at the chasm between party haves and everybody else, confirming all that he knew about the authoritarian country. Cha aims to get at some of the pressing questions since Kim Jong-il’s death and the succession of the utterly unknown younger son, Kim Jongun—e.g., what happened to this once-vigorous dictatorship, and why does the populace do nothing about it? How can the West know so little about what really goes on there? For Cha, the key that unlocked the regime’s secrets was its nostalgia for the good old days of the 1950s and ’60s, when China and the Soviet Union were bolstering North Korean industry and military, while the South was still an agrarian backwater. American aggression during the Korean War left a lasting bitterness, and while the South was grappling with American ambivalence toward its leaders, the North under Kim Il-sung embraced the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and the cult of the Great Leader. As a result, writes Cha, the North Koreans are simply too oppressed to revolt—not to mention the devastating effects from “Olympic envy” of trying to catch up to Seoul’s 1988 hosting, and the terrible famine of the mid ’90s. The author looks closely at the Kim family, the terrible economic decisions that plunged the country into poverty, the shocking gulag system, its paranoid nuclear proliferation program and the tenuous relations with South Korea.

A useful, pertinent work for understanding the human story behind the headlines. (16 charts and graphs; 8-page color photo insert)

read a book about it, preferably this one by prolific British science writer Clegg (How to Build a Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel, 2011, etc.).

No revisionist, the author begins with the Greeks, who got it wrong. Believing that reason trumped observation (the senses could betray you), they thought deeply about gravity and concluded that heavy objects fell because they yearned to move toward the center of the universe (i.e., the Earth). Matters changed little for 2,000 years until Copernicus shifted the Earth away from the center, Galileo discovered the first equations of motion and Newton became the world’s first scientific superstar by producing laws that described the movement of every object, from a falling rock to an orbiting planet, a dazzling accomplishment. However, for all his brilliance, Newton couldn’t explain how gravity worked. The sun seemed to influence Earth magically across empty space.

This made everyone uncomfortable, Newton included. After nearly 300 years during which scientists hypothesized a space filled with odd, invisible material that allowed one body to tug on another, Einstein solved the problem, explaining that

ISBN-978-1460999769

GRAVITY How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives

Clegg, Brian St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $25.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-312-61629-8 978-1-4688-0252-0 e-book

Although by far the feeblest of the four universal forces, gravity is the only one we experience continuously. Every inquisitive person should |

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THE RULES OF INFLUENCE Winning When You’re in the Minority

any mass warps space-time in its vicinity. Moving through warped space changes the direction of nearby bodies, giving the impression that a force is acting.

The downside (for readers) is that Einstein’s version of gravity is more complicated than Newton’s, but Clegg’s skills never flag, and his account remains lucid and free of jargon, bad jokes and math phobia.

INTO DUST AND FIRE Five Young Americans Who Went First to Fight the Nazi Army

Cox, Rachel S. NAL Caliber/Berkley (352 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-451-23475-9 A multifaceted, moving story of five American Ivy League students who committed themselves to fight alongside the British in the spring of 1941.

Journalist Cox, the relative of one of the recruits, pieces together this extraordinary story of five patriotic young students at Dartmouth and Harvard who bucked the official U.S. decision to remain out of the war while the Nazis were conquering Europe and offered themselves as volunteers for the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Dartmouth senior Charles G. Bolté led the way by firing off an incendiary letter to President Roosevelt on the front page of the student newspaper announcing, “Now we have waited long enough.” At Harvard, senior Rob Cox had been wrestling with his own decision, spurred by a high draft number; while visiting a friend at Dartmouth that spring, he persuaded fellow Dartmouth students Jack Brister and Bill Durkee, along with Harvard sophomore Heyward Cutting, to join the fight. Within six weeks the five well-educated, fairly privileged young men arrived by Allied convoy to Halifax. Mixing in with the English they underwent recruit and officer training at Winchester and were considered curiosities and often displayed for the press and upper echelon. When events in North Africa boiled over, they were finally sent out by freighter in June 1942— the author gives a terrific account of onboard shenanigans and reflections by the bored, fearful men. They endured harsh conditions in the desert and were engaged in the decisive, ferocious Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. Brister was the only Yank not wounded in this battle; once Cox had recovered from being shot in the back, he and Brister returned to fight, and they both died in the Battle of Mareth in 1943. Bolté went on to pursue the cause of veterans’ rights and international peace; his first book, The New Veteran (1945), was dedicated to his fallen colleagues.

A unique take on the war, from the point of view of the young, idealistic and foolhardy.

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Crano, William D. St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-312-55229-9 978-1-4299-5672-7 e-book

A social psychologist explains how the few can persuade the many.

Crano (Psychology/Claremont Graduate Univ.; co-editor: The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change, 2010, etc.) offers a series of rules—e.g., “Be Persistent.

Don’t Retreat and Don’t Compromise. Be Flexible. Adjust Your Message to Circumstances”—that must be followed if minorities are to be successful in persuading majorities to change.

The author succeeds in explaining the concepts and studies in a manner accessible even to readers with no prior knowledge of social psychology, and he cites abundant examples of the success of his proposed rules from history and politics. Unfortunately, the structure of the book sometimes detracts from what could be a compelling topic. The first third of the book is devoted to explaining basic group dynamics and defining “majority” and “minority.” This primer is useful but bloated, as is the introduction, which contains at least 10 iterations of one statement—“This book will show you how to influence majorities”—in 30 pages. The repetition of this assertion, combined with the introductory nature of the material, gives the reader the unfortunate impression of being subjected to a sales pitch and a lecture at the same time. The rules themselves are buried in the text, and many of them are wordy: “Do not expect direct focal influence, but be attuned to indirect influence” makes for a rather cumbersome rallying cry. Fortunately, Crano reviews the rules in the final chapter.

The core rules governing minority success are overshadowed by the supporting evidence in this manual for social change.

OVER TIME My Life As a Sportswriter

Deford, Frank Atlantic Monthly (350 pp.) $25.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8021-2015-1

The prolific sports commentator returns with an episodic, anecdotal memoir.

Deford (Bliss, Remembered, 2010, etc.) is an amiable travel companion—sometimes sharp, witty, even irreverent (twice he slams big-time college sports for corruption and even for trivializing American education)—but for the most part here he’s on cruise control. Although he takes us back to his school days (he knew in third grade he could write) and high-school sports career (he had one good season in basketball), and writes

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breezily about acquiring, fairly easily, his editing gig at Sports Illustrated, he offers no real detailed, sequential account of learning his craft. Deford is principally interested in telling stories, a few jokes and a few poignant recollections. He recalls, for example, his very close relationship with Arthur Ashe and how he, John Feinstein and some others covered up Ashe’s AIDS battle until the story finally broke elsewhere. He also remembers a touching moment when Magic Johnson refused to let a press conference end until veteran journalist Jim Murray could ask his question. He relates some stories about sportswriters from earlier generations (Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner) and describes the shift in sportswriting from cheerleading to criticism. He also writes about the diminished state of print journalism (and his own failed paper, The National) and the adjustments he’s had to make—from print to radio to TV to the Internet. Celebrities of all sorts populate the pages—Howard Cosell, Mickey Mantle, Dean Smith, Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, Carl Lewis, Jimmy Connors, Bobby Knight—but only rarely does Deford strip the bark to see what lies beneath.

A throwback jersey of a book.

AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf

Dodson, James Knopf (384 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 19, 2012 978-0-307-27249-2

Evoking a Golden Age of American golf.

Within a span of a few months in 1912, three golfing legends were born: Byron Nelson, Sam Snead and Ben Hogan. The trio would transform the game of golf, bringing it greater popularity than ever before and paving the way for the sport’s mainstream acceptance in the United States. This “American Triumvirate” competed furiously against one another from the Great Depression through World War II and, at least as far as Hogan and Snead were concerned, well into the 1950s. At various time each man could stake a claim to being the world’s best golfer. In this triple biography, golf writer Dodson (A Son of the Game, 2010, etc.) explores the inevitably intertwined lives of these three giants, exploring their personal foibles and struggles as well as their golf careers, and he conjures a picture of how golf came into its own in the American sporting firmament. With crisp prose, the author captures the feel of mid-century America and the game of golf before an era of multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, unimaginable tournament purses and 24-hour global TV coverage. Indeed, Dodson clearly shows how Nelson, Hogan and Snead essentially created the world of golf as it exists today.

Occasionally the author gets caught up in vague pronoun usage within the overlapping paths of his protagonists, and only true golf fans will find all of the blow-by-blow accounts of significant tournaments compelling. Nonetheless, the book is a fine example of sports history and popular American history. |

There may well never be an American golfing trio to compare with Nelson, Snead and Hogan. Thanks to Dodson we now have a much better idea of why they were so vital to a sport that continues to simultaneously fascinate and vex millions of people across the country and the world.

(16 pages of photographs. First printing of 60,000. Author tour to Atlanta, Jacksonville, New York, Orlando)

HOW TO COOK LIKE A MAN A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession Duane, Daniel Bloomsbury (224 pp.) $24.00 | May 8, 2012 978-1-60819-102-4

Uneven but intimate look at the intersection of fatherhood and cooking.

Men’s Journal contributing editor Duane (A Mouth Like Yours, 2005, etc.) chronicles his newfound fixation on providing for his budding family through cooking.

Early on the author relates how, after his daughter was born, he wanted to contribute to the household in a meaningful way. He deduced that the most valuable contribution he could make was “seeing to it that [his] little family ha[d] a delicious, wholesome meal on the table, every single night, forever and ever.” Building on this simple declaration, Duane turned it into an eight-year experiment. As he cooked and learned more about nearly every aspect of the cooking process, his family grew and experienced setbacks and tragedies. Some of Duane’s memoir is self-indulgent; he was obviously searching for something—approval, the meaning of fatherhood, a sense of purpose and self—through his cooking. Though he and his wife had financial issues, Duane insisted on making extravagant, uncompromising meals that no one really wanted to eat. However, the author’s prose is mostly smooth and occasionally beautiful; despite unnecessarily long sentences in certain sections, he effectively immerses readers in his thoughts and feelings. Duane produces a mostly coherent narrative thread, but he does meander into adventures in eating rather than cooking. This tendency may frustrate some readers but should appeal to die-hard foodies looking for their next read.

A flawed memoir, but one that would make a good gift for a father-to-be searching for a sense of self in the midst of life-changing events.

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“In this fascinating, well-written book, [Fortey] offers a worldwide tour of places whose lands and waters shelter extraordinary forms of life that have overcome mass extinctions, sea-level changes, ice ages and other obstacles to survive into the present” from horseshoe crabs and velvet worms

ISAIAH BERLIN The Journey of a Jewish Liberal

Dubnov, Arie M. Palgrave Macmillan (320 pp.) $40.00 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-230-11070-0

Dubnov (History/Stanford Univ.) debuts with a biography of Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the world-renowned Jewish historian and philosopher.

The author provides insight into both Berlin and the English culture and society to which his family fled to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and revolution. Dubnov claims that the mature Berlin’s ideas of freedom and “value pluralism” were rooted in his experiences defining and maintaining a Jewish identity during the 1920s and ‘30s, while also assimilating into Oxford academic culture. Berlin’s participation in the philosophical disputes of the day took place against the background of the British elite’s appeasement of Hitler and Nazism and the Peel Commission’s adoption of partition for Palestine.

Such conflicts were foreshadowed in encounters with the anti-Semitic Christian “Englishness” of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and later with the views of retired imperial officials at All Souls College, Oxford. They were echoed during the time of Berlin’s service in the United States during World War II, when it became increasingly obvious that Churchill’s government was not going to support the establishment of Israel, and America’s Zionists began to follow their own path. This was also the time when Berlin first made the acquaintance of Chaim Weizmann and became a Zionist, and the author compares what he calls Berlin’s postwar “diaspora Zionism” with his becoming a political thinker of freedom.

An inspiring account of the relationship between the struggle to defend pragmatic liberalism and the dilemmas and conflicts of politics.

HORSESHOE CRABS AND VELVET WORMS The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind Fortey, Richard Knopf (352 pp.) $28.95 | Apr. 11, 2012 978-0-307-26361-2

A leading natural scientist’s search for animals and plants that have survived nearly unchanged for millions of years.

“Deep history is all around us,” writes Fortey (Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, 2008, etc.), formerly a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. “In the life of the planet, the latest model 476

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does not always invalidate the tried-and-tested old creature.”

In this fascinating, well-written book, he offers a worldwide tour of places whose lands and waters shelter extraordinary forms of life that have overcome mass extinctions, sea-level changes, ice ages and other obstacles to survive into the present. Taking great joy in his trip back in time, Fortey plays both adventurer and detective as he searches for these ancients.

At Delaware Bay, he watches the mating orgy of horseshoe crabs, which for millennia have laid and fertilized their eggs along the shoreline. On New Zealand’s North Island, in a rotting pine log, he finds the elusive caterpillar-like velvet worm, which survived the same event that killed the dinosaurs.

Detailing the appearance and behavior of each species, Fortey explains each life form’s place in evolutionary history. In Shark Bay, Australia, he finds living stromatolites (mounds built by microscopic organisms) dating back 3.5 billion years. With occasional outbursts of “And there it is!” he tracks down many other creatures, including the lizard-like tuatara on a log in New Zealand “looking as if it were resting after a stroll from the Triassic,” and the echidna, an oddly shaped mammal living on Australia’s Kangaroo Island. Evolution goes on, writes the author. These species are not exactly the same as those in the distant past, but they are here and alive now.

Informative, engrossing and delightful. (25 illustrations)

FATAL COLOURS Towton 1461—England’s Most Brutal Battle Goodwin, George & Black, Star Norton (288 pp.) $27.95 | May 1, 2012 978-0-393-08084-1

The history of a bloody battle and its context in mid-15th-century England.

The war between York and Lancaster heralded the end of the era of chivalry. In earlier battles, noblemen were taken for ransom; however, in the War of the Roses, no prisoners were taken. Henry VI was not only ineffective but also incompetent; he “did not exhibit the personality of a king.” Crowned as a child, he was indifferent to his task of ruling. When he fell into catatonic schizophrenia for the first time, Richard, Duke of York, was named to “protect” the king’s person and duties. Subsequent bouts of madness finally drove the Yorks into a war of usurpation, and Henry’s queen raised an army to save the throne, proposing herself as regent. Civil war is always devastating, and this was no exception. It was especially horrific as no quarter was given to any combatant. Nobles were slain in revenge and as insurance against further uprisings. Goodwin, a member of the Towton Battlefield Society, provides detailed background, hoping to clarify the jumble of English nobility. It is always a challenge to sort out the players, and thankfully the author provides family trees and two Dramatis Personae, which list the salient members of each side. Goodwin’s descriptions of the battles leading up to Towton, as well as his attention to detail, are impressive,

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BETRAYED BY NATURE The War on Cancer

and he lays out each side and the movements that affected the outcome simply and comprehensively.

Well-told stories of historical events that should lead readers to further study of the period. (16 pages of color illustrations; 3 maps)

THE RIGHTEOUS MIND Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Haidt, Jonathan Pantheon (448 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-307-37790-6

A well-informed tour of contemporary moral psychology.

Haidt (Psychology/Univ. of Virginia; The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, 2005, etc.) lays out a rich landscape of morality, presenting a cross-cultural, evolutionarily sensible scenario wherein a moral universe can be shaped from six moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. Haidt examines, via a wide array of theories, research and experimentation, how various subsets—for instance, the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) group— emphasize one or more of the foundations with respect to group traditions and evolutionary progress. He explains how he has arrived at an intuitionist’s rather than a rationalist’s stance regarding the elemental governing of our moral behavior—a framework with us at birth, though not deterministic— how our reasoning comes later to justify our social agenda and how moral intuitions such as loyalty, authority and sanctity gather such subjective importance and potential evolutionary value. He arrives at a broad definition of moral systems as “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfinterest and make cooperative societies possible.” Haidt finds within Western democracies an ethnic and moral diversity that is best served by utilitarianism, producing the greatest total good, and that happiness comes from “getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.”

A cogent rendering of a moral universe of fertile complexity and latent flexibility.

Hesketh, Robin Palgrave Macmillan (272 pp.) $28.00 | May 8, 2012 978-0-230-33848-7

Informative, optimistic tour of the science of cancer.

Hesketh (Biochemistry/Cambridge Univ.), familiar to lay audiences from BBC radio and TV, opens Part 1 with a capsule history of cancer, ranging from papyrus records of ancient Egypt to the scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century. He follows with a look at the distribution of different types of cancers around the world and what the data suggests about cancer’s causes. Matters get technical in Part 2, but the author assumes little previous knowledge on the part of readers; he takes time to explain DNA, RNA, genes, chromosomes and how some genes mutate into cancer genes. In Part 3 he tackles cancer cells and the behavior of tumors. Throughout Parts 2 and 3, relatively simple diagrams and some black-and-white photographs help to clarify the technical discussions. For most readers, the final section—“Where Are We? Where Are We Going?”—will be of greatest interest. Here Hesketh explains how genome sequencing has begun to change how cancers are diagnosed and classified, and the promise this holds for therapy. We are at the beginning, he writes, of the era of personalized medicine, which holds the promise that we will someday be able to detect the threat of cancer long before it manifests itself by sequencing an individual’s genome and using that information to design an individualized therapeutic strategy. The back matter includes a helpful glossary and two delightful odes to cancer, one written in 1964 by the noted geneticist (and cancer patient) J.B.S. Haldane and the other a modern version by Hesketh.

Despite the author’s occasionally breezy style—“cancer is jolly complicated”—this is not a book to breeze through, but rather a solid account of how cancer works, how it has been combated and what the future holds for its treatment. (40 illustrations)

MRS. KENNEDY AND ME An Intimate Memoir

Hill, Clint with McCubbin, Lisa Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-4844-7

Evocative memoir of guarding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy through the young and sparkling years of the Kennedy presidency and the dark days following the assassination.

Secret Service Special Agent Hill had not looked forward to guarding Mrs. Kennedy. The action was with the president. But duty trumped preference, and he first met a young and pregnant soon-to-be First Lady in November 1960. For the next four |

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“An important addition to the environmentalist bookshelf.” from garbology

years Hill would seldom leave her side. Theirs would be an odd relationship of always-proper formality combined with deep intimacy crafted through close proximity and mutual trust and respect. Hill was soon captivated, as was the rest of the world,

by Mrs. Kennedy’s beauty and grace, but he saw beyond such glamour a woman of fierce intelligence and determination—to raise her children as normally as possible, to serve the president and country, to preserve for herself a playful love of life. Hill became a part of the privileged and vigorous life that went with being a Kennedy, and in which Jacqueline held her own. He traveled the world with her, marveling at the adulation she received, but he also shared the quiet, offstage times with her: sneaking a cigarette in the back of a limousine, becoming her unwilling and inept tennis partner. When the bullet ripped into the president’s brain with Hill not five feet away, he remained with her, through the public and private mourning, “when the laughter and hope had been washed away.” Soon after, both would go on with their lives, but Hill would never stop loving Mrs. Kennedy and never stop feeling he could have done more to save the president. With clear and honest prose free of salaciousness and gossip, Hill (ably assisted by McCubbin) evokes not only a personality both beautiful and brilliant, poised and playful, but also a time when the White House was filled with youth and promise.

Of the many words written about Jacqueline Kennedy, these are among the best.

ALASKAN TRAVELS Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure

Hoagland, Edward & Hoagland, Edward Arcade (208 pp.) $22.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-61145-503-8 Prolific essayist Hoagland (Sex and the River Styx, 2011, etc.) vividly reflects on a time, 30 years ago, when he repeatedly fled his failing second marriage to follow a younger nurse through Alaska.

The nurse was testing the locals for tuberculosis and treating a wide variety of ailments, from injuries resulting from a jetski accident to wounds from a bar fight. “At Seattle the business suits scuttled off officiously, to be supplanted by jitterily jeanclad, provisional souls, Alaska-bound roughnecks who looked like hijackers,” Hoagland writes of the flights before his adventures. His trips, paid for by assignments from magazine editors, led him to interview the new millionaires making their claim on the state to natives such as Hubert Koonuk, who singlehandedly killed 36 polar bears. Like an anthropological study, Hoagland records the details of Koonuk’s traditional life, such as the craftsmanship of his skin boat, which he used for hunting seals and bowhead whales. With the same verve, the author profiles Bob Uchitel, who brought cable TV to the far reaches of the Alaskan wilds following a successful construction company, sponsorship of a prizefighter in the lower 48 and several other profitable businesses, before dying a recluse with a Maserati 478

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and Corvette in his garage. Hoagland inserts historical facts about the towns and cities he visited, and he provides plenty of appealing natural descriptions of a wondrous landscape.

A pleasing combination of personal essays and reflections, a love story and a naturalist’s view of one of the last unspoiled lands.

GARBOLOGY Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

Humes, Edward Avery (288 pp.) $27.00 | Apr. 19, 2012 978-1-58333-434-8

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Humes (Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution, 2011, etc.) examines how wastefulness is built into the American way of life.

The author shines a spotlight on every aspect of the economy, from corporate practices to the habits of individual families, to substantiate his thesis that “the American Dream is inextricably linked to an endless, accelerating accumulation of trash.” Marketing encourages wastefulness, he writes; planned obsolescence is built in to manufactured products, and purchasing the new rather than repairing the old has become the order of the day. The products “all come packaged in instant trash [and] what’s inside that packaging is destined to break, become obsolete, get used up or become unfashionable in a few years, months or even days.” Humes offers plenty of surprising, even shocking, statistics—e.g., one in every six big trucks in America is a garbage truck; according to the EPA, from 1980 to 2000, “the average American daily trash load increased by a third.”

This is more than 50 percent higher than in other countries with a similar standard of living. Humes discusses the problem of pollution caused by the proliferation of trash, specifically hazardous, nonbiodegradable waste. He uses the example of Coca-Cola’s mid-1960s substitution of plastic for reusable glass bottles to show how companies have cheapened their cost of production at the expense of the environment. The author also writes about families who have enthusiastically adopted more frugal lifestyles to protect the environment, taking simple measures such as downsizing their living accommodations, buying in bulk and not wasting food. He looks at the case of Ireland, where the government has introduced a tax on plastic bags; a similar proposal in San Francisco was blocked.

An important addition to the environmentalist bookshelf.

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THE DEFINING DECADE Why Your Twenties Matter—and How to Make the Most of Them Now

Jay, Meg Twelve (288 pp.) $22.98 | $10.99 e-book | CD $22.98 Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-446-56176-1 978-0-446-57506-5 e-book 978-1-611-13091-1 CD A clinical psychologist issues a four-alarm call for the 50 million 20-somethings in America, “most of whom are living with a staggering, unprecedented amount of uncertainty.”

Hooking up, hanging out and generally holding off adulthood seemed like a viable option to the many damaged, distraught and depressed 20-somethings who found themselves desperate for help inside the author’s office in Charlottesville, Va. Here Jay artfully coalesces much of her in-office therapy sessions into three easily accessible yet provocative sections: “Work” sets a reasonable timeline on career goals, “Love” puts Cupid on the clock and “The Brain and the Body” provides physiological reasons why it’s so important to seize the day.

Real-life stories (and some composites) from Jay’s practice aid in convincing, cajoling and maybe even conniving 20-somethings into realizing that there is no time to kill, and that what happens between the teen years and age 30 matters a lot.

If nothing else, it’s just harder to do everything later on. The warning, at times almost shrill, is probably justified given the stakes and often-clueless individuals who need motivation. For all those still looking up the hill at 30 (and even those standing on that hill), Jay provides indispensable life coaching. Forget all the balderdash about “30 being the new 20,” the author writes; time still waits for no man, or woman: “There are no guarantees.

So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.”

A cogent argument for growing up and a handy guidebook on how to get there.

BLOOD KNOTS A Memoir of Fathers, Friendship, and Fishing Jennings, Luke Skyhorse Publishing (240 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-61608-587-2

The coming-of-age memoir of an avid angler, weighted with plenty of fishing detail and lore and tied with a filament of retrospective reverie.

British novelist Jennings trolls for meaning in the ineffable mystique of fishing. In the canals of London or hidden ponds and streams of the countryside, this passionate philosopher of |

the fisherman’s arts sends his line and engages his ratchet for pike, perch, trout, carp and any number of other fish. He seems to recall every line and fly in his kit, every cast and catch and every one that got away. He remembers those “tiny red worms downstream beneath a toothpick float cocked by a single dustshot,” and a “plain black wet fly with soft hen-hackles, something that would look like a drowning insect against the fading light.”

Jennings also analyses a great 1938 debate at the renowned Flyfishers Club. In addition to the general rod-and-reel concerns and the pervasive theology of ichthyology, the author offers warm memories of his childhood days building model airplanes, of prep school, of his father and of his first mentor in the Izaak Walton fraternity. The stories of his adventures are graceful and filled with verdant description; Jennings finds something numinous in nature and mystical in the waters in which he stood for hours. Though well executed, his is essentially an elegiac work of a special genre, designed to hook fellow enthusiasts. Readers who simply don’t get it are not likely to bite.

A fishing book that will appeal to initiates in the piscatorial arts (especially as practiced in the British Isles), but may be a bit tedious to others.

MORE POWERFUL THAN DYNAMITE Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy

Jones, Thai Walker (288 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-8027-7933-5

A messy conglomeration of personalities make up this ill-focused yet engaging portrait of New York City on the verge of anarchy and war, 1914.

Chockablock with research and detail, journalist Jones’ second work (after A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience, 2004) includes everything except a clear thesis. If there is anything he is proving, it is his passion and respect for the players of that roiling, revolutionary time: anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Beckman, reform-minded New York City mayor-elect John Purroy Mitchel, crusading journalists like Mother Jones and Uptown Sinclair and even the Christian idealist out of step with his plutocratic patriarch, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Jones moves chronologically throughout 1914, which opened after the relative harmony of the previous year. However, social evils in all facets of society were exposed by enlightened provocateurs like the young unemployed labor leader Frank Tannenbaum, who led fellow groups of unemployed into the city’s churches for shelter during that extremely harsh winter and was eventually arrested. Anarchists were on the march as well, supported by union protestors, often to violent effect; they taxed the resources and good will of the new mayor and his broad-minded new police commissioner, Arthur Woods. Employees at the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, co-owned by Rockefeller but managed from a distance, went on strike, culminating in the so-called

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KASHER IN THE RYE The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16

Ludlow Massacre, which prompted a sea change in Rockefeller Jr.’s antiquated views on collective organization and union rights.

President Wilson struggled with turmoil in Mexico, calls for war in Europe and his own health, while a bomb probably designated for Rockefeller Jr. detonated accidentally in a Lexington Avenue apartment, killing three anarchists.

Jones provides deep research and nicely fleshed portraits but only partial synthesis of the information.

HEAVEN ON EARTH A Journey Through Shari‘a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World Kadri, Sadakat Farrar, Straus and Giroux (400 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-374-16872-8

A history of the development of shari‘a law, from Muhammad’s recitations to modern interpretations of the Qur’an.

Kadri, an English barrister (The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson, 2005) whose family hails from Muslim India, undertakes an ambitious, accessible survey from the first notions of shari‘a as conveying “the idea of a direct path to water” in the time of Muhammad when no written form of the moral law yet existed. Wisely, the author focuses on four key themes (war, modernity, criminal justice and religious tolerance) as he pursues how the Prophet’s sense of jurisprudence—indistinguishable from one’s all-consuming faith and worldview— was envisioned and practiced, written down a century later, institutionalized over the successive caliphate and creatively interpreted or misinterpreted by today’s fundamentalists. In a time of pagan worship, female infanticide and ruthless tribal stratification, Muhammad’s message, like that of Jesus, was revolutionary, emphasizing compassion, repentance and economic justice. Four sins were punishable by amputation, lashing or exile: theft, fornication, false accusation and “waging of war against Islam”—yet Kadri points out that physical punishment is only authorized five times in the Qur’an and stoning recorded only once. After discussing the early schism into Shia and Sunni sects, Kadri tracks how the necessary pull between religiosity and expediency spurred the formation of a science of jurisprudence and schools of law in eighth-century Baghdad. Decades of sectarian jockeying for power yielded a richness of Arabic scholarship, while 13th-century Mongol threats prompted new glosses, such as a casting back to the ancestors, or Salafism, and a justification for lethal force against Muslims in battle—the jihad. The author also examines the perilous modern resuscitation of these precedents in the 21st century.

With occasional personal travel details added to an engaging scholarly history, Kadri offers a readable, useful companion to the Qur’an.

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Kasher, Moshe Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 28, 2012 978-0-446-58426-5

A bleak memoir, played for laughs, of growing up poor, Jewish and drugged-out in Oakland, Calif.

Los Angeles–based comedian Kasher encountered enough unusual early trauma to justify both his profession and his acerbic outlook. Both his mother and father were deaf; as a boy, his mother abruptly broke up the family to move to California (“Oakland in the mid-eighties was a very interesting place to be white”), leaving his embittered father to retreat into an ultraorthodox sect. Like many misfits, Kasher realized early on that class clown provided a potent identity. As an adolescent he took to drug and alcohol abuse with a vengeance, moving quickly from marijuana to LSD to dealing and wannabe gangsterism.

He is frank about the appeal of drug abuse to self-loathing, marginalized teenagers: “I walked around the world convinced that I had some private information that had been kept from the rest of the squares in the world.” Kasher is equally honest about his callous treatment of his long-suffering mother and about his antagonistic trips through various rehab programs and specialneeds schools. Yet his redemption arc is rather brisk; aware that any opportunity for a future was melting away, he ultimately decided at 16 to give up his atrocious habits on his own. “Why that day was any different, I don’t know,” he writes. “Something had died in me. My will had died. My childhood had died.”

Throughout the narrative, Kasher relies on exaggerations, asides to the reader, general crudity and broad ethnic humor rooted in the absurdity of a Jewish adolescent narrator-observer in racially tense Oakland. However, the author provides keen observations, capturing grim yet mordantly funny details about the everyday life of lower-income people living hard lives in decayed urban environments.

Not likely to appeal to everyone, but irascibly charming in its honesty.

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A NATURAL WOMAN A Memoir

King, Carole Grand Central Publishing (484 pp.) $27.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-4555-1261-4 An acclaimed singer-songwriter invites fans into her personal life.

When King embarked on her Living Room Tour in 2004, she re-created onstage the atmosphere that millions

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had come to expect from the slew of albums she recorded from the 1970s onward. Tapestry, her breakthrough 1971 album, not only became a bestseller and a benchmark for women’s achievements in the music industry but also introduced the down-toearth, optimistic and liberated worldview of a woman with some timely stories to tell. King’s trajectory mirrored that of many of her fellow musical peers. Bitten by the music bug at an early age and subsequently converted to rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s, she began writing her own songs, landing a record deal at the age of 15. She would experience far greater success, however, when she and co-songwriter Gerry Goffin turned out hit after hit for such artists as Aretha Franklin, the Shirelles and the Monkees. Having married Goffin when she was 17, King spent most of the ’60s balancing her career with her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Change was in the air, though, and when her marriage deteriorated, she set off for Los Angeles to seek her own voice. That voice comes through strongly on every page of this memoir, an engaging assortment of recollections comprising a journey that started in her working-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, took her to Manhattan and Laurel Canyon and saw her escape what Joni Mitchell called “the star maker machinery” to settle in rural Idaho. In one of the book’s best sections, King explains her decision to retreat from fame in the mid ’70s, chronicling the joys and sorrows of going “back to the land” as well as the tempestuous relationships she had with two men during this period. She is also refreshingly candid about her four marriages.

A warm, winning read that showcases baby-boomer culture at its best.

like drug dealers.” Since the 1980s, law enforcement has coordinated tracking efforts with the industry-run Art Loss Register, yet numerous unscrupulous individuals evade their efforts, constantly developing innovations to both hide, and eventually sell, stolen art. The FBI finds stolen art at auction 15 to 20 times per year, while the few urban cops on the art detail have consistently found it being used as underground-economy currency by drug dealers and organized crime. Knelman’s account is surprisingly pessimistic, but it’s entertainingly written, with a fine sense of the cultural landscape that drives both thieves and a handful of cops to become self-educated art experts in perpetual competition.

Engaging exposé of an underground world less glamorous and more intricate than its Hollywood representations.

Is it too risky to let life happen moment by moment? “. . . reflective readers, who seek artistic healing of the common hurts of growing up and growing older, will find that Mirror Mirror speaks powerfully.”

— ForeWord Reviews

HOT ART Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art

Knelman, Joshua Tin House (320 pp.) $18.95 paperback | Mar. 13, 2012 978-1-935639-38-1

Skillfully rendered overview of the startlingly complex world of art fraud and thievery.

Toronto-based journalist Knelman makes shrewd use of extensive interviews with figures on both sides of the law, allowing him to fully establish this hidden, high-stakes milieu. The author argues that, far from being a sexy victimless crime, art theft has a hugely corrupting influence on museums, commerce and cultural patrimony. As one thief tells him, “It’s like a big shell game. All the antique and art dealers, they just pass it around from one to another.” One key element of the story is provided by “Paul,” a retired British art thief who has since started an angry blog on the topic called Art Hostage. Paul explains why this has been such a profitable criminal specialty: It is low-risk and high-reward, the police response is often disorganized and the purportedly legitimate art market is suffused with hidden relationships and secrecy. As the LAPD’s art-theft specialist observed, “some art dealers act |

“A hopeful, finely rendered portrait of a dysfunctional family and its effects on the author.”

—Kirkus Reviews Read the full reviews at mirrormirrorhart.com

Mirror Mirror: A Collection of Memoirs and Stories

by Stephanie Hart ISBN: 978-0-615-49808-9 Paperback: $12 / eBook $4.99

For information about publication rights, email info@mirrormirrorhart.com or call 415.459.2573

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h c r a i g tay l o r Q: What concerns emerged about contemporary relevance and current events?

L o n d o n i s a c i t y o f v o i c e s , captured by the great and small, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith. But where are the common people, the outlaws, the refugees, the police and the protestors in the story of the world’s greatest metropolis?

Canadian playwright Craig Taylor has made sure to include those voices in his portrait of London in the 21st century. For this polished collection, he boiled down nearly a million words of raw material into vignettes that Kirkus called “alternately poignant, uplifting, amusing and sad.”

Londoners

Craig Taylor HarperCollins (448 pp.) $29.99 Feb. 21, 2012 978-0-06-200585-4

A: The book is about London now, but much of London now has a direct link to the past. I’m thinking of the fruit sellers and buyers who enact an old ritual out at New Spitalfields market every night from midnight to 9 as they buy and sell and banter and boast. Or the street cleaner, whose testimony, with a few small changes, could have come from the 19th century. There have always been people picking up London’s mess. That topic will always be relevant and will say plenty about what the city was like at that particular moment in time.

Q: To what end does your great oral portrait of the city devote itself?

Q: What were the essential components of life as a Londoner that you wanted to address?

A: I knew I couldn’t compete with the great histories of London, and by that I mean the great social histories, the books about London’s secret rivers, the insider’s views of Soho, or books on specific streets in London. I didn’t train as a historian, but I knew I could wander the city and speak to as many people as possible. I knew speaking to the residents of the city might just make the book unique. I wanted a democratic mix of voices. The city planner knows a lot about London but so does the manicurist.

A: I wanted to address the ambivalence this city engenders. Luckily, I’m not the mayor of London, so I didn’t have to write a rose-tinted book about the rah-rah wonders of the place. London is hard, cruel and often life-sapping. From early on I needed to find voices who could take whingeing to an operatic level. I wanted the book to include tragedy and horror, like the account of a young man witnessing a suicide in Camden Town tube station, as well as moments of kindness. I wanted moments of revelation to rise organically from the words of others.

Q: One of the most popular series to run in The Guardian was your work One Million Tiny Plays About Britain.

How did you first start to listen and record the voices around you in Great Britain?

Q: There are always stories that necessarily get cut because of time or relevance. What stories do you wish had made the cut for Londoners?

A: One Million Tiny Plays About Britain started as a self-published zine. There was plenty of listening, no recording. When I came to London I didn’t know what to do with the onrush of sound—the loud phone conversations on the night buses, the loose chat, the subtle status games that happen every day throughout the city. I started writing down fragments in my notebook, and from those fragments I wrote short plays. They’re meant to look like overheard conversations, but they’re anything but.

A: I spoke to a Thames waterman who told a wonderful story about drifting up the Thames when the fog was thick and being able to tell where he was on the river from the old smells still emanating from the brickwork places like Cinnamon Wharf. There were a lot of great stories that didn’t make it, unfortunately.

Q: Now that the book is alive and in print, who sticks with you out of the hundreds of people you interviewed?

A: I learned very quickly to ask interviewees about specifics. It made the project easier to explain. I didn’t cold-call people and ask if they’d like to set up a date to explain their hopes and dreams and intimate knowledge of London. It’s much easier to ask what a person does. This is a book about the verbs of London, so I wanted to find people who enacted those verbs: cutting, cleaning, buying, selling, loving, hating London.

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–By Clayton Moore

9 For the full interview, please visit kirkusreviews.com |

p hoto © JEA N G OLDS MITH

A: I don’t have favorites. I was always impressed when someone I approached for one reason told me another story entirely. I thought I’d be speaking to the currency trader about money. He ended up telling me the story of how he scratched and scrambled and made his way to London and finally fulfilled his dream. I remember sitting in a Costa Coffee, surrounded by commuters, dumbstruck.

Q: What was the typical reaction when you first approached potential subjects about interviews for the book?

“A heartbreaking story of love and dedication told with remarkable compassion and literary skill.” from like any normal day

LIKE ANY NORMAL DAY A Story of Devotion Kram Jr., Mark St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-312-65003-2 978-1-4668-0221-6 e-book

Philadelphia Daily News writer Kram explores the complicated relationships among family, love, duty and assisted suicide.

During a football game in a small Pennsylvania town in 1973, Buddy Miley, an 18-year-old quarterback with plenty of athletic promise, suffered a devastating accident that left him a quadriplegic. In 1997, with the help of his younger brother Jimmy, Miley died at the hands of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kram poignantly tracks the family’s emotional struggles following the accident. The author first met Miley in 1993 after Miley’s mother Rosemarie wrote a protest letter to Sports Illustrated after New York Jets defensive end Dennis Byrd suffered a spinal injury in a game.

She decried football’s glamorization of violence and wondered if the NFL should “donate some of its profits to aid research into spinal cord injuries.” Kram’s editor urged him to visit Miley, sensing he might find a local angle to what had become a national debate on spinal-cord injuries. By the time the two men met, Miley had spent nearly 20 years, or “better than seven thousand days,” unable to care for himself. Rosemarie assumed the bulk of responsibility for her son’s care. “With no appreciable help from her husband,” writes Kram, “Rosemarie had soldiered on with the help of her other now-grown children.” Worried about his aging mother and his own deteriorating condition, Miley began contemplating suicide. Kram deftly reveals the intimate details of the story, and he delves into the complex and troubled Miley family dynamics with a skilled reporter’s eye.

A heartbreaking story of love and dedication told with remarkable compassion and literary skill. (20 black-and-white photos)

COVENANT OF LIBERTY The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement

Leahy, Michael Patrick Broadside Books/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 20, 2012 978-0-06-206633-6

A prominent Tea Party voice examines the roots of modern conservative populism.

Leahy begins his identification of the ideological forebears of the Tea Party in 17th-century England with John Lilburne, fierce opponent of the absolutism of both Charles I and Cromwell and a champion of individual liberty who prefigured American colonials like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. England’s famed jurist Edward Coke and philosopher John Locke helped supply the intellectual framework that informed the American Revolution, inspiring the likes of Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. |

Through these men Leahy (Rules for Conservative Radicals, 2009, etc.) traces the various philosophical threads woven into the Constitution, all intended to safeguard individual freedom against the encroachments of a centralized government. From the time of the document’s ratification, though, Leahy’s story is one of almost unrelenting constitutional apostasy. He starts with Hamilton, according to the author the first of our leaders who didn’t feel especially bound by the secular covenant of the Constitution. Expanding federal control, selecting economic winners and losers, intruding into private lives, ignoring the Constitution’s written words, failing “to honor the customs, traditions and principles that comprised the ‘fiscal constitution,’ ” Hamilton’s successors have been as varied as Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and FDR. LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have continued the project of undermining the Constitution, treating it as outdated, inefficient or simply inconvenient. There’s a more complicated political and intellectual history than Leahy presents here, but his goal is neither nuance nor completeness. Rather, it’s to draw a straight line from the past to today’s Tea Party, whose emergence he briefly discusses.

Effectively establishes the ideological bona fides of a movement too easily caricatured.

WHY SPENCER PERCEVAL HAD TO DIE The Assassination of a British Prime Minister

Linklater, Andro Walker (400 pp.) $26.00 | May 8, 2012 978-0-8027-7998-4

The assassination of the British prime minister on the eve of the War of 1812 spirals gradually into a tale of pernicious

political intrigue.

In this account of Spencer Perceval’s murder in the House of Commons on May 11, 1812, by the seemingly lone gunman John Bellingham, Linklater (An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson, 2009, etc.) bides his time adding key details that amplify the story from one man’s private injury to a nation’s sense of economic outrage. Bellingham started out as a Liverpool trader whose work lured him to Russia in 1804 to import a cargo of timber and iron; however, a snafu resulted in his arrest on debt charges, the result of commercial blackmail by a former partner. Repeated demands to British officials for justice came to naught, and over the next seven years the injury rankled at Bellingham, overtaking all aspects of his life. As the tale widens, Perceval is portrayed as an ambitious Evangelical, nobly born but penniless until marrying well and becoming a driven barrister.

Embracing William Wilberforce’s attempts to ban the slave trade, Perceval became prime minister in 1809. His determination to choke the illegal slave trade was essentially destroying international commerce, especially for Liverpool merchants and those who traded with them—namely, the American slavers. The plot

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“In her hard-hitting debut, popular MSNBC host Maddow examines how the country has lost control of its national-security policy.” from drift

DRIFT The Unmooring of American Military Power

thickens as Linklater follows the money: Who was financing the bankrupt Bellingham while he left his wife back in Liverpool supporting the family at her dressmaking business and went to London to plot and carry out the shooting of Perceval? The author creates a challenging mystery requiring some acquaintance with the historical period.

Linklater cloaks a valuable history lesson within a dark, dramatic story. (8-page b/w insert)

RUN TO FAILURE BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

Lustgarten, Abrahm Norton (320 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 26, 2012 978-0-393-08162-6

The Deepwater Horizon tragedy wasn’t an accident after all, but the logical result of a long pattern of incompetence and corruption.

So charges ProPublica environmental reporter Lustgarten (China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, 2008), who’s been on the case since long before the deep-sea rig blew up off the coast of Louisiana. Readers may remember that BP, the company responsible for the rig— though other companies, including Halliburton, had a role, too—protested that it had a disaster plan in place for just such occasions; they may also recall that the plan “called for the protection of walruses,” which do not live in the Gulf of Mexico.

That slip is symptomatic, by Lustgarten’s account: BP staffers cut and pasted bits and pieces of the plan “from a website describing conditions halfway around the world.” Walruses do, of course, live in the chilly waters of the Arctic, and much of the author’s account is set there, following BP’s adventures and misadventures on the North Slope. Lustgarten then reverses to the 1970s, when British Petroleum was on the hunt for safe— read, English-speaking—territory in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, “places with the lowest possible additional risk”— i.e., without the danger of terrorism, the whims of sheiks or commissars and other political externalities. All the riches of Alaska (and, later, the Gulf of Mexico) were paltry compared to the wealth of Saudi Arabia, and to get at them required risk and technological innovation. BP was plenty strong on the risk part, so much so that the EPA had staffers doing nothing but tracking the violations, and that plenty of whistle-blowers were sounding alarms about shortcuts, leaks and accidents waiting to happen from within the company itself. Lustgarten writes with immediacy and urgency, peppering his pages with plenty of human-interest anecdotes and characters on both sides of the story. In the end, though, the story has a depressing inevitability. Readers may justifiably conclude that the Deepwater Horizon tragedy happened mostly because a bad company with an arrogant management was at the wheel.

Solid investigative reporting and a worthy addition to earlier books on the immediate effects of the disaster.

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Maddow, Rachel Crown (280 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-307-46098-1 978-0-307-46100-1 e-book

In her hard-hitting debut, popular MSNBC host Maddow examines how the country has lost control of its national-security policy.

The author holds Dick Cheney, to whom the book is dedicated (“Oh please let me interview you”), responsible for much that has gone wrong, associating the former vice president with the presidential prerogative of war-making powers. Cheney, writes Maddow, had been nursing these ideas since his days as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and he elaborated on them in his minority report on congressional investigation into the IranContra affair. American forces are now accompanied by an equal or greater number of private contractors who perform functions that used to be reserved to the military, without either accountability or military control. The author shows how Bill Clinton used contractors extensively in Bosnia to avoid political fallout.

These contractors, writes Maddow, typify the way in which the bonds that used to unite the military to the rest of society have been systematically severed, weakening political discussion and control. During the Vietnam War, Gen. Creighton Abrams and others reformed the structure of the military to make going to war without calling up the reserves and the National Guard—thereby guaranteeing national debate—very difficult, but these checks and balances have broken down. Maddow documents how the budgetary element has also gone out of control and raises important questions about the safety of the nuclear arsenal. She grounds her argument in the Founding Fathers’ debates about going to war, and how difficult they intended to make the process—a state of affairs that is opposite to what is represented now.

With humor and verve, Maddow lays a solid basis for that hoped-for interview with Cheney (fingers crossed).

DEAR MARCUS A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me

McGill, Jerry Spiegel & Grau (180 pp.) $22.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8129-9307-3 978-0-679-64460-6 e-book An inspirational memoir by a writer who refuses to be defined by his paralysis, as he comes to terms with the unknown

man who shot him.

As an intelligent, talented, athletic and slightly rebellious 13-year-old from what was then the ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower

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East Side, McGill experienced a tragedy in 1982 that would lead to epiphany. Walking home with a friend on New Year’s Day, he fell victim to a senseless, apparently motiveless gunshot from an unseen sniper. His initial recovery required six months in the hospital, where he learned to adjust to his new life as a quadriplegic, discovering the ways that he could take care of himself and the limits to what he could do. The incident would transform his life, in surprisingly positive ways as well as predictably negative ones, as he explains in this memoir addressed to the man who shot him, a man he will never know but to whom he forever feels linked. “Until I speak to you, I can never fully close this door,” he writes. “And I need that resolution. I think I’ve earned it.” He gives his shooter a name, a race and a plausibility that led him to this unfocused violence. But while he’s addressing the “Marcus” he has invented, he is also exorcising justifiable anger and offering his own life as an example of the rewards one can reap by accepting loss and learning the value of love. “I didn’t write this book for you, Marcus,” he writes. “My reasons for writing this are bigger than you or me, my friend. I wrote this book to release demons into the warm night air.”

Such a literary flourish is an exception to the matter-offact approach that characterizes the narrative, where most of the lessons learned are plainspoken, but also hard won.

DWIGHT YOAKAM A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

McLeese, Don Univ. of Texas (232 pp.) $19.95 paperback | Mar. 15, 2012 978-0-292-72381-8

Music critic McLeese (Journalism/Univ. of Iowa; The New York Times Reader: Arts & Culture, 2010, etc.) examines the career of iconoclastic country star Dwight Yoakam.

The author informs us early on that this book is not intended to be a biography, but rather “an extended piece of music and culture criticism.” Of course, McLeese provides some biographical detail, mainly as an entry into how Yoakam’s upbringing and experiences have informed his work. Of particular interest to the author, clearly a fan of his subject, is the musician’s childhood fascination with television and especially the Monkees, influences that led Yoakam to Los Angeles, where his career began. Though his earliest support came, oddly, from that city’s punk-music scene, it’s clear that Yoakam had his sights set on Nashville stardom from the beginning. The book often reads as a refutation of the charge that Yoakam, because he paid attention to his image and put on a good show, and later pursued an acting career, is somehow less “authentic” an artist because of it. Though McLeese does a fine job countering that idea, his focus on it over 200plus pages begins to feel defensive. The narrative benefits from the author’s extensive access to Yoakam and his collaborators, most notably longtime guitarist and producer Pete Anderson, as it proceeds album by album through his career. Context on |

the country-music industry and how it has changed during Yoakam’s time, particularly B.G. and A.G. (before and after the rise of Garth Brooks in the early 1990s), adds depth to what might otherwise read as an extended magazine article.

Perfect for Yoakam fans looking for a book-length critical defense of his work.

TWO AMERICANS Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World Miller, William Lee Knopf (416 pp.) $30.00 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-0-307-59564-5

A comparison of the origins and careers of two presidents from the middle of the 20th century.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower were both past 50 when each was catapulted to fame and power after decades of diligent but largely unnoticed public service.

They came from conservative small-town roots—Truman from Missouri forebears with strong Confederate sympathies, Eisenhower from pacifist Mennonite ancestry. Truman, however, was a lifelong partisan Democrat; Eisenhower had been trained as part of the officer class to look down on politicians and had no affiliation with a political party until shortly before running for president. Truman relished the president’s role as a partisan political leader, while Eisenhower emphasized that of an apparently apolitical head of state. Regrettably, the 1952 campaign poisoned the earlier cooperative relationship between the two men, as exemplified by Eisenhower’s childish snubs on the day of his inauguration. They came to power when the United States was adjusting to the breakup of the alliance that won World War II and formulating the Cold War policy of containment. The development of the hydrogen bomb by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a balance of terror that avoided another all-out war at the price of keeping the world on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Distinguished historian Miller (President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, 2008, etc.) offers lively, well-presented parallel biographies, though the book is superficial in comparison with recent exhaustive works on each man. The author is primarily interested in comparing the experiences of these two men as they rose through the ranks of their chosen professions, and their approaches to government as exemplified by several specific issues: McCarthyism, in which neither president distinguished himself; civil rights, in which Miller finds Eisenhower severely wanting despite his use of troops in Little Rock; and their attitudes toward the possible use of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.

Nothing groundbreaking, but entertaining reading for presidential-history buffs.

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REBOUNDERS How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success

Newman, Rick Ballantine (256 pp.) $26.00 | May 1, 2012 978-0-345-52783-7 978-0-345-52785-1 e-book

Some people deal with failure better than others. U.S. News & World Report chief business correspondent Newman (co-author: Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, 2008, etc.) offers some reasons why.

Looking for the quality that enables some people to bounce back from failure and adversity quicker than others, the author singles out resilience. “Rebounders” recover while “Wallowers” do not.

While some view failure as an opportunity to improve, others just sit around and complain about how they’ve been wronged. Newman examines a series of detailed studies of people from different walks of life, all of whom qualify as rebounders. He looks at their shared qualities—e.g., having a bias toward action, being comfortable with discomfort, reserving the right to change their minds, etc. Newman’s subjects include: musician Lucinda Williams; restaurant owner-operator Thomas Keller; former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre; Tammy Duckworth, an Army helicopter pilot who fought back from double amputation to run for Congress; and James Blake, a world-class tennis player who recovered his form after suffering a broken neck. Persistence of this sort is one of the qualities the author includes under the umbrella of resilience.

It applies to the attitude Thomas Edison brought to the work of discovery, as well as to John Bogle’s lifetime dedication to building the Vanguard investment company. Newman also discusses Cheers actor John Ratzenberger and Majora Carter, a leader in efforts to revive New York’s South Bronx.

An entertaining use of case studies to support self-help activity.

THE KENTUCKY DERBY How the Run for the Roses Became America’s Premier Sporting Event

Nicholson, James C. & McCarriston, Linda Univ. Press of Kentucky (288 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-8131-3576-2 An efficient examination of the “Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports.”

As Nicholson, the scion of a genuine Kentucky horse-breeding family, points out, the Kentucky Derby is as much about colorful colonels, pretty ladies and mint juleps as it is about starting gates, furlongs and Thoroughbreds—maybe even more so. Since its inception in 1875, the great race run annually at Churchill Downs has been understood as an experience, a yearly celebration of a very particular time and place in the nation’s storied history. Whether or not that time or place 486

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ever truly existed, writes the author, is immaterial. In fact, it is the malleable nature of the Derby—perhaps best exemplified by the juxtaposition of its notoriously raucous infield and its extravagantly affluent grandstand—that is its greatest strength.

Although rooted in a suspect antebellum tradition, the Derby still somehow manages to epitomize whatever the prevailing view of America happens to be at the time. “These values are not static; they evolve, disappear, and resurface at the whim of the pervading cultural, political, and social climate,” Nicholson writes. Keen observations like this prove to be consistently powerful throughout the book, as the author touches on everything from the scandalous demise of celebrated black jockeys to the heavy influence of powerful Middle-Eastern sheiks. The winning horses, of course, are never far from the spotlight. All the great Kentucky Derby champions are here, from Aristides to Secretariat to Smarty Jones. Despite their many heroic exploits on the track, Nicholson’s focus falls beyond the thundering hoof beats that speed past Churchill Downs’ iconic twin spires each spring.

A perceptive history of “Kentucky’s mythic past and modern society” and how the Derby has helped fans “experience Kentucky and…make meaning of themselves as Americans.” (71 photos)

HEAVEN IS HERE An Incredible Story of Hope, Triumph, and Everyday Joy

Nielson, Stephanie Voice/Hyperion (320 pp.) $23.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4013-4179-4

Family, friends and faith support a woman through personal tragedy.

As a young stay-at-home mother, Nielson was living the rewarding life she had always dreamed about. She had a loving husband who worked hard to support her and their four healthy children, a nice home, compassionate friends and extended family, a strong Mormon faith and a successful blog read by people around the world. Life only promised to get better when her thoughts turned to the possibility of another child. Then tragedy struck when Nielson and her husband, Christian, were badly injured in a plane crash. The author suffered disfiguring burns over 80 percent of her body and was in a coma for four months. Her husband suffered a broken back and burns on 40 percent of his body. Nielson recounts the ensuing months of struggle to regain some semblance of her former life. Graphic details of the numerous surgeries, physical therapy and daily existence as a severely burned patient are interconnected with the emotional roller coaster Nielson rode throughout her months of recovery. Her yearning desires were to tend to her children, husband and home, but she battled depression as she watched her children pull away from her disfigured body. Ultimately, self-determination, the encouragement of Christian, empathetic relatives and total strangers and Nielson’s devout faith helped her reclaim many aspects of her former life.

Strength found through faith helps a woman combat personal disaster—will appeal most to Christian readers.

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“A gritty, down-and-dirty saga about the Irish politicos who ‘ruled Boston for nearly a century,’ from 1902 to 1993.” from rogues and redeemers

ROGUES AND REDEEMERS When Politics Was King in Irish Boston

O’Neill, Gerard Crown (416 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-307-40536-4 978-0-307-95279-0 e-book

A gritty, down-and-dirty saga about the Irish politicos who “ruled Boston for nearly a century,” from 1902 to 1993.

Pulitzer Prize–winning ex–Boston Globe investigative reporter O’Neill provides a candid look at the political machinations that built, and destroyed, a legendary American city. He begins with the famine ships that arrived with the “bedraggled [Irish] newcomers” who became the scourge of Yankee Boston. These immigrants quickly learned that the only way they could lay claim to “jobs, education [and] religious tolerance” would be through bare-knuckle politics. Boston elected its first Irish mayor in 1884, but O’Neill begins with a portrait of the shrewd and magnetic John “Honey” Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, who served as mayor from 1906 to 1908 and again from 1910 to 1914. By this time, other ambitious Irishmen, such as the infamous Ward 8 boss Martin Lomasney and the combative Boston Common Councilman (and later four-time mayor) James Michael Curley, were also on the scene. All engaged in cloak-and-dagger political schemes to enhance their power, while Curley unabashedly used his position to enrich himself at the city’s expense. As Machiavellian as they were charming, these men brought Boston into the modern era—and to the brink of bankruptcy. Mid-century redeemers such as Mayors John Hynes and John Collins and urban planner Ed Logue brought the city back through programs that renewed parts of the city at the expense of creating enmity between numerous social and ethnic groups. They left Mayor Kevin White the unenviable task of guiding Boston through the desegregation crisis of the 1970s. Eager to put the city’s tumultuous past behind him, White focused on making Boston “world-class,” while the last “mayoral mick,” Ray Flynn, attempted to make a city now increasingly divided between rich and poor livable for all.

A splendidly detailed great American epic.

TO SELENA, WITH LOVE

Perez, Chris Celebra/Penguin (304 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-451-41404-5

The widower of murdered pop star Selena reveals poignant details of their short time together as a couple.

In the early 1990s, Selena Quintanilla shook up the world of Tejano, a hybrid of Mexican and American music, by fronting an energetic young band that included guitarist Chris Perez.

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innovative take on tradition than in romance, Perez soon found himself falling head over heels for Selena. Perez portrays his girlfriend and eventual wife—they eloped in 1992 after growing weary of concealing their relationship from Selena’s overly protective father—as a spirited daredevil with a heart of gold. She was an animal lover, motorcycle enthusiast and emerging fashion designer whose religious beliefs grounded her within the chaotic music industry. Unfortunately, Selena’s trusting nature led her to welcome a dangerous woman, Yolanda Saldivar, into her inner circle. As Selena’s fan-club president and personal assistant, Saldivar soon proved to be unstable, manipulative and larcenous. Perez calls her a “cancer,” an epithet that would turn out to be tragically apt when Saldivar killed Selena in 1995, shooting her in the back and causing internal bleeding. Recounting the day that Selena died as well as the ensuing funeral, Perez captures these events in heartbreaking detail. At one point, he writes, he wanted nothing more than to crawl into the coffin with her and pull down the lid.

Given Perez’s easygoing, confidential tone throughout the book, this image carries an emotional weight that it would not have had coming from a melodramatic storyteller. The ending of the book feels somewhat rushed, though, as Perez duly notes his descent into depression and substance abuse, his rebound and his eventual remarriage and fatherhood.

A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.

GREEN WASHED Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet

Pierre-Louis, Kendra Ig Publishing (224 pp.) $15.95 paperback | Apr. 15, 2012 978-1-9354394-3-1 Justmeans.com sustainable development editor Pierre-Louis takes a hard look at the new wave of buying “green” products and the hidden detriments behind such seemingly helpful practices.

Most scientists agree that “humanity has wrought enough environmental damage to bring our continued future (in any significant measure) into real question, unless we fundamentally change our relationship with the planet.” This fact has raised concerns over the increasing toxicity of many production practices used to manufacture “green” products sold these days. The author examines the clothing industry, food production, beauty products, the car industry, water bottles and water consumption and green building technologies. What she uncovers will have readers questioning the ethics and methods behind large companies that push “organic” and “sustainable” products while ignoring the hidden costs to the environment and the future of the planet. Confusing and misleading labels, hybrid cars and biofuels, the endless stream of plastic that fills our landfills and oceans and the dangers behind “clean coal”—these are just a few of the topics Pierre-Louis explores.

The United States has become a nation of consumers of primarily disposable products: “When we get bored with what we have,

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“The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.” from midstream

MIDSTREAM An Unfinished Memoir

we simply go out and buy a new one.” By engaging in this course of action, we ignore the simple fact that “we consume resources at rates faster than they can repair themselves, a practice that is inherently unsustainable regardless of how you slice it.”

A slim but revealing investigation of how “purchasing green can be good, but buying less is better.”

THE SCENT OF SCANDAL Greed, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Beautiful Orchid

Pittman, Craig Univ. Press of Florida (304 pp.) $24.95 | Apr. 5, 2012 978-0-8130-3974-9

An excruciatingly detailed account of the 2002 controversy that rocked Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Fla., when its scientists were asked to identify an orchid of dubious origin.

St. Petersburg Times writer Pittman’s (Manatee Insanity: Inside the War over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species, 2010, etc.) zeal for his subject is admirable, but his enthusiasm is unlikely to be shared by many of his readers. Was Michael Kovach a simple orchid collector who, by removing a rare new species of orchid from its native Peru and bringing it back to the United States, unwittingly violated the law? Or was he a greedy, scheming orchid smuggler, well aware of the illegality of his actions?

Such questions are intriguing at first, but the book begins to drag as the reader discovers how little is actually at stake: Kovach will either be sentenced to jail but not serve any time, or he’ll simply have to pay a small fine. The executive director of the Gardens will either keep her job or be fired. People’s professional reputations will suffer, they’ll lose money and they’ll be otherwise inconvenienced. But after expectations of explosive, life-or-death drama, such mundane reversals feel anticlimactic.

However, Pittman’s background as a reporter mostly serves him well; he is adept at foregrounding the most pertinent details of a story that involves conflicting accounts and years of complex litigation, and the narrative moves along swiftly. In other ways, though, his journalistic instincts are a liability. The book often feels choppy and rushed, as if it were written on a tight deadline, and Pittman has a penchant for hackneyed phrases (“the big pay-off…that would put you on Easy Street”) and heavy-handed foreshadowing (“She believed she had climbed to the pinnacle of success. Actually, she was standing on a precipice”).

Though exhaustively researched, the book is not compelling enough to hold the interest of anyone who does not have a personal connection to the material. Read Eric Hansen’s Orchid Fever (2000) instead. (21 black-and-white photos; 1 map)

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Price, Reynolds Scribner (192 pp.) $25.00 | May 15, 2012 978-1-4391-8349-6

The late acclaimed novelist, shortstory writer, playwright and memoirist begins with a return to Oxford University in 1961 and breaks off shortly after the death of his mother in 1965.

When he died in January 2011, Price (Ardent Spirits, 2009, etc.) had completed about two-thirds of this memoir (he had already chosen the title); his younger brother assembled the current volume and offers a grim afterword about Reynolds’ final rough months of debilitating pain in his wheelchair and bed. Price’s former student at Duke, novelist Anne Tyler, contributes a lovely foreword. The rough text is, of course, not polished. The early sections in particular (written from memory and from a diary he kept) are often superficial accounts of meals and socializing.

But occasionally something piercing pokes through the surface.

Price had hoped to rekindle an earlier relationship with a former lover, but the man let him know immediately that he was now with a woman. A bit later the author provides a star-struck but amusing account of a Roman meal and visit to the set of Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Things pick up with Price’s return to the United States, where he lived for a while in the guesthouse of composer Samuel Barber, who was proposing a collaboration with Price on the libretto of a new opera for Leontyne Price. Price suggested using the Pocahontas story; Barber demurred. Price has some thoughts about his peers (e.g., John Updike and Philip Roth) and the JFK assassination, but emerging most strongly is his love of teaching, which he practiced for more than 50 years at Duke.

The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.

EXPERIMENT ELEVEN Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug

Pringle, Peter Walker (288 pp.) $26.00 | May 8, 2012 978-0-8027-1774-0

Pringle (The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, 2008, etc.) tells a complex tale of scientific intrigue.

The stage was set in 1943, when the future Nobel Laureate Selman Waksman headed the Department of Soil Microbiology at Rutgers University and President Roosevelt launched a major initiative to identify and develop antibiotics to treat animals and humans and to deal with the potential threat of biological warfare. Among the graduate students in the department was Albert Schatz, who was analyzing

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soil samples in an attempt to find an antibiotic that would cure tuberculosis. In his 11th experiment he succeeded, isolating two strains of a microbe—one from a soil sample and the other from a throat culture taken from a chicken’s throat—given to him by a fellow graduate student. In fact, he had discovered the drug later to be named Streptomycin. Pringle gives a fascinating account of the steps on the road to turning it into a pharmaceutical—determining its effectiveness, testing for toxicity and side-effects, etc. Although the first announcement of the discovery was made jointly by the professor and his graduate student, Waksman began taking sole credit, pressuring Schatz into relinquishing patent rights to Rutgers and hiding the fact that he was being paid a significant percentage of the royalties.

Ultimately, Schatz sued Waksman, and an out-of-court financial settlement was reached. Though it acknowledged Schatz’s part in the discovery, Waksman’s reputation and prestige remained intact and he alone was awarded a Nobel Prize.

A gripping account of academic politics and the birth of the pharmaceutical industry.

THE FIRST 20 MINUTES The Myth-Busting Science that Shows How We Can Walk Farther, Run Faster, and Live Longer Reynolds, Gretchen Hudson Street/Penguin (288 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 26, 2012 978-1-59463-093-4

A fitness columnist for the New York Times dispenses documented exercise science for a healthier life.

In this healthful refresher course, Reynolds acknowledges the ubiquity of redundant and contradictory fitness material available to those seeking advice. In an effort to condense and clarify, she begins with expected wisdom, offering unsurprising declarations on the serious health consequences for those Americans who lead a sedentary lifestyle. These consequences are preventable, however, and Reynolds presents some surprising ways to change things up. She’s at her strongest (and most intriguing) in chapters debunking and devaluing some muchtouted rituals like massage therapy, extended workouts, warmup routines, carb-loading, water intake, fat burning, weight loss and nutritional supplements. Imparting advice supported by physicians, academics, group control studies and scientific research, Reynolds gives the type of practical information can be useful for both seasoned gym-goers and those just beginning to equate exercise with disease prevention and longevity. The author’s confident narrative demeanor is a good fit for the delivery of her material as it breathes new life into the well-worn fundamentals of core fitness training, injury prevention, wholesome dieting and how exercise can promote graceful aging. She concludes each chapter with condensed, bottom-line specifics that will prove immensely helpful to readers short on time and attention. Whether directed at a marathoner or a once-a-week |

sprinter, Reynolds’ important message rings true: “The body wants to move,” she writes. “Go with it.”

Solid advice with motivational oomph to get you up and running.

AMONG THE CREATIONISTS Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line Rosenhouse, Jason Oxford Univ. (256 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 2, 2012 978-0-19-974463-3

An evolution proponent writes about his encounters with creationists.

Rosenhouse (Mathematics/James Madison Univ.; The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brain Teaser, 2009) has been meeting anti-evolutionists on their turf—at Intelligent Design conferences, Christian universities and Kenneth Ham’s state-of-the-art creationist museum in Kentucky—since he worked on implementing math standards for public schools in Kansas two years after that state banished Darwin and the Big Bang from its science curriculum. A Jewish atheist, Rosenhouse sought to understand the mindset of Christians who not only dismiss the overwhelming evidence of natural selection in favor of a literal interpretation of Genesis, but also use their political influence to try to outlaw any view but their own in public schools. Contrary to the stereotype common among his fellow science defenders, the author discovered opponents who were as intelligent and sincere as they were determined. It isn’t ignorance or stupidity that makes a creationist, Rosenhouse learned; it’s firm and consistent belief in the divine origin of the scriptures and their teachings. While the author has greater respect for creationists as a result of his encounters, he maintains that if evolution by natural selection is true, then creationism and even Christianity as a whole, with its anthropocentric view of the cosmos, cannot be. However, for all their biased selectivity toward the evidence and misuse of science and history, at least creationists (unlike more sophisticated theological evolutionists) recognize what is really at stake. Rosenhouse is an amiable storyteller and a fair-minded reporter. The narrative drags and diffuses a bit as the author wrestles with theology, but that has more to do with theology’s abstruseness than Rosenhouse’s.

A thorough introduction to the controversy with much to teach both sides.

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“Sherr sends a sweet valentine, with enough background to keep it interesting, to a love that has never let her down.” from swim

THE TASTE OF TOMORROW Dispatches from the Future of Food

Schonwald, Josh Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-06-180421-2

What will be featured on restaurant menus in 2035?

In his examination of food trends of the future, journalist Schonwald discovers a fascinating array of characters and an unpredictable set of conclusions. He begins with the vibrant world of greens, particularly salad greens, and pursues a cross-continental search for the next big salad ingredient, a journey that takes him from his local Illinois farmer’s market to California’s “Salad Bowl.” While conducting research, the author began to realized that “many of the ideas of the foodie mainstream are dangerously myopic, potentially destructive, and possibly the source of widespread blindness in Southeast Asia.” Describing his own then-radical experience of eating bagged salad mix in the late 1990s and his resulting abstinence from iceberg lettuce, Schonwald displays a gleeful obsession with heirloom varieties of radicchio, deep interest in the “weedy” greens grown on Alice Waters’ farm and childlike delight in rooting his own eating in the realities of seasonal availability. The author tackles an admittedly self-selected set of potential food trends, including “the next salmon” (cobia), healthier meats and the next big trend in ethnic food. Along the way, Schonwald comes to the conclusion that the future of food trends is actually a question about the future of the earth’s ecological integrity, leading him to explore and largely embrace the possibilities of genetically engineered foods. The author effectively pairs his personal experiences with significant research, interviews and lively anecdotes.

An articulate food book that has an opinion without being preachy and that exudes a joy about food without being oversimplified.

INSANELY SIMPLE The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success Segall, Ken Portfolio (240 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 26, 2012 978-1-59184-483-9

Steve Jobs’ longtime advertising guru weighs in with a memoir/extra-long promotional brochure about the secret to Apple’s success: Simplicity with a capital S. Inveterate copywriter Segall’s goal is to sell readers on the idea of how the ruthless but noble Jobs beat his Silicon Valley competition into submission using his “Simplicity Stick.” Like an inescapable mantra throughout the book, the author constantly reiterates the idea of Apple’s colossal struggle against 490

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Simplicity’s worst foe: Complexity. When Jobs left NeXT to head up Apple, he went on a mission to streamline his products to make them simpler to use than those of complexity-loving rival brands such as Intel and Dell. In relating Jobs’ monomaniacal mission to make the world of handheld technology a simpler place, Segall employs an unsettling combination of militaristic language and softer terms that suggest humanist sensitivity in Apple’s quest for global domination. Describing Jobs’ commitment to brutal honesty with his employees, the author writes, “Being straight with people alone does not make you a heartless bastard.” Of course, having well-documented ties to sweatshop labor doesn’t exactly make you a paragon of virtue.

Readers should not expect to find unpleasant facts that undermine the deification of the author’s subject. Although Segall fully discloses Jobs’ well-known tendency to steal ideas from competitors, this dubious characteristic doesn’t stop the author from painting a broader portrait of Jobs as a tirade-prone earthbound god ruling his Apple kingdom with fear, while generously dispensing technological convenience to the grateful masses.

“Steve’s greatest achievement wasn’t a Mac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad,” writes the author. “He accomplished something that no one had even contemplated before. Steve Jobs built a monument to Simplicity. That monument is Apple itself.”

Fine inspirational material for aspiring tech moguls, but far too propagandistic.

SWIM Why We Love the Water

Sherr, Lynn PublicAffairs (224 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-61039-046-0

A collection of swimming traditions and anecdotes wrapped in a celebration of the pleasures involved.

Former ABC News correspondent Sherr (Outside the Box: My Unscripted Life of Love, Loss, and Television News, 2008, etc.) is a lifelong swimmer, and her passion for the act, from a lazy bobbing in gentle waves to a hard push across the Hellespont (aka the Dardanelles)—her story of which is tracked at intervals throughout the narrative—issues from each of these pages. Even when her comments are at their most random—e.g., “Swimming…allows you to dream big dreams”—her enthusiasm propels the book forward. That enthusiasm bleeds over into her history of swimming, which has a gratifyingly great sweep. Sherr moves from the deep past, when immersing oneself was only typical during wartime, to Leander and Lord Byron making their own Hellespont dash, to Benjamin Franklin (who wrote, “I thought it likely, that if I were to remain in England and open a Swimming School, I might get a good deal of Money”), to the coming of spandex.

With a breezy touch, the author chronicles the evolution of public bathing, in the process revealing the disdain with which some purists view swimming pools: “Swimming under a roof to me is like big game hunting in a zoo. All legitimate fascination

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goes,” said Annette Kellerman, one of swimming’s grand dames.

Sherr also explores the application of physics on competitive swimming and on miracle fibers in the latest swimsuits. From start to finish, she searches for the essence of why swimming has touched so many, be it Oliver Sacks (“I never knew anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant”) or Chairman Mao (“Do you swim? Water is a good thing”).

Sherr sends a sweet valentine, with enough background to keep it interesting, to a love that has never let her down.

RUSSIA A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East Sixsmith, Martin Overlook (624 pp.) $37.95 | Mar. 15, 2012 978-1-59020-723-9

Former BBC Moscow correspondent Sixsmith charts a millennium of one-stepforward, two-steps-back Russian progress.

Communism has long gone by the wayside in most of the former Soviet Union, writes the author, but the authoritarian, if not totalitarian, impulse remains strong. Even when Nikita Khrushchev made his celebrated four-hour-long denunciation of his predecessor Stalin in 1956, it was a compromise, since “its focus was on the repression of Communist Party personnel, rather than the sufferings of the ordinary people”—and it gave the speaker an excuse to say he didn’t know what was going on. This tendency to absolutism—to “what Russians refer to as silnaya ruka, the iron fist of centralised power”—stretches back, as Sixsmith conceives the historical arc, to the days of Mongol rule and even before.

Where the Mongols left Russia a smoking ruin, almost all the rulers who followed revisited the harshness on everyone they ruled. They also tended to apologize for one another; one of the many whip-smart sequences of Sixsmith’s long book finds Stalin upbraiding filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein for being too hard on Ivan the Terrible, down to the point of making “Ivan’s beard too long and pointy.” Just so, these days Vladimir Putin is making kind noises about V.I. Lenin, one of a succession of red emperors. Against this Sixsmith traces countercurrents of liberalism and enlightenment, noting that the great subject of Russian culture is Russia herself and that against the prevailing absolutism has always pulsed a softly democratic current.

A compelling look at Russian history by a practiced Russia hand—though some would complain that Sixsmith comes down a little too hard on Mikhail Gorbachev, even without a long, pointy beard.

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THE MAKING OF A PATRIOT Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit

Skemp, Sheila L. Oxford Univ. (176 pp.) $22.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-19-538657-8

The second in Oxford’s new Critical Historical Encounters series, covering formative events in American History— this time with a focus on a Benjamin Franklin many readers may not have encountered before.

In January 1774, Franklin stood up to the vitriol directed at him by the King’s Privy Council in the Cockpit, a former cockfighting room in Whitehall Palace. At this juncture war was inevitable. Incendiary letters sent 10 years earlier by Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver fell into Franklin’s hands, and he sent them to friends in Massachusetts who published them. Incensed, the Assembly of the Bay Colony instructed Franklin, their agent, to request their removal from office. Franklin knew very well that the request would be denied and thought that would be the end of it. The Boston Tea Party proved to be the tipping point. Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn, standing as an agent for the Council, delivered the verbal assault. Was Franklin merely a scapegoat, or was he truly an “incendiary” bent on poisoning the relationship between England and her colonies?

Skemp (American History/Univ. of Mississippi; First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence, 2009, etc.) questions Franklin’s innocence in the matter of the letters and whether, as he claimed, he was the only one who could serve as an effective liaison between the British and the colonies. The author also questions his motives, invoking his many commercial enterprises and his laidback diplomacy. Superfluous information on those present at the Cockpit and the collapse of the relationship between Franklin and his son don’t detract from Skemp’s depth of knowledge on the man and the period.

A worthy addition to the literature on both Franklin and the Revolutionary War.

GOOD SELF, BAD SELF Transforming Your Worst Qualities into Your Biggest Assets Smith, Judy Free Press (288 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-4999-4

After a career managing high-profile crises, Smith debuts with a book in which she asserts that “the root causes of most crises often lie in an imbalance in one of seven traits: Ego, Denial, Fear, Ambition, Accommodation, Patience and Indulgence.”

As “America’s #1 crisis management export,” the author’s client list is impressive, including everyone from corporate

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“Witty, civilized and intelligent narcotourism.” from heart of dankness

executives and politicians to Monica Lewinsky and Michael Vick. Smith contends that the goal of understanding how these seven characteristics operate in your own life is “to ensure that your defining traits work to your advantage instead of your detriment.” In fact, many people require some of these traits to succeed, but the author is emphatic about the importance of maintaining equilibrium and not letting any of the traits cause behavior to spiral out of control. Smith devotes a chapter to each of the seven high-risk qualities, exploring the positive and negative extremes of each attribute, and she provides warning signs for when these traits are out of balance in our lives. The author’s prose is clean, well-organized and easy to read. She peppers the book with examples from high-profile celebrities and political snafus, as well as everyday workplace, marriage and parenting problems. Each chapter closes with Smith’s POWER model applied to the trait: Pinpoint the problem, Own it, Work it, Explore it, and Rein it in. The final chapter outlines the art of the apology, and Smith provides a helpful checklist to make sure that the apology doesn’t devolve into “something that creates even more scorched earth and damage.”

Smith provides a good overview of how to identify and curtail egregious behavior, with just enough celebrity misbehavior to hold the reader’s attention.

HEART OF DANKNESS Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup

Smith, Mark Haskell Broadway (256 pp.) $14.00 paperback | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-307-72054-2

A personal quest for the world’s finest weed.

“Dankness,” a concept akin to “awesome,” was first formulated by snowboarders to describe the ideal buzz from their favorite recreational drug, a notion that easily spread to other cannabis connoisseurs. In 2009, novelist, screenwriter and pleasure-seeker Smith (Writing/Univ. of California, Riverside; Baked, 2010) was sent to Amsterdam by the Los Angeles Times to cover the Cannabis Cup, a sort of Academy Awards for marijuana growers sponsored by High Times magazine since the late 1980s. The assignment (and Smith’s natural curiosity) inspired him to seek in the coffeehouses of Amsterdam and in the medical marijuana dispensaries and underground farms and grow houses in his home state of California for the strains that best illustrate the concept of dankness. A food- and wineappreciating epicure, Smith was most attracted to strains that taste and smell good—fruity hybrids like Cup winners Lemon Silver Haze or Chocolope—as well as the psychotropic socalled “sativas,” which elevate mood, rather than the indicas, which induce stupefying couch-lock. Michael Backes, founder and curator of the exclusive Cornerstone Research Collective for medical marijuana (who incidentally Smith that every strain humans ingest is actually an indica) says the best strains are 492

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“pharmaceutical quality” and that the dopey effects of pot are due to impurities rather than the complex of psychoactive molecules, of which THC is just one, in the plant’s genome. “Anything that impairs me, I view as a side effect,” Backes says. “I want to get rid of the side effects.” Smith is an amusing and easygoing narrator with a talent for describing the sensations good weed brings on, but beneath the fun, he has a serious message: Criminalized marijuana is not good for anyone but criminals.

Witty, civilized and intelligent narcotourism.

RESTLESS SOULS The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice Statman, Alisa R. & Tate, Brie It Books/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-06-200804-6

Unsavory account of the suffering of Sharon Tate’s family in the aftermath of her murder and her mother Doris’ and sister Patti’s subsequent rise to national prominence as advocates of victims’ rights.

It would be impossible not to feel sympathy for the Tate family following the horrifying events of 1969. After witnessing the murders of three of her friends, Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time of her death, was hanged and fatally stabbed.

Unfortunately, this book by Statman and Brie Tate, Sharon’s niece, is luridly exploitative and shrilly self-righteous. It may be unfair to ascribe less-than-saintly motives to any member of the Tate family, who arguably have the right to tell (and sell) their story in any way they choose, but it’s difficult to imagine what noble purpose is served by lingering over Sharon’s dying words or the exact dimensions of her stab wounds. The authors would likely argue that emphasizing the killers’ savagery is crucial to securing the public’s opposition to their release. Throughout the book, Statman and Tate shift perspectives and time so much that readers will become disoriented. Furthermore, the prose is overly cliché-ridden—e.g., Sharon’s eyes “twinkle with the faith of her dreams”; her parents were both “as set in their ways as a grape stain to white pants and equally as stubborn”; “their love was as preserved and age-worn as a pressed rose hidden in a Bible”; cancer is “a thief in the night.” Indeed, many sentences read like bad translations: “My inflamed opinion may have a biased tone, but the hippie trend is not my favorite culture.” The authors’ most laudable goal is to pay tribute to Sharon’s mother, Doris. Though some readers will disagree with her politics, she was also an admirably determined person who channeled her grief and rage into decades of service to others.

Horrifies more often than it enlightens. Not recommended.

(16-page color photo insert)

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KILLER ON THE ROAD Violence and the American Interstate Strand, Ginger Univ. of Texas (222 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 15, 2012 978-0-292-72637-6

Strand (Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies, 2008, etc.) explores the connection between America’s sprawling highway system and the pathology of the murderers who have made them a killing ground.

Alternating case histories of notorious serial killers who exploited the mobility and anonymity made possible by the interstates with a history of the political and social forces that built them, the author strives to debunk popular notions of the resourceful, brilliant psychopath—most of the men profiled here were uncharismatic, not particularly bright and eerily ordinary in affect and appearance. She also tries to link the psychological effects of the lonely open road to the will to murder. Strand’s sociological assertions can seem a bit notional and flimsily argued, and the history of the politics behind the building of the interstates is unsurprisingly dry, but the case histories of the murderers and their crimes exert a queasy fascination. The author offers well-researched summations of the Charles Starkweather/Caril Fugate multi-state spree, the appalling history of the Atlanta child murders and the prostitute killings of trucker Bruce Mendenhall, among others. The chilling effect of these stories is difficult to shake. The Mendenhall material is particularly interesting in its look at truck-stop design and the trucking lifestyle and the ways in which they may actually precipitate violent behavior. The narrative is tedious for stretches, not unlike a long cross-country drive, but the grim stories of murder on the highway may do for road trips what Jaws did for surfing.

An interesting detour into a true-crime niche. (18 blackand-white photos; 4 maps)

THE RESCUE OF BELLE AND SUNDANCE One Town’s Incredible Race to Save Two Abandoned Horses

Stutz, Birgit & Scanlon, Lawrence Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo (240 pp.) $22.00 | Mar. 15, 2012 978-0-306-82097-7

The story of a town in northeast British Columbia that came together to rescue two horses trapped on a mountain’s snowy summit.

With co-author Scanlan (The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, the World’s Greatest Racehorse, 2007), horse trainer and riding instructor Stutz opens with a kind of fairy-tale tone that hints at sublime imagery, suspense and creatively drawn characters. Despite sincere, balanced efforts by the author, the |

story—while impressive and inspiring—ultimately fails to deliver on these literary counts. Still, there is certainly something here for animal lovers and those for whom life in the Canadian Rockies is either familiar or of interest. In September 2008, a lawyer from Edmonton took his two pack horses, Belle and Sundance, up Mt. Renshaw to deliver supplies to a friend hiking there.

When the weather turned foul, he made a wrong turn and led the horses through two treacherous bogs, after which they refused to follow him. Figuring the horses would come down the mountain when they were ready, he abandoned them and headed for the valley, not to find them again for 12 weeks. By mid-December, “the verdant mountain meadows…gradually transformed into…a cold, white prison” for Belle and Sundance. The owner determined them too weak to make it through the deep snow, and decided to “let nature take its course,” a decision for which he would later be charged with animal cruelty. Meanwhile, snowmobilers had spread the word around a nearby town that two emaciated horses were trapped at Renshaw summit. After ruling out euthanasia due to the glimmers in Belle and Sundance’s eyes, the locals mobilized in a collective act of community spirit to orchestrate a rescue attempt. Over seven days, they dug a “tunnel to freedom” to lead the horses down the mountain to the logging road nearly 20 miles away, and eventually to health on separate ranches in the region. Stutz emerged as the lead horse handler and spokesperson for the effort.

A bit narrow, but worth the read if the topic appeals.

(30 black-and-white photographs)

AFTER CAMELOT A Personal History of the Kennedy Family —1968 to the Present

Taraborrelli, J. Randy Grand Central Publishing (624 pp.) $29.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-446-55390-2

Taraborrelli (The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, 2009, etc.) continues the Kennedy family saga begun in Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (2000).

We have met them before: the martyred president’s widow Jackie, the cigar-smoking Eunice, the beloved paterfamilias Joseph, the mother Rose, the changed-man Bobby, Ted of Chappaquiddick, the raucous Ethel, etc. In this gossipy, admiring story of the Kennedys of Massachusetts in the four decades after Bobby’s 1968 assassination, Taraborrelli celebrates the enduring appeal of America’s royal family and rehashes the feuds, scandals and heartbreaks that have made them so human. Again and again, he shows the family closing ranks: “The Kennedys would do what they always did in such situations,” he writes of Ted’s crisis with the girl in the car on the bridge. “They would come together.” This larger-thanlife clan, striving to serve while grappling with the Kennedy “curse,” certainly lends itself to soap opera (Jackie, Ethel, Joan became a TV mini-series), and Taraborrelli gathers every luscious detail of the scandals, arrests, affairs, overdoses and bad-boy antics that

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“From novelist/essayist/editor Taylor, an idiosyncratic, atmospheric portrait of ‘the great open-air theater of Europe.’ ” from naples declared

have marked the post-Camelot years. It’s all here: Jackie’s marriage negotiations with Aristotle Onassis, Ted picking up young women in bars with his sons, the dangerous ski game at Aspen that took Michael Kennedy’s life, the interventions to halt young David Kennedy’s drug abuse, William Kennedy Smith’s trial on rape charges in Palm Beach and the deaths in recent years of Rosemary, Ted and Sargent Shriver. The author reveals the family’s most intimate details, and some readers will wish the author had taken his cue from the Cape Cod photographer who stopped shooting pictures of 103-year-old Rose Kennedy: “She was so wasted away…it felt like an invasion of privacy to even photograph her.”

A big, juicy read for Kennedy fans.

KITTY CORNERED How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

Tarte, Bob Algonquin (304 pp.) $13.95 paperback | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-56512-999-3

A cat owner chronicles his felinedominated household.

A journalist by day, Tarte (Fowl Weather, 2007, etc.) has also entertained animal lovers for years with humorous tales from the veritable zoo of animals with whom he and his wife, Linda, share their Michigan home. Here the author depicts the six feline buddies who deign to cohabitate with him. Before the narrative begins, an illustrated map of the “Ground Floor of a House Overrun by Cats” and cast list including the six “Cats of Characters” suggest the playful tone to follow. Although as a pet owner Tarte demonstrates an uncommon enthusiasm for animals (his household also includes parrots, rabbits, geese, ducks and parakeets) and rare openness to helping any in distress, his journalistic objectivity and self-deprecating introspection lend heartwarming humor to this account of cat-inspired chaos. Though some of the hyperbolic, unnecessarily dramatic descriptions may take some getting used to, Tarte’s more contemplative passages contain real insight into both human and feline behavior. Particularly moving is the author’s self-assessment of his dynamic relation with his cats, as he depicts each with the care typically reserved for a beloved. Explaining his affinity for animals in general, Tarte writes: “I loved their attentiveness, the grace with which they dealt with problems, their tenacity, and just about every other attribute they had that I lacked.” But what also helps normalize this tale is the author’s humor in realizing when his and his wife’s behavior exceeded normal pet-owner behavior.

A funny, pleasing read for cat lovers of any age.

NAPLES DECLARED A Walk Around the Bay

Taylor, Benjamin Marian Wood/Putnam (240 pp.) $26.95 | May 15, 2012 978-0-399-15917-6

From novelist/essayist/editor Taylor (The Book of Getting Even, 2009, etc.), an idiosyncratic, atmospheric portrait of “the great open-air theater of Europe.”

Once considered Italy’s pleasantest city, second only to Rome in importance, Naples today is as noted for its dire poverty and malevolent Camorra crime syndicate. “Its residents know themselves by instinct to be different from other European citizenries,” writes Taylor: “more ancient, less well-off, more skeptical, less clean. But wiser, grander.” Those sentences resonate with the author’s attractive blend of romanticism and realism as he plumbs Naples’ Greek roots and the pagan sensibility that still underpins its Catholic surface. Taylor’s scope is as all-embracing as the stroll he takes around the Bay of Naples. He connects the magnificent wall paintings in the Villa of Poppaea with Italian art of the 15th century. He notes his “fear and dislike” of Christianity “because it sets the flesh against the mind and denies the brevity of our expectations; because, in a word, it is so un-Greek.”

Taylor finds Neapolitans of every generation deeply Greek in their tragic sense of life, borne out by centuries of foreign domination, climaxing with the brutal Nazi occupation in the final years of World War II. The author wears his formidable erudition lightly as he cites classical authors and 20th-century travel writers such as Norman Douglas with equal zest and acuity. Yet some of his most enjoyable pages are present-day encounters with a fervently communist doctor, a chain-smoking student of Faulkner and novelist Shirley Hazzard, one of Naples’ many devoted longtime, part-time residents. Though this is a highly personal book, the Neapolitan spirit is palpable: “the being-visible-now, the quasi-divinity that flows from a fundamentally theatrical sense of life,” as Taylor puts it in a characteristically ecstatic, evocative assessment.

Packed with elegant aperçus and vibrant with the author’s rueful understanding that “Naples the glorious and Naples the ghastly have always been one place.” (8-page color insert; b/w photos throughout)

INDOMITABLE WILL LBJ in the Presidency

Updegrove, Mark K. Crown (400 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-307-88771-9

Hey, hey, LBJ: The former president, not much talked about these days, comes in for assessment by political colleagues and journalists of the day.

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Celebrated playwright Clare Boothe Luce once remarked that all presidents are known by a single sentence: Thus, Lincoln freed the slaves; Washington was the father of his country; Clinton—well, you get the idea. For Lyndon Johnson, as LBJ Presidential Library Museum director Updegrove (Baptism

by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis, 2009, etc.) writes, the sentence would necessarily involve Vietnam, an assessment that is not strictly fair, since Johnson inherited the war. However, as he put it, “I knew from the start that if I left the woman I love—the Great Society—in order to fight that bitch of a war, then I would lose everything.” So he did, and in doing so he effectively repudiated his own record by not running for reelection in 1968. One bit of news in this newsworthy book is that Johnson plainly believed that he would have defeated Richard Nixon had he stood for office: “I believe I would have been nominated by that convention,” he said near the end of his life, “and that I would have won over Nixon by a substantial margin.” Instead, as Updegrove notes, the Democrats chose the bland Hubert Humphrey, who must have seemed a walk in the park after years of the mercurial Johnson, who was a blusterer and bully. However, notes staffer Myer Feldman, “I think Lyndon Johnson had great virtues and great vices, [and] depending on whether that particular day he was emphasizing the vices or the virtues, you liked or disliked him.” Other news: Johnson didn’t read books; by Dean Rusk’s account, Johnson was closely involved in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, though Bobby Kennedy later froze him out of the historical record; and Barry Goldwater missed an opportunity by pretending the civil-rights movement didn’t exist in the 1964 campaign.

A readable, endlessly interesting look at the LBJ years.

IN MY FATHER’S COUNTRY An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

Wahab, Saima Crown (352 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-307-88494-7 978-0-307-88496-1 e-book

An extraordinary journey by a Pashtun refugee in America who was able to return gracefully back to Kabul.

At age five, in 1979, Wahab began her life on the run after her father was taken from their Kabul home by KGB agents during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At the mercy of male relatives, Wahab, her two siblings and mother were sent to live with Baba, the grandfather, first in Ghazni Province, then in Peshawar, Pakistan. Out of guilt, kindness or a promise to her father, Baba allowed Wahab to attend school, even though she was the only girl in her class and was already getting marriage proposals at age nine. At age 15, the three siblings were sent to Portland, Ore., to live with their professor uncle, who bestowed on them an American education but insisted on traditional sexist double standards at home, which eventually enraged the strong-willed teenager. After college, she finally moved out of |

the close-knit family when she’d had enough of being considered “dishonorable and dirty” for craving a life of her own. Being outspoken was a liability for a traditional Pashtun woman, and while she never lacked for American suitors, it invited loneliness. As a rare speaker of both English and Pashto, she was hired by the U.S. military in 2004 to help coordinate efforts in Afghanistan. She was sent to work among refugees and local leaders, and the bulk of her detailed, lively memoir delineates the stress and emotional toil she endured.

A carefully wrought work that allows a rare look inside Pashtun culture.

HIDE & SEEK The Irish Priest in the Vatican Who Defied the Nazi Command

Walker, Stephen Lyons Press (352 pp.) $24.95 | May 1, 2012 978-0-7627-8039-6

Suspenseful, cat-and-mouse account of one Vatican priest who resisted the Gestapo’s terror policies.

While Pope Pius XII was wringing his hands about Allied bombing of Rome and essentially keeping quiet while the Gestapo deported the Jews and massacred the inhabitants, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest and official of the Holy Office, had accidentally begun to organize an Allied escape operation by the summer of 1943. As told in this non-scholarly account by BBC journalist Walker (Forgotten Soldiers: The Irishmen Shot at Dawn, 2007), O’Flaherty had no love for the English, having been politicized by British violence against the Irish back in the 1920s while he was in apostolic college in Limerick.

However, during World War II he gradually changed his mind.

Thanks to O’Flaherty’s network, which offered money, false ID papers and safe houses, a trickling of British soldiers had managed to seek refuge at the Vatican, and soon others found aid during the nine months of Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, the head of Rome’s intelligence agency was the ruthless, ambitious Nazi Herbert Kappler, who organized the Fascist police force and infiltrated espionage operations in Rome. Protected by Vatican neutrality, O’Flaherty operated under the nose of the Gestapo and barely missed being kidnapped and assassinated.

Following orders, Kappler was responsible for rounding up 1,000 Roman Jews for deportation to Auschwitz, as well as the cold-blooded massacre of 325 prisoners in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944. While O’Flaherty was celebrated after the war, Kappler was tried and imprisoned for life.

Another extraordinary story of how the bravery of one individual halted the tide of evil.

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“A wide-ranging, marvelously complete overview of a diverse, teeming civilization poised for ruin.” from on the eve

HARVEST THE WIND America’s Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability Warburg, Philip Beacon (256 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-8070-0107-3 978-0-8070-0108-0 e-book

Warburg believes that that collaboration between the government and the private sector can make wind power a major source of energy for the generation of power in the United States.

An attorney specializing in environmental law who served as president of the Conservation Law Foundation from 2003 to 2009, the author has been a committed environmentalist for more than 40 years. Warburg makes the case that with this “inexhaustible domestic energy resource,” America can finally demonstrate a willingness to lead the international fight for climate stability. He reports on recent travels through the U.S. and in Denmark. where he met with “farmers, ranchers, shop owners, truckers, crane operators and more,” whose lives have been improved by the new technology. He also visited large and small-scale wind farms, on land and offshore. While Warburg admits that wind power still presents serious problems for the environment—the turbines are responsible for the death of thousands of birds, the noise they produce can disturb neighboring residential communities, etc.—he is optimistic that these will be resolved and that the benefits of the new technology exceed the costs. At present, Danish investors are the leaders in turbine production. They outsource assembly production to China and the U.S., which rank first and second respectively in annual installations. The author writes that while American companies are only beginning to compete, they recognize that this is “the next big strategic bet.” Citing a 2011 government report, Warburg estimates that Kansas alone could supply 90 percent of the nation’s present power consumption with the installation of a sufficient number wind turbines. In 2010, seven percent of the state’s energy needs have been met by wind power, providing up to $50,000 annually to farmers.

Although Warburg summarily dismisses the potential of solar energy as a major part of the clean-energy mix, his arguments about wind power are balanced and informative.

ON THE EVE The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War

Wasserstein, Bernard Simon & Schuster (448 pp.) $30.00 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4165-9427-7 A bright, hard glimpse at the final thriving days of European Jewry and the first edges of its unraveling.

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Straightforward, scholarly and tidily organized, this historical snapshot by Wasserstein (Modern European Jewish History/ Univ. of Chicago; Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, 2007, etc.) encompasses myriad aspects of Jewish society, culture, language, health, demographics and religious and political sects. Nearly 10 million Jews were inhabiting Europe, contained in what the author delineates as four zones enjoying more or less benevolent status among communities of non-Jews but already feeling the lashing of secular currents as well as antiSemitism—across both Europe and the Soviet Union. On one hand, Jews tended to live longer and have lower rates of alcoholism and infant mortality; on the other, they were migrating, “marrying out” and quarreling among themselves, while birth rates were declining. Anti-Semitism, stoked by paranoia, nationalism and conspiracy theories such as in France, became “part of the perfume of the age.” Jews, writes Wasserstein, essentially became victims of their own success. In concise chapters, the author examines one facet of Jewish identity after another for a staggering big picture: politics, Zionism, life from shtetl to shtot (city), cultural centers like Minsk and Salonica, the press, the theater, the status of women, converts, vernacular languages like Yiddish and Judeo-Espanol, and much more.

A wide-ranging, marvelously complete overview of a diverse, teeming civilization poised for ruin. (32 b/w photos)

THE AWFUL GRACE OF GOD Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wexler, Stuart & Hancock, Larry Counterpoint (400 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-58243-830-6

Wexler and Hancock (Nexus: The CIA and Political Assassination, 2011, etc.) use newly available documentation from the FBI and other sources to present their case for the role of religious terrorism and white supremacists in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Cross-checking files from local offices with the central records and with the investigations conducted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations enables the authors to explore different elements of the events, which they argue might form the basis for a conspiracy case if followed up by the FBI and other agencies. The authors show that there were a series of prior assassination plots against King, and they argue there is reason to believe that James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty to assassinating King, may have been the recipient of a bounty for the murder.

Wexler and Hancock document the existence of a religious terrorist/white supremacist network made up of Rev. Wesley Swift’s California branch of the Christian Identity church, J.B. Stoner and the National States’ Rights Party in Alabama and Sam Bowers’ White Knights of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. The authors write that these leaders desired to bring about King’s death as the precipitator for a national apocalyptic race war. They show that

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the capabilities of these terrorists were systematically underestimated by law enforcement, not only because of J. Edgar Hoover’s prejudices against King, but also because of the view that “redneck” KKK members were not capable of the sophistication required. Wexler and Hancock identify crimes they believe the network was involved in, such as the “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil-rights workers in the summer of 1964.

A timely study, not only because of ongoing Islamic terror threats, but also because of more homegrown activities like the attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last year.

BREASTS A Natural and Unnatural History

Williams, Florence Norton (336 pp.) $25.95 | May 7, 2012 978-0-393-06318-9

Five decades after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, breasts may have replaced birds as early indicators of chemically induced catastrophe.

According to Outside editor Williams, breasts are the proverbial canaries in the coalmine, warning us of environmental damage that may be causing early puberty, breast-milk contamination and other maladies. “Breasts are an ecosystem,” she writes, “governed by long-evolved functions, migrating molecules, and interconnected parts.” Williams buoys her arguments by interviewing a host of scientists, surgeons, breastimplant candidates and even former Marines who believe they have developed breast cancer from drinking tainted water at the Camp Lejeune base. In the name of science, she also volunteered for experiments, “detox[ed]” from processed foods and personal-care products and sent her breast milk to a lab to test for flame-retardants. The author peppers these encounters with accessible information on how breasts evolved, how they develop and, tragically, how they can go wrong. While Williams excels at making complex science understandable to an educated lay audience, some of her conjectures come across as hyperbole, as she decries “modern times” in which we are “marinating in hormones and toxins” without considering some of the ways in which chemistry has led to better living. Her conviction that childbearing and lactating protect women from breast cancer may alienate women who either can’t or don’t wish to have children. One senses that she is proud of herself for refusing even an Advil after giving birth and for eating organic food and climbing mountains, but this slightly smug tone detracts from the otherwise valuable evidence she presents.

Lively and thought provoking, albeit tainted by selfrighteousness. (Author tour to Denver, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Salt Lake City)

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WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

Williams, Terry Tempest Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $24.00 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-374-28897-6 An elegiac exploration of nature, creativity and Mormon female family relationships.

After her mother’s death from cancer, Williams (Finding Beauty in a Broken World, 2008, etc.) discovered that the journals she had left behind did not contain what she expected. This prompted the author to conduct a reflective search. In numbered sections of varying lengths, memories intersperse with mentions of the journals, whose “harmony of silence” haunt her as a poetic refrain. Williams recalls her bird-watching grandmother, Mimi, her mother’s originality, and events that would guide her toward becoming a writer and a naturalist. Declaring that “Mormon women write. This is what we do, we write for posterity, noting the daily happenings of our lives,” Williams considers the work of, among others, Gustave Courbet, Robert Walser, John Cage and Wangari Maathai (“People like Wangari don’t die, that’s how irretractable and resilient she was to me”); music and birdsong; poetry; creation myths; birth; personal accounts of marriage and work; and the importance of empowerment both as a woman and as a wildlife advocate. She draws intelligent connections between varied subjects, with emphasis on voice and silence and how the two richly inform one’s inner life. Over the course of several decades, the ability “to speak through our vulnerability with strength” became a hard-won realization.

A graceful examination of how grief inspires a writer to merge private and public interests.

BY INVITATION ONLY How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop

Wilson, Alexandra Wilkis & Maybank, Alexis Portfolio (256 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-1-59184-463-1

The founders of Gilt Groupe chronicle the rise of their smashingly successful

fashion business.

The authors met when they were undergraduates at Harvard, where they reunited for business school in 2002. Maybank had worked at eBay, where she was instrumental in launching the company’s Canadian and automobile branches, and Wilson had established a solid career in the fashion business. In 2007, at the age of 30, Maybank and Wilson (with a third partner, Kevin Ryan) launched Gilt.com, an online sample sale of top-tier

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designer clothes at greatly reduced prices. “If shopping had traditionally been a slow, leisurely activity,” they write, “it would now be competitive, addictive, urgent, thrilling.” The authors describe in minute detail every decision that contributed to the launch of their business. Part of what set Gilt apart from other websites selling designer clothes was its exclusivity and, for the first time, online access to high-end brands like Zac Posen. Gilt. com is only accessible to members, who are required to give their e-mail addresses. Every day brings a new sale, and each sale lasts only 36 hours. The authors predicted, optimistically, that the company would generate $6 million in revenue its first year; it cleared $25 million. In addition to a description of their business model, the authors offer a fine combination of personal stories and direct advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. The writing is clear, but most impressive is the authors’ confidence and exacting attention to every detail.

Well-suited to aspiring fashionistas, entrepreneurs and those interested in the wildfire popularity of this online business.

A SILENCE OF MOCKINGBIRDS The Memoir of a Murder Zacharias, Karen Spears MacAdam/Cage (324 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-59692-375-1

One woman’s investigation into the murder of the daughter of a former family friend.

Zacharias (Journalism/Central Washington Univ.; Will Jesus Buy Me A Double-Wide?, 2010, etc.) draws on personal experience in recounting the murder of Karly Sheehan, a 3-year-old who died at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend.

The author continually highlights her once-friendship with the victim’s mother, Sarah Sheehan, even though their relationship dissolved in the years prior to Karly’s death. Arguably, this is still Zacharias’ story to tell, though her occasional missteps into the realm of melodrama undercut her ability to tell it. In the opening chapter, Zacharias explains that only three people know what happened on the day of Karly’s murder: “One of them is dead. One of them is in prison. And one of them blames me.” This notion of Sarah—who was not her daughter “in the literal sense, or even in the adopted sense, but in that way people choose others as ‘family’” —blaming Zacharias seems a bit of a stretch. This and other exaggerative flourishes will prompt some readers to question Zacharias’ continual need to insert herself into the narrative, a decision that leaves precious little space for the complexities of the case.

While the author constructs her narrative from a wide range of letters, e-mails, court documents and personal experiences, many of the key witnesses—including the murderer and Karly’s mother— played no role in her investigation. What’s left is a story told by the heroes, most notably Karly’s father, David Sheehan, who agreed to the book and is noted in the dedication.

An incomplete though mostly engaging portrait of the circumstances surrounding the death of a little girl.

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BYE BYE BABYLON Beirut 1975-1979

Ziadé, Lamia Translated by Snaije, Olivia Illus. by Ziadé, Lamia Interlink Graphic (296 pp.) $24.95 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-56656-877-7 Visually arresting and emotionally devastating, this graphic memoir of war and childhood feels like an art book and explodes like a car bomb.

Now based in Paris, Ziadé recounts her childhood in Beirut, where the privileged life of a well-to-do Christian family was shattered by incomprehensible conflict. Unlike the convention of most graphic narratives, this is not a work of panels and captions. Instead, full-page, full-color illustrations are interspersed with occasional pages of text, mostly short bursts of a paragraph or two, using an adult’s command of prose to reflect the perspective of a young child, one who grappled with the complexities of lethal violence that pitted Christians against Muslims, Christians against Christians, Palestinians against Israelis. “I would have loved to learn that the Palestinians were actually the bad guys; it would have been so much easier,” she writes. “At eight I had entered a complex world filled with contradictions and nuances.” Rather than offering a political polemic, Ziadé shows how it felt to find the comforts of consumer culture (often rendered with Warhol-esque brand names) give way to violence that then became the everyday reality.

“It’s a casual war. For us, what’s important is doing it with style,” she writes with a child’s open-eyed wonder. She then continues after three pages of drawings (Chivas and cigar, a cheeseburger, corpses at the feet of rifle-toting terrorists): “In Lebanon, the violence takes on legendary status. It’s paramount as the war unfolds—during the first two years everyone is having so much fun: it becomes a ritual for fighters from both sides to drag their prisoners through the streets behind a car until they die. Torture and mutilations are common practice.”

Stunning in both the art and the audacity.

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children & teens THE RIGHT AND THE REAL

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Anthony, Joëlle Putnam (288 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 26, 2012 978-0-399-25525-02

THE GOLDEN PRINCE by Arthur Felix....................................... p. 499 SUMMER OF THE WOLVES by Carlson-Voiles, Polly................... p. 502 CHUCK CLOSE: FACE BOOK by Close, Chuck............................. p. 503 TRACTION MAN AND THE BEACH ODYSSEY by Grey, Mini.......................................... p. 507 TUA AND THE ELEPHANT by Harris, R.P................................... p. 507 THE CHAOS by Hopkinson, Nalo.................................................. p. 508 SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Knowles, Jo.......................................... p. 510 AUNTIE YANG’S GREAT SOYBEAN PICNIC by Lo, Ginnie........ p. 512 THE UNBEARABLE BOOK CLUB FOR UNSINKABLE GIRLS by Schumacher, Julie.......................... p. 518 IT JES’ HAPPENED by Tate, Don.................................................. p. 520 CODE NAME VERITY by Wein, Elizabeth..................................... p. 522 FIVE FUNNY BUNNIES by Van Leeuwen, Jean............................p. 524 BATS! by Carson, Mary Kay.......................................................... p. 525

The daughter of a well-to-do recovering alcoholic becomes homeless after her father joins a cult.

At Jamie’s father’s wedding to a woman from The Right & the Real Church of Christ, the church’s spiritual leader insists that Jamie sign a Pledge committing herself to the Right & the Real. When she refuses, Jamie finds herself kicked out of her house. Determined and selfreliant, Jamie keeps her homelessness a secret, afraid that if she tells the truth to friends or authority figures, she will be sent to live with her drug-addicted mother in Los Angeles. After a dismal search for accommodations, she ends up at a dirty pay-by-the-week motel.

There, she finds a mentor in LaVon, a grandfather and parolee who teaches her how to cook and clean and ultimately risks his own freedom to help Jamie and her father. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Josh, another church member, starts hiding the pair’s relationship in increasingly humiliating ways; readers will find Jamie irritatingly oblivious to her feelings for another boy as this subplot continues.

Jamie’s family drama and her struggle to stay fed, sheltered and in school are compelling; LaVon, unfortunately, seems more an instrument for the white protagonist’s growth than a person in his own right, a troubling role for a black character.

A thought-provoking but flawed look into cults and homelessness. (Fiction. 12 & up)

CHOKKO’S ADVENTURES IN BIRDLAND by Siliq Digital......................................................p. 529

THE GOLDEN PRINCE

Arthur, Felix Illus. by Capon, Jenny Inside Pocket (32 pp.) $7.99 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-956712-23-3

THE ARTIFACTS by Stace, Lynley..................................................p. 529 SKULLS by simon winchester by Winchester, Simon.......... p. 530

This prince’s day as related in simple words and images will prompt requests for still more reads.

The “Brave Knight known as the Golden Prince” is preschool age, and he sports a shield with a duck on it, a play sword, a helmet and a cloak that may have started life as a bath towel.

The pictures expand the story elegantly: The prince’s “Big Castle at the top of a Very High Mountain” is depicted as a quite nice house on a hill, for instance. The wild beast he hunts is the family cat, and he rescues his damsel older sister from her |

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computer by the simple expedient of rolling her desk chair away (with her in it). At bedtime, the prince is scrubbed completely and put to bed with a magic kiss from the queen. The images, bright and clear, are punctuated by changes in attitude of the duck on the prince’s shield and the family cat in various modes of play or discomfiture. The charm of this little volume can hardly be overstated. It is what so many picture books for the very young strive to be, escaping both simpering sentimentality and shrill instruction.

Straightforward and sweet—almost darling, but in a very good way. If only it were available in hardcover. (Picture book. 3-6)

WANTED

Ayarbe, Heide Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-06-199388-6 A young bookie finds herself on the wrong side of the odds.

For 17-year-old bookie Michal Garcia, life used to be simple: She recorded bets, collected and distributed cash and splurged on expensive clothes. But she never bet herself. She connects with a rebellious classmate, Josh Ellison, after he observes Michal taking revenge on a client who failed to pay up, and he begins encouraging her to take more risks. When a family friend dies, leaving behind many debts, Michal and Josh enact their own wealth redistribution system to help the family, charitable organizations and themselves. As they become bolder in their law-breaking, Michal finds herself trapped. Ayarbe’s laudable interest in exploring issues of social justice in her novel is compromised by didactic dialogue, forced romance and a dull narrative. Approaching the hot-button topic of immigration through generic soundbites, for instance, doesn’t add any depth or insight to the discussion, especially when voiced by unlikable characters. Michal’s friend Moch embodies gang-member stereotypes, while Michal is as uninteresting as she imagines herself to be, never standing out even in her own narration. Ayarbe’s attempts at chemistry between Josh and Michal never come to fruition, creating awkward gaps where emotional connections should occur.

A bad bet all around. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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THE MORE THE MERRIER

Barden, Stephanie Illus. by Goode, Diane Harper/HarperCollins (144 pp.) $15.99 | PLB $16.89 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-06-200440-6 978-0-06-200441-3 PLB Series: Cinderella Smith, 2 Cinderella Smith knows how to spell and define many words, but sometimes the hardest word to understand is friendship.

Third grade with beloved Mr. Harrison is “vexylent,” especially when Cinderella invents new words and her friends begin to adopt them. But, alas, things can be “awshucksible,” too. The Rosemarys are in her class and continue to make life difficult.

They make fun of her words, visiting aunt, little sister Tess and just about anything else that Cinderella enjoys. When the reward for winning the school spelling bee (getting to choose the theme for a class party) is announced, the gauntlet is thrown.

Cinderella and her crew do NOT want to have Rosemary T.’s “I Believe in Unicorns” party. Cinderella and best friend Erin will have to do a lot of studying. In between study sessions, the girls become increasingly irritated by the mean behavior of the Rosemarys and decide to give them the silent treatment, which ends in a very believable confrontation. Goode’s appealing line drawings keep things light and help readers cheer for Cinderella.

The invented words, the spelling bee and Cinderella’s voice, which is maturing and becoming more likable, make this a great offering for youngsters who are figuring out the confusing social terrain of third grade. (Fiction. 8-11)

DEATH OF A DREAMER The Assassination of John Lennon

Behnke, Alison Marie Twenty-First Century/Lerner (96 pp.) $24.95 e-book | PLB $33.26 | May 1, 2012

Twin narratives converge in New York City on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark

David Chapman.

Behnke calls the murder an assassination, and by the general definition of the word—”to murder (a usually prominent person) by sudden or secret attack, often for political reasons”—the murder of John Lennon might qualify. Lennon was political by the end of his life, writing “Give Peace a Chance,” which became the anthem of the peace movement, but he was hardly a revolutionary, as Behnke terms him. Chapman was not especially political, and he didn’t really seem to know why he attacked Lennon; it was certainly not from any well-thoughtout political motives, as the author herself describes. The volume will have plenty of eye appeal for young readers, though, with its lively (if overdone) black-and-white design, well-chosen photographs and thorough backmatter that includes a handy

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“[I]t is impossible not to be smitten by a book with such ingenuous opening words: ‘This is Pop. Hello, Pop!’ ” from toot and pop !

timeline and a “Who’s Who?” section. The writing is mostly clear, though occasionally awkward and too often interrupted by unnecessary definitions and asides. It’s an adequate starter book for readers a bit young for Elizabeth Partridge’s John Lennon: All I Want is the Truth (2005).

A good first volume for a new generation of John Lennon fans. (source notes, bibliography, for further information, index, about the author) (Nonfiction. 11-16)

MADHATTAN MYSTERY

Bonk, John J. Walker (304 pp.) $16.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-8027-2349-9

A jewelry heist, an abrasive new friend and the Big Apple itself carry a young visitor through lingering grief-related issues in this engaging, if thematically crowded outing.

Lexi and her little brother Kevin are spending the summer in New York City with their aunt while their father honeymoons with his new wife. Hardly does Lexi step off the train in bustling Grand Central Station than her purse—holding treasured mementos of her mother, two years dead—is snatched. She overhears a suspicious conversation in the station’s Whispering Gallery about jewels before being whirled off to her aunt’s West Side apartment house to meet the super’s hyper daughter, Kim Ling Levine. Electrified by news that gems destined for an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have disappeared, Lexi shares the aforementioned conversation with Kim Ling.

She is only half-unwillingly dragged into an investigation that takes the young sleuths on a tour of Manhattan, from the Met and Central Park to some of Grand Central’s darker corners. Bonk casts and contrasts his sparky characters deftly.

He good-humoredly portrays Kim (purple haired, and loud of both mouth and clothing) as a stereotypical New Yorker and Lexi as a quiet brooder who is nonetheless capable of holding up her end of a tumultuous relationship. Her new personal insights and the adventure itself ultimately work to thaw her frozen emotional state. Superfluous flashbacks and an extraneous subplot involving the rehabilitation of a teenage runaway are just distractions on the way to a boisterous happy ending.

A pleaser for fans of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) and like New York odysseys. (Mystery. 11-13)

TOOT AND POP!

Braun, Sebastien Illus. by Braun, Sebastien Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $12.99 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-0-06-207750-9

Pop the tug lives in a harbor populated with grand boats, presented by Braun on magnetic two-page spreads in the bold, thick colors of first-grade art class. The scenes bustle with purpose and the pleasure that comes with being engaged in work that you like; Pop squires his heavy loads with the easy hand of experience. Smiles grace all the elements of the picture, from the crane to the lighthouse. Then a great big new ship, Toot by name, all high and mighty with the arrogance of the clueless, arrives and declines Pop’s offer of a towrope. “I’m big and strong.

I don’t need help from anyone, especially you.” Toot proceeds to run into the seawall, gets dressed down by the harbormaster and humbly accepts Pop’s tow back to the boatyard. There is a high degree of charm in the baldness of this pint-sized parable.

The pacing is pleasingly swift, and the mood is upbeat. And it is impossible not to be smitten by a book with such ingenuous opening words: “This is Pop. Hello, Pop!” A jaunty, minimalist drama that radiates a sense that all will be right by the time the sun goes down. (Picture book. 2-5)

THE STORY OF US

Caletti, Deb Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-1-4424-2346-6 Cricket accepts that life is transient and change is inevitable; she just needs a survival guide for getting through it.

Ready or not, change happens. It’s time to choose a college (home or away?) and decide what to do about Janssen, her longtime boyfriend. Having initiated a tentative breakup, Cricket’s unsure where to go next. Jupiter, the family’s aging, beloved dog, is slowing down. Cricket welcomes her mother Daisy’s imminent remarriage. But as friends and family— including former spouses—gather on an island off the Washington coast, tensions arise. Fractured relationships have jagged edges. Change is Daisy’s refuge, and Cricket worries that she’s looking for an escape route. Smart, likable Cricket is supported by a surfeit of colorful characters and plenty of action. Still, this is a contemplative romance (think chicklit for eggheads). It has a slow, elegiac feel even as it covers a lot of ground—caninehuman bonds and loyalty, courage and crutches, the nexus of love and desire. Timid plotting, an insensitive sexual-orientation subplot and the awkward, semi–high-concept narrative device—Cricket’s letters to Janssen telling him “their” story— are weak points.

Still, Caletti’s exceptional insight into and compassion for her characters more than compensate. Adrift in a world where only impermanence is permanent, they remain hopeful, loving what they know can’t last. (Fiction. 12 & up)

A big ship slaps the helping hand of a little tugboat in Braun’s straightforward tale of reckoning. |

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“Even the least wilderness-savvy readers will be drawn into the breathtaking landscapes, the human-to-animal relationships and the gradual evolution of Nika’s new family.” from summer of the wolves

SUMMER OF THE WOLVES

Carlson-Voiles, Polly Houghton Mifflin (352 pp.) $15.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-547-74591-6 Can the wildness of wolves transform the heart of a girl who has suffered too many losses?

Twelve-year-old Nika and her younger brother Randall, recently orphaned, live in California, finally content with their-best-foster-mother-yet, Meg. When Meg’s health deteriorates, however, a well-meaning social worker locates their long-lost uncle Ian—a globe-trotting wildlife biologist now studying wolves in rural Minnesota— ostensibly for a “visit.” How will Nika incorporate yet another change of venue into her life? For starters, Nika nurtures a motherless wolf pup, fiercely advocates for caged wild animals and makes friends with a like-minded boy named Thomas. But when faced with stark moments of truth, both wild and domestic, will she make the right choices? Through close third-person narration, debut novelist Carlson-Voiles renders Nika’s emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas with gentle, compassionate strokes. Even the least wilderness-savvy readers will be drawn into the breathtaking landscapes, the human-to-animal relationships and the gradual evolution of Nika’s new family. While evoking the girl-wolf-hunter triad of Jean Craighead George’s 1973 Newbery Award–winning classic, Julie of the Wolves, the author brings enough of her own experiences with animals and troubled young people into the story that it feels like nonfiction.

A little gem of a book for all wild-hearted lovers of the natural world. (Fiction. 10-14)

WHAT SANK THE WORLDS BIGGEST SHIP?

Carson, Mary Kay Illus. by Elliott, Mark Sterling (32 pp.) $12.95 | paper $5.95 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4027-9627-2 978-1-4027-8733-1 paperback Series: Good Question To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this volume inaugurates a new series that employs a question-and-answer format to convey essential information.

Here, the format works quite well, the questions being the ones that have so fascinated people ever since the tragedy occurred. Why did everyone think the Titanic was unsinkable?

How could an iceberg appear out of nowhere? Did the telegraph operator ignore an important message? What happened to the stranded passengers? The answers are written in clear prose full of fascinating details: The ship was “the largest human-made moving object in the world”; “The propellers were as wide as 502

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houses”; “Using cheap rivets likely cost 1,500 lives.” Paintings, photographs, maps and a timeline complement the text to offer a fascinating account for young readers who love information.

Besides the questions that head each section, there are questions within the answers: Who was at fault? Why was the ship traveling so fast in an ice field? “Why didn’t the lookouts have binoculars?”

The format is irresistible, each answer just long enough to provide essential information. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography that could lead readers to other good books on the subject, but overall this will be a sure hit with young readers.

A promising start to a new series. (Nonfiction. 7-11)

GODDESS INTERRUPTED

Carter, Aimée Harlequin Teen (304 pp.) $9.99 paperback | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-373-21045-9 Series: Goddess Test, 2

Fasten your seatbelts, lower your expectations, then sit back and enjoy the modest pleasures of this mostly smooth sequel.

Kate has graduated to deity status and married Henry (Hades, Titan-born Greek deity of the Underworld, reconfigured as a category-romance hero). She looks forward to her coronation as Queen of the Underworld, but Calliope (Hera) has other plans. She awakens her father, head Titan Cronus, enlisting his aid in a scheme to take down her victorious rival and promising his release from captivity in return. For that, she’ll need help from her fellow deities, and there’ll be collateral damage—destroying the Olympians and wiping out humanity.

This may strike readers as overkill (and a shameless Rick Riordan retread), but it makes a nifty plot complication. Kate chafes at being left behind when the top Olympians leave to prevent catastrophe. She feels responsible, and, worse, Henry is in danger. Joined by Ava (Aphrodite) and James (Hermes), her trek to rescue him is the tale’s main event. Henry remains the series’ weakest link—less intriguingly mysterious than exasperatingly vague. Kate spends much of the text pondering and misinterpreting his intentions, but one can hardly blame her; this is a marriage badly in need of intervention from Deborah Tannen (You Just Don’t Understand, 1990, etc.).

A good bet for readers mostly interested in the romance.

(Fantasy. 12 & up)

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PLANET TAD

Carvell, Tim Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $12.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-06-193436-0 A phoned-in Diary of a Wimpy Kid wannabe from a Mad Magazine and Daily Show writer.

Based on a blog of the same name that runs in Mad, the narrative is framed as nearly daily entries over the course of a calendar year by a middle-school Seinfeld. The content is entirely predictable. He skates on or over the edge of embarrassment while trying to be noticed by girls, generally comes out second best in dealings with his gifted little sister and briefly lands a summer job wearing a hot-dog suit. He joins several of his classmates in making a (wait for it) science-project volcano and records many similarly unexceptional experiences and encounters. These entries are thickly padded with a monotonous litany of callow opinions on dozens of cultural markers from various commercial mascots (including Ronald McDonald) to TV shows (Jeopardy, for example) and movies (Jurassic Park, among many others). These share space with complaints about minor annoyances like gum in water-fountain drains and superficially clever ruminations about why “werewolves” aren’t called “arewolves,” the nature of Santa’s reindeer games and like burning topics. Moreover, he decides that his school mascot, movies about volcanoes, work and a mind-numbing catalog of other irritations all “suck.”

So does this tedious effort to climb aboard the bandwagon. (line drawings, mood icons) (Fiction. 10-12)

YEAR OF THE BOOK

Cheng, Andrea Illus. by Halpin, Abigail Houghton Mifflin (160 pp.) $15.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-547-68463-5

In what promises to be a reading year, 10-year-old Anna Wang finds real-life friends as well.

Fourth grade is not turning out well for Anna. Her friend Laura is now part of a threesome that excludes her; she’s become uncomfortable about her mother’s cleaning job and her family’s different traditions; and she struggles in Chinese school. Luckily her teachers encourage their students’ independent reading, and, even better, Anna is the kind of reader who can lose herself in a story. Anna’s own story, conveyed in a first-person, present-tense voice, is one of developing empathy. Early on, her mother says, “It’s time you must think about other people.” Over the year she has significant interactions with her crossing-guard friend Ray; her mother’s elderly employer, Mr. Shepherd; and her new friend Camille, and she also achieves a growing understanding of Laura’s family problems. As a result, Anna learns to think about the people around |

her just as she cares about fictional characters. Good readers will enjoy the frequent references to well-known children’s literature titles and may even be prompted to seek new ones out. Halpin’s grayscale illustrations and occasional Chinese characters (introduced in a glossary at the beginning) add interest, and instructions for sewing a lunch bag are included at the end.

A gentle, affectionate take on familiar middle-grade issues and the joys of reading. (Fiction. 7-10)

CHUCK CLOSE: FACE BOOK

Close, Chuck Abrams (64 pp.) $18.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-4197-0163-4

A magnificent interactive “face book” portrait of the artist.

This book grew out of a studio visit/ conversation between Close and a dozen Brooklyn fifth graders. Through the kids’ simple questions and the artist’s forthright answers, readers eavesdrop on the event and witness the ongoing dialogue between an artist and his unforgettable, iconographic work. Close discloses struggles with childhood ill health and severe dyslexia. He tells how his early artistic promise was nurtured by caring parents and teachers and how he adjusted for his prosopagnosia (face blindness) by sketching the faces of his students. He also shares how the steady progress of a rewarding career and warm family life was nearly derailed by his near-total paralysis after the 1998 collapse of a spinal artery.

He also discloses the many “hows” of his astonishing technique: how he uses gridded photos to build his faces and how he works from his wheelchair and wields his brush with less-abled hands.

Readers witness his discipline and see how he works in a dizzying variety of media. At the book’s brilliant center is the irresistible opportunity to “mix ‘n’ match” various eyes, noses and mouths among 14 of the artist’s arresting self-portraits.

Art lovers of all ages will revel in this vivid, wonderfully affecting book, which is almost as ingenious and memorable as Close himself. (timeline, glossary, list of resources and illustration credits) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

GRIMALKIN THE WITCH ASSASSIN

Delaney, Joseph Illus. by Arrasmith, Patrick Greenwillow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-06-208207-7 Series: The Last Apprentice, 9 This installment deviates from The Last Apprentice’s usual formula, following witch assassin Grimalkin instead of Spook’s apprentice Thomas Ward after the events of Rage of the Fallen (2011).

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The Fiend has been bound but not killed, so his servants seek to restore him. To prevent this, Grimalkin took his decapitated head with her—it must be reunited with the bound body for the Fiend to rise again. Narrated by Grimalkin rather than presented as Tom’s writing, the story is in present tense. The immediacy ratchets up tension as increasing numbers of powerful dark servants pursue Grimalkin. Although the legendary witch assassin is among the best killers to ever have lived, she is endangered by a kretch, a she-wolf/demon hybrid created by dark-magic users specifically to kill her. Forced to seek help, stubbornly self-reliant Grimalkin leaves a path of violent devastation among her allies wherever she goes, making painful sacrifices to thwart the Fiend while Tom seeks ways to kill him. The narration and short, free-verse poems at the beginning of each chapter give a complex look into Grimalkin’s peculiar thought processes, and her history is unveiled through the personal stories her protégé enjoys hearing time and again. While her voice differs greatly from the familiar Tom’s, the closer look makes her all the more intriguing.

A good balance between dark action and emotional costs. (Fantasy. 11-15)

THE LAST ECHO

Derting, Kimberly Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-06-208219-0 Series: Body Finder, 3 Seventeen-year-old Violet returns in the third installment of the Body Finder series, this time working for a secret agency that specializes in using paranormal powers to fight crime.

For the first time since she learned that she is drawn to the locations of murdered dead bodies, Violet feels less of a freak.

Although she doesn’t understand all the paranormal abilities of her crime-fighting teammates, she feels as though she fits with them. However, she still loves her normal boyfriend Jay, so she worries about the strong physical response she feels whenever she touches Rafe, a member of the team. Meanwhile, Violet doesn’t know she’s become the target of a terrifying serial killer.

As in previous volumes, Violet continues to reject simple safety precautions and hides all her worries from her parents. Her personal irresponsibility does not cause the danger when the killer attacks, however, and she demonstrates maturity and courage, assisted by a few doses of deux ex machina, when she fights back.

She finally emerges as a mostly sympathetic heroine, even with the flaws that Derting often highlights. As always, this author writes a gripping tale, although she takes her time getting to the final conflict. Personalities come across quite strongly, as several of the characters tend toward the eccentric.

With another sequel set up, this intriguing series continues to provide great entertainment for suspense fans.

(Paranormal suspense. 12 & up)

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A HERO FOR WONDLA

DiTerlizzi, Tony Illus. by DiTerlizzi, Tony Simon & Schuster (464 pp.) $17.99 | May 8, 2012 978-1-4169-8312-5

Long on action and atmosphere, with detailed descriptions and illustrations of the odd world of Orbona, Eva Nine’s adventures pick up just where they ended (The Search for WondLa, 2010).

In the ruins of an ancient city, an airship has appeared, piloted by the first other human Eva has ever seen. Hailey (think a teenage Han Solo) promises to deliver Eva and Rovender to New Attica (the reference will doubtless be lost on young readers), where the human population lives beneath a giant dome.

Once there, Eva gets briefly caught up in its glamour and novelty before a strangely familiar young woman opens her eyes to the destructive intentions of the colony’s leader. A complicated escape and a series of chases ensue, with dramatic battles, a stop to reunite Rovender with his estranged family, betrayal by an ostensible ally, a mystical encounter and an attempt to rescue friends from danger. Once again, a not-terribly-surprising surprise ending sets up the next installment. The pace is faster and DiTerlizzi’s voice is stronger in this sequel, but it still feels like less than the sum of its parts. The accompanying website offers games, character descriptions and an “Augmented Reality” flying game. Full interactivity requires a webcam and a software download and may or may not increase readers’ enjoyment.

Inventive in detail if predictable in plot, this should please fans of the first volume. (Science fiction/fantasy. 10-13)

ESCAPE FROM MERCY HALL

Edwards, Garth Illus. by Stasyuk, Max Inside Pocket (192 pp.)

Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-956712-24-0 Series: The Thorn Gate Trilogy, 1 Three orphans pass through a tall hedge and find themselves in a world of advanced (to them) technology and car-

nivorous sheep.

Rescuing fellow orphan Milly from orange-robed kidnappers, George and Sam discover a temporary gap that has opened in a seemingly impenetrable hedge. Beyond is a land of sharktoothed “Muttons” (and actual sharks in the rivers), talking animals and child-sized humanoids. These last ride floating carts along a road powered with electricity from a Robe-owned generating plant, which is staffed by stolen children. So it’s off to another rescue—aided greatly by a passage through a “Rainbow Cave” where Milly gains super strength and the boys acquire other powers. At the end of the entirely predictable escapade,

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“There’s a certain attractive ick factor about a girl who spews out toads every time she speaks, but is it enough to sustain a novel?” from once upon a toad

all return to the orphanage to find that the evil headmaster has fled, leaving them in charge. Signs of slipshod construction range from the Robes’ utterly ineffectual efforts to capture the orphans to the sudden reappearance of a dog that was killed in the first chapter. These only add to the overall sense that the author has just thrown together familiar tropes and random elements in hopes that they’ll stick to each other. Occasional small monochrome drawings add neither character nor detail.

The action never lets up, but readers are likely to come away from this trilogy opener more confused than intrigued. (Fantasy. 10-12)

SUMMER ON THE MOON

Fogelin, Adrian Peachtree (240 pp.) $15.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-56145-626-0

Meet Socrates, better known as Socko, on the first day of summer before his eighth-grade year, a summer that will change his life forever.

The musty walls of the dilapidated Kludge Apartments are marred by creepy-looking spiders: tags indicating that the building is the territory of the Tarantulas, a neighborhood gang headed up by a local thug called Rapp.

Socko and his friend Damien make it their business to avoid the gang, putting off as long as possible the inevitable day that they will be forced to join. When Socko’s mom announces that they are moving to a house in Moon Ridge Estates, Socko is thankful for the escape but devastated that he cannot bring Damien with him. And when they arrive at the Estates—which is bereft of trees, grass and other people, nothing like the fancy brochures promised—and meet the curmudgeonly great-grandfather that they will be taking care of in exchange for housing, his hopes sink still further. Eventually, Socko meets Livvy and learns that her father owns the now-struggling housing development. At first, there seems to be no way to save it, and no way to help the folks that Socko and his mom have left behind in the old neighborhood, but with some creative thinking and generosity of spirit, miracles might just be possible. The third-person narration is tightly focused through Socko’s perspective, adopting a gentle colloquial voice that complements the natural dialogue.

Steeped in violence (more implied than graphic) and poverty, but focused on love and hope. (Fiction. 9-12)

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ONCE UPON A TOAD

Frederick, Heather Vogel Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-1-4169-8478-8 There’s a certain attractive ick factor about a girl who spews out toads every time she speaks, but is it enough to sustain a novel?

Since her mother, an astronaut, is in space, Cat has been sent to spend the rest of the school year with her father, his wife and her two step siblings. Olivia, aka Miss Prissy Pants, is her own age, and more likable Geoffrey is just 3. After ample angst—the two diametrically opposite girls can’t stand each other—and a visit from Cat’s decidedly odd great-aunt Abyssinia, the pair wake up with strange new problems. When Olivia opens her mouth, jewels and flower petals fall out, but poor Cat just produces toads. Geoffrey is kidnapped by someone eager to get at Olivia’s jewels, and the two girls are forced to flee, seeking some resolution for their multitude of issues. Can their related afflictions make them overcome their numerous differences? The saving grace, beyond the charming toads, is that Cat is very attractively mouthy, and her narration is fresh and funny. The pace never lets up, but only readers capable of truly suspending disbelief will buy the many convenient coincidences needed to make the plot work.

This appealing fairy tale is fun, fast paced and more than just a little bit foolish. (Fantasy. 10-15)

HEROES OF OLYMPUS

Freeman, Philip Illus. by Willis, Drew Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4424-1729-8

A numbing catalog of “Gods, Goddesses, Monsters, and Mortals” from Greek and Roman mythology, condescendingly “adapted” for younger audiences from a juicier version for adults.

Spun off from Freeman’s Oh My Gods! (2012) but hardly differing in page count, Calkhoven’s methodical treatments of 60-some classical myths and legends only rephrase and tone down Freeman’s language. She leaves most of the (nearly continual) sex and violence in but describes it euphemistically or in dryly factual ways. The retellings arbitrarily blend Greek and Roman versions of names (Zeus, Hercules) and inconsistently render some in English (“Sky” rather than Uranus and “Earth” rather than Gaia, but only proper names for all of their offspring). The dozens of headed entries begin with “Creation” and, after Cronus castrates his father (or, as it’s put here, “slashed Sky’s flesh”) the war between gods and titans. Thereafter in no particular order (except that the Roman entries come last) come short accounts of individual gods and demigods mixed

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“Eccentric characters, both good and evil, add life to the tale, but the bad ones become increasingly caricature-like, diminishing their menacing effect.” from the shadow collector’s apprentice

with topical overviews (“Goddesses,” “Heroes”), genealogical recitations and short summaries of epic tales (“Troy”) or legends (“Scaevola”). Original sources for all of these get scarcely a mention, and though many of the tales are not among the usual suspects, readers needing reminders of who Despoina, Otus, Ephialtes and dozens of less familiar figures are will get no help from the spotty annotated cast list at the end.

An opening promise of “beauty and magic and disturbing twists” goes unfulfilled in this monotonous parade of ancient names and detached barbarism. Illustrations not seen. (Mythology. 12-16)

MY MIXED-UP BERRY BLUE SUMMER

Gennari, Jennifer Houghton Mifflin (128 pp.) $15.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-547-57739-5

The summer of 2000 should be an idyllic one for June, spending it alongside Vermont’s Lake Champlain, but her mother has decided to wed her partner, Eva, under the state’s newly enacted civil-union law.

The 12-year-old doesn’t mind much that her mother, MJ, is a lesbian, but she preferred life with just the two of them. Besides that, Eva isn’t subtle about her relationship with MJ, and that’s attracted negative attention from some local people opposed to the new statute. They begin boycotting the family business, a marina that also sells the pies June and her mom love to bake.

To protect her from public interest, MJ tells June she can’t enter a pie in the local fair, a competition the girl has eagerly awaited.

Although her best friend, Luke, and the town librarian provide emotional support, June remains conflicted over her mother’s relationship and local reaction to it. Unfortunately, debut author Gennari portrays those opposed to the civil-union law as a group of misanthropic cardboard characters disrupting the library and offering inappropriate, unwelcome advice to June.

This black-vs.-white depiction of a polarizing topic pitches the story to the choir rather than providing a complex and emotionally satisfying exploration. A dramatic, somewhat unlikely climax brings a ready resolution to most of her issues.

A one-sided exploration of a timely and important subject falls short, failing to plumb the potential depth of the issue. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

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THE SHADOW COLLECTOR’S APPRENTICE

Gordon, Amy Holiday House (202 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2359-0

Gordon (The Gorillas of Gill Park, 2003, etc.) sets the stage for an eerie fantasy that doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

Cully Pennyacre, 12, reluctantly becomes the apprentice of antiques dealer Batty, who seems to be up to something with his shadow-collecting hobby. In the back of his store, Batty runs an apparatus that neatly removes people’s shadows. He has plenty of willing participants who aren’t warned that, once shadowless, they will be sadly incomplete. Appalled, Cully stays on because he needs the money to help keep his family apple farm running, a job made all the more difficult since his father disappeared a year ago, leaving his quirky aunts to run the business. Batty’s granddaughter, Isabel, a notably unpopular classmate of Cully’s, seems to know more about the shadow business and her malevolent aunt and uncle’s determination to acquire the Pennyacre farm than she’s telling, at least at first.

As Cully’s friendship with Isabel strengthens, she develops some emotional energy to defy her nasty relatives. Eccentric characters, both good and evil, add life to the tale, but the bad ones become increasingly caricature-like, diminishing their menacing effect.

Unfortunately, as the tale becomes less grounded in reality, it also begins to lose its atmospheric threat.

Even if not fully disquieting, the fast pace and unusual characters will keep most readers turning the pages. (Fantasy. 10-14)

DOUBLE DOG DARE

Graff, Lisa Philomel (304 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-0-399-25516-8

Media Club becomes “a place of battle” when the time comes to select a news anchor for the spring semester.

Fourth-grader Francine Halata has dreamt of sitting behind the news desk since the beginning of the school year, and she’ll do just about anything to get to get there. Kansas Bloom couldn’t care less, until passing it up means losing his status as “King of Dares.” And the race is on. For two weeks, members of the Media Club agree to assign Francine and Kansas each a dare a day. Each dare is worth a point, and the one with the most points at the end will win the coveted anchor seat.

Though Kansas and Francine are pitted against each other in this high-stakes game at school, the competition pales in comparison to what they are both coping with at home. Through a third-person narration that alternates focus between Francine and Kansas, readers see them both struggling to come to grips

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with parents who are in the throes of divorce. Graff does an impressive job striking a balance between humor and heft in this middle-grade novel.

With two equally compelling protagonists to root for and plenty to make kids laugh, this is sure to resonate with and entertain young readers. (Fiction. 7-10)

TRACTION MAN AND THE BEACH ODYSSEY

Grey, Mini Illus. by Grey, Mini Knopf (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-375-86952-5 Series: Traction Man, 3

The intrepid, square-jawed action figure Traction Man is back, but is he ready for the likes of Beach-Time Brendaâ„¢?

The endpapers alone are worth the price of admission to the third comic-book–style picture book in Grey’s award-winning Traction Man series, thanks to the commercial glory of BeachTime Brendaâ„¢. She is “fully accessorized with lots and lots of stuff,” including “teeny tottery microshoes,” a “pinkly patterned towel” and “unrealistic Vital Statistics.” Traction Man collides with Beach-Time Brendaâ„¢ when he and Scrubbing Brush head off for a beach holiday, or more grandly, “odyssey.” Granny comes, too, with her new pet dog Truffles. Once at the beach, it soon becomes Traction Man’s charge to defend the picnic—especially the quiche—against Truffles. Truffles buries him, literally. The ever-loyal Scrubbing Brush digs him up, but watch out! Both hero and sidekick end up adrift in the ocean, then seaweed-compromised in a Beach-Time Brendaâ„¢ Bucket that belongs to another kid. Every vivacious spread teems with delicious details in a world where both the tide-pool creatures and the quiche have eyes. The spare, dryly funny text on bits of torn graph paper is perfectly choreographed with the colorful, boldly designed spreads.

A wonderfully satirical, action-packed romp that echoes the grand tradition of comic books as it ingeniously communicates the complete absorption of imaginative play. (Picture book. 6-9)

TUA AND THE ELEPHANT

Harris, R.P. Illus. by Yoo, Taeeun Chronicle (204 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8118-7781-7

this elephant is chained, used as tourist bait. Tua must face dangers including poachers and treacherous rivers as she steals away with the young elephant, pursued by two menacing mahouts, or elephant drivers. Naming her new friend Pohn Pohn, Tua escapes with her to a Buddhist temple, where she learns of an elephant preserve in the mountains. Will Tua be successful in getting Pohn Pohn into the preserve? For a book aimed at middle graders, kudos on three fronts: providing a child’s-eye view of Thailand with foreign words to be decoded in context, creating a strong connection between the elephant and the girl and using a simple vocabulary to introduce the complex issue of poaching. Yoo’s multiple illustrations, done in charcoal and linoleum block prints, catapult the story even higher. Foreign yet familiar, the action is often humorous and reinforces the sweet bond between pachyderm and “peanut.”

A rousing adventure that introduces the issue of elephant trafficking in a gentle and appropriate way. (Fiction. 8-12)

COWBOYS

Harrison, David L. Illus. by Burr, Dan Wordsong/Boyds Mills (48 pp.)

PLB $17.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 Free-verse cowpoke ruminations on the trail to Abilene, with paintings of long-horned dogies and grizzled riders beneath big skies.

Saddle up, pardner, leave the bunkhouse (where “[b]ugs gnaw plugs right outta your hide”) behind and look fer dusty days, freezing nights, rattlers, storms and meal after meal of beef and beans from Cookie. Harking back to cattle drives of yesteryear, Burr portrays leather-skinned figures with nearphotographic realism. “You need sand in your gizzard / to wrangle wild cows, / chaps for fendin’ off thorns / or horses with a taste / for cowpoke leg.” They pose in full regalia, branding a calf, mending barbed wire, gazing up at the stars, trying desperately to stay on horseback amid a stampede, lazing around the chuck wagon, riding at last into town and ruefully bidding hardearned wages goodbye at a poker table. Two saloon floozies at the end, a dark-skinned trailhand (“I’m on a journey of my own / figuring how it feels / to be free”) and a spirited filly in blue jeans left back at the ranch to fulminate are the only ones here who aren’t typecast Marlboro Men. So git along, there, anyone with a mind to share cowboy dreams in romanticized, Old West style. (afterword) (Poetry. 10-12)

How do you hide an elephant?

Inspired by a trip to an Asian elephant refuge, Harris transports young readers to the lands of curry, banana leaves and the bustling Chiang Mai Night Market. Little 9-year-old Tua, which means “peanut” in Thai, finds a young, but very large captured elephant. Their connection is instant. But |

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WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING HATCHLINGS A Guide for Crocodilian Parents (and Curious Kids)

Heos, Bridget I llus. by Jorisch, Stéphane Millbrook/Lerner (32 pp.) $18.95 e-book | PLB $25.26 Apr. 1, 2012 Series: Expecting Animal Babies

This lighthearted introduction to the group of reptiles that includes alligators, crocodiles, caimans and gharials presents itself as an instruction book for prospective crocodilian parents.

Third in the Expecting Animal Babies series, this resembles previous titles covering insect and marsupial development.

The focus on the lives of animal children makes an immediate connection to readers who are children themselves. Using a question-and-answer format, Heos addresses readers directly in a cheerful second-person narration. She introduces the order, describes where the various families live and lay and guard their eggs, shows fetal development and hatching, then looks at babies’ early lives. She chooses details that will intrigue: a mother carrying her hatchlings down to the water in her mouth, caiman foster moms and, of course, how big they will get. With watercolor, gouache and pen and ink, Jorisch creates humorously personified creatures: a white-coated crocodile doctor, a gharial mom knitting on the beach as she watches her children slide into the water, a caiman family with backpacks and suitcases trudging off to a wetter swamp. Accurate facts, nicely numbered pages, a glossary, and a substantial list of further reading and websites make this toothsome treat useful for reports as well as entertainment.

Both engaging and informative, this is a welcome addition to a kid-pleasing series. (Informational picture book. 6-11)

THE POWER OF THE PARASITE

Holm, Jennifer L. Illus. by Holm, Jennifer L. & Holm, Matthew Random House (96 pp.) $6.99 paperback | PLB $12.99 May 22, 2012 978-0-375-84391-4 978-0-375-93785-9 PLB Series: Squish, 3 Summer swim camp and a reckless new friend test a young amoeba’s courage and moral compass alike.

Squish has been left to face the scary pool alone because his buddies Peggy and Pod have gone to ballet camp. He is delighted to meet Basil, an equally water-averse hydra with the same taste in comics (which is to say, Super Amoeba) and the cool ability to detach portions of his body. But Basil also sports 508

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stingers at the ends of his tentacles that he meanly uses to trip up not only unwary fellow campers but even the camp leader.

Squish is inspired by his revered comic-book superprotozoan, who in a parallel plot deals briskly with a visiting superhero, a self-serving fluke named Parasite whose arrogance and outsized sense of entitlement lead to some bad behavior—and also by Pod’s demonstration of how to open a black hole with a pirouette. Squish mends fences with the counselor, sends Basil packing (or most of him, anyway) and even finally nerves himself to dive into the pool. Blobby but clothed figures pose beneath big balloons of clearly lettered dialogue and side commentary in the Holms’ thick lined, minimally detailed panels, and the suburban backdrops make it even easier for younger readers to transpose the microbial cast to their macroscopic world.

More evidence that Squish is anything but a Wimpy Kid, for all his diminutive size. (science demo, drawing page) (Graphic novel. 7-9)

THE CHAOS

Hopkinson, Nalo McElderry (256 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 12, 2012 978-1-4169-5488-0 Noted for her fantasy and science fiction for adults, Hopkinson jumps triumphantly to teen literature.

Scotch’s womanly build and mixed heritage (white Jamaican dad, black American mom) made her the target of small-town school bullies. Since moving to Toronto, she’s found friends and status. Now both are threatened by the mysterious sticky black spots on her skin (she hides them under her clothes but they’re growing). When a giant bubble appears at an openmic event, Scotch dares her brother, Rich, to touch it. He disappears, a volcano rises from Lake Ontario and chaos ripples across city and world, transforming reality in ways bizarre and hilarious, benign and malignant. A lesbian folksinger with Tamil roots becomes a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk; jelly beans grow teeth; buried streams resurface. Scotch searches for Rich across a surreal, sensual cityscape informed by Caribbean and Russian folklore. Although what they represent and where they come are open to interpretation, the manifestations are real to everyone and must be dealt with. Hopkinson opens her YA debut conventionally but soon finds her own path, creating a unique vocabulary with which to explore and express personal identity in its myriad forms and fluidity. Anything but essentialist, she captures her characters in the act of becoming.

Rich in voice, humor and dazzling imagery, studded with edgy ideas and wildly original, this multicultural mashup—like its heroine—defies category. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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“This perky, kid-friendly introduction to worldwide ‘green’ construction efforts also happens to be both well-informed and carefully designed for optimal engagement.” from earth- friendly buildings, bridges and more

GHOST FLOWER

Jaffe, Michele Razorbill/Penguin (368 pp.) $9.99 paperback | Apr. 12, 2012 978-1-59514-396-9 In a tense mystery, a former foster kid calling herself Eve Brightman enters a dangerous scheme to impersonate a missing heiress.

In the coffee shop where Eve works, an expensively dressed brother and sister approach her with a proposition: Eve, a “dead ringer” for their cousin Aurora Silverton, will pass herself off as Aurora to collect a multimillion dollar inheritance, of which Eve will receive a share. Without asking too many questions about Aurora’s disappearance three years prior, Eve agrees to the scheme. After a month of rigorous coaching, the false Aurora arrives at the luxe but cold Silverton home. Tension builds rapidly and effectively from all sides as unanswered questions pile up: Will the Silvertons believe that Eve is Aurora? What are Bain and Bridgette, the siblings who engineered this scheme, hiding from Eve? Was the death of Aurora’s best friend Liza truly a suicide? Who—or what—is behind the mysterious door-rattlings and phone calls that make Eve wonder if Liza’s ghost is haunting her? Eve’s determination to solve the mystery of Liza’s death propels the plot forward, and ambitious readers can piece together theories of their own from clues that are revealed at just the right pace. A twist near the end dissolves some of the tension prematurely, but much of the suspense remains until the final moment.

A compellingly sinister page-turner. (Suspense. 14 & up)

THE SHARK KING

Johnson, R. Kikuo Illus. by Johnson, R. Kikuo TOON/Candlewick (40 pp.) $12.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-935179-16-0 The Shark King’s deadly son gets an extreme makeover in this version of a traditional tale from Hawaii.

Born to a loving human woman, Nanaue is a happy child (rather than the flesh-eating monster of yore) with a huge appetite and a jagged line on his back that sometimes opens into a snapping, toothy mouth. His mischievous nature soon leads him into trouble, and he dives off a cliff to escape angry villagers from whom he had been stealing fish. This unites him with his father—a huge shark who had taken human form to marry Nanaue’s mother, Kalei, but returned to the sea on the night of his birth. Johnson presents a quickly told story in bright, fluidly drawn sequential panels of varying size and shape, with a mix of narrative and dialogue. Set against a rocky shoreline and underwater scenes teeming with sea life, his brown-skinned, lightly clad characters gesture and |

move with smooth naturalism, displaying both distinct personalities and expressions from comical to noble.

A myth involving rampant anthropophagy transformed into a lightly sketched tale of parent-child bonding. (Graphic folktale. 7-9)

EARTH-FRIENDLY BUILDINGS, BRIDGES AND MORE The Eco-Journal of Corry Lapont Kaner, Etta Illus. by MacEachern, Stephen Kids Can (64 pp.) $18.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-55453-570-5

This perky, kid-friendly introduction to worldwide “green” construction efforts also happens to be both well-informed and carefully designed for optimal engagement.

Kaner, the Toronto-based winner of numerous nonfiction book awards, introduces readers to Corry Lapont, the clever 12-year narrator of this “Eco-Journal” and an always-curious wayfinder through a brave new world of “smart” architectural projects and principles. Along with Corry and her wiseacre sidekick, kid brother Riley, readers see and learn about site selection, planning, designing, the integration of green engineering solutions (like using rainwater for cooling) and nifty details on the how-tos of constructing eco-friendly structures. Across a series of two-page spreads, Corry explores not only new buildings (domes and skyscrapers) but also such diverse projects as the Vizcaya Bridge (Spain), the English Channel Tunnel and the locks of Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, as well as dams, dikes and levees. Veteran illustrator MacEachern’s bright, appealing cartoony illustrations merge with well-selected stock photos to expand the concepts. The book also features an easy-to-decode table of contents, a glossary of construction terms and a workable index. Though sustainable architecture is becoming more and more a part of school curriculum and family discussions, there are surprisingly few books available on the topic.

This handsome, information-rich, yet brief illustrated “eco-journal” fills a gap—and more. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

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LEXAPROS AND CONS

Karo, Aaron Farrar, Straus and Giroux (240 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-374-34396-5 Senior goofball Chuck Taylor has struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder all his life, and his crush on the new girl in school pushes him to deal with it. Finally.

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“Prescient writing, fully developed characters and completely, tragically believable situations elevate this sad, gripping tale to a must-read level.” from see you at harry ’s

pure teenage-boy lust. When she asks him to tutor him for her calculus AP exam, he knows something’s up. Add his hilarious BFF Steve, who pines after Chuck’s bitchy younger sister, a couple of douchey school bullies and a psychiatrist who speaks using only questions, and Karo has all the beginnings of a madcap coming-of-age first novel. For the most part Chuck’s agreeably foul-mouthed narrative voice rings totally true: Everything from his laugh-out-loud repartee with Steve to his inner longing and lusting for Amy feels fully fleshed and real. There are moments when he seems too observant or too full of wisdom for his own good, but those times are few and far between.

Short chapters and clever pacing help Karo’s plot move quickly.

Strangely enough, the only piece of this debut that feels forced is Chuck’s OCD. While his instincts and reactions to triggers seem authentic, at times the descriptions of his illness feel like they’re coming more from a textbook than a teenage boy.

Still, Karo is definitely an author to watch. (Fiction. 14 & up)

CAPTAIN AWESOME AND THE NEW KID

Kirby, Stan Illus. by O’Connor, George Little Simon/Simon & Schuster (128 pp.) $14.99 | paper $4.99 | May 8, 2012 978-1-4424-4200-9 978-1-4424-4199-6 paperback Series: Captain Awesome, 3 MI-TEE! It’s superhero adventures in sleepy Sunnyview.

Seven Captain Awesome adventures are slated for release in 2012. In this, number three in the series, the Sunnyview Superhero Squad encounters several nemeses, rescues a lost cat and meets a potential super-buddy. Second-grader Eugene McGillicudy and his best friend Charlie Thomas Jones have secret identities: Inspired by their idol Super Dude, they are Captain Awesome and Nacho Cheese Man. Together with their hamster sidekick, Turbo, they patrol the streets of Sunnyview in costume to keep unsuspecting citizens safe from crime (but mostly just to have fun). They rescue their fantastic Frisbee from Mr. Drools, “the most slobberingest monster from the Howling Paw Nebula.”

They investigate the moving van down the street for alien spies.

At school they defend a new girl from the cootie insults of Little Miss Stinky Pinky, aka Meredith Mooney, and avoid the evil peas of Dr. Yuck Spinach in the lunch room. Kirby and O’Connor’s ultra-illustrated early chapter book will be of interest to superhero fans graduating from easy readers, but they will need a high tolerance for super-lingo. Several chapters set up interesting events that are not played out in the text or comics-inspired, black-and-white illustrations, which is a disappointment.

For seekers of super-silly series sagas. (Fiction. 7-10)

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SEE YOU AT HARRY’S

Knowles, Jo Candlewick (320 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5407-8 978-0-7636-5994-3 e-book Sit back in a comfortable chair, bring on the Kleenex and cry your heart out.

Seventh grader Fern, in pitch-perfect present tense, relates the dual tragedies of her family. Her high-school–freshman older brother Holden has come to the place in his life where he’s acknowledged that he’s gay and is taking the first painful, unsteady steps out into a less-than-fully-accepting world. Fern offers him support and love, but what she can give is not always what he needs. Their older sister, Sara, spending a frustrating gap year after high school supposedly helping with the family restaurant, makes life hard for everyone with her critical eye and often unkind comments. And then there’s 3-year-old Charlie, always messy, often annoying, but deeply loved. Fern’s busy, distracted parents leave all of the kids wanting for more attention—until a tragic accident tears the family apart. The pain they experience after the calamity is vividly, agonizingly portrayed and never maudlin. Eventually there are tiny hints of brightness to relieve the gloom: the wisdom of Fern’s friend Ran, the ways that Sara, Fern and Holden find to support each other and their thoughtfully depicted, ever-so-gradual healing as they rediscover the strength of family.

Prescient writing, fully developed characters and completely, tragically believable situations elevate this sad, gripping tale to a must-read level. (Fiction. 11 & up)

THE PRINCESS OF TRELIAN

Knudsen, Michelle Candlewick (448 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5062-9

An engaging fantasy sequel marred by middle-book syndrome.

Princess Meglynne is already being groomed for the throne of Trelian, despite her youth, impetuous behavior and increasingly volatile temper. Of greater concern is her magical bond with Jakl, since the dragon arouses fear among her people, and ultimatums from rival kingdoms. Meanwhile, Meg’s best friend Calen is also taking on adult responsibilities among the council of his fellow mages.

But when their stronghold comes under attack, the Magistratum ruptures into bitter divisions over ominous prophecies that seem to point directly at Calen. Chapters alternating between Meg and Calen’s viewpoints add depth and breadth to a generic fantasy world, as the two young people attempt to navigate conflicts with those they looked to for protection and support. It is a pleasure to revisit two such appealing protagonists;

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unfortunately, much of the plot rehashes the first novel, without allowing either character change or growth. Once again, Meg chafes at her royal restrictions, and her impulsive choices lead to disastrous consequences. Calen’s excessive caution and frustration at his mentor’s cryptic methods again inspire him to prove himself, with fateful results. The stakes may be raised, but the terms, the villains and even the romantic triangle are all the same. An abrupt magical “fix” and an out-of-character plot twist may solve the characters’ immediate challenges, but they also set up a maddening cliffhanger.

Nonetheless, the likable characters and brisk narrative will undoubtedly lure readers into eagerly anticipating future installments. Next time, though—more Jakl, please! (Fantasy. 11-16)

OLLIE & MOON: FUHGEDDABOUDIT!

Kredensor, Diane Illus. by Kredensor, Diane Photos by Meskin, Mike Random House (32 pp.) $15.99 | May 22, 2012 978-0-375-87014-9 Series: Ollie & Moon

Feline best friends Ollie and Moon take a whirlwind tour of New York City.

During their adventures in Paris (Ollie & Moon, 2011), Ollie provided Moon with delightful surprises. Now Moon is determined to make Ollie laugh as they wander uptown, downtown and crosstown. She tries food jokes, dance moves, silly snapshots and cavorting with a troupe of mimes, but she wins only an occasional smile. In the manner of Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny books, Meskin’s colorful photos of the Staten Island Ferry, the subway, the Library Lions, Central Park and other iconic city sights and settings form the backdrop for Kredensor’s goofy cartoon characters. Ollie and Moon have square heads and enormous eyes and are decidedly uncatlike. As they move through the city, they are surrounded by a cast of outlandish creatures.

A snail cab driver utters the poetic “Fuhgeddaboudit.” A trio of mouse musicians plays on the subway platform as a giraffe listens to a boom box on the train. Observant readers will find even more madcap extras, such as skating penguins, a beaver with a backpack and an announcement for an exhibit about cheese through the ages. It all concludes with a gross-out event that finds Moon and Ollie—and probably readers—giggling.

A fun-filled romp around the Big Apple for children and adults to enjoy together. (Picture book. 3-7)

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REBEL FIRE

Lane, Andrew Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-374-38768-6 Series: Sherlock Holmes: The Legend Begins, 2 The opening of this second adventure/ mystery starring the teenage Sherlock Holmes finds two men searching for a giant red leech for their terrifying boss, Duke Balthassaar, ably and ickily introducing the sleuth’s antagonist.

One afternoon, Sherlock returns to his uncle’s home to a surprise visit from brother Mycroft Holmes. Eavesdropping, he learns that John Wilkes Booth escaped death after assassinating Lincoln and is somewhere in England. Mycroft and Amyus Crowe, Sherlock’s tutor, have to prevent Booth’s return to the United States—a perfect adventure in the making for Sherlock and his friends Virginia Crowe and Matty Arnatt. In this story, good characters have some depth, while the evil are there to provide narrative oomph.

Lane has a talent for gross and grotesque villains, and Balthassar is no exception (check out what he does with those leeches). Abductions, frantic train rides, near-death experiences and efforts of the three friends to save one another increase suspense with each chapter. A slam-bang climax and satisfying conclusion will please readers while leaving loose threads for further volumes.

This intriguing look at the times and development of a much-loved character fascinates across gender lines. (author note) (Mystery/adventure. 13-17)

OUT IN LEFT FIELD

Lemna, Don Illus. by Collins, Matt Holiday House (224 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2313-2

How is a guy supposed to live down taking a baseball to the noggin in the critical moment of an inter-town baseball game in the waning days of summer 1947?

Before flubbing the game, 11-year-old Donald was getting used to living on their farm in Station Hill, Mont. A year ago, he’d thought his life was over when his father returned from the war and dragged the family away from town, electricity and indoor plumbing (When the Sergeant Came Marching Home, 2008). Donald and his younger brother Pat have settled in thanks to baseball, a dog of confused breed, hockey and a pretty teacher. After his major baseball embarrassment, Don thinks he can win back respect by becoming a deadly archer like Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. A near-total lack of funds and his mother’s reluctance stand in his way. Don is nothing if not resourceful (well, maybe stubborn, too). Archery impresses no one, and the school bullies won’t let up. Don then hopes learning to drive and helping with harvest will do the trick; no such

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luck. Can Don survive angry bulls, wearing mom’s skates until Christmas and revival-tent–inspired fears of Lucifer himself? As with Lemna’s first, adult readers will have trouble not hearing the voice of Jean Shepherd in their heads as Don narrates his trials and tribulations. It’s downright refreshing to see a funny book that doesn’t rely on quirky characters for its gusto.

Young fans of Robert Newton Peck’s Soup titles will find much to enjoy in this funny, episodic, historical novel full of realistic characters and light family drama. (Historical fiction. 8-11)

THE PIRATE GIRL’S TREASURE An Origami Adventure Leung, Peyton Illus. by Leung, Hilary Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-55453-660-3

soybeans on a Sunday drive. Mao dou were considered animal food in this country at the time but widely consumed in China.

The armloads of plants that the friendly farmer allows her to bring home begin an annual picnic tradition. It eventually expands to include many Chicago-area families with, as the young narrator notes, “lots of kids just our ages who all spoke Chinese as badly as we did!” Years later, a long-awaited reunion between Auntie Yang and her sibs from China closes these memories of good times and mouth-watering Chinese food on a joyful note. The simply drawn scenes of busy, festive groups reflect the narrative’s happy tone, and they are capped with old snapshots from past gatherings in the afterword.

The pleasure of finding unexpected links between a new country and the old suffuses this autobiographical outing. (glossary) (Picture book/memoir. 6-8)

FOX TAILS Four Fables from Aesop

An interesting idea suffers from an unimaginative presentation.

When a pirate girl receives a mysterious note offering a treasure hunt from her grandfather, she leaps at the opportunity. The girl conquers mountains and dark caves before encountering lightning, sharks, and a shipwreck. Paralleling her journey, the book describes the steps one would take to make an origami hat, boat and shirt. At last she arrives on an island and digs up a treasure that consists of a congratulatory note from the grandfather and a real pirate shirt. Instructions at the back of the book show how to create your own origami shirt with steps clearly laid out. Alas, text-heavy pages weigh down what should be a bouncy, imaginative story. The digital style that serves Hilary Leung so well in his surreal Ninja Cowboy Bear series comes across as merely flat and uninteresting when paired with a story written for the sole purpose of helping kids memorize folding steps. No surprise if child readers are disappointed that the shirts they’re making cannot be worn like the one found in the story. Though certain to find an audience where origami books are all the rage, this promising idea suffers from a dull follow-through.

To call this origami tale an “adventure” is a stretch to say the least. (Picture book. 4-8)

AUNTIE YANG’S GREAT SOYBEAN PICNIC

Lo, Ginnie Illus. by Lo, Beth Lee & Low (32 pp.)

PLB $18.95 | Apr. 1, 2012

Lowry, Amy Illus. by Lowry, Amy Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2400-9

Four of Aesop’s familiar fables feature wily fox shamelessly tricking his fellow creatures, followed by their gleeful retaliation, strung together in one continuous if episodic narrative.

First, hungry fox fails to retrieve a luscious bunch of grapes from a tree. To save his dignity, fox announces the grapes “are quite sour,” proving it’s “easy to scorn what you cannot get.”

Then, fox encounters crow with cheese in her beak. When fox cleverly asks if crows really do have amazing voices, crow opens her mouth to caw, dropping the cheese. As he gobbles crow’s cheese, fox moralizes, “never trust a flatterer.” In his smugness at this victory, fox stumbles into a well—and then tricks hapless goat into helping him escape. Leaving goat in the well, fox warns to “look before you leap.” And finally, “one bad turn deserves another,” when goat, crow and stork give fox his just deserts. Lowry cleverly incorporates the four fables into a single story sequence with each fable adding to the theme of fox’s self-centered dishonesty. Pale gouache-and-pencil illustrations in muted greens, browns and greys provide a subdued, understated backdrop to fox’s self-serving antics while emphasizing the very human behavior of each animal character.

Four fable favorites cleverly repackaged. (author’s note, morals) (Picture book. 4-8)

More warm family memories from the Chinese-American creators of Mahjong All Day Long (2005), with cheery illustrations painted on ceramic plates.

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“[T]hese discussions of the relationship between artists’ lives and the stories they produce… are indubitably worthwhile.” from show me a story !

CON EL SOL EN LOS OJOS / WITH THE SUN IN MY EYES

Luján, Jorge Translated by Glass, Janet Illus. by Zahedi, Morteza Groundwood (32 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-1-55498-158-8

Broadly daubed, semiabstract views of children and animals illustrate 10 short, reflective lyrics by an Argentinean poet.

“All that I have is a lot: / my dog Oliver, / wind hitting me in the face / and your laughter that explodes for no reason.” Placed beneath their Spanish originals on cream-colored pages, the translated poems speak in relatively simple language and imagery. They imagine a rooster and a hen orbiting each other, wading toes as little fish, the son and moon daydreaming together, a street like a tree’s trunk with roots and blossoms extending tantalizingly out of sight in different directions. Using markers, linocuts and other media, Iranian artist Zahedi offers fanciful but recognizable views of each poem’s subject and speaker. Smudgily reminiscent of Chris Raschka’s work, the little dreamscapes are marvels of micro-composition and color.

Not exactly a heaping helping of words and art, but handsomely designed and rich in the sort of observations that will attract readers for whom silence is “louder than noise.” (Poetry. 9-12)

SHOW ME A STORY! Why Picture Books Matter: Conversations with 21 of the World’s Most Celebrated Illustrators

Marcus, Leonard S.--Ed. Candlewick (304 pp.) $22.99 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-3506-0

Selecting 11 illustrators popular in the past decade, among them Chris Raschka, Lois Ehlert and Mo Willems, and adding postscripts to 10 he had interviewed for Ways of Telling (2002), Marcus mines the A-list, producing fascinating insights into the lives of picture-book creators and the format itself.

Organized alphabetically, each interview is preceded by a photograph and brief introduction. In contrast to the representative reproductions in the earlier title, the accompanying color insert presents process. Studies, sketches and scenes that didn’t make it are accompanied by instructive captions. The historian’s command of publishing trends, personalities, formal elements and psychology leads to customized questions, although common themes emerge. These include the power of teachers to enable artists to recognize their potential or doubt it, the role of encouraging relatives, the ways sensitive people grapple with family issues and economic or political realities and the |

impact of Charles Schulz and Maurice Sendak. The inclusion of Quentin Blake, Yumi Heo, Peter Sís, and Lisbeth Zwerger adds an international perspective. It is curious, though, that Marcus recycles so much from his previous book; except for Sendak’s seven-page commentary on Bumble-Ardy (2011), not much value is added. Why not a full-fledged second volume? That said, these discussions of the relationship between artists’ lives and the stories they produce, preferences regarding medium or style, and the unique confluences of circumstance, market and passion are indubitably worthwhile.

A welcome illumination of a historically under-appreciated art form. (bibliography, source notes) (Nonfiction. 14 & up)

ZOOM, ROCKET, ZOOM!

Mayo, Margaret Illus. by Ayliffe, Alex Walker (32 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-8027-2790-9

Rollicking verse introduces youngsters to the jobs various space vehicles do and to the astronauts that explore outer space.

Who knew that astronauts had such a wide variety of vehicles to choose from? Rockets and shuttles help them blast off. Lunar modules and moon buggies allow them to explore the moon. And space stations are a home away from home for astronauts who need to work in space. Mayo also devotes pages to unmanned space vehicles, including satellites, robotic spacecraft and rovers, all the while explaining in simple language what each does. But while each vehicle gets only one spread, the “smart,” “excited,” “brave” and “bold” astronauts are granted several, reflecting the many jobs they do—guiding, exploring, collecting, studying, working, rebuilding and repairing. Onomatopoetic sounds enliven the bouncy verses: “Mighty rockets / are good at zoom, zoom, zooming. / 5 4 3 2 1 and … / Lift off! Launching! / Whoooom! / Up they go, zooming. / Blasting into space.” The bright colors will keep readers’ attention, and it is more than evident that Ayliffe has done her research in the amazing detail she has put into her cut-paper collage illustrations.

Space enthusiasts will be launched out of this world.

(Informational picture book. 3-6)

ASIAGO

McHeffey, Adam Illus. by McHeffey, Adam Marshall Cavendish (32 pp.) $16.99Apr. 1, 2012 978-0-7614-6138-8 How can the little vampire enjoy the beach with his friends?

Asiago lives in a castle with his greatuncle Gouda. He likes to play his accordion and swing from a rope, and at night he turns into a bat. When his friend Wendy

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“Medina breathes life into Sonia and many of the secondary characters, and the vivid descriptions and touches of magical realism will enthrall readers.” from the girl who could silence the wind

calls to invite him to the beach, he really isn’t sure what a beach is. But he finds an old bathing suit (with cool purple stripes) and is ready to go. Asiago’s fun is short-lived: He turns bright red in the sizzling sun, which even sets his ears to smoking. Wendy rescues him with her beach umbrella, but he can’t really play, and he gets a splinter from the dock (almost as dangerous as a stake) and a stomach ache from the clams she gives him to eat (all he really likes is garlic). At home, Asiago can’t help thinking about his not-so-great day at the beach. Wendy and his other friends save the day with a great idea; they surprise Asiago in his coffin and return with him to the beach... at night. McHeffey’s clean colored-pencil illustrations add style and mirth to his simple tale of friendship. His characterization and plotting, however, leave something to be desired. Adults will wonder why these vampires are named for cheeses, and children will wonder how the nocturnal vampire managed to make human friends?

Goodhearted, if silly. (Picture book. 3-5)

BEING FRIENDS WITH BOYS

McVoy, Terra Elan Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4424-2159-2 Too many false notes sound in this tale of music, friendship and relationships.

“Trip’s out of the band.” Those simple words make Charlotte’s life very complicated. The manager of the band Sad Jackal as well as their lyricist, Charlotte is the invisible girl among the boys in her life. These include her oldest friend and fellow band member Oliver, new band member (and Charlotte’s short-lived crush) Fabian, and the growingdistant Trip—not to mention potential new boyfriend Benji.

Charlotte’s appeal will be hard for readers to see, too, since her personality is so flat and undefined. It’s only when she’s pulled into singing with Sad Jackal that she shows some life. After performing at the school Halloween dance, Charlotte stretches her wings by singing with another band and leaving Sad Jackal after an argument with Oliver. Yet Charlotte continues to exist because of the males in her life, whether it’s freaking out over the rumor that she’s dating Oliver or fighting with her dad over her bad report card.

While Charlotte’s musical growth is inspiring, the numerous plot elements and one-note personalities make McVoy’s fourth novel less a symphony and more of a garageband song. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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THE GIRL WHO COULD SILENCE THE WIND

Medina, Meg Candlewick (256 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-0-7636-4602-8

Laden with the hopes and fears of her village, a 16-year-old girl casts aside her appointed calling to discover her true destiny.

“The curse on Sonia Ocampo’s life came without warning before she was even born, cleverly disguised as good luck.” Sonia’s birth marked the end of the colossal storm that had been ravaging the village of Tres Montes. From that day on, she carried the prayers of Tres Montes in the form of milagros, small, metal prayer charms, sewn into her shawl. When her prayers fail to save the life of young village boy, Sonia questions her supposed gifts. With the help of her spirited Tía Neli, she finds a job in the capital city as a wealthy woman’s maid. She leaves behind her parents, her brother and her schoolgirl crush, Pancho Muñoz, and joins three other village girls in service at Casa Masón. Soon word of her brother’s disappearance reaches her, and Sonia must decide how much she is willing to risk to save the ones she loves. Medina breathes life into Sonia and many of the secondary characters, and the vivid descriptions and touches of magical realism will enthrall readers. However, teens may find themselves with more questions than answers as the novel builds towards a hasty resolution and a tidy epilogue.

A worthy effort weakened by a rushed conclusion. (Magical realism. 14-18)

THE MASK OF DESTINY

Newsome, Richard Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $16.99 | May 15, 2012 978-0-06-194494-9 Series: The Archer Legacy, 3 A frenetic dash across Europe that leads both to hidden treasure and the resolution of a 1,600-year-old mystery brings Newsome’s once-promising trilogy to a muddled, heavily contrived close.

Framed for the (supposed) murder of archenemy Sir Mason Green, jumped-up preteen billionaire Gerald Wilkins and his twin sidekicks Sam and Ruby are on the run. They repeatedly escape police and a beautiful poisoner while following a trail of baroque clues that take the three from an ossuary deep within Mont Saint-Michel to Grecian Delphi. This, improbably, turns out to have been secretly roofed over beneath fake ruins centuries ago to protect its fabled treasures and still-functional oracle. Newsome seems far more intent on chivvying his characters along than in setting any credible challenges for them. He pitches the trio through one chase scene or rescue after another, giving them easy access everywhere by leading them directly

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to a series of conveniently discovered open doors and cave entrances. All is revealed in a climactic subterranean faceoff during which the (surprise, surprise) still-living Green explains his nefarious purposes in great detail, before Gerald knocks him unconscious and expedites the death of his pet assassin.

Occasional jokey dialogue won’t be enough to carry readers over a story riddled with logical gaps, extraneous characters, massive coincidences and laboriously fabricated suspense. Illustrations not seen. (Adventure. 11-14)

NANCY CLANCY, SUPER SLEUTH

O’Connor, Jane Illus. by Glasser, Robin Preiss Harper/HarperCollins (128 pp.) $9.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-06-208293-0 Series: Nancy Clancy, 1 Fancy Nancy is back, this time in a chapter book.

Nancy Clancy loves fancy words here as much as she does in her popular picture-book series.

Her interests are changing, though, as she grows up. An avid Nancy Drew fan, she and best friend Bree have a new Sleuth Headquarters and are excited to solve their first case. When their teacher’s special blue marble disappears, everyone in the class becomes a suspect. Their targets of suspicion change from moment to moment, leading the new detectives on a number of wild goose chases. When the real criminal is uncovered, the girls are forced to examine their assumptions. Fans of the Fancy Nancy series will enjoy reading about an old friend in a new, more grown-up setting. Fully fleshed-out secondary characters, especially Nancy’s parents and Mr. Dudeny, Nancy’s teacher, create a nice backdrop for this new series aimed at transitioning readers. It’s hard to write mysteries for a chapter-book audience, but O’Connor creates a plot with subtle clues and red herrings that allow readers to puzzle out the mystery along with Nancy.

Nancy’s love of colorful language makes it fun to discover new vocabulary (motive, accessory, obstinate) while solving a dandy mystery. Glasser’s frequent black-and-white illustrations will help connect this new series with the earlier one.

Nancy is one sassy gumshoe. Her fans will enjoy growing up with her. (Mystery. 7-10)

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IT’S OUR PROM (SO DEAL WITH IT)

Peters, Julie Anne Megan Tingley/Little, Brown (352 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-316-13158-2 A ho-hum and largely affectless take on what is now well-trodden ground in LGBT teen fiction.

Peters (She Loves You, She Loves You Not, 2011, etc.) gives her tale to two narrators. Excitable Azure is a lesbian who works in a thrift store and has a clandestine crush on her straight friend Radhika. Mechanically-inclined Luke is bisexual and producing a play based on his coming-out experience—and also has secret feelings for Radhika.

After Azure’s apparent protest the previous year that prom was not inclusive enough, the school principal asks her to join the prom-planning committee. Azure ropes in Luke and, eventually, Radhika too, and suddenly a small group of students and one inexperienced teacher are scrambling to put together a nontraditional prom on a shoestring. Meanwhile, the love triangle deepens, Luke’s brother’s friend harasses Luke and an old girlfriend reappears in Azure’s life. Though it is an adequate romance, little is new here: Luke’s play and its production feels derivative of and inferior to the musical extravaganza in John Green and David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010), and Madeleine George, Brendan Halpin, Brian Sloan and others have written LGBT teens at prom with far greater panache. Furthermore, a premier LGBT author and her editors should know better than to refer to transgender people as “transgenders.”

Fails to dazzle. (Fiction. 12 & up)

IF ALL THE ANIMALS CAME INSIDE

Pinder, Eric Illus. by Brown, Marc Little, Brown (40 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 17, 2012 978-0-316-09883-0

A young boy imagines the riot that would ensue if his house were overrun with wild animals.

“The lions would roar as they sprawled on the floor. / The lemurs would lollygag right by the door. / My daddy would try to sit down in his chair. / He’d holler and whoop with a porcupine there!” The hodgepodge of animals ranges from forest chipmunks and savanna giraffes to Australian kangaroos and even an octopus. And they all come with mischief in mind. Pinder neatly describes the chaos that this bunch could cause. From ruining the furniture and eating all the food to taking up the comfiest places, they would eventually leave no room for the boy and his family, relegating them to sleeping outside. And in fact, the boy wisely decides in the end that, as much fun as all the animals might be, he will be satisfied with just his cat and dog. The rhyming verses have a nice rhythm, and a repeated

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refrain allows listeners to join in. Brown uses a similar style to his illustrations in Lindsay Craig’s Farmyard Beat and Dancing Feet (2011, 2010), but the corrugated-looking collages that incorporate photographic elements are not as successful here. The details tend to get lost in all the texture. Still, the animal antics are priceless, and the boy’s transformation from joyful participant to disgruntled observer is easy to see.

All the fun of imagination without the mess of reality.

(Picture book. 3-6)

THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL & MADEMOISELLE ODILE

Reese, James Roaring Brook (368 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-1-59643-684-8

A reworking of the classic tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde imagines his beastly transformation is achieved at the hands of a desperate young woman in this slowly paced thriller that’s steeped in historical detail.

Odile and her younger brother, Gréluchon, flee to Paris after their parents are murdered. Arriving in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, they struggle to survive on their own.

Odile is terrified for her brother, who suffers from a debilitating eye infection that has been made worse from malnourishment and living in the damp of the catacombs. Descended from a family of witches, she searches her mother’s spell books for something that might fortify her brother. At the same time, she becomes indebted to oddball Dr. Henry Jekyll, setting events into motion from which Odile cannot escape. Situating this well-known story against the backdrop of the Prussian invasion of Paris and its short governance by the Commune is conceptually interesting, but the pacing lags somewhat. In keeping with the style of the era, Odile’s narrative voice is formal, and teens that are not established historical-fiction fans may find it difficult to identify with her.

While overall appeal may be limited, it will hook patient readers by the palpable sense of foreboding established early on, and they will enjoy the gradual build of suspense in this gritty and layered novel. (Historical fiction. 12-18)

TWICE UPON A TIME

Riley, James Aladdin (352 pp.) $15.99 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-1-4169-9596-8

With no dearth of novels that fracture and mingle fairy tales, waste no time on this sequel and its lazy metaphysics.

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tales; May, of unclear heritage, comes from the modern real world. They have many adventures. As they get into and out of scrapes, some magic startles them while some inexplicably doesn’t. Rather than portraying the magic with consistency or structure, the text indolently justifies itself: “[m]agic [is] strange.” Any detail can be just “[p]art o’ the magic”: When ocean replaces forest, the “because” is “Because why not.” Riley strives for twists and intrigue, but so many things appear “out of nowhere” that surprise becomes tedium. He simply hasn’t the knack yet of creating a plot in which characters are consistently confused but readers aren’t. There’s some cool stuff: Peter Pan is also Pan the satyr, and Jack’s sardonic narration is often funny.

But words like “immediately” and “quickly” can’t force excitement, nor can offered-and-retracted inescapable peril (“nothing could possibly stop the sword as it flew straight and true right at Phillips’ back— / Until an urgent, vibrant musical note sounded from behind”). The retrograde sexism of May’s fussy, sharp-tongued, victim role chafes.

Go for Lyn Gardner’s Into the Woods, (2007) Emily Rodda’s Key to Rondo (2008) and Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark & Grimm (2010) instead. (Fantasy. 8-11)

TEEN BOAT!

Roman, Dave Illus. by Green, John Clarion (144 pp.) $14.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-547-63669-6 He’s a teen... and a boat.

This overly ambitious and often downright odd graphic novel introduces the not-too-creatively named Teen Boat.

This is a young man for whom the ordinary trials and tribulations of adolescence are amplified by his bizarre nautical alter-ego, which he turns into if he gets any liquid in his ear. In an effort to fit in at his stereotypical high school where the jocks get the hot girls, the punk kids are anarchists and the goth kids moodily mope around, Teen Boat tries to use his transforming abilities to achieve popularity. He lets the incrowd throw a party on him when he is in his boat form; this, of course, ends disastrously. He tries to get a driver’s license, but his jerky driving maneuvers lead to his evaluator’s coffee accidentally spilling in his ear, resulting in a calamitous outcome.

This is very much a comic for adolescent boys: Humor is often sophomoric, and most of the girls—with the exception of Teen Boat’s best friend—are busty caricatures. While some of the jokes will indeed induce a chuckle or two, many are stretched to the point of exhaustion, leaving readers ho-humming rather than haw-hawing. The peculiar concept and campy jokes create a strange blend, sort of Archie meets the Transformers—a puzzling combination, indeed.

Puerile and odd, this concept doesn’t float. (Graphic fiction. 12-15)

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Get Moving with Singer and Pham B Y JU LI E

DA NI ELSON

I recently ran across an article about how sitting all day is making us unhealthy.

It makes all the sense in the world, but many of us have jobs that simply necessitate sitting at desks most of the day (such as, ahem, writing about children’s books). So, even though we know it’s true, it’s still a bummer to read.

happiest), this poetry collection, to be released at the end of the month from Clarion, celebrates the beautiful thing that is imaginative outdoor play in the lives of children.

Whether it’s playing catch with one’s dog, swinging with wild abandon, catching fireflies, or running through the sprinkler, Singer captures the inherent exultations of being young and carefree in the outdoors. One of the book’s pleasures, in fact, is that she gets very specific in some poems, noting particular games: Double Dutch on the jump rope; jacks on the sidewalk; Monkey in the Middle with the basketball; a variation on Swinging Statue (my favorite as a child), involving a Sculptor and Clay; and more.

Framing the collection within the span of a day—Singer opens with a poem celebrating outdoor play on a summer morning and closes with a poem about stargazing—she includes variety in her poetic forms. There are rhyming couplets, there’s a poem for two voices, and there are other surprises in between (including one take on “Hey Diddle Diddle”).

Two weeks ago, I wrote about new picture books that address depression in children’s literature. Consider this the flip side: Pham depicts nearly every child in this book (and there are many) with huge smiles. Her digitally colored, pencil-and-ink illustrations are filled with movement and color. Kirkus’ starred review notes the Ezra Jack Keats vibe in Pham’s art here, pointing out the great warmth. This is an observant point, but the penultimate spread is also its own Wild Rumpus, so throw in a note of Sendakian joy, too. In this, the book’s titular poem, the children parade with their sticks in hand, one boy with a crown on his head: “A stick is an excellent thing. / If you find the perfect one, / it’s a scepter for a king. / A stick is an excellent thing.”

Now, when you take the advice of health professionals and get up from your desk to get yourself moving for a

A friend who’s a second-grade teacher visited recently. She told me that she did a quick, informal survey with her students about the number of screens in their lives on which they could, say, watch a movie, whether it’s a laptop, a monitor in their family’s vehicle, an iPad, etc. Two students in her class had over 25 screens in their home and car on which they could watch a movie or TV show. None of them had fewer than five, and only one had fewer than 10.

I’m not one to demonize A) working at one’s desk, or B) modern forms of entertainment for children, even if I will always prefer snuggling with my own children and reading aloud picture books and novels. But our sedentary, screen-filled lives are all the more reason to share Marilyn Singer’s latest poetry collection with our children, with the primary reason being that it’s simply a good book.

A Stick is an Excellent Thing: Poems Celebrating Outdoor Play delivers just what the title promises. Brimming with the joyful illustrations of LeUyen Pham (she depicts children here at their |

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bit during the work day, perhaps your legs can take you to the nearest library or bookstore for this collaboration from Singer and Pham.

It’s well worth the exercise.

9 Julie Danielson (Jules) has, in her own words, conducted approximately eleventy billion interviews and features of authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog focused primarily on illustration and picture books.

A Stick Is an Excellent Thing: Poems Celebrating Outdoor Play

Marilyn Singer, illus.

by LeUyen Pham Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (40 pp.) $16.99 Feb. 2, 2012 9780547124933 &

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“The characters…sparkle, and even amid drama the narration remains lighthearted enough to appeal beyond bookish readers.” from the unbearable book club for unsinkable girls

ANYWAY* *A Story about Me with 138 Footnotes, 27 Exaggerations, and 1 Plate of Spaghetti Salm, Arthur Simon & Schuster (192 pp.) $15.99 | May 1, 2012 978-1-4424-2930-7

Can 12-year-old Max become someone totally new at family summer camp?

When his parents announce the three of them are going to camp together for a week, Max initially wishes he could stay home, like his college-age brother, Ben. Not that Max would want to actually stay with Ben, who has the temperament of a grizzly bear. However, on the way to camp, Max realizes he will be able to be anyone, to act any way, to say anything about himself that he wants to in a camp full of strangers. Thus Mad Max is born. After a couple of (tame) adventures with the wilder kids at camp while his parents are otherwise occupied, Max begins to rethink his new persona. Still, there were aspects of Mad Max that he liked. Can he import those traits into his home life, find out why bully Wiley McNaught hates him and maybe kiss a girl?

Salm’s debut is a meandering tale with a narrator who leaves no aside unexplored… even within other asides. The hand-lettered footnotes wear thin early on, especially those that explain why Max’s witticisms are so funny. The characters are realistic enough, but the scattershot plot and abrupt end leave much to be desired. Scattered doodles add visual interest but seem largely unrelated to the text.

Preteen boys might initially identify with Max’s love of baseball and his nervousness around girls, but they will be too bored to finish his “adventure.” (Fiction. 9-12)

THE UNBEARABLE BOOK CLUB FOR UNSINKABLE GIRLS

Schumacher, Julie Delacorte (240 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $19.99 May 8, 2012 978-0-385-73773-9 978-0-375-98571-3 e-book 978-0-385-90685-2 PLB In a novel tailor-made for literature teachers, four unwilling high-school girls and their mothers join a summer book club with both comic and tragic results.

In the summer before her junior year, Adrienne, recovering from a knee injury, falls under the influence of beautiful and irresponsible CeeCee, another reluctant member of the book club. Adrienne has always had a good relationship with her mother, but CeeCee flippantly bullies her into late-night excursions that do not end well and pesters Adrienne about her absent father. Reluctant to blame CeeCee for anything, 518

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Adrienne instead begins to worry that her single mother sees her as a “mistake.” Meanwhile the two other girls, Jill and Wallis have problems of their own. Adrienne constantly re-injures her knee during CeeCee’s midnight outings, the mothers begin quarreling with one another and circumstances deteriorate until the girls’ final nighttime jaunt ends tragically. Schumacher weaves the narrative around common literary terms, such as setting, mood and conflict, which she illustrates in their respective chapters. Always a bookworm, Adrienne also ties her firstperson narration into the five books the club reads, including The Left Hand of Darkness, Frankenstein and The Awakening. The characters, especially the four girls, sparkle, and even amid drama the narration remains lighthearted enough to appeal beyond bookish readers.

Smart and insightful. (Realistic fiction. 12 & up)

THE MARKED

Scott, Inara Hyperion (320 pp.) $16.99Apr. 3, 2012 978-1-4231-1637-0 Series: Talents Trilogy, 2 The intrigue deepens at Delcroix Academy in volume two of the Talents Trilogy (The Candidates, 2010).

Dancia Lewis has always been different, not surprising for a girl with a potential Level Three talent for manipulating forces of nature.

But even among her gifted peers at Delcroix Academy, Dancia doesn’t quite fit in. She not only has one of the greatest powers the school has ever seen but also the street smarts to realize that there is something more to the Program and its Chief Recruiter, Mr. Judan, than meets the eye. Though Dancia is working hard to learn to control her powers, she’s increasingly distracted by her mounting suspicions. Why did her best friend Jack choose to live a life on the run rather than commit to the Program? How much does her boyfriend Cam really know about Mr. Judan and the secret operations he oversees? This outing is likely to please fans of the series. Dancia is a likable heroine, and it’s fun to watch as she comes into her own, both harnessing her powers and gaining the confidence to stand up for what’s right even in the face of danger. Though there is far too little of Jack, diminishing the potential for a truly juicy love triangle, there’s plenty to keep readers entertained.

Still, not likely to win new fans to the series. (Supernatural mystery. 12 & up)

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DINOSAUR PET

Sedaka, Marc Illus. by Bowers, Tim Imagine Publishing (28 pp.) $17.95 | May 1, 2012 978-1-936140-36-7 Sedaka rewrites “Calendar Girl” for the Stone Age set.

Neil’s son, Marc, reworks the lyrics of his father’s famous song. Endpapers show a happy little boy sliding down a dinosaur’s tail, and title page depicts him lugging a big purple egg down the street as a puzzled pooch looks on. “I love, I love, I love / my dinosaur pet,” the text begins, offering 13 additional bright two-page pictures (one for each month and a bonus). In January, the egg hatches: “[H]e’s breaking out of his shell.” Then February: “His body’s starting to swell.” (He’s bright green with purple stripes.) And so it goes through the year, with the dinosaur growing bigger and bigger. In April, “when he sleeps with me / he crushes the bed.” In July, “like the fireworks, / he touches the sky.” September, “just the tail alone is / thirty feet long.” And December, “come the new year, things are / gonna get rough.”

The final picture has the little boy seated at a piano, which the dinosaur is large enough to wrap all the way around, head and tail crossing. The dinosaur, the illustrations and the book itself are all appropriately big, and it’s hard to beat the catchiness of the tune. The accompanying CD features this track for children and two more all performed by Neil Sedaka.

Sure to get toddlers and early readers dancing. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE PLANT HUNTERS True Stories of Their Daring Adventures to the Far Corners of the Earth Silvey, Anita Farrar, Straus and Giroux (96 pp.) $19.99 | Apr. 10, 2012 978-0-374-30908-4

Greed! Obsession! A passion for nature and travel! All these and more have driven intrepid explorers to search for exotic plants around the globe for centuries.

Most of these hunters have been altruistic professionals seeking valuable plants to advance the cause of science and medicine or to improve their nations’ economy with potential commercial crops. In their pursuit many experienced serious illness and injury, extremes of harsh weather and terrain in remote locales, not to mention encounters with dangerous animals, insects and fellow humans. Yet the thrill of the chase, the love of adventure and the outdoors and the tantalizing belief that the objects of their desire indeed lay at the end of their arduous journeys spurred these men and women on, despite the challenges. Some didn’t survive the trip home. Today searches continue so that scientists may catalog Earth’s biodiversity and develop massive seed stockpiles against any future catastrophic destruction of plant life. The slim, engaging narrative paints vivid portraits of these botanic adventurers. It is |

smoothly written, smartly paced and filled with exciting tales of risk taking and derring-do. Handsome visuals include contemporary maps, photographs, sketches, paintings and excellent botanic illustrations.

Who could have imagined that something as seemingly ordinary as a plant could incite such ardor and devotion? (timeline, author’s note, notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 9-13)

TALLULAH’S SOLO

Singer, Marilyn Illus. by Boiger, Alexandra Clarion (40 pp.) $16.99 | May 1, 2012 978-0-547-33004-4

The ballerina-in-training sparkles in her return engagement when she learns to be a good big sister and to share the spotlight.

Tallulah, of Tallulah’s Tutu (2011), is certain that she will star in her school’s winter recital of the Frog Prince and shows little patience with younger brother, Beckett, who has joined her in ballet studies. Her head swells with visions of flowers for her outstanding performance as the princess. Meanwhile, Beckett pays little attention and even spends a stint in the time-out chair. Surprise! Beckett’s jumping skills land him the role of the Frog before princedom, and Tallulah is, alas, only a lady-inwaiting. The moment of reckoning arrives when their mother asks Tallulah to help her crying and nervous little brother. That she does, commendably. The result is a wonderful performance that is instrumental in landing each of them starring roles in the spring production of Hansel and Gretel. Veteran Singer approaches both issues—ego and sibling bonding—with a sure hand. Boiger once again uses watercolors in balletic shades of lilac, blue and green to great effect and creates a welcoming studio and stage setting.

A lovely story that gently and effectively presents common childhood difficulties wrapped in a world of tutus and sparkles. (Picture book. 3-7)

THE STORM MAKERS

Smith, Jennifer E. Little, Brown (384 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 3, 2012 978-0-316-17958-4

Contemporary twins in rural Wisconsin discover what’s really behind the weather in this meteorological tale of power and sibling solidarity.

A year ago, Ruby and Simon’s parents quit their jobs in a Chicago suburb and moved to a small farm to pursue dreams now threatened by a severe drought. The children have always been close, but since turning 12, Simon seems moody and withdrawn. When

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a freak thunderstorm coincides with Simon’s sudden illness, a mysterious stranger named Otis reveals that Simon is a Storm Maker, one of a select few with power to control the weather.

The youngest Storm Maker on record, Simon has tremendous potential, but he is threatened by Rupert London, chairman of MOSS (Makers of Storms Society). London hopes to coerce Simon into participating in his sinister agenda, stirring up destructive weather events. Initially overwhelmed, Simon must choose between preventing disaster by stabilizing the weather or joining forces with London. In a surprising climax, Simon realizes how much he needs his science-savvy twin. Building like a summer storm, the pace and drama accelerate as thunderstorms, earthquakes, wildfires and tornadoes buffet the twin protagonists, who stand together as they face the elements.

Black-and-white illustrations capture dramatic scenes.

Credible and timely fantasy for the global-warming generation. (Fantasy. 8-12)

JAKE AND LILY

Spinelli, Jerry Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $15.99 | May 8, 2011 978-0-06-028135-9

As if growing up isn’t hard enough, twins also have to face growing apart.

Ever since they can remember, twins Jake and Lily Wambold, born on the California Zephyr train, have sleepwalked on the eve of their birthday and awoken at their local train station, where they distinctly smell pickles. They have never been able to explain this or how they can occasionally read each other’s minds or finish each other’s sentences. The twins name their secret gift “goombla.” It’s now the summer before middle school. The brother and sister alternate telling each chapter as spunky, tomboy Lily worries that they’ll lose their goombla and sensible Jake looks forward to living separately for a change. Each sibling’s chatty narration reveals a range of emotions. Lily, feeling lost for the first time in her life, leans on her hippie grandfather, whose wife and soul mate passed away and who knows what it’s like to lose half of oneself.

Just when she’s given up on finding herself through ridiculous hobbies, friendship comes to her. Meanwhile, Jake immediately relishes his time with his new Death Rays posse as they scout out social outcast “goobers” to pick on. When he realizes that goobers can be brave and even friends, he reconsiders his allegiance. Perhaps Jake and Lily aren’t so different after all.

Double the feelings, double the fun. (Fiction. 8-12)

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IT JES’ HAPPENED When Bill Traylor Started To Draw

Tate, Don Illus. by Christie, R. Gregory Lee & Low (32 pp.) $17.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-60060-260-3 Tate and Christie capture the spirit behind the work of Bill Traylor, “one of the most important self-taught American folk artists of the twentieth century.”

Traylor went from slavery to sharecropping to raising his family in rural Alabama. In his early 80s, having outlived his family, he moved to Montgomery, sleeping on sidewalks and in doorways and alleys. In his loneliness, he dwelt upon “the saved-up memories of earlier times,” and, with the sidewalk as his studio, began drawing. He drew cats, cups, snakes, birds and what he saw around him in Montgomery: the blacksmith’s shop, people walking dogs, men in tall hats and women in long dresses. Christie must feel himself a kindred spirit to Bill Traylor, his acrylic and gouache illustrations sharing Traylor’s palette of rich color, whimsical humor and sense of play with the human form. In his debut as a picture-book author, Tate crafts prose that is clear and specific, the lively text sometimes surrounded by playful figures cavorting off the pages as Traylor draws them. Though an author’s note is provided, an artist’s note would have been welcome.

An important picture-book biography that lovingly introduces this “outsider” artist to a new generation. (source notes, afterword) (Picture book/biography. 6-11)

THE LONERS

Thomas, Lex Egmont USA (406 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Apr. 24, 2012 978-1-60684-329-1 978-1-60684-330-7 e-book Series: Quaranteen, 1 Lawlessness and violence erupt in a quarantined high school.

David Thorpe can’t ditch school and his ex-friends on the football team because it’s his epileptic younger brother’s first day. That’s the day a weapons manufacturer’s biologically improbable virus reaches the school—a suspension-of-disbelief–necessary germ that infects teenagers but kills everyone else. However, the virus leaves teens as they leave puberty, taking their resistance but allowing them a chance to escape. Government technology tells the exact date a student will leave puberty and quarantine, just from a thumb on a scanner. Knowledge of this “escape date” undermines the novel’s potential for claustrophobic tension. The breakdown into chaos and establishment of new orders (fierce fighting for resources dropped every two weeks) are mostly skipped over. The virus causes white hair, enabling cliques (Varsity, Geeks, Nerds, Freaks, Skaters, the Pretty Ones and Sluts) to dye their hair uniform

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“Beautiful, vibrant fish—although not ones found in nature—illustrate emotions in this art piece for children and for adults translated from the Dutch.” from happy

colors for identification. David and the other outsiders must fight the strict caste system by forming their own clique. The female-dominated groups—Pretty Ones and Sluts—reflect a tiresome woman-as-commodity approach. The female lead and love-triangle anchor (fought over by David and his brother) only occasionally shows signs of personality and is offended but also “excited” by unwanted groping. Additionally, the major characters’ voices are indistinguishable and the villain cartoonishly evil— characterization is generally ignored in favor of more gore.

At least this battle for survival has gore going for it. (Science fiction. 14-18)

WUFTOOM

Thompson, Mary G. Clarion (256 pp.) $16.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-547-63724-2 In this unfulfilling fable, a young boy transforms into a worm and is thrust into a war against his will.

Evan has been bedridden for two years with a disease that has caused him to become sensitive to light and his limbs to fuse. No doctor can cure him, because he’s changing into a large grub called a Wuftoom. As he transforms, Evan is torn between the Wuftoom and their sworn enemies, the giant Vitflys, who want Evan to act as their spy among the worms. Once in their underground sewer camp, Evan must decide whether to betray the Wuftoom in order to save his mother, who is being held hostage by the Vitflys. While the unusual premise initially intrigues, Thompson’s earnest tone quickly wears thin, and her worldbuilding is unconvincing. The origins of the Wuftoom are given scant explanation: “We have lived since the earliest men came to this place. No one knows how the first one appeared.

But we spread through the greed of men.” The legions of Wuftoom are mostly indistinguishable, and the rather tepid ending is equally disappointing. It’s unclear if the author meant to pen a Metamorphosis for kids or a creepy horror story, but the resulting novel doesn’t work as either.

Squash this worm. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

APPLEWHITES AT WIT’S END

Tolan, Stephanie S. Harper/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $15.99 | May 8, 2012 978-0-06-057938-8

In Newbery Honor–winning Surviving the Applewhites (2002), Jake Semple, the big-city “bad kid,” didn’t know how he’d manage a year with that irrepressible clan. In this sequel Jake’s back, but it’s the Applewhites who don’t know how or if they’ll make it. |

Thanks to an embezzling financial manager, they’re facing ruin. Theater-director dad Randolph decides to raise money by opening a creative-arts summer camp on their property, at which his uber-talented family will teach gifted kids. As with all of Randolph’s plans, the family is initially skeptical.

They pull together when it really counts, though, and soon things are humming and the stage is set for a rousing summer. Just a couple problems, though—threatening notes are turning up in the mailbox, and a mysterious stranger’s nosing around. Organizational-genius daughter E.D. and Jake are on the case, eventually enlisting the aid of the rest of the family. Together with the campers, they devise an ingenious plot to foil the enemy in a satisfying, comical solution to a not-very-mystifying puzzle. The Applewhites remain humorous, heartwarming and devoted to their respective crafts and each other. The campers are fairly successfully realized, though most characterizations are superficial.

Readers who liked the first book will appreciate this one, too, and the glimmerings of a few romances on the horizon will satisfy. (Fiction. 10-13)

HAPPY

van Hout, Mies Illus. by van Hout, Mies Lemniscaat USA (52 pp.) $17.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-1-935954-14-9 Beautiful, vibrant fish—although not ones found in nature— illustrate emotions in this art piece for children and for adults translated from the Dutch.

Each double-page spread is constructed with an image of a fish on one side, in what looks like a chalk drawing on a blackboard. Opposite is a single hand-lettered word, also drawn in chalk or crown, on a jewel-toned, textured sheet. “Brave” is a very small pale fish with a tentative smile, isolated in the lower corner of the black page, opposite a cherry-red page with the word brave in lower-case white letters. “Sad” is small, smeared letters on a blue page like streaks of rain or tears. The large blue fish opposite has little definition; eyes and mouth are almost invisible in its misery. The “content” green fish aligns itself in the precise middle of the page; one can almost see it wriggling in its satisfaction. The “shocked” square-ish fish is shocking pink and purple and prickly, with open mouth and round eyes. The line, color, and texture make each page a pleasure to return to, and each single word is fully expressed in its corresponding picture.

Along with the azure-and–sky-blue ovoid fish at the end, readers will pronounce themselves, in yellow, white and green letters, “delighted.” (Picture book. 4-10)

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“Breaking away from Arthurian legends …Wein delivers a heartbreaking tale of friendship during World War II.” from code name verity

HOOEY HIGGINS AND THE SHARK

Voake, Steve Illus. by Dodson, Emma Candlewick (112 pp.) $14.99Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-7636-5782-6

Best friends Hooey and Twig go to great lengths to raise money to buy a giant chocolate egg.

Mr. Danson wants to raise money to build a new shop window with his name etched into it, like a “true chocolatier.” Hooey and Twig just want his enormous oeuf en chocolat, which sports an equally oversized price tag. Being 8-year-olds, they are willing to take on the fundraising challenge, coming up with one plan after another. First, they try to catch a shark for the reward that they imagine will follow.

While spilling ketchup to attract the shark, Hooey discovers a giant sea urchin and comes up with a plot to charge folks to see it. Things never go the way they are supposed to, of course, and the urchin proves to be more than the boys can handle.

Over-the-top situations are matched perfectly with exaggerated black-and-white illustrations. Anything that skinny, spiky-haired Hooey doesn’t want to do will be embraced by big-eared Twig, including wearing a sandwich board and gluing straws in his hair to mimic a sea urchin. Mix in some underwear, a World War II sea mine and old guys wearing the Union Jack on their swim trunks, and you’ve got a romp that might just drag a few eyes away from the Wimpy Kid books.

Fast-paced fun. (Chapter book. 7-12)

CODE NAME VERITY

Wein, Elizabeth Hyperion (352 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | May 15, 2012 978-1-4231-5219-4 978-1-4231-5325-2 e-book Breaking away from Arthurian legends (The Winter Prince, 1993, etc.), Wein delivers a heartbreaking tale of friendship during World War II. In a cell in Nazi-occupied France, a young woman writes. Like Scheherezade, to whom she is compared by the SS officer in charge of her case, she dribbles out information—”everything I can remember about the British War Effort”—in exchange for time and a reprieve from torture. But her story is more than a listing of wireless codes or aircraft types. Instead, she describes her friendship with Maddie, the pilot who flew them to France, as well as the real details of the British War Effort: the breaking down of class barriers, the opportunities, the fears and victories not only of war but of daily life. She also describes, almost casually, her unbearable current situation and the SS officer who holds her life in his hands and his beleaguered female associate, who translates 522

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the narrative each day. Through the layers of story, characters (including the Nazis) spring to life. And as the epigraph makes clear, there is more to this tale than is immediately apparent.

The twists will lead readers to finish the last page and turn back to the beginning to see how the pieces slot perfectly, unexpectedly into place.

A carefully researched, precisely written tour de force; unforgettable and wrenching. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

TRACKS

Wilson, Diane Lee McElderry (288 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 13, 2012 978-1-4424-2013-7 An interesting historical setting is marred by a morally ambiguous protagonist.

When his father dies in the Civil War, 13-year-old Malachy, now head of his household, heads to California to help build the transcontinental railroad. The work is back-breakingly hard, unglamorous and dangerous, but Malachy perseveres. Occasionally he finds himself working alongside Chinese immigrant laborers, who usually keep themselves separate, sleeping and eating alone. One in particular is a boy he names Ducks. Ducks saves Malachy’s life more than once, but Malachy resents Ducks and rebuffs his friendly gestures. When the Chinese go on strike for equal wages, Malachy steals a bag of gold from the railroad. Ducks takes the blame and is forced to work without pay for a year. When, at the end, he forgives Malachy at the drop of a hat, it strikes a disappointing and unrealistic note. It’s hard to feel sympathy for Malachy, who gambles and steals and, though he feels remorse, never does anything to make amends. While years pass in the novel, and readers are told Malachy grows and matures, they never really see this growth or truly believe it. Wilson’s vigorous, lively prose, her fascinating setting and her meticulous attention to historical detail—including the Chinese workers’ customs and a blind horse named Thomas— can’t overcome the deficiencies in her story.

In the end, they ride off into the sunset—too bad it’s not credible. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

THE WORD COLLECTOR

Wimmer, Sonja Translated by Brokenbrow, Jon Illus. by Wimmer, Sonja Cuento de Luz (36 pp.) $14.95 | Apr. 1, 2012 978-84-15241-34-8

A young girl shares her love of words and their power in this fanciful tribute to language.

Luna, who lives in the sky, collects words. “Words so beautiful that they make you cry, friendly words that embrace your soul.... / Magic words, delicious words... magnificent words.”

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But one day the words stop coming. Luna learns that the people have become too busy to remember the importance of words.

With her collection, she travels across the land. Where Luna finds darkness and despair she plants words of compassion and love. When her words run out, people begin to create—and generously share—new words. Playful type and placement of text personify the words, as they luminously glow in a jar, fly in a cage or float from a page, seamlessly integrated with the images.

Wimmer’s illustrations, done with a European sensibility, are even and rendered with the same texture throughout, perhaps to allow the words to shine. Unfortunately, while the text appears free-spirited, the painting is labored and overworked.

It is a testament to her impeccable design that the spreads are visually interesting, despite the drawings, and manage to create a compelling story. An addendum that reproduces the text in conventional layout is included to give readers clarity, as the spreads are so whimsically designed.

Beautiful, haunting descriptions of words and the power they hold will make this a favorite for linguaphiles, both old and new. (Picture book. 4-7)

k i r k u s r o u n d- u p easter & bunny picture books WAKE UP, IT’S EASTER

sometimes a little sing-song, but the pleasant, cheery tone of the text is matched by soft-focus illustrations in bright, jewel tones against azure blue skies.

A jovial, sunny story with a slightly unusual interpretation of the role of rabbits in Easter celebrations. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE HOUSE OF 12 BUNNIES

Stills, Caroline & Stills-Blott, Sarcia Illus. by Rossell, Judith Holiday House (24 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2422-1

Twelve adorable bunnies, each with a different color or pattern of fur, play together in their rambling Victorian house in this sweet counting book.

Soft-focus watercolor-and-pencil illustrations are filled with traditional toys and cozy furniture, with each spread focusing on a different room of the house. The simple text for each room presents a list of 12 related items to search for, such as “7 buckets, 2 brooms, 2 mops, and a duster without any feathers.” One of the bunnies, a pure-white charmer named Sophia, is too busy to interact with her siblings because she is searching in each room for a mysterious lost item. Sophia finds the missing item (a book) under her quilt, and the final pages depict all 12 bunnies cuddled up together as Sophia reads to her brothers and sisters. Preschoolers who are learning to count will enjoy finding all the named items and counting up all the bunnies in each room. Budding mathematicians will find other sets of 12 cleverly incorporated in the illustrations: 12 toothbrushes, 12 bunny portraits and 12 windows in the house.

A pleasant way to practice counting skills, with additional beginning math concepts quietly woven into both text and illustrations. (Picture book. 2-6)

Krüss, James Illus. by Weldin, Frauke NorthSouth (32 pp.) $16.95 | Feb. 1, 2012 978-0-7358-4070-6

THE EASTER BUNNY’S ASSISTANT

This pleasant, rhyming story was first published in Switzerland, adapted from a children’s poem that describes several animals working together to alert all the rabbits that Easter is coming.

In the introductory pages, Mr. Croak the raven flies down to tell Vicki Vole that Easter is coming. She spruces up for the holiday “as all good creatures do” and then sets off to find her friend Rob Rabbit. He appears to be in bed recovering from a cold, but he bounds up and takes off in a hurry to spread the news to the other rabbits about Easter’s impending arrival. The final spread shows several rabbits at a distance romping across a green field with tiny eggs just visible hidden among the spring flowers. Mr. Croak and Vicki Vole enjoy a cup of tea together as one rabbit approaches them with baskets of decorated eggs. The story could not be much slighter, and the rhymes are |

Thomas, Jan Illus. by Thomas, Jan Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $12.99 | PLB $13.89 | Feb. 1, 2012 978-0-06-169286-4 978-0-06-169287-1 PLB This super-simple story with bold, cartoon-style illustrations features just two characters, the Easter Bunny and a skunk, and one joke: The overly enthusiastic skunk can’t control his excitement, leading repeatedly to unpleasantly odiferous results.

The Easter Bunny clearly explains the process for dyeing Easter eggs, with a few numbered steps and easy instructions in speech balloons. The skunk releases his stench at each step until the Easter Bunny sends him outside. After pleading to be reinstated as the Easter Bunny’s assistant, the skunk is allowed to help deliver the finished eggs, but the bunny has protected himself with a clothespin on his nose. The story isn’t much; all the fun is in Thomas’ cleverly rendered facial expressions, body language

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and Saturday-morning-cartoon pacing. The simple plot and bold, heavily outlined illustrations, as well as the stinky-funny humor will appeal to kids in the early elementary grades as well as to older children with limited reading ability. The directions for making Easter eggs are repeated in numbered format on the last spread.

An amusing approach to a popular springtime craft, presented with a spray of not-so-subtle humor. (Picture book. 4-10)

PIGGY BUNNY

Vail, Rachel Illus. by Tankard, Jeremy Feiwel & Friends (32 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 28, 2012 978-0-312-64988-3 Another entry in the well-populated genre of animals that experience an existential crisis features a pig who wants to be the Easter Bunny.

Liam the piglet practices hopping and delivering eggs. He tries to like salad. And he copes with his siblings, who tease him, and his parents, who offer lots of advice about what a perfect piglet son he is, without any need for change. His grandparents, however, are more supportive of his unusual ambition, and they provide him with an Easter Bunny suit. (They order it from the Internet, as they are modern grandparents who don’t do homemade costumes.) The costume isn’t perfect, but it gives Liam the confidence to believe in his transformation, and others then accept his new role as well. The understated conclusion could even be interpreted to mean that Liam becomes the Easter Bunny, but each reader can decide what Liam’s role really means.

Simple cartoon-style illustrations with thick black outlines are set off against bright backgrounds with lots of pink accents playing up the porcine premise.

Though the believe-in-yourself theme has been told in many ways, Liam holds his own with his quiet determination. Who can resist a piglet who introduces himself with “Hello, my name is Liam and I’ll be your Easter Bunny”?

(Picture book. 3-6)

FIVE FUNNY BUNNIES Three Bouncing Tales

Van Leeuwen, Jean Illus. by Wilsdorf, Anne Marshall Cavendish (40 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 1, 2012 978-0-7614-6114-2

Three interlinked short stories about a big rabbit family add up to a satisfying whole with humorous plots, witty text and utterly charming illustrations.

In the first story, Mrs. Rabbit and her five children bake a berry pie for their grandmother, but the pie flips over onto the children in a slapstick sequence as they take it to grandma’s house. Next, the bunnies play outside with a scooter and pogo sticks, trying to outdo one another, until Baby Sadie outdoes 524

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them all when she learns to hop by herself. In the final and funniest story, Flossie the bossy older sister pretends she is the mother putting the children to bed. When the younger bunnies pull typical bedtime stalling tricks, Flossie spins a magical tale of a princess and a dragon that puts everyone to sleep in a rewarding conclusion. The text is masterfully paced, with just the right combination of drama, action and dialogue, spiced with a droll sense of humor. Watercolor-and-ink illustrations provide individual personalities and amusing expressions for the rabbits, who live in a well-appointed home full of comfy furniture and familiar toys.

This fresh and funny look at family life will have both children and adults chuckling. (Picture book. 3-6)

interactive e-books CHICKEN IN THE KITCHEN

Ayalon, Ori Illus. by Ayalon, Ori Touchoo $2.99 | Dec. 22, 2011 1.0; Dec. 22, 2011

Crude drawings and simple interactions don’t hold this guided tour of a modern home, but its soundtrack may.

A large chicken stands in front of a white picket fence, beckoning readers to touch a doorknob (yes, a doorknob on a fence) to enter. From there, things only get stranger. As readers explore a garden, a living room, an attic, a kitchen and other rooms in a house, the chicken keeps popping up. It pops out of drawers, emerges from the toilet and appears from behind the television set. What does this chicken want? Does it own the house, or is it merely an avian interloper? Readers will never find out, but they will learn that this chicken likes to dance. At the end of a series of challenges, such as finding a pillow or a garden hose, the chicken jumps out, dancing to an addictive earworm of a song. The bulk of the app, which involves tapping objects on screen when prompted and activating others that are highlighted, is responsive and satisfying for young readers still learning basic words. The app’s art is not particularly slick, and there’s no story to speak of (even the kitchen scene promised in the title is anticlimactic), but the chicken’s dance theme and the ease of navigation in the app nearly make up for it.

It’s certainly not the most attractive app on the market, but its twitchy, cackling, dance-happy main character has a certain air of mystery that’s hard to resist. (iPad storybook app. 18 mos.-5)

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“A seamless blend of realistic graphics, high-resolution photography and well-chosen interactive features makes for an inviting introduction to bat behavior and types.” from bats !

BATS! Furry Fliers of the Night

Carson, Mary Kay Story Worldwide $4.99 | Jan. 30, 2012 1.01; Jan. 30, 2012 A seamless blend of realistic graphics, high-resolution photography and wellchosen interactive features makes for an inviting introduction to bat behavior and types.

In each of the seven topical sections, Carson’s short overview commentary is supplemented by captions and touch-activated windows. These show, for instance, a map of major bat colonies with touch-activated sub-windows or what a human skeleton with bat wings would look like and how it would articulate. The screen-filling nighttime scenes are sometimes sequential; one series leads viewers in stages into the Bracken Bat Cave in Texas, for instance, to view a huge mound of guano. Hidden bats (always specific, identified types) on several screens can be “spotted” with a fingertip. The “Seeing with Sound” chapter features a “record” button that allows readers to see their own bat screeches in action, and the closing animation is a tiltcontrolled bat’s-eye “flight” over a moonlit landscape. The onscreen slider that appears to signal that the next page has loaded may prompt too-quick digits to flick before the narrator is quite through, but its bottom-to-top action is pleasingly different from the usual site-swiping motion as well as suiting its aerial subject. Overall, navigation is smooth, and the special features enhance rather than distract from the presentation.

A winner: beautifully illustrated, nicely designed and solidly informative. (iPad informational app. 6-9)

THE PORTAL IN THE PARK Casey, Cricket Ninestars $0.99 | Dec. 3, 2011 1.0; Dec. 3, 2011

A well-meant but pathetically inept paean to the virtues of emotional balance and physical exercise is boosted, though not very high, by seven songs from a pair of renowned Grammy winners.

Heavily abridged from previously published print and audiobook editions, the skeletal plot projects young bully Scott through a portal in New York’s Central Park. He falls into the clutches of monsters named Fearoid and Angroid until Sitara, the Queen of Self-Esteem and other members of the buff Cortex Rescue Team arrive. They deliver him to wise Relato, Master of Reality for a sermonette on responsibility interspersed with bland hip-hop lyrics. Reformed, Scott returns to the park and turns his friends into believers with mystic light from a little box. Appearing piecemeal on most but not all screens, the text can be read either silently or by a breathy narrator. There is |

also a self-record option but no other interactive feature aside from manual-advance arrows and a pale light that will follow a fingertip around each screen. The cartoon art is so perfunctory that Scott’s figure is repeatedly cut and pasted unchanged into multiple scenes. Along with the occasional misspelling and sentence fragment, the prose runs to stunning lines like “…her eyes pop open, staring at the most loathsome and weird-looking creatures with hairy limbs undulating and pulsating above the water’s surface.” The songs, all shoehorned into one of the seven chapters, are written and performed by Grandmaster Mele Mel with help on two cuts from Lady Gaga.

Star power may fuel sales, but Casey’s semiliterate prose conveys her message(s) with notable incoherence. (iPad storybook app. 8-12)

SWAN GEESE Russian Folk Tale

D.B.S. Alliance D.B.S. Alliance $2.99 1.1; Jan. 7, 2012

Nominal effects and scant interactivity do little to enhance this Russian folktale When a little girl neglects her babysitting duties, her brother is carried away by a flock of swan geese, and she goes in search of him. She asks for help along the way from a stove, an apple tree and a brook, which each offer her something to eat or drink. When she refuses their offers, they in turn refuse to help her find her brother. She finally comes across Baba Yaga’s hut, where the witch is preparing to cook and eat her brother. A little mouse creates a diversion so the two children can escape, but Baba Yaga sends the swan geese to recapture them. On the way home, when the children meet up with the brook, apple tree and stove, the little girl accepts what they offer, and they hide the children from the swan geese. The story ends abruptly when the children arrive home safely: “And then her parents came back.” There is no title page or menu, and bare-bones navigation leaves readers stuck moving page-by-page forward or back. Though there is no narration, there are some sound-effects.

The best features of the app are the lovely, old-fashioned illustrations, which have been sparingly animated.

Unfortunately, this is a case where minimal effort yields corresponding results. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

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“The cumulative effect gives readers (especially young ones) a small sense of the scale of the Earth and its many inhabitants.” from children around the world

KONG King of Skull Island

Devito, Joe & Strickland, Brad Illus. by Devito, Joe Copyright 1957 $4.99 | Jan. 4, 2012 1.0; Jan. 4, 2012 Positively awash in high melodrama, this digital version of an “authorized” sequel takes readers back to Skull Island for a flashback to Kong’s early years.

Drawn from DeVito’s 2005 illustrated print edition, passages of abridged text scroll manually over close-up views of lurid paintings and sketches depicting toothy monsters and buff natives. The tale strands two latter-day (mid-1950s, that is) explorers on the island. There, one views ancient murals and statues, and the other hears from an old storyteller a rousing tale of heroic young lovers witnessing a titanic battle between Kong’s parents and a killer dino named Gaw. An incomplete tale, the adventure stops at a cliffhanger that is signaled by a blare of organ music and a promo for an upcoming Part 2. Aside from the opening and closing screens there is no animation, but abundant zooms, dissolves and pans heighten the drama.

Readers can set a bookmark and tap any screen to bring up a thumbnail strip index; a double-tap produces views of the art unobscured by text. A separate gallery of the illustrations and commentary from the first edition bring up the rear.

A pulp-tastic production, though the abrupt cutoff won’t make the creators any friends. (iPad e-book app. 11-13)

CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD Guttman, Peter Photos by Guttman, Peter Banzai Labs $0.99 | Jan. 7, 2012 1.1; Jan. 16, 2012

A photo gallery–as-app is light on features yet becomes a moving visual statement communicated through the faces of hundreds of kids from around the world.

The 230 photos—often-breathtaking, in-the-moment portraits—are accessed via pins on a world map, as a slide show or as a gallery with a simple horizontal bar as navigation. Each photo has a caption that can be accessed by tapping a wordballoon button. The one-line descriptions are light on detail, yet evocative. “Wearing his last meal as lipstick, a full child takes a break from dining and greets a visitor to his simple home in a riverside African village,” reads a caption for a photo taken in Juffure, The Gambia. But it’s the faces of the children themselves that are most compelling. Whether they appear to be bored or giddy, engaged in activity or posing for a foreigner’s camera, their emotions are sometimes as clear as what the backdrops tells us about their living conditions. The cumulative effect gives readers 526

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(especially young ones) a small sense of the scale of the Earth and its many inhabitants. If there’s anything missing, it’s a cleverer way to browse the images than flipping through them one by one, pointing on a clunky map or rolling a too-tiny thumbnail bar. And, though the app is visually overstuffed, there’s no sound at all. It’s as if the kids all went eerily silent when even a few sound clips would have enhanced the app greatly.

This impressive photo set makes for a stunning, if occasionally overwhelming geographical experience. (iPad informational app. 3 & up)

ZAMZOU

Langevin, Isabelle Illus. by Langevin, Isabelle Cocomongo $4.99 | Dec. 21, 2011 1.0; Dec. 21, 2011 This amusing buddy app-venture proves that sometimes the road to paradise is paved with trouble.

Relaxing by the river, best pals Zam and Zou, fuzzy, monsterish creatures, are bored. “Nothing ever happens around here, Zam!” Zou, the polka-dotted one, says, and Zam, in stripes, suggests that a trip to the beach might be just the adventure they need. So they hop in the car and hit the road—through the city, the suburbs, three fields, a village a lake and two forests—only to be thwarted time and again. Young readers will enjoy driving the car by swiping through the scenery on the page. Additional fun includes a puzzle, a labyrinth and problem-solving activities. Help Zam and Zou recover after their crash, escape from jail and choose the right pump for refueling. But there are some potholes along the way. So many great opportunities to make Zam and Zou’s adventure memorable are simply lost for lack of sound reinforcement or interaction. This on-the-road adventure begins and continues on several pages without so much as a peep of sound. And despite its clever characters and unpredictable ending, the storytelling itself tips toward the dull side. Even more disappointing: The text is available in English, French or Spanish, but there is no read-to-me option.

Still, for those with dramatic reading skills, it might be worth the trip. (iPad storybook app. 3-5)

THE PARTY THIEF

Larsson, Mikael Ali Illus. by Larsson, Mikael Ali Acne Production $1.99 | Jan. 19, 2012 Series: Liam & the Fifflers 1.0; Jan. 19, 2012 A slapdash digital mini-mystery lacks a visible text or even relevant interactive effects.

Translated from Swedish, the audio-only narrative sends dark-skinned young Liam, a shmoo-shaped friend and a gang of wormlike little “Fifflers” on the hunt for birthday-party fixings

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that have disappeared overnight. The party is only delayed a little, though, because, by following a wandering trail of tiny black footprints, they eventually discover that the thief was the intended guest of honor. Done in a cartoon style strongly reminiscent of Annette Tison and Talus Taylor’s Barbapapa tales, the 16 manually advanced scenes feature lots of tiny creatures and details. A select few of the latter will respond to taps with a small random movement or noise that bears no relationship to the story’s events. As another sign that the creators haven’t thought things through, a large button visible on every screen silences the narration, which, though read so fast it’s hard to understand, at least makes the plot possible to follow.

Tap-happy toddlers may enjoy working the sound effects, but even they will likely lose interest after a few moments. (iPad storybook app. 3-6)

GONE WISHING

Lorenci , Luka Illus. by Jenko, Matej Gone Wishing $3.99 | Dec. 16, 2011 1.0.1; Dec. 16, 2011

The inner workings of the wish-fulfillment business are exposed in this imaginative romp, which features lush fantasy art in the service of a fairly conventional coming-of-age story.

Best Wishes is the company that collects wished-upon fountain coins, blown-out birthday candles and wishbones, granting the wishes of those who’ve pinned their hopes on these objects. But Jacob, the tiny, sad-looking genie who’s the son of the company’s director, has no talent for granting such wishes.

The story of how he uses ingenuity and invention instead of magic to make a child’s wish come true is enhanced most by beautifully gloomy art that wouldn’t look out of place in a Tim Burton animated feature. The clever animation and the interactive elements (throwing coins into a fountain with the flick of a finger or a neat set of mirrors that refract light and create a playable drum set) are entertaining. The story itself is full of great surprises (a “Shooting Star Service” for wish delivery) and fascinating peripheral characters who, sadly, get little more than a single page to shine. The nice thing about a story overstuffed with entertaining bits it doesn’t fully explore is the possibility that more stories will spring from this universe in the future.

Let’s hope that’s the case with the Best Wishes setting.

The app’s character design, expert construction and even the precise use of text in just the right spots on each page will leave readers wanting even more. (iPad storybook app. 4-10)

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CHASING FIREFLIES A Haiku Collection

Modjeski, Ryan --Ed. Honeybee Labs $1.99 | Dec. 15, 2011 1.2; Jan. 19, 2012

A collection of classic haiku accompanied by original music and lush seasonal backdrops.

Modjeski has assembled more than 150 Japanese poems written over centuries by haiku masters, including Basho, Shiki and Issa—to name only a few. The overall presentation is both lovely and in keeping with the spirit of the ancient Japanese art form, as the soft, muted illustrations and the mesmerizing score encourage readers to linger over verses and ponder their meaning. “Each Haiku,” says Vickerman in the foreword, “is dedicated to freezing a particular moment in time, like a miniature word photograph.” The app opens to a table-of-contents wheel that has no beginning or end and can be dialed to various “chiming” points on the circular spectrum. Once launched, the background image is static in composition, meaning the basic scene never changes (except that tilting the screen will change the orientation.) However, with each swipe of the text box, more poems appear, and the seasons not only change, but the music and sounds do as well.

Stormy skies give way to brilliant sunsets and gently falling snow.

The tree loses its leaves and later buds again. There’s very little interaction, which seems fitting for this meditative offering; the beauty lies in its simple invitation to tune in to the wondrous sights and sounds that regularly surround us.

A breath of fresh air. (iPad poetry app. 10 & up)

THE NUMBERLYS

MoonBot Studios MoonBot Studios $5.99 | Jan. 11, 2012 1.0.3; Jan. 13, 2012

A fanciful take on the invention of the alphabet, more a video than a fullfeatured app but through the roof for production values.

The setting seems right out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and is depicted with the accomplished 3-D modeling and monochrome gray tones of Chris Van Allsburg’s pencil work. Goose-stepping hordes of small, peglike Numberlys stamp out lines of digits in a gargantuan factory amid huge shadows and gear wheels. One night, five vaguely dissatisfied workers stay behind and with mighty efforts hammer out an alphabet letter by letter that, when released the next morning, flies out into the world to introduce both words and color to the stunned masses. Readers can help them through a limited variety of touch-controlled trampoline, pinball and dexterity games. Aside from the games, there are no interactive elements in the visuals, but smoothly animated movements and scene changes aplenty keep the characters and plot tumbling along. Read, optionally, by a narrator with an

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exaggerated German accent, the sparse text appears on separate screens and runs to witty lines like “Now, what could the next letter…be?” Directional arrows at the bottom of each screen, plus a rotating main-menu index, allow rapid back-and-forth–ing. The art’s sophistication isn’t quite matched by the attention to technical detail, as toggling the melodramatic background music off also cuts out all of the nongame sound effects.

Still—a marvelous visual, if not tactile, experience. (iPad storybook app. 5-8)

AND SO YOU WERE BORN

Parsa, Mona Illus. by Kilmer, Nidra N. Twin Peacocks Publishing $3.99 | Dec. 22, 2011 1.1; Jan. 5, 2012

A far-out meditation on the implications of being born.

This app gushes spiritual sentiment but doesn’t provide a drop of insight or practical relevance.

We are born, according to the story, because we are loved. But once here, there’s a whole lot to live up to. “God wishes you to shine / and dazzle bright” and have “a heart like an illumined lamp / and a life like a star / shining forth all of its light.” No pressure. The text assumes that as readers grow, they’ll “show many virtues,” such as living joyfully, learning to pray alone and being helpful and considerate, “just as a child of God would be.”

Beyond that there’s no context, no specifics—just a whole lot of trivial moralizing wrapped in a syrupy, mawkish text. Illustrations are bright and cheery, comprised of what one might expect with the accompanying narrative: stars and butterflies, balloons and ponies, with children frolicking in the meadow or floating through the air. Interaction is limited and profoundly basic. There are bonus jigsaw puzzles, matching games and a paint feature. “Personalized” text can be inserted in the story, and readers can access prayers/scripture from a variety of faiths—everything from Bahá’í to Zoroastrianism—which can be recorded, either visually (iPad 2) or audibly (iPad 1).

A dazzly dud. (iPad storybook app. 2-5)

POINTY AND POKEY

PixelMat PixelMat $0.99 | Jan. 4, 2012 1.0; Jan. 4, 2012

party for a little rabbit, Pointy and Pokey use their quills to protect the revelers and are hailed as heroes. Grandpa Rabbit concludes, “You should not hide your precious quills. You are good, as you are!” The message is fine, but the characterization and plot are unexceptional. Pokey is supposedly naughty, and Pointy is likewise shy, but there is never any evidence of this. Moreover, the plot depends on the myth that porcupines “throw” their quills, giving this ability to hedgehogs as well. Swipe navigation works well enough for getting forward and back, with a popup menu that will bring viewers back to the homepage. Rudimentary effects are mostly limited to animal sounds or a stream of colored confetti that is released when the screen is touched.

Some pages are designed with split panels, offering some interest, but the cartoon-style artwork is uninspired. Words are underlined as the narrator voices the text.

The worthy theme needs a better vehicle than this to carry it to its audience. (iPad storybook app. 3-7)

GOODNIGHT SAFARI

Powell, Luciana Navarro Polk Street Press $2.99 | Jan. 11, 2012 1.0; Jan. 11, 2012

A mellow bedtime book about baby animals preparing to sleep.

In this charming, sweetly illustrated book, toddlers can “join the goodnight safari” and help the animals get ready for bed. Tap a baby zebra, and he stops frolicking in the tall grass so he can join his mother.

The young giraffe needs help reaching the leaves in a tree so she can finish her dinner. Readers can also dunk the speckled rhino to wash off his muddy back and help the brown monkey swing into her “bed” in an adjacent tree. The rich, lush illustrations burst with color, and the fuzzy, sock-like texture of many animals adds to their appeal. Each page offers just enough interaction to hold the interest of rambunctious little ones, but not so much that they become overstimulated. There’s even an optional background sound-effect loop that functions much like soothing white noise—a plus when the aim is to bring the energy level down a few notches. Once tasks are completed, an arrow appears to navigate to the next page. Touch elements and page turns can be a bit sluggish (it takes repeated taps to submerge the rhino in water, for example), but overall it’s not terribly disappointing— after all, the point is to slow down and chill out.

A simple, lovely lullaby. (iPad storybook app. 1-4)

An undistinguished animal story teaches the importance of kids accepting themselves and others for who they are.

Pointy the hedgehog and Pokey the porcupine can’t make friends with the other forest animals because of their sharp quills, so their friend Spinner (a weaver bird) stitches shirts out of hay and grass to help them hide their quills. When some wolves threaten the animals at a birthday 528

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This beautiful, resonant story about the way we leave behind childish things (but never really abandon them) delivers a specific, potent experience unusual even for the best iPad apps.” from the artifacts

JESSE APPLEGATE AND THE INCREDIBLE INEDIBLE MEATBALL Schneweis, Scott The Guys in the Booth $2.99 | Dec. 19, 2011 1.0; Dec. 19, 2011

As customizable as they come, this tale of a wisecracking meatball on the run from a greedy chef can take longer to set up than to read through.

Pursued by evil Chef Bumbleshoot, who “talks with an accent” (Brooklynese), the small “animated sphere of beef ” and the lad in whose backpack he escapes go on a madcap chase. They join a bicycle race and a fashion show, then end up going out for lunch with a princess and a plainspoken cowboy (“Yippee-ki-yay, meatball lovers!”). Though the escapade can be read as downloaded, either silently or with a particularly stilted audio, it can be customized, too. Children inclined to alter the printed text or listen to their own voices can pick names and numerous other details from checklists or add, and record for the audio option, their own choices. Most of the crudely drawn cartoon scenes contain further interactive elements, from lights that switch on or off to a shooting gallery, touch-activated exclamations or snide asides (“And top of the morning to you, there, old Irish guy with hair in his ears!”). There’s also a word game and a foamy “bubble party” at the end. Icons on every screen lead to the main menu and a help feature, but there is no way to skip forward or back, nor a “default” setting to delete user changes all at once.

The plot lurches from one surreal scenario to the next, but readers can really amp up the silliness if they’ve a mind to. (iPad storybook app. 6-9)

THE PIRATE KOOSTOE

Scotto, Michael Illus. by The Ink Circle Midlandia Press $1.99 | Dec. 20, 2011 1.2; Jan. 19, 2012

A young would-be pirate learns that kindness and other intangibles are the real “treasures” in this lesson-driven episode.

The story is set around an island dubbed “Midlandia” and populated by candy-colored residents displaying odd combinations of animal and human features. It introduces a bright blue doglike character named Koostoe O. Bobo whose ambition to be a pirate founders on his discovery that stealing things is less satisfying than finding them and giving them away to friends. The slightly hazy, saturated color cartoon scenes pan, zoom and dissolve as bland music plays in the background. Meanwhile, successive lines of narrative text and dialogue scroll in and out of view along the bottom of each screen. There are no animated figures, and the skimpy assortment of touch-activated effects (marked by sprays of stars but nonfunctional until all of the text has appeared) is limited to rare starbursts and identifications of |

haphazardly selected items like a “hat” or “sail.” Along with a tutorial most users will likely find superfluous, the “help” features include a strip index and options for silent reading or audio narration either with or without automatic advance. Several discussion questions about jobs and personal interests follow the story.

A bit livelier than the simultaneously published print edition, but the digital enhancements are anemic at best. (iPad storybook app. 6-8)

CHOKKO’S ADVENTURES IN BIRDLAND The Owl Valley

Siliq Digital Siliq Digital $2.99 | Dec. 22, 2011 1.1; Jan. 7, 2012

Set up by a separate but free prelude app, the first episode of a projected four sends two intrepid chocolate drops (one white, one brown) to Bird Island on a feather-finding expedition.

Barely have the explorers landed in their banana spaceship than Latti (the white one) is snatched by a trio of chocolate-loving meerkats. Pursuing, Chokko follows the kidnappers into Owl Valley, which has been plunged into darkness by the departure of all the fireflies. By the end, Latti remains in captivity, but light is restored after Chokko teaches the feathered residents of the valley how to make candle lanterns. The stylized cartoon illustrations resemble polychrome Chinese papercuts in general form and detail. They are heavily endowed both with animated figures and also with touch- or touch-and-hold effects that range from a fingertip flashlight and moveable items to scrolling backgrounds and snatches of sound. The text and (optional) audio narration is available in nine languages (three that do not use the Roman alphabet), and both can be flicked on or off at will on any screen.

Each screen also contains slightly hidden feathers that sharpeyed viewers can “collect” with a tap. Links at the ends of both apps will go live as new chapters become available (for purchase).

A tasty confection, likely to tempt more than just its young target audience. (iPad storybook app. 5-8 and up)

THE ARTIFACTS

Stace, Lynley Illus. by Stace, Lynley Slap Happy Larry $1.99 | Dec. 8, 2011 1.1; Dec. 15, 2011

This beautiful, resonant story about the way we leave behind childish things (but never really abandon them) delivers a specific, potent experience unusual even for the best iPad apps.

Asaf, a bespectacled boy who is turning 13, is obsessed with art and antiques, and they soon clutter his room. When

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“The big question is, who will be more amused by the vehicle/driver pairings, toddlers or their parents?” from vroom vroom

his family moves, his parents take the opportunity to remove the clutter and urge Asaf to keep a neat space. In true teenage fashion, Asaf wallows in grief and drama over the change, but in time he learns that his growing mind can store more objects (albeit imaginary) and ideas than the biggest bedroom ever could. The evocative, painted artwork throughout the story is dark and moody, which makes the occasional flashes of humor all the more enjoyable. At one point, Asaf imagines a ramshackle cottage surrounded by fearsome bears... and one silly chicken, standing upright. He ends up writing a short story featuring the clucking creature. Interactive features enhance the story rather than distract from it. A sink pours out hot and cold words from two faucets instead of water (“Interest” / “Worry”; “Pleasure” / “Contempt”). A clothesline of wiggling shadows hangs across Asaf ’s bedroom. “He stepped on shadows to snag them... then strung them across his ceiling with imaginary pegs and imaginary twine.” Touching the shadows makes them spookily float toward the reader and disappear.

The story perfectly captures Asaf’s transition from a love of objects to a thirst for knowledge that goes beyond physical things. The app shows a remarkable sensitivity to this volatile moment and does it with style and grace. (iPad storybook app. 8-13)

VROOM VROOM Here We Go!

Touchoo Touchoo $1.99 | Dec. 22, 2011 1.0; Dec. 22, 2011

With 15 exciting modes of transportation at their fingertips, this is just the ticket for travel-happy or vehicle-

obsessed toddlers.

Each mode has its own whimsical character/driver and distinctively exciting motor sound effects and offers transportation by land, sea or air. The interactivity level is more than adequate for this age level, allowing readers to not only place the driver in each vehicle, but also to initiate the vehicle sounds and movement off the page. The characters add to the fun: the elk on the bicycle, with the jolly bike horn; the fox on the motorcycle, her scarf blowing in the wind upon takeoff; a big pink rabbit to drive the big yellow bus; and the frog EMT manning the ambulance. The big question is, who will be more amused by the vehicle/driver pairings, toddlers or their parents? Navigationally friendly, with auto-play, read-to-me, read-by-myself options, the app also offers a recording option whereby parents and toddlers can identify the vehicles in their own voices. And to help toddlers learn the words for all the vehicles, there’s a visual index on the last two pages, where they can practice.

The next best thing to actually jumping in or on your own bicycle, tractor, cement mixer, fire truck, race car and space ship. (iPad storybook app. 1-3)

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SKULLS BY SIMON WINCHESTER

Winchester, Simon Photos by Mann, Nick TouchPress $13.99 | Dec. 13, 2011 1.0.1; Dec. 15, 2011

Science meets art, and outstanding page and software design put this meaty survey of vertebrate frontage on the top shelf.

Winchester contributes 12 essays of diverse tone and topic, from a technical description of a skull’s component parts to a short history of skulls in art, a scornful blast at phrenology and a bemused portrait of renowned skull collector Alan Dudley.

They are solid enough, but the stars of the show are the illustrations. Hundreds of animal headpieces, drawn largely from Dudley’s huge collection and photographed with startling clarity, float on all-black backgrounds and can be viewed either in tandem with the accompanying narrative or individually full screen.

Each skull will turn (even spin) with a touch to reveal every side, and for viewers able either to cross their eyes or lay hands on a stereoscope there are two 3-D options as well. The images can all also be seen in a separate interactive gallery, in which users can select specimens to place side by side, download detailed identifications of each skull’s original owner and (for many) listen to a recorded comment from Dudley. Further bells and whistles include an internal search function, a choice of black text on white in portrait mode or the reverse in landscape mode and also a complete, sonorous audio reading by the author.

Challenging reading for younger audiences, at least in its more academic passages, but dazzling visuals and ingenious digital enhancements (not to mention the topic itself) more than compensate. (iPad informational app. 12-18, adult)

This Issue’s Contributors # Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Alexis Burling • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Lisa Dennis • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Barbara A. Genco • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Leslie Jones • Betsy Judkins • K. Lesley Knieriem • Robin Fogle Kurz • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Ellen Loughran • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Melissa Riddle Chalos • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Dean Schneider • Chris Shoemaker • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Karin Snelson • Shelley Sutherland • Jennifer Sweeney • Monica D. Wyatt

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kirkus indie Kirkus has been keeping an eye on selfpublishing for years, and we’ve never seen anything like the current boom. With the number of self-published titles now pushing 1 million per year, and independent authors utilizing new technologies to sell tens of thousands of copies of their work, the age of indie has truly arrived. Kirkus Indie brings readers the best works by independent authors, and we bring independent authors the crucial tools to get the word out about their books like no one else. We’ll give your book an unbiased, professional review, and then we’ll push that review into the world via our social-media properties, newsletters, website and expanding content. To learn more about Kirkus Indie and start promoting your title, please visit us online at kirkusreviews.com/indie/about.

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JASMINE

Aarons, Winston iUniverse (174 pp.) $11.86 paperback | Nov. 14, 2011 978-1462061440 Trace the curved line between love and obsession in this steamy novel.

Sor Avraham is content with his structured life: He and his wife Jasmine have settled into a comfortable partnership in their house by the ocean in Florida. Sor finds fulfillment as an English professor at a local university, a job that allows him to focus some of his repressed passion. He’s a model teacher, colleague and husband until a chance encounter with the mysterious and sensual Marguerite, a free-spirited artist and professor whose bohemian spirit has been temporarily tamed by marriage and two young boys. Marguerite and Sor quickly fall into a whirlwind affair, as Sor, who once exhibited precise control over his thoughts and emotions, is swept away on the tide of desire. The intense sexual encounters and lust-soaked e-mails fly between the two, disorienting Sor until he feels he has “lost his equilibrium.… He was no longer Sor Avraham.” His marriage and job fall apart as his fixation with Marguerite consumes him—he becomes infatuated with the smell of jasmine, Marguerite’s signature perfume. Then, as Marguerite slowly begins to draw away from Sor, eventually ending the affair, he recognizes himself as a man who has lost nearly everything. Aarons artfully portrays the demise of his lead character’s control in the stable world he once inhabited. Vivid characters enliven a compelling story that reveals Sor’s innermost thoughts and personal letters. The style and pacing of the narrative realistically parallel the timeline of Sor’s affair, while rising to meet his transformation from a controlled, settled husband into an adulterous obsessive. Eventually, the intense love scenes dim as the narrative resettles for Sor to consider the contentment he abandoned.

A well-crafted tale of passion, loss and the dangers of obsession.

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: THE LONG DRUNK by Coyote, Eric.............................................. p. 532 THE TENANT LAWYER by Dinnocenzo, Eric............................... p. 532 BLOOD MONEY by Rizio, Laura M...............................................p. 535 FROM THIS WICKED PATCH OF DUST by Troncoso, Sergio........p. 537 |

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THE LONG DRUNK Book One: The Homeless Detective Triology

Coyote, Eric Amazon Digital Services $2.99 e-book | Nov. 20, 2011 A vagrant turned amateur sleuth investigates a murder in Coyote’s debut novel and series opener of the Homeless Detec-

tive Trilogy.

Murphy is a hapless drunk living on the streets of Venice, Calif. When his cherished Rottweiler, Betty, needs an expensive surgery, the former football player takes on the role of gumshoe to solve a local murder. He’ll need to solve the 6-month-old case within a week to claim a monetary reward for identifying the murderer and save his best friend. Coyote’s novel, its title reminiscent of books from authors such as Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, is a play on film noir. While working against genre conventions has become the norm for some writers, Coyote ventures into new territory by unassumingly renovating the traditional qualities of film noir. Most detectives are slipped a mickey at some point, whereas Murphy is almost perpetually drunk, and concussions from his football days cause him to blackout. It seems he’s slipping the mickey to himself, especially when he’s drinking Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor. The seedy underworld is one with upscale restaurants and a gay bar called Pufferfish, and the femme fatale is a yoga instructor. The murder, however, is incidental, and the novel is in top form during scenes highlighting Murphy’s crew of homeless friends, most of whom are individually featured, and with the appropriately named Mama Bear, a maternal figure and thrift-shop owner who literally puts the clothes on Murphy’s back. Regular visits to Betty at the vet’s office are the heart of the story, so Murphy’s incentive remains noble. The book may not appeal to all readers, as sex and violence are graphically depicted, though never insensitively.

An unshakable noir with a protagonist learning along the way, but beyond the more overt genre traits is a rewarding story of a man’s unconditional love for his faithful companion.

THE TENANT LAWYER

Dinnocenzo, Eric iUniverse (264 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Nov. 18, 2011 978-1462004775 A young attorney struggles to humanize the law—and himself—in this quietly absorbing legal tale.

Fired from his high-powered Boston law firm for an unseemly attack of conscience, 32-year-old Mark Langley has descended to the lowest rung of the lawyering trade as a legal services attorney doing eviction cases in his blue-collar hometown of Worcester, Mass. In the assembly-line proceedings of Housing 532

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Court, there’s little he can do for his impoverished clients—many of them tenants in the town’s bleak housing projects—except postpone the day they’ll be evicted. Then a case comes along with a mixture of technicalities and pathos that grabs his attention: a single mom faces eviction from public housing because her son was arrested on drug charges; a guilty verdict would cause her other son to lose his college scholarship. While he pursues a longshot trial in the case, Mark also squares off against the haughty mandarins in his old firm to challenge the corrupt diversion of anti-poverty funds to a well-connected developer. In his first novel, Dinnocenzo, himself an attorney with legal-services experience, ventures into John Grisham territory—a callow, idealistic lawyer battles the establishment—but with less histrionics and more social insight. Poverty, chaos and infuriating regulations precipitate one crisis after another in the lives of his underclass strivers. The seemingly low-stakes Housing Court becomes an arena of tense legal strategizing and real drama, where verdicts destroy families. Writing in a limpid, nuanced prose, Dinnocenzo crafts sharp but subtle portraits of his characters and their agonizing dilemmas. Mark in particular is a flawed but appealing hero plagued by self-doubt and courtroom stage fright. He’s torn between glittering yuppie Boston and dilapidated Worcester as he obsessively sharpens his arguments in pursuit of justice for people who can’t afford it otherwise.

A notable debut that infuses an engrossing legal procedural with deep empathy.

LOOK AT THIS

Dwight, Art Tagral (224 pp.) $12.95 paperback | Oct. 29, 2011 978-0983941804 In this inspirational memoir, Dwight transforms everyday lessons into essential wisdom.

Dwight, an inspirational public speaker and life coach, compiled this memoir from 50 mini essays, but it’s really a book of tiny epiphanies. Through intimate interactions with family and friends—he’s twice married and the father of three teenage daughters—Dwight experienced deeply significant life lessons that belied their simplicity. His disarming sincerity and gentle humor serve to smooth the ordinary friction of relationshipbuilding. In one particularly illuminating essay, Dwight relates his suggestion to his daughters that they ignore their personal electronics for a weekend to experience how tech-free time could enhance their face-to-face social interactions. Dwight puts himself to the same test—he discovers, somewhat surprisingly, that he had forgotten the value of direct human contact beyond the glowing rectangles that now possess our lives. That lesson resonates in his description of his church’s mission to the Dominican Republic, where he marvels at the simple joy experienced by people in material poverty but with psychological and spiritual contentment. In this midlife perspective, Dwight pays tribute to all the people who inspired him, especially his second

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“Dimwitted escapee Bobby Joe Blaine poetically compares a dying man to ‘a puppet with a cut string.’ Luckily, the touch of literary license doesn’t sever the tension.” from shooting crows at dawn

wife. The closing portion of the book is a hymn of praise for his spouse—he proudly details the upward trajectory of her military career that culminated in her appointment as a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. His pride assumes added gravitas since, as a former Marine, he recognizes the formidable challenges inherent to military service. While written in a highly readable style aimed at a mass audience—references to popular films abound—readers may be surprised by the frequent steps out of Dwight’s chronology. People and events scramble through Dwight’s narrative, which could leave readers lost and in need of a simple timeline of his life. Yet that complaint fades if the book is considered not a conventional memoir, but a random set of inspiring, characterbuilding moments.

Dwight’s wholesome love for his family and friends, and the life lessons they’ve offered, makes for an engaging account of one man’s life well lived.

SHOOTING CROWS AT DAWN Grace, David PointBlank/Wildside (354 pp.) $8.99 paperback | $4.95 e-book Jan. 23, 2012 978-1434440365

Escaped murderers, a Texas sheriff and an author who isn’t afraid to spill a lot of blood.

Crime novelist Grace (Daniel, 2010, etc.) sets up a classic police procedural, but whets the plot with cutthroat Texas politics told in the sharp perspective of a remorseless escaped con. Aging Sheriff Jubal Dark put murderer Carl Alvin Spence in prison four years ago—since then, Spence has thought only of freedom and revenge. After his escape from a Louisiana prison, Spence aims for Mexico with two co-conspirators along for the ride, but he can’t pass through Texas without trying for Dark’s life. Meanwhile, Dark, sheriff of Francine County for nearly 20 years, focuses on his upcoming, long-odds reelection bid. Two years before, a local girl was found raped and murdered in her home; despite Dark’s best efforts, the killer is still walking free. Spence rumbles through the county on a murderous romp two weeks before the election—although he fails to take out the sheriff, the trail of stolen cars and dead bodies does nothing to help Dark’s reelection bid. Relentless Dark vows to stop Spence before the election, so the chase is on. Initially, the bloody details of Spence’s violence—told from his brutal perspective—feel gratuitous, but as the novel progresses, his cunning and ruthlessness hit the right notes for guilty pleasure. One drawback: Grace has a tendency to overwork his similes and metaphors with impressive comparisons from unlikely sources, distracting the reader. Dimwitted escapee Bobby Joe Blaine poetically compares a dying man to “a puppet with a cut string.” Luckily, the touch of literary license doesn’t sever the tension.

Revenge and justice burn across Texas in this gripping, grisly shootout.

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CURSE OF THE SHAMRA The Shamra Chronicles

Hoffman, Barry Edge Books (325 pp.) $12.99 paperback | May 15, 2011 978-1887368681 Dara has always been an outsider among the peaceable Shamra, but when her people are enslaved by the Trocs and their predatory Shriek birds, only she can lead the Resistance.

Hoffman (Hungry Eyes, 1997, etc.) ventures into young-adult territory in the first of a trilogy based in a world inhabited by human/animal hybrids with very human problems. The blueeyed, brown-skinned Shamra have marsupial-like pouches, froglike tongues and a happy, communal culture guided by a priesthood that fosters sharing, a casteless social structure, celebration and the complete subservience of adult females to their husbands. Orphaned Dara is a brown-eyed tomboy gifted with prophetic visions. On her adoptive sister Pilla’s wedding day, their isolated domain is invaded by the Trocs, who resemble parasitic worms and quickly enslave the defenseless Shamra. Dara and a few others flee to the swamps, where Dara is anointed the prophesied One who will lead them to freedom—even though she is a female. When Pilla and her betrothed Wren mysteriously disappear, Dara realizes that she must follow her visions to seek help in the unknown lands beyond the surrounding desert. Accompanied only by her second-in-command, Heber, and her Bauble, Tyler (all Shamra have caterpillarlike companions that they carry in their pouches, but only a few Shamra realize that they can talk to them), Dara sets out to find the birdlike allies she has seen in her dreams attacking the Trocs’ subservient Shrieks. Meanwhile, Wren’s brother Glondel has discovered that the Trocs have much more in common with maggots than one might imagine. And treachery always lurks in the wings.

Hoffman has constructed a world that is just alien enough to intrigue, yet familiar enough to entice. He has a didactic agenda, encouraging female agency and questioning religious dogma. However, as a novel, the story relies too often on authorial narration rather than showing the characters’ interactions, and the climactic battle is surprisingly flat, although the action may amp up in the later volumes.

A promising beginning, but readers will have to wait for the next volume of the Shamra Chronicles to see if that promise is fulfilled.

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“Like the female cicada, she causes the frenzied men to buzz and drone around her in hopes of attracting her bewitching affection.” from cicada

SPIES INC. The Adventures of Dash Danger

Keilman, John Illus. by Ravenscraft, StephenTuma, Rick Storybuilders $11.01 paperback | Aug. 25, 2010 978-0982755204 This interactive spy caper entices kids to concoct their own detective missions while helping the main character solve a sweet-tasting mystery.

The unnamed fifth-grade narrator of this short, spirited story is entrusted with an assignment—if he knows what’s good for him, says school bully Biff Vermin, he’ll figure out a way to snag the coveted but top-secret recipe of the cafeteria’s cupcake frosting. But first he must pitch a plan to get past the hilariously illustrated keeper of said treats—the Lunch Lady (think hairnet, crooked glasses, 200-pound sacks of flower under both arms, all on a behemoth of a woman with a gargantuan waistline atop toothpick legs). Unsure of where to start, the boy looks for tips in the latest book of his favorite series, The Adventures of Dash Danger (excerpts from the series begin each chapter).

Following Dash Danger’s example, he creates an alias, develops a disguise and pencils a blueprint featuring directions on how he’ll sneak into the cafeteria’s kitchen. Although the boy’s strategy backfires, Biff still snags the cupcake recipe, leaving advanced spies to wonder why Biff couldn’t just find it on his own in the first place. Despite a jacket design and some illustrations that look suspiciously derivative of those that populate Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, the book’s blackand-white sketches possess all the cool, classic elements of an Inspector Gadget and Spy vs. Spy hybrid. While the play-by-play of the narrator’s dilemma might wear thin on seasoned snoops, and the 50 pages of lined paper included at the end of the book seem excessive, those glitches don’t matter in the long run.

Kids—especially reluctant readers—might be too busy making up their own spy names and drawing themselves in undercover disguises to notice.

Lacking as a total package, but the interactive bits promise hours of undercover fun.

CICADA

Laing, J. Eric CreateSpace (264 pp.) $8.63 paperback | Dec. 6, 2011 978-1468022506 Tragedy befalls a small town in the 1950s Deep South when the Klu Klux Klan’s arrival coincides with an unraveling of long-held family secrets.

A suicide gunshot rattles the humid air in this bleak but often beautifully crafted tale of cultural strife in the Southern town of Melby.

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tries to cope with the stifling heat. Since the childhood death of his brother, farmer John Sayre has held a terrible secret, one that comes to bear on his marriage, his status in town and his relationship with his young son, Timothy. John’s inner demons lead him into an affair with college-educated Cicada Anderson, whose family joined the African American exodus from a nearby town tormented by the Klan. At the same time, Tim, aka Buckshot, finds the body of a lynched man. While the lovers carry on late-night trysts, Frances Sayre fears her husband has taken up with the Klan, until she discovers what she takes to be a love letter. Her discovery, Buckshot’s secretiveness and the increasing boldness of the town’s bigots and its reprehensible minister all sit heavy in the uneasy, oppressive heat. The cicadas incessantly hum in ominous chorus. Everyone is being watched: suspicious townsmen spy John and Cicada, the gravedigger sees visitors to the lynched man’s grave, the mockingbirds eye the old family cat in the last hours of its life. The town’s animals, wild or domesticated, play as big a part as any of the well-drawn characters in the tragedy. Nature’s cruelty—and occasionally, its beauty—foreshadow and echo the townspeople’s wicked acts. Only beautiful Cicada remains a mystery. Like the female cicada, she causes the frenzied men to buzz and drone around her in hopes of attracting her bewitching affection.

Be sure to read this steamy Southern noir in the A/C.

REVENANT RISING Book 1 of the Second Chances Trilogy Mayle, M.M. CreateSpace (504 pp.) $13.99 paperback | Oct. 4, 2011 978-1463557331

Sparks fly when a rock star teams up with a brilliant attorney in this sprawling tale of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll—and revenge.

It’s 1987, and British musician Colin Elliot has just re-emerged on the music scene, two years after a devastating car accident that killed Aurora, his heroin-addict wife, and left him close to death. Now, Colin’s determined to reignite his dormant career, but on his own terms. To that end, he enlists Laurel Chandler, a successful and beautiful attorney, as his official biographer, with the intent of publicly clearing the air regarding both the accident and his notorious late wife.

Colin and Laurel’s relationship starts out icy, but before long they bond over similarities in their troubled pasts. The struggle to come to terms with a past that won’t stay buried is a recurrent theme in the book. It’s most clearly embodied by Hoop Jakeway, Aurora’s unrequited high school suitor, who blames Colin for Aurora’s untimely demise—he’s intent on avenging her death, no matter what it takes. The book opens with a gripping account of the fateful high-speed car chase across Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, and then leaps forward two years to the sleazy drug dealers, scheming lawyers, put-upon managers and vulturelike paparazzi who inhabit Colin’s world. Mayle capably evokes the milieu of the ‘80s-era rock star, though the

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“[Peterson’s] crafting, although gray and humorless, candidly frames the drifting characters in a snapshot of life outside the confines of comfort.” from jimmy james blood

book suffers from an overabundance of minor characters and some heavy-handed exposition. However, music fans will appreciate the references to classic pop songs sprinkled throughout the novel, while Hoop, with his misguided quest for vengeance, proves himself to be a complicated, fully realized character. But the novel falters in portraying the romance between Colin and Laurel, which never quite comes to life. Finally, a less-than-satisfying conclusion resolves one of the book’s main conflicts but leaves the other to be sorted in the next volume of the series.

A somewhat unwieldy novel that nonetheless delivers fast-paced, dramatic action and engaging, lively characters.

THE ANATOMY OF SURVIVAL An Odyssey of Global Adventures

Nadukkudiyil, Stephen M. CreateSpace (563 pp.) $19.93 paperback | Dec. 9, 2011 978-1461119203 In this debut memoir, a globetrotting teacher from small-town India recounts 80 years at home and throughout Africa, against backdrops of occasional political turmoil.

Nadukkudiyil was born in what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala, in 1931, a time when his older relatives could still remember people being bought and much of the country was under British rule. During the next 20 years, Nadukkudiyil lived out a happy, colorful childhood; India struggled for independence; our narrator graduated high school and miserably attempted to work the family farm before being granted a reprieve in the form of college; colonialism ended to great jubilation but also great turbulence; and Nadukkudiyil ran away from home to make his way in the big bad city of Madras, where he was robbed, experienced life at the bottom rung of society and returned home the sheepish prodigal son. Upon graduating college, he set out to teach in first the port city of Aden (now part of Yemen), then rural Ethiopia, less-rural Ethiopia, Eritrea, and finally Nigeria, where he stayed for 25 years through a bloody coup and the Nigerian civil war. Along the way, he married and had kids. The narrator’s good cheer and upbeat outlook on life make for absorbing reading, and wonderfully vivid images appear throughout, such as a childhood memory of clearing the front yard of frogs during a monsoon or milk bottles corked with rolled-up leaves. However, the story is flattened by a lack of shaping or pacing. Too much weight is given to mundane details like the layout of a school or the bureaucratic process of applying for a job transfer, while events that should stand out in sharper relief, like the sight of an anti-Jewish massacre in Aden, are lost in the deluge of information. Numerous unfamiliar terms are used without explanation, and major events like the births of the author’s children do not receive much attention.

A straightforward, good-humored narration of a genuinely fascinating life, but with too many pages devoted to its mundane aspects. |

JIMMY JAMES BLOOD (The Man From Angel Road) Peterson, Melissa Cedar Street Publishing (194 pp.) $20.00 paperback | Sep. 18, 2011 978-0615362939

Hopelessness dims this poignant tale of a young woman’s tumultuous, modern American life.

Vera Violet, as she’s called by her boyfriend Jimmy James Blood, lives a life of misery. In this depressing narrative darkened by doom, she knows only poverty, drugs, murder and incest. The sense of despair weighs heavily; perhaps too heavily for some readers. But those who persevere will be rewarded with an eloquent description of today’s desensitized, emotionally detached youth. Drugs and absent parents are mostly to blame, according to Anne, although unexplored causes, like technology and culture on a larger scale, could also play a part. Frequent drug use mirrors James Fogle’s sobering autobiography, Drugstore Cowboy, a term Anne frequently references in her debut.

From the gloom of Washington state, where the timber industry rules, to the rotting bowels of St. Louis, Vera sees despondency in the clouds and pain in the stars while she sinks into the helpless feeling that her future holds nothing more than agony.

Nonetheless, she lives on to take solace in the small things: her oxblood boots, which serve as her special connection to Jimmy James, the love of her life; and cherished memories of Colin, her troubled brother. Anne’s powerful storytelling startles readers with its unapologetic bleakness. Her crafting, although gray and humorless, candidly frames the drifting characters in a snapshot of life outside the confines of comfort.

An intense, lyrical portrait of America’s vulnerable underbelly.

BLOOD MONEY

Rizio, Laura M. CreateSpace (332 pp.) $12.50 paperback | Feb. 23, 2011 978-1453618707 In her exciting debut, personal injury attorney Rizio crafts a legal thriller with compelling characters and tense action that more than compensate for a familiar premise.

Nick Ceratto is a young attorney at the prestigious Philadelphia firm of Maglio, Silvio and Levin, a rising star and protégée of “supreme litigator” Joe Maglio. But when Maglio and his family turn up dead Christmas Eve, apparently the result of a murder-suicide, the incredulous Nick begins to suspect Silvio and Levin. Shortly after, when the firm’s eavesdropping receptionist is the victim of an apparently random homicide, Nick discovers that she has left him a vital clue in her safedeposit box—what seems to be an ancient VHS copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. With the help of Maglio’s fiery Italian cousin, Maria Elena, Nick begins to investigate his employers, while also taking

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h r e b e c c a m e r e d i t h Rebecca Meredith has carried the seeds of her novel The Last of the Pascagoula with her for years. A poet, psychoanalyst and native daughter of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, she follows in the tradition of the Southern novel in her story of 15-yearold Kate Lynn and her sister Martha. The two grow up as outsiders in a small Mississippi town during the 1960s before being called to return as adults.

Meredith’s success at melding together a compelling plot and unique and sympathetic characters in an unforgettable setting earned the novel a Kirkus star. Here she talks to us about the South, the plight of outsiders and being cruel to her characters.

THE LAST OF THE PASCAGOULA

Q: Were you a big reader when you were growing up?

Meredith, Rebecca La Sirene (332 pp.) $14.99 paperback; $9.99 e-book August 20, 2011 978-0615506371

A: Oh, yes. I was one of those kids whose sanity was pretty much saved by reading and writing. I read Black Beauty and Jack London books, anything on critters I could find. As a teen I sucked up everything: Twain, Steinbeck, Catch-22, even Valley of the Dolls (which I had someone steal for me since it was behind the counter in the enticing “adults only” section). As a young adult, I finally wound back around to my heritage and read Welty, O’Connor, Capote, Williams and Faulkner. I have a huge soft spot for Truman Capote, always have. I suppose Tom Carmody reflects a lot of that.

K irkus M edia L L C # K irkus M edia L L C President M A RC W I# NKELMA N President SVP, Finance M A RC W I NH Kull ELMA N J ames SVP,Marketing Finance SVP, J ames ull M ike HH ejny SVP, Marketing SVP, Online M ike H ejny Paul H offman

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Q: What did and didn’t you like about growing up in the South?

A: I grew up on the Gulf Coast, which is a unique part of the South. I loved the bayous and the water, the New Orleans–influenced culture (I love New Orleans something fierce), and the fact that it’s not like any other part of the world. It’s damn near magic. I didn’t like its overt racism and suspicious nature. Like Kate Lynn, I hated what the rest of the country was saying about Mississippi even as I recognized the truth in it.

Q: What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

A: I literally stood in the shower and cried over what I was about to do to Martha—both Marthas.

I thought, “This is the God concept, that of creating a mortal, fragile being and placing her in a world where the unthinkable can and will happen,” and being sad, sad, sad even as you know it can’t be any other way and be as powerful.

Q: Pascagoula has been likened to some of the works of well-known Southern writers. What do you think makes a “Southern novel” and how do you think your work fits that description?

A: The South is a dramatic, loquacious, close-to-the bone place. We talk about anything and everything, and we talk to anybody and everybody. Nothing is quick and impatient. The language of Southern fiction reflects that. Because of our past, we face things in ourselves that are far more easily hidden elsewhere, but also because of our past we have a sense of cohesion, of being “us.” Southern writing tends to be nosey, emotional—it has the ability to incorporate the strange and disturbing without making it seem strange at all. As the saying goes, the veil is thin. Life and death are always near one another. The music and literature reflect that wonderful and terrifying relationship. I hope the book fits that description because that’s what I love and want people to see.

Q: Why did you decide to self-publish, and do you think it’s the wave of the future, with readers determining what gets read?

A: I did it because I was tired of waiting for someone else to decide whether my book would ever see the light of day. I got lovely, encouraging rejections.

I decided my fate should lie with readers rather than businesspeople. I think writing is becoming a whole new art form, and there are exciting little presses out there doing things I may never do. I think the industry will become many industries, and where I’ll fall remains to be seen. For now I just want The Last of the Pascagoula to find its way, and to find the time to continue the story and all the others I want to tell.

Q: Where did you begin?

–By Jenny Langsam

A: The buds for the plot are concepts I’ve been playing with for years. The outsider, who isn’t an easy participant in life but stands back and watches from a different kind of reality, is interesting because, |

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paradoxically, we all identify with her. Everyone in the novel has a relationship with this idea in some form. I am deeply moved by “outsider” artists who obsessively make art in order to give life to a world that most of us can’t see. I created Martha because I wanted to show how someone might become that way, not in a remote, exotic way but by going through what someone might go through, someone whose combination of natural inclination, fragility and circumstances come together to create something amazing. Martha has been with me in some form forever. Kate is just a more sophisticated form of Martha—she’s also just as trapped, as most of us are to one extent or another.

over one of Maglio’s high-profile cases. Although this murderous boutique law practice will remind some readers of The Firm, Rizio’s book has several qualities that surpass that more famous work.

Scenes are filled with cleverly observed details, from a conference room that was “supposed to be soundproof” but from which “yelling had been audible for at least twenty minutes” to a receptionist picking up a phone and pressing an “angry flashing button” with a “sculpted, inch-long red fingernail.” Additionally, an appealing tart cynicism haunts the novel’s scenes of legal maneuvering: “Nick Ceratto sat on one side of the dingy courtroom, its magnificent Victorian paneling and ornate plasterwork overlaid with generations of dirt,” evoking Raymond Chandler’s tone far more than John Grisham’s. Rizio also writes excellent, unfussy action scenes. A chapter where Nick attempts to subpoena a reluctant witness is a model of the form, as is a climactic confrontation in which two children are menaced by a killer. There are some missteps: An engrossing, you-are-there first chapter is besmirched by a jarring jump between characters; the murder of an appealing female character feels superfluous; and a key villain is lazily sketched, especially when cliché dictates he pontificate about classical music. But these are minor quibbles. For a debut, Rizio’s novel is remarkably accomplished.

An entertaining thriller full of clever touches, whose characters and tone enliven an overworked genre.

FROM THIS WICKED PATCH OF DUST

Troncoso, Sergio The University of Arizona Press (229 pp.) $17.95 paperback | Sep. 1, 2011 978-0816530045

Troncoso tells the story of a Mexican-American family as they come to terms with their cultural heritage over a span of 40 years.

The new novel from Troncoso (Crossing Borders, 2011, etc.) follows Cuauhtémoc and Pilar Martinez and their four children in the border town of Ysleta, Texas. As the children grow up, they feel the pull of their parents’ love for Mexico and the opposing force of their own identities in America. Cuauhtémoc is able to retire early from working as a draftsman and travels with his wife, living off the income from the apartments owned by the family. Pilar, a Catholic mother who is stern but instills strong values in her children, is a hardworking housewife who sold Avon to help with the bills. However, she worries that she hasn’t done enough to fill her children with her beliefs: “Pilar was overcome with incredible sadness. Why had her children abandoned the church? Why had they become like grains of sand scattered throughout the desert?” The oldest, Julia, becomes Aliyah, converting to Islam and moving to Tehran with her husband and three children. Francisco is overweight and attending community college, but works tirelessly at the apartments, playing the role of the good son. Marcos becomes a teacher and a member of the Army Reserve, marrying a white woman and living near his family in Ysleta. Ismael, the youngest, goes to Harvard and marries a Jewish woman, escaping the confines of his |

home in Texas only to meet with the labors of life as a man torn between his duties as a husband and his aspirations as a writer.

Troncoso seamlessly intertwines the struggles the grown children face with their parents’ desire to help them become independent and proud Mexican-Americans. The prose is powerful in an unassuming way, making for a captivating read. The author carefully paces the book, with each chapter plotting an era in the family’s lives, ultimately joining the family’s collective narrative of religion and family obligation with the current events of the time. Troncoso is clearly adept at his craft, telling a story filled with rich language and the realities of family life closing with a son reassuring his mother, and literature reassuring them both.

With its skillful pairing of conflict over religious and familial obligations with the backdrop of a MexicanAmerican family’s love for one another, Troncoso’s novel is an engaging literary achievement.

STOP THINKING ABOUT IT! Winning the Emotional Battle Surrounding Food & Weight Loss Williams, Lori A. BookWise Publishing (98 pp.) $12.95 paperback | Mar. 1, 2011 978-1-606-45073-4

A wife and mother of six, Williams shares her struggles with food and dieting, and delivers her perspective on the sensitive topic of weight loss.

After struggling with her body image for much of her life, Williams felt compelled to share her deceptively simple secret for losing weight and keeping it off: just stop thinking about food. To be more specific, Williams insists readers can “stop dieting, stop worrying, and start living” by distracting their hungry minds with nonfood related thoughts. “Don’t think about food unless you are planning dinner, buying groceries, preparing a meal, or eating,” she advises. In order to “stop thinking about it,” Williams recommends specific distractions—ranging from clever to ridiculous—to help you step away from tempting foods like burgers and fries. Some suggestions are sane, even productive: call a friend or finish your chores to forgo ice cream.

Others are bizarre, although someone very well could chop wood or “swing on a swing” to ignore a craving. Are Williams’ concepts revolutionary? Not at all, which she readily admits.

If anything, readers will find the chapter on paying attention to physical cues obvious, and the overview of how to develop healthy habits is shallow. But, even though Williams’ techniques are nothing new, her unfailingly supportive tone complements the easy-to-follow program, while charming illustrations and relatable anecdotes freshen up the decidedly gloomy prospect of self-improvement. In the end, readers will feel like they’ve just had a pleasant chat with an honest, knowledgeable friend, instead of a lecture by yet another self-described diet expert.

While not groundbreaking, this simple, short book may find an audience with readers looking for hope and a gentle push in a healthy direction.

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1 march 2012

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